Tehran, Iran
Yoseff Abbas was Iranian — but he was also something else, which meant he had reason to be scared.
He glanced over his shoulder as he walked. He looked again and again. He checked the plate-glass windows of the stores he passed, to see if anyone was following him. What he feared was the MOIS, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the dreaded secret police. He’d gone to the food market near the Vali-E Asr, with its pricey shops and little boutiques, to pick up some groceries, but the store was packed with customers, and the lines were awful. Abbas knew how the U.N. sanctions had made life harder for the average citizen — but it hadn’t stopped Iran’s plans for a nuclear showdown with Israel.
And of all people he ought to know.
Back at his upscale apartment, he sent yet another urgent encrypted email to Rafi, his counterpart in the Israeli Mossad. The last he’d heard, Rafi was in Amman, Jordan, but in the last twenty four hours, he’d dropped off the radar. Yoseff’s orders were not to send anything directly to Tel Aviv … too easy for the Iranians to trace. Instead he was to use Rafi. But the intel that Yoseff had gathered simply couldn’t wait. He was toying with blowing protocol completely, contacting IDF headquarters at the Kirya compound in Israel and letting them know what he knew.
Yet for Yoseff, this whole thing felt like a bitter act of betrayal. As a proud Iranian, he hated what he was doing. He felt like a traitor — even though he despised that crazy man, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Ayatollahs and their ilk. Thinking back, he wished he’d been left alone to study Persian literature and Sufi poetry and teach at the university. That was his passion. But then his brother and sister were captured by the Israelis up in the Golan, spying for Iran, and placed in indefinite detention. Yes, he told them, he would give the IDF what they wanted in return for the release of his siblings and their safe passage back to Iran. What choice did he have? He also cursed the fact that he had accepted a lucrative job as a documents researcher in the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the AEOI. This made him a useful pawn for Israel.
Suddenly he received a secure text message from Rafi. It was terse: “Send pictures immediately using HD encrypt code.”
Yoseff jumped into the chair at his computer and uploaded an array of digital pictures that showed Iran’s nuclear refinement facility at Natanz. The photos proved that the site contained missile silos. It seemed grotesquely audacious for Iran to weaponize the very facility that Israel and the Western nations had complained about and Americans had put under surveillance with a spy plane so many years before.
But now Iran’s program was complete, the nuclear warheads were armed, and the missiles were being readied for launch. Yoseff needed to get his siblings out of Israel before death rained down from the sky. He even thought that maybe, if he prevented Iran’s missiles from leaving the silos, just maybe he could save not only his brother and sister, but also millions of innocent Iranians who would be caught in the horrors of a full-fledged war when Israel retaliated.
Yoseff put his index finger down on his computer keyboard and hit Send.
It was done. For good measure he double-checked his Sent folder. Delivery and receipt were verified.
Suddenly, Yoseff felt sick with fear. He knew he needed to vacate his apartment and go into hiding. At least for a while. Or maybe longer.