Countdown to Midnight

Five

The conference room on the top floor was crowded. A dozen people, all of them high-ranking executives in the Central Intelligence Agency, sat around a large rectangular table. Their coffee cups, tablet computers, and notepads littered the table’s surface. More men and women, senior staffers for those around the table, occupied the chairs lining three sides of the dark-paneled room. The fourth wall held a large digital screen currently showing the CIA’s seal, an eagle above a shield embossed with a compass rose.

A heavyset, florid-faced man sat alone at the head of the table. Charles Horne was the recently appointed DCI, the director of Central Intelligence. His thick lips pursed as he jotted down a quick a note to himself. Finally, with a satisfied nod, he looked back up. “Very good. That last report from Science and Technology takes care of all of our priority agenda items.” He ran his heavy-lidded gaze around the table. “Now, does anyone have anything else we should discuss this morning?”

Miranda Reynolds, head of the CIA’s highly secret Directorate of Operations, hid a grimace. In the weeks since he’d taken over the reins at Langley, Horne had definitely put his own personal stamp on the way things ran. Unlike many of his predecessors, he’d spent most of his government service in the State Department — where talk was more valued than action — and it showed.

Focused one-on-one meetings between the director and his senior subordinates were now rare, replaced instead by seeming endless daily conferences like this one. Not only did these talkathons waste time, something that was always in short supply for those at the top of the CIA’s food chain like her, they were also an added security risk. Bringing so many people into the loop on matters they had absolutely no need to know anything about was just asking for trouble. Unauthorized leaks to the press and to Congress were already a serious problem for the agency. In Reynolds’s cynical view, all these gabfests really accomplished was to expand the list of suspects for any internal security investigation.

She fought the temptation to check her watch. With luck, her colleagues would keep their mouths shut so they could go ahead and adjourn. Important messages from CIA stations around the world were piling up in her email inbox. It wasn’t as though America’s adversaries took a timeout while Horne made his senior people and their top aides suffer through these interminable, unproductive meetings.

Reynolds snarled inwardly when she saw Philip Demopoulos lean forward to catch the DCI’s attention. Demopoulos, a wiry man with wavy gray hair and a stylish goatee, was her counterpart in charge of the Directorate of Analysis. In general, his analysts were supposed to evaluate the raw data gathered by her officers and agents — together with snippets of intelligence accumulated from other sources — and produce coherent, accurate intelligence reports on trouble spots around the world. Sometimes it worked the other way round, when his analysts needed her people to confirm wild rumors or stories they’d picked up elsewhere. All too often, those were nothing but dead ends, a waste of precious manhours and scarce resources.

“It looks as though the Iranians are working on a very unusual project in one of their shipyards near Bandar Abbas,” Demopoulos said. “At least that’s what we’re hearing through previously reliable sources.”

Reynolds frowned. That wasn’t anything her people had dug up, which meant this was another case where the Analysis Directorate was freelancing. Wonderful. She listened intently while he rattled off an impressive-sounding recitation of Tehran’s plans to heavily modify one of their AFRAMAX-sized oil tankers for some unknown purpose.

To cap off his short presentation, Demopoulos pulled up a satellite photo of the shipyard in question. “This image was taken earlier today,” he explained. “During a pass by one of our KH-11 recon birds.” He highlighted the enormous ship occupying the yard’s large drydock. An odd, tentlike structure obscured all but the forward sections of its bow. “As you can see, this image confirms part of what we were told by our sources. The Iranians are definitely taking extraordinary precautions to keep us from seeing the kind of work they’re doing on this tanker.”

The DCI stared at the satellite image in silence for several moments. Then he turned back to Demopoulos. “Does this story of yours come from the Israelis, Phil?” he asked. His tone was skeptical.

“No, sir,” the analysis chief said. “At least not directly. This information was relayed to us through a small private security firm with corporate contacts in the Middle East.”

“Relayed from who, exactly?” Horne asked sharply.

“We’re not quite sure,” Demopoulos admitted. “But our best guess is that what we’re hearing probably originated with one or more of the various Iranian dissident groups. There’s also a possible connection to that Iranian official found murdered in Austria a couple of days ago. He worked for their state shipping company.”

Horne’s lips thinned in irritation. “The man the Iranians claim was assassinated by the Mossad, you mean?”

“Jerusalem has unequivocally denied any involvement in his death,” Demopoulos said carefully.

Horne snorted. A scowl settled on his jowly face. He looked down the table at Reynolds. “Can you confirm any of this material, Miranda?”

She saw the way the wind was blowing. Horne might be a career diplomat by training, but he was a political animal by inclination. He’d climbed the ladder steadily over the years by attaching himself to rising stars on the political side of the State Department — appointees who moved up in successive administrations to more and more powerful positions. Whenever these men or women looked around for a trustworthy subordinate, they always found Charles Horne waiting, eager and willing to do their bidding and happy to toe the chosen party line.

At this moment, the president and his advisers were orchestrating a major diplomatic push to lure Iran “back into the community of nations.” They faulted previous administrations for treating the Islamic Republic as a pariah state. Tehran’s isolated rulers, they argued, would respond more positively to carrots — trade deals, relaxed sanctions, and renewed arms limitation negotiations — than to insults and threats. So the last thing the new DCI wanted to do now was go to the White House with worrying new intelligence about Iran’s possible plans and intentions.

Miranda Reynolds thought very quickly. Two recent blown covert operations in a row — one in Libya, the other in Alaska — had painted a target on her back. So far, she’d kept control of the Operations Directorate by pulling political strings herself… and by not so subtly reminding those above her that she was one of the few women in the CIA’s top echelon. For the moment, no one wanted to endure the media frenzy that could result from firing one of Langley’s pioneers for women’s equality. But making an enemy of Horne now by siding with Phil Demopoulos might easily tip the balance against her.

No, she decided, she had nothing to gain here. Especially since the reports passed to the Analysis Directorate seemed so vague and open to different interpretations. Certainly, nothing about them suggested any level of threat to the United States or its interests that might make this situation a hill worth dying on.

“Confirm these fragmentary reports? No, sir. I can’t,” Reynolds said firmly, ignoring the surprised look on Demopoulos’s face. “None of our own sources inside the Iranian government have reported anything about this mysterious oil tanker project. Not a peep.”

Left carefully unstated was the inconvenient and rather embarrassing fact that the CIA only had a few agents inside Iran. Or that none of them were based anywhere near Bandar Abbas. Left equally unstated were her growing suspicions that a significant number of the Iranian nationals her officers had recruited as sources were actually double agents for Iran’s own Ministry of Intelligence.

“I see.” Horne looked satisfied. He turned back to Demopoulos. “I don’t think this tanker business is worth pursuing further, Phil.” He shrugged. “More likely than not, it’s just a wild rumor planted by Israeli or Arab hardliners. Or by Iranian no-hopers feverishly imagining we can be tricked into supporting some lunatic effort to overthrow the government in Tehran.”

“But—”

The DCI rode roughshod over Demopoulos’s half-hearted attempt to object. “Whatever sort of changes the Iranians are actually making to this ship, one thing’s sure: it can’t stay hidden forever. And if this converted tanker really does pose a genuine threat to our national security, I’m quite confident that we can stop it cold when the time comes.” He shook his head. “I won’t condone jumping at shadows on my watch. And there’s certainly no justification here to jeopardize one of the president’s top foreign policy initiatives by going off half-cocked.” He stared hard at Demopoulos. “Is that understood?”

Reluctantly, the analysis chief nodded. “Yes, sir. Completely understood.”

Watching the uncomfortable byplay through narrowed eyes, Miranda Reynolds made a mental note to have one of her staff discreetly dig into who was really feeding Demopoulos these juicy morsels of intelligence out of Iran. She didn’t buy the obvious fairy tale he’d spun for Horne. Material like that coming over the transom via some unnamed self-styled private security firm with connections in the Middle East? Not in a million years. No, she thought coldly, someone else was pulling the strings here. Someone who was poaching on her turf.