Palace of Treason

42

They stirred again after several minutes. They were both stifling as a result of having just carnally coupled while wearing winter clothing, including sweaters and outer coats, in an overheated hotel room, the premises having been last used as a sweat-bath in 1634. When Nate proposed a shower, Dominika countered with a suggestion that they go back outside into the cool night air and walk around the romantic little island, perhaps crossing a bridge into Saint-Germaine-des-Prés to find a late-night Left Bank bistro to have a glass of wine. Nate saw that Dominika was tense and keyed up — it wasn’t just the usual sewing-machine legs after coition — and going back on the street was a subconscious tonic for her. The unspoken thought was that this life of espionage could very suddenly end for her, and she was prepared to have a fight about it.

Dominika put her arm into Nate’s and they exited the hotel — as usual checking both ways down the length of the deserted main street. They turned right toward Île de la Cité — the cathedral would be lighted, and they could cross the “Lovelock” bridge with hundreds of lovers’ padlocks hanging from the railings. They were the only ones on the street as they neared the little square at the western end of the island. The bistros and brasseries were all dark, sidewalk tables and chairs stacked and chained together. It was near midnight and the air had grown cold. A river barge steamed down the left channel, blocking the reflected lights of the grand siècle lampposts along the embankment, its diesel thrumming.

Dominika suddenly spun Nate by an arm, took his head in her hands, and kissed him. Nate kissed her back but then began to pull away to say something smart, but Dominika wouldn’t let go of his head and brought his face down to hers again. Her eyes were open and she shook her head slightly, still holding his head. Nate didn’t move, but put his arms around her. He could see her looking at something out of the corner of her eye. He was conscious of someone walking by, but Dominika’s hands blocked his view. She jerked her hands and shook her head again. Finally she broke free. Her eyes were wide.

“Zyuganov,” she whispered, “that was Zyuganov.” She turned and started moving in the direction the little shadowy figure had gone, along the Quai d’Orléans, along the southern side of the island. Nate reached out and grabbed her hand.

“Stop. I’ll follow him and call in reinforcements,” he said. “Gable will be here in fifteen minutes.” Dominika shook her head and twisted her hand out of his.

“If he gets away, I’m finished,” said Dominika.

“Not if you’re back in the hotel,” said Nate.

“Zabud’ pro eto, forget it,” she said. “He’s trying to kill me, and I will not take a back door. Don’t even think of trying to stop me.”

“You mean take a backseat,” Nate said.

Dominika shook her head. “There’s no time,” she said. “Zyuganov is moving. TRITON is on this island. They could slip into a building and we’d never find them.” She started moving, looking back at him. “Come on,” she hissed.

They walked tight against the wall of the buildings, pausing in doorways to let Zyuganov maintain his distance. His silhouette ghosted along the opposite sidewalk. He was not hurrying — he occasionally looked out over the water — and he certainly wasn’t looking for surveillance. Jesus, thought Nate, we cannot blow this. Zyuganov’s head and shoulders appeared, then faded, and then reappeared, as he passed through light reflected off the river. Halfway down the street, Zyuganov slowed and turned to walk down one of the broad ramps leading to the river-level landing, his head descending out of view. Nate and Dominika quietly crossed the street and peeked over the wall. Zyuganov was standing at the bottom of the ramp, leaning against a lamppost. River water swirled blackly past him.

“We wait for TRITON to show, or go now?” asked Dominika. Nate pulled her sleeve and dragged her back into a shadow cast by a tree growing out of the sidewalk.

“Zyuganov’s not going anywhere on that landing. And TRITON has to come right by us to get down to him,” said Nate. “We want them both.” Dominika nodded, and took out two lipsticks. Christ the lipstick gun again, thought Nate. Russians. They stopped talking and watched the top of the ramp. They were cold waiting two, three, five minutes.

They suddenly heard voices from the riverside platform. They peeked over the wall again to look down on the top of Zyuganov’s and Angevine’s heads. Nate pulled up straight. Fucker came around the other way along the lower river-level promenade, thought Nate. Dominika was looking down at them and started tugging at Nate’s sleeve. The two men were arguing, and their voices grew louder. Angevine reached out and collected a fistful of Zyuganov’s jacket lapel. The dwarf pulled away angrily, turned, and started walking up the ramp. Angevine followed him, shouting as he caught up. Nate heard the word “euros” repeated twice. Zyuganov ignored him and continued walking up the ramp.

“TRITON just told Zyuganov my name,” said Dominika, starting to move. And Zyuganov just told him he had no money, thought Nate, coming up behind her. Maybe they’ll kill each other.

At the top of the ramp, Angevine spun Zyuganov around — the American towered over the Russian — then both men stopped as they saw the silhouettes of Nate and Dominika standing in front of them. They were five feet apart, looking at one another, frozen in place. Angevine passed fingers through his hair. Zyuganov’s face was crazed, his chest heaved.

“Suchka, little bitch,” said Zyuganov, meeting Dominika’s eyes. “I knew it was you,” he said in guttural Russian. “Are you ready to come home to die?”

“I’m more interested in whether you know you will never set foot in the Rodina again,” said Dominika. “The Paris pauper’s cemetery is called Thiais, zhopa, asshole.” Listening to the Russian, cool and deadly between them, Nate was once again reminded that the only people Russians hated more than foreigners were themselves. Then everything broke loose.

As if it were a starter’s gun, a river barge sounded its air horn, and Angevine spun and ran back down the ramp, sliding on the uneven cobbles as he descended, and Zyuganov simultaneously darted to his right past Dominika. Spurred perhaps by their respective instincts, Nate and Dominika reacted simultaneously. Nate pounded down the ramp to chase Angevine along the landing. Dominika moved toward Zyuganov and tried a foot sweep, but the poisonous dwarf agilely skipped over it and sprinted down the darkened Quai d’Orléans. Dominika ran after him down the center of the midnight-empty street. She flashed that there were two spans of the Pont de Sully on the eastern corners of the island into either side of the city proper — she could not let him escape. Zyuganov knew she was the mole.

Zyuganov was surprisingly fast, and Dominika could not gain on him, even as she vaulted over the hood of a parked car to try to shorten the distance. Zyuganov sensed she had drawn closer and he veered wildly away from the bridge and instead vaulted the waist-high fence of the little Barye park, tore through hanging willow branches and blindly down the broad steps to the platform on the river. A hoarse call from a watchman sounded from the shadows. This was the eastern tip of Île Saint-Louis and the Seine endlessly plowed into and flowed around the prow-shaped breakwater. Zyuganov stopped short and turned around. Dominika stood at the top of the stairs, breathing heavily. She was dressed in a dark pleated woolen skirt with tights, a sweater under an oiled jacket, and jogging shoes. Her hair was halfway down from the running, and she absently brushed it behind an ear as she slowly came down the steps toward him. She could still feel Nate on the inside of her thighs. She was immeasurably tired.

Rounding the corner of the landing, Nate slipped on a slimy cobble and went down hard on his butt, which saved him from the ten-foot pipe — one of several discarded scaffold stanchions that had been stacked against the wall — Angevine had swung at his head, but which instead rang like a bell off the stone wall. Angevine swung it again like a broadsword, over and down in a log-splitting stroke, directly at Nate’s head. Still on his back, Nate twisted to avoid the massive skull-caving blow and rolled into the freezing Seine, all sewer-sweet smell and bitter taste. He could immediately feel the scour of the water as it boiled past and he got his fingers and the toe of one shoe into a masonry seam before the current could pluck him off the stone and whirl him downriver — he’d be around the Orsay bend and past the Eiffel Tower in three minutes. That’s if he wasn’t sucked into some vortex or pinned under a dock and drowned. He tried a quick grab at the pistol in his belt but almost lost his grip and had to hang on as the river tugged at him.

Angevine stood over him, legs apart, seriously winded but lining up a final swing to smash Nate’s face or shatter his clinging hands. “You fucks underestimated who you were dealing with,” he panted, resting the pipe across his shoulder, as if he were waiting his turn in the batting cage.

“Yeah, you’re right: You’re a bigger traitor than any of us imagined,” said Nate.

Angevine fumed at the insult, choked up on the pipe for more accuracy, and stepped closer. Nate risked being taken by the river as he reached out with one hand, grabbed Angevine’s pant leg, and pulled. Unbalanced by the big pipe he held over his head, Angevine’s feet shot out on the slimy blocks and he tumbled into the river, the stanchion bouncing off the stones into the water next to him. He came up spluttering beside Nate and reached for a handhold, but was a foot too far and was instantly swept away from the embankment, turning in the water, arms feebly paddling for stability. In three seconds he was in the middle of the channel.

One of the late-night Bateaux-Mouches boats — long, wide, gaily lighted, and glass-topped — thrumming downstream sounded its whistle as the dot that was Angevine’s head bobbed over the bow wave and down into the trough, bouncing along the hull until bobbing again over the stern wake, and with an audible scream was sucked into the foaming prop wash. His body disappeared underwater, then was thrown back up by one of the prop blades, followed by his severed head. The frantic ship’s horn kept sounding its bass note while Japanese tourists on the upper rear deck turned night into day with flash photography. Angevine’s body continued floating downstream in the shimmer of embankment lights, eventually disappearing around the Île de la Cité.

With considerable effort, Nate scrabbled back up onto the landing, shivering, his clothes streaming river water. As he pounded up to the street, his thoughts raced. Angevine was gone. The prick never got his final payment for betraying his country, and now he was dead. Gable would kick his fished-out head back into the river and say, “Our grief can’t bring him back.” Then Nate flashed to Zarubina floating facedown in a fountain. Dominika. He sprinted down Quai d’Orléans, his breath ragged and his shoes squishing, the river stink in his nose. Down at the other end of the island there were lights and sirens.

As she came down the steps toward Zyuganov, Dominika knew she would kill him. Taking him back to Moscow in chains had been an appealing option — Putin would have been impressed — but not now, not after he had heard her name from TRITON’s lips. She fingered a lipstick tube in her pocket, feeling for the end with the trigger plunger. She would walk to within an outstretched arm’s distance and aim for center mass. With the explosive bullet even a hit in the hand would vaporize it to the wrist and cause massive blood loss. A torso hit and the subsequent hydrostatic shock would turn the thoracic cavity into an inflated bag of sweetmeats.

Zyuganov stood watching her, darting glances to the left and right — there were no stairs or ladders, no other way off the terrace. The river? He was not a strong swimmer and did not think he could survive a plunge into the water. Egorova had a reputation, had killed men, had gone through hand-to-hand Sistema training, but was she that good? As he waited for her, the diminutive Zyuganov experienced the old familiar sensation of the assassin’s prickling impatience to get up close and stick pointy things into soft places. His instincts told him to wait, get her close, blind her, or cripple her, then finish her. Zyuganov wanted to see Egorova’s face as she died.

Bat wings of black unlimbered behind Zyuganov’s head — no gargoyle on the cornices of nearby Notre Dame could match these — as Dominika walked up to Zyuganov, slowly sliding her hand with the lipstick out of her pocket.

Marta and Udranka were on the riverbank, like two Rusalki mermaids, singing. Over the sound of her pounding heart, she heard Hannah behind her.

Dominika raised the lipstick tube, her arm straight and tense, pointed at his chest, and pushed the plunger. Zyuganov flinched and ducked. Then the world slowed, the stars froze in their orbits, the river stopped flowing. All that came out of the lipstick was a faint musical ping, as if a spring had snapped in a pocket watch. Misfire. Faulty electrical primer. Cracked component.

There was no time to dig around for the second lipstick tube. In a singular circular motion, Dominika threw the dud lipstick into the river, stepped slightly to Zyuganov’s left, and grabbed his sleeve. He pulled back, and she continued stepping into him, swinging his arm in the direction he wanted to go, then suddenly back in an arc toward her, bringing her other arm up and across his neck. Before she could strike, Zyuganov had somehow blocked her arm and stepped away from her. He had moved with speed and skill. They stood looking at each other — black fog came out his eyes and mouth, and he snarled at her. She would trap an arm and deliver another strike to the head, then fish out the second lipstick gun.

Zyuganov came at her in a strange loping gait, and Dominika stepped into him to use his momentum, but he put one arm around her neck and barred his teeth. Was the little cannibal going to bite her? Dominika pulled her head back and hit him twice, very fast, under his nose, aiming for a spot two inches inside his skull. Zyuganov’s head went back and his eyes blurred, but he kept his claw around Dominika’s neck, and with a jerk drew her to him, mashing her breasts against his chest. He smelled like vinegar and night soil.

Zyuganov’s free hand brought up the eight-inch Sabatier fillet knife he had taken from his mother’s kitchen and stuck it in Dominika’s side, down low, just above her hip bone. The curved blade was thin and murderously sharp, but it flexed — as boning knives are predisposed to do — as it tore through Dominika’s tough outer jacket and only three inches of the blade penetrated her body. Dominika felt a flash of fire in her side that radiated around her waist and up her stomach. She dug thumbnails into Zyuganov’s eyes — got one but missed the other — as he shook his head in pain.

Zyuganov knew what flesh felt like and he pulled the blade out and stabbed back in, trying to get inside the coat, and this time felt sweater wool against his knuckles, but Dominika’s hand clamped down on his wrist and he could get only an inch of the blade in. Wrenching the knife away, Zyuganov stabbed again, then again, reaching around to her lower back, trying for kidneys or the lower lobe of her liver. Zyuganov looked up at her face with one good eye — the other was blurred and weeping — and saw the bitch’s mouth was open and she was panting, those blue eyes were blinking rapidly, and her body trembled a little as she started sliding down the front of him; he let go of her neck and she sat down with a bump on the stones, leaning a little and holding her side.

Dominika was only aware of a belt of intense pain around her waist, and of the feel of the cobblestones as she lay down on her good side and the wet grittiness on her cheek. Zyuganov was close, enveloped in black, and he pushed her on her back — rolling was an agony because something inside her was adrift, hot and liquid. She heard a man’s voice — Nathaniel help me, she thought — but Zyuganov screamed and brandished the knife and the voice — a night watchman, not Nathaniel — faded away. Zyuganov straddled her and sat heavily, causing more pain. He greatly regretted that he could not spend hours with Egorova, but this would have to do. That meddlesome watchman would call the police — he had a minute or two to spare.

The night glow of the City of Light filled her vision. The pain in her guts was rising in waves to her jaw, and the hand clamped over the first wound was sticky. She opened her eyes and saw Zyuganov leaning forward, silhouetted against the lights of the city, bat wings extended. She felt cold air on her belly and breasts, and realized Zyuganov had pulled her sweater up to her chin. Not like him, the little asexual bug. She then felt cold, questing fingers running along her rib cage, cold beetle fingers feeling for the space between the fourth and fifth ribs where he could shiver the knife in to fillet her heart and lungs.

He hadn’t been flirting. His fingers had stopped moving — he had found the hollow between her ribs, exactly where he could start the tip of the blade into her. Zyuganov leaned over Dominika — one of his eyes was swollen shut — and breathed into her face. Then he placed one hand behind her neck and lifted her head, as if he were about to spoon soup into a sick relative. He hoarsely spoke in Russian.

“A person can never know exactly when and where he will die, but you can know this now, Egorova: midnight in Paris, on a stinking embankment, tasting blood on your tongue, and smelling blood in your nose. I will cut off your clothes and roll you into the Seine so your American friends can find you downstream, swollen and splitting, with the river in your mouth, and it will pizdets, an ending, for you.” Dominika’s eyelids fluttered, and she whispered softly. Zyuganov frowned and put his ear close to her mouth. He relished the dying declarations of people in pain, especially when he personally administered the pain.

“Do you know when you will die, svinya, pig?” said Dominika. Zyuganov looked into her blue eyes — they were flat and dull from the shock. He smiled and shook her head side to side a little, chidingly, while whispering.

“Little Sparrow, you will not be—”

Dominika put the lipstick tube under Zyuganov’s chin and pushed the plunger. The distinctive click was barely audible, followed by a wet melon-against-the-wall sound. Zyuganov’s undamaged eye was open as he fell to one side, and his head hit the stones with a flat slap. One of his legs was lying across Dominika’s stomach, and his face was pointed away from her. The back of his head — there was no aura around it — was a furry candy dish empty down to the start of his teeth. The night air stirred strands of his hair around the shattered rim of his skull.

With a shaking backhand toss, Dominika threw the lipstick tube over Zyuganov and into the river. The motion caused her great pain in her stomach and she tried pushing Zyuganov’s leg off her. Her arms weren’t working very well and her hands were numb. That further movement brought a fresh wave of pain in her chest and a rushing noise in her ears, which blanked out the rumble of the river, so she did not hear the running footsteps and was surprised to see a young face in an orange jacket lean over her. She could smell his aftershave. He was very handsome, not as lovely as her Nate, but he smiled and said, Ne bouge pas, don’t move, and she heard the word “plasma” and she felt him lift her sweater and apply pressure to the stab wounds, and wondered whether they would release her body into the river, because there she could swim and sing with Marta and Udranka, and there was the whiff of alcohol and a pinch in her arm and she took Hannah’s hand as they lifted her onto the gurney and carried her up the stairs away from the river, the night glow fading in her eyes.

Lights flashed off the façades of the buildings. There was a small crowd of gawkers, those already moving at this early-morning hour, and Nate pushed through them. He ran up to a policeman in boots and a helmet who turned with extended arms to stop him. Nate could think of nothing to say in French except ma femme, my wife, the irony of which almost made him choke with emotion. The policeman nodded and Nate walked a few feet and stopped at the top of the steps. The cobbled terrace looked like an invasion beach: Discarded medical packaging and two clumps of red-soaked gauze were strewn around amid two substantial puddles of black treacle — by lamplight blood appeared quite shiny and black — and Nate could see a knife on the ground, the gore on its blade in lacy streaks. Dominika did not have a knife. It must have been Zyuganov’s. And the blood on the blade must be hers.

There was another policeman standing beside a body on the ground with a rubber sheet over it with more blood showing from underneath. An ambulance team was unzipping a body bag. A second policeman in coveralls and a garrison cap was writing on a clipboard. The cop signaled the medical personnel with a wave and they laid the bag next to the figure and dragged the rubber sheet off the body. Nate held his breath.

It was Zyuganov without the top of his head. Lipstick gun, thought Nate. Where was Dominika? Was she stabbed? God, the river. Nate imagined Dominika, having blown the dwarf’s head off, clutching herself and trailing intestines, staggering blindly and pitching headfirst into the water. The gurney with Zyuganov’s bagged body came up the stairs, the two policemen following. Cremate the little bastard, thought Nate. Otherwise he’ll crawl out of the crypt during the next full moon.

The first cop signaled that Nate had to leave. Nate tried to ask a question, but his brain was stuck in Russian. All he could get out was Ma femme? again and the cop shrugged and said, Hôpital several times, then, Elle était mourante, and Nate got enough of it, and he could feel the blood drain from his face and he stammered, Mort? dead? but the impatient cop repeated, Elle était mourante, which Nate guessed meant not dead but dying. The cop looked at him with interest.

Nate sat down on a bench in the shadows and closed his eyes, his hands shaking, his clothes still dripping. Phone it in. Encrypted cell phone, but be careful.

Gable answered after the first ring. “What?” he said.

“We saw them on the island. I went after TRITON.”

“You get him? Tell me you got him,” said Gable.

There was buzzing and a thump. “Nash?” said Benford. “You’re on speaker. What happened?”

“Simon, listen, your mole is dead, he fell in when we fought and was run down by a riverboat. The prop took his head off. I saw it. By now he’s bumping against the flood walls along the Île aux Cygnes, the Isle of Swans, downstream from the Eiffel Tower.”

“Where’s sweet pea?” said Gable.

“She went after her boss, chased him to the end of the island.”

“What they fuck were you two doing out of the hotel?” said Gable.

“We went out for dinner and were walking back. You can fire me later,” said Nate.

“Never mind that,” said Benford. “What happened? Where is the dwarf?”

“Missing half his skull. She did it, but Jesus, Simon, it looks like he stuck her, there’s blood, a lot of it, and the medics took her away before I got there. I think the cop said she was dying.”

“Maybe it was his blood,” said Benford.

“There was a bloody fillet knife on the ground. The cop kept saying ‘hospital.’”

“Did he say where?” said Benford.

“I don’t know what hospital, but I’m going to find out and go.”

“Negative, Nash. Stand down,” said Benford.

“What do you mean stand down? She’s fucking dying.”

“Nash, did she have her dip passport with her?” asked Benford.

“Yeah,” said Nate, holding his head.

“The hospital authorities will inform her embassy. When they hear her name, there will be a diplomat, a consular officer, and two security men in her room within thirty minutes.”

“We don’t know that,” said Nate.

“Hey dumbass,” said Gable. “You see where this is going? You want to go visit her with a handful of daisies and bump into half her embassy?”

“We can’t just leave her,” said Nate, rocking back and forth.

“Stop talking and start thinking,” said Gable. “She did what she was supposed to do, she completed her mission. She’s a frigging hero.”

“Maybe a dead hero,” said Nate.

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Gable. “Think it through.”

“So we’re withdrawing and letting her go through this alone?”

“And we hope for the best and we wait till we hear from her back inside,” said Benford quietly.

“What do you mean hope for the best? What if she dies? She won’t be around to answer her messages.”

“If she comes through this her bona fides will be unassailable. Anyone who could hurt her now is gone. It’s perfect,” said Benford.

“Simon, listen to yourself,” said Nate. “She’s all torn up and you’re talking about her cover?”

“I am concerned for her as much as you are,” said Benford. “But she has excelled in the service of the State. She’ll be untouchable.”

“If she doesn’t die in one of their shitty clinics,” said Nate.

“Nash, I want to see you in twenty minutes at the hotel,” said Gable. “I’ll help you check out.”

“Sure, Bratok,” said Nate. “Some big brother.”

“That’s right,” said Gable. “I’ll do anything, no matter how difficult, to keep her safe.”

“Abandoning her is your way to keep her safe?” said Nate, gripping the phone. It’s probably best we aren’t face-to-face, he thought.

“That’s exactly how we’re going to keep her safe,” said Gable. “That dark day I told both of you about just happened.”

Nate closed his eyes and saw Dominika with a tube in her mouth, her vital signs twerking on a green screen, one hand and arm wired with sensors and IVs, the other lying at her side, that’s the one he would hold to his cheek, to let her know he was there. His eyes stung and he didn’t speak.

“Nash, you there?” said Gable.

He didn’t answer, looking at the river, blinking at the fuzzy lights.

“Nathaniel,” said Benford. “Talk to her now. What would she tell you?”

“I don’t know,” said Nate.

“Yes, you do,” said Benford. “Listen to her.”

A chill went through him as Nate heard her voice, at once stern and sweet, with the lilting accent that went straight through him, and his name, Neyt, and she said, dushka, let me go, I will do this work and see you next time, and he asked her when, and she said next time, and Nate thought he could hear Dominika’s Kremlin Mermaids singing on the riverbank.

He let out a shuddering sigh. “I’ll see you at the hotel,” Nate said brutally, and clacked the lid of his phone shut.

It was midnight, eighteen months later, two hundred miles southeast of Tehran. A musical note — like a ticker-tape bell — began dinging in the underground control room dedicated exclusively to Centrifuge Hall C at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Two night-duty technicians roused themselves and looked at each other across the control console. They could feel movement in the floor, and their wheeled desk chairs swayed slightly. On the wall, a framed photograph of the Ayatollah Khamenei swung lopsidedly on its hook, and a glass of tea with a spoon in it chittered across the desk like a wind-up toy. The little bell kept dinging. Earthquake.

One technician casually roll-walked his chair to the barrel-shaped CMT40T triaxial broadband seismometer in the corner of the control room and made sure it was recording and sending MMI values to their desktops. He noted that initial seismic intensity readings were in the 4.0 to 4.5 range. Heavy, but not dangerous. At least, not now that they had the seismic-isolation floor under the machines.

Both technicians automatically checked digital and analog dials to verify cascade feedstock flow, rotor status, and bearing temperatures. All normal. The Hall C cascade was operating perfectly; it had been absolutely perfect since its installation and testing a year ago. Seventeen hundred gas centrifuges were spinning at fifteen hundred revolutions per second, a speed of over Mach two. Now, six months of careful, measured production — kept secret from IAEA inspectors — was increasing stock and pushing enrichment up toward weapons-grade percentages. The late martyr, Professor Jamshidi — likely a victim of Zionist assassins — had built this. It is his magnificent legacy, thought the technician.

The earthquake bell continued dinging, but tremor values were decreasing. There might be aftershocks, but it was over. The two technicians flicked quick looks at the closed-circuit video of the cascade hall, dimly lit, cool, and quiet, a forest of tubes and spaghetti clusters of pipes above them, the soothing, steady hum of centrifuge rotors the only sound in the room. All normal, all running smooth and true. Even through a four-point-oh tremor, thought the tech.

It was the floor, the seismic floor, a true marvel of German engineering. The techs knew that the equipment was German — all the labels said so — but Russian technicians had assisted in the installation. Who knows why? Don’t ask. The new display on their board was mesmerizing; you could look at it for hours. A graphic schematic of the seismic floor — the whole thing was computer-controlled — with hundreds — no, thousands — of LED lights representing subfloor pivots, pintles, and hinges. The dark-blue LEDs winked and flashed, sometimes singly, sometimes in blocks or rows or ranks, sometimes in vertigo-inducing waves, indicating the constant, individual, minute adjustments made by the mechanism beneath the pebble-grain aluminum floor. Like the flashing marquees at the casinos and hotels in Las Vegas, enough lights to turn night into day, thought the tech. Like to see all that, preferably before we bomb New York.

The LED display was active, lights blinking first on one side and then the other, showing the technicians that the floor was reacting to and dampening tremors they themselves could no longer feel through the control-room floor. Amazing. Then a single red warning light appeared on the master display, a light they never expected to see: Fire. The techs looked at the dials, then at each other. Short circuit? Negative. Mechanical failure? None indicated. Equipment racks? Air handlers? AC power? Nothing.

The floor display came alive as all the LEDs blinked on, flashed once, and went dark. Both techs simultaneously looked at the video monitor and saw a spot of blinding white light burning from beneath the floor, now visible among the rotors, growing arc-weld white, casting Clockwork Orange shadows of centrifuge tubes against the far walls. One of the techs dove for and slapped the red SCRAM button to stop the centrifuges, but a melting spot on the floor had created a minute imbalance in the third machine of the second row of the first cascade. It came off its bottom bearings, and with the vacuum broken, the spinning internal rotor first cracked the casing and then shattered it, sending whining shrapnel squealing into neighboring machines, beginning a deep, rumbling crash that increased in fury as rank after rank of dervish machines came off their rotor points. The bellowing destruction was overwhelmed only by the cacophony of the fire alarms howling in the hallways.

One tech had already hit the emergency radiation alarm, and the klaxon began braying outside the control room. The other tech picked up the phone and called IRGC General Reza Bhakti, the four-star Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander of the facility. Screaming into the phone and cursing foully, Bhakti ordered the two technicians to stay in the control room until he got there. He put on his hat with the gold leaf on the bill and rushed in his Jeep to the aboveground adit to the Hall C tunnel. Both techs knew the drill and remained calm: they would stay in the sealed, windowless control room until the immediate crisis was over, then walk out dressed in the protective radiological suits hanging in the closet. This emergency procedure, however, did not take into account the accelerating white-phosphorus-and-aluminum-fueled meltdown whose next stop was, arguably, the center of the earth.

The techs watched the monitor as the picture went white from pixel overload, then to brown when the lens fused, then to black when the camera melted off its wall strut like candlewax. Had the camera still been working, the technicians would have seen the few still-upright centrifuge tubes melting like sand castles at high tide. With gaseous feedstock released into the superheated air, the conflagration became radioactive. The white phosphorus by that time had taken over the entire aluminum floor, and was now consuming the cement walls and the steel reinforcing beams in the ceiling, creating a supersonic, swirling annulus of fire that drew in air so violently that the Hall C blast doors buckled inward. The slanted, quarter-mile entrance shaft was turned into a wind tunnel, sucking equipment, carts, and loose construction materials down into the furnace at 100 mph. The Hall C air vents were likewise turned into jet nacelles, a phenomenon IRGC General Bhakti personally experienced when he parked his Jeep next to an aboveground air intake and was lifted out of his seat, slammed through the protective grate, and sucked down into the superheated vent, igniting halfway down like a kerosene lamp wick. His general’s billed hat somehow remained on the floor of the Jeep.

It was getting hot in the control room, and the phone no longer worked. The dials were dead, the digital displays black, and air screamed down the tunnel, rattling the door. The techs swiveled in their chairs when they heard a hissing noise. A spot of fire had begun in a lower corner of the control room and soon elongated and climbed up the angle of the wall and along the line of the ceiling. The control room was constructed of concrete, which wasn’t supposed to burn. The techs struggled into their protective suits as the fire spread along the join of the ceiling. The far wall was changing color as the magma in the cascade hall next door began to burn through. The swaddled techs hesitated at the door, not knowing whether to go out into the bellowing entrance tunnel. The tilting photo of Ayatollah Khamenei fell to the floor and spontaneously combusted.

A week later Ali Larijani, chairman of the Parliament of Iran, was instructed by Supreme Leader Khamenei to place a call to the office of the president of the Russian Federation. Larijani’s previous position as secretary to the Supreme National Security Council and leading nuclear envoy made him well-versed in the minutiae of Iran’s nuclear program. His high rank, moreover, gave him sufficient gravitas to speak to the northern idolater frankly, informing the Kremlin of the suspension of diplomatic relations between the Islamic Republic and Russia, and of Tehran’s intention to reestablish cooperative, unilateral contacts with Islamic groups in the Caucasus. Larijani ended his call by passing a personal message from the supreme leader to the president. Eeshala tah akhareh ohmret geryeh bakoney. I hope you mourn for the rest of your life.