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ones Tariq Khan was working on. The ones in Khorramabad.
    TTI: What happened?
    JAZINI: The moment Khan went missing, the head of security at the Khorramabad facility feared for the safety of the warheads. He feared Khan might be working for the Zionists. Since the warheads weren’t yet attached to the missiles, he decided to move them out of his facility and hide them elsewhere. I just spoke to him. He’s safe. The warheads are safe.
    TTI: I thank you, Allah, for you have given us another chance to strike.
    The president looked up from the transcript and stared at the CIA director.
    “So where do we think they are?” he asked.
    “That’s the problem, Mr. President,” Allen conceded. “At the moment, we have no idea.”
    “And they could be fired at Tel Aviv or Jerusalem at any moment, right?”
    “Yes, sir,” Allen said. “Or . . .”
    “Or what?”
    “Or, Mr. President, they could be headed here.”

4
    KARAJ, IRAN
    Few people on the planet knew David Shirazi’s real identity.
    Not a single person in the White House, State Department, or Pentagon knew. Only four people in the Central Intelligence Agency knew, and Roger Allen, the director, wasn’t one of them. The truth was that David was the CIA’s top NOC—nonofficial cover agent—working deep inside Iran. He was known to the president of the United States by the code name Zephyr. He was operating as a German passport–holding telecommunications specialist by the name of Reza Tabrizi, and he had penetrated deeper and faster and higher inside the Iranian government than any agent in CIA history. The question, however, was whether any of that mattered. If Zephyr succeeded, few would ever know, and he was legally prevented from ever saying so. But if he failed, the impact could be cataclysmic.
    Some 6,331 miles away from the White House Situation Room, in a CIA safe house not far from Tehran, David could feel the enormous weight on him growing. He desperately wanted to deliver for his president and his country, but he also increasingly believed failure was the more likely result.
    He had miraculously escaped the burning Jamkaran Mosque in Qom only to very nearly die at the hands of an Israeli fighter pilot he was trying to rescue. Now, three days later, he was back at the safe house. He was unharmed—but he worried he was being ineffective as well.
    David wondered if the president or the secretary of defense or thesecretary of homeland security or anyone inside the American national security establishment who was cleared to even be aware that Zephyr existed knew Washington’s inside man was the youngest and least-experienced NOC the Agency had ever deployed.
    Except for his age, David was in many ways the Agency’s dream recruit. He was tall, athletic, and brilliant, with a near-photographic memory, multiple degrees in advanced computer science, and a near-perfect fluency in Farsi, Arabic, and German, aside from American English, his actual mother tongue. His parents had both been born and raised in Iran and had raised David with a rich cultural heritage that now helped him hide in plain sight inside their native country. His father, Dr. Mohammad Shirazi, was a renowned and highly successful cardiologist. His mother, Nasreen, had graduated in the top one percent of her class at the University of Tehran and had been offered full scholarships to study and eventually teach at almost every institution of higher learning in her country. But she turned down all the scholarships and instead took a job working as a translator for the Iranian Foreign Ministry under the Shah on various U.N. issues, rising rapidly in her division and winning a dozen commendations. Later, the Canadian Embassy recruited her to become a translator for them, a post she eagerly accepted, working her way up to the role of translator and senior advisor to several Canadian ambassadors.
    When the Shah was overthrown and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power during the Islamic