Tags:
Fiction,
General,
thriller,
Thrillers,
American Mystery & Suspense Fiction,
Suspense fiction,
Intelligence Officers,
Political,
Terrorism,
Fiction - Espionage,
Political Fiction,
iran,
Mystery & Thrillers,
Rapp; Mitch (Fictitious character),
Special operations (Military science)
Persian.
He blended in and did his job. He cleaned toilets, washed floors, and kept his eyes and ears open. At first he had been extremely cautious. Surprise inspections were not unusual and the security people were unusually hard on the newcomers. The small room where he kept his cleaning supplies was tossed twice in the first month. This caused the already cautious Shoshan to be even more careful. After the second month he learned that the guards inspected his closet not to look for evidence of espionage, but to pilfer supplies. In the passing months Shoshan got to know them better and their suspicion of the newcomer dissipated. In a breakthrough that no one could have predicted, it was Shoshan’s lifelong hobby of tinkering with all things mechanical and electric that would prove to make the difference.
Shoshan was cleaning the guards’ break room one day when he happened to overhear the men complain about the poor reception of the television. He asked them if he could take a look at it, and they consented. After a quick inspection Shoshan located the problem and fixed it with a few turns of his screwdriver. In the eyes of the guards this elevated him to near-godlike status. In no time at all he was fixing broken TVs, microwaves, radios, and pretty much anything with a circuit board. Word spread quickly that the new janitor was a very handy man to have around. Even Ali Farahani, the head of security, came calling. The hot summer months were upon them, and Farahani’s air conditioner was not working.
Shoshan went to Farahani’s house and located the problem. He ordered a part and the following weekend installed it free of charge. Farahani was very grateful and asked Shoshan if there was anything he could do for him. Shoshan said there was, and showed the head of security his storage closet at work. In addition to the cleaning supplies, brooms, mops, and buckets, the room now contained haphazard stacks of household appliances that were waiting to be fixed. Farahani was at first enraged, thinking that the janitor was being taken advantage of by the other employees. Shoshan assured him that was not the case. He had no family to go home to. They had all been lost in the earthquake. The work helped him pass the lonely hours in the evening. What Shoshan wanted from Farahani was permission to stay after his shift was over so he could work on the appliances. Not only did Farahani give him permission, he found the janitor a much larger, unused storage room on the third sublevel where he could set up his makeshift repair shop. At the time, Shoshan knew he had reached a critical breakthrough, but he had could have never dreamed just how advantageous this single move would turn out to be.
In the months that followed, Shoshan spent many evenings and weekends at the facility. He explored the corridors by day while pushing his cleaning cart from one room to the next. The guards now paid him only a passing glance as he came and went with boxes of tools, circuit boards, batteries, tubes and all of the other stuff he needed to stock his repair shop. It was during this time that Shoshan got to know Cyrus Omidifar. Omidifar was the chief engineer for the entire facility. He was the man who made sure everything worked properly. The power plant, the elevators, the ventilation systems, the plumbing, the guts of the place, it all fell under the purview of Omidifar. Like Shoshan, he loved to tinker with things.
At first Shoshan did not grasp the importance of Omidifar and all that he oversaw. Shoshan was too busy focusing on the scientists and nuclear program to stop and think about the actual bricks and mortar, or in this case steel and concrete. That all changed one evening when he went to visit Omidifar in his aboveground office. There on the table was a set of blueprints for the entire facility. Shoshan remembered the request from the air force targeting specialist and immediately cursed himself for not having his tiny digital camera