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with him. He stood over the prints, trying to grasp as many details as possible while his friend finished up a phone call.
    When Omidifar was done he joined Shoshan at the table and announced, “An impressive feat of engineering…isn’t it?”
    Shoshan agreed.
    “It is designed to act as a series of nets.” Omidifar flipped the top page over and revealed a side elevation of the ground floor. “The top floor is two meters thick with six interlaced layers of rebar. If the Americans drop their bunker-buster bombs, we are very confident this first line of defense will stop them.”
    Shoshan wasn’t so sure. Before going in country he’d been told that the Americans had their best military minds developing a new series of bunker-buster bombs that would get the job done. Shoshan looked at his friend. “And if it doesn’t?”
    Omidifar shrugged. “There are three more floors the bombs would need to penetrate. They are not as thick as the first floor, but they don’t need to be. The first floor will stop or slow even their heaviest bomb. If one happens to get through, it still has to penetrate three more floors. Each of them one meter thick with interlaced rebar. The only way the Americans could destroy this facility would be to use a nuclear weapon, and they would never be so reckless.”
    “What about the Jews?” Shoshan asked. He’d learned to take a perverse joy in playing role of Jew hater.
    The question made Omidifar pause. He was a practical man not prone to spewing anti-Semitic remarks. “I am not so sure about the Jews. I advocated conducting this entire operation in secret, but our fearless president likes to taunt our enemies. Now we have made ourselves a ripe target.”
    Shoshan smiled and nodded. His eyes returned to the print and his inquisitive mind went to work, not as a spy, but as someone who was endlessly fascinated by how things worked. “How did you support all this weight?”
    Omidifar flipped several pages to a new sheet that showed a different cross-section of the facility. “We basically built an underground skyscraper. There is a steel skeleton that supports the entire structure.”
    That was when it hit Shoshan. He had never been allowed access to the fourth sublevel where the reactor and the centrifuges were located. He had assumed it was built into or under the bedrock. From the air the facility was impervious to all but a nuclear strike and despite the hawkish attitude of some, Shoshan felt that neither the Americans nor Israel would play that card. Isfahan was a city of over a million people. There was no way either country would drop a nuclear weapon in the vicinity of so many civilians. If Shoshan’s instincts were right, however, no air strike would be needed. Something far simpler could cripple the entire facility. As Shoshan looked at the prints on that afternoon he paid particular attention to the size and gauge of the steel that had been used. By the time he left Omidifar’s office a new course of action was forming in his mind. Shoshan was ready to make the transition from spy to saboteur.
    Months later Shoshan was struck by the irony that the destruction of the Twin Towers was what opened his eyes to the facility’s central weakness. He did not think of the towers in their pre–9/11 form and the way they dominated the southern tip of Manhattan. He didn’t think of them as piles of rubble and twisted steel. His mind fixated on a five-second clip of each building as it collapsed under its own weight.
    After leaving work that night Shoshan did not sleep. He played the clip of the towers imploding on themselves over and over in his mind. He knew he had stumbled across the bare underbelly of the dragon. His mind raced ahead, making a list of what he would need, and how he would sneak it into the facility. On that night nearly a half year ago the whole thing seemed crazy, but what bold action didn’t at its inception. The next morning he put everything in an encoded report and