The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller by Whitley Strieber Page A

international flights without drawing official attention to himself. The result was that he was unarmed. He wouldn’t try to buy a gun in Iran, and in any case, he’d never attempt to enter the foreign ministry heavy.
    Khomeini International Airport was a mixture of sparkling new and what appeared to be abandoned construction. Flynn immediately noticed the odor of the air, which was a mix of burning coal, engine exhaust, grease, and dust. Even inside the terminal, the air was dense.
    The passport control line moved slowly. Very slowly. Ahead of him there was a woman dressed in a Chanel original worth easily five thousand dollars, her head covered by a scarf of sheer, floating silk. She was perhaps forty-five. Her face, with its large, questing eyes and tight-set lips, expressed a regal calm that reminded Flynn that you don’t approach customs looking uneasy, or, for that matter, too relaxed.
    She spoke Farsi, so he was able to pick up only a few words, but it soon became clear that she expected to get an on-arrival visa. The customs officer appeared for a moment concerned, then indifferent. He picked up a telephone, spoke a few words, and put it down. A moment later, another man appeared, this one in the weary business suit of a police official, and began escorting the woman away. He stopped, then turned back. His face opened into a smile that lifted his broad mustache almost comically.
    He said, “Oh, and Mr. Grauerholtz, too, right here. Come, also, please.” He gestured grandly, like a pretentious maître’ d.
    As Flynn followed the woman’s sweeping silks, he thought that Iran’s foreign ministry must be very damned efficient to not only expect him, but to send somebody who knew him by sight. As he walked, another man fell in beside them, this one in an expensive Italian suit. Ahead of them, the woman was drawn into a hallway. The door closed and she disappeared.
    The man said, in German, “I am Davood Ghorbani, vice minister of armaments in charge of acquisitions. We’ll pass the formalities and go directly to the ministry.”
    â€œYes, I think that’s best.” Flynn’s German had better be as serviceable as he imagined it to be.
    Ghorbani’s suit was an excellent cut, which put him far up in the ministerial hierarchy. Flynn had signaled almost nothing about the purpose of his visit, but Grauerholtz’s manufactured reputation must have preceded him. His specialty was rocket parts, most specifically highly machined nozzles for rocket engines—in other words, one of the items highest on the Iranian wish list.
    The engine was not just the power source of an intercontinental missile, it was the basis of its accuracy. Without an engine capable of producing a clean burn, no guidance system could achieve enough accuracy to hit a city at a distance of five thousand kilometers. In addition, the engine had to have far more lifting power than anything presently in Iran’s arsenal. The current state-of-Iranian-art missile was the Saji-3, which was capable of throwing a modest payload as far as four thousand miles. But to make a nuclear warhead small enough to be lifted by that system was going to take a major technological effort on Iran’s part. And so far, anybody who was working in that direction was almost certain to be assassinated by the Israelis and the West. No doubt that was what had happened to Dr. Josefi.
    The car passed quickly through Tehran’s traffic in a protected official lane. Flynn noted that the traffic was extremely heavy—in fact, the heaviest and most chaotic he had seen in any city. He would not forget this.
    As they moved into the governmental area, Ghorbani said, “We won’t be going to the ministry.”
    â€œOh?”
    â€œTo a home.”
    So they assumed that their ministry was bugged and under observation by the West. And they were probably right.
    Five minutes later, they were in a quiet, leafy