We're Doing This Again?
Iran
The fluorescent tubes above Farid’s workstation hummed at a frequency that had burrowed into his skull years ago and never left. He no longer noticed it the way one no longer notices a scar. What he noticed, at 11:47 on a Tuesday evening in a building that officially processed medical isotopes, was a number that did not belong.
He’d been reconciling the monthly enrichment logs against declared output, a task so routine it usually functioned as meditation. Column after column of figures that told a clean story: low-enriched uranium hexafluoride flowing through centrifuge cascades at rates consistent with Iran’s civilian declarations to the IAEA. Molybdenum-99 for cancer diagnostics. Cobalt-60 for radiotherapy units bound for hospitals in Tabriz, Shiraz, Mashhad. This was the work he had committed his life to, the work he defended at family dinners when his brother called him naive, the work that let him sleep.
But the September log showed a discrepancy in cascade output. Not large. A fraction of a percent. The kind of variance that could be chalked up to instrument drift or a rounding artifact in the software. Except that Farid had calibrated those instruments himself, and the software didn’t round; it truncated. The number was too high, and it was too high in exactly the direction that mattered.
He pulled August. The same variance, slightly smaller. July. There again. A trend line took shape in his mind with the clarity of a diagnosis.
Someone was skimming enriched material off the declared stream and routing it somewhere the logs didn’t follow.
Farid closed the file. He pressed his palms flat against the cold steel desk and held them there until the metal warmed to his skin temperature. A thought arrived with surgical precision: If you report this upward, you will vanish. Not metaphorically. Engineers who asked the wrong questions at facilities like this did not get fired. They got invited to meetings they didn’t return from. He thought of his daughter, Nasrin, who was seven and still believed her father made medicine.
The inspection window reopened in nine days.
Elena Barros had been sitting in the Hôtel de la Paix’s bar for forty minutes, nursing a glass of Chasselas she hadn’t wanted and watching the French delegation’s second attaché pretend not to watch the Russian delegation’s first attaché. The whole room was a clockwork of surveillance disguised as socializing. She belonged here the way a scalpel belonged at a dinner party: functional, unwelcome, tolerated only because someone might need cutting.
Her phone buzzed. A message from her section chief, Lindqvist: Access restored. Conditions attached. Call me.
She didn’t call. She read the message four times, parsing each word for the trap she already knew was inside it. “Access restored” meant her eighteen months of lobbying, briefing, cajoling, and occasionally begging had produced a result. “Conditions attached” meant the result had been gutted.
When she did call, Lindqvist confirmed what she’d suspected. The inspection team would be allowed back into Isfahan, but only into declared areas, only with 48 hours’ advance notice, and only with Iranian technical escorts present at all times. Environmental sampling would be restricted to pre-approved locations.
“They’re giving us a tour,” Elena said. “Not an inspection.”
“They’re giving us what the Americans agreed to trade for a pause on carrier deployments in the Strait,” Lindqvist replied. “Take the win, Elena.”
She thought about Daishan. She always thought about Daishan. The facility in North Korea where she’d led a verification team in 2018, where she’d signed off on compliance because the access restrictions had been identical to these, where eighteen months later satellite imagery revealed a plutonium separation line running under a building she’d been forbidden to enter. Forty-seven people had died in the accident that followed. Not from a weapon. From incompetence, from a reprocessing operation run without adequate shielding by technicians who’d never been properly trained, because the program was secret and secrets couldn’t have safety protocols.
She’d been cleared by the internal review. That was worse than being blamed.
“What if there’s something to find?” she asked.
“Then we find it within the conditions we’ve been given.”
Elena hung up and finished the wine. Across the bar, a television mounted above the top shelf showed footage of the USS Eisenhower carrier group transiting the Strait. The sound was off, but the chyron was legible: TENSIONS ESCALATE AS DIPLOMATIC TALKS ENTER CRITICAL PHASE.
Nine days. She had nine days to design an inspection protocol that could catch a discrepancy through a keyhole.
Farid spent six nights building his solution. The facility’s routine maintenance reporting system transmitted technical data to the IAEA as part of ongoing safeguards obligations. Most of it was mundane: centrifuge vibration profiles, cooling system temperatures, UF6 pressure readings. The reports were generated automatically, reviewed by a supervisor, and uploaded to a shared server the inspectors could access. Nobody read them closely. They were furniture.
He couldn’t alter the enrichment logs themselves. Those were locked behind access controls he didn’t have and monitored by people whose job was to watch for exactly the kind of tampering he was contemplating. But the maintenance reports included diagnostic data from the cascade hall sensors, and those sensors, the ones Farid had calibrated, recorded the same flow rates that the enrichment logs were supposed to reflect. If an inspector knew where to look, the maintenance data would show a throughput inconsistent with declared output. The discrepancy would be small. It would require someone on the other end who already suspected something and knew how to read between the numbers.
It was, he understood, a message in a bottle thrown into an ocean of bureaucracy.
On the seventh night, he embedded the anomalous sensor readings into the October diagnostic package. He didn’t flag them. He didn’t annotate them. He simply ensured they were accurate, which was, after all, his job. The supervisor approved the upload without comment at 6:15 AM.
Farid drove home as the sun came up over the Zagros foothills, the mountains sharp and colorless in the early light. He showered. He made tea. He sat in the kitchen and turned on the radio because the silence in the house before Nasrin woke was the kind that invited thoughts he couldn’t afford.
The state broadcaster’s morning bulletin led with three items: a wheat subsidy adjustment, a provincial governor’s infrastructure tour, and a brief statement from the Foreign Ministry. In light of evolving diplomatic conditions and ongoing provocations in the Persian Gulf, the Islamic Republic has determined that the proposed inspection framework no longer reflects the principles of mutual respect and sovereign equality. Negotiations have been paused indefinitely. International inspection personnel have been asked to conclude their activities and depart.
Farid set his tea down. The glass was warm in his hands.
He did not know whether the maintenance report had reached the IAEA server before the access was revoked. He did not know whether anyone on Elena’s team would open it, or recognize it for what it was, or act on it before the carrier group’s presence turned a diplomatic failure into something worse. He did not know if the data he’d sent was already orphaned, a signal swallowed by noise, or if it was sitting on a server in Geneva waiting for someone with the right eyes and the right guilt to pull it open and see the truth hiding inside the routine.
The radio moved on to weather. Nasrin’s footsteps crossed the ceiling above him, light and quick.
Farid finished his tea and stood to make her breakfast.