“Okay,” he began. “Here’s the background. In 2015, Iran signed the JCPOA nuclear deal, opening them up to various inspections. The problem for them? They’d been secretly working on their nuclear program for years.”

“Probably the worst-kept secret ever.”

“True, but no one had the goods to nail them. Now if these inspectors discovered all the written materials documenting their work, our Persian friends would be in quite a balagan.”

“A what?”

“Sorry. A mess. Their hands would be in the cookie jar, right? That’s how you say it?”

“Close enough.”

“So they decided to hide all the evidence.”

“Makes sense. Shouldn’t be too hard to do given the size of the country.”

Nir had given a short laugh at that. “Agreed, but here’s where it gets weird. Rather than dig a big hole for an underground vault out somewhere in East Camel Flop Province, they decided to use a regular warehouse in a commercial district in Tehran. They installed a bunch of vaults there, and then in early 2016 they started transferring load after load of their nuclear secrets into them. They thought they were being sneaky, but we’ve had cameras on this warehouse from the moment they first started moving it all in.”

Nicole had tried to picture the scene in her head. “So what are we looking to do? The place has to be fortified like it’s the national treasury. Walls, guards, state-of-the-art security system…”

Again, Nir laughed, and she could feel the movement of his head shaking. “That’s the thing. It’s not. It’s like they thought they were so sly and tricky that nobody would have a clue that quite literally tons of nuclear secrets sit in that warehouse. They put in a good alarm system, and they have guards there during the day. But at nine o’clock at night, the guards shut everything down and go home, leaving the building one hundred percent unattended.”

That’s when Nicole sat up and scooted to the next cushion so she could see Nir more clearly. “You have got to be joking.”

“I know. It’s mind-blowing.” He feigned a small explosion from his forehead. “Your country’s greatest secrets, and you walk away each night, saying, ‘Oh, they’ll be just fine.’”

“So is that the operation? Break in and photograph all the materials?” She’d crisscrossed her legs on the couch and tucked a small pillow onto her lap. She was starting to piece together what her role in the action might be.