Blaze by Andrew Thorp King Read Free Book Online Page A

as a psychological balm. The heartburn was psychosomatic.
    Arash Jafari was constantly worried that he would be revealed, or worse yet, that as a result, his lovely wife and two daughters, eight and five, would be slaughtered as punishment to a traitor of the regime. Arash was indeed a traitor. He had been working with the Israelis via his work with the CIA. He had helped to refine a new strain of the Stuxnet computer worm intended to utterly and completely destroy the Iranian nuclear program, at least the tentacles of which they were aware. The first deployment of the worm in 2009 successfully harmed the program enough to retard its progress by wiping out a fifth of the program, but the final blow was still yet to be struck.
    Like the computer malware, Arash Jafari himself was also a worm. He was a worm planting a worm. He was snugly nestled inside the personnel infrastructure of the Natanz nuclear facility and so far as he could ascertain, he had been undetected and unsuspected. But his belief that he’d gone undetected didn’t assuage the persistent anxiety that plagued him. Nothing could assuage that. It was part circumstance and part the makeup of his nervous nature.
    Arash’s journey into espionage started oddly and dramatically with a vision. A religious vision. And not an Islamic religious vision. Jesus . Clear as could be. Strong, loud, and shock-inducing.
    And with His appearance, Arash felt his flesh heat up as if he was locked in a dry sauna with the temperature kicked up to the max. Yet, he felt no pain or discomfort, as if he had been shrouded in a protective fire to which he himself was immune.
    He later processed this experience by considering it an immersion in the supernatural fire of truth that manifested itself to him in a physical and real way.
    The Nazarene spoke to him in direct terms about his then fanatical obsession with the imminent re-appearance of the Mahdi; the glorious Islamic Messiah—the eagerly anticipated Twelfth Imam—who was to rescue the world from chaos and establish a glorious Caliphate once and for all.
    The Nazarene rebuked this fascination in Arash and scolded him for believing in and looking towards the coming of a false Messiah. Boldy, the Nazarene quoted scripture that referred to false Messiahs in the days of last things. He made it abundantly clear that the worship of Jesus, the great I Am, was the only pathway to paradise and peace. He gave Arash glimpses of the future war that would take place in conjunction with the claimed return of the Mahdi.
    Arash became filled with poignant and vivid mind pictures of these future times and the chaos and confusion that would mark them. Arash fell prostrate and worshiped the Nazarene with a passion and fervor that far surpassed any of the feelings he had ever expressed for the figure of the Mahdi.
    Arash had changed in an instant. He was now an outlaw Christian in the land of the devotees of the Mahdi.
    It took Arash several weeks to come to grips with the experience and to even begin to feel comfortable in his new skin, and with his newly transformed soul.
    He felt like a fraud and an imposter everywhere he went, particularly when with his wife. He continued to lay his prayer rug next to hers and pray with her daily at all the requisite intervals, only he was praying to who she would only recognize as the Mahdi’s chief deputy, Jesus Christ. She had no clue what had transpired within him.
    Arash had only confided in one person regarding his conversion. It was a person who he had known was critical of the Islamic doctrine surrounding the Twelfth Imam, and of radical Islam in general. It was his dear childhood friend Reza Kahlili, who at the time, served in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and unbeknownst to Arash at the time, was also a full-fledged spy for the CIA.
    Arash told Reza of his conversion with great trepidation. Even though Arash trusted Reza intrinsically, he knew that he was revealing one of the most