Oath of Office

“What?” Nima said. “My walls are thin. I heard you apologize to your friends for my stories, so I told a story. Besides, that one is very popular in Mashhad. Everyone here has heard it before.” She gestured to the small couch and a pile of cushions in the corner. “You are exhausted. Please sit before you fall.”

“Thank you,” Dovzhenko said. “But I must ask, did you stop smoking?”

Nima hung her head. “I did not.”

Dovzhenko looked like he might cry. “Good. Because I will go insane if I do not get a cigarette.”

Nima reached to the cardboard box she used as a bedside table, and then threw him a pack. “Oh, Erik,” she said, “you are already insane.”

Jack sat on the edge of the couch, looking around the cramped room. The ornately stamped metal ceiling sagged low, making the room seem smaller than it was. The average Iranian made around two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and prostitutes fared much worse. Nima had very little in the way of material possessions but offered what she did have, giving Ysabel her bed, explaining candidly that she never slept on the sheets on which she worked. Ysabel said she was just happy to lie down anywhere. Ryan made do with the living room floor and was asleep seconds after his head hit the cushion.

In the small kitchen area across the room, Nima Hasanova quietly readied tea. She never had guests and wanted desperately for them to stay for a while when they woke up. Erik was snoring softly, an arm across his face. He was involved in something dangerous. It was written all over his face. Was it not her duty to protect him? But what could she do, a fallen woman. She laughed at that. Fallen woman. Women in Iran had to stand up before they had any room to fall. She eyed the leather case at his feet. Whatever Erik was up to, the answer must lie inside.

54

The engineer who’d been explaining the process to Reza Kazem smiled, seemingly grateful for the opportunity to be near him, and then excused himself to return to his duties. But for the buzz of activity around the missiles and transport trucks this hidden spot in the desert would have been a calm, almost religious place. Both men wore the green uniform and cap of the IRGC, part of what Kazem and his men had stolen from the storage depot north of Tehran. The remote location west of Mashhad hid their activity from the actual military, but the official uniforms would slow any police patrols who happened to approach. It was a big enough lie that few men would have the stones to challenge him directly. No one would want to step on the toes of an official action. Even another IRGC unit would want to check with higher authority before taking any action. Kazem had a small army of his own, nearly a hundred men, all of whom believed themselves patriots, revolutionaries against the revolution, hoping for a new Iran.

Kazem planned to give them one. Just not quite what they expected.

He was a physicist, so he understood the dynamics, if not the minutia of what they were doing. He had the woman for that. She was in her late fifties and carried herself with the arrogance of a man in charge, showing little deference to even Kazem. He didn’t care. They needed each other — and mutual need brought a different kind of respect.

She was across the valley floor now, in the lee of a tall escarpment that shielded the trucks from the incessant wind. Wearing pants, her head uncovered, she shouted into her radio, holding it directly in front of her but away from her face — as if she did not quite understand how radios worked. That was the thing about geniuses, Kazem thought, the shine that came in one facet of their lives left other parts lacking. Dr. Tabrizi was among the most gifted mathematicians and aeronautical physicists in the world. She’d come within a mathematical breath of the correct solution for the Poincaré conjecture when she was an undergraduate at the University of Tehran, and might have solved it had the revolution not shunted women to the side of almost everything. She could, with nothing but pencil and paper, make the needed calculations to thread a needle with an antiballistic missile. And still, a simple mobile telephone baffled her. She could draw accurate pictures of radio waves and explain the science to them, but the buttons and knobs on the radio itself remained an uncrackable mystery.

The men on the crane and missile transport trucks leaned out the windows of their respective cabs, looking for relief from the verbal barrage of this crazy scientist. Kazem did not worry. One truck was already loaded, they only had to repeat the procedure.