The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,119
When they had passed over to the Iranian side, the driver led his three visible passengers into the passport control office, where they stood in line with several dozen other travelers, all smelling of tobacco and the road. It wasn’t Ramadan or Moharram, so the number of pilgrims was fewer than it might have been, which only meant the border police could work even slower. The driver handed over their passports and explained in his broken Farsi that they were pilgrims—a Lucknow Shiite from Pakistan and his bride, and a Shiite from the Zaydi sect in Yemen. The Iranian passport man barely looked at them. The two men looked dumb and dirty, and the woman didn’t exist. The rubber stamp came down and they were through.
The driver moved on to the customs check. He gave the customs man his registration document with the usual ten dollars folded inside, but another man was working the post as well today, and he wanted his cut. So after some grumbling, the driver procured more money from his valise, and eventually they were on the road again.
They crossed the border into Iran proper just before 10:00 a.m. The highway rolled south through a gritty urban landscape and then into patchwork farmland. But you could see in an instant that Iran was a real country, with road signs and police and even a little airport on the Iranian side of Saraghs for the twice-weekly flight to Tehran. Gradually the highway rose from the desert floor to the uplands of Gonbari and Mozdurem. Passenger cars zipped past the wheezing Mitsubishi. Iranians were in a hurry to get where they were going, even at this eastern edge of the country. There was a high hum from the middle seat. Jackie was singing to herself and, she imagined, to Karim bundled underneath.
Mashad was an urban sprawl in the eastern desert. It was bigger than visitors expected, and more modern, with several generations of ring roads encircling the old city and the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza. The city’s growth had been a perverse consequence of Iran’s modern history; its population had nearly doubled during the Iraq-Iran war because it was the farthest city from the war zone, and it had never shrunk back to its old size. It was noisy and sulfurous, a jumble of people and traffic. That disorder was another bit of cover for the group in the Mitsubishi.
They took the eastern bypass and headed north until they reached a clover-leaf interchange called Ghaem Square. The driver had a rest stop near there; a petrol station run by Turkmen immigrants where he habitually pulled in for fuel and repairs. He steered the minivan into the garage and closed the door so that the vehicle was hidden from view. Hakim and his putative wife climbed out of the middle seat. The Turkmen driver opened the rear-seat bench and pulled a very sore Karim from his iron box. The Iranian’s legs were so cramped that he wobbled at first, barely able to stand.
The driver left them alone to make their last preparations. It was now just past one. Karim planned to meet his friend Reza in an hour. The team would collect him two hours after that, at four.
Jackie handed Karim the super-taser that would burn out the synapses and memory links of the processor in the neutron laboratory at Ardebil. She had kept it under the billowing black folds of her chador. She went over the plan one more time: he must enter the facility with the device, be present when his friend was logging on to the system, and remain there with him for an hour, if possible. He should lay down his jacket so that the device physically touched the computer processor in the laboratory.
Marwan would be outside the facility, driving the chip-burning taser with a battery-powered unit that was now hidden in a dirty canvas bag hoisted over his shoulders. Hakim and Jackie would check in as husband and wife at a pilgrim hotel that would be their escape place. She handed Karim the address. The Tus Hotel on Shirazi Street. After they got the room, she and Hakim would return with the driver in the Mitsubishi van and wait at a park just south of the ring road, near Ardebil Research Establishment, until Karim emerged around four.
“Bring your friend Reza out with you,” said Jackie. “Ask him to have dinner. That will make him think everything is normal.”