The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,125

He shook that guard’s hand, too, to thank him. He said he would be back soon.

The sun was low in the sky now. Reza asked Karim where he wanted to eat. There was a new restaurant on Khayyam Boulevard called the Silk Road. It was very tasty, and not just the food. Pretty girls from the Engineering University liked to hang out in the coffee bar. Reza beckoned for his friend. These Tehranis were too arrogant; they breathed all that smog every day and it made them dizzy. They thought they knew all the answers.

MASHAD, IRAN

The two Iranian scientists walked together out of the Ardebil compound. A soft late-afternoon breeze was blowing in from the farmlands, bearing the fragrance of saffron and the other exotic spices for which the region was known. Students were leaving the university campus across the way; cascades of them, the boys and girls walking in separate clusters. The women were so slim and fine; you could see their shapes as the breeze blew their cloaks tight against their hips and bust. “Mashad girls rock,” said Reza in English.

Karim looked up and down the street until he saw a dirty Mitsubishi bearing the glittery trappings of a shared taxi. It was moving slowly toward them and then stopped, about fifty yards away. He tried not to stare at the van; he was so close to being done, he needed only to keep moving. He put his arm around Reza’s shoulder, not so much from affection as to bind himself to the other man a little while longer until his job was finished.

Reza’s car was in the parking lot next to the Ardebil compound. It was a new Peugeot—not one of the Iranian knockoffs, but a real French Peugeot. That must be a token of official affection. They had tried giving Karim cars over the years, and vacation apartments on the Caspian, and special coupons to import consumer electronics products, but he had always refused. That had been part of why they trusted him at Tohid, because he appeared to be a scientist only, a man who had joined the program not for the perquisites, but for the intellectual challenge of the work.

Reza drove south toward the Silk Road restaurant where he had booked a table. It was in the Homa Hotel near the center of town. The late-afternoon traffic was heavy, but it was going the other way, toward the suburbs. Karim didn’t speak much. Reza popped a cassette into the music system. The percussive sound of R. Kelly filled the car; Reza turned up the bass and began nodding his head, in the way he thought a rapper would. Every time the singer said the word “motherfucker,” Reza would repeat it loudly, because it sounded cool.

The little Mitsubishi van from Saraghs carrying its three pilgrims followed behind, the car stopping and starting in the traffic and the driver cursing in Turkmen at the Persian assassins at the wheels of the other vehicles. They were heading to the city center too, it seemed, doubtless to the pilgrim shrines of the haram-e-motahhar.

A third vehicle had been waiting as well outside the Ardebil Research Establishment. It was a black Paykan, hired for the day from the Iran Hotel. The driver of the car would have been recognizable to passengers who had traveled on the overnight Green Express from Tehran. He had kept watch through the night outside one of the first-class cabins, never moving once.

In the back of the Paykan sat Al-Majnoun and Mehdi Esfahani. Both men were carrying weapons. Mehdi, a man who was uncomfortable with silence, would occasionally start up a conversation, but the other man would leave it hanging in the air. His face was dead still, scanning the guardhouse of the Ardebil Research Establishment in the middle distance.

When he saw the two Iranian scientists emerge from the gatehouse, Al-Majnoun told the driver to start the car and follow at a safe distance. Mehdi peered toward the window and then pulled back.

“The Molavi boy!” proclaimed Esfahani in the stern voice of a prosecutor. “I was certain of it, always. The traitor. The dog. Coon-deh!” The last word, spoken with special scorn, was a slang term for homosexual. “Who is the other one with him?”

Al-Majnoun did not answer. He removed one of the two automatic pistols from his black Tumi briefcase and attached a silencer to the barrel. He tucked the gun inside the belt of his trousers and then folded himself into the recess of