The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,3
too, in the manteau: a tighter button at the waist that, with a push-up bra from Turkey, could give a woman a pleasing shape. The young men buzzed past on their motorbikes, in shades and cheap leather jackets, looking but not touching, dreaming of the women they could never have. Pedestrians skittered across the pavement like waterbugs, the onrushing cars missing them by centimeters.
“Would you like to hear some music?” asked the driver. He was looking in the rearview mirror with a solicitous eye toward his passenger. The young scientist did not answer. He did not want to speak; he was somewhere else. The driver’s wife was clucking about the impossibility of finding good melons in the market at a reasonable price. The driver began muttering about the poor performance of his favorite soccer team, Esteghlal, hoping for a sympathetic audience from his passenger in the back. Yes, it was terrible, said the scientist. They could not play the game, these young men. They were dogs—no, worse than dogs; they played like women; they played like Arabs.
How long had the young man been thinking about what he was doing now? A year, at least; perhaps his whole adult life. No one could have suspected it from any outward sign, he was quite sure of that. Otherwise they would never have allowed him into the secret precincts of Jamaran, or given him an office in the white building that had no name.
That was their weakness. They suspected everyone, but they had to trust some people even so, and they could never be sure that this trust was well placed. They said they trusted in God, but that was not enough. So they created God’s secret party, the conspiracy of God, and the young man was part of it. He had been loyal in every way except one, which was that he had allowed himself to think of the possibility of disloyalty. That idea had grown until it was a living thing. And then a moment had come when it was the only thing, and the boundary between loyalty and disloyalty had dissolved.
The taxi deposited the young man in Fereshteh Square, a half mile from the Ministry of the Interior. That was his joke. If you are going to defy them, do it in plain sight. He walked with his valise to a villa on Khosravi Street. On the first floor was the office of a small company owned by his uncle Jamshid, which fabricated aluminum siding for residential buildings. The young man helped out with the office paperwork sometimes, as a favor to his uncle. He had installed a computer a few months ago, and arranged for Internet access in his uncle’s name. He came by sometimes in the late afternoons to work on the books and send messages to his uncle’s suppliers here in Iran and in Dubai and Ankara. One of the Iranian companies had its own Internet server. It wasn’t hard to hack into it, and to write code that could make it seem as if a message had originated there when it had really come from somewhere else. The young man was good with computers: he knew how to smooth out the sand, as it were, so that there was no sign that anyone had come or gone.
The young man had his own key and let himself in the door of Uncle Jamshid’s office. A secretary was still there, an awkward girl from Isfahan who was a distant relative. She tidied up the wastebaskets and then said good night, leaving him alone. The young man had wanted to give her a few riyals for her trouble, but she left too quickly. Probably it was better this way; she might have remembered the tip. He powered up the computer and slipped a CD-ROM with his new software into the drive. It was cooler outside now. He turned on some music and let himself relax.
He was posht-e-pardeh. Behind the curtain. He had a secret. Or rather, he had a secret locked inside many other secrets. That was the Persian way. This was a land where it was bad manners to speak plainly; it was too forward, too disrespectful. If you asked a tradesman how much he wanted for his work, he would refuse payment and tell you it was for free. It wasn’t that he didn’t expect to be paid, but that he didn’t want to name a price. And so it was with this special secret. It was