you offside, and whispering in your ear. You have to figure out what to do next. We’re not smart enough for that. Not even your old pal Adrian. This is your show now, Harry. But if you tell a soul what you learned today, I promise that you will bring the house down. On yourself and everyone else. Promise, old chum. Bank on it.”
They walked back to Mount Street, where the car was still waiting. Harry was late arriving at Heathrow, but such was the power of Adrian and his colleagues that the plane had mysteriously been delayed an hour because of a security review by the British Airports Authority. Harry tried to sleep on the long flight home, but he couldn’t.
TEHRAN
Karim Molavi’s door was open just a crack inside the white building that housed Tohid Electrical Company. Dr. Molavi had left it that way on purpose—neither open nor closed. He worked on secrets, but he was not secretive. That was the message his door told. They had given him less work the past few weeks, and that made him wonder: Did they trust him less? Had they put his name on a watch list? But those were questions you couldn’t think about for very long. They made you weak.
The young scientist repeated to himself the passage from the Koran that the regime took to be its guiding precept. Amr be marouf, va nahi az monker. Promote virtue and contain vice. That was what he did every day. He had just turned the idea inside out, supplanting the liars’ definitions with his own. He had to be smarter than they were, every day and every minute. That had always been his protection, that he could see things before the others and process them more quickly in his mind.
Molavi was dressed in his usual white collarless shirt, but without his father’s gold cuff links. He had put them in a box and hidden them in his apartment a few weeks earlier. He wasn’t sure why. The jacket of his black suit was neatly placed on a wooden hanger on the back of the door. He had cut his hair so it wasn’t as thick and lustrous; he had looked too elegant before, he feared. People would notice. And he had let his beard grow. Good grooming for men had become dangerous in recent months. The police were visiting the barber’s shops now, warning not to trim men’s eyebrows or the hairs in their nose. It was against God’s will. When Molavi thought of that, it made the idea of betrayal seem easier. Who could not betray such lunacy—the idea that God commands us to have bushy eyebrows?
On his desk were several articles he had printed out from journals in the West. He was underlining them; yellow ink for information that would be useful for the university institute where he lectured once a week as part of his cover; red ink for information that would be useful for his secret work at Tohid. He walked to the window and pulled back the dark curtain. It was so bright outside; it was another world. The push of the traffic, the babies in prams, taken by their grandmas and nannies for a morning walk. The rich men who lived in Jamaran and the poor men who served them—whose biggest secret, nearly all of them, was the dream of what lay between a woman’s legs.
“Karim?” There was a rap at the half-open door and then a push, and his boss, Dr. Bazargan, entered the room. Dr. Bazargan wore a white coat, as if he were a medical doctor or a laboratory technician. He was stupider than the people who worked under him. That was why they had given him the job.
“May God grant you good health, Director,” said Molavi.
“And to you. Thanks God.” Bazargan hovered awkwardly, unsure whether to stand or sit.
Molavi rose and offered him a chair, but the visitor declined. It wasn’t that sort of courtesy call, evidently.
“People have been asking more questions about you, Karim. I thought I should tell you.”
The young scientist blinked, his eyelashes falling like a curtain.
“What are they asking?” said Karim as confidently as he could manage. “Do they wonder how I do my work? Do they read my papers and wish to discuss them?”
“No, Karim. It is not that. I do not think these people are scientists.”
Molavi remained standing. There was a roar in his ears.
“Who are they, then?”
“They are with the Etelaat, I think. Like the