Electrical and the several dozen other companies in the secret network—came under periodic suspicion like this. Maybe that was the game, to shine a harsh light on everyone and see who flinched.
Molavi took a taxi to the Vali Asr district. He wanted to be with other people. He went to the movies at the Farhang Theater and then stopped by a little coffee shop around the corner on Shariati Avenue and ordered a Faludeh, with extra rosewater and syrup. He wondered if they were following him. He struck up a conversation with a young man in an expensive leather jacket who was cradling a Nintendo Game Boy. All this young privileged man cared about were video games, it turned out. At home he had an Xbox and a PlayStation. He rattled off all the bootleg games he had managed to obtain, as if they were trophies of a better world. Karim tried to sound interested, just to have the company, but he wasn’t, and he eventually apologized that he was sleepy and paid his bill.
He went home to his flat in Yoosef Abad and tried to sleep, but when he closed his eyes, all he saw was light. He took his father’s yellowed volume of Ferdowsi’s epic poem, thinking the heavy words would lull him to sleep. The opening chapters told of Kayumars, the first king of the Persians.
You will not find another who has known
The might of Kayumars and his great throne
The world was his while he remained alive,
He showed men how to prosper and to thrive:
But all this world is like a tale we hear—
Men’s evil, and their glory, disappear.
Karim read the metered lines, wishing to be embraced by the timeless epic, but always his heart was racing. He was in mortal danger. If he stood still, they would eventually catch him. If he tried to escape, they would also catch him. If he spoke or was silent, either way, they would detect his crimes. Was there any path that was not an illusion? What would torture feel like? What would it be to…die? As dawn was breaking, in the half-dreaming state after a white night, he had a thought: He would communicate without communicating. He would send a message that was not a message. It would contain its own cover. He thought it would work. But was that the sleeplessness talking, the dream of escape?
WASHINGTON
Harry Pappas didn’t believe in disloyalty of any kind. He couldn’t abide it in others and he had never, so far as he could remember, been guilty of it himself. But he returned from his latest trip to London with a feeling not so much of a breach as of having traded one loyalty for another. He couldn’t quite explain it to himself. He was a man who had never experienced ambivalence about things that mattered—not toward his wife, nor the agency; certainly not to his country. But he had that sense now. A part of him felt he was doing something wrong, but a much stronger voice said that his actions were correct and necessary. He was going to tell Andrea about it, but she was tired when he got home and he didn’t know how to begin. So he poured himself a deep glass of whiskey.
The first morning he was back he met with Marcia Hill and his young staff. The operational routine continued, with its reassuring checklist of tasks attempted and completed. A case officer in Yerevan had cold pitched an Iranian businessman who was living in Nekichevan; the man hadn’t said no, and the case officer thought he would say yes if they sweetened the deal by fifty thousand dollars. An Iranian scientist attending an IAEA meeting in Vienna had left his laptop computer in his room when he went to dinner. The hard drive had been copied, and the take from the computer was now being analyzed. The staff went through the rest of the in-box, and it all sounded serious—operations approved, agents vetted, source reports approved for dissemination. But who could say how much of it was real?
When the meeting broke up, Marcia Hill lingered in Harry’s office. She knew him in a way that none of the others did. She had covered for him when he ran off on his trip, but he hadn’t told even Marcia where he was going. For all she knew, he had been playing craps in Las Vegas, or banging a hooker in Boca Raton.
“So how are you?” she asked. It