The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,7

see it and understand, perhaps just a little, what a peculiar country Iran was.

It was a cheap, almost luridly sentimental poster, the sort of thing that would embarrass an educated Iranian, but it had the cartoon energy of folk religion: the martyr’s sweet, dark-eyed gaze; his skin as fine as rice paper; his black hair as silky as a leopard’s fur; his eyes moist with tears for the tragedy that lay ahead. When Iranians looked into those limpid eyes, they cried too, in shame and rage. The face spoke of the wound that never healed, of the martyr’s blood that flowed like a perpetual fountain. The story was so cruel: the Prophet’s descendant lured by the evil Yazid and murdered on the plain of Kerbala. Iranians marked the awful betrayal every year, whipping themselves into a collective hysteria. The abiding message was that history is a conspiracy against the believers. And if that were so, what counterconspiracies were not permissible?

Harry stopped to look at the poster each morning, to put himself in the mind of people for whom the events of A.D. 680 were as yesterday. The Iranians understood suffering. They knew that the decent young men were betrayed by the deceit and blunders of others. They knew that goodness is a secret and that happiness is an illusion. That was what Harry had in common with them.

Harry Pappas hadn’t wanted to become head of the Iran Operations Division. After Baghdad, he had hoped to disappear into a senior staff job somewhere, jump to a safe lily pad, or perhaps just retire like most of his friends. Sign up for the “Horizons” course and be done with it. He was broken inside. Iraq had done that; not the big war that had destroyed everyone, but the private and desolate grief that comes from personal loss. The agency was broken, too, but that wasn’t Harry’s problem. Or at least, he didn’t want to think it was.

But the director had made a special appeal, and several of his closest friends had told him it was his duty. The only way to avoid another Iraq was to have the right people do Iran. They told Harry he was the best; he was the teacher; he was the one who could say no and also yes. Harry might have walked away even from that, he was still hurting so much. But his wife Andrea told him that taking the job would help him get over Alex; that it was a way to keep faith with his dead son. That otherwise, he would die.

So Harry said yes, and he put the picture of the Imam Hussein up on the wall to remind himself that he was living in the country of betrayal and pain.

Harry’s office was just inside the heavy door. There was a big oak desk for him, a fat leather couch for visitors, and against the back wall, a conference table and chairs for staff meetings. The room had no windows, and when the door was closed, it was an airless and colorless tomb of secrets. Harry hadn’t bothered to decorate the office. He had cartons of memorabilia from his previous assignments—in Tegucigalpa, Moscow, Beirut; even a brief stint with an earlier Iranian “virtual station” known as “TehFran,” located in Frankfurt, Germany. But he didn’t have the heart to unpack all the old junk. It would only have depressed him to see the artifacts of his life up on the walls, so he left them in the boxes. As for the medals and testimonials from the agency, he had destroyed them, one by one, the night of Alex’s funeral.

Harry’s senior staff gathered in his spartan office for the morning meeting. They were kids, most of them. The agency was becoming like a university, with a few old professors and the rest young people who were called “officers” and perhaps had even had a tour or two overseas but were more like students. There was no middle; only a top and bottom. That was the good part for Harry, the fact that most of his young colleagues hadn’t learned to game the system yet. Harry took his seat at the head of the conference table, his body too big for the chair.

“Sobh bekheir az laneh jasoosi,” said Harry. It was the same Farsi phrase he used each morning. Good morning from the nest of spies.

“What do we have overnight?”

“Mostly we have a lot of nothing,” rasped back Marcia Hill. She had a thin smile