The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,95

and green. Soon they picked up the A01, the main route to the northeast, and the bus began climbing the steep slopes of the Alborz Mountains. The sun was low in the sky, and the majestic Mount Damavand was bathed in a golden wash of refracted light. They wound through the mountains for several more hours, the snow at the peaks faintly illuminated in the pale moonlight, so that the landscape looked as if it had been painted in shadow colors. He nibbled at his sandwich and sipped occasionally from his water bottle. He dozed off for an hour, and when he awoke the bus was descending from the mountains toward the commercial towns along the Caspian Sea. The bus stopped in Amol, and then Babol, and a half hour after that it rolled into the ancient town of Sari.

Molavi looked out the window. The town looked familiar. He had come here as a boy with his parents, before his mother became ill and it was impossible for her to travel. The bus passed the old part of town, graced by a white clock tower that gleamed in the floodlights. Did he remember this place, or was it the idea of this place that he was remembering? The bus stopped at the Sari main terminal, near the Tajan River. A few other passengers stumbled off, weary from the trip.

It was past 9:00 p.m., and the station was nearly empty. It had the desolate feel of a small bus terminal anywhere; it was a place people left to go to bigger cities, not a place they came back to. Molavi asked the station manager for directions to Golha Square and the Hotel Asram. It was just a few hundred meters south from the station, said the manager, an easy walk. Molavi walked along the bank of the river, thinking to himself: I don’t want to die here. I want to live.

The hotel was modern and ugly, two words that often went together in Iran. The concrete exterior was lit in red and green, which made the façade even less attractive. The desk clerk gave him a room on one of the upper floors, with its own bathroom and a view of the old city and its whitewashed tower. Molavi wasn’t ready to sleep, and the hotel made him uncomfortable. He found a café near the old city, close by a graceful fountain, and ordered himself a glass of fresh pomegranate juice. It was at once sweet and tart on his tongue. He went back to the hotel, washed his undershorts and socks in the bathroom sink, and hung them by the open window to dry. It was an act of faith that he would survive, washing his undergarments. He slept naked, the fabric of the cheap cotton sheets rough against his arms and legs.

Jackie and her Iranian agent took the fast road north from Tehran to Chalus on the Caspian coast. They passed through Karaj and then climbed the spectacular highway through the mountains to the sea. In Chalus, Jackie and her friend stopped at the Hotel Malek and dined at the stylish hotel restaurant. The atmosphere was more relaxed here than in Tehran, and Jackie loosened her head scarf, as had many of the Iranian women seated nearby. In the ladies’ room, an Iranian woman said in perfect English, “I love your purse,” and asked where she had bought it. It turned out she had a flat in Paris.

The two travelers were conspicuous enough that a dozen people could have testified who they were—a rich Iranian traveling with his mistress along the Caspian Sea coastal road, bound for the east.

When they returned to the Mercedes after dinner, an additional passenger was waiting in the shadows. He was a Pakistani man, dressed neatly in a black suit and tie. He looked like he might be a personal servant to the Iranian man—a valet, or perhaps an office manager. He was carrying an elongated travel bag, of the sort tennis players carry. He placed it in the trunk of the Mercedes.

The three drove east along the coast road, stopping for the night in Babol, just west of Sari. The Iranian man and his German woman friend took adjoining rooms at the Marjan Hotel. The Pakistani continued east a few more kilometers.

Molavi rose with the cry of the dawn prayers the next morning. He walked to his window and looked out on the city. It was uglier by day. The buses and cars