The Disciple

“Did you see Grandfather today?” she asked her cousin.

“Yes.” Ghasem threw himself into the only stuffed chair in the room. He stared at his toes. “His health is failing.”

“He will be free soon,” she remarked.

“Free?” Ghasem wasn’t sure what she meant.

“Death is the only way you can escape the clutches of the government,” she said.

Ghasem rolled his eyes and sagged back into the chair. Davar had spent three years at Oxford, and although she never said it, she had obviously loved England. She came home transformed, as British as Prince Charlie. She had arrived home three years ago this past July. Her father, who should have wanted more for her, thought her presence a godsend. At his request she did all the calculations necessary for his huge construction projects, which he got because he wholeheartedly supported the regime.

Ghasem straightened slightly and looked at his cousin. She wasn’t a pretty woman. Sort of plain, actually. Also brilliant, well educated, and widely read. Not many men would appreciate such a wife, but there were a few that might. There were even rare ones who would treasure her. She would never meet them, he thought, nor they her. If he or her father brought such a man to meet her, she would refuse to see him.

“Not the manteau thing again?” Ghasem said disgustedly. Manteaus, or ripoushes, were loose-fitting, full-length coats that covered the wearer from neck to ankles. Those worn in summer were made of light cloth; those for winter were much heavier. They were plain or discreetly patterned, usually muted pastel colors.

“I loathe the things,” she said. “They are a symbol of all that is wrong in Iran, all that is wrong with this religion. Allah wants me to wear a chador or manteau? I don’t think so.”

“You will become an old maid, never marry, be childless… Have you ever thought about the future, about what will happen when your father dies?”

“I’ll come live with you.”

“Better think of something else,” Ghasem shot back. “I do intend to marry, when I find the right woman, and my wife, whoever she turns out to be, might not appreciate having a maiden cousin as a permanent boarder.”

Davar said nothing. She became even more engrossed in a set of blueprints. Ghasem rose from his chair and looked over her shoulder. These were blueprints for a large underground city. The regime had worked diligently for years to get all nuclear weapons and missile fabrication activities completely underground.

“Which tu

“The executive bunker,” she said. “The galleries are over a hundred meters below the surface. If the Israelis or Americans attack with conventional or nuclear weapons, the Supreme Leader, President Ahmadinejad, and the key mullahs and parliamentary supporters will ride out the hostilities in this bunker. They could stay down there, cut off from the world, for years before their supplies ran out.”

“What about the people on the surface?”

“In a nuclear war, anyone without a bunker ticket is going to be cremated alive or die of radiation poisoning, either fast or slow.”

“While the mullahs will be safe below,” Ghasem mused, “urging us martyrs on to glory.”

“Something like that,” Davar muttered. She made a note on a sheet of paper and continued to stare at the blueprints.

Realizing the conversation had reached a dead end, Ghasem left, closing the door behind him.

When the door latched, Davar stood and took a deep breath. She went to the window and gazed out. Across the rooftops she could glimpse the mountains’ snow-covered peaks and the clouds building on the windward side.

The chador was loathsome, to be sure, and the manteau only a little less so, but they weren’t very high on her list of things she hated about life in Iran. Shia Islam-the way it permeated every nook and cra

Then there was her father, who thought Khomeini was sent by the Prophet to straighten things out here in Iran. He was arrogant and small-minded, with a nose for which way the wind was blowing. After the Islamic Revolution he landed lucrative government contracts and became even richer. Her father was precisely what was wrong with Iran, Davar thought.

If her mother had been gone when she graduated from Oxford, she would have married that American boy who followed her around like a shadow and gone with him back to Tulsa. Her mother had still been alive, though, only dying last year. So she had made her choice. She kissed the boy, told him good-bye, do

Remembering her mother, she rubbed her forehead.

At least there were no more tears.

Then there was her younger brother, Khurram, whom Davar loathed. A devout Muslim and member of a volunteer paramilitary branch of the Revolutionary Guard called Basij, he believed in the revolution with all his heart and soul, and tried to make the rest of the world believe as he did. He was always getting in fights with people who criticized the revolution, the government or the president. No scholar, he was lazy and self-righteous, his sole virtue his love for fighting.

Oh, how she would love to get out of this house. Out of Iran. Out, out, out.

Unfortunately, death was the only escape.

Davar glanced at the plans for the executive bunker. Those fools… Carmellini had photographed these blueprints, she knew, so at least the Americans knew where Ahmadinejad and the mullahs were going to hide.

She had lied to him. Told him all her information came from dead drops, when in truth there was only one drop. Much of her material came from the people she knew and talked to, the young professionals who made Ahmadinejad’s nuclear program possible. If Carmellini knew their names and he was tortured, they were as good as dead.

And yet… the truth was, they were all doomed. Death would come soon for a great many Iranians, she thought, and she knew she was one of them.

“Okay,” George Washington Hosein said and handed me a folded sheet of paper, which I pocketed. G. W. was our illegal in charge in the heart of the beast. “The names on that paper are the people we know she had been meeting. There are some others, but I don’t know their names. Those four are prominent critics of the government. It’s a wonder that they’re still aboveground and breathing.”

“She figured out she’s being tailed?”

“If she knows we’re following her, she doesn’t seem to care. Nobody else is tailing her. She isn’t taking any precautions. Takes her car and goes wherever.”

“How about you and Ahmad and Joe’s guys? You got tails?”

“Clean as new pe

We were in the main bazaar, and Hosein was again selling fruit and veggies from his stand. He had to keep up appearances. I paid him for a pear and automatically rubbed it on my sleeve without thinking.

“Don’t you dare eat that without washing it,” he whispered fiercely. “They’ll have to hammer a cork up your ass to keep you from shitting yourself to death. This is a non-toilet-paper country, Tommy. Use your goddamn head.”

I felt foolish. After all, I spend half my life in the third world. I acknowledged the point and inspected the apples.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

G. W. glanced around to see if anyone was listening to us. “I think Davar is skating on damn thin ice,” he muttered.