The Disciple

He amazed me. It began to sink in. America. He got up, balancing himself while he looked quickly around. He took a small photo that he had jammed in a crack in the wall over the heater, put it in a trouser pocket, then started for the door. I followed him.

At the Grand Bazaar I purchased him two sets of clothes and a small carry-on bag to carry the set that wasn’t on his back. We dickered with a shoe merchant over one shoe. He insisted we take a pair, which we did, for half price. Qomi put on the shoe he needed, and we threw the other away. Then we drove out to the airport and parked.

I got Qomi a reservation on Turkish Airways to Istanbul, then London, and United to New York. I put the tab on my spy American Express credit card. As I was signing the invoice, it finally hit Qomi that he was going and I was sending him. He began sobbing.

We spent the night in the airport terminal. I bought food, and we ate in a lounge. He snuffled a while, then slept. I walked around, looking, wondering when all this was going to be obliterated. If all these people I was looking at were going to be dead next week. The men, the women, the kids, the Revolutionary Guards with their submachine guns, infidels and faithful, si

At ten o’clock the next morning I shook Qomi’s hand, pressed a hundred-dollar bill into his hand and shoved him toward the security line.

“I can’t pay you back,” he said.

“Life isn’t about payback. Find a woman, have some kids, be a good dad.”

He pumped my hand one more time, then got in line. After he was through the pat-down, he disappeared through the door.

I waited until his plane was taxiing out before I turned to go.

My cell phone rang as I was hiking out of the terminal. It was Jake Grafton. “You get those visas?” he asked.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Your voice sounds fu

“Yeah. Thanks, Admiral. I owe you.”

On the way to my hotel I stopped at the mapmakers’ shop where Mostafa Abtahi worked. He was hunched over a drawing table in the back of the shop; I saw him as I walked past the racks of maps on display. A clerk asked me what I wanted in Farsi, and I pointed at Abtahi, who turned, saw me and came charging toward the counter.

I pulled the little envelope from my pocket and said, “Have your passport on you?”

“The visa?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

He whipped the passport out and handed it to me. “Ghasem said you’d come through, oh, yes. He told me I was going to America, oh, yes. I didn’t believe him, but he said it would happen, oh, yessss!”

I stood there frozen, staring at him. “Ghasem?”

“Ghasem Murad,” he said, as if I were an idiot. “He and I share an apartment. Every night we talk about my dream of going to America. Ghasem said you were a good man, that my dream would come true.”

Although there are billions of people, it’s really a small world. Tiny, in fact. I wondered what else my buddy Ghasem had told Mostafa Abtahi about me.

The clerk was standing there watching, openmouthed. Abtahi noticed him now and hit him on the shoulder as he shouted, “I am going to America!”

While they gabbled at full throttle, I glued the visa into the passport and shoved it at Abtahi. “The sooner the better,” I said. “Go as soon as you can.”

The future newest American looked at me quizzically.

“Damn country is filling up fast,” I explained. “Hurry on over while there is still some American Dream left to get.”

Hazra al-Rashid worked hard at staying informed about the activities of foreign spies in Iran. With over fifty thousand employees, the MOIS had suf ficient manpower to keep tabs on most of the foreign visitors, many of whom, Hazra believed, were spies.

Foreign diplomats got the full treatment, since all of them were spies. Their comings and goings and contacts were observed and reported and logged.

This American, Tommy Carmellini, had her stumped. Since he had arrived in Tehran, he had disappeared for hours at a time, on several occasions for as many as twenty-four hours. Slippery as an eel, he was undoubtedly an active spy milking information from traitors.

Yet, according to the MOIS daily reports, just two days ago he spent a day in a working-class slum in the southwestern section of town, met a one-legged laborer who had lived there for six years while working on residential construction projects-nothing for the government-then accompanied him to the airport, bought him a ticket to America and waited with him until he left. Abdullaziz Nasr Qomi. A nobody. His dossier made that crystal clear. He had lost that leg in the Iraqi war and had been doing common labor ever since. Attended mosque occasionally. Never worked in the defense construction industry. Qomi had an American tourist visa in his passport when he presented it at the airport. Carmellini had undoubtedly delivered it. Why? What could Qomi have done for the Americans that they would reward him with a visa?

Then Carmellini had gone to the Islamic mapmaker’s shop and delivered an American tourist visa to Mostafa Abtahi, who was the roommate of Ghasem Murad, the grandson of the deceased scholar, nephew of Habib Sultani, the defense minister, and cousin of Davar Ghobadi, al-Rashid’s conduit for passing misinformation to the CIA via Professor Azari in America. Abtahi was going to America, too.

Due to his relationship with Murad, Abtahi was a much more interesting person than Qomi. Abtahi could be a spy, a conduit from Ghasem Murad to Carmellini. Was he? What secrets had he passed?

Al-Rashid knew precisely how to find out. With a telephone call, she could have Abtahi picked up and interrogated by the MOIS. She could even assist in the interrogation. She knew from long experience that Abtahi would eventually admit all of his crimes against the Islamic Republic. He might resist at first, but he would talk. They all did.

But was that the right move at this time?

The day of reckoning was eight days away. On that date, Zionism would be smashed a fatal blow, and Iran would be catapulted into a leadership position in a worldwide jihad against the infidels.

Hazra al-Rashid rose from her desk and went to the window of her office, from which she could see the skyline of Tehran.

Assuming that Carmellini had learned everything that Ghasem Murad knew, which was everything that Habib Sultani knew, and had passed it to the CIA, would the spymasters in America believe it? The missiles, warheads, the targets, the date of launching…

Iran was but eight days away from seizing a leadership position in the Islamic world, one that would make her a major power and give her leaders a prominent voice in remaking life on planet Earth.

For the last few years the spymasters in Washington had received an impressive river of intelligence that said Iran was years away from being a nuclear power. The simple fact was that Iran’s nuclear program was too big to hide. Too many people of doubtful loyalty were involved; the truth would eventually leak out. So al-Rashid had done what Churchill recommended during World War II, given the truth a bodyguard of lies.

Humans, al-Rashid knew from hard experience, tend to believe those bits of data that support their political and religious views and prejudices, their framework for making sense of the physical and spiritual world, and tend to reject all data that don’t fit into the framework. This was a universal human trait.

If she went after Tommy Carmellini now, Hazra al-Rashid thought, she might give him instant credibility and force Washington to reevaluate whatever information he had been passing.

That didn’t strike Hazra al-Rashid as a wise move. Not just now.

On the other hand, hearing what Mostafa Abtahi knew from his own lips might give her information she did not have and provide some clarity to the intelligence picture.