Oath of Office

Dovzhenko paused mid-step, taking a contemplative sip of his coffee — a third of it milk — and steeled himself in the sterile quiet. He was already exhausted and wanted to sit down right there on the stairs, but he was on camera so there was no point in that. Stopping to drink some coffee was one thing. Sitting down to think would surely spawn questions he did not care to answer. Russia and Iran were allies, but the IRGC mistrusted even those in their own ranks — especially now. A moment of weakness or indecision would be seen for what it was — a lack of commitment. So Erik Dovzhenko took another drink of his coffee and hauled himself downward with the metal banister. The journey to section 2A, subbasement 4, of Evin Prison was not an easy one to make, and he needed all the help he could get.

He was an experienced, if uneasy, professional, fifteen years with the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki — the SVR — half of the Russian version of the old Soviet KGB that worked mainly outside the motherland. If FSB was the Russian equivalent of the American FBI, SVR was the CIA. Dovzhenko had the dark, wavy hair of his Azeri mother, which he combed straight back with pomade. He’d inherited his father’s handsome, if somewhat brooding, Russian face. That along with his olive skin and dark hair made it difficult to tell just exactly where in the world he was from. Such ambiguous ethnicity came in handy for an intelligence officer, and he sometimes wondered if his mother had not married his father for the sole purpose of having a child who could easily melt into a crowd virtually anywhere in the world. Dovzhenko was a fit one hundred ninety pounds and just under six feet tall, with square shoulders and massive boxer’s hands. His thumbs were on the large side, which had prompted a combatives instructor at spy school in Chelebityevo to comment that they would be good for gouging out the eyes of an opponent in battle. Dovzhenko had done some grisly things during his fifteen years with the SVR, but so far, he had yet to poke out anyone’s eyes with his thumbs.

He should have been promoted by now, certainly further along in his career than watching the goings-on of IRGC thugs in the belly of an Iranian prison that stank of shit and moldy bread. His mother was the spy in the family, using her knowledge of Azerbaijani and other Turkic languages in service to the KGB in the early 1980s. She had good stories and told them often, joking that she had started pushing Erik toward the clandestine life while he was still “hanging on the tit.”

As far as Erik knew, she’d not been employed since the KGB was dissolved, but, as she often said, there was no such thing as a former KGB officer. You were always active, just waiting to be called back into service. No one called. Erik could tell she missed the action, the excitement. He supposed that was the principal reason she pushed him toward the SVR — so she could live vicariously through the exploits she knew he would have. His father had been a teacher. An unassuming and gentle man who sat in his chair with his nose in a book while his wife skulked around the house with an old Makarov in her pocket, drinking a potent Azerbaijani mulberry liquor called tutovka—or, worse, cheap Russian vodka in a bottle with a tearaway foil lid. There was no need to replace a cap once Zahra Dovzhenko tucked into a bottle.

His mother’s drunken tirades alone had been enough to push Erik out of the house. She still had enough contacts that she was able to get him recruited. He was athletic and smart, and he found he had an aptitude for the work, though he never really enjoyed it. There was a certain sociopathic nature to spying that always left him a little bilious. He had no trouble walking up to a criminal and punching him in the face — or even shooting him, if it came to that. But he had too much of his father in him to enjoy the lying game as much as his mother did.

Men and women who lied for a living tended to be uncomfortable around those who valued the truth. Erik Dovzhenko was trusted implicitly, but he was not loved — by his peers or by his superiors. In an organization like SVR, not to be loved meant not to be promoted. While so many of his cohort had already attained chief of station in places like Prague and Berlin, Erik Dovzhenko was stuck in the eternal purgatory of mid-level case officer, descending into the lowest circles of Hell — like here in Tehran.

Six meters above, spring had come to the city. Sparrows flitted and chirped among new sycamore and mulberry growth, grass turned from brown to green overnight, and the snow that blanketed Mount Tochal was beginning to melt. Six meters below, deep in the bowels of section 2A, subbasement 4, things were much darker. Sewage gurgled through open drains. The smell of urine and hopelessness mingled in the fetid air with stale cigarette smoke and the overwhelming stench of the IRGC guards’ cologne.