Oath of Office

The chief justice, a mujtahid well versed in Islamic law and chosen by the Supreme Leader himself, stood on a wooden platform and read the sentence over the loudspeaker. He’d been chosen for a reason and knew what buttons to push to get the crowd going. The accused were all guilty of mofsed-e-filarz—spreading corruption on the earth, a crime often attributed to pimps and abusers of children. What good citizen would not want their streets rid of corruption? Members of the crowd — many of them likely Basij militia who’d been ordered to attend — began to cheer at the sentence that had become a sermon. They goaded others into joining them. The pious mujtahid raised his arms, inhaling the applause.

Babak, Javad, and Yousef did not even have to leave their cells to be convicted. That crime alone assured a death sentence, but the council of mullahs sitting in judgment tacked on the capital crime of blasphemy for good measure. The sentence did not matter to Javad. His heart had stopped in the subbasement of Evin Prison under the brutal hand of Major Sassani.

The Ayatollah’s trusted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would carry out the execution. Sassani decided that Javad, too, would be strung up with his comrades, a grisly reminder that even if you were already dead, a death sentence from the Supreme Leader would be carried out without deviation.

Dovzhenko lowered the binoculars, feeling his stomach roil. Even the heartless KGB had customarily surprised condemned men with their execution — just another trip to the interrogation room, a walk down a long hallway that turned unexpectedly left instead of right, and ended with a bullet behind the ear before the poor addled soul knew anything had changed. Hose down the walls and bring on the next one. Neat and tidy, and humane in its brutality. These IRGC animals were medieval in their methods. There was no merciful breaking of the neck at the end of a drop. The Americans were fond of calling people Nazis — but the way the Iranians did this was just that, the Nazi method of hanging. A length of heavy rope or blue plastic cord was affixed to the boom of a construction crane and then tied around the victim’s neck. He or she was then hauled upward to strangle slowly. If they were fortunate, the cord cut off the carotid arteries’ blood flow to the brain. More often than not, the victim danced and twitched during the long haul upward, choking to death over long and excruciating minutes.

Dovzhenko was no stranger to brutal tactics. God above knew he’d been party to much for which he would someday have to answer. The two students quivering at the back of the van — and the one already splayed beside the body bag that would eventually hold him — had been betrayed by someone. Many had been murdered across this country, but those deaths had all been during confrontations with the police. Arrests were made, hundreds rounded up, but Dovzhenko read the statistical reports, and to his knowledge, there had yet to be any other trials. No, these three men had been singled out, plucked from among a thousand others. Why? To make some kind of point? They were not even Reza’s mid-level lieutenants. Someone had convinced the Supreme Leader that the benefit of their death would outweigh the unification their martyrdom would bring to the movement. There was something here Dovzhenko was not seeing.

He himself had convinced more than a few to betray their friends. Even though his mother had pushed him into intelligence work, Dovzhenko turned out to be gifted. Getting others to betray their compatriots was the bread and butter of such work, by smooth talk or heavy-handed coercion. Lie, blackmail, threaten — it did not matter so long as the secrets flowed to the presidium in Moscow — and Erik excelled at every facet. There was a necessary heartlessness to it, a willingness to rape the mind of another human being without going completely amok. Sociopathy within bounds, they called it, a sterile medical word to make themselves feel atoned. Any SVR officer with a soul was left nothing but a dried husk in no time at all. Those without, took a bit longer.

The squeal of cables outside the balcony slowed Dovzhenko’s gallop of runaway philosophy, and he drew himself back to the scene on the streets below. He forced himself to watch the three blindfolded men rise as if taking flight, jerking kicks causing the two who were still alive to twist. He played the binoculars down to the chairs where the executioners stood at parade rest beside the prison slippers that had fallen off the men during their struggles. Parviz Sassani stood at the edge of the crowd, wearing civilian clothing so he could blend in. Those on either side of him shouted halfhearted chants of “Allahu Akbar,” but the major said nothing. He was too busy smiling.