Oath of Office

Dovzhenko rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger as he drove, trying to clear the fog from his head. He’d fled straight from Maryam’s apartment toward Imam Khomeini International Airport, pounding on the steering wheel, screaming at the windshield in between his attempts to call Kashani and warn her.

No answer.

Highway 7, the main north-south freeway through Tehran, was still relatively busy for the late hour, and he floored the Tiba’s sluggish accelerator in an attempt to merge with the river of red lights and thumping traffic. In the end, the driver of a crane truck, much like the ones used to hang the students, took pity and slowed to let him on.

He’d never met the woman, but he’d heard Maryam’s side of the conversation when they spoke on the phone, and knew this to be the correct number. The IRGC would eventually get it from Maryam’s phone records. Such information would not have been difficult to obtain in Russia. Dovzhenko imagined Iran would not be much different. The Persians were meticulous in their recordkeeping. He smacked the steering wheel again, hard enough to hurt his hand. One could not run from a cancer as pervasive as the Sepah. They had connections in every government office, most every business, and, through the interconnecting circles of Iranian society known as dowreh, to most families as well. There were IRGC fingers in every pie.

There was no point in going back to his apartment. Dovzhenko had what he needed — his Russian diplomatic passport and money. The rest he could buy or steal.

It was better that he keep moving, to get out of Iran as quickly as possible. That meant abandoning his post. He could feign illness.

Dear Comrade Chief of Station, I am much too ill to continue working, because my dissident Iranian girlfriend was murdered by our corrupt allies.

No. Spies did not call in sick.

And this business with General Alov, whatever it was, complicated matters — a high-ranking member of the GRU general staff meeting with the very people trying to overthrow the ruling mullahs. People had been shot for stumbling into situations that were far less strange.

Dovzhenko knew it was time for him to leave. Not just Iran, but the SVR. Russia. But defection was not easy. Even forgetting the emotional trauma of leaving his country behind, the Americans would not trust him. They would see him as a dangle — a double agent meant to provide misinformation. And anyway, what would he have to offer? The Americans would want someone they could use, not a burned spy who’d been caught up in an affair with a dead Iranian dissident.

A horn blared, pulling him from his anguished stupor. He looked sideways and caught the flash of white teeth in the headlights as the driver of a black sedan cursed and shook an angry fist. Guilty, he saw IRGC operatives everywhere. His hands convulsed on the steering wheel, startled that they had found him so quickly. Then the black sedan sped up, just another driver on Highway 7, pissed that Dovzhenko had drifted into his lane.

The Russian wiped his face with one hand while he kept the Tiba steady with the other, settling deeper into the seat as he focused on the road. He could not afford to have an accident now, or to get stopped by a traffic policeman for erratic driving. But he could not stop. A dog like Parviz Sassani would be relentless in his pursuit. Going to ground, even for a moment, to think, to make a plan, would only do half his job for him.

Sassani would be tied up for a few hours with the remainder of the investigation at Maryam’s apartment. She was naked, a sight most of these men did not often get to see. A painful sob caught in his chest. They would take their time collecting evidence and taking lurid photographs, all in the name of thoroughness. The most devout in any religion, Dovzhenko had observed, were often the last to see their own perversions.

He locked the Makarov and his two-way radio in the trunk of the Tiba, which he abandoned among hundreds of similarly ugly sedans in the Number 3 parking lot west of the starkly lit Novotel airport hotel. The sky bridge through the metro station took him across the road to the main terminal where a tired-looking man at the Emirates ticket counter tapped the requisite keys to book him on the next flight to Dubai.