Oath of Office

Last-minute airline travel by people who paid with cash and had no luggage was a sure sign of something illegal, so Dovzhenko switched gears, pretending he was the hunter instead of the hunted, as if he were chasing someone and simply had to get on that flight. He exuded the official swagger they taught so well in SVR training — the look that said his business was of the highest import and that it would be extremely dangerous to know what he knew. The ticket agent looked over his diplomatic passport, read between the lines — though incorrectly — and issued his boarding pass so Dovzhenko could continue chasing whatever miscreant he was chasing.

He made it through security quickly, though the screeners were on high alert because of the recent student unrest, not to mention the ever-present threat of Jundallah terrorists for an independent Balochistan.

The flight to Dubai would leave just after one in the morning, leaving him a two-hour layover before he could catch a flight to Kabul. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to eat besides a cigarette. The hangings had pressed a fist to his gut that made food unthinkable. He and Maryam had thought to eat late, but then…

He needed to put something in his stomach, even if he didn’t feel like it. Most of the shops here were closed anyway, so he decided to wait until he reached Dubai. The airport there was a riotous crossroads of cultures that was almost, but not quite, Muslim. The same way Vegas was almost, but was not quite, America. Or maybe they were both the real faces of the culture and the rest of UAE and USA were the façades.

Dovzhenko’s diplomatic passport would get him into most countries without a visa, but a record would still be made. Cameras, though, were ubiquitous in Dubai. Whether in the open or tucked behind the virtual aquarium at passport control, facial-recognition scanners were everywhere. Dovzhenko would be careful, but all he could really do was hope for the best. It would take time for Sassani to pursue a formal inquiry with his superiors, and he would need proof to do that. Wouldn’t he? Unless the chief of station saw Dovzhenko’s absence as prima facie evidence that he was guilty of something. In which case, he would be detained the moment he got off the plane, if not before it even took off.

It couldn’t be helped. Just another reason not to dally.

He alternately cursed for not shooting Sassani when he had the chance, and then consoled himself that he needed to stay alive in order to warn Ysabel Kashani. Sassani would pull out every stop to hunt her down, to find out her connection to Maryam. It was the way he worked, hopping from friend to friend, acquaintance to acquaintance, using his whips and torches to extract the next person who might have something to do with this uprising. Women, it seemed, were the faces leading the crowds of late. Ysabel Kashani was a friend of Maryam’s and a woman, which made her doubly suspect, though she was guilty of nothing beyond letting her friend stay at her apartment.

Dovzhenko had seen a few photographs of Kashani but knew little about her, other than she came from a wealthy family and that she and Maryam were friends. He guessed that the two women had met at the university, or possibly the treatment center, both working to help those affected by the torrent of opiates flooding the country from Afghanistan. Kashani was out of the country for the moment, doing something with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. But she was still well within the reach of the IRGC. The Sepah had men all over the Middle East, Africa, and Asia — Dubai, Damascus, Pakistan, and certainly western Afghanistan. Vast networks of paid informants that linked them to virtually every border guard in the Middle East and Central Asia.

What they did not have was Maryam’s notebook.

Ysabel Kashani’s address was written boldly on the second page, along with several phone numbers. Her office with the UNODC was on the outskirts of Herat, less than a hundred miles from the border with Iran. The government in Tehran would have a record of her employment, but, as with any bureaucracy, Sassani would have to know where to look in order to find it. As long as Dovzhenko got to her before she crossed a border or hit some other checkpoint that entered her passport number into a computer, he could get her out.

Dovzhenko sat down in a plastic chair and waited for his flight to board. It wouldn’t be long now. He would fly to Dubai, then on to Kabul where, even with his diplomatic passport, he would have to explain himself before catching the one-hour flight to Herat. He’d been there before, several times, overseeing the transfer of weapons to the Taliban on behalf of the Russian government.