Ken Follett - On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

In a strange way he was grateful for the experience. He had grown up fast, and it had given him an edge over his contemporaries in business life. It had also given him a healthy respect for the sound of gunfire.

But most of his colleagues did not feel that way, nor did their wives. Whenever evacuation was discussed they resisted the idea. They had time, work, and pride invested in EDS Corporation Iran, and they did not want to walk away from it. Their wives had turned the rented apartments into real homes, and they were making plans for Christmas. The children had their schools, their friends, their bicycles, and their pets. Surely, they were telling themselves, if we just lie low and hang on, the trouble will blow over.

Coburn had tried to persuade Liz to take the kids back to the States, not just for their safety, but because the time might come when he would have to evacuate some 350 people all at once, and he would need to give that job his complete undivided attention, without being distracted by private anxiety for his own family. Liz had refused to go.

He sighed when he thought of Liz. She was funny and feisty and everyone enjoyed her company, but she was not a good corporate wife. EDS demanded a lot from its executives: if you needed to work all night to get the job done, you worked all night. Liz resented that. Back in the States, working as a recruiter, Coburn had often been away from home Monday to Friday, traveling all over the country, and she had hated it. She was happy in Tehran because he was home every night. If he was going to stay here, she said, so was she. The children liked it here, too. It was the first time they had lived outside the United States, and they were intrigued by the different language and culture of Iran. Kim, the eldest at eleven, was too full of confidence to get worried. Kristi, the eight-year-old, was somewhat anxious, but then she was the emotional one, always the quickest to overreact. Both Scott, seven, and Kelly, the baby at four, were too young to comprehend the danger.

So they stayed, like everyone else, and waited for things to get better--or worse.

Coburn's thoughts were interrupted by a tap at the door, and Majid walked in. A short, stocky man of about fifty with a luxuriant mustache, he had once been wealthy: his tribe had owned a great deal of land and had lost it in the land reform of the sixties. Now he worked for Coburn as an administrative assistant, dealing with the Iranian bureaucracy. He spoke fluent English and was highly resourceful. Coburn liked him a lot: Majid had gone out of his way to be helpful when Coburn's family arrived in Iran.

"Come in," Coburn said. "Sit down. What's on your mind?"

"It's about Fara."

Coburn nodded. Fara was Majid's daughter, and she worked with her father: her job was to make sure that all American employees always had up-to-date visas and work permits. "Some problem?" Coburn said.

"The police asked her to take two American passports from our files without telling anyone."

Coburn frowned. "Any passports in particular?"

"Paul Chiapparone's and Bill Gaylord's."

Paul was Coburn's boss, the head of EDS Corporation Iran. Bill was second-in-command and manager of their biggest project, the contract with the Ministry of Health.

"What the hell is going on?" Coburn said.

"Fara is in great danger," Majid said. "She was instructed not to tell anyone about this. She came to me for advice. Of course I had to tell you, but I'm afraid she will get into very serious trouble."

"Wait a minute, let's back up," Coburn said. "How did this happen?"

"She got a telephone call this morning from the Police Department, Residence Permit Bureau, American Section. They asked her to come to the office. They said it was about James Nyfeler. She thought it was routine. She arrived at the office at eleven-thirty and reported to the head of the American Section. First he asked for Mr. Nyfeler's passport and residence permit. She told him that Mr. Nyfeler is no longer in Iran. Then he asked about Paul Bucha. She said that Mr. Bucha also was no longer in the country."

"Did she?"

"Yes."

Bucha was in Iran, but Fara might not have known that, Coburn thought. Bucha had been a resident here, had left the country, and had come back in, briefly: he was due to fly back to Paris tomorrow.

Majid continued: "The officer then said, 'I suppose the other two are gone also?' Fara saw that he had four files on his desk, and she asked which other two. He told her Mr. Chiapparone and Mr. Gaylord. She said she had just picked up Mr. Gaylord's residence permit earlier this morning. The officer told her to get the passports and residence permits of both Mr. Gaylord and Mr. Chiapparone and bring them to him. She was to do it quietly, not to cause alarm."

"What did she say?" Coburn asked.

"She told him she could not bring them today. He instructed her to bring them tomorrow morning. He told her she was officially responsible for this, and he made sure there were witnesses to these instructions."

"This doesn't make any sense," Coburn said.

"If they learn that Fara has disobeyed them--"

"We'll think of a way to protect her," Coburn said. He was wondering whether Americans were obliged to surrender their passports on demand. He had done so, recently, after a minor car accident, but had later been told he did not have to. "They didn't say why they wanted the passports?"

"They did not."

Bucha and Nyfeler were the predecessors of Chiapparone and Gaylord. Was that a clue? Coburn did not know.

Coburn stood up. "The first decision we have to make is what Fara is going to tell the police tomorrow morning," he said. "I'll talk to Paul Chiapparone and get back to you."

On the ground floor of the building Paul Chiapparone sat in his office. He, too, had a parquet floor, an executive desk, a picture of the Shah on the wall, and a lot on his mind.

Paul was thirty-nine years old, of middle height, and a little overweight, mainly because he was fond of good food. With his olive skin and thick black hair he looked very Italian. His job was to build a complete modem social-security system in a primitive country. It was not easy.

In the early seventies Iran had had a rudimentary social-security system, which was inefficient at collecting contributions and so easy to defraud that one man could draw benefits several times over for the same illness. When the Shah decided to spend some of his twenty billion dollars a year in oil revenues creating a welfare state, EDS got the contract. EDS ran Medicare and Medicaid programs for several states in the U.S., but in Iran they had to start from scratch. They had to issue a social-security card to each of Iran's thirty-two million people, organize payroll deductions so that wage earners paid their contributions, and process claims for benefits. The whole system would be run by computers--EDS's specialty.

The difference between installing a data-processing system in the States and doing the same job in Iran was, Paul found, like the difference between making a cake from a packaged mix and making one the old-fashioned way with all the original ingredients. It was often frustrating. Iranians did not have the can-do attitude of American business executives, and often seemed to create problems instead of solving them. At EDS headquarters back in Dallas, Texas, not only were people expected to do the impossible, but it was usually due yesterday. Here in Iran everything was impossible and in any case not due until fardah-- usually translated "tomorrow," in practice, "some time in the future."

Paul had attacked the problems in the only way he knew: by hard work and determination. He was no intellectual genius. As a boy he had found schoolwork difficult, but his Italian father, with the immigrant's typical faith in education, had pressured him to study, and he had got good grades. Sheer persistence had served him well ever since. He could remember the early days of EDS in the States, back in the sixties, when every new contract could make or break the company; and he had helped build it into one of the most dynamic and successful corporations in the world. The Iranian operation would go the same way, he had been sure, particularly when Jay Coburn's recruitment and training program began to deliver more Iranians capable of top management.