Greg Rucka: The last run

Another knock, this one more forceful and somehow more formal, the hand of one of the guards, leading the prisoner into their trap.

"It's all or nothing," Shirazi said.

"All or nothing," Zahabzeh agreed, and went to answer the door. The prisoner drew himself up in his chair, cast an angry glance at Zahabzeh standing beside him, then glared at Youness Shirazi.

"Do you know who I am?" the man demanded.

Shirazi considered the question, taking the man in. He certainly looked old, or, at the least, older, though Shirazi thought that might simply be the result of seeing him here and now, rather than as he appeared in photographs taken over thirty years before. Beard and hair both more gray than black, small eyes. None of the clothes of the ulema, the learned Shi'a scholars, but instead a simple buttoned shirt, tan, and even simpler black trousers. While he watched, the man began scratching at the back of his right hand with the nails of his left, an unconscious gesture that persisted for several seconds before stopping.

Shirazi met the prisoner's eyes, returned the stare with the practiced patience he had learned from twenty years in counterintelligence, unwavering, until the man's indignation faded and the fear reasserted itself. Then, satisfied, Shirazi looked to Zahabzeh, and gave him a small, almost inconsequential, nod.

Zahabzeh took up the stack of photographs and began laying them out in a roughly chronological line along the desktop, facing away from Shirazi, towards their prisoner. Some of the photographs had suffered with age, their edges yellowing and beginning to curl, and in the few of them that had been taken in color, that same color had begun to wash away, rendering the figures insubstantial, almost fictional, and dreamlike.

Or nightmarish, Shirazi thought, as he gauged the man's reaction. At first there had been nothing, blank incomprehension, perhaps bewilderment, but when his eyes fell upon the third photograph, the one with the two young men in the back of the car, everything changed, the reaction inescapable. The prisoner started in his chair, stifling an exclamation. He looked up and then, meeting Shirazi's eyes, quickly away, to the side and down, as if hoping to find refuge somewhere between the cracks of the linoleum floor. Zahabzeh ran out of room on the desk, went back to the beginning, now laying the photos one atop the other. Somewhere, outside Shirazi's office, a phone rang and was quickly answered.

"That was a long time ago," the man said. He brought his head up, looking at Shirazi again, and his voice touched on plaintive. "I was young. Very foolish. It was thirty years ago."

Zahabzeh finished placing the last of the photographs. Some of them were now stacked four-deep. Shirazi adjusted his glasses, rotated his chair to face the wall on his left, where a portrait of the Aya tollah hung. He pretended to contemplate it.

"I was foolish," the man said, softly.

"You are a spy," Zahabzeh spat, and Shirazi had to fight a smile at the savagery of the declaration. "A spy in service of the British."

"What? No!" The man twisted, unsure who to address, finally settling on Zahabzeh. "No, I swear!"

Zahabzeh plucked one of the pictures from the desk, a black-and-white surveillance shot of their prisoner at twenty-five, seated outside a Tehran cafe, his head bent to the ear of a handsome European. He shoved it angrily in the man's face.

"This!"

"No, I don't-"

Zahabzeh scooped up a handful of the photographs, began dropping them into the old man's lap. "This one. This man, we know him, SIS. This one, his cover was as a trade representative. This woman, a known British whore. Did you sleep with her, too? Or was it only the boys? Is that how they paid you? With sex? Sex and money? This one, do you remember this party? This one, what are you handing him, the so-called trade representative? What secrets did you sell? You were in the Army, you were a soldier. How many men died because of you? How many men died because of secrets the British gave to Saddam? This one. This one. This one."

Zahabzeh continued to assault him with the photos, one after the other, and the prisoner was cringing, drawing back further against his chair, until, with no place to go, he lashed out with an arm. His hand caught the remaining stack in Zahabzeh's hand, sent it flying. They hit the floor with a slap, sliding over one another like an opening fan.

"I'm not a spy!" The old man pushed himself out of his chair, past Zahabzeh, grabbing the edge of the desk. He appealed to Shirazi. "These are the mistakes of a young man, a stupid, foolish boy! Why are you doing this? Why now? I swear to you, I swear by the Prophet's name, it ended thirty years ago!"

Shirazi, his eyes still on the portrait, replied, "Things have changed."

The prisoner shook his head, and then, at last, followed Shirazi's gaze to the picture hanging on the wall. He groaned softly, pained, then sank back into his chair. It took him two attempts before he could get out his next words.

"My uncle… he knows?"

"Of course he knows," Shirazi lied, turning his chair back to face his prisoner directly. "Would you be here otherwise if he didn't?"

"It was so long ago." He spoke in a whisper, to himself, then raised his voice again, speaking to Shirazi. "It ended thirty years ago, thirty-two years ago now. You must tell him that. I beg you, tell him that."

"We did tell him that," Shirazi lied. "But after the last election, after all the unrest, with so many counterrevolutionaries and spies suddenly emboldened, things, as I said, have changed. What we were once obliged to describe as the indiscretion of youth we must now, by order of the Supreme Leader himself, view as crimes against the State. You understand? We did tell him, I assure you."

The man hung his head. "God help me."

Shirazi caught Zahabzeh's look of triumph.

"Not God," Shirazi said. "Not God. We will help you."

The despair that had taken the man near to tears broke with the possibility of renewed hope.

"There is a way out of this for you. There is a way to remove the stain and save yourself. If you help us, then we can help you."

"I will!" the prisoner said. "I will do anything!"

"The first thing you must do," Shirazi said, "is remember."

Then, with the patience of a hunter, Youness Shirazi began walking Hossein Khamenei, the eldest nephew of the Ayatollah Khamenei, of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, back through memory. As it turned out, Hossein Khamenei's memory was surprisingly good.

At the School, the instructors had talked a lot about fear, and even though Caleb Lewis had listened to their every word and believed each one that was uttered, he still found himself entirely unprepared for the real thing. It was, without question, awful, purely, completely, clawingly awful. It was a fear that had its own feel, its own scent, even its own taste. Nothing anyone had ever told him, nothing that he had ever experienced growing up, had proved an adequate preparation for its constant presence.

For three and a half weeks, since first setting foot in Iran, fear had been with him, and it showed no signs of leaving anytime soon. He hadn't wanted the post as the Tehran Number Two. What Caleb Lewis had wanted, what he had trained for, was a desk job, in the Intelligence Directorate, preferably on the Iran Desk. He had wanted to work for D-Int Daniel Szurko, who was by all accounts both a quite brilliant and very pleasant gentleman who demanded the best from his staff. That was why Caleb Lewis had worked so very hard at mastering his Farsi as well as his Arabic, and it hadn't ever occurred to him that doing so would lead to his downfall, the same way it had never occurred to him that doing less than his best in his other coursework at the School might propel his life on an entirely different trajectory.