Stephen Coonts - The Disciple

Then he made a gesture, reached up to brush some hair back off his forehead, and the revelation hit me like a hammer. This was no boy! Rostram was a woman!

I looked at my shoes, scanned the passersby, then looked at him again. Yep, almost no Adam’s apple, really clean cheeks, slender fingers and just the faintest hint of a chest.

Oh, man! The one thing everyone in the world agreed upon was that the Islamic fundamentalists were super-protective of their women. It wasn’t enough that I was a spy in the house of the saved. Oh, no. That goddamn Jake Grafton had sent me here to hook up with some Muslim traitor babe.

I sat there trying to keep my temper from going thermonuclear as I let the reality of the situation sink in.

“So how did you meet your pen pal?” I asked finally, when Rostram had smoked her weed about down to the filter.

“Pen pal?”

“The guy in America you correspond with.”

“Oh,” she said. “He was a professor at Oxford when I was there.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Does your daddy know you’re out running around in men’s clothes, smoking cigarettes and talking to foreign spies?”

She flipped her cigarette away and gave me The Look.

“You had me fooled there for a while,” I told her.

“What tipped you off?”

“That thing you did with your hair. It’s a woman’s gesture.”

“Not my stride?”

“Nope. Fooled me there.”

She got out her Marlboros and kicked one out of the pack. Stuck it in her mouth and lit it like an English schoolboy who was pretty damn cool and ditching school and didn’t care who knew it.

“So how did you get into treason, anyway?” I asked, just to make conversation.

“My pen pal asked for my help. I agreed to do it because I loathe the fanatics who are running this country.”

“Passing military secrets to foreign spies strikes me as a bit more than a political protest.”

“These fools are about to start World War III.”

“They catch you, you won’t live to see it.”

“I know that. That’s why I’ve been watching you for two days, checking to see if anyone is watching you. They aren’t.”

“Or you just haven’t seen them.”

“You’re clean, Carmellini.”

“What’s your real name?”

“I’m not going to tell you. Rostram is enough.”

I nodded and looked casually around. No one seemed to be paying any attention to us, but that may have been only window dressing. For all I knew we were being filmed for a starring role on the six o’clock evening news. I could see the headlines now: american spy seduces islamic woman.

“Why are you in Iran spying on us?” she asked.

I tried the old Carmellini charm, which had apparently worked fairly well for dear old Dad or I wouldn’t be here. “Well, I had a choice. Several choices, actually. My boss wanted me to do this gig, but I could have gone back to Iraq for another tour of tracking down roadside bombers, or I could have resigned from the Company and joined my brother-in-law in his bagel business. Or I could have taken a banana boat to South America and become a beach bum until the money ran out or I ruined my liver, whichever came first.”

She was eyeing me while I ran my mouth, wondering if any of this was true.

“You worry a lot, do you?” she murmured. She was playing with the cigarette pack.

“All the time. Don’t you?”

“So what is it you want from me?” she asked. Her eyes darted around again, then lit on me. This was one nervous woman.

“Are you nervous because we’re doing a little treason, because I’m an infidel, or because you’re out and about with a strange man?”

“A bloody headshrinker,” she said disgustedly. “Let’s get to it. What do you want?”

“Who do you get your information from?”

“You want names?”

“Names and where they work.”

“Get their names from Azari. He set up the network, and he made promises to them.”

“Do these people know that you are a woman?”

She dropped the cigarette from suddenly numb fingers and stared at me with big eyes. “No,” she whispered.

“How do you get your information?”

“Dead drops.”

I tried to keep a straight face. If that was true, she had only Azari’s word that there even was a network. Nor could she verify any of the names Azari gave Grafton. Anyone could service drops, including the MOIS.

“We practice good security,” she said, almost as if she were trying to sell me. Or herself.

I rubbed my face with my hands to restore circulation. I was up to my eyeballs in it this time. There was absolutely no doubt in my criminal mind that the Iranian government controlled Rostram and Azari and the flow of information to the West. I would have bet my life on that. Then it occurred to me that I probably already had.

“Go home,” I said and waved my hand in dismissal.

“Don’t you want to set up another meet?”

“I’ll find you if I do.”

“But you don’t-”

“Get the hell outta here.”

She started to say something else, thought better of it and left. I watched her go.

Well, she had the stride right, anyway. She walked like a guy.

I went straight to the embassy, crawled into my soundproof booth and called Jake Grafton. “Rostram is a woman,” I told him when we finally got connected and the crypto gear had timed in. “Not only that, she doesn’t know who supplies the information she transmits to Azari. She picks it up from dead drops.”

“Oh, great,” Grafton said disgustedly. “Does she know she’s working for the Iranian government?”

“I doubt it. She thinks she’s doing a noble thing.”

“Who is she, anyway?”

“She refused to give a name. She says she’s twenty-five and studied under Azari at Oxford. She’s maybe five-five, dark hair, trim, boyish figure. How many of those girls could there be?”

“I’ll get you a name.”

“What’s my next move?”

“If you’re up for it, find out who is servicing the dead drops. Use the guys in country.”

“Okay. What then?”

“I’ll think of something, Tommy.”

I called Jake Grafton back twelve hours later, in the middle of my workday.

“I talked to the Brits,” he said. “They think her name might be Davar Ghobadi. If so, her father is the president and CEO of a big construction company that is building a lot of Ahmadinejad’s hardened factories and launch sites. Her uncle is Habib Sultani, the minister of defense.”

“So she’s somebody.”

“With a capital S ,” he said. “She was also a math wizard at Oxford. One of the British profs said a brain like hers comes along once in a generation.”

“If I hang around her, the powers that be are going to get antsy.”

“The Iranians have gone to a lot of trouble to sell us some lies,” Grafton said. “The only possible reason to do that is to hide the truth, whatever that is. Let’s see how far they can be pushed.”

“Truth is rare, these days,” I remarked.

“Priced that way, too,” the admiral observed.

The booming of thunder woke Davar Ghobadi in the middle of the night. Her room was in the attic, tucked up here under the eaves. The room was chilly, and she could hear the rain drumming on the eaves of the old house quite plainly.

Too plainly. She opened her eyes and, as lightning flashed, saw that her window was open. The curtains were dancing in the breeze coming though the opening.

She threw back the blanket, got out of her small bed and walked past her desk and the big table covered with her father’s blueprints to the window. Hadn’t she shut it before she went to bed?

She paused a moment in the darkness, listening to the wind and rain in the trees and looking out at the neighborhood, which was composed of monstrous old houses on big lots on the hills on the north side of Tehran. In the early part of the century rich people and foreigners had built these houses, trying to escape the noise and traffic of the city center. They had succeeded. This neighborhood was an oasis in a third-world sea.