Oath of Office

8

Some people were born spies. Others found themselves deceived by the lure of international travel. Erik Dovzhenko was shamed into it by his mother.

The slap of Dovzhenko’s scuffed leather shoes pinged off the concrete walls of the stairwell, sounding like a handful of coins dropped into a wishing well. Wishes were wasted in Evin Prison. The Ministry of Intelligence, or VAJA, made certain of that. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stomped out any hope they missed.

Dovzhenko paused mid-step, taking a contemplative sip of his coffee — a third of it milk — and steeled himself in the sterile quiet. He was already exhausted and wanted to sit down right there on the stairs, but he was on camera so there was no point in that. Stopping to drink some coffee was one thing. Sitting down to think would surely spawn questions he did not care to answer. Russia and Iran were allies, but the IRGC mistrusted even those in their own ranks — especially now. A moment of weakness or indecision would be seen for what it was — a lack of commitment. So Erik Dovzhenko took another drink of his coffee and hauled himself downward with the metal banister. The journey to section 2A, subbasement 4, of Evin Prison was not an easy one to make, and he needed all the help he could get.

He was an experienced, if uneasy, professional, fifteen years with the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki — the SVR — half of the Russian version of the old Soviet KGB that worked mainly outside the motherland. If FSB was the Russian equivalent of the American FBI, SVR was the CIA. Dovzhenko had the dark, wavy hair of his Azeri mother, which he combed straight back with pomade. He’d inherited his father’s handsome, if somewhat brooding, Russian face. That along with his olive skin and dark hair made it difficult to tell just exactly where in the world he was from. Such ambiguous ethnicity came in handy for an intelligence officer, and he sometimes wondered if his mother had not married his father for the sole purpose of having a child who could easily melt into a crowd virtually anywhere in the world. Dovzhenko was a fit one hundred ninety pounds and just under six feet tall, with square shoulders and massive boxer’s hands. His thumbs were on the large side, which had prompted a combatives instructor at spy school in Chelebityevo to comment that they would be good for gouging out the eyes of an opponent in battle. Dovzhenko had done some grisly things during his fifteen years with the SVR, but so far, he had yet to poke out anyone’s eyes with his thumbs.

He should have been promoted by now, certainly further along in his career than watching the goings-on of IRGC thugs in the belly of an Iranian prison that stank of shit and moldy bread. His mother was the spy in the family, using her knowledge of Azerbaijani and other Turkic languages in service to the KGB in the early 1980s. She had good stories and told them often, joking that she had started pushing Erik toward the clandestine life while he was still “hanging on the tit.”

As far as Erik knew, she’d not been employed since the KGB was dissolved, but, as she often said, there was no such thing as a former KGB officer. You were always active, just waiting to be called back into service. No one called. Erik could tell she missed the action, the excitement. He supposed that was the principal reason she pushed him toward the SVR — so she could live vicariously through the exploits she knew he would have. His father had been a teacher. An unassuming and gentle man who sat in his chair with his nose in a book while his wife skulked around the house with an old Makarov in her pocket, drinking a potent Azerbaijani mulberry liquor called tutovka—or, worse, cheap Russian vodka in a bottle with a tearaway foil lid. There was no need to replace a cap once Zahra Dovzhenko tucked into a bottle.

His mother’s drunken tirades alone had been enough to push Erik out of the house. She still had enough contacts that she was able to get him recruited. He was athletic and smart, and he found he had an aptitude for the work, though he never really enjoyed it. There was a certain sociopathic nature to spying that always left him a little bilious. He had no trouble walking up to a criminal and punching him in the face — or even shooting him, if it came to that. But he had too much of his father in him to enjoy the lying game as much as his mother did.

Men and women who lied for a living tended to be uncomfortable around those who valued the truth. Erik Dovzhenko was trusted implicitly, but he was not loved — by his peers or by his superiors. In an organization like SVR, not to be loved meant not to be promoted. While so many of his cohort had already attained chief of station in places like Prague and Berlin, Erik Dovzhenko was stuck in the eternal purgatory of mid-level case officer, descending into the lowest circles of Hell — like here in Tehran.

Six meters above, spring had come to the city. Sparrows flitted and chirped among new sycamore and mulberry growth, grass turned from brown to green overnight, and the snow that blanketed Mount Tochal was beginning to melt. Six meters below, deep in the bowels of section 2A, subbasement 4, things were much darker. Sewage gurgled through open drains. The smell of urine and hopelessness mingled in the fetid air with stale cigarette smoke and the overwhelming stench of the IRGC guards’ cologne.

The prison — sometimes called Evin University because of the intellectuals and student activists housed there — could be unbearably hot in summer and bitter cold in winter, adding to the misery of the prisoners. Dovzhenko’s white shirt was damp from his short walk across the parking lot in the rain. He customarily wore a brown horsehide jacket, though it made him look decidedly more like the Russian spy that he was. But good jackets were hard to break in, so he’d left it in his car, not wanting the stink of the prison to seep into the leather.

Maryam would smell it, even over the smell of his cigarettes. She was attuned to such things.

Reaching the bottom level, he took a long drink of coffee and pulled open the heavy steel door. It was not locked. No one in their right mind would come down here unless they had to. Dovzhenko almost smiled at that notion. Major Parviz Sassani wanted to be here, but the IRGC thug only bore out Dovzhenko’s theory. The man was good at his job but definitely not in his right mind.

The moans and whimpers of the prisoners met Dovzhenko before he got the stairwell door open — along with something else.

In Lefortovo, the prison in Moscow where this sort of work was undertaken, detainees were kept isolated from outside stimuli. But the Iranians had taken a page from the playbook the Argentine junta had used during their Dirty War. The sounds of traffic driving down from the ski resorts on Mount Tochal, planes flying overhead, and groundskeepers’ equipment were clearly audible. Like a medieval oubliette or “pit of forgetting,” prisoners heard the world above as it carried on around them as if they did not exist. These sounds went only one way — piped in electronically so the prisoners’ complaints and the torture itself could not be heard above. The Ayatollah had assured the world that this sort of thing did not go on in Evin. According to the Supreme Leader, the government had built a swimming pool and Jacuzzis in the prison. In Iran, as elsewhere, the biggest lies were more easily swallowed.

He pictured the IRGC interrogator before he saw him, eyes gleaming, spittle flying with each word. The volume varied from maniacal scream to breathy hiss, but the intensity remained the same. The whispers were the worst, under pressure, each word capable of flaying skin.

And it was the same questions, over and over and over again. Who are the protesters? Where are the protesters? Where is Reza Kazem?

Dovzhenko followed the anguished sounds to the right, through another door, this one locked, so he had to be buzzed in. Then he took one last breath before stepping through, gritting his teeth and squinting, as if anything would blunt the sights, sounds, and smells of the section 2A interrogation chamber. Two men he recognized from the Ministry of Intelligence stood smoking along the concrete wall to his left. He’d seen them work and knew they could mete out severe torture, but they were generally professional, torturing when they felt it necessary to elicit information or gain mental control of a dissident. Dovzhenko did not know if all VAJA men were the same, but though these two did not shrink from use of the wooden rod or spring cable, they were dispassionate in the application. A more professional security and intelligence service, the Ministry of Intelligence ran the prison, but the IRGC was much more powerful, both in government and the business world. They were seeing to the protesters by edict of the Supreme Leader, and they kept their VAJA counterparts at arm’s length so as not to divulge too many of their methods.

IRGC Major Parviz Sassani enjoyed his work — and it showed in his smile, a ghoulish grimace, as if the act of harming another somehow caused pain to leave his own body. Cathartic.

Two young men hung suspended from eyebolts in the ceiling, shoulders displaced, hands purple from the thin ropes biting into their wrists. Their feet were just inches off the concrete floor. Looking more like sides of meat than human beings, they were naked but for gray prison shorts that resembled cutoff jogging pants, soiled with all manner of blood and filth. Their bodies swung hypnotically on the cables, moving, no doubt, from a recent beating at the hands of the three IRGC men. Blood trickled from the largest man’s toes, where the nails had been before Sassani pulled them out. The pliers and the nails lay neatly arranged on a wooden desk — along with a couple of bloody teeth.

Dovzhenko shook his head. This was new.

The IRGC goons had turned their attention to a third prisoner, this one not much more than a boy. His name was Javad — seventeen years old, but he looked maybe thirteen. He cried more than the others, babbling pleas for his mother that only seemed to enrage Sassani and spur him on.

Javad was on his back, hands tied behind him so he teetered on his fists, unable to lie flat. Legs up, his ankles were bound to a wooden board set between two posts. Stiff cords kept the soles of his bare feet pointed upward. They were already swollen, black and blue from earlier treatment. Sassani himself swung the three-foot length of willow branch, roughly the diameter of his little finger.

Foot whipping was a favorite of secret police the world over. Parts of the feet could, by necessity, withstand a large amount of stress. Other parts — small bones, the toes — snapped with relative ease. When meted out by an expert, bastinado could cause maximum pain, with damage that was hardly visible but for a little pink and swollen flesh. Turn up the force and it could cripple. This often led to a perverse relief when a prisoner saw he or she was going to be bastinadoed instead of receiving a treatment that left more visible scars and marks. “Perhaps they will only whip my feet and let me go…” Such thoughts flew quickly after the first agonizing blows.

Major Sassani used the treatment as a fallback, when he tired of breaking ribs or stubbing out cigarettes on exposed skin. He swung the willow branch from over his head, causing it to whir through the air and allowing the poor boy time to anticipate the blow, doubling the agony.

These three prisoners had been here for the better part of a week, with Sassani getting right to work almost from the moment the doors clanged shut behind them. They had told him everything they knew within the first hour. Even trained operatives eventually talked, but these students leaked like broken vessels, spilling everything they knew at the mere sight of the torture chamber. Through snot and tears and terrified sobs, they confessed to sins from grade school.

In the end, it did not matter.

Javad stopped thrashing after the fifth blow. His feet looked like great purple balloons with toes. Sassani hit him twice more to make sure he was truly unconscious. Satisfied, he tossed the willow branch on the desk in the corner. He nodded to his two IRGC companions and then hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the hanging men.

“Allow this one to rest,” he said. “And bring me another. The fat one will do.”

The heavier of the two students, a man in his early twenties named Babak, began to whimper. A swollen eyelid fluttered open.

“Comrade Erik,” Sassani said, rubbing his hands together in front of his chest like a housefly. “I am sorry that we did not wait for you.”

The Russian waved away the comment. Sassani knew full well that Dovzhenko despised him. The feeling was surely mutual — if only because Sassani appeared to hate everyone.

The Iranian was younger by five or six years, perhaps thirty-four or thirty-five. He’d been promoted quickly in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Dovzhenko supposed the IRGC rewarded cruelty, so long as it was focused in the preferred direction. His own SVR was not so different in that respect, which was likely why Dovzhenko found himself stuck working with the likes of Parviz Sassani. His superiors obviously thought he needed some sort of lesson in cruelty.

Dovzhenko knew little of Sassani’s background. His father had apparently been martyred in the war with Iraq, and he was highly regarded by the mullahs and ranking IRGC members. His father-in-law was a ranking IRGC general. He must have learned English in the UK or some commonwealth country, because he spoke it with a British accent — like the devil in an American movie.

Sassani was slightly taller than Dovzhenko, with dark, wavy hair and a coal-black beard he kept trimmed only slightly longer than a five-o’clock shadow. He wore fine suits, even during interrogations, hanging his jacket inside a metal locker along the wall by the door. Several flecks of blood spatter dotted the breast of his collarless white shirt, the tail of which had come untucked during his exertions with the willow rod.

He rolled down his sleeves, producing a pair of gold cuff links from gray woolen trousers, along with a dark blue pack of Gauloises. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and spoke around it while he fastened the cuff links.

“What do you hear, my friend?” He searched deeper in his pockets until he found a disposable lighter.

Dovzhenko kept his eyes on the IRGC men who were busy tying Babak’s feet to the board.

“There are rumors of bombing,” he said. “Some sort of government building.”

Sassani clicked the cheap lighter, to no avail. “I have heard this as well,” he said, giving up. He gave a little chuckle. “At least we do not have the American flu. A plague on the Great Satan for her fight against God.”

Dovzhenko wondered how the Iranian squared the earthquakes and illness in his own country, but he kept the thoughts to himself.

Sassani gestured with the unlit cigarette. “What of the phone trackers and computer software your government has promised us? Our technology is fine, but yours is much more precise. I should not have to remind you that we are in a time of national crisis.”

“Very soon,” Dovzhenko said. He fished the lighter from his own pocket and opened it with a flick. It was a gift from his maternal grandfather, gold, with the eight-pointed star and flame of the Azerbaijani crest.

A cloud of smoke enveloped Sassani’s face as he puffed the cigarette to life. He held it to the side, considering Dovzhenko for a long moment. “The precision of your technology would be extremely useful in ferreting out the traitors.”

“As I said, very soon.” Dovzhenko nodded to the prisoners. “Surely these three have given you viable information by now.”

Sassani shrugged. “I suppose. But they are weak.” The Iranian wheeled and walked toward the heavy man, who was now strapped to the board, touching the coal of the cigarette to the arch of the man’s bare foot. Sassani stepped away from the thrashing and croaked screams.

Bloody spittle drooled from the corners of the man’s lips, down his cheek, to pool on the filthy concrete floor by his ear. Sassani hovered over him.

“I ask you again,” the IRGC thug said. “Where is Reza Kazem?”

The prisoner groaned. “I do not—”

Sassani pushed the cigarette into the man’s eyelid, bringing more screams and futile attempts to escape the pain.

“Tell! Me! Where!”

The prisoner coughed, wincing.

“I do not—”

Sassani lifted his hand to apply the cigarette again.

“Isfahan!” the prisoner screamed, pulling away, way, attempting to shrink into the concrete. Anything to avoid another injury to his eye. “He is in Isfahan.” He began to sob. “I swear it. Isfahan.”

The smile drained from Sassani’s face when he realized his cigarette had gone out.

A callow guard wearing a green uniform and baseball cap walked in and stood to the left of the door beside the metal lockers, taking in the sights. Unknown to Dovzhenko, this one was young, incapable of growing more than a sprout of facial hair. If the torture room bothered him, he was smart enough to keep that to himself.

Sassani stood and raised a wary brow, as if he’d been caught doing something vile by a younger brother. “What is it?”

The young man braced against the wall. “The court has handed down the sentence,” he said. He offered up a folder, which Sassani snatched away.

He read it over, giving a slow nod of approval. “Public hanging.”

The IRGC thug nearest the boy, Javad, spoke up. “This one has cheated the hangman.” He gave the lifeless body a shove, causing it to swing in a greater arc.

Sassani scoffed. “See,” he said to Dovzhenko. “As I told you. Weak. But he will hang with his fellow traitors, nonetheless, by way of example.”

Sassani took the cigarettes out of his slacks and put a fresh one in his mouth. His venomous smile made Dovzhenko sick to his stomach. “May I trouble you for another light?”

Dovzhenko looked on passively as he lit the Iranian’s cigarette. There was something at play here. Something Dovzhenko could not quite put his finger on.

Reza Kazem was a troublemaker to be sure, the face of the tens of thousands of students and other dissatisfied Iranians who took to the streets in greater number every day across the entire country. It was natural for Sassani to want to know his whereabouts — but he wasn’t hard to find.