Oath of Office

18

The crowd on Keshavarz Boulevard, west of the roundabout known as Valiasr Square, numbered more than two thousand. At least a third were there to protest the hangings. The Nīrū-ye Entezāmī-ye Jomhūrī-ye Eslāmī-ye īrān, or NAJA, Iran’s uniformed police force, had set up a broken skirmish line in front of the ones who were brave or foolish enough to be vocal in their protests, but Erik Dovzhenko was certain there were even more among the spectators. He doubted the protesters would use violence in the demonstrations. That would only give the NAJA an excuse to respond with violence of their own — as if they needed an excuse. There would be no rubber bullets here. The slightest act of civil disobedience would be adjudged a capital offense. The riot squads were dressed for battle—“hats and bats,” the Americans called it. It would take little more than a cross word, an unholy wink, to bring two hundred hickory sticks down on the protesters’ heads in a “wood shampoo”—another American term Dovzhenko found a better description than anything he had in Russian.

Three crane trucks manufactured by Tadano of Japan sat idling in the gray drizzle, blue plastic nooses dangling from their booms, empty for another few moments. Dovzhenko stood on the roof of a cinema across the street, along with two IRGC minders, watching the scene below through his personal pair of Leupold binoculars. A drizzling rain matted the Russian’s hair and dripped from the tip of his nose, prompting him to turn up the collar of his horsehide jacket and snug it tighter against his neck. He couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to wipe the rain out of his eyes.

Down on the street, IRGC executioners readied the condemned at the rear of a waiting van. Given the recent groundswell of protests, officials had seriously considered holding the executions behind the secure walls of Evin Prison. But when the chance for civil unrest was weighed against an opportunity to make a public show of force — the show of force won out. The Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader himself had agreed. The observations of justice would be good for everyone who attended the execution. Protest the regime and you got the rope. In public. In front of your friends. In front of your parents. The West could go piss up the rope you were hanged from if they did not like it.

Any of the nearby parks or sports complexes would have offered more room for people to witness the hangings, but though the authorities were cruel and inflexible in the theocratic rule, they were not completely stupid. The intersection at Valiasr Square would provide choke points their troops could exploit and high vantage points for snipers and observation, making it much easier to control.

Dovzhenko’s assignment, along with the two IRGC men with him on the roof, was to scan the thousands of people who milled three stories below and watch for any protesters hidden in the crowds. The Supreme Council of Cyberspace had already banned Twitter and Facebook, and recently followed Russia’s lead and blocked the popular messaging app Telegram. Other social media platforms had been slowed to a debilitating crawl. Instagram posts from the Ayatollah still went out, but that was about it. Cellular service in downtown Tehran had been cut, leaving any would-be protesters unable to communicate for two hours preceding the hangings.

At last count, more than a thousand dissidents had been killed by police and IRGC thugs over the last three weeks at various rallies across the country. While publicly urging peace, the Supreme Leader made it abundantly clear in private that he was prepared to wipe out tens of thousands to ensure the survival of the theocracy. In Iran, God did indeed move in mysterious ways.

Dovzhenko played his binoculars from face to face in the crowd. Some looked appropriately horrified at what was happening in their country. But many stared sleepily at the simple metal chairs and black body bags that had been readied below the cranes. Theirs was a numb half-interest, something to do before taking the kids to the park or evening prayer. After all, they weren’t the ones being hanged.

The chief justice, a mujtahid well versed in Islamic law and chosen by the Supreme Leader himself, stood on a wooden platform and read the sentence over the loudspeaker. He’d been chosen for a reason and knew what buttons to push to get the crowd going. The accused were all guilty of mofsed-e-filarz—spreading corruption on the earth, a crime often attributed to pimps and abusers of children. What good citizen would not want their streets rid of corruption? Members of the crowd — many of them likely Basij militia who’d been ordered to attend — began to cheer at the sentence that had become a sermon. They goaded others into joining them. The pious mujtahid raised his arms, inhaling the applause.

Babak, Javad, and Yousef did not even have to leave their cells to be convicted. That crime alone assured a death sentence, but the council of mullahs sitting in judgment tacked on the capital crime of blasphemy for good measure. The sentence did not matter to Javad. His heart had stopped in the subbasement of Evin Prison under the brutal hand of Major Sassani.

The Ayatollah’s trusted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would carry out the execution. Sassani decided that Javad, too, would be strung up with his comrades, a grisly reminder that even if you were already dead, a death sentence from the Supreme Leader would be carried out without deviation.

Dovzhenko lowered the binoculars, feeling his stomach roil. Even the heartless KGB had customarily surprised condemned men with their execution — just another trip to the interrogation room, a walk down a long hallway that turned unexpectedly left instead of right, and ended with a bullet behind the ear before the poor addled soul knew anything had changed. Hose down the walls and bring on the next one. Neat and tidy, and humane in its brutality. These IRGC animals were medieval in their methods. There was no merciful breaking of the neck at the end of a drop. The Americans were fond of calling people Nazis — but the way the Iranians did this was just that, the Nazi method of hanging. A length of heavy rope or blue plastic cord was affixed to the boom of a construction crane and then tied around the victim’s neck. He or she was then hauled upward to strangle slowly. If they were fortunate, the cord cut off the carotid arteries’ blood flow to the brain. More often than not, the victim danced and twitched during the long haul upward, choking to death over long and excruciating minutes.

Dovzhenko was no stranger to brutal tactics. God above knew he’d been party to much for which he would someday have to answer. The two students quivering at the back of the van — and the one already splayed beside the body bag that would eventually hold him — had been betrayed by someone. Many had been murdered across this country, but those deaths had all been during confrontations with the police. Arrests were made, hundreds rounded up, but Dovzhenko read the statistical reports, and to his knowledge, there had yet to be any other trials. No, these three men had been singled out, plucked from among a thousand others. Why? To make some kind of point? They were not even Reza’s mid-level lieutenants. Someone had convinced the Supreme Leader that the benefit of their death would outweigh the unification their martyrdom would bring to the movement. There was something here Dovzhenko was not seeing.

He himself had convinced more than a few to betray their friends. Even though his mother had pushed him into intelligence work, Dovzhenko turned out to be gifted. Getting others to betray their compatriots was the bread and butter of such work, by smooth talk or heavy-handed coercion. Lie, blackmail, threaten — it did not matter so long as the secrets flowed to the presidium in Moscow — and Erik excelled at every facet. There was a necessary heartlessness to it, a willingness to rape the mind of another human being without going completely amok. Sociopathy within bounds, they called it, a sterile medical word to make themselves feel atoned. Any SVR officer with a soul was left nothing but a dried husk in no time at all. Those without, took a bit longer.

The squeal of cables outside the balcony slowed Dovzhenko’s gallop of runaway philosophy, and he drew himself back to the scene on the streets below. He forced himself to watch the three blindfolded men rise as if taking flight, jerking kicks causing the two who were still alive to twist. He played the binoculars down to the chairs where the executioners stood at parade rest beside the prison slippers that had fallen off the men during their struggles. Parviz Sassani stood at the edge of the crowd, wearing civilian clothing so he could blend in. Those on either side of him shouted halfhearted chants of “Allahu Akbar,” but the major said nothing. He was too busy smiling.

Dovzhenko scanned past Sassani, freezing at the face of a bald man behind the IRGC commander. His breath caught in his throat, enough that the IRGC man beside him gave him a quizzical look. Dovzhenko coughed to cover his sudden surprise. This was unexpected. General Vitaly Alov of the GRU. There had been no mention of the general coming to Tehran in the cables. With ostensibly the same goals, the SVR and the GRU often found themselves at cross-purposes, if only because of jealous turf wars. A visiting general from the military intelligence agency would surely have Dovzhenko’s chief of station up in arms, and yet he’d mentioned nothing about it. Curious indeed. Alov was in the open. It was difficult to miss his bald head shining in the rain among a sea of black hair and scarves.

Dovzhenko passed the binoculars to the IRGC thug on his right. They were good binoculars, fifteen-power. He’d had them for years, a present to himself on his first assignment to the Russian consulate in Los Angeles. But they were tainted now with the sights he’d just witnessed. He never wanted to look through them again.

“Where are you going?” the youngest IRGC thug asked.

“To mingle with the crowd,” Dovzhenko said. “Gather intelligence. That is what intelligence officers do.”

He smiled as if he were still a coconspirator in this idiocy, swallowed his disgust, and then wheeled, cursing in Russian under his breath as he pushed open the rooftop door. He used his forearm to wipe the rain from his eyes, feeling as if he couldn’t touch his face until he washed his hands. At times like this, there was only one person in the world who could make him feel human. Maryam Farhad was the most intelligent and tender woman he’d ever known. It was hardly fair for a man with his job to want to spend time with her. She was his lifeboat in this sea of shit — and he was dragging her under.