Oath of Office

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.