On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

Bucha was in Iran, but Fara might not have known that, Coburn thought. Bucha had been a resident here, had left the country, and had come back in, briefly: he was due to fly back to Paris tomorrow.

Majid continued: "The officer then said, 'I suppose the other two are gone also?' Fara saw that he had four files on his desk, and she asked which other two. He told her Mr. Chiapparone and Mr. Gaylord. She said she had just picked up Mr. Gaylord's residence permit earlier this morning. The officer told her to get the passports and residence permits of both Mr. Gaylord and Mr. Chiapparone and bring them to him. She was to do it quietly, not to cause alarm."

"What did she say?" Coburn asked.

"She told him she could not bring them today. He instructed her to bring them tomorrow morning. He told her she was officially responsible for this, and he made sure there were witnesses to these instructions."

"This doesn't make any sense," Coburn said.

"If they learn that Fara has disobeyed them--"

"We'll think of a way to protect her," Coburn said. He was wondering whether Americans were obliged to surrender their passports on demand. He had done so, recently, after a minor car accident, but had later been told he did not have to. "They didn't say why they wanted the passports?"

"They did not."

Bucha and Nyfeler were the predecessors of Chiapparone and Gaylord. Was that a clue? Coburn did not know.

Coburn stood up. "The first decision we have to make is what Fara is going to tell the police tomorrow morning," he said. "I'll talk to Paul Chiapparone and get back to you."

On the ground floor of the building Paul Chiapparone sat in his office. He, too, had a parquet floor, an executive desk, a picture of the Shah on the wall, and a lot on his mind.

Paul was thirty-nine years old, of middle height, and a little overweight, mainly because he was fond of good food. With his olive skin and thick black hair he looked very Italian. His job was to build a complete modem social-security system in a primitive country. It was not easy.

In the early seventies Iran had had a rudimentary social-security system, which was inefficient at collecting contributions and so easy to defraud that one man could draw benefits several times over for the same illness. When the Shah decided to spend some of his twenty billion dollars a year in oil revenues creating a welfare state, EDS got the contract. EDS ran Medicare and Medicaid programs for several states in the U.S., but in Iran they had to start from scratch. They had to issue a social-security card to each of Iran's thirty-two million people, organize payroll deductions so that wage earners paid their contributions, and process claims for benefits. The whole system would be run by computers--EDS's specialty.

The difference between installing a data-processing system in the States and doing the same job in Iran was, Paul found, like the difference between making a cake from a packaged mix and making one the old-fashioned way with all the original ingredients. It was often frustrating. Iranians did not have the can-do attitude of American business executives, and often seemed to create problems instead of solving them. At EDS headquarters back in Dallas, Texas, not only were people expected to do the impossible, but it was usually due yesterday. Here in Iran everything was impossible and in any case not due until fardah--usually translated "tomorrow," in practice, "some time in the future."

Paul had attacked the problems in the only way he knew: by hard work and determination. He was no intellectual genius. As a boy he had found schoolwork difficult, but his Italian father, with the immigrant's typical faith in education, had pressured him to study, and he had got good grades. Sheer persistence had served him well ever since. He could remember the early days of EDS in the States, back in the sixties, when every new contract could make or break the company; and he had helped build it into one of the most dynamic and successful corporations in the world. The Iranian operation would go the same way, he had been sure, particularly when Jay Coburn's recruitment and training program began to deliver more Iranians capable of top management.

He had been all wrong, and he was only just beginning to understand why.

When he and his family arrived in Iran, in August 1977, the petrodollar boom was already over. The government was running out of money. That year an anti-inflation program increased unemployment just when a bad harvest was driving yet more starving peasants into the cities. The tyrannical rule of the Shah was weakened by the human-rights policies of American President Jimmy Carter. The time was ripe for political unrest.