On Wings Of Eagles (1990)

Rich Gallagher, who accompanied him to the airport, went off to inquire whether the authorities were planning to give Perot a hard time. Gallagher had done this before. Together with an Iranian friend who worked for Pan Am, he walked through to passport control carrying Perot's passport. The Iranian explained that a VIP was coming through, and asked to clear the passport in advance. The official at the desk obligingly looked through the loose-leaf folder that contained the stop list and said there would be no problems for Mr. Perot. Gallagher returned with the good news.

Perot remained apprehensive. If they wanted to pick him up, they might be smart enough to lie to Gallagher.

Affable Bill Gayden, the president of EDS World, was flying in to take over direction of the negotiating team. Gayden had left Dallas for Tehran once before, but had turned back in Paris on hearing about Bunny Fleischaker's warning of more arrests to come. Now he, like Perot, had decided to risk it. By chance, his flight came in while Perot was waiting to leave, and they had an opportunity to talk.

In his suitcase Gayden had eight American passports belonging to EDS executives who looked vaguely like Paul or Bill.

Perot said: "I thought we were getting forged passports for them. Couldn't you find a way?"

"Yeah, we found a way," Gayden said. "If you need a passport in a hurry, you can take all the documentation down to the courthouse in Dallas; then they put everything in an envelope and you carry it to New Orleans, where they issue the passport. It's just a plain government envelope sealed with Scotch tape, so you could open it on the way to New Orleans, take out the photographs, replace them with photographs of Paul and Bill--which we have--reseal the envelope, and, bingo, you've got passports for Paul and Bill in false names. But it's against the law."

"So what did you do instead?"

"I told all the evacuees that I had to have their passports in order to get their belongings shipped over from Tehran. I got a hundred or two hundred passports, and I picked the best eight. I bogused up a letter from someone in the States to someone here in Tehran saying: 'Here are the passports you asked for us to return so you could deal with the immigration authorities,' just so that I've got a piece of paper to show if I'm asked why the hell I'm carrying eight passports."

"If Paul and Bill use those passports to cross a frontier, they'll be breaking the law anyway."

"If we get that far, we'll break the law."

Perot nodded. "It makes sense."

His flight was called. He said goodbye to Gayden and to Taylor, who had driven him to the airport and would take Gayden to the Hyatt. Then he went off to discover the truth about the stop list.

He went first through a "Passengers Only" gate, where his boarding pass was checked. He walked along a corridor to a booth where he paid a small sum as airport tax. Then, on his right, he saw a series of passport-control desks.

Here the stop list was kept.

One of the desks was manned by a girl who was absorbed in a paperback book. Perot approached her. He handed over his passport and a yellow exit form. The form had his name at the top.

The girl took the yellow sheet, opened his passport, stamped it, and handed it back without looking at him. She returned to her book immediately.

Perot walked into the departure lounge.

The flight was delayed.

He sat down. He was on tenterhooks. At any moment the girl could finish her book, or just get bored with it, and start checking the stop list against the names on the yellow forms. Then, he imagined, they would come for him, the police or the military or Dadgar's investigators, and he would go to jail, and Margot would be like Ruthie and Emily, not knowing whether she would ever see her husband again.

He checked the departures board every few seconds: it just said "Delayed."

He sat on the edge of his chair for the first hour.

Then he began to feel resigned. If they were going to catch him, they would, and there was nothing he could do about it. He started to read a magazine. Over the next hour he read everything in his briefcase. Then he started talking to the man sitting next to him. Perot learned that the man was an English engineer working in Iran on a project for a large British company. They chatted for a while, then swapped magazines.

In a few hours, Perot thought, I'll be in a beautiful hotel suite with Margot--or in an Iranian jail. He pushed the thought from his mind.

Lunchtime went by, and the afternoon wore on. He began to believe they were not going to come for him.

The flight was finally called at six o'clock.

Perot stood up. If they come for me now ...

He joined the crowd and approached the departure gate. There was a security check. He was frisked, and waved through.

I've almost made it, he thought as he boarded the plane. He sat between two fat people in an economy seat--it was an all-economy flight. I think I've made it.

The doors were closed and the plane began to move.