Part Three — The Corridor · Adam's Robe Book 1
Chapter Twenty-One
Gilan Province, Iran — Present Day
Rostami had ridden in the second vehicle rather than the first at Nassiri's own quiet insistence — "not superstition, Sheikh, arithmetic; the lead car draws whatever's watching the road, and I would rather it draw fire meant for me than for you" — and so he was close enough, when the road came apart forty meters ahead of them, to feel the blast through the floor of the vehicle before he heard it, a single hard concussion that lifted the lead car's front axle a full meter off the asphalt and set it back down already burning.
The convoy had been running the coast road south of Bandar-e Anzali in the gray hour before proper light, three vehicles, standard interval, standard countermeasures — the same electronic jamming package Nassiri insisted on for every movement now, a low, constant hum in the cabin that Rostami had stopped noticing somewhere around their third journey together. He noticed it now, in the half-second after the blast, in its sudden and total absence, the jammer's hum gone dead the instant the device beneath the road had found whatever signal it had been waiting for and fired anyway, early, into the gap between the lead car and the one directly behind it rather than beneath either.
His own driver was already reversing, already shouting into a radio, already doing everything a trained man does in the four seconds after an ambush that has not yet finished revealing itself, and Rostami sat very still in the back seat and watched Nassiri's car — the second vehicle, the one he himself should have been riding in, had Nassiri's own arithmetic not moved him one car back that morning for reasons Rostami suspected had less to do with fire patterns than with a colonel unwilling to explain to Directorate leadership why their religious liaison had died on his watch — watched it come to a hard, controlled stop eleven meters short of the crater rather than inside it.
Small-arms fire started somewhere in the tree line thirty seconds later, professional and brief, the specific economical burst of men who had planned for a kill and were now improvising a withdrawal instead, and it was over, in the way these things were always over, faster than the body's understanding of what had happened could keep pace with.
Rostami sat through all of it with his hands folded in his lap, and understood, distantly, that this was not courage. Courage was a thing that cost a man something to hold onto. What he felt, watching smoke climb off a burning vehicle forty meters up a road he had expected, that morning, to survive without incident, was closer to recognition — the specific, unwanted familiarity of a man who had already once stood at the edge of a grave he had not been ready to stand at, and had discovered, standing there, that the worst thing the world could do to him had already been done. Fear, he had learned in February, required a future still worth protecting. He was no longer entirely certain he had one of those in the ordinary sense, and the absence, this morning, felt less like grief than like armor.
He found Nassiri standing beside the ruined lead vehicle eleven minutes later, in the strange, suspended quiet that always followed gunfire in open country, directing his surviving men with a steadiness Rostami had come to expect from him and had, until this morning, assumed was simply the man's nature rather than something he was actively holding together by force.
Two of the lead car's three occupants were dead. The third, badly burned, was already being loaded into what remained of a working vehicle. Nassiri himself had a shallow laceration above one eyebrow, dust ground into every fold of his uniform, and was otherwise, as far as Rostami's own unhurried inspection could determine, entirely and inexplicably whole.
"You should have been in that car," Nassiri said, when he finally turned and saw him standing there. It was not gratitude. It was arithmetic again, the same flat accounting Rostami had watched him apply to everything since the morning they'd met. "I moved you back for the wrong reasons and it happened to be the right decision. I want you to understand that distinction clearly, Sheikh, because I am not going to let either of us mistake luck for providence over breakfast."
"I understand the distinction perfectly." Rostami said it without heat, without the visible shaking Nassiri's own hands were only now beginning to betray, and he watched the operator notice that absence and not know, entirely, what to make of it. "A device that fires a full car-length early is a device with a technical fault, or a trigger man who flinched, or a jamming signal that found the frequency a half-second before it should have. I am not disputing any of that, Colonel. I am telling you that I have stopped finding it interesting to argue about which explanation is correct."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have left that costs me anything to say honestly." Rostami looked past him, at the two shapes now under ground sheets a few meters off the road, men he had exchanged perhaps a dozen words with across three weeks of shared travel, and felt the specific, familiar grief that no longer arrived alone anymore — it came now always paired with something else, something he had stopped trying to talk himself out of feeling. "You survived the strikes in February because you happened to be outside Tehran that morning. You have just survived a professionally planted device because a signal fired a half-second early. I do not require either event to be a miracle in order to notice, Colonel, that this is now the second time the ordinary explanation has arrived exactly early enough, or exactly late enough, to leave you standing in front of me asking me not to draw conclusions."
Nassiri did not answer that immediately, and Rostami watched him choose, visibly, not to. "I need the site secured and I need a real explanation for how a device got planted on a road my own people cleared eighteen hours ago," he said instead, turning back toward the wreckage, toward the work that was, Rostami understood, the only shape of grief a man like Nassiri had ever permitted himself to hold. "Ride with me the rest of the way. I find I would rather not spend the next hour of this particular morning wondering whether moving you a second time changes anything."
"It won't," Rostami said, and meant it, and found, walking toward the one undamaged vehicle through smoke that still hadn't fully cleared from the road, that the calm he felt saying it frightened him considerably less than it plainly frightened Nassiri to hear.