Chapter One

Bandar Abbas, Iran — Day 3

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The queue at the northern checkpoint ran four hundred meters back up the hill, and Nassiri counted it twice.

Thirty-one vehicles in the car lane. Nine trucks in the other, most of them stopped with their engines off. A man in the truck lane had spread a mat on the verge and was praying beside his cab. The sun had been up forty minutes. Below the hill the port lay in a haze the color of tea, and beyond the port the strait was a flat gray plate with the ships standing on it.

He had driven through the night from Kerman and had slept an hour in a lay-by outside Sirjan. His body told him about it. He disregarded the report, as he had learned to do, and went on with the arithmetic.

There were two lanes for cars at the barrier, each with its own officer. The left one was run by a sergeant, a heavy man of fifty with a clipboard and the stillness of one who had been bribed before and remembered every occasion. The right one was run by a conscript. Nassiri could see him from here, a thin boy in a uniform cut for a larger man, working the line with his eyes on the ground. He was nineteen at most. He had been told that every car was a test, and nobody had told him the answer.

The rules had changed again in the last month. Every vehicle entering the city was to be searched, boot and cabin, and every adult male was to open his coat. Nassiri had read the order on a board outside Kerman. It named smuggling, sabotage and "unauthorized materiel." The order said nothing of what the blockade had done to prices. It had no need to. Diesel in the port was selling for four times its posted rate. Anyone who could move anything was moving it, and the checkpoints existed to take their share.

Under his shirt, against the skin below his breastbone, lay a folded length of cloth. He left it alone. It had no weight. It had had no weight for nearly three years, and he had stopped checking that it was still there in the same way a man stops checking that his heart is still in his chest. It was warm, as it always was. In the car the warmth was easy to explain. The heater had been broken since Yazd, and the morning was cold.

He ran the numbers on the search. If the sergeant took him, he would be asked to step out and open the coat. The coat was a loose linen jacket over two cotton shirts. A competent man would pat the chest. The cloth would register as a bandage, or a money belt, or nothing, and he had answers ready for all three. He estimated the chance of a full body search at one in three. He estimated the chance that such a search would end badly at less than one in ten.

Those were good odds. He disliked them anyway. He had lived long enough in his profession to distrust any figure that let him go on.

The car ahead of him was waved through. He moved up ten meters. The left lane was shorter. Everything about the left lane said that he should take it: the sergeant looked bored, his clipboard was nearly full, and a sergeant with a full clipboard wants his breakfast. Nassiri had his hand on the wheel to turn.

He took the right lane.

He could not afterward have said why. There had been no hunch. The decision had arrived whole, in the way the answer to a question arrives after the question has been forgotten, and he had followed it before he had examined it. The Peugeot's nose crossed the painted line. A van behind him sounded its horn, once, and he raised a hand in apology and eased into the gap beside the conscript's booth.

The boy came to the window. He looked at the dashboard, then at the passenger seat, then at Nassiri.

"Papers."

Nassiri gave him the passport and the letter. The passport was in the name of Dr. Kamran Ardalan, a conservation consultant with a heritage survey office in Isfahan. The letter was on the office's paper. It was a good letter. It asked all officials of the Islamic Republic to extend every courtesy to a scholar engaged in the documentation of endangered monuments, and it was signed by someone who did not exist, over a stamp that did.

The boy read the first line twice. His lips moved. Nassiri had seen men of every rank read documents, and he knew the difference between reading and looking. This one was reading. He was trying to find the trouble in it, because the trouble was what he had been told to find.

"Dr.," the boy said.

"Yes."

"What kind of doctor?"

"Of buildings." Nassiri kept his voice mild. "Old ones. The kind that fall down."

The boy nearly smiled and stopped himself. He looked at the car again. "Open the boot."

Nassiri got out, which was the correct procedure, and went round and lifted the lid. Two aluminum cases lay in the boot, one with a tripod and a laser rangefinder, one with a notebook computer and a roll of survey tape. They were real. He had bought them in Qom in a hurry and had not liked what he paid. The boy pulled at the clasp of the first case, looked at the rangefinder with the expression of a person shown a foreign animal, and shut it.

Behind them the line shifted. A truck driver was leaning on a horn.

"Your coat," the boy said.

He said it to the boot. It was an order, and he had been given it that morning in a sergeant's voice, and he spoke it like a lesson repeated.

"Of course." Nassiri opened the linen jacket with both hands and held it wide. It was what he would have done for anyone. He stood there in the cold with his arms out and his chest exposed, and the shape of the cloth showed under the cotton as plain as a hand drawn on a window. He held his breath. He watched the boy's face.

The boy lifted his hand. It went toward the left side of Nassiri's chest, where the folded edge made a long soft ridge under the shirt, and stopped a hand's width from it. For a moment he looked at the place where his hand had stopped, as though he were not sure how it had come to be there. Then he lowered it. He frowned, as one frowns when he cannot remember what he had come into a room to fetch.

"Go on," the boy said.

"Thank you."

"Go on. Please." He had already turned to the van behind. He was rubbing the back of his neck.

Nassiri closed the jacket. He shut the boot, got into the car, started the engine, and drove through at the pace of an honest scholar. In the mirror, the boy's cap was a small pale shape against the booth. Beyond it, in the left lane, the heavy sergeant had finished with his car and was looking down the line. He was looking at the conscript. He had seen the Peugeot go through without a search, and he had seen the boy's hand, and he handed his clipboard to the man beside him and began to walk.

Nassiri watched him come up the line in the mirror until the road bent and the hill took them out of sight. He kept his eyes ahead. He told himself what he had told himself for most of three years. The boy was tired. The queue was long. The morning was cold. Men made exceptions for a hundred reasons, and nobody could prove a single one of them had been anything else.

He noted the time on the dashboard clock, and the hour went into the file where he kept such things. He had made a point of not looking at the name tape on the boy's chest. He had read it anyway. It said Soltani.

---

The port had been working at a quarter of its capacity for most of the year, and the city showed it the way a body shows hunger, in the face first. The waterfront road was lined with parked trucks that had not moved in weeks. Cranes stood over the container terminal with their arms up like men surrendering. Out past the breakwater the tankers lay at anchor in rows, deep in the water, with nowhere to go. Some of them had been there since before the Treasury's new list came out. Some had changed their names. The harbor pilots told one another which.

The blockade had settled into the town as weather settles into a coast. The first month it had been news. Now it was the price of bread and the hours of the power cuts. The men at the tea stalls spoke more quietly than they had. The women on the street carried their shopping in a hurry. Nobody here argued with anyone about it. They had not been asked.

Karimi's warehouse stood in a row of identical sheds behind the fish market. A new padlock hung on the rolling door, and a boy of about twelve sat on a crate beside it, eating sunflower seeds and watching the street. He stood up when he saw the Peugeot. He asked no questions. He unlocked the padlock and ran the door up four feet, and Nassiri stooped and went under.

The shelf was exactly where he remembered it. Karimi took it with him wherever he went, the way another man might take a favorite chair. It ran the whole length of the back wall and held forty or fifty objects that had never been lost from any museum. There was a lamp, a seal, a scrap of tile, and a brass dish whose inscription had been cut by a man in Tehran. Each had a card in front of it with a provenance in Karimi's hand. Nassiri had seen the shelf in three buildings and had never found a card he believed. That was the shelf's purpose. A customer who looked at it knew what sort of man he was dealing with, and what sort of price he would be paying.

Karimi was standing in front of it with his back to the door, holding a clay lamp up to the light. He was a short, wide man of sixty, bald, in a brown cardigan, with the shoulders of a wrestler gone to seed. He did not turn around.

"Colonel," he said.

"Mr. Karimi."

"Seventeen months." Karimi put the lamp down. "I counted. You did not call. You did not send a card. I thought, either he is dead or he has money, and I am not sure which would be better for me." He turned. "You are not dead."

"No."

"You are not wearing the coat you wore last time."

Nassiri looked down. The jacket was linen, pale, and a size too wide. The last time he had stood before this shelf, in Sarakhs, he had worn a gray wool overcoat with the collar turned up.

"It is warmer in the south," he said.

"It is." Karimi did not smile. He looked at Nassiri's face for rather longer than the remark required. He had stopped a full stride farther off than usual. In two meetings he had always come within an arm's length, because he liked to look at a man's hands while he spoke. Now he stood with his own hands in the pockets of the cardigan and the lamp behind him, and both of them could see the distance between them.

"You are different," Karimi said. "I do not say it as an insult."

"A great deal is different."

"Yes." Karimi nodded slowly. "That is what I thought."

There was a stool by the door. Nassiri did not take it. He had never sat in front of this shelf, in any of its homes, and he did not wish to begin.

"I need papers for South Asia," he said. "Good ones. The kind that survive a customs officer with an afternoon and an internet connection. A research affiliation. Heritage, museums, the conservation trade. I want to move without drawing the attention my own service's file would draw if someone looked at it properly."

"For how long?"

"Weeks. Possibly months."

"What name?"

"Ardalan."

Karimi's eyebrows went up. "Ardalan I have letterhead for. I have a stamp and a signature and a telephone number that someone will answer. A new name is three weeks." He scratched his jaw. "The old name is three days. But the old name has been in a few files. Some of them are not yours."

"I know."

"You know." Karimi studied him. "Then you have decided the risk is acceptable."

"I have."

It was true, and he had thought it through on the road. The name had been burned only to a service that, he believed, had stopped looking. A flag on a dormant file was a ghost, he judged, and ghosts did not send anyone to the airport. Three days against three weeks was a trade he could make with his eyes open. He could not have said what the extra eighteen days would cost. He did not intend to spend them in a rented room with the strait outside the window and the war going on without him.

"Three days," Karimi said.

He said it at once. He named no fee. He asked nothing about what the papers were for, or who would carry the risk, or whether the deposit would come in dollars or yuan. In two meetings Nassiri had never known the man to give a figure without first turning it over for several minutes, as if defusing a mine. He wrote on a scrap of paper, tore it off, and handed it across. It was a receipt for papers not yet made. The sum on it was half of what Nassiri had expected to pay.

"You are not going to argue?" Karimi said.

"No."

"I am not going to argue either." Karimi stared at the receipt in Nassiri's hand as if it belonged to someone else. "It is not like me."

"No," Nassiri agreed.

A forklift started up somewhere in the shed row, and they both waited for it to finish. Karimi went to the shelf and moved the lamp a few centimeters to the left. He did it to give his hands work.

Nassiri considered the situation as it was. A professional negotiator, whose living came from the gap between what a piece was worth and what a buyer thought it was worth, had just given away a margin unasked. He had done it for a client he feared, in a room where nobody was holding a gun. He had seemed, for a moment, almost relieved to be agreeing. And he had no idea why.

Nassiri had a good idea why. He filed it with the sergeant, the conscript and a dozen other small, deniable facts that each had a plain explanation. A tired man. A busy morning. A decent impulse. He had ceased to count them some time ago.

"There is one other matter," Karimi said.

He had turned back to the shelf. His voice had changed. It had become casual, in the way Nassiri had learned over two meetings meant its opposite.

"You asked me once to remember anything about old garments and the families that guard them. Do you remember asking?"

"I remember."

"I did not charge you for the asking. I am not charging for this." He ran a thumb along the edge of a tile. "I have a dealer in Mashhad. Old Haddad. He buys and sells paper, mostly, and he takes on commissions from people who do not give their names. A month ago a woman wrote to him. Not to him, exactly. Through a lawyer, who wrote through another lawyer. She wanted a document authenticated. A fragment, he said, sixth century, perhaps a bit later. A court inventory from a provincial treasury near Ctesiphon. It listed a great many ordinary things. And one thing that was not ordinary."

Nassiri did not move.

"A garment," Karimi said. "Whole. Without division. Received from a family in the eastern hills, and kept apart from the rest by order of the household steward." He said it in the flat cadence of a line learned by rote and not understood, each word set down where he had been told to put it. "Haddad did not know what to make of it. He told it to me as a curiosity. He thought I might find a buyer for the story."

"Who is the woman?"

"I do not know."

"Karimi."

"I do not know." The trader raised both hands, palms out. It was the first time he had looked frightened. "Haddad does not know either. The lawyers are in Mumbai. There is a city, a rumor that the woman is a scholar of some kind, and the sense that she is not anyone who wants to be found. That is all. I swear it. If I had a name I would sell it to you, and I would sell it dear."

Nassiri looked at the man's face. He had interrogated many people in his career and had believed perhaps one in ten. He believed this one. It troubled him more than he had expected.

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because you asked." Karimi lowered his hands. "And because I do not think you will thank me if I sit on it."

Nassiri nodded. The nod cost him more than it should have, and he could not have said why.

The cloth against his chest had been made without a single seam. For nearly three years no one but himself had known what that meant, and he had told it to nobody. Now a woman in a city he had never visited had put almost the same words on paper and sent them into the world with two lawyers between her and the reader.

It might be coincidence. He disliked the word as much as he disliked the figure he had worked out at the checkpoint, and for the same reason.

"Thank you," he said. "I will remember it."

"I would prefer you forgot where you heard it."

"That is also arranged."

He went out under the door and stood in the glare. The boy with the sunflower seeds had gone. The street smelled of fish, diesel and hot tar. Somewhere along the waterfront a man was shouting a price, and nobody was answering him.

He sat in the car with the engine off and wrote in his notebook, in the small block hand he used for things he did not intend to lose. Haddad, Mashhad. Lawyers, Mumbai. Ctesiphon, sixth cent. Whole, without division. He looked at the last four words for some time. Then he wrote one more line beneath them, and underlined it twice.

Someone else has the same page.

For nearly three years he had carried the cloth alone, and had held, in the long evenings, to a single comfort: that whatever it was, no one else on earth could be after it. He had made his decisions in that silence and had come to depend on it. He would need to find out who the woman was, and how much she knew, and whether she was running toward him or away. He would need to do it quietly. He would need to be quicker than he had been in a long time.

He started the car. He pulled into the road.