Chapter Eighteen

Sarakhs, Iran-Turkmenistan Border — Present Day

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The warehouse looked exactly as it had a year and a half ago, which Nassiri understood, standing in the same front room with its same carefully curated shelf of plausible-provenance antiquities, was very much the point — Hossein Karimi's entire business rested on the specific, reassuring fact that nothing about his operation ever looked like it had changed, regardless of what had actually changed around it.

What had changed, considerably, was the man standing across from him.

"You're not wearing the uniform," Karimi said, by way of greeting, walking the same shelf he'd walked eighteen months ago with the same unhurried, appraising patience, though his eyes, Nassiri noted, moved to him rather than the merchandise considerably more often than they had the first time. "I noticed that the moment you walked in. Colonels who still matter wear the uniform even to meetings where it's inconvenient, because the uniform is doing work the man underneath it no longer has to. You're not wearing it, which tells me either you've decided it's stopped being useful to you, or someone above you has made that decision for you and simply hasn't found the appropriate moment to say so out loud."

"The second, mostly." Nassiri did not see the value in pretending otherwise with a man whose entire livelihood depended on reading exactly this kind of thing accurately. "I retain my rank. I do not retain much that used to come attached to it."

"I'd heard something to that effect." Karimi finally stopped walking, and turned to face him fully, and Nassiri understood, watching the shift, that whatever transaction was about to happen here would happen on considerably different terms than the last one had. "I want to be direct with you, Colonel, the way I was direct with you the last time, because I think you'd respect that more than tact, and because I find I have less patience for tact than I used to, now that I understand the man asking me for a favor no longer has a great deal standing behind his own name. Last time, you offered me your personal guarantee, and I accepted it, because your rank made that guarantee worth something. What, precisely, are you offering me this time?"

"Money. Considerably more of it than last time, and paid in advance rather than on delivery, which I understand is not how you generally prefer to structure these arrangements, but which I suspect you'll find easier to accept from a man in my current position than a promise you'd have no practical way to collect on if it went wrong." Nassiri set a case on the counter between them, and did not open it yet, letting the weight of it — visible, obvious — do the first part of the negotiating for him. "I don't need cargo moved this time. I need documentation. A cover identity clean enough to survive sustained scrutiny, not a checkpoint glance — heritage conservation work, Armenian architectural preservation, something that would let a foreign-adjacent researcher move through New Julfa's church properties in Isfahan without drawing the kind of attention a stranger asking questions about four-hundred-year-old stonework would ordinarily draw."

Karimi was quiet for a long moment, and Nassiri watched him do the same careful arithmetic he'd watched him do eighteen months ago, weighing risk against fee with the specific unhurried patience of a man who had never once, in Nassiri's observation, let urgency change the actual shape of a negotiation.

"That's a considerably stranger request than a crate of antiquities, Colonel." Karimi opened the case, counted without appearing to count, closed it again. "And I find myself curious, given everything I've heard about the mountain and everything I haven't heard anyone explain since, why a man in your position wants to spend what's clearly a significant remaining fraction of his liquidity walking around an Armenian church in Isfahan pretending to study its walls."

"You don't need to know why. You need to know that the fee reflects the difficulty, and that I have structured this so that nothing about the request connects back to you if it goes wrong, which is considerably more than I offered you last time."

"Last time went wrong anyway, if you'll recall — four men stopped my lead truck at a fuel depot and searched a crate they had no legal authority to search, and I have spent eighteen months wondering exactly how close that came to costing me a decade of relationships I built without your help and intend to keep building long after whatever you're currently involved in has resolved itself, one way or another." Karimi's voice stayed level, but something underneath it had sharpened. "I'll do it. The documentation, the cover, all of it — I have a printer in Mashhad who does work clean enough to survive considerably more scrutiny than a church caretaker is likely to apply. But the fee triples from what's in that case, Colonel, and I want it understood, this time, that if anyone comes asking me questions about an Armenian researcher with forged credentials, I will answer those questions completely and immediately, and I will not spend one hour of goodwill protecting a man who no longer has the rank to make protecting him worth my while."

"Understood." Nassiri did not argue the price, which told Karimi, he suspected, considerably more about his desperation than any explanation would have. "Triple. Paid now, in full, as you've structured every part of this that matters to you."

Karimi nodded, and turned back toward his shelf, and Nassiri understood the meeting was, in every practical sense, concluded — until Karimi spoke again, almost carelessly, in the specific tone of a man mentioning something he'd nearly forgotten rather than something he'd been saving.

"You're not the only one asking about Armenian merchant families this month, for what it's worth. A contact of mine in Yerevan mentioned a Beirut man — an import broker, by his account, though not one anyone in that city currently recognizes as active — making inquiries at an archive there about a New Julfa trading registry. Around the same week, curiously, that the archive in question suddenly found itself unable to answer any further questions on the subject." Karimi did not look at him directly, which Nassiri understood, across a career built on reading exactly this kind of deliberate non-look, was itself a kind of message. "I don't know if that means anything to you, Colonel. I only mention it because a man in my line of work has learned that information costs nothing to share and occasionally buys goodwill considerably more valuable than a receipt."

Nassiri absorbed this with the same flat professional stillness he absorbed everything, and understood, walking back out into the free zone's flat afternoon heat with a considerably lighter case and a considerably heavier piece of intelligence, that Sarkisian's side was not simply reacting to his own movements anymore. They were pulling the same thread, from the same city, within days of his own people closing it off — which meant, whatever else was currently true about his diminished rank and his emptied accounts, he was still, for the moment, exactly one step ahead of them, and intended, with the specific patient discipline that had kept him alive since a mountainside had taken everything else, to make certain that single step remained the entire distance between them for as long as it possibly could.