Chapter Twenty-Three

Isfahan, Iran — Present Day

---

"The permit is real," Vartan said, over a connection Nassiri had learned, across three weeks of exactly this kind of call, was routed through enough relay points that neither of them fully trusted it and both of them used it anyway, because the alternative was trusting something considerably less deniable. "Structural assessment, water damage to the south sacristy wall, filed under our trust's standing cultural-heritage designation and approved by a diocesan administrator who has signed considerably less scrutinized paperwork for us a dozen times before. Nine days, Colonel. That's the window. After that, the administrator's own superiors review anything left open past the standard term, and I do not currently have a second signature I can produce on short notice if that happens."

"Nine days is workable." Nassiri stood at his own guesthouse window, watching the cathedral's bell tower catch the last of the afternoon light three streets distant, close enough now that he had begun, against his own professional instincts, to think of the wall as already partially his. "I have a mason lined up through my own channels, discreet, accustomed to the kind of work that doesn't ask questions about its own paperwork. Once your permit gets us inside during working hours, the actual assessment of the section Father Manvel has spent three decades protecting without explanation should take considerably less time than the diocese has budgeted for it."

"And once you have it." Vartan's voice carried something Nassiri recognized, across a career spent reading exactly this kind of hesitation, as a man circling a question he'd been rehearsing for longer than the call itself had run. "I think it's time we stopped being vague with each other about what happens next, Colonel. I have a family currently tearing itself apart over what I've already done to get us this far. I would like to know, plainly, what I've actually helped deliver you, before we're standing in that sacristy with considerably less time to have this conversation honestly."

Nassiri considered, for a moment, offering the same careful, half-true answer he'd given Karimi, and understood, watching the bell tower's shadow lengthen across the courtyard wall, that Vartan Manukian had earned, at minimum, a version of the truth closer to whole than what he'd been offering everyone else in his life for the better part of a year.

"I intend to keep it," he said. "Not use it, not in the way I suspect you're currently imagining. Keep it — verified, documented, entirely outside any government's reach, including my own, until I have decided precisely which door it opens most usefully for me. I have spent a year with nothing left of my old life but rank I no longer wield and debts I can no longer discharge through the channels that used to discharge them. This is not an ideology, Mr. Manukian. It is the only remaining asset substantial enough to buy back whatever version of a future I still intend to have."

The silence on the line lasted long enough that Nassiri understood, before Vartan spoke again, that he had just confirmed something the other man had already half-suspected and had been hoping, against his own better judgment, would turn out to be wrong.

"I did not risk my family's entire reputation, and very possibly its actual survival, so that one disgraced colonel could retire comfortably on the back of it." Vartan's voice had gone careful in a new way, the specific control of a man recalculating an equation he'd trusted too readily. "I want it used, Colonel. Openly, verifiably, in front of the kind of catastrophe currently unfolding daily in this war that a single unambiguous demonstration could actually stop — not hidden in a vault as somebody's private insurance policy. My family spent four centuries arguing about exactly this choice, and I did not walk away from every caution I was raised with in order to hand the outcome to a man whose only stated ambition is personal security."

"Then we appear to have arrived, considerably sooner than either of us likely hoped, at the actual shape of our disagreement." Nassiri said it without heat, the specific flat clarity he brought to every negotiation that had stopped being about trust and started being about terms. "I would remind you, Mr. Manukian, that I said as much to you the first night we spoke. We would very likely disagree about the ending. I did not lie to you then, and I have no intention of lying to you now. What I would ask, before either of us decides this disagreement is worth ending an arrangement that has gotten both of us further than either of us managed alone, is whether it can wait nine more days. Recovery first. Argument after. I do not believe either of us currently has the leverage to win the argument before we have the thing the argument is actually about."

Another silence, shorter this time, and Nassiri understood, listening to it, that Vartan was doing the same cold arithmetic he himself had done a dozen times already this week — weighing a principle against a timeline, and finding, as most people eventually did in exactly this kind of negotiation, that the timeline currently held more practical weight.

"Nine days," Vartan said finally. "Recovery first. But I want it understood, Colonel, plainly, the way you've apparently decided to be plain with me tonight — I am not walking away from this once we're standing in that sacristy with it in our hands. Whatever leverage you believe you currently hold over how this ends, you will not hold it alone, and you will not hold it uncontested."

"I would think considerably less of you if you'd said otherwise." Nassiri watched the bell tower's shadow finally swallow the last of the courtyard wall, full dark settling over a city that had no idea, going about its evening exactly as it had for four centuries, how narrow the window currently sitting above it had actually become. "Nine days, then. I'll have the mason ready within three. I would suggest, Mr. Manukian, that you spend the remaining time deciding exactly how confident you actually are that your own family's four-hundred-year argument survives contact with the thing it's been arguing about. I have found, in thirty years of this work, that certainty and the object one is certain about rarely survive introduction to each other cleanly. I do not say that to discourage you. I say it because I suspect, whatever we each decide to do with it once it's in our hands, neither of us currently understands what it actually is closely enough to be as certain as we both currently sound."

He ended the call, and stood a while longer at the window, watching the cathedral's dark silhouette against a sky just beginning to show stars, and understood, with the specific cold clarity that had carried him through thirty years of exactly this kind of arithmetic, that he had just spent considerable effort securing a partner he now fully expected to betray him the moment their shared timeline stopped being more useful than their shared disagreement — and understood, further, that Vartan Manukian was, at this exact moment, almost certainly standing somewhere in Colombo or Chennai, looking at his own version of the same dark sky, arriving at precisely the same conclusion about him.