He stayed quiet. I wasn’t interested in small talk either and did my part to reinforce this, staring at the grid of skyscrapers waltzing along the horizon.
Panahi busied himself with the task of keeping his rattletrap on the road while his gaze flitted nervously from mirror to mirror. We passed through the village of Roodak and three kilometers later merged with the main highway for Tehran. The more we drove, the more frequently Panahi dipped into the sunflower seeds.
Traffic backed up, and now I could see why. Orange cones funneled all southbound traffic into a single lane. Men in police uniforms with AK-47s checked each vehicle coming through.
I’d spent my career talking myself out of tight corners. As the moment of deception approached, I’d learned to cope by smothering any possible doubts or fears with self-confidence and faith. Meanwhile, Panahi munched nervously. Damn guy might as well have tattooed the word suspicious on his forehead.
“Relax, my friend,” I said in a voice that was far more businesslike than it was friendly. “Take a deep breath and relax.”
When it was our turn to advance to the checkpoint, he spit the wad of chewed husks out the window and let the truck roll forward. Two policemen. One stood out in front of the car with his hand resting lazily on the butt of a pistol riding high on his right hip. Panahi halted the Chevy next to the second policeman and rolled down his window. The cop leaned in. He was overweight and sloppy. He wore sunglasses and chewed on an unruly mustache. He wasn’t nervous — I saw that — and he didn’t carry himself like a man expecting trouble. All good.
I managed to catch snippets of his exchange with Panahi. I heard the words, but mostly I was studying his tone, his inflections, his tempo. Same conclusion.
“What is your business today?”
“What do you mean?” Panahi played it well. He cocked a thumb to the goats in the back. “You think I’m taking my flock out for a joyride?”
The policeman ignored the sarcasm and extended an open hand through the window. “Papers.”
Panahi handed the cop his ID. He studied it. Flipped it over. Studied it some more. “What is your destination?”
“The Grand Bazaar.”
The cop returned the ID and looked at me. “And you?”
“He’s from the French Ministry of Agriculture,” Panahi answered. “Here to study how we raise animals.”
The policeman beckoned with his fingers. I gave him my passport.
He flipped through the passport and read my name. He pronounced it, “Ri-charde Mora?”
“Close enough,” I replied in French.
The cop studied me, eyes narrowing as if deciding what to do next. I looked at him with eyes so calm and warm that he might as well have been my best friend. My message was simple: don’t cause trouble. Which translated into: don’t make me shoot you between the eyes. I had already triangulated my position between him and his partner. If I had to, I could drop them both in a single heartbeat. After that? I’d have to ditch Panahi and commandeer a car. Things would get hairy. Again.
The policeman returned my passport and then did a rapid-fire exchange with Panahi, talking too fast for me to catch any of it. The cop took a step back and waved us through. Panahi dug into his cup of sunflower seeds and shoved a fresh handful into his mouth.
I looked into our rearview mirror. The policeman stared at us. His partner joined him. They exchanged a dozen words, then his partner spoke into a handheld radio.
A cataract of undeniable questions unraveled in my mind. Had Panahi given me away? Was the MEK — hell, or even the Iranian government — using him to shadow me? I didn’t think so. He was Mr. Elliot’s man. Mr. Elliot picked his people carefully. He trained them. He put them in the field only after they’d passed muster in situations a whole lot more dicey than a police roadblock.
“So?” I said.
“Tensions are high,” he answered. He nodded toward the police. “These pricks have been warned to trust no one. A foreigner is a foreigner. Even when he’s traveling with a local.”
Great answer. Who could argue with that? He was right. Tensions were high in Tehran. They’d been high for thirty years, and the people had no one to blame but themselves.
We drove into Tehran, a city of fifteen million people with as much freedom as caged mice in a deceptively urban setting. Yeah, most of the world was quick to demonize Iran, but you couldn’t tell it by the lush, well-manicured greenbelts lining the highway, and you couldn’t tell it by the amenities and architecture as modern as Chicago’s. You couldn’t see the tension, not from the front seat of a pickup truck. But it didn’t take much to imagine how much brighter this place would be without crazy zealots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his gang of mullahs riding their people’s back.
A cell phone chirped from Panahi’s coat pocket. He answered it in Farsi. “… Just crossed the Hemmat Highway…” A sideways glance to me. “Safe and sound.” He put the phone away and said in English, “All clear.”
“Who were you talking to?” He could tell by the tone of my voice that full disclosure was his only option. “Who?”
When he glanced across the console this time, he looked me right in the eye. We held that pose for a good three seconds. Then he gave his attention back to the road. His voice was calm when he said, “Do you really think I’d drive straight into Tehran with someone as important as you in my care without eyes and ears on our drop zone, Mr. Moreau?”
Another good answer. “Not if you wanted to live very long.”
“My life is not important. That we succeed is.”
I wanted to say, You’re breaking my heart, but I didn’t.
Panahi turned from the highway onto Shariati Street. We rattled down the road and curled in the direction of the city’s sprawling downtown. Like Istanbul and so many other cities in Mesopotamia, the old and the new could hardly be separated in Tehran. You had to remember that the area we were driving through had first been settled more than eight thousand years ago. That’s a lot of years and a lot of time for humans to mess up whatever had been good about this ancient land in the first place. You could travel through Tehran and see a thousand-year-old mosque across the street from a twenty-year-old steel and glass high-rise, a piece of junk that wouldn’t last another fifty. Guess which one got the nod in my book?
The streets were packed with cars and buses, taxis and minicabs, bicycles and motor bikes. And thousands of people. It was hot in the cab now that we were moving at a snail’s pace, and I rolled down the window. A cacophony of motors and mechanization melded with the shuffle of footsteps and a wave of competing voices.
I saw soldiers. I saw police. I heard sirens.
Pedestrians darted between cars, and my insides squirmed. Someone could jog right up to us and put a bullet through my brain. Well, maybe that was a little melodramatic, but I reached inside my coat and grasped my pistol nonetheless. I clicked the safety off, index finger resting on the trigger. Panahi made a left onto a side street lined with boxy row houses.
The Grand Bazaar probably didn’t have the benefit of road signs and billboards announcing its location back four hundred years ago, when the first merchant put up his tent, but now there was signage helping everyone from tourists to bankers to find it. Four hundred years ago, it was an outdoor market. Today it was housed in a remarkable domed affair with corridors meandering more than six miles and selling everything from copper and gold to cinnamon and coriander. You could borrow money in the bazaar or barter for cow’s liver. You could buy a kite or a kitten. You could haggle over jewelry or hire a tailor. You could have your fortune read in one booth, drink coffee and munch homemade pastries in another, and negotiate a loan in another. You could see and do a lot of things in six miles’ worth of booths and stalls. You could spend a week and not see everything.