The Handler

PROLOGUE

Sahar Rahimi arrived at the airport early only because her mother had insisted on it. The smart, lithe, yoga-­loving nineteen-­year-­old had pushed back on the early hour, trying to tell her mother that she worried too much. But her mother, Nadia, had lived in Tehran for all of her fifty-­one years. Somewhere in that instinctual space between maternal wisdom and middle-­aged pessimism, the older woman had just known she’d be right.

“They’ll find a way to hold things up,” she’d kept saying during the pack up. “An unscheduled search, a long interview, a fivefold check of your visa, a dispute over the weight of your luggage—­doesn’t matter. There will be something. It’s Tehran. Trust me.”

A premed student near the top of her class, the nineteen-­year-­old responded with a subtle eye roll and a stream of text messages to her boyfriend, Esfan. The one-­month trip home from university had been insufferable. Thank God, it was all nearly over.

With a long, labored breath, Sahar had gone on to explain to her mother that the world was no longer quite so jammed up as it once had been, even in Iran. The magic of technology had smoothed things out. Today’s Tehran was not her mother’s Tehran. It was, the daughter had advised, perhaps time for a more optimistic outlook.

Waving all of that away, Nadia replied with a mantra of near religious clarity. “You don’t know these people the way I do. There will be something,” she’d said again.

Recalling their conversation now, Sahar stifled a yawn and looked blearily at the queue in front of her. She checked her phone again. Still no reply from Esfan. The last she’d seen him was at a shuttle stop as she was leaving Montreal’s McGill University for the airport weeks ago, a scene she’d replayed in her mind at least a hundred times since. Because they’d both pledged to keep their relationship a secret from their meddling parents, texting had been the only way to stay in touch.

But to her liking, he’d been a little too quiet. Of late, his sometimes hours-­long silences would cause her to create wild, spine-­tingling fantasies of a forthcoming breakup. Even now she was imagining he’d found some new way to avoid her at the airport, wobbling her faith in the one immovable thing she’d been counting on: their shared flight back to Canada. This morning’s flight.

At a little after four thirty in the morning, trapped in an overengineered glass tunnel somewhere between security and immigration, she stood among a crowd of fellow travelers with nervous faces, none of them Esfan’s. Adding to her anxiety, in the close confines of the tunnel, the line had ballooned and lost its shape. There was some kind of delay up ahead. Grudgingly, she’d begun to think her mother might have had a point.

Someone behind her accidentally kicked her heel. Her elbow touched the man next to her. She balled her fists in frustration and shifted the strap of her shoulder bag away from someone else. This was not coming off at all the way she’d hoped.

Compounding it, her despair rang with a certain sense of inevitability, a pang of foreboding. She’d intuited it as soon as she’d stepped out of bed a few hours earlier. She told herself that her mother’s dour outlook, coupled with the disquiet of her relationship, had morphed into this stubborn sense of dread and that it would all go away soon enough. But it hadn’t. If anything, it had gotten worse.

In the car on the way in, the reporter on the all-­news station had been going on about the Iranian missile attack on the American base in Iraq, payback for the US bombing of a top Revolutionary Guards general named Soleimani. Forty dead American soldiers, invaders, the newsreader had kept saying, repeating the number as though it were a football score.

Hearing this, her mother had stabbed the steering wheel with an index finger. “That’s it,” she’d said. “The fools.”

Now, ignoring the jabs of the crowd, Sahar could picture her mother sitting in the parking lot out there somewhere, waiting in their snow-­mottled sedan, obsessing on the news. Nadia had lived through the Iran–­Iraq War, so anything of a military nature always made the woman jumpy. As though in concert with Sahar’s own dark presentiment, Nadia had vowed to stay at the airport until Sahar’s plane had safely taken wing.

Her spirits at a low ebb, Sahar supposed that whatever was happening up there might cause her to miss her flight. With a shaking thumb, cramped against fellow travelers, she began to compose a signal to her mother to wait for her, just in case.

But her typing was interrupted with an incoming message. It was Esfan finally. She savored the few words glowing in front of her, the weight of her fears suddenly lifted. She canceled the message to her mother and opened a dialog with him instead.

He was also in the throng, somewhere back behind her, around the corner where she couldn’t see him. Predictably, he complained about being too early. No doubt, she replied, adding that he was lucky his mother wasn’t as much of a psycho as hers. She restrained from further comment, attempting to play it cool, giving him a taste of his own taciturnity.

The line narrowed and re-­formed. Travelers were moving forward. Things were happening. She felt a rising sense of confidence. While Esfan remained out of sight some hundred yards behind her, his presence had made all the difference.

Over the next quarter hour, she passed through the gauntlet with a smile, eventually selecting a red vinyl chair in the waiting lounge where she could block the seat next to her with her bag. Aiming for a look of metropolitan sophistication, she adjusted the pink hijab across her throat and crossed her legs, checking her lipstick in a glass railing. Comprehending nothing at all, she flipped through a censored—­but mostly intact—­Vogue magazine, preparing for Esfan’s arrival.

It wasn’t that hard to tune out a ceiling-­mounted TV that went on and on about the missile attack. Now and then she glanced up at the reporter, but tried not to. Nearly departed from this besieged country, she was determined not to be her mother.

Yet ten minutes on, there was still no sign of Esfan. The gate agent ran through the boarding procedures over a squawking PA. The foreboding reemerged. The connection time in Kiev was painfully brief. If he missed this flight, then she wouldn’t see him for another day, perhaps even three, given the sparse schedules out of Tehran.

A tortured breakup fantasy bubbled up from the depths. Who was she to think she could hold on to him during this long time apart? She stewed on her shortcomings for another few minutes before her substantial reasoning powers finally won out. Even if he was going to dump her, she reminded herself, he still had to come. He had school starting in a few days and responsibilities of his own. It made no sense that he would turn around now.

Then where was he?

She leaned forward and looked up the concourse in a fruitless search. It made no sense. She lost control of her fingers, texting him three times in forty-­five seconds with essentially the same message: WTF? But no response came. She soon regretted sending them and melted under a hot wave of self-­incrimination. Exasperated with her overactive imagination, she stuffed the magazine into her bag and stared at the carpet, her phone on her lap, just in case it should come back to life.

But it didn’t. When her row was eventually called, she proceeded glumly through the door, down two flights of stairs, and out onto the tarmac. It was still dark, only five thirty in the morning. A cold breeze ruffled her headscarf.

Sahar gaped at the big blue airplane before her, which hissed from its ground turbines and gleamed under the floodlights of the terminal building. She climbed the boarding stairs and squeezed into the cabin, where she was greeted by an enviously pretty Ukrainian flight attendant. Sahar thought that a flight attendant with those looks would have no problems with men.

She settled into her seat and waited; in order to distract herself, she watched the other passengers stow their bags. She watched the luggage streaming into the belly of the plane. It was going to be another gloomy day, but there was a small gleam of pink as dawn crested an eastern ridge.

Pulling out her phone, she snapped a picture of it. She coached herself to stop caring about Esfan. If he wasn’t coming, then so be it.

She thought about posting the photo to Instagram with a few words about a new day, a new year, a new semester, faintly hoping he’d see that she’d turned the page. But nothing clever came. Better to leave it alone than say something stupid, she thought. Besides, her father had told her to avoid Instagram while home in Iran. She was suddenly glad of the excuse. Reminded of her parents, she texted her mother, letting her know she was safely on the plane.

The incoming text found Nadia a half mile away through a cordon of security fences. On seeing it, she closed her eyes and thanked her god. Despite all her misgivings, Sahar was safely on the plane.

Nadia was sitting in her car with the engine running, her chai thermos empty and cold. She’d been firing the engine in three-­ to four-­minute intervals, just long enough to ward off the chill while still conserving gas, which had been rationed for the last eight months. She stared out at the orange line cresting the ridge and ran her hand through her hair, tension draining from her fingertips as she massaged her scalp.

Her phone rang. It was her husband, Zana. Though he’d also planned on staying to see Nadia off, he’d been recalled three days early to his work site, a few hours off to the northwest, over toward the Caspian.

Nadia had been angry with him for that, which had led to a nasty spat. But in her suddenly expansive mood, she’d let it all go, appreciative that he’d thought to call. While she didn’t like his job, she admitted that he was well looked after by the government. They had a pleasant home up in the foothills and a daughter in her second year of premed at a Canadian university. On balance, she thought now, it seemed one of life’s more equitable trade-­offs.

“Everything going okay?” he asked through the phone tentatively, the fight over his early exit still fresh in mind.

“Yes, it’s fine now,” she replied. “But you know your daughter. She’s obsessed with that Taghavi boy. And believe it or not, she still thinks we don’t know.”

“Hmph,” he said with a chuckle. “She thinks we’re idiots.”

Nadia smiled. She glanced in the mirror on the back side of the visor. There were some wrinkles on the forehead, some skin gathered below the chin. But her hair was still thick and black. “I was once that way about you, eh? Sneaking around behind our parents’ backs.”

“A long time ago. Not so sure about now.”

“Hmph,” she said, imitating him. She tucked some hair behind an ear and closed the mirror.

Seeing Sahar step out onto the airport curb in the dark a few hours prior had made Nadia wistful. The old argument with her husband was gone now, displaced by the sentimentality of parenthood.

“Am I so terribly old?” she asked her husband.

“Whatever you are, you’re younger than me.”

She’d hoped he might say a little more, but let it go. Trade-­offs. Through the phone she heard the sound of papers rustling, the creak of a chair.

“So,” he said, anxious to get to more practical matters, “she’s on the plane? On her way to Canada?”

“Yes, she’s on. Ukraine first, remember? It connects in Kiev.” In the spare gray light, Nadia could see that they’d removed the boarding stairs. A squat yellow tractor was pushing the jet back toward a taxiway. “Late but leaving now.”

“That’s a relief,” he said. “You know Tehran.”

Sahar gasped aloud when she saw Esfan walking down the plane’s aisle. Flustered, she tidied the empty middle seat to make room. She smoothed her scarf and pulled out a thick lock of hair across her shoulder. Esfan dropped into the seat, grabbed her hand, and brushed his lips across her cheek.

“My bag was too big,” he said, grinning. “Apparently the plane is overweight. I had to make arrangements to get it back to my mother.”

Abandoning another particularly cruel breakup fantasy, Sahar sucked in a shaking breath and held it for a moment. The very smell of him gave her vertigo. To steady herself, she squeezed his hand.

“They’ll ship it” was all she managed to say.

“Yes,” he answered. “And . . . in all the confusion, they missed this.” He pulled a small bottle of Listerine from his carry-­on and took a sip. “Canadian Club,” he added, smiling widely. “Minty fresh.”

She leaned in conspiratorially to catch a whiff of the whiskey. “Oh, do I ever need that.”

“What was the big rush to get back to work?” Nadia asked, grateful to see Sahar’s plane rolling toward the end of the runway.

“I assume you’ve been listening to the news,” Zana answered tersely.

The Americans, she thought. He had a rule against talking politics over the phone and dropped into this monotone whenever she ran afoul of it. “Never mind,” she said. “I understand.”

He changed the subject. “How is the new medicine doing? Been long enough to tell?”

Nadia, who’d developed multiple sclerosis in her early forties, looked unconsciously at her hand. No shaking. The headaches had dissipated as well. Come to think of it, the new medicine had been a blessing during Sahar’s long visit home.

“You know,” she replied, “I think it’s very good. You can get me more?”

“Good,” he said. “Yes, I can get more.”

In a wide dirt clearing three miles away, a twenty-­five-­year-­old third lieutenant in the Iranian Air Defense Force had just assumed the watch.

It was now after six and the January sky was brightening, but the young officer had no sense of that. There were no windows in the corrugated metal box where he worked, which was roughly the size and shape of a shipping container. Inside he had only the gray-­green pall of optical TV and radar screens with which to render the world.

His eyes were pink and narrowed, his uniform rumpled. He’d been up until two at an after-­hours party at a friend’s house a few miles away. Though Iran was a dry country, the after-­hours-­cocktail circuit was something of an open secret among Tehran’s Snapchat set.

The interior of his trailer was a steady sixty degrees in order to keep the electronics happy. The unending whir of computer fans made him sleepy, while the disapproving glances of the three sergeants in front of the radar scopes made him jumpy. More than anything, he wished he could simply crawl back in bed and sleep off the thumping in his head.

He thought about grabbing one of the Toyota four-­by-­fours to drive around the Tor missile batteries a few hundred yards away just to get away. The fresh air would be a tonic, he told himself, just the thing he needed. Moreover, driving around the missile site would buoy his mood. He liked mixing it up with the crews, inspecting the tank-­tracked vehicles, glimpsing the spotless white missiles.

But as the platoon commander, his job was in here, the trailer, the nerve center. Especially since his commanders had called in the alert. There’d been some kind of attack on the Americans. All crews had been recalled. They were at the highest state of alert.

He and the sergeants wore their working green fatigues and heavy winter coats, shivering against the chill. A diesel generator chugged outside, keeping the systems running. Raising his voice over the hum of machines, one of the men said something about a status report. The young officer rubbed his face, put his communications headphones over his black beret, and shifted in his chair. He read aloud from a checklist into his microphone, just as he’d done a thousand times before.

He’d been coming to this particular tac trailer on the outskirts of Tehran for going on two years now. It was his first assignment as an officer of the ADF and he had decidedly mixed feelings about it. On the one hand it wasn’t a particularly prestigious billet, manning a button to launch surface-­to-­air missiles against an air raid that would probably never come. But on the other, it allowed him to live in the city and go to after-­hours parties.

“Say status,” he said to the lead radar operator, continuing the exercise.

“Clear sweep sectors one, two, three, and four” came the rote response.

They could all do this in their sleep. The lieutenant’s mind drifted back to the party.

“Contact!” the sergeant suddenly shouted. “Designate unknown target Alpha One.”

Jarred by the sharp tone, the young lieutenant stiffened. He rose and approached the sergeant from behind, the cord from his headphones stretching back to his console. The operator repeated the information, the words tumbling out in haste.

The lieutenant looked dubiously at the scope. But there it was, a blip moving at about two hundred knots, circling in toward them. Headed toward his sector, it had already been designated a target by HQ. A suspected American Tomahawk cruise missile, according to the scope’s marker.

“Range nine kilometers, speed two-­five-­zero knots, altitude one thousand feet and holding. Bearing two-­eight-­five. Heading three-­zero-­zero. Turning south now.”

The officer studied the glowing red dot, his mind running through calculations. The profile didn’t seem quite right to him, too slow for a Tomahawk. He noted the bearing.

“That’s near the airport,” he said to the sergeant at the scope. “How do we know that’s not just civilian traffic? Check the squawk.”

The sergeant rattled off some instructions into his microphone and punched a few buttons. “IFF showing a negative response, sir. No plane would be out there without a squawk.” The experienced operator angled toward him. “Sir,” he said, “they’ve marked it hostile—­it’s right over the city.”

His mind still reeling with calculations, the lieutenant turned away and gave a grudging nod. It didn’t add up. But he had no time to override procedure. It was all happening too fast.

“Fire-­control radars ready,” he said automatically. “Batteries one through four. Standing by.”

The sergeant barked out the changes in altitude, bearing, speed, and heading of target Alpha One. The radar operators reported a solid track, a good targeting solution. The missiles were armed and ready.

No, the lieutenant thought. It didn’t add up. The contact was too slow. Its altitude was rising rather than falling. The profile was just plain wrong. The young officer tugged at his shirt collar, bit his lip. To the man at the scope he said, “This has to be a drill.” But the older sergeant dismissed him with a crisp shake of the head.

The target was now in sector four, the one he commanded. Through his own headset, the lieutenant heard the order from the ground-­control-­intercept operator in the hardened underground bunker some six miles south.

“Sector four: fire, fire, fire! Target Alpha One. Fire!”

Though trained to accept them, in all his time at this site, he’d never heard those exact words. This was no drill.

The young officer hesitated. He couldn’t believe his own ears. The sergeant at the scope glanced at him. The lieutenant started to say something, then thought better of it and cleared his throat. He wet his lips.

“Lieutenant!” the sergeant yelled. “Did you hear?”

The young officer put a hand over his microphone. “No. I mean, yes, I heard. But it doesn’t look right. . . .”

All three of the sergeants were looking at him now.

“It’s an order,” the lead one said, eyes wild and searching.