The Leveling

Most of the complex was technically off-limits to non-Muslims, but tests for religious purity were impossible to administer to the millions of visitors who passed through every year.

He followed the arrow pointing to the shrine itself and soon reached an inner courtyard that was ringed by a two-story arcade clad in millions of hand-painted tiles. Clusters of men in robes knelt on rugs, praying, and a gray cat walked on a roof high above the courtyard. A little girl, too young to need to cover her hair, brushed by him as she chased a little boy. As Mark traversed the courtyard, a flock of green pigeons flew up and settled on top of the gilded water station where pilgrims were washing themselves before entering the shrine to pray.

The entrance to the shrine stood under a gold-tiled vaulted Persian arch; a giant chandelier hung from its apex. To either side of the entrance were areas where pilgrims could remove their shoes before going inside. Mark approached the men’s section and pulled out his sheaf of fliers.

On each flier was a photo of the man in the black turban.

Underneath the photo, it read, in Farsi, Are you learned enough to know the name of this esteemed sayyid, next Friday’s Prayer leader? The first fifty worshippers to call will be rewarded with a private sermon by this learned man, to be held at the Balasar Mosque. There he will enlighten all of the glory of Imam Reza, peace be upon him. At the bottom of the flier was a telephone number and the name Center for Islamic Studies.

Mark taped three fliers to a wall where people preparing to enter the shrine were sure to see them.

Next he went to a school, where women in black chadors were seated on a carpeted floor in a central room studying the Qur’an while their children played with humidifiers, putting their hands near the steam and laughing when it touched their hands.

He taped five fliers to the green bulletin board near the entrance.

Next came a library, then a huge courtyard where he taped fliers to half the lampposts.

Outside a mosque, over a thousand people stood in bare feet or socks on prayer carpets, bowing as one. Mark walked among them as though looking for a family member, trying to avoid the men in blue suits wielding rainbow-colored feather dusters who were directing late-arriving worshippers to their proper places. He spotted fourteen black-turbaned sayyids among the crowd. None was the man he was looking for. He taped more fliers to the walls near the mosque entrance on his way out.

As he did so an old man, dressed in a torn sport coat and wool ski hat, with a face like leather, demanded to know what he was doing.

Mark flashed him a nasty look. “Contest,” he said in Azeri, and taped up another flier.




He met Daria outside the main entrance to the shrine complex. She’d spent the morning posting fliers at religious universities and mosques around greater Mashhad. In her pocket was one of two cell phones they’d bought that morning, along with several prepaid SIM cards; the number for the cell phone in her pocket was the number now printed on all the fliers.

“Three calls already.”

The first had been from a school administrator who was irate about the fliers that had been plastered all over his campus. The second was from someone pointing out that the prayer leader for next Friday was supposed to be Ayatollah Tabrizi, not the man pictured on the flier. The third was from a student who had mistakenly thought the man pictured was the leader of Iran’s parliament.

Another call came in twenty minutes later. Daria answered as if she were the receptionist for the fictional Center for Islamic Studies, cupping the mouthpiece with her hand to muffle the street noise.

After hanging up, she said, “A woman from Ferdowsi University swears our man is a guy named Amir Bayat, owner and editor in chief of the Enqelab. She said she grew up in Tehran and her father worked at the paper for years. She wants to know when she’s getting her pass for the sermon.”

The Enqelab, Mark knew, was a hard-line conservative newspaper published in Tehran. When he’d been with the CIA, he’d frequently read translated versions of it. He eyed a cop directing traffic and suggested that they find an Internet café and find out everything they could about Amir Bayat.

“I’ve got a better idea,” said Daria. “We can be in Tehran in seven hours. Once we get there, I know someone who will be able to tell us a lot more about Amir Bayat than we’d ever be able to learn online.”





53


Beijing, China



LI ZEMIN DROVE up to a set of spiked wrought-iron gates in his black Toyota Camry. A private security guard, wearing a uniform that mimicked those worn by the Chinese army, motioned for him to stop.