“Precisely. Have you found anything useful on her?”
“We’re putting together a list of her friends and we’re already looking into Ahmale Okoro, who appears to be her closest. Young girls’ phones tend to have light security, and they often misplace them. Some also play online video games with each other. It’ll take a little time, but there’s a good chance we can follow these kinds of connections to Anna.”
“I wonder if they’ll commit such a careless error.”
“Children are hard to control,” Nasrin said. “But I agree. I’m less confident in that approach than Yasmin. One thing we’re working on is penetrating the communications of the American team watching him. But their level of professionalism makes it no small task. Also, it appears that they were as surprised by his departure as we were.”
“Any indication that they know where he went or when he’ll return?” Cyrah asked.
“None.”
“It’s a thread we can pull—but only with great care. We don’t want to risk revealing ourselves to the American government. In the end, I think we have to resign ourselves to this taking a while.”
“We have money and time,” Yasmin said. “That gives us the luxury of being methodical. If it takes six months, it takes six months.”
Cyrah nodded, gazing out over the empty landscape below. “Then as they say, the ball is in your court. Get me a location on Claudia so I can go to work.”
“But you’re not going to get bored in the meantime, right?” Nasrin said. “You’re not going to start shark diving or hunting leopards with your bare hands…”
Cyrah smiled and shut down the connection before removing the SIM card and battery. The former she destroyed with the flame from a lighter and the latter went over the side of the cliff. A fist-sized rock was enough to deal with the handset and she’d randomly scatter the debris as she descended.
Then what? Perhaps a drink in her rented apartment? Not something she did often, but a pleasure forbidden to her in her youth might be a nice way to finish the day. Yet another reminder of how far she’d come.
The voices became audible when Cyrah was still more than a hundred meters away, echoing off the stone. Not English or Afrikaans, but one of the country’s tribal languages.
Out of force of habit, Cyrah had already been moving quietly, but now she slowed and went entirely silent. It was a skill she’d learned avoiding her abusive father and one that even her male instructors had begrudgingly acknowledged.
In truth, she’d done everything well, excelling at every test she was given. Speed, endurance, intelligence, courage. But above all, her ability to remain calm under pressure. Even her greatest weakness, physical power, was far better than anyone would guess of a woman who stood only one hundred and sixty centimeters and weighed barely fifty-six kilograms. It was a disconnect between expectation and reality that proved quite useful. But not one she’d ever had an opportunity to leverage in the service of her country.
The relatively liberal Iranian president had started the program with the idea of creating a division of women spies and saboteurs that would be so unexpected as to be invisible to their Israeli opponents. He’d recruited young women from a wide swath of society. In her case, the police, but also universities, intelligence agencies, and the sciences. Of course, most washed out quickly, but she and a few others held on. At the end of their training only she and two others—Nasrin and Yasmin—remained.
But there were to be no clandestine infiltrations into enemy territory. No glorious operations that thwarted their enemies and proved the value of their gender. In the endless push-pull between the civilian government, religious leaders, and military, the president had been forced to turn the program over to the Republican Guard. Predictably, they’d immediately replaced her instructors with the cruelest and most misogynistic men they could find.
The night before what was to be her graduation, the director of the program had come into her quarters and violently raped her. He explained that it was an experience that she’d need to be prepared for if she were ever captured. Nasrin and Yasmin, she discovered later, had suffered the same fate.
Despite the humiliation and considerable injuries, all three of them had gotten up that morning, dressed, and made their way to the ceremony that would welcome them into Iran’s most secretive intelligence organization. They’d stood at attention outside their commander’s office for hours before one of his people told them that the program had been canceled and that they’d been reassigned to the typing pool.