Hosyen’s wife had mailed photographs of his funeral to him at his hotel in Dubai. Every so often he would get up from the muffin softness of his king bed to look at them. He would arrange them by time stamp on the floor of his suite. He usually waited until sleep overtook his orderly and nurse—paid for by the Sacred Sons who orchestrated his death. He was their secret prize possession. He also belonged to their allies, a self-righteous satrapy officially known as the National Council of Resistance of Iran, but one, he was gratified to see from this seven-star suite, with money. Outsiders said the cash from these Iranians in exile came from Americans, but his new friends inside this particular finger of the opposition told him, Oh no, we are free. We are pure Persians, here for the overthrow of mullahs and Western lies. Inside Iran, they were known as Ahva Pesarah Persis, the Sacred Sons of Persia.

These holy offspring, even now, knew nothing of his work for Washington. He hoped his American case officer, Will Holmes, knew nothing of these Sacred Sons.

Ten years ago, before Hoseyn had met Will, Will had tried to recruit other nuclear scientists, and, suspicious, these scientists tracked down his story, and his real name, which some of them believed was Will Holmes. Will had tried to befriend many of them—taking each separately to dinner, pretending to enjoy each one’s hobby, professing connoisseurship of drink or delicacy impossible to obtain in Iran. They saw through it; they had been recruited before. The British, the French, the Israelis, the Germans—all were busy to know Iran’s nuclear fathers.

But Hoseyn, the youngest of his colleagues, had not been recruited before Will Holmes. It smelled sweet to him. He liked the steps. The coincidental drink at a conference in China. The stories Will fashioned about a life he had not lived. The exchange of confidences about personal tribulations that had not happened, though maybe some of them had. Its convolutions occupied Hoseyn’s brain in a way only certain pleasures of the mind, such as theoretical physics, could. The gifts—liquor his favorite, but not the most enticing—could be elicited from Will by Hoseyn’s slightest hint. He made out once that he liked the meat of yak. It came to him vacuum-packed in a box through the mail.

For a year, maybe more, not one thing was required of Hoseyn. By the time he shared information that might be judged treasonous, it felt as if he were telling a story about someone else’s work, in a facility wholly imagined. He was convinced of only one thing—the attachment Will Holmes had for him. He knew it was false, but, like a woman who needs to hear she is loved before she will succumb to seduction, he believed.