Hoseyn scaled these decision trees his first afternoon. He concluded that anyone commando enough to overpower or steal wouldn’t be linguistic enough to master Farsi or technical enough to finesse his way out of the gaps he had in both. Sir James Bond was Sir Unrealistic Trash. Yet he had to remind himself that the unrealistic and unlikely had happened and could happen. That’s what got him in Ahwaz.

After spending the night thinking, sleepless and overheated, he concluded once again that if he’d stayed in Dubai, whoever came looking for the transistor could be either American or Iranian. To look at the person, he might not be able to tell who was what.

Getting out of bed, he felt hyperactive, like a first-grader. Not sleeping always made his thoughts race. There was nonsense mixing through the competing fragments of ideas. He tried to silence the pinging. Maybe sitting down on the side of the bed would help. He put his head in his hands. Protect me. He repeated that a few times. Even a non-believer could pray, and he always had.

When he lifted his head, he noticed that the curtain on the room’s one window was loose from the rod in places, letting in weak triangles of light. It must be overcast. That was calming, for some reason. He went to the bathroom and turned on the cold tap. The water was warm and cloudy. He let it run and was about to walk back into the room when he heard voices in the hallway. He put his ear flush with the door.

It was a German and a Japanese, two men. Neither spoke English well, but they were trying to pass pleasantries back and forth. They moved down the hall to the elevator bank, and he lost their voices. He looked at the watch his in-laws gave him—fortunately, still with him. It was a Monday, and it was before seven. The maids should be in the hallway by now. He listened carefully, but there was nothing. Perhaps they were at the other end of the hall.

He examined the tap water he’d poured into the bathroom glass. It was still cloudy after he’d let it sit. So the cloudiness wasn’t trapped air. He’d have to take his chances. It could just be chalk. As he drank, tasting nothing unusual, he picked through the bag of food he’d bought at the airport. He ate some chips. He started prying apart pistachios to store up the nuts for later, when he was too hungry to wait.