And that was the end of that interaction.

On Monday, she went to work and did nothing but fill out paperwork, because Ampersand was not there, and she had to pretend he was. Once again, she was asked to make herself available for Brigadier General Porter, which she did, and once again, he blew her off. She didn’t even find out until one of his underlings let her know an hour after he had already gone home for the day. Cora didn’t hear from Kaveh all day, either, except for one text after she got off work:

&&&&&?????

Her reply: :-(:-(:-(

His utterly unhelpful response: fuuuuuuck

She had been so preoccupied with the “hurry up and wait” nonsense they’d been forcing on her at work, she’d hardly spent any time at home, and what time she had spent there been mired in exhaustion. She’d forgotten to look into this guy, despite the fact that he was apparently a minor celebrity.

With some horror and a little research, she learned how much of an understatement that was.

The two-time Pulitzer nominee and Rhodes Scholar was also a two-time New York Times number-one bestselling author. His most recent book and second Pulitzer nomination, Internal Enemies: Testaments on the Banality of Evil, followed the lives of several American citizens, mostly Iranian-born, who had been detained in CIA black sites inside the United States in the months and years following 9/11 on false or trumped-up charges. He’d even gone on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote it.

His was a story of triumph over adversity, and the tale of his family’s escape from Iran was even more harrowing than he had indicated. It had been a Sound of Music–style dash to freedom, complete with bribes at the border and over a year of living in limbo in Turkey before finally making it to the U.S. But his family, fortunate to already have relatives in the States, prospered quickly, and his natural intelligence netted him a full ride at Berkeley, which chafed Cora’s rapidly swelling inferiority complex. She’d been accepted to Berkeley, but certainly not on a full ride, which only UC–Irvine and (ironically) UC– Riverside had offered, hence her ending up at Irvine. Kaveh was also a polyglot, fluent in English, Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish, and German (and was “conversational” in Mandarin and Japanese, according to a profile on him in The Atlantic).

But it was his first Pulitzer nomination that chilled her, especially now knowing she had put herself in a position where she had no choice but to trust this man. The nomination, in the category of Investigative Reporting, was: For an exposé of secret CIA black sites in the Middle East and Asia uncovering mass human rights abuses, reporting that ultimately led to sweeping reforms in U.S. intelligence gathering.

The names on the nomination: Kaveh Mazandarani and Nils Ortega of The New Yorker.

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