6: Chapter 6 Tehran's Prey

March 1976, Tehran.

Reza's way of arriving in Tehran was very rustic—taking a long-distance bus.

The long-distance bus from Ahvaz to Tehran took fourteen hours, and the ticket cost eighty rials.

The bus was packed with farmers going to the capital for work, women visiting relatives, and small vendors carrying big bags and small parcels.

The air was filled with the smell of sweat, onions, and cheap cigarettes.

No one would notice a young man wearing a gray robe and a turban.

Only two people came with him—Abbas, the best shot in the guard, and a local guide who had relatives in Tehran.

The three of them sat separately, did not speak to each other, and left through different exits upon arriving at the Tehran bus station.

Standard anti-surveillance procedure.

Although crude, it worked.

In 1976, Tehran was a city in the midst of violent division.

The north of the city was the wealthy district—where the Pahlavi royal family, high-ranking bureaucrats, American advisors, and foreign businessmen lived, filled with Western-style villas, high-end restaurants, and nightclubs.

The south of the city was the poor district—millions of rural immigrants squeezed into slums, with no running water or electricity, and mosques were their only spiritual solace.

The University of Tehran was in the middle of the city, sandwiched between the two worlds.

Reza chose to arrive near the university at three in the afternoon.

At this time, students had just finished class, the campus was at its most chaotic, and security was at its most lax.

He sat down at a teahouse opposite the university, ordered a pot of black tea, and then took out a newspaper, pretending to read it while actually observing the situation at the school gate.

There were two people in plain clothes at the school gate.

One was smoking, and one was reading a newspaper.

Both were wearing ill-fitting jackets and standing in positions that could cover both directions of the school gate.

SAVAK agents.

The Iranian secret police, SAVAK, had informants at every university, focusing on monitoring left-wing student organizations and religious radicals.

As the most prestigious institution of higher learning in Iran, the University of Tehran had at least ten to fifteen plainclothes agents deployed by SAVAK.

Reza did not intend to enter through the school gate.

He sat in the teahouse for forty minutes, waiting until a group of students surged out from a side gate.

There were no plainclothes agents guarding the side gate—budgets were limited, and SAVAK could not watch every exit.

He blended into the crowd of students, lowered his head, passed through the side gate, and walked along the tree-lined path on campus toward the Physics Department building.

The Physics Department was in the northeast corner of the campus, a drab four-story building with a faded Persian slogan painted on the outer wall: "Science is the ladder of national progress."

Ironic.

The Pahlavi Government preached the development of science, but in reality, Iran's best science and engineering students were all sent to the United States to study, and very few returned.

Those who stayed in the country mostly just scraped by at universities on meager wages.

Reza waited at the entrance of the teaching building for twenty minutes.

At 3:30 PM, a figure walked out of the building.

Short hair. Black-rimmed glasses. She wore a men's khaki jacket over a dark blue long skirt, and her arms were cradling a stack of books thicker than her arms.

She walked quickly with her head down, as if her brain was processing some complex calculation problem, completely unaware of the people around her.

Fatima Hosseini.

She was thinner than in her file photo. She had obvious dark circles under her eyes, chapped lips, and ink stains on her fingers.

She was clearly the type of person who put eating and sleeping on the back burner and dedicated all her time to the laboratory.

Reza walked up to her.

"Ms. Hosseini?"

Fatima looked up at him, her gaze guarded: "Who are you?"

"Someone interested in gas centrifuges."

Fatima stopped.

She looked Reza up and down—gray robe, turban, looking like an ordinary person from the provinces.

But the six words he said, "gas centrifuges," were not things an ordinary person would know.

"What do you want?"

"Find a place to sit down and talk."

"I don't talk to strangers." Fatima turned and walked away.

"There is a mistake in your thesis."

Fatima stopped again.

She turned around, her pupils behind her glasses contracting slightly—this was the instinctive reaction of a scholar hearing "there is a mistake in your thesis," more effective than any threat or inducement.

"What mistake?"

"When calculating the radial concentration distribution of UF6 gas inside the centrifuge rotor, you used the ideal gas law."

"But under actual operating conditions, the intermolecular interactions of high-concentration UF6 cannot be ignored; after correcting with the van der Waals equation, the separation efficiency will be 12 to 15 percent lower than the value in your thesis."

Fatima's eyes grew brighter and brighter.

Not the brightness of anger—but the brightness of excitement.

"How do you know? Have you done experiments?"

"I haven't done experiments. But I have a better theoretical model."

There was a five-second silence.

"Follow me." Fatima turned and walked toward the small garden behind the teaching building, moving twice as fast as before.

There was no one in the small garden. A few old plane trees were still bare in the March wind.

Fatima placed her stack of books on a stone bench, crossed her arms over her chest, and lifted her chin slightly—a posture of "I'm listening, speak."

Reza took a notebook out of his pocket, flipped to the pages with sketches of the solid-fuel rocket engine, and handed it to her.

"Look at this first."

Fatima took the notebook, looked down for three seconds, and then her whole body stiffened as if electrocuted.

She flipped page by page. Flipping slower and slower.

The thrust chamber structure of the rocket engine, the de Laval nozzle design, the formulation ideas for solid propellant, the thermal insulation scheme for the combustion chamber—each page only had rough sketches and key parameters, without complete calculation processes, but for a solid physicist, these sketches were enough to outline a complete technical blueprint.

"This is..." Fatima's voice trembled slightly, "This is a solid-fuel propulsion system?"

"Yes."

"Where did you get this? The Soviets? The Americans?"

"I drew it myself."

Fatima looked up at him sharply, her eyes a mixture of shock, suspicion, and—longing.

That was the look of someone who had walked in the desert for a lifetime and suddenly saw an oasis.

"Who exactly are you?"

Reza looked into her eyes and made a decision.

"My name is Reza Pahlavi."

Fatima's expression shifted instantly from excitement to terror.

Pahlavi. The royal surname.

At the University of Tehran in 1976, the royal family represented corruption, oppression, and SAVAK.

For any student with independent thought, the instinctive reaction upon hearing this surname was—stay away.

Fatima took a step back, subconsciously pushing the notebook back.

"Don't rush." Reza didn't take the notebook, "I am not here to arrest you. SAVAK agents don't understand the van der Waals equation."

This sentence precisely struck Fatima's rationality.

She stopped, but her guard did not go down.

"What do you want?" Her voice was very low, "People from the royal family looking for a physics student wouldn't be doing it to discuss gas dynamics."

"You're right. I'm looking for you because I need you."

"Need me for what?"

"Help me build a missile."

These three words were like a bomb, exploding in the quiet small garden.