65: Chapter 62 The Last Card Before the Final Game

Reza called everyone together that morning—Hassan, Fatima, Iskandari, and Karimi. Karimi had rushed back from Tehran, having driven all night. He looked tired when he arrived but didn't complain, sitting in a chair and waiting to listen.

Daoud was not called; he had been here for less than three weeks, and the time was not right.

Reza stood in front of the table, without documents or a PowerPoint, just standing there, and began to speak:

"I am now telling you the upcoming nodes and everyone's tasks."

He paused for two seconds, then continued:

"Pahlavi will leave Iran next January; this is irreversible. After he leaves, there will be a vacuum period of about three to six weeks. During this time, many forces in Iran will simultaneously try to fill this vacuum—Ayatollah Khomeini will return from Paris, and his people will take over Tehran's administrative agencies; a group in the military will choose to swear allegiance to the new authority; SAVAK will partially disintegrate, with some people disappearing and others changing masters; the CIA will be in chaos because all their judgments are based on the assumption that the Pahlavi regime can hold on. That assumption has collapsed, and they will need time to rebuild their intelligence network."

No one in the room spoke; four pairs of eyes were watching him.

"During this vacuum period," Reza continued, "we need to complete three things. First, have Khuzestan Province complete a political statement across the entire province as quickly as possible. The content should be supporting self-determination and opposing external interference. This statement must have the joint signatures of oil workers, the endorsement of religious leaders within the province, and the signatures of grassroots administrative officials, but it cannot carry the political label of any party—it cannot be the royal family's, nor Ayatollah Khomeini's; it must be 'Persia's'."

He glanced at Hemmati. Hemmati was not present, but Reza habitually marked this task to him in his mind.

"Second," he said, "the workshop must complete all factory tests for the first mass-produced batch of Persian-1 Type B by the end of January, box them up, and prepare for transport. The destination is to be determined, but they must be ready to move at any time."

Fatima and Iskandari exchanged a look, and Fatima asked: "The timing is doable, but I need to confirm one thing. If the destination for transport is towards Tehran, I need to plan the route in advance. The highway from Khuzestan to Tehran might be under control during the later stages of the revolution—"

"I know," Reza said, "I will handle the route; you just focus on the factory tests."

"Understood." Fatima didn't ask further, and the matter was settled.

"Third," Reza said, his tone unchanged, but everyone in the room could feel that this point carried more weight than the previous two, "I need to make a trip to Tehran. The time is early next January, before Pahlavi leaves. I need to meet two people in person."

Hassan asked: "Which two people?"

"Mohammadi, and Ayatollah Khomeini's people."

Hassan didn't ask again, and neither did Karimi. Only Fatima said: "You going to Tehran, regarding safety—"

"Hassan will accompany me," Reza said, "You and Iskandari stay here; the workshop cannot be left empty."

Fatima nodded and said nothing more.

After the meeting, Reza let the others get back to work, but kept Karimi behind, speaking with him alone for nearly an hour.

They talked about the part of the "third thing" that hadn't been shared with the others—meeting Ayatollah Khomeini's people wasn't just continuing the probing from last time; it was to discuss a specific matter, the card that Reza had never fully revealed to anyone in the past three years.

That card was the oil sovereignty of Khuzestan.

Reza explained the complete logic to Karimi:

"Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution derives its ultimate legitimacy from two things: the religious and the national. The religious part is his; I won't touch it. The national part has a core—Iran's oil resources must truly return to the hands of the Iranian people. This is where the revolution's greatest political appeal lies, and it is the reason why tens of millions of people at the bottom are truly standing up. It's not because they are so pious; it's because they know the underground of this country is bleeding, and all that flows out is drunk by others."

He paused: "Khuzestan is the province with the highest concentration of Iran's oil; nearly eighty percent of the country's oil is produced here. If the new Iranian regime cannot handle the oil sovereignty issue of this province well, then the slogans of the revolution will be empty. And I am currently the only person in this province with real influence who can also be trusted by the oil workers."

After listening, Karimi said slowly: "You want to use this to negotiate a position with Ayatollah Khomeini's people."

"Not to negotiate a position," Reza said, "but to discuss necessity. Let them understand that without me, their revolution cannot take root in the most important piece of land in Iran."

These are two completely different kinds of logic. Negotiating for a position is begging; discussing necessity is letting the other party calculate the costs clearly—a necessary person doesn't need to beg; they only need to make the other party realize the consequences of their absence.

Karimi was silent for a while, then said: "Once this card is played, there is no turning back."

"I know," Reza said, "that's why I waited nearly four years."

December 25th, the Western Christmas.

The streets of Tehran had no Christmas trees, but Reza knew that the United States Embassy in Iran was brightly lit that day. Diplomats were celebrating the holiday inside, drinking, and had received two unfavorable year-end assessment reports sent from Washington. The wording of one of them reportedly made the Ambassador himself smoke three cigarettes in a row.

What Miller did that day, Reza didn't know, but he could guess.

An intelligence officer who had worked in Iran for many years, on Christmas night, sitting in a position in Tehran that he was no longer confident he could maintain, facing a situation where all his assessment models had begun to fail—he was likely going through his list of informants again, thinking about which ones were still reliable before the storm arrived, and which ones had started looking for an escape route.

Reza was in the Governors Mansion study, opened the dark blue notebook, and carefully went through the nodes for the next forty days again.

For every node, he had already prepared the corresponding action.

But there was one thing that he would stop at every time he went through the node simulations, not because he hadn't thought it through, but because even he did not have complete certainty about the outcome of this matter.

That was his relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini himself, and where it would ultimately land.

The Ayatollah Khomeini in history was a person with extremely strong willpower and extremely keen political judgment. He had gone through decades of exile, dealt with various forces, and finally won the power struggle after the revolution with an overwhelming advantage, eliminating all potential opponents, leaving not a single one.

The appearance of this Reza in this lifetime had changed many variables, but what had not changed was the essence of that man—he would not easily trust anyone, and he would not allow any force to truly form a confrontational existence within his system. And everything Reza was doing now was, in essence, building a confrontational existence.

This contradiction must eventually have a solution. Reza wrote three directions in the notebook, each followed by a large amount of deduction.

The first direction: collaborative coexistence. Reza takes secular governance, Ayatollah Khomeini retains religious authority; both sides manage their own affairs and do not interfere with each other. This direction is the least laborious, but the premise for its establishment is that Ayatollah Khomeini himself can accept this division of labor, and Reza had reservations about this—a person who firmly believes that political power must be subject to theological authority could not truly accept the independence of secular governance.

The second direction: marginalization. By controlling the three core resources of oil, the military, and intelligence, Reza compresses Ayatollah Khomeini's substantive influence into the religious sphere, making him a symbol with symbolic significance but no substantive power. This direction has extremely high risks and requires extremely strong execution and extremely precise timing control. If any node in the middle goes wrong, it could lead to a total reversal.

The third direction: — On this line, Reza wrote the beginning, then crossed it out. After crossing it out, he wrote five words next to it: "Cannot think about this now."

He closed the notebook, locked it in the drawer, then called Hassan over and said one thing:

"On January 5th next year, we go to Tehran."

Hassan said: "Understood."

"Bring that contact information for Mohammadi," Reza said, "and the meeting address for Bakhtiar that Karimi gave."

"I have them all."

"One more thing," Reza said finally, "tell Iskandari to speed up. Tell him I want the factory time for the first batch of mass-produced missiles to be pushed to before January 20th."

Hassan didn't say "the time is too tight"; he just nodded, noted it down, and went out to make arrangements.

After the door closed, Reza sat alone in the study for a while. He didn't flip through any documents or write anything; he just sat there, letting his mind go blank for a short while.

This was something he had learned over the past three years—before every major move, leave a period of empty time for yourself, not thinking about plans, not thinking about risks, not thinking about anyone, just being empty.

Because the road he was about to walk on could not be entered with any impurities.

He needed to be clear-headed, he needed to be calm, and he needed to remain the only person in the entire game who hadn't lost their mind when the chessboard in Tehran started to truly burn.

The game of Persia was never won by hot-bloodedness.