Shirazi met the prisoner's eyes, returned the stare with the practiced patience he had learned from twenty years in counterintelligence, unwavering, until the man's indignation faded and the fear reasserted itself. Then, satisfied, Shirazi looked to Zahabzeh, and gave him a small, almost inconsequential, nod.

Zahabzeh took up the stack of photographs and began laying them out in a roughly chronological line along the desktop, facing away from Shirazi, towards their prisoner. Some of the photographs had suffered with age, their edges yellowing and beginning to curl, and in the few of them that had been taken in color, that same color had begun to wash away, rendering the figures insubstantial, almost fictional, and dreamlike.

Or nightmarish, Shirazi thought, as he gauged the man's reaction. At first there had been nothing, blank incomprehension, perhaps bewilderment, but when his eyes fell upon the third photograph, the one with the two young men in the back of the car, everything changed, the reaction inescapable. The prisoner started in his chair, stifling an exclamation. He looked up and then, meeting Shirazi's eyes, quickly away, to the side and down, as if hoping to find refuge somewhere between the cracks of the linoleum floor. Zahabzeh ran out of room on the desk, went back to the beginning, now laying the photos one atop the other. Somewhere, outside Shirazi's office, a phone rang and was quickly answered.

"That was a long time ago," the man said. He brought his head up, looking at Shirazi again, and his voice touched on plaintive. "I was young. Very foolish. It was thirty years ago."

Zahabzeh finished placing the last of the photographs. Some of them were now stacked four-deep. Shirazi adjusted his glasses, rotated his chair to face the wall on his left, where a portrait of the Aya tollah hung. He pretended to contemplate it.