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he was surprised to hear the volume of crowd noise jump. The mob was reacting to him, which was unnerving. He noticed for the first time that some of the protesters had gotten inside the walls. Instead of walking, he trotted in the direction of the motor pool, where he found the Iranian captain.
    “Al wants you to call him,” Hermening said.
    “Fine,” the captain said.
    When Hermening turned to go back, the masses outside the gate seemed to lurch toward him, so he broke into a run, which provoked gleeful cheering. As he bounded up the front steps he saw the big front doors of the chancery closing and heard panic in his voice as he shouted, “I’m coming in! Don’t close the doors yet!”
    He took the rest of the steps three at a time and made it back into the building before the doors were closed and locked.
    Inured to months of angry public displays, the Tehran embassy staff was slow to recognize that this one was different. It was late morning when Tom Ahern first noticed that there were young Iranians in the compound. The CIA station chief was a tall, slender man with a concave face, deep-set eyes, and straight, thin, brown hair. The Eagle Scout son of a Wisconsin plumbing contractor, Ahern had earned a degree in journalism from the University of Notre Dame before joining the agency. He had a studious, retiring manner and a wry sense of humor and worked in a complex of offices behind an unmarked door on the east end of the chancery’s second floor. He usually started early, reading through the cables collected overnight and chatting with people in the political section. Early that morning he had encountered Laingen on the front steps conferring with a gardener and, pausing to say hello, had quipped, “Sorry to interrupt a meeting of the Fine Arts Committee.”
    When he saw protesters inside the walls he called downstairs to alert the marines, but when he looked back out the window a few minutes later the number of invaders had grown. He checked with the political folks across the hall, who seemed unconcerned. They demurred when Ahern suggested they might want to consider destroying sensitive files.
    Given his position, it made sense that Ahern would be more sensitive about protecting sources and files than the others. At that moment, all of his office papers fit into a file only three inches thick. This was partly because the spy agency was cautious about keeping written records on site in a precarious post, but it also reflected the paucity of CIA activity in the country. Ahern himself had arrived only four months earlier and the two officers on his staff, Bill Daugherty and Malcolm Kalp, had even less time in the country. Daugherty had arrived fifty-three days earlier and Kalp just a few days ago. They had been focusing their efforts on trying to sort out the political mess and find sympathetic Iranians from the ranks of the more moderate mullahs and nonreligious factions in the emerging power structure. They had plans. They wanted to get back up and running the vital Tacksman sites, telemetry collection centers along the northern Iran border that had been essential for monitoring Soviet missile tests, but which had been shut down by khomitehs earlier that year. If the current unrest and instability continued, they hoped eventually to figure out how to influence events in a more America-friendly way. But they were still a long way from making these things happen.
    The difficulty excited Ahern, who at forty-eight was an old agency pro. He had held posts throughout Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, during the long years of conflict there, and he had signed on for Tehran knowing that its future would be tumultuous and uncertain. He didn’t have much to work with, however, only his two officers, neither of whom spoke Farsi, and no real agents to speak of, only a handful of prospects. The language barrier invited misadventure. Once, Ahern had gone to a high-rise apartment house to meet with an informant. The two