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course of a normal social function,” she retorted.
    “State Department rule – report all social contacts. You should write a formal report and send it up.”
    “Just for that?”
    “You have to at least mention it to the ambassador. I’d write it up, if I were you. If nothing else, it gets your name in the weekly report, shows you’re in the game.”
    Maybe a written report would be useful, she thought as she pressed her ID against the card reader at the door to the embassy.
    ****
    “Your report mentions the possibility that Shirazi has contacted you for some purpose of diplomacy,” the ambassador said, standing in his office holding Dabney’s one-page report of her encounter with the deputy ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Iran.
    “Yes, sir, I think that is a possibility.”
    “Did he say anything to indicate that Iran had something to discuss?”
    “No, but he was very gracious, and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a diplomatic gesture to begin with a deputy,” Dabney responded, feeling even more confident in her position.
    “True. But, let me remind you, you’re not a career Foreign Service officer. You’ve worked in intelligence. There are some rules to this game, and some risks.”
    “Yes, sir, I’m aware of that.”
    “Shirazi is a slick customer. Be careful, and report every contact – every contact. Is that clear?”
    “Certainly,” she said.
     

Chapter 13: The Rug Run
    “W
    hat’s that?” Boyd asked into the intercom, looking down from the right seat of the cockpit of their C-130. They were 190 miles southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on their way to Europe. He fumbled with the map by his seat.
    “Sable Island,” Bud Weidman said. “It’s the last land on the East Coast.”
    It was a newbie’s discovery. The old transatlantic fliers know Sable Island.
    “Just a speck down there,” Boyd said, looking out the side window. “Look at the waves. You can see them breaking over it from 25,000 feet.”
    “Big waves on the North Atlantic. Sucks to be down there,” the navigator said as he got up from his computer desk behind Boyd and leaned over to see.
    “No,” Boyd said, “it’d be a blast watching big waves crash against those rocks, wind howling, snow swirling about.”
    “You go,” Bud said. “I’ll pick someplace warmer.”
    They were two hours out of Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, where they had refueled and picked up two pallets of cargo and one space-available passenger bound for Lajes Field, Azores. The extra pilot was asleep on the bunk at the back of the cockpit, the navigator was busy calculating their location and fuel consumption, while the passenger and two loadmasters were stretched out down in the cargo bay. The flight engineer was tinkering with something behind a panel back by the tail.
    It had turned out to be a more complicated mission than any of them had originally thought. This embassy run required that they have official passports, which are brown instead of the usual blue for tourist passports. They’d need positive identification that they were agents of the United States involved in official business so they could remain overnight en route in some obscure Central Asian capital without being treated as tourists or spies. They’d been in Washington for a week getting briefed on the importance of diplomacy and the primacy of the diplomatic pouch, which was to be their primary cargo.
    Any package designated as a diplomatic bag or diplomatic pouch, and labeled as such, has diplomatic immunity from search. As official diplomatic couriers, they would travel armed, park their aircraft at a diplomatic ramp, and bypass customs and immigration checkpoints. This is the single most secure way to transport documents, especially in this day of vulnerable computer systems and cellphones.
    In addition to sensitive diplomatic communications, they would transport embassy personnel and dependents back and forth to Germany and points toward