The Viper of Kerman by Christian Oliver

Author:Christian Oliver [Christian Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781905559282
Publisher: Halban
Published: 2011-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cath passed Andy the story just before their meeting with Max.

‘Bernie Whelan? Jesus Christ, I thought Reuters had put that guy out to pasture years ago.’

By Bernard Whelan

TEHRAN, Oct 26 (Reuters) – Iran is a country where people riot over changes in telephone codes. Protests are not a sign that there’s a revolution afoot.

Andy skimmed through Whelan’s rant. There seemed to be only one source. Probably the British ambassador. It was a tub-thumping, bombastic piece explaining that there was no central co-ordination between the groups involved in the Iranian sedition. Each of these groups had completely different agendas. The Kurds believed they, as Sunnis, were the object of discrimination, and they were unhappy because they were poor. The students were fighting for social freedoms that were a total non-issue out in rural Kurdistan. These groups were all just seizing on the momentum of other protests because they wanted to give a communal two fingers to the government. But, deep down, these revolutionary aspirations would never come to anything, Bern argued, because there was nothing fundamental tying these groups together. It was the same smug argument that the ambassador was putting in his memos. He quoted that thing about the telephone codes in every dispatch.

‘Is it true about the phone codes?’ Cath asked.

‘Yeah,’ Andy said with a short laugh. ‘It was near Tabriz, I think. But the ambassador really never got the point. I’m not a psychologist but, if you ask me, these riots over postcodes or voting districts, or whatever, show Iran is just mightily fucked off. People hate their lives and they look for any excuse to get out and shout. At the moment, there’s food on the shelves and high oil prices, so people might not want to risk bullets. But there’s a lot of anger out there. It’s dangerous. Baharvand knows this better than anyone. Your ambassador and Whelan might think Iranians are silly little people who let off steam every now and again. I don’t, but they are all on anti-depressants.’

‘Why do you think he completely ignored the Baharvand comments?’

‘Easy. The guy’s a moron.’

‘You know him?’

‘Sure, he was in Hungary a bit in the eighties. He was an idiot then.’

‘Ah, yes, your mysterious past. You dark horse.’

‘I don’t think Baharvand’ll mind too much. The BBC and CNN have included him.’

‘So I saw. And crucially, I guess, if it is him pulling the strings, he’ll love anyone who convinces us that there just can’t be one central brain behind all this.’

Max had appeared at the shatter-proof perspex door of the office. He was agitated and wasted no time in venting his spleen.

‘There’s no way round it, the Pentagon have fucking shafted us. I’m sorry guys, I pretty much knew they would.’

Cath immediately looked concerned.

‘You don’t mean they are actually going to back Baharvand up on his co-ordinates?’

Max looked at her a little vacantly, then smiled, as if it suddenly dawned on him that things weren’t quite as apocalyptic as he had been telling himself for the last seven hours.

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