Page 95 of Grave Danger
“Imagine that you are married to an abuser. Would youeverrun away and leave your daughter behind to live alone with a monster? What mother would do that to her daughter, no matter how much she feared for herself?”
Andie didn’t want to judge any woman in that situation, but she understood Farid’s point. Fleeing an abuser and leaving your own daughter behind was almost unimaginable.
“I understand what you’re saying, Mr. Bazzi. But I don’t see where your hypothetical leads us.”
He leveled his gaze, again looking Andie straight in the eye. “I know why Ava ran away,” he said in a very serious voice.
Andie was beginning to wonder if she needed a witness to this conversation, but Farid had come to seeher, and she didn’t want to shut down the flow of information. “Go on, please,” she said.
“Before she was arrested, Ava was part of a... how should I call it? Not an organization. A group of women.”
“Women in Tehran?”
“From all over Iran. Women who wanted change and who specifically opposed enforcement of the hijab laws.”
“Women who participated in the street demonstrations, you mean?”
“No. To the contrary. Most of them did not show their faces. They were too afraid. Or they had children and there was too much to lose.”
“Then how did this group operate?”
“Mahsa Amini’s death changed everything in Iran. You know of Mahsa?”
“Yes. The young woman killed by morality police for disrespecting the Islamic Republic’s dress code.”
“The police said she was being ‘educated’ on hijab rules and suffered a heart attack—happens all the time to twenty-two-year-old women in Iran. But yes, after Mahsa’s death, the demonstrations exploded. The government shut down the internet so that protesters couldn’t organize. Information was hard to come by. This group of women—Ava included—became a network of information.”
“A network?”
“They shared text messages on their cell phones. ‘Street protests in Rasht.’ ‘Nine-year-old boy shot and killed in Izeh.’ ‘Dress code crackdown at Anushiravan Dadgar High School in Tehran.’ The idea was to keep the information flowing. A woman sees something, and she texts her friends, who text their friends, and it goes on and on.”
“I imagine it would be very dangerous if those messages were detected,” said Andie.
“Yes. Definitely. That was the reason for ‘the rule.’”
The rule.It made her think of Jack and the nonsensical rule that had caused so many problems in their marriage, but she killed that thought. “What was ‘the rule’?”
“Pass on the message to another woman in the network and then immediately delete both the incoming and outgoing text message. That way there would be no record of the substance of the communication if the morality police confiscated a woman’s cell phone.”
“Brilliant,” said Andie. “Not even the tech geniuses at the FBI can retrieve the substance of deleted text messages. We can only confirm the sender, recipient, and time of transmission.”
“Ah, but you are assuming the rule was followed.”
“Ava broke the rule?”
“Partly. She deleted the messages from her phone, but she saved them to a flash drive.”
“She told you this?”
“No. I found the flash drive in our home computer at our apartment. She left it there by accident. I knew nothing about the network until then.”
Andie showed no reaction, but she’d read about Yasmin’s testimony about the scissors. She was certain that Farid’s version of “what happened next” would be very different.
“Did you ask her about it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What did she tell you?”