The earth became redder, more aid, the sky bigger and emptier, the bushes more spaced out.

It was a geography I had never crossed by this specific route, and it seemed purposely desolate, as if the distance from the cities was visible in the soil.

I slept for maybe an hour in the passenger seat after Parisa took the wheel.

somewhere between Shiraz and Kman.

When I woke up, the sun was low on the left, which meant it was late, and we were moving more or less in the right direction.

I had dreamed of the laboratory, not of the being, not of the vision of the respplendant Isvahan, but of the daily routine of work, the screen with the monitoring readings, the hum of the air conditioning, the specific smell of filtered air in that environment.

I woke up with the disorientation of someone who is no longer sure where the before and after lie.

Parisa said she had passed through another post without any problems while I was asleep.

There was an open bottle of water in the car door and I drank half of it in one go.

Kman was another technical stop.

We refueled again, used a public toilet in a mosque that was open, bought more food.

It was dark when we arrived, the city reasonably quiet, but not in the ghostly way Isvahan had become in recent days.

There was a surface normality in Kman that suggested enough distance from the main targets for the routine instinct to still function.

On a side street, a bakery still had its light on, and the smell of hot bread reached the pavement.

Paresa bought two loaves.

We ate inside the car, parked on that side street with the engine off, not talking much, the sound of the city around us completely normal, as if there were no war going on a few hundred kilometers away.

The route I had planned south from Kman was the one that worried me the most.

Not because of the distance but because of the nature of the stretch.

The region of Belaluchistan on Iran’s southeastern border with Pakistan was a zone of unstable control even in normal times.

The Beluch ethnic group had fought for decades for autonomy.

The IRGC maintained a heavy presence in the region precisely because the border was porous and this paracity had been a documented nuclear security problem in briefings I had read.

The possibility of sensitive material leaving Iran via these routes was a real concern of the control programs.

I knew what these roots were because I had needed to know them for reasons completely opposite to those now leading me to use them.

The irony of this occurred to me on some dark stretch of the road to Zahedan, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to let it pass in silence.

In Zahedan, on a street near the bazaar, closed at this hour, I found the contact I had mentally stored without ever writing it down.

the kind of information you carry in your memory because putting it on any physical or digital medium represents a risk that training teaches you not to take.

It was a phone number associated with a man who worked in the illegal transportation of people across the Baluchaan border.

I knew him only as an intelligence reference, a facilitator whose movements had been monitored because the routes he used were the same routes that nuclear material could potentially use.

I called from a mobile phone that Parisa had bought with cash in a shop in Shiraz specifically for this purpose.

The kind of operational care that 18 years of life in a classified program instills as a reflex.

The man answered, “I got straight to the point.

Two people, Iranian documents, needed to cross into Pakistan without going through the official posts.

” He asked the price I could pay.

I gave a number.

There was a pause.

He gave a location and a time for the next morning.

We spent the night in the car at a petrol station on the outskirts of Zahedan.

reclined in the seats, taking two-hour shifts, so there was always someone awake.

There wasn’t much to say.

Parisa read a few verses from the New Testament in a low voice from her mobile, the same app she had downloaded two years earlier.

And I listened to her without recognizing most of the passages, but recognizing the language and the rhythm, because it was the same structure of the language of beauty in which the being had spoken to me in the laboratory.

And hearing that in that car parked at that petrol station in Zahedan at 3 in the morning created a continuity between the two moments that quieted me in a way that tiredness alone would not have achieved.

The meeting with the facilitator took place at a rural property outside Zahedan, a cluster of low mud brick buildings with a dirt courtyard where three other groups of people were waiting.

six people in total besides me and Paresa, all with the specific appearance of someone carrying more weight than the backpack on their shoulders.

The facilitator was a man in his early 50s of marked Balo phenotype with the hands of someone who had spent decades working with heavy physical things.

He didn’t ask our names.

We didn’t ask his.

There was a logic of mutual convenience in that silence that everyone on the property seemed to understand without needing instruction.

He gave us a simple instruction.

Stay close to the guide.

Don’t talk more than necessary.

Don’t stop for any reason until you cross.

The crossing took 11 hours.

It began before dawn when the sky was still dark and the stars of the Baloistan desert were denser than anything I had seen in an urban sky.

There was a guide in front, a young man of perhaps 20 who knew that terrain with the kind of intimacy that only comes from having walked it countless times.

And we followed in a line with a few meters spacing between each person.

The terrain was stony with dry bushes that scratched your shins when you passed too close, and there were irregular ascents and descents that after 2 hours of walking had informed my knees that they were not used to it.

Parisa did not complain at any point.

She carried her backpack with that posture of someone who had decided that complaining would be a waste of energy.

There was none to spare.

We crossed the border at a point the guide identified only with a nod of his head.

There was no visible physical mark, no sign, no change in the terrain to tell me we had left Iran and entered Pakistan.

But the guide stopped, turned to the group, said in Farsy with a beluch accent, Pakistan, and pointed ahead.

Then he returned to the Iranian side without further ceremony like someone who has finished their shift and is going home.

I stood for a moment looking at the border I had just crossed.

The same stone, the same dry bush, the same red ground on both sides.

And there was nothing remarkable about that place to justify what I felt.

But Iran was behind me.

The laboratories were behind me.

The 18 years were behind me.

A midday sun was beating down on the back of my neck and Parisa was beside me with her shoulders tense from exhaustion and her moist eyes which she did not let turn into tears and we kept walking.

We arrived in Qua 2 days later in a cargo lorry that the facilitator had arranged for the group for more payment in cash.

The city was larger than I expected and smaller than any Iranian city I knew in terms of visible infrastructure.

Streets with irregular paving, shops with intensely colored facads, the continuous noise of motorbikes without exhausts, the smell of spice and smoke from old cars that seemed to have saturated the very air.

There were posters in Erdo that I couldn’t read.

And the feeling of the environment’s illegibility, not understanding the signs, not recognizing the patterns of people’s movement in the street was a type of disorientation I had not felt before because I had spent my entire adult life in environments where I understood the rules even when the rules were unfair.

We had no specific destination in Queta other than the general idea of finding some kind of Christian network that might receive a converted Iranian.

An idea I had formed from what I knew about support networks for Iranians who had left the country.

Information that existed in the intelligence files I had read over the years about dissident and fugitives.

There were churches in Queda that worked with Iranians.

I knew that.

Where they were located specifically was another question.

On a street near the central bazaar, I stopped a man carrying a Bible under his arm.

The cover was unmistakable, even without reading Erdo, and asked in English, which he spoke with a heavy but clear accent, if he knew of any Christian congregation in the city.

He looked at me for a moment, evaluating, and then said yes, he would give me the address.

The church was a room on the second floor of a commercial building on a side street blocks from the bazaar.

The facade had no external identification, no cross visible from the street, no sign, nothing to indicate to a passer by what was up there.

We went up a narrow staircase with the paint peeling from the walls in several places and came to a wooden door with a small cross nailed at eye level.

I knocked.

The door was opened by a man of perhaps 50, Pakistani, with round glasses and a graying beard starting with the kind of face that has accumulated a lot over time, but without letting the weight harden his features.

He looked at me, looked at Parisa behind me, and said in Farsy, Farsy with an accent but intelligible, “You are Iranian.

” It wasn’t a question.

His name was Ysef.

He had converted from Islam to Christianity 20 years earlier in a journey he described in a brief summary while bringing us tea on a tray with glass cups.

The same thin cups from Chaharba that burn your fingers if you don’t wrap the napkin just right.

And the familiarity of that object in a context so distant from everything I knew created a lump in my throat that took a few seconds to pass.

The church room had perhaps 40 white plastic chairs organized in rows, a simple wooden cross on the front wall and windows with glass that let in light, but not the view of the street.

There were plastic flowers in a concrete window box on the sill, faded pink that had probably been more intense at some point.

We sat down and Yousef listened to us.

When I finished telling our story, he had placed his teacup on the chair beside him and had his hands clasped with his elbows on his knees, his eyes with that moisture of someone who is receiving something that moves him but does not completely surprise him.

Ysef was silent for a moment after I stopped speaking.

Then he said something I have not forgotten.

He said that I was not the first Iranian scientist to walk through his door.

He said this with a calmness that was not boastfulness.

It was a statement of fact.

He said that Jesus was emptying Iran’s laboratories.

He said that he had received engineers, doctors, university professors in recent years.

People who described encounters of different kinds in different circumstances, but with the same core.

Issa presenting himself.

Issa calling them by name.

Issa asking them to leave and move on.

I heard that and thought of Reza from Tabris who had not left.

And I wondered if he had received some kind of call and ignored it or if he simply hadn’t received one at all.

And that question has no answer I can reach and probably never will.

And I have learned to let it exist without needing to resolve it.

Ysef asked if we wanted to be baptized.

He briefly explained what it was, what it meant in the faith he practiced.

Not a long theological explanation, but the practical essence, the declaration that you believe, that you accept, that you enter.

Paresa answered before me.

She said yes.

That she had come to this 2 years earlier and was waiting for the right moment.

She looked at me after saying this.

I replied yes too.

Ysef left the room and returned with a blue plastic basin, the kind used for washing clothes, large enough to fit two arms inside, and a green garden hose that he connected to a tap in a side corridor.

He filled the basin with water that came with the sound of ordinary water, tap temperature, with no ceremony of temperature or addition of anything.

There was a slight smell of rubber from the new hose.

The afternoon sun came through the windows and made the concrete floor shine in horizontal stripes.

Parisa went first.

Ysef asked the questions in Farsy.

Do you believe that Issa is the son of the living God? Do you believe that he died and rose again? Do you accept him as Lord? And she answered yes to all three with the firm voice of someone answering something she had already decided long before being asked.

Ysef wet his hand in the basin and touched her forehead.

Then it was my turn.

I stood before that blue plastic basin with hose water in a room of plastic chairs with a wooden cross on a wall in queta.

And Ysef asked me the same three questions.

And when he got to the third, “Do you accept him as Lord?” I said yes and felt the warmth that had started in my chest inside the Mubarak laboratory expand in a way for which I can find no unit of measurement to describe because the instruments I learned to use my whole life were built to measure other things.

The water touched my forehead and it was cold ordinary water and it was the most extraordinary thing that had touched my skin in 44 years.

And Ysef said in the Farsy of Hes, “Welcome to the kingdom of the son of the living God, Cave,” “Now go and heal with what you know, because he will need you whole.

” What happens when a man who has built weapons his whole life receives a visit he cannot explain? That’s what you’ve just watched.

Tell me in the comments.

Would you believe a story like this or dismiss it as madness? Be honest.

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