On Wings of Eagles Read Free Page A

a telephone call this morning from the Police Department,
        Residence Permit Bureau, American Section. They asked her to come to the
        office. They said it was about James Nyfeler. She thought it was routine.
        She arrived at the office at eleven-thirty and reported to the head of the
        American Section. First he asked for Mr. Nyfeler's passport and residence
        permit. She told him that Mr. Nyfeler is no longer in Iran. Then he asked
        about Paul Bucha. She said that Mr. Bucha also was no longer in the
        country."
    'Did she?"
    'Yes. 11
        Bucha was in Iran, but Fara might not have known that, Coburn thought.
        Bucha had been resident here, had left the country, and had come back in,
        briefly: he was due to fly back to Paris tomorrow.
        Majid continued: "The officer then said, 'I suppose the other two are gone
        alsoT Fara saw that he had four files on his desk, and she asked which
        other two. He told her Mr. Chiapparone and Mr. Gaylord. She said she had
        just picked up Mr. Gaylord's residence permit earlier this morning. The
        officer told her to get the passports and residence permits of both Mr.
        Gaylord and Mr. Chiapparone and bring them to him. She was to do it
        quietly, not to cause alarm."
    "What did she say?" Coburn asked.
        "She told him she could not bring them today. He instructed her to bring
        them tomorrow morning. He told her she was officially responsible for this,
        and he made sure there were witnesses to these instructions."
    "This doesn't make any sense," Coburn said.
    "If they learn that Fara has disobeyed them-"
    "We'll think of a way to protect her," Coburn said. He was
        ON WINGS OF EAGLES 19
     
    wondefing whether Americans were obliged to surrender their passports on
    demand. He had done so, recently, after a minor car accident, but had later
    been told he did not have to. "They didn't say why they wanted the
    passports?"
    "They did not. "
        Bucha and Nyfeler were the predecessors of Chiapparone and Gaylord. Was
        that a clue? Coburn did not know.
        Coburn stood up. "The first decision we have to make is what Fara is going
        to tell the police tomorrow morning," he said. "I'll talk to Paul
        Chiapparone and get back to you."
     
    On the ground floor of the building Paul Chiapparone sat in his office. He,
    too, had a parquet floor, an executive desk, a picture of the Shah on the
    wall, and a lot on his mind.
        Paul was thirty-nine years old, of middle height, and a little overweight,
        mainly because he was fond of good food. With his olive skin and thick
        black hair he looked very Italian. His job was to build a complete modem
        social-security system in a primitive country. It was not easy.
        In the early seventies Iran had had a rudimentary socialsecurity system,
        which was inefficient at collecting contributions and so easy to defraud
        that one man could draw benefits several times over for the same illness.
        When the Shah decided to spend some of his twenty billion dollars a year in
        oil revenues creating a welfare state, EDS got the contract. EDS ran
        Medicare and Medicaid programs for several states in the U.S., but in Iran
        they had to start from scratch. They had to issue a social-security card to
        each of Iran's thirty-two million people, organize payroll deductions so
        that wage earners paid their contributions, and process claims for
        benefits. The whole system would be nin by computers-EDS's specialty.
        The difference between installing a data-processing system in the States
        and doing the same job in Iran was, Paul found, like the difference between
        making a cake from a packaged mix and making one the old-fashioned way with
        all the original ingredients. It was often