Dariush Ansari had been born in Abadan, the son of an oil worker, and he’d worked in the same plant himself, briefly, as an engineer. His father had since retired, but his former colleagues had shut down the refinery for the funeral ten days before and they had not returned to work since. Ordinarily, Tehran would have sent in the army to deal with the pickets and bussed in workers from across the country, but someone in the regime must have grasped the fact that if they did that, it would end with the city in flames.

Half the people in the crowd were speaking Arabic; Martin’s vocabulary was negligible, but he could easily distinguish it from Farsi. Many of the refinery workers were Arabic-speaking Iranians; whilst Ansari had not belonged to that ethnic group, he had been a local, and fluent in the local dialect – quite different from the Arabic studied in Iranian high schools – and his willingness to use it in speeches here had helped attract supporters. But rather than trying to inflame ethnic tensions, or demanding special treatment for the region, he’d focused on the benefits of a determined, nationwide assault on corruption and nepotism. People here knew that their wealth was being pilfered and wasted, but Ansari’s answer had been transparency and equity, not separatism.

When they came within sight of the picket line, Martin saw that the usual Referendum! signs had been supplemented with photographs of Ansari and a new slogan that Behrouz translated as ‘Murderers, get lost!’ That soldiers weren’t tearing the signs from people’s hands was no less amazing than if they’d borne the strongest profanities, given that this accusation and advice was meant for the government.

Martin took out his new phone and snapped some pictures of the pickets, trying to balance a fervent wish to avoid being seen by the soldiers with a fear that if he looked too furtive the people around him would take him for an informer. One young man did move towards him, scowling, but Behrouz stepped in and whispered an explanation that seemed to satisfy him.

He checked the pictures and queued them up for their long, tortuous journey to Sydney. Even back in his office in Tehran he was no longer able to use the internet; he had to print out his copy and fax it. He’d tried uploading files direct to the newspaper’s computer using a dial-up modem, but the government was degrading international phone lines to the point where the modems just kept hanging up; even the faxes he sent arrived peppered with static and were only legible if he used an absurdly large font. The conventional mobile service was now disabled across the country, and every major city had installed transmitters to jam the frequencies that had enabled the mesh network Mahnoosh had showed him at the demonstration in Tehran.

Slightly Smart Systems, though, had left one last option open: infrared. Their phones could pass data to each other by IR along a line-of-sight path, and whilst the government could interfere with the system in a limited space, such as a stadium or public square, in principle, they could no more jam it everywhere than they could flood the whole country with strobing blue disco lights.

The point-to-point bursts of IR carried email and news in much the same way as those services had worked in the days before the internet proper, when university computers had been linked up only sporadically via brief late-night phone calls but, in lieu of fixed landlines, the modern incarnation involved ‘polling’ phones in the vicinity to discover which ones were in a position to exchange data. Before the restrictions on intercity travel had come in, Slightly Smart email had diffused across the country and over the borders in a matter of days; from Tehran, Martin had sent a test message to his editor and received a reply in four days, probably via Turkey. No doubt there would soon be government programmers working on ways to clog the whole system with spam – and plainclothes police strolling around arresting anyone who responded to their polling signal – but for now the benefits were worth the risk, and a crowd of Ansari supporters was a good place to start. Martin switched his phone to polling mode and parked it in his shirt pocket with the tiny lens of the IR transceiver exposed, leaving it to try its secret handshake on as many passing strangers as it liked.

As he looked around at the crowd, trying to judge whether it would be wise to attempt some interviews, Martin spotted the young man whom Behrouz had deflected earlier, returning with four physically imposing friends.

‘You think we’re in trouble?’ he asked Behrouz.

‘Who’s this “we”, beegaané?’ Behrouz replied.

The first man ignored Martin and went straight to Behrouz, while the wrestling team hung back, looking stern and inscrutable.

‘They’d like us to go with them,’ Behrouz announced.

‘Is that an invitation to tea, or should I phone my embassy?’

Behrouz smiled. ‘It’s up to you, but if you’d like to interview Ansari’s brother, they can take you to him.’

They walked for more than half an hour, heading into a maze of small, quiet streets far from the refinery. It was a poor neighbourhood, but not an especially rough-looking one, full of car work-shops, grocery stores and spice vendors. There were young children playing on the streets, and strolling teenagers who looked neither fierce nor fearful. Martin gave up feeling nervous; while it wasn’t inconceivable that he was being set up, foreign journalists from obscure countries would have no value as bargaining chips in this purely Iranian game. He suddenly recalled the time a friend of Liz’s had thoughtfully mailed her a DVD of A Mighty Heart, and he’d had to sit beside her in their apartment in Islamabad, watching Angelina Jolie convulsing with grief over the death of her journalist husband. Martin had given the movie four stars, and sent Liz’s friend an email that won him a place on her no-Christmas-cards-ever list.

They arrived at a slightly shabby terraced house and were admitted by a wary doorkeeper who insisted on patting them down and examining their phones and wallets. There were other men lurking inside the house, but, encouragingly, Martin had yet to see a single weapon.

Karim, the young man who’d spotted Martin taking pictures, handed the two guests over to a middle-aged man who introduced himself as Mehdi and offered them tea and halvaa; it would have been rude to refuse, and Martin was grateful for the sugar rush. They sat on the carpet, shoeless and cross-legged, while Mehdi chatted volubly with Behrouz and politely enquired about Martin’s health and family.

‘Hich zan nadaaram, hich baché nadaaram,’ Martin confessed: I have no wife, I have no children. Mehdi regarded him with a mixture of astonishment and pity.

‘Your parents?’ he asked in English.

‘They both died a few years ago.’ Mehdi couldn’t quite parse that, so Behrouz translated. Mehdi tssked and shook his head forlornly, momentarily as anxious and perplexed as if an orphaned child had turned up on his doorstep. But then he shifted his attention back to Behrouz and they started discussing football scores. There was a TV switched on in a corner of the room, tuned to IRIB’s Channel One, which was screening reruns of a popular historical miniseries, No Room to Turn. Martin had heard claims that the show – which featured a love story between an Iranian student and a Jewish woman in Nazi-occupied Europe – was mere propaganda, portraying the endangered Jewish heroine sympathetically while caricaturing her Zionist relatives, but he’d yet to see enough of it to form his own opinion. In any case, it was a more enjoyable way to improve his Farsi than listening to Mehdi’s match post-mortems.

After almost an hour there was a flurry of activity in the adjoining room; Martin hadn’t heard the front door open, but apparently a small entourage had arrived, maybe through another entrance. Mehdi picked up the remote and turned down the volume on the TV. Martin managed to rise to his feet before Kourosh Ansari entered the room, alone.