Read Online Fault Line by Barry Eisler - Free Book Online

to study and to perfect their English as was the custom among the sons and daughters of well-off Iranians of the day. Her father, Emaan, was pre-med and planned to become an ophthalmologist. Her mother, Ashraf, was studying nineteenth-century English literature and wanted one day to become a professor herself. They married while still in school. Their parents were pleased with the match, and their future looked bright.
    Then came the revolution, and the seizure of the U.S. embassy. Amid talk of war, President Carter froze Iranian assets. Their families lost everything. Forget about tuition-it was all they could do to find a way to eat and pay the rent. Ashraf took a job as a waitress. Emaan sold eyeglasses at an optician's shop. They worked their butts off and saved money by sharing a two-bedroom apartment with another Iranian couple who had been similarly afflicted. Eventually, they had enough put away to buy out the optician. Now they owned five eyeglass stores in the Bay Area and some real estate, too, and were damn proud of it. Once, when Sarah had told her father she wanted a job that paid psychic income, he had laughed and said, Silly child, don't you know that financial income is psychic income?
    She understood his point. But she had more opportunities than her parents did, opportunities they had given her. Wouldn't it be wrong not to take advantage? Shouldn't she build on the foundation they had provided?
    And besides, she thought she had seen sadness behind her father's laugh.
    She tried to ignore it, but she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something more for her, if only she could figure out what.
    And that was her problem: all her dreams were inchoate. She didn't know what she wanted. There was a longing inside her, but she couldn't name it. It could be quietly corrosive, feeling so strongly something was there yet unable to express or even identify it. She wondered which was worse: betraying a dream or being too shallow even to have one?
    And then she would tell herself she was being silly. She was hoping for too much, that was the problem. She should just be satisfied with all the good things she had.
    Sometimes she wished she had a sibling she could confide in. But times had been hard when she was born. Her parents didn't think they could afford another child, and by the time they could, Sarah was already ten. They didn't want to start all over again.
    The one thing that really interested her was politics. She read everything, across the political spectrum-newspapers, magazines, books. Blogs especially. There were some great ones out there, and with their diversity and spontaneity she trusted them much more than she did the mainstream media, which was controlled by corporations or driven only by a hunger for access to whoever was in power, or both. The voracious reading was a kind of hobby that had started in high school and intensified as she got older. But what was she supposed to do with it? Look at how Obama's opponents had tried to smear him by falsely suggesting he was Muslim. Or the way they'd destroyed that Iranian-American businessman, Alex Latifi, with textbook malicious prosecution in Alabama. What would people make of an Iranian-American woman who really was Muslim, who in fact found passages of the Koran breathtakingly beautiful? Her given name was Shaghayegh, for God's sake, after the Persian flower-Sarah was just a nickname. Shaghayegh Hosseini, vote for me Really, she had a better chance of being sent to GuantAnamo than of being elected to office.
    She had been a freshman at Caltech when the planes struck the Pentagon and Twin Towers. After, she had been approached by recruiters from all over the federal government: FBI, NSA, CIA, the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. They were all desperate for people who could speak the languages of the Muslim world, and Sarah, whose Farsi was fluent, seemed to be popping up on all their computer lists. She was intrigued by the notion of a