Order in Teheran

Synopsis

After 25 years of living in the West, Cyrus Salaar is ordered to return to Iran, the country of his birth - and of his father’s murder at the hands of fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries.

A well-known surgeon during the Shah’s regime, Cyrus’s father was a main shareholder of a San Diego-based pharmaceutical company.

In the chaos of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, he arranged for his entire family to get out of Iran while he stayed behind to provide medical care to victims of the fighting. One terrible day, armed revolutionaries burst into his clinic, killing him and his staff. After his murder, the new fundamentalist government confiscated the Salaar family’s entire fortune. Cyrus, now a German citizen, works for an insurance company in Hamburg. His employer orders him to go to Teheran in order to verify the authenticity of the death certificate of a young Iranian policyholder. The insurance company suspects fraud. Cyrus’s private interest in taking this dangerous trip is to retrieve the family coat of arms, which had to be left behind as his family fled Iran. He wants to give it to his mother for her 70th birthday.

The coat of arms hangs on the entrance gate to his parents’ home, an old villa that the secret police took over after the revolution.

Soon after he arrives in Teheran, Cyrus learns that the supposedly dead policyholder is alive and hiding in Germany, because the Iranian authorities consider him a terrorist. One of the most feared members of the Iranian secret police wants Cyrus to turn over the suspected terrorist’s address. Cyrus refuses. He knows Iranian agents in Germany would liquidate the young man, which would be inhuman and would make the insurance benefits due again.

Cyrus watches aghast as the terrorist’s beautiful sister causes an accident that takes the life of the feared secret police official. Suspicious mullahs investigating the death discover Cyrus’s family background and ask him more and more questions, trying to catch him in a lie.

Frightened but undeterred, Cyrus finishes the job for his employer and works to get his family’s coat of arms. Fortunately, Cyrus has the help of his childhood friend Zino, a former pilot in the Iranian air force, whose own father was the maintenance person at the villa many years ago and thus has inside knowledge. Cyrus is also aided by Nehmat, a troubled and mysterious man he meets at his father’s gravesite in Teheran.

Under the nose of the secret police, in a three-phase plan of breathtaking action, Cyrus, Zino, and Nehmat remove the family coat of arms and sneak it out of Iran, barely a step ahead of the religious authorities and police officials.