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After I got into Mr. Roosta’s car, I tried Amir again. He answered the phone, but didn’t want to stay on too long.

“Don’t call me again,” he said. “Just come here, to the temporary office, as quickly as you can.” The day before he had sounded nervous; now he sounded scared.

The office was in Zaferanieh, an exclusive area in north Tehran. Before reaching the office, I called Alireza at Ahmadinejad’s headquarters to see how he was feeling.

“Mr. Ahmadinejad’s votes are above twenty million,” Alireza told me. “We expect it to go as high as twenty-five million. I’ll call you later.”

I hung up with a lump of cold fear in the pit of my stomach. There are no exit polls in Iran. At about five P.M., more than four hours remained before the polling stations closed. It didn’t make sense that Alireza would know the number so early. Once again I thought of Leonard Cohen’s words.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

Everybody knows that the captain lied

Everybody got this broken feeling

Like their father or their dog just died

For the first time I began to think that perhaps I should resign myself to a different outcome than the one I had been hoping for. Perhaps Mousavi was fighting a losing battle. At the temporary office, I rang the buzzer Amir had told me about on the phone: the third one from the top, with the logo of a construction company. Someone in a state of fear answered the video intercom.

“Who are you?” he asked, in a direct—and wholly un-Iranian—manner.

“I want to talk to Mr. Amir,” I answered.

“Who are you?”

“Maziar Bahari.”

“Wait,” he directed me. It was a few seconds before he returned. “Come in,” he instructed. “Wait in the lobby.”

The building was a gaudy modern structure with brown marble and golden railings. There was a large brown leather sofa in the lobby. Before I could sit down, the elevator’s doors opened. From inside, Amir waved hurriedly for me to join him.

“Did anyone follow you here?” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his white handkerchief.

“I don’t think so.”

Amir had not pushed the button for any floor. “Okay. Get back in the car and ask your driver to circle the area and come back after ten minutes. I will look from the window to see if anybody’s following you.”

“What’s happening?” I asked as calmly as I could.

“It’s a coup d’état, a military takeover by the Revolutionary Guards,” Amir said. “Now go.”

Amir’s words worried me, but more than anything, I was worried about the future of the country. The consequences of the Guards taking over the government were so horrifying that I didn’t even want to think about it. I didn’t want to envision the claustrophobic society that would create, or the possibility of a military confrontation with another country if the Guards came to power.

I had to invent an excuse to get Mr. Roosta to drive us around the block a few times without arousing his suspicions. As he rolled down the window to ask what was wrong, I told him that I had decided to buy some pastries for my friends. In the car, I kept my eyes trained on the side mirror to see if anyone was following us. There was no one. I had never seen Amir so afraid. What did he mean by a coup d’état? I wondered. Had the reformists seen the results and did they want to take preemptive action and accuse Ahmadinejad supporters of vote rigging? Had Ahmadinejad and the Guards managed to pull off a scam that meant that he had gotten himself elected four hours before the polls closed?

I could barely concentrate on what I was ordering from the pastry shop. I called a friend of mine. He told me that the Fars News Agency, which was run by the Revolutionary Guards, had just announced—at five-thirty, three and a half hours before the polling stations closed—that Ahmadinejad had won the election with more than twenty million votes.

When we pulled back in front of Amir’s building, fifteen minutes later, he was walking out the door with another Mousavi adviser I knew.

I jumped out of the car. “Have you heard about the Fars News report?”