Even his detention in the Kahrizak prison had failed to tear the veil from his eyes. All the beatings, all the torture, all the pain we had inflicted. Was it only willful pride that kept him from submitting? Where did he find his strength? How was it he endured? Despite his talk of Persia and the glories of the past, without the peace of Islam, how could he have survived?
The answer was...he couldn’t.
Like all who stray from Allah’s path, Faraj lived in illusion. So God had deemed to test him as He now was testing me—“to show the truthful in their sincerity and expose the liars in their falsehood.”
Truthfulness. Falsehood. Look more carefully. See.
See how I had strayed from the guidance of my master. I had been far too impatient for revenge.
It wasn’t until I spoke with the Grand Ayatollah that my path forward suddenly came clear. Instead of reprimanding me, he thanked Allah the Exalted One for allowing Duran to escape. The American was flying to Azerbaijan and the city of Baku, he said. A private jet was being fueled to take me there from Rome. “I put my trust in you,” he said. “You must find the American and follow where he goes. Insha’Allah, he will lead us to his brother—and the source of the lotus seeds!”
I stood at the phone in the airport terminal, stunned in mute astonishment, a vision of God’s intention suddenly forming in my head.
The city of Baku was the Caspian port of Faraj’s old smuggling route! I remembered the connection he had there, an oily old Azeri named Pashazadeh. That double-dealing crook might very easily be bought.
This was it, no question—the grand design of Allah! Faraj would be the secret snare through which I’d catch Duran!
The Old Man mistakenly took my silence as regret for my defeat. “God is divine and Islam is our guide,” he said. He quoted the blessed Quran: “Or do ye think that ye shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed away before you? They encountered suffering and adversity, and were so shaken in spirit that even the Noble Messenger and those of faith who were with him cried: ‘When will come the help of Allah?—’”
I finished the verse for him, my heart bursting with joy: “Ah! Verily, the help of Allah is always near!”
THE CASPIAN
30.
Opera Buffa
I PLAYED ALONG.
Not that I had any choice at first. I could neither move nor speak. It took three stewardesses to drag me from the bathroom and prop me up in my seat, all the while trying to get Oriana to calm down and answer their questions about my medical history and drugs I might have taken and what exactly it was we had been doing in there so long. I marveled at Oriana’s performance: the hysterical Italian wife, fretting away in fractured English, tearing at her chest in grief-stricken anguish, mopping up her tap-water tears. She told them we had had some terrible row and she’d refused to sit beside me on the plane. But I was still angry and wouldn’t leave her alone and had tried to confront her in the bathroom. She had told me again how much she wanted to have children, but I insisted I wasn’t ready, and she couldn’t believe I loved her, and—she went on and on like this, revealing tawdry details of our operatic marriage, until eventually the stewardesses were no longer listening to her. They were too busy forcing blood-thinning aspirin down my throat and trying to secure the cabin for landing and calling ahead for an ambulance to meet us on the ground.
Oriana’s wacky plan was based on a kind of paradoxical logic. Having already been tailed from the airport in Istanbul, she knew I had no chance of slipping into Baku unnoticed. So rather than continuing to protect me incognito, she decided to draw as much attention to us as she could.
It worked.
I was carried off the plane the moment the engines were shut down and before any other passengers were allowed to leave their seats. Even though by that point I had recovered much of my strength, I felt painfully achy and nauseous, reinforcing my inclination to continue the pretense. Paramedics dropped me in a wheelchair and rolled me across the tarmac to a waiting ambulance. My hysterical spouse accompanied me. Shouldering my backpack, she scrambled into the hold with me along with one of the medics. “Please hurry!” she cried, glancing back at the parked plane’s disembarking passengers.
An aging paramedic strapped me with an oxygen mask and asked me to try to breathe normally. He began taking my vital signs as the ambulance pulled away.
Our passports were inspected at the airfield gate by a dour-faced security official wielding a nightstick flashlight. He asked the paramedic questions in a language I assumed must be Azeri. Oriana grew anxious with the time it was taking and her pleadings brought the flashlight beam to her face. She was tying down her headscarf and tucking in her hair.
The officer eyed her a moment, then made some request in Azeri. The paramedic ominously turned to Oriana: “He say he need to speak to you. Inside.”
Oriana protested: There wasn’t time! “Can’t you see my husband is dying?”
The officer held the light on her, repeating his demand, then disappeared into the gatehouse with our passports.
Oriana reached for her oversize purse, apparently her only piece of luggage. I wondered if she thought she’d have to pay the man a bribe—or if she was expecting something worse. When I tried to ask her through the oxygen mask, the diva shushed me, caressing my cheek. “Please don’t worry your little head, caro mio.”
I watched her climb out and head inside.
The paramedic donned his stethoscope and once again checked my heart. An old man in a young man’s job, I thought. With his sagging jowls and watery eyes, he looked like a human bloodhound. “Is normal,” he said reassuringly. He removed my oxygen mask. “You breathing easy?”
I took a deep breath and nodded.
“I no think you have heart attack.” He noticed the bruise at the base of my neck, the mark from Maya’s Taser. “What happen here? Two red marks. Very tender.”
“My wife’s a vampire,” I said. I nodded toward the gatehouse. “What does he want from her?”
The old man shrugged, averting his gaze.
I craned my neck for a view outside. Suddenly the barrier lifted.
Oriana exited, passports in hand, scurrying back to the ambulance. “Please hurry,” she ordered the driver.
He leaned forward, searching the gatehouse. The dour-faced guard was nowhere to be seen.
“Go!” she shouted.
The driver threw her a grudging glance and shifted into gear.
Oriana watched out the rear window as the ambulance drove away. She turned to find me studying her.
“Brighten his smile?” I asked.
“He seemed shocked to find out I was telling the truth.”
WHETHER OR NOT THEY BELIEVED I had suffered a heart attack, the paramedics took full advantage of their emergency right-of-way and sped with siren blaring toward the hospital. Headlight beams flared across Oriana’s face as she made several phone calls on her cell. She spoke hurriedly in a guttural language I didn’t recognize.
The hospital lay within sight of the harbor—my first glimpse ever of the Caspian. The night sea looked black as oil. I was unloaded and quickly rolled in through the Emergency entrance. Oriana carried my backpack, continuing her wifely charade. I could see her searching for an opportunity to spirit me away, but with the paramedics and all the staff around she couldn’t afford the risk. The admissions nurse insisted she fill out paperwork, and a male orderly with a pirate earring briskly wheeled me away.
I continued my malingering, wondering what they’d do with us when they finally discovered the truth. The orderly deposited me in a large waiting room overflowing with a cast of unfortunates. A few women patients appeared to be sick, but most were men who had been injured. One large man in overalls cradled an arm that must have been broken. Another burly worker with a bandaged hand appeared to have lost a finger. Still another had injured his foot. Baku was a bustling oil port city, and this hospital was probably the nearest to the docks. My guess was
these men were oil derrick workers or cargo stevedores; they looked rough and strong and seemed familiar with pain. Their grubby, solemn dignity put my silent deception to shame.
A wall of windows reinforced with wire mesh separated the waiting room from the busy admissions area. I looked for Oriana among the crowd and spotted her again on her cell phone, holding her hand over an ear to block the surrounding chatter. Who was she talking to? I wondered. Harry Grant? The Italians? Her boss at the CIA?
She froze suddenly, staring toward the entrance. Two men in dark suits had walked in through the door. One was heavy-set, the other small and wiry. Both sported clipped beards similar to the Iranians. Their eyes searched widely as they moved into the room. They walked directly to the head of the line and began to question the nurse.
I looked back for Oriana, but she had already fled. Turning, I found her standing over me, peering down through her shades. “Can you walk?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
I struggled out of the wheelchair like Lazarus out of his grave. My tingly legs wobbled.
“Hurry,” Oriana said. She took my hand and pulled, hauling me stumbling after her. The injured dockworkers stared.
As we entered the hallway to the examination rooms, I threw a glance back through the window toward the admissions line. The heavy-set Iranian was talking on his cell. The wiry one had vanished. We hurried up the hall, turned the corner, and spotted him walking toward us.
His eyes locked on ours.
31.
Beatrice
ORIANA HAULED ME SIDEWAYS through a set of double-doors. A nurse shouted, waving her arms. Oriana blasted past her through a second set of doors. Emerging on the other side, we crashed into a gurney. The patient’s IV toppled, clattering to the floor. Three attendants in surgical garb glared at us over their masks. We ran on past the OR’s and through another set of doors. A surgeon scrubbing at a line of sinks shouted for us to stop.
Oriana momentarily froze.
I yanked her through a doorway into the doctors’ changing room. A naked man stood gaping. We barreled down a passageway of steamy shower stalls, through a room of benches and lockers, and finally out the surgeon’s entrance into the main corridor.
Hospital visitors streamed left and right. We plunged in among them, scurrying down the hall. A glance back at the door revealed no sign of the agent who had spotted us. Could we have actually lost him?
None of the signs in the hallway were in English, so we followed the general flow of the crowd. Eventually we found our way to the entrance lobby and hurried out the automatic doors.
“There!” Oriana said.
Beyond a row of idling cars a single taxi waited. The bald, bearded driver watched us hustle into the back. Both of us turned in tandem to check the hospital entrance—still no sign of the Iranians.
Oriana gave the driver an address, shouting over the Azeri pop tune blaring on his radio. In English, she asked him to drive as quickly as he could. “Understand?”
The man turned down his radio and looked in the mirror at me. “You lucky man,” he said. “My wife always say I driving too fast!” He shifted the taxi into gear and peeled out onto the street.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Oriana was still peering out the back. “Away from him,” she said.
I turned. The wiry Iranian had finally emerged. He walked to the curb and stood there, watching his quarry speed away.
“Doesn’t seem in any hurry to catch us,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Maybe they don’t want to catch us.”
“What do you mean?”
She turned and stared ahead through the windshield, finally removing her shades. “They want to find your brother. Perhaps they think you’ll lead them to him.”
“Me?” I turned again and looked out the back. The street behind us was empty. “Then why isn’t anyone following us?”
“Good question,” she said. “And why were there only two of them here?”
“You were expecting more?”
“We’re less than an hour’s flight from Iran. Harry’s list had twelve names. One was killed in Syria. Harry killed one in Iraq. Your friend killed Arshan Azad in Rome. Since then, little brother’s joined in the fun. Do the math.”
“Twelve minus three, plus one, equals ten.”
“And that only counts the assassins,” she said. “I doubt that includes the man who got on our plane in Budapest. And the Grand Ayatollah is sure to have contacts all over the Caspian basin. Now that he knows you’re in Baku, they’ll all be looking for you.”
She worriedly fingered her jade necklace and turned to gaze at the streets. We had entered a more desolate part of the city. Shops were closed and gated for the night, and the streets and sidewalks were empty.
They’ll all be looking for you.
The hairy worm inside my gut again uncoiled itself. My chest tightened, my heart raced, a sweating chill crept over me. I rolled down the window and let the hot breeze dry my neck. Only one thing seemed to calm the worm: this woman who was guiding me like Dante’s Beatrice. I wondered why she was doing it.
“Is that why you followed me here?” I asked. “You hoped I would lead you to Dan?”
She looked at me directly. “These men may be going after your brother. But we’re going after them.”
Just like Harry, I thought. And I was glad to hear it. Especially now I knew Vanitar Azad was still alive. “It’s Vanitar worries me most,” I said.
“You have good reason to worry.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Vanitar was a spy in the intelligence ministry under a sadistic thug named Ali Mahbood. During the Green Revolution, Mahbood led interrogations at the Kahrizak Detention Center. Vanitar worked under him. It was worse than Evin Prison. Lot of people went in there never came out.”
“Great. A spook who likes to torture people thinks I murdered his brother.”
“It’s odd,” she said. “Vanitar was quite well educated. He reportedly studied for years in Qum, preparing to become an imam. Yet sometime during the Green Revolution, he turned into a fanatic.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t really know. Radicalization often occurs with an identity crisis of some sort. I suspect something pushed him over the edge in that prison.”
“Maybe Mahbood pushed him over,” I said.
“If he did, he’s likely still pushing. Mahbood’s name is second on the list of assassins. Right under Vanitar’s brother.”
I gave her a look. “Thanks for that. Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse.”
“Things can always get worse,” she said.
I squinted into the breeze through my window. “Speaking of that, where is it we’re going?” The taxi was passing every car on the street.
“We need visas for Turkmenistan. I have a friend who can get us them quickly.”
I turned to her, startled. “What makes you think I want to go to Turkmenistan?”
“Why else would you have flown to Baku?” she said. Lowering her cashmere wrap, she retrieved a note from inside her blouse and handed it over to me.
Unfolding it, I saw it was the stationery with the lion symbol—Maya’s handwritten directions to the archaeological site. At some point during the flight, while I was incapacitated, Oriana had apparently rifled through my pack.
I glanced at her ample chest. “You hiding my brother’s books in there, too?”
She grinned. “I’m afraid it’s too—” The taxi screeched around a corner. As Oriana reached to steady herself, her hand touched down on my thigh. I glanced at her. She looked at the driver. “You needn’t go that fast,” she said.
I smiled to myself. That was the moment I made the decision I wouldn’t try to keep her from joining me. I probably couldn’t have, anyway. And really, it only made sense. Whoever she was, she had saved my life, and was likely to save it again.
I looked at Maya’s hand-draw
n map. It started out from Ashkhabad, a city in southern Turkmenistan. “So how do we get there?” I asked. “I was told to fly over the Caspian.”
“Too risky to return to the airport,” she said.
“What do you recommend? Rent a car?”
“It would take a week to cross the deserts to the north—that is, if you get past the Russian border.”
“What about the southern shore?”
“You want to pay a visit to the mullahs on the way?”
Of course. Iran. I’d forgotten my geography. “Probably not a good idea,” I said. “What about a boat? Isn’t there a ferry?”
“There’s an overnight ferry to Türkmenbashy, but the Iranians will be watching the harbor.”
The breeze blew Maya’s map off my lap, sending it to Oriana’s feet. She reached to the floor and retrieved it. For a long moment she stared at the page, as if she saw something written there she had not previously noticed.
“What is it?” I asked.
She looked at me without speaking. Then she glanced up the street and called for the driver to pull over.
“Oriana, what’s wrong?”
She spoke a little louder so the driver could hear. “The address. I’m afraid I gave the wrong address.”
The driver talked to the rearview mirror. “Wrong address?”
I didn’t understand what her friend’s address had to do with Maya’s desert directions. “I thought your friend was at the embassy.”
“No,” she said, now searching in her purse. “He doesn’t work for the embassy.”
The cabbie pulled to a stop at the curb. The moment he did, Oriana extracted her toothbrush Taser and slammed it into his neck.
Bzzzzzp!
The driver’s bald head slumped to his chest.
“What the hell?” I glared at her in disbelief.
She coolly climbed out of the cab and opened the driver’s door. The man sat slumped and didn’t move. She quickly checked his eyes, then searched his seat and the floor beneath him.
The radio kept playing.
“What are you doing?” I frantically scanned the street—for the moment it was empty.
The Assassin Lotus Page 12