The Assassin Lotus

by David Angsten

  “It was not long after that,” Faraj said, “that everything got to hell. As if Allah were testing me.”

  “What happened?”

  “The authorities decide to bulldoze a Sufi mosque in Isfahan. My uncle and I, and forty other Sufis, we stand arm in arm on the street, try to stop them. We are all arrested, thrown in jail. A Ministry of Intelligence official interrogated us. His name was Ali Mahbood. When we were released, my uncle complained that Mahbood had beaten him. For this, he was convicted of slander, flogged 74 times, and sentenced to a five-year prison term.”

  “This intelligence official—Mahbood,” I said. “He’s on the list of assassins. Oriana—the Israeli woman—she told me Vanitar worked under him.”

  “That came later,” Faraj said.

  “What happened to your uncle?” I asked.

  “He died within a year of being jailed. A heart attack, they said. But they refused to perform an autopsy.”

  Faraj was devastated. His grief turned to anger and to politics, and he moved back to Tehran to pursue a degree in law. When the presidential election dispute occurred in the summer of 2009, he joined the growing Green Revolution, leading his fellow Sufis in demonstrations against the regime. Faraj was again arrested, and this time sent to Kahrizak, the notoriously squalid underground prison and the scene of that summer’s worst horrors.

  “That’s where I encountered my old friend again,” he said. “Vanitar was working for Mahbood, interrogating those who were arrested. Forcing them to give up the names of their friends—addresses, phone numbers, emails. To confess what they’d done. Tell everything they knew. Every secret. Every sin. Every last...” Faraj grew quiet and seemed to sicken of his cigarette. He tossed it half-smoked out the window, then chucked the whole pack out after it.

  I remembered what I’d been told in Baku. “Oriana thought something must have happened to Vanitar during his stint at that prison. Something that pushed him over the edge. Some kind of ‘identity crisis.’ Turned him into a religious fanatic.”

  I looked at Faraj. He was staring intensely at the road ahead. I hesitated to ask him the obvious question. But I felt I was close to something, that darkness he seemed to be holding back.

  “Did Vanitar interrogate you, Faraj?”

  For a moment he didn’t answer. He seemed to be struggling to contain his emotions. Then, suddenly, he erupted in anger. “This woman, your friend. She talks about a crisis. What does she know? Islam? Fanatic? She knows nothing. Nothing! Nothing but lies!”

  I backed off; I’d struck a nerve. Exactly what it was, I couldn’t be sure. But something had clearly happened between Faraj and his old friend. My question had disturbed him deeply.

  41.

  Saints & Sinners

  I WAITED FOR FARAJ TO CONTINUE. After a long silence, he did.

  “Every day, hundreds of protestors were taken into custody. The prison became extremely overcrowded and chaotic, with new inmates hauled in every hour as others were released. In the confusion, several of us managed to escape. I fled north across the border into Azerbaijan. I’ve lived there, in exile, ever since.”

  Faraj ran a rug-trading route through Central Asia, the same work he had done for his uncle. “Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” he said with a joyless grin. But his self-reliant pride, while full of bravado, seemed haunted by an undertone of melancholy.

  The prison must have changed Faraj, too, I thought. “It must have been a horrible experience,” I said. “It’s amazing that you managed to survive.”

  Faraj stared out at the onrushing road. “Others had it worse,” he said. “I was only beaten.”

  “Only?”

  He brushed it aside. “The body heals,” he said. “No bones were broken.”

  I continued looking at him, waiting for more.

  He kept his eyes on the road. “I never had men beat me before. They used sticks, and metal pipe. I couldn’t… I had no strength to fight them. I felt…” He seemed to be searching for the right word—the one he had managed to forget.

  “Humiliated,” I said.

  “Yes. You feel…less than a man.”

  I thought of myself trembling in that airport toilet stall. And shaking beneath the blade of Arshan Azad. “I know what you mean,” I said. “Sometimes it’s like…there’s just nothing you can do.”

  “My uncle would have done something,” he said. “He would fight back. Not run away. Not from his country. Not from God.”

  “But your uncle ended up dying in prison, Faraj.”

  “My uncle died for what he believed. Now I live. For what? For this? For to sell the Turkmen rugs and fishes?”

  I peered ahead at the tapering road and the brilliant orange ball at the end of it. “To see the sun rise another day,” I said.

  Faraj shook his head. “Is not enough. Not for me.”

  This attitude of his unsettled me. I mulled it over now as I sat inside the truck, watching him walk out into the desert. Surely his uncle would be pleased that Faraj had escaped from the clutches of his jailers. A life lived in freedom was a form of revenge—even if that life were lived in exile. Not everyone is obliged to die fighting for their liberty or defending their unauthorized God. He had acted sensibly by fleeing when he could. Why should he feel remorseful about it?

  Faraj abruptly stopped walking and dropped down to his knees. He appeared to be clearing off a space in the sand. I climbed out of the truck and headed toward him.

  He pressed his hands firmly palm-down on the ground. Then, as I approached, he sat back calmly on his heels and began methodically wiping down his head and face and arms, as if he were washing himself.

  I came to a stop. He was performing, I realized, a formal rite of ablution, the Muslim’s ritual cleansing. In Turkey, I’d seen Muslims do this wash routine in preparation for prayer, but never without water. Here, in the desert, Faraj was using sand. And sure enough, when he was through, he stood and held his palms up, the start of his midday prayer. I watched him kneel and bow forward, touching his head to the ground.

  Feeling intrusive, I walked away, and after crossing a respectable distance beyond him, stopped at a scrubby bush and peed.

  I’m relieving myself, I thought, only I don’t feel relieved. Perhaps I, too, need some form of ablution. Some ritual to wash away this cruddy feeling I have. This feeling that—what? That I was “less than a man?” Wasn’t that why Faraj’s discontent had so bothered me? Because I, too, felt useless and cowardly?

  A glistening silver tank truck rolled down the highway. I zipped up and watched it rumble by. It was the first vehicle I’d seen since awakening in the truck. Even though the highway offered the only passage south, it had been surprisingly devoid of traffic—emblematic, I supposed, of the desert nation’s cruel economy. According to Faraj, Turkmenistan was awash in gas and oil, but the billions it brought in were squandered by the state, leaving half the population unemployed.

  A rusting van with a ruined muffler came belching after the tanker, its roof stacked precariously with luggage. Faraj, oblivious, continued with his prayer. As the noise faded and the dust settled, I noticed something through the haze I hadn’t seen before. Beyond the road, far off in the distance, a faint silhouette of blue-gray mountains hovered just over the horizon. These ghostly peaks had not been there when I’d fallen asleep in the truck, back in the salty lowlands of the Caspian. I remembered now Steinberg’s ink-stained finger pointing them out on the map. This was the Kopet Dag range, the mountainous border with Iran.

  How strange, I thought, to be standing within sight of the one country that wants to kill me.

  An ugly groan, like a injured lion’s, came howling over the desert. I turned around. The horizon seemed to stretch into infinity. Shielding my eyes, I detected in the distance a traveling herd of beasts.

  Wild camels. No men anywhere near them.

  I watched them tramp slowly through rippling waves of heat. Six of them, maybe seven. It was hard to tell if they were moving t
oward me or if they were moving away. I wished I had Faraj’s binoculars.

  Again the growl erupted. Then, out of the silence came the whining hum of a car. I turned and followed its approach from the north. The car was moving fast.

  It was black. A Mercedes. And aside from the darkly tinted glass, virtually a duplicate of the rental back in Rome.

  42.

  Diplomacy

  I DROPPED TO THE GROUND, scrambling behind the scrawny bush into which I had just finished peeing. Was I being paranoid? Sometimes a black Mercedes is just a black Mercedes. Among Turkmenistan’s oil apparatchiks, it was probably a popular car.

  I peeked over at Faraj. Having finished his invocations, he was trudging back toward the truck. The Mercedes blew right past him in a billowing cloud of dust. I watched it fly away.

  Sighing in relief, I started to my feet. But just as I did, the Mercedes slowed to a stop. I quickly dropped back down on my belly.

  The car made a U-turn and rolled back toward Faraj. I swore under my breath. Had they spotted me? The Mercedes pulled off the road and stopped a short distance from the truck. Its opaque windows concealed the interior. I struggled to calm my nerves.

  Faraj seemed to only half-notice the car as he leaned in the open window of his truck. After a moment, he pulled out the jug of drinking water and gulped down a generous swig.

  The driver of the Mercedes climbed out of his car. Heavy-set and slow-moving, he wore dark slacks and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. Even from a distance, peering through the thistle, I could see the man clearly had a beard.

  Faraj very casually glanced in my direction, then took another sip from his jug.

  A second man exited the passenger door and flicked a cigarette into the sand. Though similarly bearded, he was wiry and small. He wore dark dress pants just like the big man, but without the white shirt, just a wife-beater tee. I recognized him as the guy who pursued us through the hospital back in Baku. These were the two Iranian thugs sent out to track me down.

  Sar and Oriana had failed to stop them.

  Faraj screwed on the bottle cap as he watched the men approach. My heart seemed to pound against the hot sand beneath me.

  The men exchanged greetings, and the large man asked Faraj a question. In a calm voice, Faraj replied. The man asked another question, scanning the desert around them. I lowered my head. Although I could barely hear what he said and had no idea what language he spoke, the affable tone of his voice sounded fake.

  While the two of them continued talking, the guy in the T-shirt wandered over by the truck. He peered in the passenger window.

  I thought of Sar’s duffel bag lying on the floor. All my stuff inside it. Had I left something out that would tell them I was here? I’d been studying Dan’s notes in the Rig Veda text just before I’d fallen asleep on the road.

  Faraj noticed the guy peering into the truck and addressed him sharply. The man gave a curt reply. Just then a car appeared on the road—an old, dust-coated Russian Volga packed to the brim with a family.

  The three men watched it pass. Then the nosy guy wandered behind the truck, moving completely out of view.

  Faraj walked back to check on him. The big man followed, gazing in through the driver’s side window as he passed. Then Faraj disappeared, and all I could see was the broad back of the big man standing at the rear.

  I wondered what they were doing. Asking Faraj to open the back to see if I was hiding inside? For all I knew, at that very moment, they might have a knife at his throat.

  The cargo doors swung open. The big man closed in for a look. All I could see was his hand on the door. Then his hand moved off.

  A minute passed. Then another.

  What the hell were they doing?

  I raised my head above the bush, straining for a view. Just then a hand reappeared on the door and slammed it loudly shut. I ducked back down to hide. All three men—to my relief—emerged and walked up front. Faraj chatted with the exuberant Iranian, who was tucking a package under his arm. I had helped load the packages in the truck before we left—each was filled with several tins of caviar.

  The Iranian agents seemed pleased with themselves. I watched through the bramble as they walked back to their car. Faraj was watching them, too, and stole a worried glance toward me.

  The men reached the Mercedes and opened up the doors. As the big man started to climb inside, he happened to look my way.

  He froze.

  I ducked. He said something to his partner and nodded directly toward me. I pinned my nose to the ground, heart suddenly racing. The man spoke to Faraj; I heard Faraj respond. I lay there breathing into the sand, trying not to move. Afraid to lift my head to see them, I now heard their footsteps crunching toward me.

  It was too late to make a run for it. There was nowhere I could hide.

  A shadow fell over me. I heard his rasping breath. Slowly, I looked up.

  The camel lowered its snorting nose and sniffed where I had peed. It raised its ugly head and groaned. Then it moved on casually, as if I wasn’t there. Another camel followed, as enormous as the first. Then another a few yards farther off. And another beyond that.

  There were seven camels in all. Single-humped behemoths, with mats of molting fur, and long drooping necks like deflated old giraffes. They leisurely ambled across the road as if they owned the desert. Right past the Mercedes. The big Iranian made some crack, holding out a tin of caviar. The animals ignored him. The wiry agent laughed.

  Then the men, chuckling happily, climbed back into their car. They U-turned in front of Faraj and sped off down the road.

  I waited until the Mercedes vanished, then started back toward Faraj. The camels appeared to be heading toward the foothills of the Kopet Dag and the mountain streams that bled into the desert. From the south a large semi grinded its way toward us, and I paused a moment at the roadside until it thundered past.

  Faraj seemed disturbed, even angered. I asked who the men were and what they wanted.

  “Iranians,” he said. “They told me they are diplomats. They are looking for their American friend, want to know if I have seen him.”

  “What made them think you would know? Why did they stop?”

  He nodded toward his truck. “They say their friend crossed the Caspian on a boat with a cargo of fish. They say he would come down this highway. That is why they stopped.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. Only a few people knew our plan—Steinberg, Sar, Oriana. “Who could have told them? Pashazadeh?”

  “No, he hates the Iranians. Their patrol boats always stop his fishing, force him to pay a bribe.”

  “Maybe he was pressured into telling them,” I said.

  Faraj peered down the sun-drenched road. “I can’t say. I know only one thing. These men are devils. You can feel it, in their eyes. I wanted only for them to leave. Before they find you here.”

  “Is that why you gave them the caviar?”

  “Yes. But I did not give it. I said they must pay, and they offered me this.” He drew a necklace out of his pocket. A choker made of jade.

  I stared at it in sudden despair. “They got Oriana,” I said.

  43.

  Call of Duty

  SOMETHING MUST HAVE HAPPENED on the ferry. Sar’s plan had gone horribly wrong.

  “Do you think your friends, they are both of them dead?” Faraj was at the wheel again, speeding toward Ashkhabad.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t want to think about what happened to them. If they hadn’t been killed, it was likely they’d been tortured; neither would have willingly divulged our plan. “If they’re still alive,” I said, “they may be in the backseat of that Mercedes.”

  “I’ll never catch up to them,” Faraj said. “They’re driving much too fast.” The empty road ahead appeared to stretch into infinity.

  “They must know the plan is to meet up at the dig—that’s got to be where they’re heading.”

  “To find thei
r ‘American friend?’”

  “They know I left earlier. They must figure I’m already there.”

  “What will they do when they find you are not?”

  “They’ll assume they were lied to,” I said.

  The two of us silently considered what that meant. If Sar and Oriana were somehow still alive, it was likely they wouldn’t be for long.

  “We must hurry,” Faraj said.

  I looked at him, then back at the road, then back at him again. “You’ve already done enough, Faraj. You don’t have to take me there.”

  “It is my choice,” he said. “I know these kind of men. I have seen what they can do.”

  “Just take me as far as Ashkhabad. I can rent a car.”

  “Rent a car? You are not a Turkmen. This will take too much time.”

  He was right. “But…you don’t even know these Israelis,” I said.

  “Do you? Know them?”

  I recalled Oriana’s near-kiss on the plane—and the paralyzing zap she administered. “No. Not really. But Oriana has rescued me twice from these men. If she’s still alive, I have to try to help her.”

  “Yes. It is your duty as a man. But how is it you will do this?”

  How indeed. Even the thought of confronting the Assassins started my stomach churning. If they had outmaneuvered Sar and Oriana, they were sure to make mincemeat of me. “The market you’re going to in Ashkhabad—they sell guns?”

  “They sell everything. What kind of gun you want?”

  I thought about the last time I had used one. It had been the first time, too. “The only thing I ever fired was a pistol,” I said. “And that was a long time ago.”

  “Did you kill the man you shot?”

  I glanced at him. “It wasn’t a man,” I said.

  “You shot a woman?”

  “No. It was… In Mexico. It’s a long story, Faraj.”

  “So you did not shoot a man to kill him.”

  “No,” I said. “But…I actually did kill somebody there. I just didn’t kill her with a gun.”

  He grimaced. “You should use a gun, it’s quicker.” He reached down under his seat and like magic whipped out a pistol. “It’s a Makarov,” he said, offering it. “Semi-automatic. Russian-made.”