“May you see the lotus of the Hashishin grow once again in your garden in Qum,” I said. “Could there be any greater proof that you are God’s instrument on earth?”
The Ayatollah answered humbly. “If the believer submits to His will, Allah empowers the believer.”
“May He empower us to defeat evil and carry the flag of Islam to the Mahdi!”
“The will of Allah will always prevail.”
The Old Man said he would have me booked on a direct flight out of Karshi. The Assassin who had made the payphone call had surely informed Mahbood, which put me in a race now to beat him to the site. We said our goodbyes and ended the call.
Moments later, I pulled up in front of the hospital. Duran, I assumed, would be arriving any moment. Although I had told the Ayatollah I’d leave for Karshi at once, I could no longer resist the command of Allah to avenge my brother’s death.
HAVING LEFT HER OVERNIGHT BAG at a hotel back in Bukhara, Phoebe popped into a women’s apparel shop to buy a change of clothes and shoes for the trip. She was planning to transform herself back into a woman once we got ourselves clear of the city.
While waiting for her on the street outside, I used her cell to call Faraj.
Oriana, he said, was in surgery. “Last thing she ask before she went in is whether you talked to Professor Baghestani.”
“No,” I said. “We were too late. And now his friend has been murdered as well.”
“I warned you about these men,” he said. “There is only one way you stop them.”
“That’s going to be harder now. The Iranians are way ahead of us.” I told him what had happened, and that I’d found Phoebe, and that we were about to board the train to Samarkand.
“Samarkand?” he asked. “But...are you not coming to the hospital?”
His disappointment was palpable and added to the guilt I felt. “I’m afraid not. We have—”
“But you must!” he said. “You must!”
His insistence surprised me. Was he upset that I wouldn’t be there, or that he wouldn’t be coming with us? “I’m sorry, Faraj. There isn’t time. We have to catch this train and find my brother before the Assassins get to him. I’m counting on you to take care of Oriana until Harry Grant shows up. I hope you understand.”
A long silence followed on the other end of the line. I thought again of the darkness he seemed always to be hiding from me, and wondered, after everything, if he really could be trusted.
“Faraj?”
“Yes. I understand.” His voice was flat, emotionless. “I would very much like to go with you, to fight and kill these men. But it is best now I stay with Oriana.”
“I’m so glad you’re there, that she’s not alone. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”
“It is my great honor to serve her,” he said.
He hadn’t heard yet from Harry Grant; I told him he was probably en route. When I hung up and tried to call Harry myself, all I got was his recording again. I left Phoebe’s cell phone number.
NIGHT HAD DESCENDED without my even noticing. As Phoebe and I walked together back to Kagan station, we found ourselves once again puzzling over the chess piece and Tamerlane’s possible connection to soma.
Woolsey had said the Mongols sacked the castle at Alamut. I asked Phoebe if she knew whether Tamerlane led the charge.
“Alamut fell to the Great Khan Möngke in the 13th Century,” she said. “Tamerlane didn’t come to power until more than a hundred years later. Besides, I doubt the Hashishin would have allowed their secret to fall into their enemy’s hands. Dan said the cache Baghestani discovered was concealed deep under the castle’s foundation.”
“Then how could Tamerlane have known about the lotus?”
We passed by a cluster of men waiting at a bus stop, none of whom paid us any mind. I’d almost forgotten about Phoebe’s disguise; normally, the wolves would have ogled her.
“There is one connection I can think of,” Phoebe said. “Woolsey’s mention of Tamerlane’s tomb reminded me of another mausoleum. I toured it last year in the city of Turkistan. It was built to house the remains of a famous 12th-century Turkic poet, a Sufi mystic named Ahmed Yasawi.”
Yasawi, she explained, was a highly influential philosopher and theologian, and helped spread Sufism throughout central Asia. His focus on the religion’s inner, mystical dimension allowed Islam to sustain itself amid waves of Mongol invaders, gradually resulting in their adoption of the faith.
Phoebe continued: “Now it just so happens that Yasawi lived during the glory years of Alamut and the Hashishin. He traveled widely, and it’s not inconceivable he might have visited the castle—the scholarly Old Man would have gladly welcomed him. Remember the bronze cauldron Baghestani found at Alamut?”
A bearded, flat-faced man in a prayer cap walked past us in the opposite direction. Phoebe waited until he was out of earshot before she went on.
“Under the massive dome of Yasawi’s mausoleum—the largest dome in all of central Asia—the builders installed a giant, two-ton bronze cauldron, six feet in diameter, its brim the height of a man’s mouth. It has eight bronze handles in the shape of lotus blossoms.”
She paused to let that fact sink in; then, with a wary glance around us, continued: “The mausoleum was erected as a tribute to Yasawi more than two hundred years after his death. Guess who commissioned it?”
“Tamerlane,” I said.
“The Scourge of God himself. It was the last monument he ever built.”
“Must have been quite a fan,” I said.
“More than that,” she said. “Tamerlane was barbaric in his passion for conquest, but he had an insatiable craving for knowledge. Whenever he conquered a city, his army would bring back scores of captive scholars and theologians. He built renowned academies and vast libraries. I can’t help wondering if he learned about soma from the writings of the Sufi master.”
I asked her if there was a similar cauldron at Tamerlane’s tomb in Samarkand.
She shook her head briskly, no. “There’s only his coffin,” she said. “Made out of jade.”
I fingered the chess piece in my pocket, pondering a possible connection.
“The mausoleum is exquisite,” she said. “In fact, the old city itself is quite beautiful. Samarkand was the capital of Tamerlane’s empire. Along with those captured scholars, he brought back as slaves architects and artisans, stone masons and marble carvers, metal workers and craftsmen. All were set to work building mosques, palaces, gardens, fountains—his jeweled imperial paradise in the desert.”
“Sounds like another heaven on—”
“Look,” Phoebe said. We had come within sight of the train station; the squad car was no longer there.
“Keep your fingers crossed,” I said as we made our way toward the station.
THAT DURAN WOULD NOT BE COMING to the hospital galled me. God’s desire for justice had been hindered once again.
I peered down at the unconscious Oriana. Pale without her face paint, her eyes drugged shut, she gave off the scent of a soulless corpse already commencing to rot. But above her the monitor annoyingly beeped, as if all that remained was her greedy heart clinging to life out of fear.
Beep, beep, beep.
The Jews are the greediest of mankind for life. Everyone of them wishes she could live a thousand years. If you think that you are the favorites of Allah to the exclusion of other people, then invoke death if you are truthful—unless you fear the fire of God and His Hell—
“You’re back.”
I turned.
The nurse walked briskly to Oriana’s side and began a routine check of her vitals. “Enjoy your dinner?” she asked in English.
“I went for tea instead,” I said.
“Ah—you like your sweets.” She eyed me conspiratorially.
I grinned back at her warmly. “You read me like a book.”
I waited until she left the room, then quietly closed the door.
No need for the knife thi
s time, I thought. Too much unwanted attention. I glanced around the room. The closet door hung open.
A wire coat hanger would do the trick—and buy me precious time. I pulled one down and untwisted it.
Beneath the bandage I found her wound, stitched like Frankenstein. In contrast to her clumsy surgeon, the Assassin had cut with skill. Though his dagger could easily have sliced through her spleen, he’d followed a delicate technique of his training and only nicked the organ, assuring that death would arrive more slowly.
It had been useful to keep her alive, but I could see no reason any longer.
Still, I hesitated. Her angelic, bloodless face seemed to taunt me. Beep, beep, beep. Was it true that her heart only beat out of fear? Or might it be pounding for me?
Might she be dreaming of me?
Slowly, I lowered my face to hers...and wet her lips with a kiss.
To my surprise, as I withdrew, her eyes suddenly fluttered open. “Faraj,” she murmured sweetly.
“No!” I backed away, flush with shame, casting off the devil.
“What is wrong, Faraj?”
I eyed the Jewess coldly. “You will no longer call me Faraj,” I said. “Faraj was an apostate and a sinner.” Wiping the demon’s kiss from my mouth, I smeared off the powder that had covered up my scar, the ‘veil’ that concealed my true identity.
Her eyes flared. “You’re Vanitar!” she gasped.
The terror in her voice as she uttered my name incited a libidinous thrill. “All this time together,” I said. “You failed to see the truth.” I moved in, staring down at her. “You should have looked more carefully—”
“Hel—!”
I clamped my hand down to stop her scream and took up the quivering wire.
SAMARKAND
62.
Caravan on Wheels
DESPITE OUR TREPIDATION, Phoebe and I boarded the train without incident, and half an hour later, ensconced in sweat-stained, second-class seats, we were rolling over a vast expanse of desiccated cotton fields, pale wastes in the moonlight, tracing the ancient Silk Road east en route to the city of Samarkand. Caravanning by camel might have been more accommodating. The train was dirty, noisy, and crowded, the air ripe with body odors, the stench of food and urine, and hot, dry, dusty gusts belching in off the flats. In front of us, a bantering gaggle of men played cards, while down the aisle, young mothers with wailing babies lined up for the lavatory. Across the way, a potbellied man in a sheepskin hat gnawed a scraggly chicken bone. Other passengers roamed about, from seat to seat and car to car, often with multiple children in tow. The train was a traveling village.
Wearisome as it was, I felt a great relief. We had escaped from Bukhara’s Byzantine streets, where eyes had peered from every corner and footsteps trailed every turn. Luck had left my throat intact and kept me out of jail, and being on the move again stoked my optimism. Though two innocent academics had been savagely murdered, it appeared that Oriana was likely to survive, Faraj remained hale and hearty, and my brother Dan, despite the odds, had apparently not yet been captured or killed—we still had a good chance to find him.
In the meantime, it seemed a miracle that I was together again with Phoebe. Two years had passed since we’d seen each other last, and my memory of her had dimmed into a dream-dwelling ghost. Now she was sitting there vividly beside me, whispering furtive observations, flashing her diamond blues, brushing her leg and arm against mine without even seeming to notice. Her near-perfect English still retained odd remnants of accent, with her r’s softly slurred into w’s, her s’s rendered silky and precise. Her boy-like locks were still clipped close—shorter even than my own. Dark bronze powder concealed the freckles on her cheeks, but the corners of her mouth still hinted at a grin, and her overbite, endearingly, still plumped her upper lip.
I had to keep restraining myself from staring at her too long. Despite the blackened hair and brows, the tawny complexion and the man’s suit of clothes, the Dutch girl appeared as enchanting to me as ever. In truth the manly ruse she used only made her more alluring, paradoxically enhancing what she’d tried so hard to hide: her essential, undeniable, irresistible femininity.
Growing aware of my gaze, she turned to ponder the moonlit wastes slung with frayed power lines and ancient telegraph poles. “The Soviets ruined this region,” she said. “All in the name of cotton. ‘White gold,’ they called it. Forced workers into state-run farms, poisoned the land with pesticides, bled the rivers dry. Up north the ancient Aral Sea was drained into a salt pit.”
The road to hell, I thought again. Central planners dreaming of a workers’ paradise. “Dan always said it was crazy how they thought they could change the world, when most of us can’t even change our own minds.”
Phoebe asked what I’d been doing in Rome. I gave her an offhanded answer, cavalierly glossing over my pathetic tour guide biz, before hastily turning the question back to her. She said that after returning to her family in Amsterdam, she applied for several teaching positions. But before she heard back from any faculty recruiter, she received an urgent phone call from Dan.
“He’d heard about the ancient Vajra found in the sands of the Murgab delta. Dan felt certain the initial dating was correct—that the relic was from a 2nd Millennium BC Aryan site.” He urged Phoebe to contact Karakov and persuade him to initiate an excavation. The Russian had strong connections inside the government of Turkmenistan; for over three decades he’d been digging up their desert.
I asked her why Dan didn’t call Karakov himself.
“He did,” Phoebe said. “Vladimir declined—he was busy digging in the Kopet Dag. But Dan knew I’d worked as his TA for several quarters at UCLA. He thought I’d be able to convince him.”
Now I knew why Karakov was so miserable. “You did more than convince him—that poor man is head over heels.”
“I feel badly about that,” she said. “But I never led him on. Men fall in love too easily.”
True enough, I thought. Especially with her. I cast my eyes over her manly attire. “Does that mean now’s my chance?”
She laughed, then looked away, her reflection faint in the glass. In the darkness the passing wasteland appeared as remote as the face of the moon. “I suppose I should tell you I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
She looked at me. “For leaving the way I did.”
I thought of Dan and me at Dodona, waking up under the oak of Zeus and discovering Phoebe was gone. “We put you in a tough position,” I said. “I can’t blame you for leaving.”
“No, it wasn’t right. I just didn’t know what else to do.”
She’d left a note on the car’s windshield: the Greek word for freedom. “We understood what you wanted. What else was there to say?”
She turned her gaze away.
I asked, “Isn’t it what you wanted?”
She continued peering out through the glass. “I thought I wanted to marry your brother. Then I fell in love with you.” She turned to look at me.
It took a moment to register the words she had just spoken. “You never told me,” I said.
“How could I?” she asked. She turned back to peer into the dark. “You think it’s going to be simple. You think it will all be clear. But it’s not. It’s messy and complicated. It seems there’s no good choice. That no matter what you do, someone will get hurt.”
I stared at her ghostly reflection in the glass. Phoebe had not wanted to be free of us, as I had always cynically assumed. She had wanted to minimize our misery. It was true, she had abandoned the both of us, but if she had gone back to Athens with Dan, she knew I’d be alone and devastated; and if she had gone on to Italy with me, she knew Dan would have suffered the same. The choice she made to abandon us both was intended to diminish our pain.
Phoebe had been thinking less about herself and more about keeping two brothers together.
The fairy tale lives on, I thought. “Do you know what it is you want now?”
For a moment she
seemed unable to say. “I just...want to make sure Dan is okay.” Her eyes came back to mine. “And to be with you...for a while?”
I held her gaze, entranced.
A small man in a uniform came by to collect our tickets. Despite the hubbub around us, I’d been so absorbed with Phoebe I’d almost forgotten about the train. As I fished out the tickets and handed them over, I noticed the conductor seemed to be scrutinizing Phoebe. Up close, her gender appeared ambiguous at best, and I worried he would see through her disguise. The scrutiny shifted to me. After a moment’s appraisal, he seemed to arrive at some unpleasant conclusion. He huffily tore off the stubs and moved on.
Phoebe leaned back and smirked at me. “Maybe it’s those fancy boots, cowboy.”
I affected my best Brokeback twang. “To the contrary. I believe it is on account of my present travelin’ companion. You are ruinin’ my reputation, Slim.”
“I hope I’m not leading you on.”
I stared into those eyes of hers. “You know how men are,” I said.
“Tell me,” she said. “How are they?”
Black feather lashes, faint fog of freckles, pouty, open-mouthed overbite. “Easy,” I whispered.
Her gaze fell to my mouth. “How easy?” she asked.
Our faces floated closer. “Like fallin’ off a horse.”
“Does that mean now’s my chance?” she asked.
We tilted toward each other. “Our chance,” I said.
Our lips were nearly touching. Phoebe’s eyes began to close...then fluttered open suddenly as her gaze climbed quickly upward.
A bearded man loomed over us, glaring down in disgust. At first I didn’t recognize his black-checkered turban, but then I noticed the dark vest and the long white gown, the baggy white trousers and the sandals.
A shock of adrenalin ripped through me. Phoebe and I disentangled.
“Salaam,” I offered lamely.
The Pashtun grimaced in disgust. “Kafirs,” he snarled. With a swoop he grabbed my duffel bag and charged off down the aisle.
63.
The Assassin Lotus Page 26