The Eden Deception

by Nathan Swain

  “I’m taking you to a new family, do you understand?” Batur told the young Samir. “You will now be the son of a great man. You will be the son of Reso Zana.”

  Now, seeing the man Samir had become, Batur wondered if he should have taken the old gypsies’ advice and left him to rot in the slums. Batur shook his head and scowled. The bastard son of the devil.

  Chapter 69

  Who the hell could that be? Dashni wondered as his cell phone vibrated at 5:00 a.m. He looked at the caller ID. Another damn non-listed number. Does anyone deal in proper channels anymore?

  The observation was ironic coming from Dashni, who religiously operated sub rosa.

  Dashni pressed the green “pick up” button on his mobile. “Who the hell is it?”

  “It’s the prime minister—how dare you address me in such a manner.” It was Olivia, affecting the stentorian voice of Dashni’s boss.

  Dashni sat up in bed and turned on his nightstand light. “Are you alright, O?”

  “Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Lots of reasons. Your professional mentor has been brutally murdered, you’re missing, and you’re not returning my calls. Although on the latter point, I suppose that’s par for the course.”

  “Sorry, yeah, sorry about that.”

  “Where are you?” Dashni asked, heading to the bathroom.

  In truth, Olivia was sitting on the front porch of the chateau in Chalus, drinking a cup of coffee, and gazing at the mist-covered peaks of the Alborz Mountains.

  “It’s a very, very long story. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  Imagine if I tried, she considered. I’m in Iran. I just escaped from Evin prison. I’m on my way to Turkey to find the Garden of Eden.

  “Does this have to do with Allison? I’m terribly sorry. I know how much he meant to you.”

  “Yes, I needed time away. I heard about his murder and just needed to clear my head.”

  Dashni poured a shot of ice-blue mouth wash into his mouth and swished it around his front teeth. He looked in the mirror and sighed. Having skipped a day of shaving, his face was a brillo pad of stubble.

  “That’s certainly understandable. It was quite a shock.”

  “Yes, quite.”

  “The Cambridge police are shitting bricks, of course. I’ve told them that you’ve crashed at the cottage, getting over Allison’s death. Not ready to talk about it.”

  “Oh, thank God. You are marvelous at deceit.”

  “It’s called politics,” Dashni said. “And who are you to talk?”

  “Material omission is different from false statement.”

  “Fine. So, where are you?”

  “The Middle East.”

  Dashni dropped two pieces of bread in the toaster. “Can you be more specific?”

  “Sharm El-Shaikh. Swimming with the sharks, etcetera and so on.”

  “Fine. Get some sun, recharge your hemoglobin, and get back in, what, a fortnight?”

  “We’ll see. I’m really in no rush to return. I assume you’ve heard.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, they’re shutting you down in Iraq.”

  “Shutting down? No. Putting a temporary freeze on us? Yes. The UN says there’s a malaria outbreak. Of course I’m dubious, but what can one do?”

  Dashni deftly maneuvered a piece of toast with a butter knife and flipped it onto a plate. “Well, you know how I feel.”

  “I certainly do. You must be turning cartwheels down Whitehall.” Olivia could not help but titter at the image of her vested, shoe-polished father doing gymnastics in the corridors of power.

  “Not just yet, it’s only 5:00 in the morning.”

  “OK, then. I’ve checked in. Talk soon.”

  The phone signal went dead with a click.

  Dashni poured a glass of orange juice and took a bite of buttery toast. His trace of the call confirmed what he already suspected: she was in Iran.

  He was saddened that she wasn’t being honest with him. She was too much like him, too secretive and cynical, preferring jovial banter to sincere conversations. She was ever the Brit he was.

  He sat down in bed with his toast and clicked on the television. The news was outstanding. The prime minister and US president were pushing democracy in Iraq. Nation building and human rights were on every bureaucrat’s lips. The rationale for war had shifted. Yes, there was an uproar from the masses about the intel that led the coalition to war. But would anyone be impeached? No, there would be no regime change in the US or the UK.

  The occupation was a circus devolving into a catastrophe. Casualties were mounting. Iraq was a powder keg, about to explode into full-blown civil war. All that was regrettable, Dashni admitted to himself. But the long-term consequences were stellar. The allies would hunker down for an extended stay. The occupation would go on indefinitely—at least long enough to secure the newly agreed upon goal of a democratic Iraq. There would need to be a ratified constitution, free elections, and a functioning bureaucracy.

  Osama bin Laden was a fundamentalist, homicidal lunatic. But his evil had sowed the ground for a revolution in the Middle East. It would start in Iraq. Dashni hoped it would spread to Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The map of the Middle East so daftly assembled by the British and French after World War I would be torn up, and something sensible would emerge in its place. Kurdish by blood, British by luck and adoption, Dashni Nazarian would set the world right at last.

  Chapter 70

  The waters of the Bosphorus Strait reflected shades of yellow and coral from the sky above. Dusk was falling over Istanbul, and Samir had the perfect vantage point to watch the oncoming darkness, sipping a bottle of Efes beer at a waterfront cafe.

  After gearing up at Batur’s arsenal, he was going stir crazy waiting for Olivia and the American to arrive in Turkey. It would have been easier if his father had allowed him to hunt them down on the road from Iran, put a bullet in the American’s head, and drag Olivia kicking and screaming from the car, by her pretty black hair if necessary. But Reso wouldn’t relent. “No, Samir. You must do things my way. Just blow off some steam while you wait.”

  Samir took Reso’s advice. He spent two nights in the small bars and night clubs off of Taksim Square. At Crimson, he joined up with a group of Erasmus college students studying abroad. One of the young men, a German, bragged of a mountain of cocaine in his flat. Samir partied with them at the flat for hours, spending equal time exploiting the German’s cocaine and his female friends.

  The second night Samir and the German went to Oscar, an electronic music club crawling with women trafficked from Central Asia and the Caucuses. He negotiated a cut-rate price for a twenty-year-old prostitute from Kazakhstan. As they walked to his hotel, she demanded $100 more from Samir. He punched her in the stomach and left her unconscious body next to a dumpster in a back alley.

  His hotel bar was also inundated with prostitutes, and he plied two of them with bottles of champagne in his room. They passed out in the Jacuzzi.

  Samir spent the next afternoon at the bathhouse Cemberlitas Hamami, sweating the coke and liquor out of his body. He hadn’t realized the baths weren’t co-ed, but it was just as well. He needed to get his strength back. With that in mind, he planned a quiet evening on the Bosphorus sipping beer. And then his cell phone rang. It was Reso.

  “Samir, I have good news.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can stand down now.”

  “What? Did you catch them? Are they dead?”

  “No, but that needn’t concern you anymore.”

  “Father, I don’t understand.”

  The long pause at the other end of the phone indicated Reso’s displeasure.

  “I don’t care if you don’t understand. You’ll do as I say.”

  “Is the holy site protected?”

  “I told you it is no longer your concern.”

  It’s no longer your concern. How many times had Reso uttered those words to Samir, only to change his mind and make him responsible, yet ag
ain, for protecting the holy site? Samir couldn’t believe his father had called him back into duty—resurrecting his feelings of humiliation and shame and stoking his thirst for revenge—only to order him to stand down.

  “Samir, listen. You’ve done your duty. It’s time to relax. Take a holiday. Sail around the world. Whatever you want. Consider it my present to you for a job well done.”

  “I want to finish the job.”

  “No. You’ll be getting in my way if you do.”

  Samir said nothing, waiting. The sound of his father’s breathing seemed to get heavier and quicken. It reminded Samir of the sound the bulls back home made when they were readying to charge. It was a sound Reso made when his patience was running thin.

  And then something extraordinary happened. Samir hung up the phone.

  He took another sip of beer. His mind went blank. He couldn’t even begin to ponder what he had done.

  A minute later, he could feel his whole being recalibrate, as if tectonic plates were shifting in his head. And then he realized—he was no longer beholden to Reso. He was no longer responsible for pleasing him. He was his own man. The past year of his life was behind him, and he was moving on. He was through with his father’s ridiculous orders. He would take matters into his own hands. He would do what was needed to protect the holy site.

  Samir eased back into his chair, braided his fingers together behind his head, and considered the state of play. His father was a grand strategist. Samir was new to the game. But Reso had underestimated Samir’s initiative, which had given him a clear advantage: unbeknownst to Reso, Samir knew the precise location of the Garden of Eden.

  Samir thought back to his meeting in Reso’s office where he presented his father with the tablet. As he had done routinely since Samir was a boy, Reso forced Samir to wait for an hour in his office before showing up for their meeting. In holding Samir captive, and forcing him to stare at his throne of power as he waited, Reso sought to emphasize his power over him.

  This time, the ploy backfired. Samir had experienced the treatment so often he knew he had time to spare. He used it wisely, going through the notes and papers on Reso’s desk. Folded under a paperweight of two golden lions, Samir discovered a detailed map of Turkey with a box drawn around one location: Lake Hazar. Clipped to the map, was a piece of notepaper with Reso’s scribbled handwriting. Written at the top were two words: “your work.”

  Reso intended to deliver the map and note to someone else, Samir surmised. Probably that old fool Batur, who Reso had hired for similar work in the past. Batur’s work would be to stop Olivia and the American before they reached the Garden. But fate had now assigned that task to Samir.

  Gazing at the Bosphorus, Samir finished his second beer and belched with satisfaction at his plan. Then he realized his father knew his location—his exact location at that very moment. Reso had mentioned to Samir how he was able to instantaneously trace any call Samir made from his cell phone. At the time, Reso’s comment was intended to keep Samir on a short leash. Now, Reso would use the technology to hunt him down.

  Panicked, Samir scanned the windows in the cafes and restaurants along the water, searching for the nose of a sniper rifle or the dancing red circle of a laser sight.

  How could I be so stupid? Drinking beer, gazing at the sunset like a fool, as father moves in for the kill. For that is what Reso would do when he tracked him down. Samir was sure of that.

  Samir knocked over his table and ran toward a line of taxis down the street, hunching over as he moved.

  He slid into the backseat of a taxi and gave the driver directions. Samir had to prepare. Not only for Olivia and the American, but for the boundless treachery of Reso Zana.

  Chapter 71

  The road to Tabriz was painful. Route 22, which Karzan followed west along the Caspian Coast from Chalus, was badly rutted—a washboard of bumps and creases. Eastgate and Olivia resumed their disguise as tree matter in the truck bed, and each time the car hobbled over the pock-marked highway they took a knock to the head from the nearest branch.

  The ride was also painfully awkward. Olivia assiduously avoided eye contact with Eastgate the whole way through.

  Eastgate’s conscience tossed and bobbed. I should never have taken the call from Beck.

  It had been so long since he was in anything resembling a relationship he had forgotten to move with extreme caution when entering emotional terrain. Olivia was probably right to be irked, he concluded.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a shout from the cabin of the truck. “Taaaaabriz,” Karzan cried out, like a train conductor announcing the next rail stop.

  Tabriz was Iran’s second largest city. But it was more like Chalus than Tehran. Gone were the strict Islamic standards of the doctrinaire capital. The women still wore chadors, but the garments were looser and multi-colored, rather than the oppressive black cloaks worn by the women in Tehran. Tabriz was also more multi-ethnic, made up of Azerbaijanis, Turks, and Kurds. Persians were a minority.

  Free from the watchful eye of the ayatollah’s spies and volunteer snitches, here, Eastgate and Olivia could walk around safely. “In Tabriz, I am more influential than the ayatollah,” Karzan boasted, as his passengers moved from the truck bed to the cabin. “Travelling with us you will be treated as VIPs. You will have no problems from the Ettela’at.”

  Stopping in a roadside outhouse, Olivia looked in the pitted and cloudy mirror fixed above a wood-box toilet. Black-purple semicircles sat beneath her eyes. For the first time in her life, she noticed the spindly creases of crows’ feet emerging at her temples. She usually wore no makeup at all, enjoying the benefits of a near-flawless complexion and golden skin tone. She wondered if the stress of running for her life was taking a toll.

  She took a step back and looked at her latest disguise: a gray skirt flowing down to her ankles and a loose-fitting roupush coat underneath a black chador. Despite Karzan’s boasting, Olivia decided not to change into the blue jeans and sweater she kept in her rucksack. With Evin prison looming behind them, she would be taking no chances.

  Olivia also was still smarting from their evening in Chalus. She felt cheapened. The frat boy got her drunk and then put his moves on her. But when more important matters came along he cast her aside like a besotted sorority chick. At the moment, she had no desire to dress for the benefit of anyone but herself.

  “Nice look,” Eastgate said, as Olivia walked back to the truck. Olivia glared at Eastgate’s Atlanta Braves baseball cap, shaking her head in disapproval.

  The late-afternoon sun was set low in the Eastern sky. The chalky white outlines of the moon began to appear on the other end of the horizon. It was in this light that Karzan led them through Tabriz’s 1,000-year old bazaar—one of the oldest in the world—to introduce his passengers to a local merchant. He was a man who Karzan believed could help them locate the treasure they sought.

  Spanning more than four miles, the bazaar was a series of ornate vaulted ceilings, made of red brick and multi-colored mosaic tile, connected by long corridors lined with shops. The sunset flooded through the sky-lights overhead, adding a rosy hue to the ancient marketplace.

  With the evening prayer about to begin, Karzan led Eastgate and Olivia quickly through the bazaar. The range of items on display was dizzying. One corridor contained hundreds of bowls of spices ranging in color from ochre to indigo to chartreuse. Others featured mounds of hand-crafted leather purses, bags, pants, belts, vests, and saddles, each of them polished and glowing in flickering candlelight. The colors from the jewelry displays alone were staggering. Gold paints and glaze shimmered all around them.

  Other hallways and alleys revealed only shadows. The bazaar had been a major stop on the Silk Road trading route between Europe and Asia. Marco Polo wrote glowingly about it. Olivia wished she could sink a shovel into the floor and excavate.

  Eastgate’s thoughts, however, were focused on the present. Behind the shelves of food and fine goods, he was sure the bazaar provided a mar
ketplace for Iran’s thriving heroine and gun trade. Hezbollah, Al-Tawhid Wal-Jihad, even al Qaeda—they were all using the bazaar as a crossroads to gather intel and finance operations.

  This place is crawling with bad guys. Eastgate wanted to get out as soon as possible.

  Karzan finally came to a stop in front of a small shop along a narrow corridor on the perimeter of the bazaar. The sign next to the door read: “Maps.” A long string of golden bells clanked and clattered as Karzan pushed the door open. Eastgate and Olivia followed.

  Chapter 72

  The map store looked more like a hermit’s cave than a modern shop. The ceiling was set low and made of stone. A fire place with an enormous mantel piece, lined with photographs of famous Western writers—T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway—was set near the back of the shop next to a dusty Persian rug and two ancient couches.

  The center of the store was lined with fifty wooden cases made of ash, each about eight feet tall. Scores of tiny square cubby holes occupied each row. Underneath each cubby was a piece of masking tape with a word written in black Sharpie identifying the category of the maps stored inside.

  “Go ahead. Have a look. He will not mind,” Karzan said.

  Eastgate approached the first case. A large “A” was written on a strip of dirty masking tape. The categories on the first row read: “Aleppo,” “Antioch,” “Asia Minor – Ancient,” “Asia Minor and the Crusades,” “Asia Minor and Greeks and Romans.” Eastgate took out maps at random. Some were dated as far back as 1830—about the time the first Europeans began travelling to the region. None were newer than 1912.