They entered a dark hallway, cooler than outside, and almost immediately a crowd of children, perhaps two dozen, nearly all girls in direhs, ages from six or seven to about fourteen, clustered around them. Two young boys, naked except for drooping underpants, hung back and watched.
“Odkhol, odkhol,” the children cried, tugging at them. Come in, come in.
One of the girls—she couldn’t have been more than eight years old—put her hands on the front of Van Zyl’s trousers, rubbing his crotch and tugging at his zipper, calling something to him.
Van Zyl squirmed and held her off.
“What’s she saying?” he asked Ghedi.
“She saying, ‘Choose me. Come with me,’ ” Ghedi said.
“Do you see her?” Sandrine asked Ghedi.
A Somali man in jeans holding a camel whip came in then, a pistol tucked in his waist. He was young, thin, his hair dyed orange like the color of a soft drink, and cross-eyed in a way that made him look stupid. His other hand was draped around a pretty young girl, about eleven years old, her dark eyes unreadable. He pulled her along with him. There were also two boys with him, about thirteen years old, both carrying AK-47s decorated with seashells and feathers. They were chewing qat, their teeth green. The young girls immediately fell silent.
Then another little girl wandered out and stood there, sucking on her thumb. About six years old with dark almond eyes, wavy hair, and an exquisite, almost perfect café au lait face. She was the most beautiful child Sandrine had ever seen.
“It’s her,” Ghedi whispered to Sandrine. He ran up to the girl and looked directly into her eyes. At first she seemed not to recognize him. All of a sudden, she collapsed on the stone floor, put her hands on top of her head and started to scream.
“Eskoot!” the Somali man shouted at the girl. Shut up. She stopped and looked fearfully at the Somali man. Ghedi took the girl’s hand. She held back but didn’t resist. He led her over to Sandrine.
“I have come to—” Sandrine began.
“Stop,” the Somali man said in Arabic, looking at her in his cross-eyed way. Ghedi translated in a whisper. “I know who you are, doctor woman. You must not be here. This is not your place.”
“I’m taking these children with me,” she said.
The Somali man took out his pistol, pointing first at one little girl, then another, then another, ending by pointing at Sandrine. He raised his arm higher and fired a bullet into the wall over her head. Sandrine flinched. The children stood there, watching the two of them, the man and Sandrine.
“These are my property. My sharmutat.” My whores. “I will kill them first,” he said, motioning to the two boys, who flipped the safety levers and pointed the AK-47s at Sandrine and the girls.
Sandrine’s heart pounded. The eyes of the qat-chewing boys were vacant. They’ve killed before, she thought, even at their age, suddenly realizing she might be about to die. She looked desperately at Van Zyl, who just stood there.
“And how if I take them?” she said, scarcely breathing. Ghedi translated. Van Zyl glanced around uneasily, his hand on his holster.
The Somali man blinked rapidly. Somewhere, that qat-addled brain was trying to think, Sandrine thought.
“These are Al-Shabaab property, doctor woman,” the man said. “Al Qaeda’s whores. Understand? Even if I gave them to you, men would come and kill them. They would kill them and you and me before you even get back to Badbaada Camp.”
“Is this so?” Sandrine whispered to Ghedi, leaning her head close to his. He stood there, holding his sister’s hand. It was terrifying to think they knew exactly where she lived and worked. If al Qaeda or Al-Shabaab came shooting in the camp, the havoc would be unbelievable.
“This is true, isuroon,” he whispered.
“And if I take only one . . .” she said. The Somali man followed her gaze and understood immediately.
“That one, impossible. Her batuliya is worth much,” he said, making the sign for money. Sandrine understood. He planned to auction her virginity.
The two boys with the AK-47s looked restless. She had to do something, and quickly.
“I have an idea,” she said, and sat down on the stone floor, motioning for the girls to gather around her.
“Ecoutez, mes enfants . . .” she began.
None of them moved. She opened the plastic bag of coconut candy and indicated they should pass it around. A few of the older girls looked over at the Somali man, who nodded.
One by one the children gathered around her. As they were doing so, she passed the wad of money to Ghedi and whispered: “Give him the money. Then take your sister and go to the camp. Don’t wait for me and don’t look back.”
She looked around at the girls gathered around her. A few of them started to giggle and eat the candy. She smiled, took a deep breath and started to speak in English.
“I’m going to tell you a story about a little girl named Cinderella. Once there was a man who married, for his second wife, the proudest woman you ever saw. She had two nasty daughters of her own, who were just like her. The good man also had a beautiful young daughter from his first wife, a good sweet girl. Her name was Cinderella.”
As she recited, she saw Ghedi give the Somali man the money. Then she watched as Ghedi and the girl left with Van Zyl, a shiver going up her spine when they were gone and she was there alone with the child prostitutes and the Somalis with guns, all of them listening rapt to her story, though they could barely understand a word.
If she ever got back to camp, they would have to leave Mogadishu, she thought. Al-Shabaab and al Qaeda weren’t going to let this go. They would get back to Dadaab somehow. She and Ghedi and the little girl, Amina. And then what? What was she to do with them? They couldn’t live forever in Dadaab.
An odd thought. The American, Nick, would find her there, if he survived his war, she thought.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Mellat Park,
Tehran, Iran
“You heard? We’re wanted by the police, VEVAK, everyone,” Ghanbari said. “Our faces are everywhere.”
“I know,” Scorpion said, leaning on the rail of the yellow metal footbridge over the lake in Mellat Park. His and Ghanbari’s faces were on the front pages of Abrar and the Tehran Times and all the major TV channels; wanted for murder in the killing of Farzan Sadeghi, an officer and a hero of the Revolutionary Guards, and Zahra Ravanipour, an employee with the AFAGIR missile command.
He had watched the news on the television at a chain restaurant, Nayeb Kebab, in Kaj Square. For a disguise, he was dressed in a floppy red outfit and a tall floppy red hat, his face covered with blackface, like something from a late nineteenth century minstrel show. He had bought the outfit from a costume shop near the Grand Bazaar, and thought he looked ludicrous. He was supposed to be Haji Firuz, the traditional Persian minstrel of the Red Wednesday festivities. While playing peekaboo with two small children who were with their parents at the next table, and shaking his tambourine, he kept one eye on the door and on the TV. He was tired. It had been a killer night and he needed to go to ground, but there would be no sleep anymore. Not till he left Iran.
The news announcer on the restaurant TV cut back to talk about the American forces in the Persian Gulf and rumors about Israel, then the scene shifted to a reporter interviewing a burly Iranian man in his fifties in an expensive suit, wearing glasses and a white dulband turban, his tie at half-mast. They were in a government office; the TV screen caption read: ABOUZAR BEIKZADEH, SECRETARY OF THE EXPEDIENCY COUNCIL.
Beikzadeh, stared into the camera and declared: “These innocent Iranians were good people. Patriots. Murdered by CIA agents and Zionist terrorists who wish to destroy Iran. They will be found out and justice will be done. We expect to have these criminals in custody by tonight and then we will seek out and destroy those who sent them. I call upon all citizens to be vigilant. I call upon the Basiji to go out into the streets to help us find these CIA criminals.”
Scorpion had already seen B
asiji militiamen out in force on every street corner. Besides the police, VEVAK, Revolutionary Guards, and ordinary citizens, it meant at least 100,000 Basiji vigilantes looking for Ghanbari and him. He could feel a prickling at the back of his neck. The noose was growing tighter.
“Further,” Beikzadeh continued, “because of the actions of the traitor, Muhammad Ghanbari, acting with the unanimous consent of the Expediency Council and the Supreme Leader, I have this morning assumed personal command of the Revolutionary Guards.” He stared into the TV camera. “All traitors everywhere will be rooted out. The criminals will not escape,” adding that anyone seeing the foreigner, Laurent Westermann, or the fugitive CIA spy, Muhammad Ghanbari, was to contact the nearest Naja police office or Basiji militiamen at once. There was no mention of the incident at Dizin or any other casualties.
Although Scorpion had known from the instant he fired the shot that he couldn’t save her, seeing Zahra’s face on the TV, confirmation that she was dead, was like a kick in the gut. How many casualties had there been on this mission? Harandi in Hamburg. Glenn. Chrissie; all of the Gnomes in Zurich. Rutledge and Mini Me on the Costa Brava. Now Zahra. She had been right about him. Just knowing him was lethal, he thought. He’d been right to stay away from Sandrine. All he could bring her was grief.
He had spent the night into the morning moving, riding buses and the Metro, not keeping still or holing up anywhere they might try to track him. After midnight he went back to the dead drop in Laleh Park to see if there was anything for him in the public men’s room.
There wasn’t.
He had torn his Laurent Westermann passport and papers into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet, pulling his last available ID from his backpack. A red Republic of Ireland passport in the name Sean O’Donnell, a documentary filmmaker from Dublin. It wasn’t deep cover, but better than nothing. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.
He’d slept fitfully on the stone floor of the public men’s room, curled next to the wall, the stink in his nostrils, ZOAF pistol in his hand. He kept waking in the dim light of a single bulb at every sound outside. In the morning, he washed and shaved with cold water and tried to clean up as best he could. Looking at himself in the mirror, he understood that without a disguise he would be caught before the morning was out. That was when he thought of Haji Firuz. The one and only piece of luck he’d had in this whole operation was that it happened at Nowruz, the Persian New Year. He wondered whether Rabinowich had taken that into account when planning the op. Which reminded him, he had to find a way to let Langley know about Sadeghi.
When he walked out in the early morning, sunlight had been filtering through the trees. The park was green, the pathways empty and beautiful. He heard a bird singing and it felt unworldly. It seemed insane that everyone in Iran was hunting him and that he would in all probability die today or that they were about to go to war.
He’d caught a bus in Vali Asr Square. Watching the city traffic and smog getting denser by the second, he calculated that he could risk up to five minutes online before the Revolutionary Guards could track him, got off and went into an Internet café. There, using the VPN, he bounced a Chattanooga message to Shaefer via the server at the Revolutionary Guards military base at Lavizan, through Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. “Chattanooga” was the agreed-upon signal that meant he had terminated the Gardener. He could only imagine the cheers and big smiles, handshakes all around, when Harris—or the DCIA himself—presented it to the President. Except he couldn’t stop thinking about Zahra and didn’t feel much like cheering.
Shaefer had responded with coded instructions for the escape. A dead drop under the fourth seat, seventh row, in a cinema on Shahrivar Avenue in Chalus. At midnight a seaplane would taxi close to the beach, and as soon as he and whomever he was bringing were aboard, they would take off for Baku in Azerbaijan. Plus one more piece of information. A coded addendum from Shaefer that translated to: “Baylor full mob.” Baylor was the code word he, Rabinowich, and Shaefer had agreed to use for Israel. “Full mob” meant total mobilization.
He’d thought of Yuval then. The Israelis were using the crisis as an excuse to launch the attack they had long wanted on the Iranian nuclear facilities. They wanted to do it with U.S. forces still in place in the Persian Gulf to give them cover, whether the Americans wanted to or not. All hell was about to break out across the Middle East. He had to get out of Iran now.
He would get to Chalus under cover of the Red Wednesday celebrations that night, he decided, signed off the computer and cleaned any trace of having been there with his NSA software. He checked his watch, saw he’d been online four minutes fifteen seconds, and looked around uneasily. Just the usual crop of students online and teenagers playing video games; nothing out of the ordinary. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was pushing it. He left the café and was less than a block away when he spotted plainclothes VEVAK agents barging into the Internet café.
They had been faster than he thought. He hadn’t had much of a margin at all.
And now Scorpion knew he had to leave the restaurant. Despite his Haji Firuz disguise, a waiter near the kitchen kept looking at him, then away. When the waiter disappeared into the kitchen, no doubt to make a phone call, he left a stack of tomans on the table and walked out, not looking back for two blocks before heading down an alley and doubling back on the next street. He was waiting at a bus stop when he got the text message from Ghanbari to meet him on the bridge in Mellat Park.
Ghanbari had shaved his beard. Sporting sunglasses and a fake Tom Selleck–like mustache, he looked more like a sports car salesman than an academic.
“What about your colleagues?” Scorpion asked, eyes restlessly running over the families and young people, students mostly, playing or walking near the lake. Apart, it was dangerous enough. The two of them together was like a neon sign saying, Call the police.
“Under arrest or disappeared. My two closest friends, Koosha and Nader, are disappeared. I’m sure they’re dead. Beikzadeh and Kta’eb Hezbollah have taken over the al Quds Force, which means the Revolutionary Guards. The tail is wagging the dog. If they find me, I’m dead,” Ghanbani said, rubbing his hands over and over, as if they were cold.
“What about your wife and children?”
Ghanbari looked at him, his eyes stricken.
“We talked. She’s going to divorce me, denounce me. She’ll testify I’m a CIA spy, whatever they want. It’s the only way to protect her and the children. Later, when it’s safe, she’ll go back to her family in Isfahan. Inshallah—” God willing “—someday we’ll see each other again. But my parents!” he exclaimed. “They will think I’m a traitor. They will live with shame,” shaking his head. “I can’t do this.”
“I’m leaving Iran tonight,” Scorpion said. “Are you coming?”
“What are you offering?”
“Me? I’m not offering anything. I’ll get you out. Someone else will take it from there.”
“The CIA?”
Scorpion didn’t say anything. Ghanbari’s face knotted up.
“They force me to be a traitor. My own people.” He grabbed at Scorpion’s arm. “What will they offer me?”
“The Americans?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Depends on the value of the information you give them. Asylum, some money probably.”
“For a spy, you’ve been honest with me,” Ghanbari said, his face twisting. “Tell me the truth. They’ll use me up and throw me away, yes?”
Scorpion looked at him and at the sun sparkling on the lake. From the shore came the sounds of families and children’s voices. It’s like their last moments of peace and innocence, he thought. Not for the first time, he wished he were in another line of work.
“Yes,” he said.
“It’s hopeless. I should kill myself,” Ghanbari said, taking his ZOAF pistol out of his pocket and looking down at it.
“Then Beikzadeh and his kind win. Is that what you want?” Scorpion asked.
“What else is t
here for me?”
“Things change. I’ve seen things I never would have believed,” he said. “Besides, you can’t commit suicide on Red Wednesday.”
“Why not?” Ghanbari said.
“Bad luck,” Scorpion said, and smiled.
As the sun set at last, a smoggy orange glow like a fire burning over the skyline, Red Wednesday exploded. There were fireworks, bonfires, rockets, and firecrackers all over the city. Children dressed in costumes or black shrouds ran through the streets, banging spoons on pots and pans and going door-to-door. They banged their pans loudly and were greeted by beaming adults offering scoops of ajeel, mixed nuts and berries, and clear water to refresh them.
People wore new clothes and broke earthen jars shaped like animals that supposedly held last year’s bad luck, so only good luck would come in the New Year. Others went up to total strangers in the street asking them to untie a knot in their handkerchiefs as a way of taking away any bad luck. Young single women, practicing fal gosh, would eavesdrop on conversations of passersby in the street. It was said that one could tell one’s future, including the romantic future, from a scrap of conversation from the first passerby you overheard.
In every street, square, and park across the country there were bonfires where people of all ages, adults and children who were old enough, would jump over the fire, singing: “Zardi-ye man az to, Sorkhi-ye to az man.” My sickly yellow paleness is yours; your fiery red color is mine.
“You understand, this is early Zoroastrianism, thousands of years older than Islam,” Ghanbari said. “Rebirth of life after winter. That sort of thing. What are we waiting for?” he asked as Scorpion, still dressed as Haji Firuz, jumped and capered around him like a clown.
“That,” Scorpion said, watching a family with three children, parents, and grandparents parking their white Peugeot 4008 SUV in a lot on Sadaqat next to Mellat Park. He also kept an eye on two Basiji militia-men who were watching the parking lot and the street. There was a sudden crackling from a string of firecrackers as the family entered the park to join the festivities.
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