Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  And nothing.

  She stopped.

  He lay like a stone beneath the sheets.

  Nora curled up on his chest and kissed his cheek.

  “Look,” he said, then ran out of words.

  “We all get headaches.”

  “If you understood …”

  “If you understood,” she said. “There’s a hundred reasons why a man can’t. It happened, so what, let’s talk about it, not be afraid of it, not worry about it ’cause that’s not the only reason I got you in here.”

  “My sense of humor, right?”

  “That’s one thing,” she said.

  “I’m not feeling too funny right now.”

  “Don’t use that tone with me,” she said. “I don’t give pity. If that’s what you want, go back to your trailer.”

  He shifted beneath her weight.

  “Don’t be so romantic,” he said.

  She felt his smile. Kissed his cheek. “I can’t help it.”

  “This isn’t love though,” he said.

  “Well, it’s something. For you, anyway.”

  “What do you mean for me?”

  “If it didn’t matter, you’d be as hard as a baseball bat.”

  “As a tree,” said Jud.

  “Probably an oak.”

  “A giant redwood,” he said.

  Their chuckle shook the bed.

  “Nice springs,” he told her.

  “We’ll see,” she answered.

  “You want me to go to the trailer?”

  “Hell, no.”

  He felt a thousand pounds lighter.

  “Why do you think I can understand you?” asked Jud.

  “When I left Vegas, I was dealing twenty-one. Hated it, like everybody. Park your car in the casino lot, walk that tunnel, eat that damn food, turn the cards. A robot in a factory. Everyone wants out but they can’t say no to the money. Real-world peanuts.”

  “Before that, I was a prostitute.”

  She paused, but Jud said nothing.

  “For about eighteen years—not a street girl. And not somebody who gives it away for three squares and a roof either. High class, high rollers. Couple thousand a date. Big time.”

  In the dark bedroom, Jud felt her breath on his cheek.

  “Does that bother you?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Does it turn you on?”

  “No,” he said.

  She kissed him.

  “You are a good man.”

  “So,” she said, settling back down on his chest, “even before I knew what you are, I could tell who you were. I know about being a spy. And I figure, a spy knows about being me.”

  Her hair smelled warm and good and real.

  “Tired?” she asked.

  “My boss works the shit out of me,” he said.

  “You’ve got a lot to work out.”

  After they laughed, she fluffed the pillows, pulled up the covers, and settled back down in his arms.

  “You don’t have to talk,” she said.

  “Do I have to listen?”

  “Damn right!” She poked him. “But not now. Tonight it’s okay to just lay here, to just drift.”

  She sighed and breathed easy. Slid into a gentle sleep, her weight settling off Jud to the mattress, her breath warm on his flesh. He wondered if she’d snore. The house groaned. How well will I learn the sighs of this home? wondered Jud. A windowpane rattled in the kitchen. The front door creaked, but he knew the lock was engaged. The muscles in his legs and back relaxed. A coyote howled in the desert night. As he lay there, Jud floated along the border of dreams and slumber with memories of Iran….

  One brisk morning in November 1970, as part of a classified mission code-named DESERT LAKE, Jud and eighty-six other Special Forces soldiers parachuted into the Tehran airport. The Shah of Iran was America’s favorite and most jealously courted dictator. His country was rich in oil and shared a border with the Soviet Union. The CIA organized the 1953 coup that put the Shah in power and trained his Savak secret police. Savak once told the Shah about a teacher from Tabriz who used vulgarity while criticizing the Shah. The Shah had a private zoo. He jeered while his men threw the screaming teacher into a compound of hungry lions.

  DESERT LAKE was a training mission, with the Green Berets scheduled to teach the Shah’s army counterrevolutionary warfare and secret operations. The mock airborne assault by the arriving American trainers was officially designed to show the assembled Iranian officers the vulnerability of their capital’s airport and unofficially designed to impress the hell out of the assembled Third World Arabs with the United States Army’s might.

  Jud joined the training team at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the night the soldiers boarded the planes for the Middle East. The other eighty-six soldiers had been working together for eight weeks. Jud told troopers that his name was Harris and he was a last-minute administrative aide detailed to the team’s commander.

  “Just a butt boy,” Jud said, “along for the ride.”

  DESERT LAKE’s paratroopers jumped on schedule, eighty-seven canopies floating down to a city cupped in a bowl of snowcapped mountains. The concept of the paratrooper demonstration was political and psychological gamesmanship; the reality of the maneuver dropped to the airport tarmac through vicious crosswinds. An acceptable rate of jump injuries for airborne assaults in the sand dunes of North Carolina was 1 percent of the paratroopers injured. That morning in Tehran, the crosswinds twirled the dropping soldiers like puppets. Eighteen of the soldiers—more than 20 percent—crashed to the ground out of control: two of them broke their legs, one broke an arm. The others suffered sprained ankles, wrenched backs, severe bruises, and concussions.

  Watching from the sidelines, the ranking U.S. military adviser didn’t need to read the after-action report to know that the assault was a debacle. He turned to the Iranian general beside him, grinned, and said, “On target, on time.” And stuck out his hand for a congratulatory shake.

  All around Jud, paratroopers were reeling in their chutes, checking their gear, helping their injured comrades toward the waiting trucks.

  An unmarked jeep driven by a blond man pulled up to the tarmac. The driver wore a sports jacket and black-hole sunglasses.

  “Fuck me,” muttered Jud when he saw the driver.

  Jud dumped his chute and jump gear in the back of a truck, picked up his pack, and walked toward the jeep.

  “Where the hell are you going?” yelled a paratrooper.

  “Shut up, soldier!” said the Green Berets’ CO.

  When Jud was ten feet from the jeep, the driver nodded toward the injury-riddled team, the civilian airport’s jetliners from fifty countries (including the Soviet Union), the terminal where camera-toting tourists were watching from behind lines of blue jumpsuited airport personnel and uniformed Iranian soldiers: “Crazy way to sneak in-country.”

  “You should have heard the other ideas.” Jud tossed his pack into the jeep. “This way, I’m not on any personnel rosters.”

  “What else is new?” The blond man in sunglasses drove through the airport exit and onto the highway toward the city.

  “Been on any whorehouse roofs lately, Monterastelli?” said Jud, ignoring the driver’s status as a superior officer.

  “Call me Art.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Anybody from the Company talk to you? Notice you?”

  Art steered the jeep off the highway to a construction site where steel girders dangled from lifeless cranes. No one watched as the jeep parked next to a Ford sedan. A locked steamer trunk filled the backseat of the Ford.

  “The whole city saw us drop in,” said Jud.

  “Blue-collar green beanies,” answered Art. “The boys from Yale know about DESERT LAKE. No big deal. No CIA reps were in the stands. Maybe some of the Iranians whisper in the Company ear, but even if they noticed me pick you up, they don’t know shit.”

  The two men transferred to the Ford. Jud tossed his pack ne
xt to the steamer trunk. Art drove back to the highway.

  “You’ve been busy since Laos,” said Art. “Those outside lock men you studied with: will there be any problem with them?”

  “No. They think I’m CIA.”

  “Are you?” asked Art.

  “Sure,” said Jud. And he smiled.

  “Don’t fuck with the program, soldier,” said Art. “And don’t ever fuck with me.”

  The Ford rolled under an ostentatious arch built over the highway by the Shah that offended the country’s devout Moslems.

  “Why me?” said Jud.

  “They asked for you.”

  “Who gave them my name?”

  “Doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “How’s your Farsi?” asked Art.

  “Sixteen weeks at the Defense language school. I can get directions to the piss hole.”

  Art drove to an underground parking garage. At the entrance, a man in a suit nodded to the Ford. A black Mercedes with smoked-glass windows was parked against the far wall. As the Ford approached, the Mercedes’s engine turned on. An olive-skinned gorilla in a suit climbed out of the front. Art stopped the Ford. The gorilla opened the Mercedes’s back door.

  “Give ’em hell,” said Art.

  Jud climbed into the smoked-glass sedan. The gorilla shut the door behind him, lumbered over to the Ford. Art kept his hands on the steering wheel. The Iranian’s face was impassive as he lifted the steamer truck from the Ford. The boot of the Mercedes popped open like an alligator’s mouth. The car sank lower on its shocks when the gorilla put his load in its trunk.

  The Mercedes left the garage first. Through the smoked windows, Jud watched his lifeline case officer keep his sunglassed gaze on the empty garage wall; watched Art disappear.

  They drove Jud through Tehran for an hour. The streets became more winding. A herd of sheep headed toward the bazaar stopped traffic. The Mercedes’s driver blew his horn, cursed at the drab-clothed peasant herdsman, who ducked his head and scurried behind his errant flock. The scent of dust, exhaust, and animal dung filled the car. In this neighborhood, men wore Arab robes. Women veiled themselves with chadors. Pedestrians averted their eyes as the smoked-glass sedan rumbled past.

  An ancient mudlike wall loomed ahead where the road split. Twenty feet high, the solid wall sealed off an entire block.

  Half a dozen grizzled men in a mix of Arab garb and faded khakis guarded a huge wooden gate in the wall. The guards carried World War II vintage rifles and shuffled with the sullen ennui of irregular troops. When they saw the Mercedes, they scurried into action. Barking orders and laying hold of rusted iron and worn rope handles, they muscled the gate open.

  The Mercedes drove into another world.

  The wall surrounded a sculptured garden of trees and flowering plants, sprinklers hissing precious water onto immaculate lawns. White swans glided across the rippling surface of a one-hundred-foot-long mosaic-tiled reflecting pool. On each side of the pool was a modern two-story barracks and headquarterslike building. The roofs of the barracks bristled with antennae. On the far side of the water stood a white-columned, Persian mansion.

  Trim young men wearing Western suits and Ray • Ban sunglasses patrolled the grounds. They carried slung Israeli Uzi machine guns, and their Italian shoes were spotless.

  Jud’s driver parked beside half a dozen other Mercedes sedans, three Iranian military jeeps, two trucks, and a Porsche.

  A man in a white tunic opened the car door for Jud and bowed him into cool, clean sunlight.

  “Please,” said the servant in white, “may I direct you?”

  Jud followed the servant along a white pebble patch beside the pool. The swans paid them no mind. In his green beret, sweaty fatigues, and dusty jump boots, Jud felt like the wrong package delivered to the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The servant led Jud into the mansion. They walked over silk Persian rugs, went upstairs to a reception room with windows overlooking the reflecting pool. High-backed chairs surrounded a table covered with bowls of fruit, platters of smoked meats, dishes of caviar. One end of the table held a silver coffee service and china cups, while ice buckets of champagne and wine sat at the other end. A selection of hard liquor waited on the sideboard.

  The servant pulled a chair out from the table.

  “If yourself must be relieved after a long journey,” said the man in white, “the door in the wall is to a closet of water.”

  Then they left him alone.

  For an hour and twenty minutes.

  He sat in the chair. Stared at the banquet. Touched nothing.

  Double doors flew open and six men bustled into the room. Leading the pack was an aquiline-faced man in a tan Pierre Cardin suit, a pink shirt, and a silk tie. His black hair swept back from a high forehead.

  “How are you? How good of you to come!” called out the man as he circled the table, hand held out to a standing Jud.

  The rest of the pack stayed on the far side of the table.

  “Sit down. I shall call you Jud, and you must call me Alexi. General this and sergeant that would be awkward among friends. We are all friends here, aren’t we?”

  “Yes,” said Jud, sitting when their handshake ended.

  Alexi pulled out the chair next to Jud. He nodded to the men across the table from them, who then pulled out chairs.

  “Are you hungry?” asked Alexi. “Try some fruit.”

  The host bit into a red apple. “Delicious. All the way from Washington State.”

  “Nice place,” Jud told Alexi.

  “I designed it myself—one’s home and one’s office should capture one’s spirit. I have heard so much about you.”

  “From who?”

  “Mutual friends. What is important is that our countries remain staunch allies. His Excellency the Shah and I discussed that just last night. We were together. Quite late.”

  “Yes,” said Jud.

  “Our governments are alike. Powerful nations with dangerous enemies. But your country has many more complications. So many more competing interests. Here we are all unified under His Excellency’s grace.

  “You are the only American ever allowed in here.”

  “I’m honored,” said Jud.

  “Your CIA thinks of Savak as its child. Such love does exist between us. But a child grows up. The father should help the son—yet respect his independence. Your CIA treats us as the children we are not. They have an observation post, telescopic cameras aimed at my gate!”

  “No!”

  “Don’t worry: the car windows are smoked and my wall is high. Your nonexistence serves everyone’s needs and the greater good of diplomacy. I understand how the bureaucracies in a country as complex as yours are forced to compete for the necessity of fruitful corresponding relationships.”

  “With, for instance, Savak.”

  “Of course, we all serve the same ends.”

  “Of course,” said Jud.

  “Which is why we agreed to help your people with a task and, in return, allowed them to give you to us.”

  “We are all very grateful,” said Jud.

  “Let me show you something.”

  Alexi hurried from the room with Jud at his side, his silent staff trotting in their wake. When the entourage reached the courtyard, the guards whirled to scan the wall, their Uzis ready. Alexi led his parade into a large briefing room on the ground floor of a barracks. Stacked doors and piles of unopened boxes sat against one wall. The boxes contained dozens of varieties of locks and more than twenty different alarm systems.

  All made in America.

  “Ready for you to begin,” said Alexi. “However, a crisis has arisen. One that can only be solved by a person with the abilities your people assure us Jud Stuart possesses.”

  “Let me help you as best I can,” volunteered Jud. There wasn’t supposed to be a test.

  Alexi led Jud to an office in the basement of the other barracks. The personnel stood at attention as Alexi swept through the crowded
outer room to a closed and guarded door.

  The windowless inner office contained a desk with a creaky chair, a battered manual typewriter, a worn leather couch. Files were scattered on the desk, its drawers were ajar. On the tile floor between the desk and the door was a dark stain.

  A solid steel panel four feet wide and seven feet tall loomed in one wall. A keyhole of a kind Jud had never seen was the only break in the steel’s smooth surface.

  “A Jew built this years ago,” said Alexi. He frowned. “You are not a Jew, are you? You do not smell like one.”

  “No,” answered Jud.

  “Pity. Those people.” His lips were grim. “The man who had this office was a most trusted servant of the Shah. He guarded sensitive matters—nothing of American’s concern. He had custody of the sole key for this safe. Soviet spies took it.”

  “No!” said Jud.

  “Yes. The safe must be opened. Our technicians will not guarantee the safety of any papers inside if they burn through. There is no one who can … ‘pick’ is the word?”

  “‘Manipulate’ is better,” said Jud.

  “Open the lock. You will do this for us. Before our other arrangement. Before we help you. Now.”

  “Where is the man who had the key?” asked Jud.

  “Unavailable,” said Alexi.

  Nothing stirred in the basement room for a minute.

  “If I do this,” Jud finally said, “I must work alone and undisturbed, or I won’t succeed.” He shrugged. “Concentration.”

  “The contents of that safe—”

  “Will otherwise remain locked up forever.”

  Alexi hesitated. Ordered Jud to unlock the steamer trunk. Tools lined the walls of the trunk. A bulging green duffel bag secured with a padlock filled most of the space.