He has dark eyes, black hair, olive skin, a big nose, and he’s dressed like an Iranian businessman, in a dark suit with a nice white shirt, the collar left open, no tie—ties are viewed as Western and frowned upon.
Nasrin clutches her small purse at her waist. If that man is an American, I’m Queen of Persia.
This is a mistake. I should go. She doesn’t move toward the door, though. Her throat tightens, and tears cloud her vision. What in the world will she do if she leaves now? She’ll never get another chance to escape like this one. Not ever.
Pressure in her bladder builds urgently. Is the Iranian-looking man actually one of the guards her husband hires to follow her daily? She thought she knew all those apes. Doesn’t she…? But maybe Raham somehow discovered her plans and now has sent a new man to trick her into giving herself away?
But how? HOW could Raham have found out what she’s up to? She’s been so careful! A week ago, when she went to the British embassy, she made sure to tell her husband—casually over dinner later—that she wants to take a trip to England with him. Raham couldn’t possibly know that she talked to a polite MI6 agent instead.
Could he?
Unless…did Raham have spies inside the building, men who saw her telling the agent that she has vital information for the United States, saw her begging the agent to arrange a meeting for her with a person from the US? At the time, she thought the MI6 agent hadn’t believed her. He was so blandly courteous during their meeting.
Then a week later, she was contacted.
A young Iranian woman came up to Nasrin at the market and asked about making āsh-e anār soup. “Can you please say if these yellow split peas are fresh?”
When Nasrin draws near, the woman tells her that tomorrow morning at ten o’clock she needs go to the Tehran Peace Museum located at the northern gate of Park-e Shahr. She should make sure to wear a light blue head covering.
At first Nasrin can only blink in confusion—the woman is speaking in such a friendly, chit-chatty manner.
“In the room of the poison gas victims,” the woman goes on, still very casual, “a man will ask you if you know of any good teahouses nearby.” The woman smiles calmly, then departs, leaving Nasrin with a palm full of split peas, just suspended, outthrust in the air, and an open mouth.
And a decision to make.
Should she go through with it?
Well, here she is. She’s come…but idiotically. She’s only fifteen years old! How can she think she has a chance against powers so much greater than hers? She’s going to end up severely punished.
Or dead.
A shudder runs up her spine, and her heart claps like an unhinged bell. She never would’ve thought her ancient husband was capable of hurting anyone…until a week ago, when she saw him in his study with the bearded man, and discovered that human life means nothing to Raham.
Nasrin whips her head around as a group of elementary school children on a class trip ramble into the poison gas room. She blushes. Holy Allah, she’s so jumpy! Well, she’s no spy…which is an even bigger reason for her to GO.
The school teacher shoos the children away from the graphic photographs almost immediately.
Nasrin can easily walk out with them…
But the Iranian businessman moves first, putting himself between her and the door, blocking her exit.
No, no, no. Her pulse leaps and beats at the veins in her wrist.
The man clasps his hands behind his back and tilts his chin up, studying the uppermost pictures on the museum wall. Or pretending to.
“Sobh bekheir,” he greets Nasrin quietly. Good morning.
He doesn’t look at her when he speaks, respecting custom: an Iranian woman shouldn’t talk to a man not her husband or family.
“Do you know of any good teahouses nearby?” he asks her in perfect Persian.
It’s the code sentence!
Nasrin stands in full arrest. Her heart stops—literally stops for a beat or two, until a smothering sensation in her lungs pushes her body to function anyway. She gasps for breath.
The high-pitched voices of the school children fade off.
The man purses his lips and squints at a picture in front on him. “You need to perfect the art of looking innocent, Mrs. Behzadi.” Then he adds something in English.
She doesn’t understand him—only one word: “present,” which she remembers from an English-language Christmas special she and her family watched last year on television with their illegal satellite dish. All of them were fascinated by the Christian ritual.
She studies English in school, of course. It’s required. But she doesn’t like it and never tries. There is one thing she understands about what the Iranian man just said, though. His rapid, easygoing American accent makes it clear English is a mother tongue.
She fingers the toggle closure on her purse. Is he really a CIA agent, then?
After a beat of silence, the Iranian man switches back to Persian, repeating himself, “The way you’re conducting yourself at present won’t do.”
She drops her eyes. He’s right. She may be fifteen, but she can’t act like a silly child if she wants to save herself. She inhales a shaky breath, then another one, deeper, calmer.
“I can ensure your safety,” he murmurs.
Pressure is a physical weight on her chest. Can he?
“It’s my understanding that you’re seeking asylum in the United States.”
Still peering at her shoes, she bites her bottom lip. That’s the gold-leaf prize, isn’t it? Freedom. Safety. Escape from…
Him.
From what he does to her every night.
“Sweet flower…sweet flower…”
Nasrin squeezes her eyes shut, her lashes quivering against her cheeks. The experience comes back to her, but as half-memories, because the act is always thrust upon her in the pitch dark. She has no image of it. She can only feel Raham’s body on top of her and hear his harsh, rapid breathing in her ear. “Sweet flower…sweet flower…” The same two words, over and over, as he moans and sweats and clumps his hips up and down.
A foul taste floods her mouth, like she’s just eaten a piece of spoiled lamb. She passes a hand over her face. Why does it bother her so much? She’s a horrible wife, that’s why—a horrible Muslim…a horrible person! It doesn’t matter that Raham is older than she is. He treats her nicely. She should ignore everything she’s recently learned about him and try harder to like him.
“Am I mistaken?” the man inquires blandly.
She pauses only briefly. “No, sir, you’re not mistaken.” She squeezes the toggle on her purse hard enough to dent her fingers. Right or wrong, she does want to escape Raham. So much… “I seek asylum,” she croaks out and braces herself for her punishment.
But the man only says, “Papers? I was told you have proof.”
She finally lifts her head and looks at the man who’s supposed to be her clandestine liaison. It’s the first time their eyes meet, and…
Relief is a warm wash of bathwater through her veins. She can tell he’s kind and honest. He is everything he’s supposed to be. “How shall I give them to you?” she breathes.
One corner of his mouth twitches. “Hand them to me, I would think. There is no one here.”
She scans the room even as she pries open the toggle clasp on her purse. Pulling out two sheets of paper, neatly folded, she gives them to him—low down by her thigh, to be safe.
He takes them, opens them, reads. After a moment, he utters something in English—an invocation to God by the sound of it. “Where are the rest of the pages?”
“I have them,” she says. “And they are much worse than those. I’ll give them all to you once I’m safely out of Iran.” The sentence is an earthquake. Her tongue stiffens. Fleeing to America means she’ll never see her family again, not her sister or father or mother…and even though she’s recently cut off her relationship with her mother, she never imagined it would be forever.
The CIA agent opens
his mouth to speak to her, but—
A shout comes from the doorway of the museum. “Hey!”
Nasrin swings around, gasping.
The shout blasted again, “HEY—!”
Chapter Nine
Present time
Aid station run by International Humanitarian Medical Relief, Northern Pakistan
Dr. Farrin Barr surfaced from the dream like a snorkeler who dove too deep and had been underwater too long—sitting up suddenly in bed and gulping for air, her palm pressed to her flailing heart.
Something’s wrong.
She panned around muzzily, but everything appeared to be in order.
The tent was sparsely furnished, like every other tent she’d lived in at the aid stations she commanded for International Humanitarian Medical Relief during her two-year career with them. There was a small desk with a chair, a lamp table set next to a double-sized bed, and a single bookcase with four shelves populated by books, a picture of her adoptive parents, medical charts, and on the top shelf, the lock box containing the aid station’s one source of communication: an encrypted satellite phone.
The canvas walls glowed with afternoon sunlight, the relentless beating of the sun cooking the interior into an arid broil. April in Pakistan wasn’t exactly a month of mild springtime weather. Many days saw the mercury rising into the high eighties. The walls were desert-colored bland, but she tried to spruce up her living space by hanging the most colorful reprints of some of her favorite artists: Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saints-Maries-de-la-Mer by Vincent Van Gogh, with its bold yellows and blues; the vivid explosion of lavender flowers in The Artist’s Garden at Giverny by Claude Monet; Edgar Degas’ spritely Four Ballerinas on the Stage; and the lone, colorfully garbed woman in blue, Emilie Floege, by Gustave Klimt. Farrin was consistently drawn to this print, the woman in it aloof and proud, yet vulnerable. Like her mother…her real Iranian mother.
Scooting to the edge of the mattress, Farrin massaged her temples with the first two fingers of each hand. Strange emotions sat with her: uncertainty, anxiety, and a vague dread. Surely malingerers from her dream. Nothing to worry over, but…
Something felt wrong.
She checked the clock on the lamp table. Thirteen hundred hours. Odd.
She’d lain down at noon to rest, her brain on the verge of collapse from a mammoth headache, no doubt the result of the enormous stress she’d been under the past several days. A week ago a newspaper reporter and a US Navy helicopter pilot, plus his crew, showed up at her aid station to work some super-secret mission. Farrin wasn’t given any particulars about the mission, but whatever it was, it culminated in more helicopters showing up here yesterday, inconveniently arriving just as an Indian-Pakistani conflict turned her outfit into a shooting gallery.
Following IHMR protocol, Farrin took immediate action to evacuate—who knew if her aid station was about to be overrun? The first people to go were her IHMR staff: a secretary, supply administrator, anesthesiologist, and two cooks. Farrin arranged for them to fly to IHMR European headquarters in Germany. She’d also tried to shoo her Pakistani laundryman back to his local home, but he refused to go, claiming he felt safer here, despite this aid station being close to a war-torn border.
Late this morning she’d cleared out the last extraneous people—the newspaper reporter and her Navy corpsman, Kitty Hart—right after making a phone call to a doctor she knew at the Bagram trauma hospital in Afghanistan. She’d found out through Mike that two out of the six helicopters on the super-secret mission were shot down. She’d known about one, having treated a casualty from the crash—the newspaper reporter—while the other casualty, the Navy pilot, continued on to Bagram. But she hadn’t known about the other crash. Mike told her that everyone had been killed, except for two men who were missing, but also presumed dead.
Terrorist activity was reported high in the area, which confirmed that her decision to evacuate had been a good one. Her ghost town of an aid station now consisted only of one steadfast laundryman, about half a dozen Pakistani guardsmen, and over a dozen patients in her post-op ward, most of whom were Pakistani locals injured in the border war raging between Pakistan and India—and the very reason IHMR had erected an aid station here. There was one American patient, a Navy pilot who took a few shards of glass to his eye during yesterday’s conflict. He was stable—everyone was—and Farrin could handle their upkeep on her own for the next few days. Better the extra work than risk anyone under her command being hurt.
Once the evacuation was complete, she ordered the front gate locked—giving instructions to the guards not to allow anyone in or out without first checking with her—then gone to her tent for a nap. She’d only slept for an hour, though, which was the odd part. Usually when she took a nap, she slept for two or three. Something had awakened her, but she couldn’t figure—
“HEY!”
She nearly jumped off her bed in abject reaction. Holy Allah have mercy…
The shout had come from the direction of the main gate, a bit muffled by distance, but very real. Not a dream.
And again, “HEY!”
She expelled a sharp breath. Why wasn’t her Pakistani guard dealing with whoever was out there? She rose quickly and stomped into her boots. She’d slept in her clothes, so she was already dressed in tan cargo pants and a dark green T-shirt, the armpits unfortunately stained with sweat.
Banging out of her tent, she took off up the path splitting her camp in two, about half a dozen tents on one side, the same number on the other. Her fingers flying, she braided her long black hair as she passed the larger tents used for the dining hall, supply, the Pakistani guards’ barracks, the bathroom, and the showers. The smaller tents serving as accommodations for the rest of the staff were now behind her.
Cutting through a neat circle of dirt, she skirted a flagpole flying the IHMR logo: a caduceus—the typical symbol for medicine, with two snakes winding around a winged staff—and two clasped hands, one light, one dark, above the caduceus. Exiting the circle, she aimed her steps onto the road leading to the front gate, putting the main medical tent off her left shoulder.
“HEY!” a man’s voice shouted. “Anybody here?!”
“Yes!” She tied off her braid with a band saved around her wrist. “I’m Dr. Farrin Barr.” She started to jog forward, then the better side of caution brought her up short.
The aid station’s gate was no more than a set of chain-link double doors held closed by a wire cable and a padlock. The hinges of the doors were secured to metal poles, and the poles were attached to huge bundles of baling wire that made up the rest of the perimeter fence. Through such a transparent barrier, the two men were easy to see. They were both very large, and if either one of them had a single spot on their bodies not covered with dirt, she couldn’t find it.
Even as dirty as they were, it was clear they were military. The taller one was dressed in the beige-colored coveralls pilots wore, and the shorter, more muscular one was in cargo-style pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt, both of which were adorned with a pattern of desert camouflage, visible through the dirt here and there. The men each wore packs and carried rifles.
“Jesus, about time,” the taller one complained. He had one arm around his companion and was clearly holding him up. “I’ve been out here shouting for five minutes. I was about to go to work picking the lock.”
“I’m sorry. My guardsmen should be manning this gate.” She took another few steps forward and peered inside the ten-by-ten wooden structure that functioned as a sentry shack. Empty. She returned her attention to the two soldiers, focusing on the shorter one, who was sagging against the tall man. “What’s wrong with your friend?”
“He’s been shot three times.”
“Three times?” How was the poor man even upright?
“Our helicopter sustained an RPG hit and crashed,” the tall one explained. “We took fire on the ground during our escape. We’ve been traveling by foot all night.”
Holy Allah, these
were the two men Mike had told her were missing and presumed dead. Kitty Hart’s ex-boyfriend had to be the injured man—since the other one was obviously a pilot, and Kitty’s ex was a SEAL. Farrin would have to get word to the USNS Mercy, where Kitty had returned, to let her know her ex-boyfriend was okay.
If they really were who they claimed to be.
Farrin set her hand on the doorframe of the sentry shack and examined the two again. Their quality-made uniforms looked like American military, but clothing could be faked. And maybe these men were purposely covered in dirt to hide skin tones that were actually swarthy.
“Is there a problem?” the tall one asked.
“I’m sorry, but who did you say you are?”
“I’m Lieutenant Commander Jason Vanderby, and this”—the tall one nodded at his injured friend—“is Petty Officer Shane Madden. We’re United States Navy.”
Those were the names of the missing men Mike told her about. Farrin glanced at the name tag on the left side of the commander’s chest: LCDR Jason Vanderby. According to the patch on the right side of his chest, he was a “Black Knight,” stationed out of HSC-414 in San Diego.
Biting the inside of her cheek, she racked her brain for some other question to ask these men that would require them to prove their identity. Name, rank, and serial number? Silly. That was from old movies. Plus, Commander Vanderby had already told her the first two, and she didn’t see how the third—serial number—would help her any more than name and rank had.
“Maybe,” the SEAL now spoke, his voice garbled and low, “you should recite the Pledge of Allegiance for her, Vanderby, or sing ‘America the Beautiful?’”
Farrin looked at the injured SEAL. The pain in his expression appeared real, not fake. Moreover, they both spoke perfect American English, something non-native speakers wouldn’t be able to accomplish. She should know.
The commander freed a drawn-out breath. “Sure,” he said, his eyes on her. He sounded impatient and tired. He looked it, too. “Whatever it takes to get Shane here some medical help.”
Wings of Gold Series Page 57