“It is our pleasure, Mr. Johnson. I apologize for your reception, but Persians are a passionate people. Especially when we feel we are in a new world. But the truth is, the new world is really just the old world we know so well. Yet occasionally some event or realization is so strange and awful it breaks through our everydayness, and people don’t know how to behave. And then disagreements occur.” He waved vaguely to the windows, acknowledging the events outside. The turnip sighed.
“In the end, all passion fades; we get old and tired.” Here he pointed to himself and touched his white beard. “But you’re still young, like our people, and we must try to turn our sour days to . . . sour cream?” He indulged a smile, “Do you not have a similar saying?”
Johnson grinned and moved his elbow. “Indeed, we say, turning lemons into lemonade.”
At which point His Eminence Moslemeen Sayyed laughed and clapped his hands.
“Precisely!”
A tray of lemonade was brought as if from nowhere. The security men filled glasses. At an un-translated word from His Eminence, the security men poured themselves glasses as well, and everyone drank. Johnson savored it, as sweet and tart as life itself. Then His Eminence began to speak in earnest.
“I am very glad you didn’t give up or change your words as so many did when these larger troubles began. So many lost their bearings with regret and confusion, but not you. It was as though the terror in our world made you see clearer, and the truth of this rose up from your heart and soul for everyone to see.”
“You’re very kind, Eminence.”
The graybeard dismissed the remark with an easy shrug.
“Hardly. Kindness is not one of my vices. I leave that to women and the children of the West. Let them bathe in kindness. It is obvious to many people that you have obeyed the stirrings of your heart. I’m here to ask you whether you are prepared to respect our total individuality. And by that I mean Persia. By that I mean Iran. I’m here to ask you whether you are fighting for ethical norms, the relativism of civilizations, the complex mosaic of the world that can never be resolved. I’m here to ask you whether you intend to use your gift once more.”
Peter Johnson put down his half glass of lemonade.
“It’s what I do, Eminence. That’s what I do.”
The blue eyes of the turbaned man stared into him, with the hidden question of Really? shimmering below the surface. And so Johnson drove the nail home.
“I’m not here to uphold norms of any kind. I’m not here to answer questions or resolve problems. I’m here to raise questions that can’t be answered, pose problems that beg no easy solution. And demand answers only from those who have the power to push a button and end the world.”
This last bit seemed to finally satisfy the graybeard turnip in the turban; he glanced silently at Sheik Kutmar, an unspoken command.
“Well, then you should start right now, Mr. Johnson,” the Sheik told him. “Jazril Mahout and his crew were asked to stand by, and so the Al Jazeera people are here now. It’s high time he took you out into the field. That is why you’re here, after all.”
Yep, Johnson thought. That’s exactly why I’m here. But instead he merely said, “What of my luggage and laptop and so on?”
Sheik Kutmar waved off his concern.
“The hotel will be notified. We’ll send everything along.”
Johnson’s heart leapt. And now he knew for certain they were going to give him all the lemons he could handle.
CHAPTER TEN
Kodak Moments
The road to Lake Kavir-o-Namak in the province of Khorasan ran some four hundred miles due east and then south of the capital across a salt desert, a whitish crystalline pan that passed for a “lake” maybe a millennium ago. Some two hundred miles east of Tehran the highway was wide, blindingly sunny, and, at noon, nearly empty. Dun-colored hills stretched off into the horizon; a grove of fig trees stood near a rocky stream that ran by the highway. A shepherd led his goats to the water’s edge. The Jazz Man and the cab driver stopped for midday prayer on the road’s shoulder. The minivan carrying the camera crew pulled up behind. Then all the men got out, put down prayer mats, and faced southwest.
When Johnson balked at joining them on a prayer rug, the Al Jazeera man, Jazril, gave him a withering look. For some long moments the men knelt in prayer bowing and speaking as one. At last, they finished with a final “Akbar.” They stood and rolled up their mats, and everyone got back in their respective cars. When the taxi was rolling along the road once more, Jazril turned to him and said mildly, “Mr. Johnson, be warned. This behavior will not be acceptable when we reach the facility at Gonabad. Dr. Yahdzi is a very pious man.”
The facility at Gonabad! Would that they had reached it already! Johnson’s irritation faded to amazement the deeper they drove east and then finally when they turned south toward the great lake. Fields of saffron flowers surrounded the road on either side, a magical carpet of pale violet petals stretching mile after mile, lazily nodding their heads in the hot breeze. The scent of saffron filled the air, making Johnson think of grilled shrimp or chicken turning that beautiful shade of yellow as the silken threads melted into the meat.
They reached the facility at about four in the afternoon. The guards at the checkpoint looked at the papers Jazril handed over and then got on the guardhouse telephone for a few moments. Regular Army? Johnson didn’t recognize the regimental chevrons. A soldier waved them through, and they drove slowly past the open water cisterns toward a cluster of buildings. The place was a fortress. Barracks, guard towers, anti-aircraft emplacements with flak guns. Johnson saw camouflage netting on the side of a low hill, a surface-to-air missile battery. With what looked like a Chinese crew.
But the four gorilla-faced guards at the facility entrance were pure Persian. In an adjoining room he was strip-searched. He’d expected this. Then the body cavities, and not by anybody half as nice as his Tehran doctor. No one spoke a word. Finally, they marched him down a flight of utility stairs and round long hallways. Down more sets of stairs into the subbasement. Around more corners until he was thoroughly lost. The guards opened a pair of double doors and left them open throughout the interview.
Beyond lay Yahdzi’s office. Dr. Ramses Pahlevi Yahdzi of the University of Isfahan. The office looked nothing like the one in Banquo and Wallets’ charade. The place was filled top to bottom with servers and computer towers. The physicist glanced from his desk, circles under his eyes beneath his spectacles. With his lab coat rumpled, he looked as if he’d slept down there for a month.
“They say you’ve come to kill me,” he remarked, nodding in the direction of the guards. Johnson started despite himself. “That you have photos of me on the walls of your study at home.” The doctor shrugged to himself sadly. “How anyone could discover that, I wouldn’t know.” The only objects on the professor’s desk besides a PC monitor were family photos. “Here, come see my pictures,” he said to Johnson, motioning to him to come behind his desk.
One of the murder scenarios from Banquo’s office came to Johnson, and he wondered in a panic: Was this it? This his chance? Why so fast? How about the gun? Or was there some other weapon he hadn’t noticed? Was this the occasion for him to use his bare hands? The thought nauseated him. Worst of all, the two guards had retreated back down the hall and now sat at a metal desk drinking tea and reading magazines. The signal?
And then time slowed down as in a car crash, an adrenalin-fueled moment-by-moment slide show, as if he were inhabiting one of those picture flipbooks that kids fan through with slightly different pictures to create the illusion of motion: he saw the tiny wiry hairs on the tip of Yahdzi’s nose and the squiggly red lines across the whites of his eyes.
When he blinked, the back of his eyelids flashed blood red. A rush of overwhelming failure washed over him: he didn’t know what to do. Didn’t have a clue. After all he’d been through, he was just going to exchange pleasantries, admire the man’s photos, and studiously ignore the man himself,
the engine of radical Islam’s greatest leap forward since—when? Since Mohammed conquered Mecca? Since the Muslims took Spain? Since the Ikhwan rampaged through Saudi Arabia, creating the predicate for a Wahhabi petro-state? So Johnson stood on the precipice, staring into irrelevancy, perfectly useless to all and sundry. His grand plan? Sit on his thumb, admire the snaps, and have a cup of tea.
He followed Yahdzi’s hand, dark creases across the pink-mocha palm, directing him toward the pictures. Each one leapt at him in a different way, telling a slightly different story, each adding to the previous:
First a black-and-white: Yahdzi and wife as a young couple. Yahdzi in a suit jacket, no tie. Smiling broadly in more carefree times. A tall slender woman stood beside him. She had an alluring, self-possessed gaze, elegant and pretty—a woman, indeed. Husband and wife, their eyes full of hope and anticipation at the wonderful future that lay ahead of them: those magical plans people make when all they see is clear skies to the horizon.
Next: Yahdzi and wife at the seaside with a new addition—a three-year-old girl holding one of her parents’ hands on either side, this picture in the stilted colors of 1970s-era photography. Mama held a baby in her free arm, her eyes a little surprised at how things turned out. Not disappointed but not overjoyed either.
Another: everyone older now, a glossy group portrait. The two daughters, seven and four, rapscallions. The older daughter looking like her mom, everyone sitting close together in a photography studio smiling aggressively for the camera. Happy, prosperous, even blessed.
Still another: A group shot again, everyone about five years older. Standing outside. The background showed a Spartan trailer in a bleak landscape, a house that looked like it was hauled over miles of desert, streaked with dust. Yahdzi’s wife leaned into his shoulder. One of her fingers gripped his forearm. But all those blue skies were long gone over the horizon of her life, hopes and dreams that never seemed to materialize. And you could see as much in the lines around her eyes.
Last of all: just his wife. Standing. Her arms hanging by her sides, hands empty. Inside some sort of scientific facility: concrete walls, cold neon lighting making her olive complexion slightly green. Horror show. She looked unnatural, forced and strained. Johnson was drawn to her eyes again. Gleaming dark brown eyes that faded seamlessly into her pupils. He saw something new there. He saw what he thought was alarm. The road of life had taken an unexpected, irrevocable turn and not for the better. Yes, fear.
Why include this picture of all pictures? Unless it had some point. Unless—in a flash Johnson understood. This man was no fanatic. Jazril the Al Jazeera man was full of it. The professor was a hostage. And terrified . You could see it in the gray pallor of his face. The way he tapped his fingers on the desk. A facial tic blinked at Johnson, and what was really frightening—Yahdzi knew about it. Each time the spasm jerked his face, his fingers as if by instinct began to rise to calm the tic down, knowing all the while it wouldn’t help.
Johnson’s brow furrowed, and his eyes met the professor’s, showing he understood his dilemma. And Professor Yahdzi nodded, acknowledging the fact. Then said matter-of-factly, “They tell me that if my work is not completed on time, my wife and daughters will be terribly disappointed.”
All of Johnson’s panic evaporated. Something in him knew he owed it to this nervous wreck of a man to betray no surprise. Pretending everything was normal would be their bond. Their secret in this strange and awful place. The pretense of strength, almost as good as strength itself. Betray nothing, and you betray no one. Keep my secrets, and I’ll keep yours.
“Thank you for seeing me, Dr. Yahdzi,” Johnson said. “The last thing I’d want is to distract you in any way. Can we make it easier if an assistant showed me around, and I reserved my most important questions for you?”
“I think it’s only proper if I start you off on the right foot. Begin with me. End with me. What happens in between we can let God decide.” Johnson could tell the man meant what he said. But just then he glanced over Johnson’s head, a brief smile crossing his face; someone had come into the office. “Ah, our Between is here already!”
Yahdzi’s assistant was a young woman of about twenty-five, with a sharp nose and cheekbones that couldn’t possibly go any higher, her face complicated, even lovely. Sober and polite, she was the professor’s finest student at the University of Isfahan. Now assigned to him exclusively. Johnson took to her immediately, as she was called, deliciously enough, Yasmine. She followed silently beside him as Professor Yahdzi explained the various features at the Gonabad facility. The Jazz Man’s Al Jazeera film crew stumbled along behind taking some standard setups. In this building, that meant the double row of silver centrifuges under the banks of lights—the whirligigs that spun yellow cake into fissionable gold—as Dr. Yahdzi explained how this particular enrichment would never be pure enough for weapons, but energy and medicine instead. Johnson took notes, while the goons, ever present, hovered nearby. The Revolutionary Guards seemed more concerned about this woman doing a man’s job in the presence of strange men than the physicist showing state secrets or a scribbler taking it all down. And Johnson wondered whether it was always like this for her—in class, in the street, every time she came to work?
When the whole group took a break in the facility’s cafeteria, the goons sat at a table to themselves, while Dr. Yahdzi, one table over, explained how much he had been instructed to show the Western journalist and where they were headed.
“We will be driving west, stops at Yazd, Zarrin Shahr, and north to Zanjan and Tabriz. In this way you can see a good sampling of our facilities—five out of twenty-five sites in a ten-day period. Some, of course, are not as remote as Gonabad, so I can guarantee you better dining,” he said with a wan smile.
He glanced at Yasmine, silently cueing her. “This is a rare privilege for a Westerner,” she said. “Even the IAEA hasn’t inspected the last two sites.” She handed him a glossy folder bulging with paper. “Here are briefing materials about the facilities we will be visiting. I think they will repay careful study.”
Then, from out of a manila folder, Yasmine slid some photos with Farsi captions, the English printed below on taped slips of paper. These were the facilities in question. Johnson flipped the photos over and saw a longer paragraph in Farsi typed on the back.
“Can we get these translated?” he asked Yasmine.
“I will for you,” she replied. “That one says, ‘Tabriz Number 3, built 1998. Fabriqué en France.’ Made in France.”
Johnson glanced at another photo, then flipped it over. But instead of an explanatory paragraph, another photo was taped to the back. Yasmine didn’t want to meet his eye. Nor did Dr. Yahdzi. He fidgeted, staring down at his lap. The second smaller photo showed a New York street scene in fuzzy black-and-white. He recognized it immediately. Abdul’s Delicatessen near his apartment in Brooklyn. The photo showed Giselle leaving through the glass door plastered with stickers advertising the New York Post, Boar’s Head Smoked Turkey, Marlboros, and Copenhagen Mint Snuff. She was beginning to unwrap a pack of cigarettes. It could have been taken yesterday. Johnson recognized the new Prada black techno suit jacket she had just bought. And her haircut was up to date, a short bob. It seemed his two guides felt personally dirtied by all this. While from the goons’ table, one of the men met his eye boldly. A tiny smile crossed his eyes.
Johnson wanted to get up and throw a chair at him. He had never minded people assuming that he had his price—since he did—but he hated threats. They were insulting, premised on his essential cowardice. Although this was a new one. No one had ever threatened Giselle before. And that they would stoop to it—against a supposedly friendly, in-their-back-pocket journalist—told him more than he wanted to know about the medievalists, the supremacists and hacks who ran the show here.
He used to think evil was subtle, alluring even. He had come to realize that, more often than not, it was dumb and ham-handed. Its instrument not some silver-tongued Deceiver but a fanatic wh
ose head was stuffed with idiocies and lies barely controlling his snickers over a threat to an innocent young woman. What was it that Bruce Meyer the lone Righty at that NYU panel said those years ago? “If they didn’t kill you or someone you love, it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
He had another urge to throw that chair. But they’d simply beat him and send him home empty-handed. He wasn’t going to betray any fluster right now, despite a flutter of panic in his chest. He even forced a smile. “You’ve given me a rare privilege, Dr. Yahdzi. And I’m going to take advantage of it the best way I can.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
One of a Thousand Iranian Nights
The whole caravan left late that afternoon. Dr. Yahdzi and Yasmine returned to the lower office to collect some papers and books, but the Professor curiously avoided overloading his briefcase with printed materials, choosing instead to take his family photos off his desk, all of them. An odd gesture, as if he couldn’t bear to be without them.
At the entrance to the facility, the cab was nowhere in sight, and three small vans waited for them. They seemed to be trading up. The Al Jazeera news crew took one van. Jazril, Johnson, Dr. Yahdzi, and Yasmine the second. And six goons from the facility took the third, outfitting themselves from a fourth, large panel van nearby, unloading tents, sleeping bags, kerosene stoves, water, and food lockers. Then arming themselves: AK-47s, flak jackets, sidearms, wireless headsets, and what appeared to be night-vision goggles. What they needed all this hardware for Johnson couldn’t imagine, until Yasmine explained:
“Some nights we will not be staying in houses with beds or in villages with policemen. We want to keep Dr. Yahdzi safe. Their van has the big radio and cell phones.” And then he noticed that yes, their van was outfitted with a satellite dish. Not even the Al Jazeera news crew had that.
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