“What did you think of our briefing materials, Mr. Johnson?” Yasmine asked, pulling his attention back away from the preparations.
“Call me Peter. And sorry—I took a nap instead.” He hoped to elicit some warmth from her. Instead he got something chillier. She wasn’t impressed with him, and he read her eye, which said, Lazy man.
“I didn’t prepare them for my benefit, Mr. Johnson, but for yours. I know what’s in them. If your trip is going to be of any use to us, Mr. Johnson, you should too.” She put a particular emphasis on the honorific ‘ Mr.,’ almost scolding him. And it made him squirm. So maybe his time would have been better spent during that stolen hour trying to snooze on the couch in Yahdzi’s office.
In true Peter Johnson style he’d taken the Professor’s offer to lie down for a spell like a duck to water. But his racing mind didn’t let him sleep; the snapshot of Giselle was as real with his eyes closed as it had been when he had been holding it in his hands. He thought of Yahdzi and what they had in common—a picture to remind them both of the insidiousness of a regime willing to turn a man’s most intimate ties of blood and marriage against him, to make what should be a refuge from this world an instrument of coercion.
They piled into the van under the watchful eyes of their minders, the facility’s goons. The driver and Al Jazeera’s Jazz Man up front. Yahdzi and Yasmine in the next row of seats. Johnson behind them. And another empty row behind. But what struck him were the evil looks he and Professor Yahdzi received when Yasmine entered the van with them. Something visceral from the eyes of the guards, as though the three adults committed some mortal sin that no absolution could possibly put right. And Johnson could guess exactly what. Yasmine covered her body with a chador and behaved, compliant and submissive, but neither Jazril the Jazz Man, Professor Yahdzi, Johnson, nor their driver was one of her relatives. Though higher authorities, like Sheik Kutmar or Gul, might tolerate it in the cause of Johnson producing a favorable story, for the local goons the presence of Yasmine was in itself enough to make her obscene and profane.
One of the guards shouted something in their direction. An insult, or a warning, sounding like, “Asanzan, bahdzan, sagzan.” Spitting the words out in contempt. If Yasmine thought anything, she kept it to herself.
The three vans pulled out of the facility about dusk, as the sun showed them its final red eye and the shadows crawled from building to building. Johnson looked again for the surface-to-air missile batteries. He spotted two more this time. One was off a roadway cut into a hill, where the large green tubes sat on their tractor-trailer launching pads. The whole array carefully camouflaged to be invisible from the air and protected by overhanging rock. The other battery sat on its tractor-trailer backed into a cave. Unless you had your own eyes inside this fortress, you’d never know they were there. And that was the idea.
Johnson, the Professor, Yasmine, and the Jazz Man rode in silence for some time.
“What does sagzan mean?” Johnson finally asked. No one in the van seemed to want to answer him. The driver blew on an opal ring on his left hand, to fog it up with the moisture of his hot breath, then rubbed it against his thigh as if to polish it—clearly some sort of nervous habit. Jazril, the Al Jazeera man, pretended to read something in the failing light. Professor Yahdzi looked down and opened the briefcase on his lap searching for something without any real intention of finding it.
When Yasmine realized none of the men would speak, she answered for them. She turned back toward him. Coldly and calmly:
“Sagzan means ‘dog-woman,’ Mr. Johnson. Bahdzan means ‘bad woman.’ Asanzan means ‘easy woman.’ ” She paused to take a breath, to glance at the two other men in the car with her, then back at Johnson. “The Revolutionary Guards were calling me a whore.”
He suppressed the urge to look into his lap like the others. Instead, he met her eyes and saw in them a brave defiance. A deep reserve of nerve.
“I’m sorry. I should have guessed.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “We can’t all be Scheherazade talking sense into those who have none.”
At this, Jazril rebuked her, and she gave him a rapid-fire response with a few darts of her own. Finally the driver shouted at everyone. Unholstered his pistol and banged it on the steering wheel with one hand. That needed no translation: Shut up! This wasn’t just a driver, but another enforcer.
They all lapsed again into silence.
After a spell, she translated: “I told him, ‘Shut up, Pig-Boy.’ He said—”
But Johnson waved her off, “I get his drift.”
And Professor Yahdzi grunted at the Jazz Man in contempt, clearly siding with Yasmine. Al Jazeera’s Jazril was a pig-boy from a long line of pig-boys. They rode the rest of the way that night in silence.
Sometime during the night, all the vans pulled to the side of the road and shut down so everyone could catch a few hours of sleep. The Revolutionary Guards pitched a single tent some ways off the road, in the desert. One of the goons came forward, hammered on the window, and started shouting. Then furiously pointed at Yasmine. Apparently they wanted her to seclude herself out in the tent for the remainder of the night for decency’s sake. At first Dr. Yahdzi shouted at the man, telling him to go to the devil, but after a few moments as the goon’s face twisted in a gargoyle of rage, Yasmine put the issue to rest, touching the Professor lightly on the forearm.
“It’s all right. I’ll be fine.” And with that she exited the van into the custody of the religious police.
The three hours of sleep passed slowly. Johnson dozed off and on, curled up on his seat, his mind occupied with Yasmine and the insults hurled at her. What must it take to bear such contempt, not to suffer a catastrophic internal loss of confidence? Then, his imagination took over as he drowsed.
Despite himself, he suddenly saw Yasmine’s dark lips speaking words to him, words he couldn’t make out but knew were meant for him alone, enticing him to some delicious moment, shrouded and veiled—but more satisfying than any he ever knew. What Jo von H said of him once in pure admiration, “Peter, you’re a dog through and through.” So true. A quality considerably more plausible before three wives, the downward slope of middle age, and the alcoholic’s inability to focus on the task required even when a young woman was available to focus his mind.
When the vans started their engines at dawn, they caught Johnson in mid-snore with Yasmine sitting beside Yahdzi as she had before.
She looked back at him. Over the back of the seat she held out the briefing materials once more. Thirty solid pages, single spaced in a manila folder. “Please don’t forget about this.” Reality banished his reveries. There were few things Johnson hated more than a nag. He sat there, slowly coming to his senses, rubbed the rheumy white gunk in the corners of his eyes, worked a tongue around a cottony mouth. His joints groaned from being cramped all night. God, how he hated being told what to do. First thing in the morning, or any time. When he took the damn materials from her, the whole bundle fanned into his lap, falling to the car floor with a rush and a slap.
“Christ.”
Yasmine turned away in disgust. The man was hopeless. Johnson sighed in defeat. A nagging harpy lurked somewhere in the heart of womankind; it queered the romance every time. Cheat on him, rob him blind, ignore him—anything but tell him what to do. Over decades, he slowly came to realize you couldn’t achieve real intimacy without give-and-take that included—tragically—being told what to do. Realized too late. Too late for his first marriage, to Jo von H when they were kids. For his second, marrying a classical dancer he thought he would dominate by virtue of his worldliness and a preponderance of knowledge. Giselle’s mother. Françoise turned out to be the worst of all, and he couldn’t help smiling. What a bobcat. Like Mother like Daughter. And even for his third, to the mature and sensible Elizabeth Richards, art curator, who had always told him that, when he died, she—not the others—would be the widow.
Briefing materials, Mr. Peter. Remember? He retrieved
the splayed folder from the floor. Then sat with them in his lap, staring stupidly out the windows. He hated reading in a moving car. Presently they left the desert, and the vans climbed into mountains. Very slow going, as the roads were single lane, barely wide enough for a tractor-trailer with its long turn radius. The air cooled as they followed the road ever upwards, a thousand feet, then two thousand, then three. Pear orchards clinging to the steep hills showed their fruit in the September sun, then thick copses of trees and patches of bare rock, a running mountain stream. A doe and her Bambi gingerly stepped across the rushing water.
The papers in his lap seemed as dull and worthless as pretty much any briefing materials ever stuck under his nose on any junket anywhere in the world. Perhaps man didn’t feel a universal hunger for freedom, liberty, and “All-the-Shrimp-You-Can-Eat Night” at Red Lobster, but he sure as hell felt the all-consuming urge to disseminate propagandistic, barely readable briefing materials. It united every government in the world—liberal capitalist, Afro-kleptocratic, Communist, Islamist, Euro-socialist. The one true God.
Johnson’s eyes began to glaze over—the poorly produced cheap grainy pages, dense Courier type all running together—when he noticed something unusual. A single letter bracketed in faint green ink. He thought he had seen that before, and sure enough, flipping back three pages, he saw another. He flipped ahead and found yet another, then another. He was wide awake now. He stared at the back of Yasmine’s neck, at the all-covering folds of her green chador. Coincidence? The same color green as the pen. She was looking resolutely ahead.
He began to piece the letters together. Flipping ahead frantically now. More letters faintly bracketed. N-O. N-O-C-H. N-O-C-H-O.
NO CHOICE.
Another series spelled out: KILL HIM.
And then another, simply: DO IT.
Johnson’s breath came fast. He thought he was going to have an asthma attack. I-T-S-W.
IT’S WHAT HE W.
Wants?
He was through one side of the folder. There was more; several paper-clipped sections. He moved to the next. P-T-O-Y-O-U. He flipped to the next. Nothing. What the? IT’S WHAT HPTO YOU? IT’S WHAT HE PTYO U? He worked it over and over but could make no sense of it. When he dropped the damn thing earlier did he lose something? Or maybe mixed up the order? He flipped through all the pages, his eyes searching for the faint green ink. Maybe on the backs of the pages? He turned them upside down. He went through from the beginning, making sure he had everything. But there were no other marks. He wanted to reach up and shake Yasmine, demanding, “What about—?”
But what did he want? The message was obvious.
YOU MUST.
NO CHOICE.
KILL HIM.
IT’S WHAT HE WANTS.
Last of all picking up with the text P TO YOU.
UP TO YOU.
He sat bolt upright in his seat, as though the message had frozen him in an electric current. Dr. Yahdzi was absorbed in the contents of his briefcase, flipping from one family photo, one Kodak moment to another. Touching the framed pictures as though they were flesh and blood. Yasmine clearly heard him going through the papers—how could you miss it? But she didn’t turn, said nothing. And he interpreted her silence as a confirmation, a kind of command.
Banquo had said, “You’ll have to allow the situation to mature, ripen.” Is this what he meant? What the hell was Johnson supposed to do with this rotten peach? Attack the physicist bare-handed and hope the driver shot one of them in the struggle? Wait for another sign from heaven?
Johnson barely noticed the distance they had traveled. As they entered the tiled and stucco town of Natanz, a single peak loomed over their heads. “Vulture Mountain,” Dr. Yahdzi explained, looking back at Johnson. “It’s told the troops of Alexander the Great killed Darius III somewhere close by.” And Johnson strained for some hint in that seemingly innocuous historical observation. Was he supposed to play Alexander to Yahdzi’s Darius? To keep the vultures at bay? Nothing seemed innocuous now.
He began to pay attention again to the passing scene. The caravan rumbled through an almost empty town, a ghost town of closed shops and no real street life. A few women head to toe in black, faces covered, walking along the cobblestone streets. They passed a number of walled mosques, then left the town behind; ten or fifteen miles onward they reached a plateau and the long straight road to the Nantanz Enrichment Facility.
The road broadened out, fully two-lane now so as to accommodate opposing traffic. A cluster of concrete buildings to the left, flat like square pancakes.
“The original uranium separation pilot plant,” Yahdzi said. “No point in going through there—it’s an antique. They’ve cannibalized most of the equipment for other projects.”
Their van reached a traffic circle, a large one enclosing the everpresent concrete open water pond, common to nearly every nuclear or industrial facility. Johnson smelled a stink coming up from the water—sulfur, rotten eggs—was some of it sewage? Run-off waste product? Somehow they’d missed that at the Banquo briefings.
Coming up on the right, another six buildings, pancake-style again, but the interesting area lay behind it on a raised berm, maybe a quarter mile square, like a huge, flat, fortified hill. There a small army of men busily toiled away, steam shovels and huge Kubota bulldozers moving earth, cranes dropping scrap into huge dump trucks to be carted away. Even at the distance of a thousand yards Johnson could tell the earthmovers were enormous, with fifteen-foot tires and many cubic yards of hauling space. They would make quite the impression at even the most well-appointed Monster Truck Show. They roved about the top of the mound like intent yellow construction robots, back and forth, belching exhaust.
And yet nothing much to see at ground level. Clearly, the workers were in the finishing stages of some large underground installation and now packing earth over the top.
“That’s where we’re going,” Yahdzi told Johnson, pointing straight ahead. The entrance was a huge tin-roofed affair like a long airplane hangar. It sloped down, the roadway vanishing into the ground. The concrete mouth larger than the double barrels of New York’s Holland Tunnel, but it was traffic-controlled in a similar way, red light/green light. With a fortified checkpoint and a heavy-gated barrier with yellow and black warning slashes.
The first two vans pulled up to the guardhouse. The van with the goons stayed behind in the hangar. For a few moments, Jazril the Jazz Man dickered with the security personnel, while the open concrete tunnel mouth waited to swallow them all. Then the gated barrier slid sideways, and the two vans were cleared to descend.
What Johnson saw that day was what many people since have come to see only in photographs, video pictures, and blueprints, which convey little but curious technological stainless-steel forms, like sci-fi art. The high-capacity, high-purification centrifuges. Much more elaborate than the ones at Gonabad. A forest of tubes stretching down one side and up the other, all humming at once. Twenty-four hours a day. Three hundred sixty-five days a year. Taking radioactive material, whether in rough cake form or slightly processed, breaking it up, spinning it ’round and ’round, separating the heaviest elements, making it purer and purer. Until at last it could be packed into a nice little baseball and put to God’s divine purpose.
What you felt when you walked down one side was the raw power of spinning cycles, a steel whirling dervish of scientific ecstasy: not in the peaceful Sufi staves of devotion, but in the Mahdi’s righteous anger at all things not-of-Islam, not-of-submission. A throbbing wrath ready to rip the heart from the very earth and show it still alive and pumping to the stars.
One of Shakespeare’s sonnets came to mind, driven into Johnson’s head eons ago by a master at Bradford Grammar Public School. The teacher’s excruciating exertions lasting him a lifetime. He closed his eyes and repeated it to himself:
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themsel
ves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces . . .
What disturbed him most about what these men were doing here was that they did it all in a country where many women never showed their faces. Keeping their heads, ears, and mouths hidden in some obscene mockery of chastity. Those who strayed were called a dog-whore. Or forced to sleep in a tent. While these men who toiled down below were not people “to temptation slow” but still and every day subject to every temptation known to man. The first and foremost—to “inherit heaven’s graces”—actively lusting after the “power to hurt.”
And no one here, in this place—above ground or below—grasped the consequences of husbanding “nature’s riches,” what it meant to manufacture this madness on their own.
Except for Yahdzi, of course. He was the indispensable Iranian indigenous contribution—evilly coerced—thus a testament to force and intimidation as much as to native skill and know-how. Take him out, and all that was left in the equation was the will to power, a bunch of pious morlocks tending their hardware, praying to machines with murder on their minds. Leaving one last hope: if you could take out this one little cog, the whole juggernaut might grind to a halt.
The green ink was never far from his mind, but as Yasmine and her Professor chattered innocently, Johnson took dutiful notes, a good little monkey scribbling like the very embodiment of Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil, writing down everything they said about “peaceful uses” and “medical applications” and “civilian electrical power” and other imbecilities. Johnson left the facility saying, “Thank you.” Jazril’s Al Jazeera crew got their video, and everyone got in their proper van, going up the great dragon’s throat, and thence out the tunnel mouth, under the eyes of the guards. Thankful they had looked at Medusa through Athena’s mirrored shield and lived to tell the tale.
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