Banquo's Ghosts

by Richard Lowry

  She grabbed for the kabobs, stripping them off their sticks. Then stuck the chrome seed in one lamb chunk and tossed the lot out her window. The dogs looked up and smelled it at once. They ran as a pack to the fallen meat.

  “Time to go.”

  And Yossi drove with even more abandon this time.

  “Helicopters and roadblocks,” Wallets kept saying. “Choppers and blocks, that’s what’s going to get us.” He kept craning his head out the window to look for aircraft overhead. And they all strained to see as far as they could into the distance, where a shimmering heat distorted the horizon, to look for a telltale checkpoint.

  They drove among buildings again, the outskirts of another populated area. Suddenly they pulled up to a locked garage with ancient gas pumps. Another car waited on the concrete apron, newer, a fast Audi, no broken rear window.

  “Time to switch,” Wallets ordered. “Though we shoulda changed the profile. We’re still four people. Minus one chrome chip.”

  Four hours later they pulled down an alley in a new town and quietly stopped. The long shadows of afternoon stretched across the buildings. They hustled Johnson out, and he hobbled through a metal door. It clanged shut behind as they climbed metal stairs—fire stairs, lit occasionally by naked bulbs. The place felt like some sort of factory. The sound of whirring from the landing above grew louder as they approached.

  “Here, put this on so we can get across the floor to the office without drawing too much attention.”

  Marjorie handed him his own burka, and Johnson cloaked himself in a woman’s robes, even his head with the niqab, covering his face except for the eye slit. He labored his way up, barely able to see, to the third landing, where they paused. They stood before a back door, the fire exit to some kind of assembly line. They could hear the sound of machines whirring on the other side, like the thrum of a thousand bees all humming at once. The door was marked, first in Farsi script,

  The name of this town, Johnson realized. Farewell, Mahabad.

  then below in French,

  La Toute-Persane Burqa compagnie, Kermanshah

  and finally English,

  The All-Iran Burka Company, Kermanshah

  “Ready?”

  Johnson nodded. The Turk pulled open the door and led them inside. A triple row of long tables ran before them in sweatshop fashion. At each station a sewing machine and a woman, clad head-to-toe, doing piece work. The work was simple: sewing labels onto garments, burkas, the noise of a hundred sewing machines deafening. Huge stacks of burkas waiting for the labels stood in one corner, in scarlet and yellow and aquamarine. When one or two women looked up from their butterfly stitches, the Turk glowered and pointed harshly at them over the noise. Their eyes fell, and they went back to work. In seven long seconds, the Turk led them through the sweatshop to the overseer’s office, a few steps up on a raised platform, a long glass window overlooking the floor.

  Once inside the office, Johnson found a chair by a desk furthest from the long windowpane, feeling totally exposed. When the door shut, the thrumming diminished by half. But he didn’t feel any safer. The Turk ignored everyone and immediately opened a Dell laptop, which began its power-up dance. Wallets slumped in one corner, as far from the window as possible. Marjorie found a first-aid kit under another desk and came over to look at Johnson’s feet.

  “What the hell is this place?” Johnson asked.

  “You mean besides our safe house?” Wallets remarked, then muttering, “to the extent anyplace here is safe.”

  “It’s the All-Iran Burka Company,” Marjorie’s voice came through her hood, “just like it says on the door.”

  “Except Iran no make burkas,” spat Yossi without looking up from his computer. “Just steal them from Label Makers.”

  “Huh?” Johnson was totally lost.

  Marjorie dabbed the cuts in Johnson’s feet with a cotton swab. “They can’t make enough burkas here to satisfy demand or the mullah’s edicts, never have. Just like soap or toilet paper. They buy and import the burkas from Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, and a few hundred thousand from a factory in northern Israel. But they don’t want to admit they can’t do it, so they sew on fake labels. ‘Made in Iran.’ Then everyone feels better.”

  Johnson digested this. It seemed nearly incomprehensible to him that the country couldn’t produce the one thing pious men made their women wear. But then again, who’d invest in an Iranian company if it weren’t selling oil? Nobody. No return.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Right now you’re going to heal up,” Wallets told him.

  “What about them?” Johnson nodded in the direction of the work floor. He hated the thought of so many seamstresses a few feet away, any of whom could pop their heads in the door. Uncover their ruse. With only a single closed door and the cloth of a burka between them and discovery.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Nobody works. The place is empty.”

  As if on cue, the whirring of the sewing machines stopped almost as one. The seamstresses rose, filing out the front door of the sweatshop, punching out their timecards as they went. When all were gone, the burkas came off with one big whew! and Wallets lit a cigarette. Yossi picked up the phone on the desk and began what immediately became a contentious conversation, his voice becoming more and more heated the more he talked.

  “I assume you realize the Iranians let me go,” Johnson said at length.

  “A gamble,” Wallets blew smoke up toward the ceiling in a long column. “They could have made a big deal of your capture, but they risked catching hell from the international press for holding a journalist. Sure, they’d called you a spy, but they call everyone U.S. spies. So they rolled the dice. Played you back into our hands.”

  He threw the cigarette to the floor and crushed it decisively under the heel of his boot. Even with the seamstresses gone, Johnson didn’t like their refuge any better. He worried that anyone from the street could wander in.

  “So they knew you were coming for me?”

  Wallets didn’t answer. Instead, Marjorie began to minister to him in earnest after rummaging through her backpack. She softened some of the crusts from his soles, and washed his feet thoroughly with peroxide. The skin bubbled.

  Drawing two liquids into one hypo: “An antibiotic and an antiinflammatory full of steroids. I’ve got a vitamin shot for you too. And keep off your feet for now. There’s a mattress here you can lie on.”

  Yeah right, like he could sleep.

  “When are we getting out of here?”

  Marjorie shrugged. Apparently not immediately. Wallets pulled a bottle of Maker’s Mark out of a desk drawer. “Let me look for some glasses.”

  He handed glasses around, but Johnson didn’t want to take his first sip, because he knew it would taste better than any Maker’s Mark he ever had tasted or ever would taste. He wanted that experience to be ahead of him instead of behind. Finally, he closed his eyes and took his draught and let out an almost erotic sigh.

  “Easy boy,” Marjorie frowned.

  Yossi’s conversation with the mystery jerk on the phone rose to the level of a shouting match. Johnson winced at the man’s harsh voice, his eyes flitting about in alarm. Didn’t he know they were in hiding?

  “What gives?”

  Marjorie dropped her voice to a whisper. “This is Yossi’s territory. He knows the ground. And actually runs this business—otherwise it wouldn’t be a viable safe house. We’re dependent on him, even if—” she glanced over at his swollen neck, veins standing out in wrath—“he’s a little volatile.”

  How reassuring.

  “Easier to just leave me back there.” The thought made him sick. What did Aristotle say? It’s harder to be free than not to be free? Now it made a kind of sense.

  Marjorie snorted. “True. But after all, we said we’d try to get you out. And a promise is a promise. You held up your end.”

  Yossi argued even harder on the phone, and Johnson’s urge to drink evaporated. He set the glass care
fully on the desk when their host suddenly snarled something in Farsi and slammed the headset into the cradle. The glass of bourbon slid an inch. Yossi began to curse in English. “Pig Mullah. I give him forty free burka for his fuck family, and he still not let my girls work Monday. He says they must make pilgrimage outside town to shrine of old dead imam who make miracles. So, factory closed. I lose $1,500 in sales in one day! Mullah wants more bribe. But give nothing in return—he makes no hand wash, girls still go put flowers shrine. Before we leave, I crap his turban and tell him it monkey shit.”

  Part of Johnson thought he should remember these piquant profanities for use later. But instantly forgot about that when he finally grasped the crux of their precarious situation. “They let me go to get to you.”

  The three spies looked at him. Marjorie’s and Wallets’ eyes calm and sober, while Yossi dismissed him with a grunt. Wallets poured himself another slug and patiently explained: “Right, Peter. They wanted us. Real spies. Better than Brit sailors even. They catch us in Iran, put us on trial, and sell tickets to the circus. If we’re lucky, they’d eventually swap us for some of their own guys we picked up in Iraq. They know how the system works. Like I said, they took a gamble.”

  The light began to soften outside, the first phase of twilight coming on in the long, slow fade toward night, Johnson’s favorite time of the day, when everything seemed softer and quieter and more peaceful. But not this time. Not in here.

  “We lucky,” the Turk explained. “But others come looking soon.”

  Wallets took a deep pull on his drink and lit another cigarette.

  “Now tell us what you saw in Gonabad. Russian missile batteries, right? And south of the Nantanz facility, there’s a big underground operation, right?”

  Marjorie put away her first-aid kit. “Give us everything.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Four Blind Mice

  He found it harder than he would have imagined to recall the events. You’d think the memories would be there on demand, just like the replay button on a DVR. But no, the mind picked and chose what it deemed important. So over and over again Yossi or Large Marge or Wallets returned him to some point, all over again.

  “You said you saw two surface-to-air missile batteries at the Gonabad facility?”

  “Chinese or Russian crews?”

  “How many to each battery?”

  “Any other camouflage emplacements?”

  “Maybe another missile battery? Only two? You sure?”

  “Can you show us on the map?”

  Now it became clear why Yossi had a laptop. In addition to helping him run the All-Iran Burka Company’s inventory, shipments, accounts payable, and so on, it also linked to fresh satellite images from Long Eye: first the Gonabad facility where he met Dr. Yahdzi, then the monstrous Nantanz refining operation.

  “How many guards inside the hangar at the underground entrance?”

  Johnson fought his exasperation over the repetition. “Like I told you. A fortified checkpoint, combination pill box with machine gunners, two of them; one pointing into the hangar, the other pointing down the Holland Tunnel, as if they could mow down anyone trying to escape. A large traffic light—red-green—beside a metal sliding gate barrier with black and yellow warning slashes.”

  “Sturdy? Could it take an impact?”

  “No, it’s just for show, traffic control. The tunnel has steel hydraulic sliding doors at either end.”

  “Railroad tracks?”

  “What?”

  “Did you notice railroad tracks? They might be concealed under metal plates flush with the concrete floor.”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe. I . . . yes. They weren’t covered by plates, just silver rails, European gauge, and flush with the floor. Shiny silver, like they’d almost never been used.”

  His questioners exchanged dark glances.

  “Did I say something wrong? Wouldn’t any industrial facility use a rail line to ship heavy equipment in?”

  “Or out.”

  Johnson’s feet were sore, his mouth sticky and his eyes grainy. “Bombs?”

  Wallets explained. “They don’t make bombs here; they refine fissionable material.”

  “Right. Yellow cake to fuel rods. Why the hell use a railcar for a hundred pounds of Strontium 90? Use a truck.”

  “Unless they want to transport more than a hundred pounds. And something more deadly than Strontium 90. And they’d need it encased in lead so there was no heat bloom. No signature that we could see from space.”

  Johnson needed a bracer. He reached for the Maker’s Mark and his third drink, but the booze disappeared into the magic drawer under Wallets’ steady hand. He felt a flash of wrath, which he chalked up to Drinker’s Thinking. It passed quickly.

  Down in the work area, Yossi rummaged through an old Whirlpool refrigerator, taking out large colorful plastic shopping bags filled with what looked like somebody’s takeout leftovers. The worker girls’ food? Then he pawed through the shopping bags themselves, sniffing cartons and takeout trays, keeping the good, tossing out whatever was ripe. Finally lugging the remainders up to the overseer’s office. The bright orange and green takeout bags were labeled in Farsi, English, then French: Jabba’s Kabob Hut. The giant Tatooine Star Wars gangster slathering over a delicious scented skewer. Johnson’s appetite was returning, but wolfing down cold gristle that others picked over turned his stomach. Not quite hungry enough for that. The shopping bags also yielded coffee in “Jabba” bottles, and green liters of flat Vichy water.

  “If you want to drink the water, you’ll need this,” Marjorie handed him a tiny white pill.

  “What is it?”

  “A combo Lomitil/all-purpose parasite killer. Drink either the water or the coffee, not both. And don’t take it on an empty stomach.” Marjorie warned him, “or you’ll crap yourself right down the toilet.”

  Johnson looked dismally at the cold takeout trays wondering how much he could choke down. Suddenly realizing that up till now in Iran, he’d only drunk boiled tea or bottled water. During his days in captivity, he quenched his thirst out of liters of stale Evian provided by his hosts. If Sheik Kutmar had really wanted him dead, he would have let him brush his teeth out of a tap. He ate a few mouthfuls, then a few more. He gave up on a whiff of one rotten scrap Yossi overlooked. Johnson’s eyes felt heavy, very heavy, and a part of him knew he was snoring.

  “Well, let’s try to find out before it’s too late.”

  Johnson awoke with a snuffle and didn’t catch who said what. Sounded like Wallets.

  They were both staring over Yossi’s shoulder at the laptop.

  The screen showed another nuclear facility from the Long Eye satellite, a collection of roads, bunkers, and buildings, but this time the caption read “Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center.”

  “What’s that place?” Johnson wanted to know.

  “Near the city of Isfahan,” Yossi told him. Esfahan. Isfahan. Everything sounded alike in this crazy place. Like modern and Middle English, Shop and Shoppe, Public and Publick.

  “It’s where we make the bombs,” Yossi told him. Johnson blinked at the use of “we,” then remembered, yes, this man was Persian, Iranian. And they called him the Turk out of sheer laziness. But still, you couldn’t miss the unmistakable note of pride in the use of “We.”

  We make . . . Us. It gave him something of a shudder.

  Each time the mouse-pointer clicked on a structure in the satellite image, that structure’s name and use appeared in a little dialogue box. Click on one concrete bunker building: MNSR—Miniature Neutron Source Reactor. Click another: LWSCR—Light Water Sub-Critical Reactor. Click again: HWZPR—Heavy Water Zero Power Reactor. This complex was half a mile on either side, a bewildering number of buildings and structures: Graphite Sub-Critical Reactor, Fuel Fabrication Laboratory, Uranium Chemistry Laboratory, Uranium Conversion Facility, Fuel Manufacturing Plant—

  “They didn’t take me here,” Peter Johnson remarked naively.

&nb
sp; “They wouldn’t have, darling,” Marjorie replied.

  Wallets lit another Marlboro. “Nobody has. Nobody we know, anyway. Maybe your guys, Yossi?” This was about Wallets’ tenth cigarette for the evening. Johnson glowed with secret satisfaction. So the man wasn’t perfect.

  The Turk grunted, shaking his head. Then took one of Wallets’ Marlboros. He pointed to the topography surrounding the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center. “Three thousand Revolutionary Guards patrol. Night vision goggles. Bobby traps. Motion detractors. Hopeless.” No one smiled at his mangling of English. “Yemen Security told me Mossad try back in 1999. Five guys in cleaning service for business office. All Iranian. No Jews. Three dead. Never made it inside. Two sent home still alive, tongues cut out.”

  Johnson interjected with a firm grasp of the obvious: “They were betrayed.”

  Yossi gave the journalist a long searching look that said, Really, you figured that out all by yourself?

  “Who, do you think?” Wallets asked.

  Yossi shrugged. “Why not you? Why not Frenchies? They built damn place.”

  Wallets didn’t answer, just stared at the screen lost in thought. “I wish the Frenchies could get us in now.” He propped his chin on his hand and kept looking wistfully at the screen, like a kid who’d dropped his lollipop on the sidewalk.

  “Darling, remember, we’re trying to get out, not in,” Marge said.

  “Right, I know. Get over the border. Get home. Let daring journalist do a news conference. A teary reunion. Another book deal. Maybe do some business with Anton Anjou. That could have been what Sheik Kutmar wanted, right? Get a few zillions out-country via our eminently corruptible American scribbler? Buy some Jihad?” Wallets’ eyes came for him.