The Shield of Darius

by Allen Kent

  “Sometimes I surprise myself.”

  “Have you considered that there might be a possible snag? Even though the hostages are gone, The Iranians know who they are and can still claim to have them. The threat might be as good as the reality.”

  “I did think about that after I saw the report of the attack on the hotels. But all anyone needs to do is insist on “proof of life.” They can’t produce it, and can easily be discredited.”

  “I hope it’s that simple. Want a break before another assignment?”

  “No. I’m ready. Something less complicated, I hope.”

  “A domestic difficulty this time - at least as far as we can tell. Someone’s running a slick blackmail operation on Capitol Hill using a top notch stable of call girls and male prostitutes. They’ve got files on about twenty key people. Congressmen. Senators. Some Cabinet level appointees. And now they’re beginning to pull the strings on major legislation. We need to quietly find out who is behind this and get it stopped before something goes public.”

  “I like it. When will I get the file?”

  “It’ll be in your box this afternoon.”

  Before leaving for the post office, Falen pulled Kate Sager’s number from his wallet and called her Baltimore office. As he’d listened to David Ishmael, he’d thought of the raven-haired widow with the stunning green eyes and sensuous mouth. She answered on the first ring.

  “Kate, this is Chris Falen. When I invited you to dinner a week ago, I detected just the slightest bit of hesitation before you turned me down. Thought I might catch you in a weaker mood and could talk you into dinner tomorrow night if I come to Baltimore. I think we’d both benefit from a status meeting.”

  . . .

  Kate had expected the call. Not at that particular moment, but she knew Falen would call again. She’d argued with herself daily, sometimes hourly, about what she should say and had decided to wait until the call came. She would then decide depending on how she felt at the moment. That wasn’t the way she normally chose to conduct her life, but her life wasn’t running normally and she was tired of making decisions. Sick of it, in fact. As much as she had shared in the responsibilities of running the company before Ben’s disappearance, it wasn’t at all like running it herself. There was no good preparation for being ultimately in charge. During the first weeks she had accepted it as a matter of necessity. Then she began to enjoy it. Relish it. Used it as a way to keep her days too full for self pity. But lately, despite the energy and health the company had, there were lengthy periods when she was finding it tiresome. Chris Falen picked one of those moments to ask how his timing was.

  “Perfect,” she said without hesitation. “I may change my mind by tomorrow, but I’ll say yes now. What time?”

  “Seven be all right?”

  “Fine. Where should I meet you?”

  “I could come by and....”

  “No....I think it would be best to meet somewhere.”

  “Fine. How about the Hyatt on the harbor?”

  “Sounds good. There’s a lounge on the second level just to the right of the escalators. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Sounds like you’ve had a tough day,” Falen said. “Maybe I should come up this evening and help you get away for a few hours.”

  Kate leaned back wearily in her chair, wishing he would not be quite so familiar. “You wouldn’t find me good company. This will give me a day to get out of this funk.”

  “Bad one, eh?”

  She shrugged into the phone. “It probably should have been a good one. We have a buyout offer on the firm, and after our first meeting I told our financial VP that if they wanted us, they’d have to come up with a lot more money. Today they did. Everything we told them we’d want.”

  “I’d think you’d be excited. Sounds like great news to me.”

  She hesitated, wondering why she was telling him all this, but feeling the need to tell someone. “You’d think so. I really don’t want to have to deal with the business anymore by myself. I like the excitement of getting things moving, and of introducing new products into a competitive market. But Ben was the idea man, and I guess we’re sort of running on our current line of success. It may be the perfect time to get out.”

  “I’m convinced,” Falen said.

  “But at the same time….” Kate settled back into the chair and began to enjoy the conversation. She was having to be positive and upbeat at work, and didn’t have anyone she could honestly call a business confidant. And mother! Mother seemed to be reveling in the idea that Kate might not be enjoying being a business executive.

  “But at the same time,” she repeated, returning her attention to Chris, “we’ve put our lives into getting this thing off the ground and it’s really doing well. I wouldn’t just feel like I was selling – but selling out.”

  “On Ben, you mean.”

  “On him and the dream we had. Plus, it’s not a decision I can make on my own until Ben is... ” There was a long pause at Kate’s end of the line.

  “I understand,” Falen said quietly. “But sometimes dreams have to change. What would you really like to do?”

  “I know this doesn’t sound right when you’ve just asked me to dinner, but to be honest, I’m still having trouble with ‘I.’ It’s always been ‘we.’ And we’d talked about eventually selling the business. Ben had this dream of buying a manor house in England somewhere and becoming a country gentleman. Traveling when and where we wanted when the kids weren’t in school. Managing our portfolio the rest of the time.”

  “That was his dream. What’s yours?”

  “I think mine was the same,” she mused. “I really kind of looked forward to it…. But as I said, it was a ‘we’ thing.”

  “And now? If you did sell at some point, what do you see Kate doing next month?”

  She found herself relaxing and responding to his soothing voice like a patient on an analyst’s couch, drawn along by his calm interest.

  “I suppose I’d bank the money for the children and get a job as a CPA for some firm. Something I wouldn’t have to take home with me every day. I’m feeling like everything’s secondary to this job. The children, personal time, everything. It’s funny, but I’m finding I hate weekends. On weekday evenings I know that it’s only a few hours before I can get back in and get to work on the things that are plaguing me. On weekends, I feel them festering, but can’t reach far enough to pick at them. The kids become a burden, keeping me from getting back in here for a few hours. And I hate myself for it.”

  “That’s what they call a workaholic,” Chris laughed. “You’d better get out! Why don’t I make it six-thirty. That will give us a little more visiting time.”

  “I’ll be pressed to make seven,” she said. “And this is just for dinner.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ben knew that he was taking a tremendous risk, but he had to get something into his stomach that would stay. The figs were turning to water and passing through with only enough delay to add to the cramping. He crouched in his stained chador beside a brown, single story building that faced onto a small marketplace. Through the first light of morning he watched furtively as women bought bread from an open shop in one corner of the cobbled square. Across the market, separated by a small harbor formed by a long stone pier and breakwater, the Caspian stretched to the sunrise. Four fishing boats, battered wooden vessels with cabins closed only on the front and sides, rode high along the pier. The air smelled of fish and diesel fuel. Ben watched the crews of three or four tie nets against the trawlers’ sides, prime smoky engines and coax them to life; rhythmic, throbbing motors that joined the cry of wheeling gulls to break the stillness of the morning. As the boats left the harbor, merchants began to fill the empty seascape along the pier with long racks of brightly colored rugs and crude wooden carts carrying vegetables, fruit and fish. The aroma of baking bread penetrated the sea smells and assailed Ben’s nostrils, and his hunger consumed him.

  He knew that he must look terrib
le. He had awakened beside the pool before first light to the sound of a family of boars grunting and rooting at his feet. He heard them before opening his eyes and looked slowly toward his feet without moving, seeing their solid dark forms shuffling listlessly by the water. They sensed something wasn’t right – that the smells at the watering hole were unfamiliar. His scent was strange to them, unlike the feared odors of Caspian men, and they felt no immediate danger.

  He slowly tensed, tightening inside like a bent bow, then threw himself sideways back into the pool, scattering the squealing pigs into the forest in frenzied panic. Carrying his dry clothes, he slid naked down the streambed to the open paddies where he dressed in the pre-dawn darkness. With the chador covering everything but his eyes, he tottered through the edge of morning into the village to await the sun. He no longer had to imitate the bent, flat-footed shuffle, finding that the deep burning of his wound doubled and tightened him like the first steps of a patient after an appendectomy.

  As he now watched the market’s first shoppers, he noticed that most of the women were differently dressed and less well covered. Some didn’t wear chadors at all and most who did had picked lighter colors, leaving their full faces exposed.

  Two approached him carrying purchases of bread and fish and he looked up at them imploringly through the eye window in his black wrap, crouching beside the wall and whimpering softly in high whines as he extended the tips of his fingers through the black cloth. They were the withered shaking fingers of a palsied old woman.

  “Bakshish,” he whispered, slurring the word for alms to hide his accent.

  The women looked at each other hesitantly and hurried by. He tried again. A younger woman by herself. She stopped and spoke to him hurriedly, looking around as if afraid to be seen with the beggar. He dropped his head to one side and muttered unintelligibly in his best falsetto. The woman reached hastily into a deep woven basket that hung over her arm and tore off a piece of bread, dropping it into his lap before running down the stone walk.

  Praise be to Allah for the zakaht, Ben thought. The third pillar of Islam, the tax of purification, had ceased over the centuries to be law and had become a matter of conscience – of voluntary charity. Fortunately for Ben, it was an obligation that most Muslims took very seriously.

  Ben shuffled off the square into an empty side street, devoured the still warm bread, and returned to his spot beside the building. He did not solicit the men, and a dozen women hurried past before another hesitated. Instead of bread, she dropped a small silver coin onto his fingertips. A toman. Ten rials. Enough to buy a full sheet of the flat round sangyak bread.

  Women clustered around the open bakery, waiting patiently for wooden ladles to draw fresh hot bread from the deep ovens. When their turns came, most paid without comment and hurried on to buy fish and vegetables. Ben waited beside them, seeing that eight rials bought a single sheet of the bread. He dropped the toman into the hand of the baker’s assistant as they drew out his purchase. The girl handed him two small copper coins and the hot sheet of bread, looking him over curiously for his basket. Ben pulled the bread beneath his chador and shuffled away, leaving the puzzled girl to her next insistent customer.

  He started again toward the narrow street where he had eaten his first piece, but quickly reversed his track as two uniformed militia stepped from the alley into the square. As he retreated toward the display racks of carpets that lined the pier, a jeep carrying four more soldiers rolled to a stop near the bakery and the men quickly spread out, beginning to form a cordon around the perimeter of the market place. Ben ducked into the racks of carpets, feeling the hot bread against his chest and the blood beginning to pound in his neck. Peering between two elaborately pattered rugs of red and black, he saw one of the soldiers beckon three fully-covered women toward the parked jeep. As each approached, a female officer ordered the woman to uncover her face and hair, sending each on after a brief inspection.

  Ben’s thoughts flashed to Jim Cannon. Somehow they had learned about the woman’s disguise. In the instant he allowed before turning again to the dangers surrounding him, he wondered if his friend had survived the interrogation.

  Another group of soldiers closed from the side of the square opposite the bakery, herding veiled women ahead of them toward the inspector. The urge to bolt from the carpet-covered screens and run for the houses beyond the square gripped Ben’s body and started him toward the end of the shelter. But his mind seized his stumbling legs and dragged him to a halt before breaching the blind of hanging carpets. The officer overseeing the inspection shouted at two soldiers who leaned against the jeep, pointing in the direction of the carpet racks and sweeping an arm to indicate that he was ready for another group. The armed men started toward Ben’s shelter, one left and one right, gesturing for women to come forward. In another moment they would reach the racks, trapping him among the carpets.

  The two soldiers closed quickly on the display, peering first down one empty row and then another. Everyone on the square had turned to watch their search for veiled women and paid no attention to the bent, bearded peasant who walked slowly away from the rows of patterned rugs toward the breakwater, pressing a flat sheet of bread against his chest. When the soldiers found no one and turned their attention to other parts of the square, the man turned and trudged northward along the seawall. He was stooped by hard work and poor nutrition and wore the loose-fitting shirt, pajama pants and crushed-backed shoes of an Iranian laborer. He paused from time to time as if to catch his breath, turning with others to watch the soldiers comb the square. On another day, he might have attracted attention; paler than the people of the Caspian coast and with tangled hair that was not hidden beneath the round felt cap characteristic of working men. But the actions of the soldiers blended all other activity on the square into a vaguely perceived periphery and he left the marketplace unnoticed, hoping the chador would remain hidden under a draped carpet until the soldiers left.

  The seawall stretched for two hundred yards north along the waterfront, a steeply sloping stone embankment that broke white-crested waves when winter storms surged down across the shallow sea from the Caucuses Mountains to the northwest. When the sea was calm, a stony beach stretched from the foot of the wall forty or fifty yards to the edge of the murky water. Along its rough expanse, fishing nets with orange plastic floats hung over long, overturned rowboats. Ben waited until the market and soldiers were well behind him, then slipped over the side of the embankment and rolled under a boat that lay upside down with one side propped against a five gallon can, a battered net veiling the opening.

  The air and sand beneath the boat were moist and cool and he stretched out on his back, holding the still warm bread against his stomach. He lay for a long time, listening to the sounds of the sea and the village above, wondering how they had known to look for a woman. Vehicles moved along the seawall above him but did not stop, and no one approached the boat. He tore a piece from the flat bread and ate.

  The village and streets were no longer safe for a bent old woman in a black chador, and he was too pale from his weeks in the prison to survive long as a peasant laborer. When night came, he might be able to make his way back through the village to the hills and behind the shielding wall of trees and darkness, trudge the remaining twenty or thirty miles to the border. But he remembered reading that there were now fences. Double fences along the frontier from Astara to the Araks River. And Iranian guards must be inspecting everyone who approached a border checkpoint. He could hike inland until he found a place where he could cross the river, but that might take him higher into the mountains and he doubted that he could climb. And he guessed that patrols along the river would be heavy now. Men with dogs.

  Ben looked above him at the rough wooden bottom of the rowboat and listened again to the sea. How far could he row in an hour? No more than a mile with his side the way it was. Even if he could row two miles, morning might find him well within Iranian waters and floating in open sight of land. He needed a
motor. He needed one of the small fishing trawlers. Ben closed his eyes and tried to recreate the actions of the fishermen as he’d watched them across the square during the early dawn hours. Since he hadn’t seen them refuel the boats, they must fill them when they came in at night. From his vantage point across the market square, he’d been too far away to see them start the trawlers, and unlike Karaj, there was no shack where an attendant kept keys. He might be able to hotwire an ignition. If the boats came in tonight, he would climb across the stone pier after dark to one of the four fishing boats and see if he could get it out of the harbor.

  The sturdy timbers above him and the net veil across the open side cradled Ben securely and he let his aching body relax into the sand. What would Kate and the kids be doing now? How long had it been? Three months? They must think he was dead. If he concentrated hard enough, he might be able to send a message of some kind. A telepathic signal that he was still alive and thinking of them. He closed his eyes and saw her soft hair cascading over him. So soft…. The bread was still warm and if he didn’t move at all, if he kept his breath shallow and slow, there was no pain. No pain, and arms and legs that felt so heavy against the sand. He was sinking – sinking into the sand. He struggled weakly against it, vaguely conscious of the muted sounds of the village above him, then allowed himself to collapse into deep slumber.

  The rhythmic throbbing of two stroke diesel engines stirred him from sleep: fish-laden trawlers driving homeward toward the narrow harbor mouth. Ben pulled his limbs loose from the molded bed of sand and rolled onto his side, peering through the mesh of netting at the lumbering boats. The sun had dropped beyond the mountains, covering the village and sea in the purple half-light of dusk. He considered moving from his shelter to a position where he could watch the boats dock and unload, but he could not see beyond the top of the seawall onto the market square, and feared soldiers might still be patrolling the village. He ate again, waiting for dark and listening to the sounds of men emptying the boats and hauling their catch along the pier.