The Peregrine Spy

by Edmund P. Murray

  Fake it, Lermontov wrote hastily on his notebook, then shoved it toward Frank.

  “But I can find a way to get access to his cables,” said Frank.

  “I’m sure you can,” said Lermontov. “Do it, please.”

  Should I salute this bastard, thought Frank, and say “Yes, sir”? He settled for “I’ll do it.”

  * * *

  “You did real good,” said Rocky. He and Frank sat alone in the bubble. “The shit we rehearsed. You did real good on the stuff about you need the money. But also about losin’ respect for the agency, about always bein’ a kinda half-assed socialist, havin’ a black wife and a black kid, about hatin’ the way America treats blacks. The Sovs always like it when there’s that ideological twist. Yeah, you want money, but you aren’t doin’ it just for the money. They’ll fuckin’ love it. Speakin’ of money … Where the fuck is it?”

  “You’re sure I can’t keep it?”

  “Very funny.”

  Frank pried the white envelope from the briefcase’s secret compartment. Twenties spilled across the table.

  “Count it,” said Rocky.

  Frank counted it twice. Each time it added up to $4,980. He peered into the briefcase and found another twenty.

  “You’re a pisser, Sullivan. Tryin’ t’ ding me for a twenty.”

  “It fell out,” said Frank. “Do I get a receipt?”

  “Sure. What else fell off the back of the truck?”

  “This stuff.” Frank pulled out three documents in Russian that Lermontov, with a finger raised to his lips, had given him along with a covering summary in English. Rocky flipped through each Russian text, then back to the summary.

  “I didn’t get a chance to read the English,” said Frank. “Just stuck it in the briefcase.”

  “This is great shit,” said Rocky. “Seems as how, after representations by the Americans, Brezhnev has decided not t’ make any statements about the Constellation and U.S. intervention.”

  “We didn’t get anything from Washington on it?”

  “Nope. Somebody back there decided to play need-to-know with us. So we’ll come back with ‘We don’t need to know from Washington. We got the skinny from Moscow.’ Sometimes I love this fuckin’ job.”

  Rocky fell silent as he examined the rest of Lermontov’s material. When he looked up, he studied Frank, then shook his head.

  “These two look even better. If it isn’t disinformation. Says the Sovs have pulled back troops from the Azerbaijan frontier as a goodwill gesture to Iran. Then, I guess this one, yeah, says the Sovs are building up their forces on the border with Afghanistan. Shit. Sounds like they’ve written off Iran to the mullahs but want to flank the holy bastards with their guys in Afghanistan.”

  “He’s giving us intel that’s a lot better than what we’re giving him,” said Frank.

  “If this shit is real, your ass is gold. If it isn’t, Lermontov may be playin’ you. And you can bet, knowin’ how paranoid he is, the Holy Ghost’s got you pegged as maybe a double agent.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Frank. “Something to come home to.”

  “Which worries me. I mean, suppose, just suppose this Lermontov guy’s tryin’ t’ set you up.”

  “How’s he going to do that?” said Frank. “He’s the one who wants medical treatment in America. I’m not running off to Russia.”

  “Think about it,” said Rocky. “Suppose Lermontov has other plans besides medical treatment. Suppose what he really wants to do is fuck you up. He’s maybe still pissed at you gettin’ him kicked outta Ethiopia. So maybe he can’t get the KGB to go for stickin’ an umbrella with a poison tip up your ass, like they did with that poor Bulgarian bastard, or whatever kind of bastard he was. But suppose now he thinks he’s got the perfect weapon.”

  “You lost me,” said Frank.

  “Henry James,” said Rocky. “The Holy fuckin’ Ghost. You can bet the farm the KGB knows how the crazy son of a bitch works. Suppose what your good friend Lermontov really wants is t’ set you up for a fall. Make it look to James like your KGB buddy’s recruited you.”

  “He couldn’t be that devious,” said Frank.

  “He couldn’t?”

  “I dunno.” Frank studied the palms of his hands. “Maybe he could.”

  “Don’t fall in love with your agent,” said Rocky. “Tricky as this thug looks, he might play it both ways. Get to the States for medical treatment and hang you out to dry with the Holy Ghost.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Please hear me. And look, when you get back to Langley, if Lermontov convinces his gang he recruited you and he does show up in Washington, talk to James. Tell him you and I talked about this shit. That I didn’t want to put all the details in a cable, not even an eyes-only cable to him. James didn’t have much t’ say on the stuff Lermontov gave you on the mole. But that figures. Who knows where this fuckin’ mole might be? He might be somebody works for James. Let James hear it from you before anything maybe does happen. And let him hear it face-t’-face, across his desk. Not in a cable somebody else might get a chance t’ read. An ounce of prevention, know what I mean?”

  “I’m afraid I do,” said Frank.

  “By the way,” said Rocky, “don’t trust James, either.”

  “Why not?” said Frank. “He wants Lermontov, he has to play straight with me.”

  “I wish it was that simple, Sully. I really do. I wish James was that simple. But he’s crazy, paranoid, brilliant, relentless. He might really believe Lermontov’s doubled you, turned you into a KGB fink. He might wanna fuck you over just so he can make Lermontov his exclusive, Henry James–certified defector. There’s no tellin’ what kinda screwball ideas he might come up with. You gotta play his game. You got no choice. Just don’t trust him.”

  “How ’bout you?” said Frank. “Can I trust you?”

  “In this business? Don’t trust anybody. Especially me.”

  You sound like a Persian, thought Frank, Another Third World country heard from. The intelligence community.

  * * *

  He came home to a quiet house. His stomach grumbled, but he felt too exhausted to cook and too depressed to eat. He pulled his Absolut from the freezer. All old spies are paranoid, he thought. Any spy who isn’t paranoid doesn’t stay alive long enough to grow old. Don’t trust James, Rocky said. Can I trust Rocky? Certainly not Lermontov. Rocky had asked him about Beirut. Two flimsy cars and a handgun. A message, perhaps, not a real attempt to kill him. In Ethiopia Lermontov had motive enough to kill him, but in Beirut Lermontov had no need to send him a message. He wondered if that message came from his own people, a warning not to come too close to finding out who stood behind the murder of the ambassador.

  “Please, Lord,” prayed Frank. “Let me be ever paranoid.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  He’d been monitoring the daylong television program for over an hour. The day before, he’d sat with Anwar, Mina, and the children in their front room watching the Tasu’a parade. Anwar had explained that the one television channel that continued to operate had limited scope.

  “Travelogues. They love travelogues. Especially long, slow-moving Iran Air travelogues of the haj to Mecca. Or pilgrimages to Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad. Sometimes they just show the flag with military music. No popular music. No movies.”

  “No soap operas,” said Mina. “We used to have some very good soap operas. Not just American soaps like Dallas, but our own Iranian soap operas. Everyone loved them.”

  “Maybe not everyone,” said Anwar.

  Young Anwar and Mina Two were bored. Frank couldn’t blame them. “Long and slow-moving” described the coverage of the Tasu’a parade. Single, static cameras were positioned at three spots along the route. The children had been sentenced to straight-backed chairs and silence. With a parent on either side, they stared vacant-eyed at images of flagellants shuffling forward and beating themselves with whips and chains. They took no interest in their father’s diligent narration. It’s n
o way to grow up, thought Frank. He thought of the often sadistic cartoons Jake had delighted in. No way to grow up. But he soon started to ignore the children, to forget about Jake and indulge his own fascination with the stark drama that paraded across the flickering screen.

  The next day’s Ashura march, which he watched alone in the living room of the house he shared with Gus and Fred, proved to be a replay of Tasu’a but with denser, slower-moving masses and a palpable heightening in the passion of the chain- and whip-wielding marchers. Frank had seen no blood on Tasu’a, but among the Ashura marchers, particularly the first waves arriving at the final rallying point, Shahyad Square, torn garments and blood-speckled backs spurred the television editors to make sudden cuts to other spots along the line of march.

  The camera editor switched back to Jaleh Square. In September troops had fired on crowds gathered at Jaleh Square for a religious rally. “The people call it Black Friday,” Mina had said. “The soldiers killed more than four hundred.” To Frank, Jaleh Square looked like a big traffic circle, but it was tiny compared to Shahyad Square. Anwar had said Shahyad, with its monument, gardens, flower beds, and fountains, was far bigger than the Place de la Concorde.

  Now, for Ashura, the tenth day of the month of Moharram, the crowds reclaimed both Jaleh and Shahyad and most of Tehran in the name of the father, Ali; the son, Hossein; and the holy spirit of Khomeini. Despite Anwar’s foreboding about Ashura, despite the bloody backs of the flagellants, the masses obeyed Khomeini’s call for a peaceful march. Frank found that evidence of the Ayatollah’s power more impressive than any level of violence might have been.

  The camera showed the crowds still coming toward Jaleh Square even though tens of thousands had already reached Shahyad, several miles west and north across town. Anwar had told him the Tasu’a march took over six hours to pass through the heart of town and involved over a million people. The military expected more than two million today for Ashura.

  He swung from the television set in the living room to the kitchen, where he stirred the huge pot of chili he’d been brewing and sliced and diced the salad. With any luck, they would live off the combination for two or three days. Gus and Fred, rather than risk cabin fever, had driven the short distance to Tom Troy’s office at the air base. Frank welcomed the chance to have the house to himself, but he had begun to imagine that his son, Jake, sat by him. He pointed to the television screen and said, “Look.”

  Millions of people marching, he said in his mind to Jake. Passionate, peaceful except to their own chain-whipped backs, not kept in check by any visible military or police presence. He thought he might be better off not understanding what the government-paid announcer had to say, because the image was the real message. Millions of people disciplined by the rules laid down by Khomeini, marching to the beat of an Islamic drum. If anybody back in America watches this, and I know no one will, he thought, they would say those Iranian folks look flat-out crazy, beating themselves with whips and chains.

  I sit here staring at the tube and see a religious revolution, powerful as any since the days of Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Ali and Hossein. The Protestant Reformation was just that, a reformation. This is revolution, as absolute as the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution of the thirties. Those revolutions were about politics and nationalism and the economic system. He tried to explain it to Jake. There’s maybe some national pride and economics and cultural pride involved here, but this is about religion, about how people want to worship their God. He imagined Jake saying, “And we just don’t get it.”

  The cameras switched to their second vantage point near a traffic circle just beyond the university where the broad street called Shah Reza changes its name to Eisenhower Boulevard. A quick change created a semblance of movement as the camera swung again to Shahyad Square, built by the Shah at the time of his controversial Persian history bash at Persepolis. The video editor switched to what Frank suspected was a previously taken beauty shot of the Shahyad monument’s twin blue-tile towers with their fluted piers and high Gothic arches. “Shahyad,” Anwar had said. “It means ‘monument to the kings.’” Seeing the thousands of thousands of true believers surrounding it, he knew Shahyad Square would soon have another name. So would the street that ran by the front of the American embassy, Takht-e Jamshid, the Persian name for Persepolis, which gave the Iranians their nickname for the embassy—Fort Persepolis.

  He watched and longed to get out among the marchers with his black wool cap pulled low on his forehead, but Anwar and Mina had told him it would be suicide.

  “If you went I would have to go with you,” said Anwar. “If some madman spotted you and started an attack on you, they would attack me, too. And I do not want to die.”

  “If either of you go out there tomorrow,” said Mina, “I will kill both of you.”

  The TV editors had switched to a replay of the arrival at Shahyad Square of the open cars that slowly, haltingly had led the march with Ayatollah Taleqani and the opposition party leader, Karim Sanjabi. Armed bodyguards, clearly not military or police, trotted alongside the cars. Several wore the turbans of clergymen. Frank was seeing new faces on Ashura, different from those he had seen on Tasu’a. Suddenly, he spotted the club-twirling Mojahedin homafar he knew from the gym. For a moment he disappeared in the crowd, then the camera caught him again, moving in a high-stepping trot, twirling his G3 automatic rifle, switching it from hand to hand, never losing concentration, his eyes always sweeping the crowd.

  I know that man, his mind said to Jake. I know that man.

  * * *

  Frank, as usual, arrived at the safe house half an hour early. He extracted the remains of the Stoli from the freezer and poured himself a short drink. They’d finished the tin of caviar at their Friday meeting. Frank wondered if Lermontov would bring more. He sipped the vodka and began unpacking his false-bottomed briefcase. Tape recorder. Notebook. An envelope with three impressive cables provided by Near East Division. Rocky had speculated that Henry James had indeed convinced them to do better. Frank skimmed the material again. Good, he said to himself. He tried another sip of Lermontov’s vodka but found he’d already emptied the glass. The flash of car lights deterred him from his trip to the freezer and sent him instead to the basement garage.

  Lermontov surprised him by easing into the garage in a dark blue Paykan. “I’m glad to see it’s you,” said Frank. “For a minute I thought Savak had come to wrap me up.”

  “For tonight, I am Savak,” said Lermontov. “I’ll explain.”

  They settled in the living room, and Frank poured them each two fingers of the leftover Stolichnaya. Lermontov shed his lamb’s-wool cap, shrugged out of his bulky overcoat, and drained his vodka in a gulp. “I am under surveillance. Thanks to your good friend the late Major Nazih.”

  Frank registered the “late.” “He’s been killed?”

  “Not yet. Not quite. But tortured in ways guaranteed to amuse Savak’s interrogators. A hot poker shoved up his fairy ass, then forced into his mouth. He was willing to talk but barely able to talk by the time they started to ask him questions. He implicated me, of course, but my Savak friends knew that. This is the interesting part. They tried to get him to implicate you.”

  “For what?”

  “For recruiting him. And, despite all the torture, he would not.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Maybe he’s in love with you. Whatever reason, he protected you.”

  “But why would anyone want him to finger … implicate me?”

  “They tell me the order came direct from the prime minister.”

  “I don’t even know the prime minister.”

  “No, but evidently he also fears your influence with the Shah. He wants to be the one who influences the Shah, and he fears his power may be slipping.”

  “He does?”

  “So I’m told. My friends also told me they’ve been ordered to keep me under surveillance. They suggested I change cars. I did and took other precauti
ons. I hope you were as careful.”

  “We were,” said Frank. “But where do you get all these cars? I expected to see you driving a Lada, or at least a Volga. But first you show up in a very fancy Peugeot. Now a Paykan.”

  “Most posts, that would be true,” said Lermontov. “But here, because of the two hundred percent import tax, when we sell a used Volga on the open market, we have the extra money to upgrade when we buy a new car. We even have some blue Fiats, just like the one you drive. Even some old taxicabs, BMWs. Toyotas. It gives us the opportunity to avoid looking so obviously Soviet. Even the ambassador, he has an official Chaika, but he prefers to drive his red Mercedes for operational purposes.”

  Operational, thought Frank. He wondered what operational requirements an ambassador might have. He knew he had been under occasional Savak surveillance ever since his arrival, but the new element, Nazih being tortured, troubled him. He did not want to but he could not help trying to imagine the pain, the burning, ruptured anus, the poker-seared tongue. For what possible reason had Nazih refused to accuse him? Never fall in love with your agent, but maybe it’s not a bad idea to have your agent fall in love with you. Not that Nazih had been his agent. Frank considered him an enemy, someone not to be trusted. Like Lermontov. Like Rocky. He felt very alone. And he knew that somewhere within the maze that was Langley, a mole might be watching him—and that Henry James might be suspicious of him. He would have to report what Lermontov had told him, but he feared that if he had made an enemy of the prime minister Rocky might have him shipped home.

  “You’re sure about all this?”

  “How can you ever be sure? But it is my instinct always to believe the worst.” Lermontov held up his glass. “Is there more of this?”

  Frank returned from the kitchen with the remains of the vodka and watched Lermontov’s ritual of disconnecting the agency’s listening devices.

  “Did your people complain about this?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Frank as he poured the last of the Stoly into Lermontov’s glass and flicked on his tape recorder.