“Wait.” The door closes.
I adjust my cap gripping the spray equipment tighter. I am about to knock again when it suddenly opens.
“Please. Come inside, please.”
Opposite the door where I enter four men are sitting on sofas. The two I’d followed still have their jackets and ties on.
Five small identical briefcases are stacked neatly near a coffee table in the opposite corner. The men watching me are tense, their uneasiness evident as they follow my progress into the room. Trying to act deferential and harassed, I touch my cap as a sign of greeting and thanks to them, bowing my head slightly as I walk into the kitchen. If they’ve baited a trap, the next few seconds will show how this is going to play out. I’ve placed a transmitter in the heel of my right shoe, which will let Josh know where I am if I am taken to another location.
Following closely behind me is the man who opened the door. He has a cluster of moles above his left eyebrow. Long hairs grow out of them. Obviously he isn’t self-conscious about the mole cluster, for he hasn’t tried to comb his hair down to try to hide it.
I slide a mask over my nose and mouth, kneel down and open each cupboard door below the sink. I begin removing pots, pans, and various crockery items and place them on the counter, stacking them in neat piles above each cupboard. Then I aim the rubber tubing that extends from a large nozzle at the top of the tank and start spraying the back, sides, top, and bottom of each cupboard, working as slowly as I can.
Sliding along the floor on my knees, I move to the stove, dishwasher, and refrigerator, spraying behind each appliance, aware that the men might attack me at any moment.
Coughing intermittently, holding a handkerchief in front of his mouth, the man stands watching my every move. One of the men has risen from a sofa and is standing on the far side of the counter. He, too, is watching me intently. Their eyes meet briefly as he lights a cigarette. He stands calmly with one hand in his pocket. As I stand up to open the cupboards above the sink, out of the corner of my eye, I see another man is now standing by the door. The fourth has moved to the wall of windows and is glancing out onto the street, moving each curtain slightly with his thumb, looking to see if any unusual activity is taking place outside the hotel.
They are getting more restless as I continue opening cupboard doors and spraying. Finally, I begin to replace the utensils and crockery into the upper cupboards.
A smoldering tension has built in the room.
“How much longer do you take?” asks the man on the other side of the counter, pointing with his cigarette. His other hand still in his pocket.
“Nearly finished, sir. Just one more spray behind the appliances. Will be as quick as I can. Sorry, sir, but the spray must dry before I can spray the second time.”
Suddenly a telephone rings. Loud and urgent, the tone echoes shrilly, continuing frantically.
The men, who have been standing next to me, walk toward the sideboard where the telephone continues to ring. One of them, the one with the cluster of moles, picks up the receiver. All eyes turn toward him as he answers the phone.
Inhaling a quick, deep breath, I set down a large frying pan next to a bowl of fruit. Watching them intently as they move toward the phone, I withdrew a small ashtray from my pocket, placing it on the kitchen counter behind the bowl of fruit. Satisfied that it will seem as if I’d overlooked it when replacing the utensils into the cupboards, I start packing away pots and pans as fast as I can. If they don’t stop me when I try to leave, I’m safe.
Speaking in Farsi, the man who answered the telephone asks the caller to wait.
I stand up grab my equipment and walk to the door. I touch my cap, open the door, and let myself out.
Leaning heavily against the wall, my head near the doorframe, I hear the security chain and dead bolt sliding into place. I close my eyes for a second, excitement surges through me. My heart races, hammering loudly against my chest. I’ve done it. I’ve planted a microphone.
Motionless, now sweating profusely, I stand for a few more seconds, feeling a trace of sweat quivering down my back. I take a deep breath, feel for my key, and open the next door down the hall. I enter room 410.
Tossing Les’s cap onto the sofa, I work as fast as I can to activate the tape recorder and switch on the transmitting receiver, at the same time putting on headphones. Through the transmitter in the ashtray, I can hear perfectly what is being said in room 412. There is no static. The high-frequency transmitter is a Penstar India-Probex medical device microchip, powerful enough to pick up their breathing.
The man with the cluster of moles is talking. Overly polite and obviously receiving instructions from the telephone caller, his responses in Farsi are curt and to the point.
“Yes, Excellency. I repeat. The times are tomorrow, Wednesday 3:40 p.m. Delta. 2:36 p.m. American. 12:40 p.m. American. 2:42 p.m. Northwest. 2:38 p.m. United Global.”
There is a pause.
“Yes, Excellency, we have checked everything. Excellency, please, we have gone over our checklist at least a hundred times….You know you can count on me, Excellency, I am very precise. I am very thorough.”
The man who had been talking must have handed the telephone to each of the others in the room. After a minute or so, a different voice answers with the words, “Thank you, Excellency. Allah Akbar.”
Finally, the phone must have been handed back to their leader.
His voice came though my headphones clearly. “Excellency, please convey to all of our families that to the very end of our lives, which we will end willingly tomorrow in this evil country, we respected and loved them greatly. Please tell them that in the same way we love them, we also love our country. We are ready to sacrifice our lives tomorrow so that our children can live good lives and all the children who are yet to be born can thrive in our motherland. Our deeds and our bravery will be told from one generation to the next.
“My men and I thank you a thousand, thousand times for choosing the nineteen of us to do Allah’s work so that our beloved country can defeat the Satan of all Satan’s. May Satan and his American offspring rot in a thousand hells. Allah be with you, Excellency, and your mission to liberate our motherland. We will do our part in Chicago to perfection, Excellency. By the time the sun sets tomorrow night, we all without exception will have accomplished your brilliant plan. We will have died so that the New World you will lead can begin to be born. Allah Akbar, God is Great.”
The man puts down the telephone. There is silence.
Tensely, I listen, beginning to become unnerved by a silence dragging on far too long. Maybe one of them had found the transmitter. Nervously, I glance at the door to see if the dead bolt has been turned. I can hear no sounds from the room next to mine.
Suddenly the leader speaks.
“Take your cases, men. Our time of greatness is now upon us. Our destiny is death. We will make glorious history for our beloved country. Leave now.”
In unison, the others say, “Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar.”
I hear the door to room 412 open, then close. Taking off my headphones, I move toward the door, holding the gun and knife in each hand. Back against the wall, standing next to the door, I crouch, waiting for them to attack, ready in case they break down the door.
They walk past my door, their shoes swishing loudly on the passage carpet. No one speaks. Slowly, their sounds float away.
Thunderclouds churn their uncertainty in my mind. I am still crouched and watch the door intently. I hear the soft clicking and whirring sounds coming from the tape recorder as it methodically records silence. I am still alive. Tremors like no others I have ever felt race through my fingers.
Outside the door, nothing. I still breathe carefully, feeling the pressure of endless anxiety building all around me as quietness crawls through the room.
I make my way back to the chair, walking softly, and sit down. Sitting upright in the chair, I watch the tape rewind. Suddenly and without warning, a nervous tic in my l
eft eye jerks my eyelid shut, surprising me with its intensity and fierceness. My stomach begins to knot savagely. I panic, knowing what is happening and am suddenly terrified that it is returning.
The tic becomes more pronounced. My fingers shake. I start to tremble. First my hands, then the shaking takes hold of my entire body. I am aware of a train rolling over me, the pounding of wheels snarling, and magnified into my ears. I recognize instantly the signs leading to a massive panic attack. Desperately I search my mind to recall what to do, trying to remember what the CIA psychiatrists had advised me to do when a panic attack begins.
They had warned me such a long time ago that I’d forgotten it could come back at any time if I was under deep stress.
Amazed by its suddenness, I set about doing the prescribed mental exercises, trying to remember exactly what I have to concentrate on. I fear that after such a long time, I might have forgotten the sequence of each exercise. Quite by chance, painful memories are resurrected, rippling through the private placed that are the dark corners hidden in my heart.
Hearing the Iranians talking about dying with the same fanatical fervor and grim determination drifts into the deep waters of my memory as I remember the terror of Teheran and how it had ignited, scorching and burning everything in its path, never sated by the hate killings, blood, or torture.
* * *
The first time I had been surrounded by this atmosphere of hate, waiting for something catastrophic to happen, had been during my last days in Teheran. It had taken years for the nightmares to finally disappear, to cease being a major part of my existence. Losing all my money devastated and rocked the steel fiber that had been my strength, shattered my confidence, imploding and eating away until with all hope gone, I suffered a nervous breakdown.
No matter how hard I tried to make the pain go away, my thoughts were broken, knowing the days ahead were empty. The devastation was there every waking minute. Each night, I slept fearful of each nightmare, knowing the horror would come. I was unable to stop it.
I had slowly returned from a life of black, desolate darkness and depression to a sort of despairing, half- living. Sanity and insanity circled like a hungry shark, had fought and jockeyed for my mind, whispering solutions—one trying to get me to take an easy way out and just give up; the other telling me to hold on by my fingernails, to fight back, to try to go on living.
The worst was an overpowering tiredness and lethargy. Sometimes I slept for days on end. When I awoke, my bed stank of urine, the stench glazing my body with stale sweat. Sometimes I couldn’t remember my name or where I was, so I slept again, pursued by layers of storm clouds, fighting and not succeeding to find a path toward a dreamless sleep.
Without the assistance of the pills, I became helpless, defenseless, and out of control as dreams ferociously attacked me, devouring me, leaving me no place to escape to, or to escape from. Jackals slathering slime tore savagely and brutally exposed torturous, frightening places that terrified me and made me cry. I wept like a small child, screaming in the night, Lying in bed half-asleep or half-awake, the scream surrounded me, surging vividly into my mind, contorting my face, wrapped tightly around my body like a vise. Involuntary muscle spasms made me cringe in fear, my chest moving with the rhythm of my sobbing.
It sometimes took hours of desperate silence to free myself from the scream, for it was so alive and so frightening, it echoed over and over in the quietness of my bedroom, chipping away as I waited fearfully for the sun to rise and lighten the darkness of my mind and my room.
That had been the most desperate time of my life. Months later, or was it years, I slept recovering and weaning myself off medication and pills, one night my sleep was dreamless.
The air is clean and cool, and the shine of the sun surrounds me gently. I know that I have lost many chunks of my life and those parts that are no longer a part of my memory, are my lost years.
* * *
I put my trembling hands under my thighs, placed them in the positions my psychiatrists had taught me, pressing my hands and outstretched fingers into the fabric of the chair seat. I draw in slow, deep breaths, holding my breath until my lungs fight for the relief of the air, swollen and bruised inside. l expel the air slowly, a puff at a time, slowly letting it escape through my nostrils.
My brain concentrates with all of its might on directing heat to my thighs, my knees, my feet. Soon they begin to feel warm and my body stops shaking. I close my eyes, sucking in deep breaths, greedily taking in and expelling huge amounts of air, allowing it to course through my body. Frantically I work at directing my mind to let go of my inner pain, urging my mind, willing it to warm my hands and to search for that peaceful place, the safe harbor where I am once again calm, once again in control, once again without terror and fear.
It takes a long time for me to find that place where I return to normalcy. I had forgotten that my freedom from fear is tenuous.
Many hours pass before the tic stops, for it has been nearly twenty years since my last attack.
CHAPTER FOUR
Josh
“Long time no see.”
“Hello, stranger. Where the hell have you been?”
“Around. you know me. I’ve got to look after my little nest egg. I’m not a big shot anti-terrorist expert like you.”
“Come, come. When we were working together and you saved my butt a few years ago, we saw each other often. I take it you are either ashamed of me, or as usual, you found a new girlfriend. What’s it been? Must be about three weeks,” Josh needled me.
“You got it. How did you guess? I’m ashamed of you.”
We both smile. Josh is head of the Anti-Terrorist Task Force in Chicago and is the best friend I have in here in the Windy City. I know he is smarter than I am. He lives by his own code of ethics, and in a war, he would be the only person I needed in a foxhole minding my back. He would find a way for us to get home safely.
A Chicago police captain I had known for many years had been one of my customers when I opened the first of my electronics stores. We had become friends, as he was into anything that was the newest technology, nanotechnology, or trendy electrical gizmos, as I was.
The captain had called me to translate when suspected terrorists who were Iranian were holding Josh as a hostage. The men had already killed Josh’s partner. The police had put an electronic key in the door from the outside to transmit what the two men were saying to each other in Farsi. I was able to more or less pinpoint where they were, as well as the room in which Josh was being held hostage.
Two SWAT teams were coordinated to attack at the same time. One team rappelled from the roof, broke the window at the same time the other team blew open the front door. From the door, dressed in body armor, I yelled as loudly as I could in Farsi, which momentarily surprised the terrorists. They hesitated, as they thought I was Iranian. Those few seconds allowed the SWAT men to kill both terrorists.
Josh had been working undercover in a massive international guns and ammunition smuggling sting. He was barely conscious, had been beaten severely, and was rushed to hospital. He still walks with the slightest of limps, and when I visited him in hospital, that was the beginning of our friendship.
One time, when we having dinner at his home, out of the blue he said, “JR, what did you shout when you went through the door?”
I answered, “The man inside is an asshole.”
Disbelief cruised into his eyes. Playing along when I saw incredulity flit across his face, I wanted to pull his leg again, but I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. He realized I was joking.
“Come on, man, enough of that shit,” Josh said.
I said, “I yelled, ‘Rafsanjani says stop.’”
Recognition drilled across his face. Rafsanjani had been the president of Iran at that time.
I knew he would find out that I had been in Special Ops, so as our friendship grew, I shook his hand one day and said, “You can ask me anything about my past, but Special Ops is off limit. You bug
me about something I don’t want to talk about, and you can find another squash partner.” In all the years I’d known him, that handshake had been enough. When he got married, I was best man at his wedding.
Josh and his wife Debbie, a smart CPA who is the senior partner in numerous companies, live a few blocks away from my apartment. They have two children, with a third to be born in a few weeks. I love being the babysitter, and they don’t have to pay me much when they want to go to a movie. I settle for the invitation to have a meal occasionally as Debbie is a one-of-a-kind cook and her meals are better than one at any five-star restaurant.
* * *
Tiring of the chitchat, Josh says, “Out with it. What’s on your mind? You never come to my office, especially with a tape recorder in your hand. Your message on my voice mail sounded serious. Glad I didn’t have to come looking for you ...”
Looking into his handsome, latte-colored face with its piercing brown eyes, I repeat what had transpired, then play the tape.
Iran has been on the list of terrorist countries boycotted by the USA ever since Reagan became president. Reagan’s administration had negotiated the release of the 52 American hostages with Khomeini, and as soon as the Americans had been released, he blacklisted Iran, putting it onto the list of Designated Terrorist Nations with which no American company could do business.
Josh speaks passable Farsi, having studied it at the academy. All security personnel were given the option of learning and training in Russian or Farsi. Josh and a few others opted to learn about Iran. Importance was placed on learning the culture, history, and nuances specific to the Iranian way of thinking.
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