Now he took them in. Western dress, a couple in their fifties, perhaps, a man with a plain, strong face and a striking woman. Not beautiful, but with a strong, clear face, a face to match the man’s. They were a nice couple. Now they smiled at him and said something in a strange language.
He started to speak, tried to understand.
The realization struck him with the impact of a fist. They were speaking English! This was an opportunity to try out his English, which he had acquired three years ago during a monthlong visit by his brother who lived in New Jersey.
“I am Mustafa Abtahi,” he said, the first two words in English.
He said it so fast his listeners looked blank. He said it again, slowly, and when he saw no comprehension moved right along. “Where you from?”
Now they understood. The light in their faces was wondrous to behold. “America,” they said in unison. Then they smiled.
“I will be an American,” declared Mustafa Abtahi with joy in his heart. “When my visa comes. I take the plane. Fly.” Their faces looked puzzled. “Fly,” Abtahi shouted and stuck his arms out and pretended to be an airplane.
Herman Strader looked at the medium-sized, swarthy, bearded man with an unruly head of black hair spouting barely recognizable English and waving his arms and wondered if this was one of those fundamentalist throat-slitters he had been warned about back in Bridgeport.
Iran, birthplace of taxi drivers! Of all the places on God’s green earth-
Suzanne chattered with the man-she could actually understand his gibberish-and huddled with him over the map.
They finished with the map, and Suzanne listened intently to the maniac. “His name is Mustafa Abtahi,” she reported. More gibberish. “He is awaiting his visa to America.” Blah, blah, blah. “He has a brother in New Jersey. Hoboken.”
She jabbered a while with Mustafa, then finally turned to her husband. “I need a pen and some paper.”
“What on earth for?” Herman Strader asked his wife.
“I am getting his address. I want to send him some English-language instructional tapes.”
Herman knew better than to argue. He gave his wife one of his business cards and a pen. She started to write on one, then realized she had two. She gave one to the Iranian as her husband watched in horror.
God Almighty-they were going to have terrorist cells turning up at their door asking for donations!
Suzanne talked all the time she worked on getting the Iranian’s address. She gave him a warm smile and returned Herman’s pen.
After handshakes all around, Herman grabbed his wife’s arm and escaped the presence of Mustafa Abtahi.
“Are you nuts?” he demanded when they were safely away and marching along the sidewalk. “That guy might be bin Laden’s brother-in-law.”
“My mother’s father came to America from Slovakia when he was twenty-three years old,” Suzanne said, “without a dollar in his pockets, speaking not a word of English, with nothing but the clothes on his back. I don’t want to hear any more bull from you.”
Herman Strader pulled out his cigar, paused to light the damn thing and blow smoke around, then took his wife’s arm and marched on. “Yes, dear,” he said contritely.
The thing about women, he reflected, is that sometimes they are right.
“What do you think of this purse?” Suzanne asked. “Was ten dollars too much?”
“Look on the bottom,” Herman advised. “It was probably made in China.”
His aunt told Ghasem that his grandfather was in the garden. “He had a bad night,” she said.
Ghasem went through the house and into the garden. Dr. Israr Murad was seated in a wooden chair, watching the birds. They had brought him out in a wheelchair, which was sitting empty a few feet away. Apparently he had asked to be moved to the wooden chair. He didn’t look up at Ghasem’s approach. He only looked when Ghasem squatted so that his face was on a plane with his grandfather and said, “Good morning, sir.”
Now the old man saw him, and his face brightened. “Ah, Ghasem, my wise one.” His voice was a whisper, barely audible. Ghasem sat on the ground. The birds fluttered around, then again went after the seeds, ignoring him.
“Your birds are very tame.”
“I suppose so.”
They sat silently watching the birds as the minutes passed. Ghasem had been too busy to start on the manuscript, and he didn’t want to say that, although he had decided to tell the truth if the old man asked. He didn’t. Ghasem wondered if he had forgotten the manuscript.
Finally Ghasem broke the silence with a question. “Is there an afterlife, a Paradise?”
Dr. Murad seemed to consider the question. He tried once to straighten up, then quit trying. Finally he said softly, “I hope so.”
Ghasem couldn’t resist. “I see you are avoiding the question.”
This comment caused the old man to smile. “Since man realized that he was mortal, he has wished for an afterlife. Dreamed of it. Prayed for it. The prophets all promised it. If they didn’t, no one listened to them and they are forgotten by history.”
“And you, what do you believe?”
He took a deep breath and exhaled. “I do not know. A lifetime of study and contemplation, and I realize I know nothing. Or, at any rate, very little. I want there to be an afterlife. I want to see your grandmother again. I want to see my parents, my brother who died so long ago… I can see their faces sometimes, but I get them mixed up, get the wrong person with the wrong face. Sometimes I am thinking about my wife and the face is my mother’s, and when I see my brother I think he is my father. My head is all mixed up.” He rubbed his forehead with two fingers, closed his eyes for a moment.
When he opened them, he put his hand back in his lap and said, “Life is a miracle. That is the only true thing I know. Everything springs from that one hard fact. When you take a religion that has lasted, one that has appealed to people for many generations, and boil it down, render it to a nubbin, all you get is two things. You should love God.”
Dr. Murad paused. “Love God, but how? Ahh…”
He rubbed his forehead again, shifted his weight in his chair.
“And the second thing?” Ghasem asked when he began to fear the old man had lost his train of thought.
“Be kind, compassionate, merciful to your fellow man. There are all manner of ways of saying it, but they all amount to the same thing. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Judge not, that you be not judged. Treat everyone as if he were a true believer.” He sighed and fell silent.
Finally he said, “Everything else is just details.”
He dribbled out some birdseed from the small sack in his lap. After a while his eyes closed, and he slept.
Ghasem crept away.
When the U.S. national security adviser, Jurgen Schulz, arrived at the Mehrabad airport, I was there to meet him. Normally the senior person at the American Interests Section would have been there to meet him, or if he or she was in the hospital dying or recently dead, the number two would go.
Amazingly, the message that arrived yesterday instructed the senior State person, our chargé d’affaires, Eliza Marie Ortiz, to send me, the lowly Carmellini, to carry the great man’s luggage.
Ortiz showed me the message. “You,” she said.
Accustomed as I am to cheerfully obeying orders without question or bitching, I passed up the morning jog that day, put on clean underwear and a clean shirt and drove the State Department’s heap out to the airport. I flashed my diplomatic passport at a heavy-lidded, overweight guard with big lips and a scraggly beard, parked in the diplomat section of the parking lot and wandered into the terminal as jet engines whined and roared and growled their usual insane symphony.
The plane was late. Some Iranian government types, with armed guards circling, waited near the gate. Finally the plane arrived, and people started filing off, first class first, of course. There was a little confusion when they decided some roly-p
oly guy was the NSA, but I recognized Schulz right off. I gave him the Hi sign, and he nodded at me. Through the interpreter, I was directed to rescue his luggage and take it through the diplomatic line at customs/immigration. With his check slips in hand, I wandered off to baggage claim while the diplomats shook hands. I kept my eye on them, and they marched out and climbed into a stretch limo. Looked like a Chrysler 300.
When I had Schulz’s two bags, I put them in the car and drove off, carefully-because Iran’s drivers are maniacs-and headed for the hotel.
Up in his room, with his bags on the bed, I started looking for bugs. The electronic kind. Found three. Didn’t move them. I was standing at the window with my hands in my pockets when Schulz came in.
“Tommy Carmellini,” I said and shook hands.
I handed him a note that told him the room was bugged. He read the note, nodded and pocketed it.
I asked him about his flight; we chatted amiably, and he said to pick him up in the morning at ten. He had an appointment with Ahmadinejad, he said, and wanted me to come along and take notes.
“Sure.”
I left him there to fight jet lag all by himself.
The next morning when I knocked on his door, he was ready to go. “Where can we talk?” he asked as we walked down the hallway.
“We think the annex is safe, but there’s always a chance. The best place would be a park, on the way to your appointment.”
So that is what we did. I pulled over; we got out and walked away from the traffic.
“I had a little talk with your boss before I left,” he said. “He wanted you to see this building, to go to the interview with Ahmadinejad.”
“I figured.”
“Do you need me to do anything?” he asked.
“Ignore me, let me tag along and pretend to be your aide. That’ll do.”
He made a face, then nodded curtly and headed back for the car with me following him. We went to the embassy annex, I parked and we headed upstairs. I dropped him at Ortiz’s office and hung around in the hallway. Sure enough, in thirty minutes Schulz came out with Ortiz.
She looked me over. I had only met her a couple of times, and of course she knew I was CIA, although that was never discussed. We were in the belly of the beast, so to speak. She was in her midforties, trim and prematurely gray. I knew she had come up through the State Department ranks and was here in Tehran because she was a hot rising star. At that moment I would have given even money that she wished she weren’t.
With a sigh, she led off. We had a limo waiting, and I got to ride facing forward and listen to Ortiz tell Schulz about Ahmadinejad. She actually thought there was a serious underground opposition to the mullahs, who had picked Ahmadinejad and rigged two elections to get him in.
“But does he need the mullahs now?” Schulz asked.
“More than ever,” she said. “Political opposition to the regime is crystallizing. The main opponents call themselves the National Council of Resistance. They have organized open demonstrations here in the capital. A thousand women marched some months ago and were attacked by MOIS agents. Still, a thousand women, parading for equal rights, in Iran… And this ferment is not just in the capital-it’s in the provinces, too. Perhaps more so there than here.”
The ministry was a huge, colorless mausoleum obviously copied from some Moscow masterpiece. Officials met us at the front door and escorted us inside. The chargé was recognized, and the three of us were led through long hallways and rode upstairs in an elevator made in France. Uniformed armed guards, IRGC, were stationed all over, standing in front of doorways and at intersections of hallways. I didn’t see any security cameras or IR sensors, no laser alarms, none of that.
There was a little crowd waiting in Ahmadinejad’s office. Schulz and I were the only two clean-shaven men there. Ahmadinejad was wearing a sports coat without a tie. Iranians, I knew, didn’t do ties these days. Too Western.
He was a little shorter than I thought he would be, but full of machismo and obviously the leader of the pack. Some of the mullahs had turbans wrapped around their heads, but several didn’t. Universally, they ignored our chargé, since there was a man present who outranked her in the enemy government. I wondered how she got anyone in this town to pay any attention to her. To put up with this bullshit on a regular basis-well, I thought she was a tough, classy lady.
As Schulz talked, through an interpreter, I surveyed the mullahs, putting faces to names. Then I saw three guys standing in the back that I recognized from their photographs. They were certainly not mullahs. One was Brigadier General Dr. Seyyed Ali Hosseini-Tash, the head of the weapons of mass destruction program. Another was Major Larijani, chief enforcer for the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Beside him was his boss.
In the back of the room was a woman in a chador, with a black headscarf. I glanced at her several times to make sure. Yep, it was Hazra al-Rashid, the spymaster. I had never seen her in the flesh, but I had seen a couple of poor photos. She always wore a chador. All the mullahs and generals seemed to be ignoring her. It was as if she weren’t even there.
As the introductions ended, I whipped out a pad and pencil and began making notes in my bastard, law-student shorthand, notes that only I could read.
Schulz started with a little speech about the United States’ concern that Iran was manufacturing nuclear warheads. He paused every few sentences for the translator to convert his English into Farsi, which allowed me to stay with him. I glanced at Ahmadinejad a time or two, just to see how he was taking all this.
His face was impassive. I couldn’t read it.
Ahmadinejad didn’t bother repeating his government’s public assertion that they weren’t making weapons, merely developing nuclear power.
When Schulz had said everything he wanted to say, he removed an envelope from a breast pocket. “The president of the United States sent me here to personally deliver this letter to you, President Ahmadinejad,” he said and handed it to the man.
Ahmadinejad took the envelope and tapped it several times on one hand as he thought. “I will read it, and my government will consider the contents,” he said, glancing at the mullahs and generals.
That was pretty much it. After a little milling around, we left, with Schulz following Ortiz.
As we rode away in the limo, I took a last good look at the ministry. Yep, it could be done. If necessary, I could get in there and root through the safe behind Ahmadinejad’s desk-and, if I had enough time, the locked cabinets in the outer offices.
I would need a diversion to occupy the guards, who I knew would be there twenty-four hours a day. As we rode through the streets in the back of the limo and Schulz and Ortiz chattered, I began thinking about what kind of diversion was possible, and about the equipment I would need.
The next day the Iranians invited us back to the president’s office. Thanks to Jake Grafton, I got to go along. I was still noodling about how to create a diversion if I needed one.
Of course I was preoccupied as Jurgen Schulz, Eliza Ortiz and I rode through the streets to the ministry. Schulz and Ortiz conferred in low tones; I paid no attention. I was looking at the streets, the power poles, the wires, a helicopter motoring across the city, thinking about how a clandestine entry could be physically accomplished, how I could stay in there for four or five hours and escape afterward with my hide intact.
The hallways were literally full of soldiers, all armed, who stood shoulder to shoulder along each side of the passageway. Each and every one of them looked us over as we went by. Most of their attention was devoted to Ms. Ortiz, who walked with her head erect and pretended not to notice them. The whole experience was something akin to visual rape.
The president’s office was packed with men. The only woman was Hazra al-Rashid, a black ghost tucked into a corner. She reminded me of the Wicked Witch of the West, but as I recall, the witch was better dressed. There were a lot of beards and fashionably grizzled faces; it looked like an actors’ tryout for the part of Rutherfor
d B. Hayes in an upcoming movie. Lots of turbans, too.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was standing in front of his desk, and he wasn’t standing still. He moved nervously from foot to foot; his face was sweaty, his movements jerky. Even his hands were in constant motion as we filed in. The guy looked like he’d had a handful of uppers for breakfast.
Ol’ Mahmoud skipped the social pleasantries and got right down to it. He waved the letter and said loudly, “This is an ultimatum, a threat. If I had known that the Great Satan-the embodiment of evil and cruelty against mankind-was going to threaten me in my own office, I would have refused to see you.”
The translator did this in English for us as Ahmadinejad wiped a hand across his face and shifted his weight from foot to foot.
“Our nuclear program is designed for peaceful purposes, yet the Islamic Republic of Iran is surrounded by enemies. Never in history has a nation had a more righteous reason to gird itself for an onslaught by the forces of Satan.”
He was spouting Farsi, and I was getting most of this, and the translator rendered a faithful translation in English, which allowed me to get the gist in shorthand. Sometimes translators try to tone down more strident politicians. This one knew better. We were going to have to take it neat.
Ahmadinejad took off next on the Jews, on Zionism, on the malignancy of Israel and its supporters around the globe. The stuff was downright vituperative, and he ended with this: “The Zionists control the banks in Europe, the parliaments, the allocation of capital-and they control the American government, which treats us with contempt.” He waved the letter at his audience and at Schulz. So far he had ignored Ortiz, but that changed almost immediately.
“Your president treats us with contempt, as if we were foolish children. We are not children. We know an insult when it is thrown in our faces. You insult us when you send a woman as your representative, a woman who refuses to wear a chador, a woman who parades in Western dress that is an insult to every Muslim.”
A murmur went through his audience. I didn’t bother glancing at them. I scribbled on.
The Disciple Page 13