by John Shirley
“Oh Christ, forget it, Bakky.” And he set off to find the Blue Sheikh and the road to Rasht.
~
The monastery of the Blue Sheikh was almost indistinguishable from the mountainside. It was an ancient warren of tunnels and ventilation shafts cut into a cliff of Mount Damāvand, overlooking a misty valley laced with attenuated waterfalls. Constantine hurried out the wood-and-brass front gate and stopped in the cool gray dawn, looking around for the monastery’s master. He picked out the familiar blue robe almost immediately against the dull backdrop of stone fifty yards down the hill, the sheikh strolling along the graveled path into the “stone garden.” Constantine saw no cars, though the sheikh had predicted one, and no gunmen.
More like something you’d see in Japan than Iran, to Constantine’s eye, the stone garden was made of rubble from hundreds of years of tunneling, set up along a gravel trail meandering down the terraced slope. Some of the stone sculptures, of stone chips roughly mortared together, were shaped like man-sized poplar trees in full leaf; some were fashioned like flames; another resembled a frozen fountain of water; and one was a pillar of smoke with a woman’s face. The Blue Sheikh was said to have made them himself, around two hundred years before. The sculptures were artfully spaced between shapeless boulders of gray stone streaked with cinnabar. There were almost no plants in the garden; the Blue Sheikh strolled to the single tree, a Persian hornbeam on a craggy terrace halfway down the garden path. He stopped there, waiting in dignified expectancy, at the base of the gnarled, nearly leafless tree . . .
“Xodavand!” Constantine called out. He didn’t know the man’s real name and he’d have felt stupid shouting Blue Sheikh!
There was no response from the magus—or none spoken aloud. But as the monastery’s spiritual master stood there, calmly awaiting death under the hornbeam tree, Constantine seemed to see him in some greater context. He understood the significance of the blue robe and turban: it was the exact color of the “blue current,” the discharge of power glimpsed when a great adept transfers energy from himself to someone he is healing. Constantine had once seen the Blue Sheikh emanate a pulse of this blue light when laying hands on an ailing monk. The man had been near death; the next day he was on his feet, sweeping out his cell and singing.
Now the garden itself seemed to have a fuller meaning to Constantine. Its images were of fluid, changeable objects—flame, water, smoke, women, growing trees—but captured in stone, the symbol of the cessation of movement, of the static. The garden declared that what seems firm is fluid, is part of an energetic change, and what is fluid is also, in some way, forever; the transitory is preserved at the place where a single consciously sensed instant connects with eternity.
And the only lively color in that garden of the changing and the unchanging was the robe of a conscious man: the blue of the energy of life itself.
Constantine stared, then shook himself out of his reverie and started down the path, into the stone garden. “Sheikh! You can’t—”
Inevitable as the cymbal clash in a symphonic composition, the gunshot rang out—and the Blue Sheikh staggered back against the tree. He slumped down, knees drawn up, gazing across the valley, at the sun rising between the hills.
Constantine found himself running down the path—stumbling in his haste across the uneven ground, and it was a stumble, perhaps, that saved his life. A bullet struck chips from a low boulder beside him and he looked up to see a man with a smoking rifle in his hands, poised behind another boulder, near the road. Constantine could just make out a red-streaked black beard and deep-set eyes. Someone shouted at the man, he turned to reply, and Constantine, heart hammering, took the opportunity to jump behind a sculpture of a rising flame. A car horn honked and the gunman drew back, gone from sight. A dusty blue Ford SUV roared out from behind a screen of boulders and went bumping down the dirt road, into the valley.
Constantine ran to the sheikh and knelt beside him. His eyes were glazed; his chest, red with welling blood, barely moved. A breath. A breath. And . . . a final breath. And spoken with that were a few words in some language Constantine didn’t understand. It wasn’t Farsi or Arabic. An Egyptian dialect perhaps—maybe Coptic. But what the words meant, Constantine didn’t know.
And then the Blue Sheikh was dead. Constantine looked around, thinking to see his spirit, perhaps to have a chin-wag with the sheikh’s ghost. But he saw nothing but the rustling of dead leaves, the last leaves from the previous year, tugged from the branches of the tree to spiral away into the garden.
Constantine sat beside the body for some minutes, trying to feel the acceptance, the rightness of this death that the sheikh had evinced. He was trying for “good reflection” on what had happened. But all he felt was the bitterness that always came in contemplating a pointless death.
He watched the mist curl and dissipate in the valley below them.
After a while he heard footsteps, clattering gravel. He was aware of Bahktiar standing nearby with some other men, talking in Farsi.
“Did you tell him, the Abi Sheikh, he must come here to the garden?” Bahktiar said.
It took Constantine several moments to realize this was a question directed at him. “You wot? No I didn’t bloody tell him to come here, you daft idjit. Who tells the Blue Sheikh where to go? Didn’t you see that car?”
“We come out, a car drove away . . .”
So that was why the gunman had left before dealing with Constantine: he’d seen the others approaching. “Well they didn’t need any help from me. The sheikh saw it coming . . .” He realized his voice was breaking. He shook his head.
Stupid, he told himself. You hardly knew the guy. He gave you maybe a total of thirty hours of direct instruction. Rest of the time you were in the back of the class, trying to figure out what they were talking about.
But the Blue Sheikh had let him come into this monastery. Him, a guy prone to going on drunks and chasing women; the sheikh had taken a chance on a man who had Lucifer himself perpetually angry with him. Constantine was not exactly a lucky talisman.
He took a risk having me here. He took a chance on me. He tolerated my vanity, my bad attitude . . .
Could it be that the sheikh’s death was somehow Constantine’s fault? Lucifer might well have decided to stop Constantine from learning any more at the monastery. He might’ve whispered a suggestion into some human’s ear:
Kill the Blue Sheikh . . .
The limp-brained human getting the suggestion would make up his own reasons for the murder. The Devil wouldn’t bother to tell him it was to keep Constantine from learning too much.
But there was no way of telling if Lucifer was involved. People were capable of generating their own evil without the Devil’s help. Constantine was sure only of his own sense of loss. He’d felt a kind of gut-level acceptance from the sheikh that he’d gotten from no one else, ever.
The monks were weeping now as they picked up the body of their master. Two of them, bearded, robed, and red-eyed with grief, glowered balefully at Constantine.
“You can just drop that whole line of thinking,” Constantine said, getting to his feet. “I had nothing to do with it.”
Not that I know of.
He started across the garden, picking his way, heading for the road. One of the younger monks came after him, tried to hold him back.
Constantine tore his arm free and whirled, raising a hand—not a fist, a hand. An incantation trembling unspoken on his lips.
But the monk was looking into Constantine’s eyes. He saw grief there—and turned away.
Bahktiar said something in Farsi, and then in English added, “I tell them let you go. We have called the chieftain of the valley, we have radio—he will take you and find the truth . . .”
“Chieftain! Local gangleader you mean,” Constantine muttered, heading down the hillside.
~
Constantine had been trudging along the dirt road for four, maybe five miles. He’d walked through the little valley and a ways be
yond it. With any luck, he was heading toward the sea. But his feet were aching, stomach complaining, making him nostalgic for an out-of-body experience. It occurred to him that he was in a place where the Caspian tiger yet roamed—and he had no idea how far he was from Rasht. Might take a couple of days to walk there.
He’d come here in the dark of night, months ago, sleeping in the back of a sheep rancher’s truck. He had almost no sense of the lay of the land. “Here is monastery,” the farmer had said, and that was that.
The road was edged with outcroppings of volcanic rock, the occasional stunted tree; from time to time, small streams from snowmelt dashed by, sometimes crossing the road. Apart from the streams and the distant brown form of a wild burro cropping a patch of grass, the only movement came from a pair of vultures, wheeling far overhead. He was increasingly hungry—daydreaming of coming upon a farmer, perhaps carrying some of the local cheese and olives for lunch. There was a pomegranate tree, and that one might be a pistachio, but neither was fruiting.
A wild gerbil scuttled under the arching root of the pistachio tree and peered fretfully out at him. “I’ve heard the local people eat gerbils,” Constantine told the animal. “I didn’t ask what was in the stew at the monastery. But I’m not one for raw meat. So relax . . . crikey, I’m reduced to talking to rodents . . . I’ll be the hermit who lives with the wild gerbils . . .”
The gerbil stared at him with beady eyes, then looked down the road, and ducked back into its den.
Constantine strode broodingly along, his emotions in turmoil. He’d made a kind of specialty of adapting to unexpected situations, to sudden changes—but after a long stay at the monastery, he’d seen his spiritual master shot dead, had been shot at himself, accused of complicity with murderers, and now he was afoot in a country where his legal status was extremely dicey. He felt like a cat tumbled about in a clothes dryer. Could things get worse?
They could: a U.S. Army surplus jeep pulled around the curve ahead. It looked to be Vietnam War-era in its green cammie paint, and it was brimming with armed men. It started past, then braked, wheels screeching, and backed up beside Constantine, pluming dust that made him cough. Five large, bearded, turbaned, and bristly browed men in paramilitary togs got out and pointed their AK47s at him.
“You gents lost?” Constantine asked. “Need directions?”
“English, get in this jeep,” said the biggest one. “You will come and answer questions.”
“Always preferred to ask the questions,” Constantine said. “Never good at answering them. C-average at best. Any clue as to the topic?”
“I do not know what is questions.” The man grinned, his teeth brown from kif, and pointed his rifle at Constantine’s head. “If you are preferring, I can kill you now.”
Constantine got into the jeep.
Tel Aviv, Israel
“Did you arrange for the old sheikh to be eliminated?” Morris asked, looking at the hazy Tel Aviv morning. A fine view from up here.
“Which sheikh would that be, Phil?” Trevino asked. His Italian accent was slight but unmistakable. “Ah! The blue one? I did, yes—I did. It was reported to me just before you came—he is dead. One shot. Muhadar is very good.”
Trevino poured Morris some more coffee, being careful with the delicate white china. A tall man with a thick head of white hair, dark, bruised-looking eyes, and a receding chin, Alfonse Trevino was a defrocked Roman Catholic bishop, at ease with Morris, whom he’d known for some years. The two men were seated at breakfast on the penthouse balcony of Trevino’s Tel Aviv hotel—the costliest suite in the costliest hotel in town. The Servants of Transfiguration paid for the hotel, after all, and the SOT had accumulated nearly forty billion dollars, counting the Krugerrands, the platinum, and the diamonds, and not counting the uranium mine.
Morris was a little younger—an American, as always in a cream-colored Brooks Brothers suit. A former televangelist, Morris was short and wiry, his black hair slicked back, his gray eyes flat, his lips a straight line in a tanned face marred by a wine stain. He was a wealthy man; he could have had the wine stain removed, but the port mark on his cheek was shaped roughly like a scimitar, which had significance to Morris. His tie tack was a single gold Christian cross.
He sipped his coffee and gazed out at the humming city. The sparkling blue Mediterranean, palm trees pacing the beach; a group of synagogues with gleaming white domes; nearer were the hotel high-rises and the architectural bristle of business eminence: Microsoft, Cisco, AOL, IBM all had imposing facilities here. Amusing to think that these graceful, proud skyscrapers would all come crashing down, probably to fall one into the next like so many dominos, when the Great Disclosure came about.
“We embellished the event quite skillfully, I believe,” Trevino said. “The sniper’s car was stolen from an American embassy in Turkey. Eventually it will be traced back there. The mullahs will be able to blame the CIA. Of course, they wanted the Blue Sheikh dead for years; only his support amongst the local people, and his avoidance of politics, kept him safe.”
“And the CIA,” Morris observed, “will blame the mullahs. The man we used, after all, was with Fedayeen-e-Iran, before he was expelled.”
“Yes. It’s all but a small part of the design, of course. But one likes everything neat. It will be necessary to have the assassin killed, I think. Perhaps we will make it appear that the Mossad did it . . .”
“Did anyone see the shooting?” Morris asked. It was indeed a small matter. But he was detail oriented.
“Yes—some sort of British spiritual seeker. We don’t have his name yet. Someone at the monastery radioed to the local warlord. As this warlord is in our pay, I have asked him to pick the man up. He could be MI6, after all. We have a number of projects in that area that MI6 would be interested in. The sheikh may have known about them.”
“Someone British. Well. Have him interrogated. Thoroughly.” He toyed with a slice of toast and chuckled. “ ‘Local warlord,’ you say. Funny, the people who get that title. Like mistaking a lion’s flea for the lion.”
Trevino cleared his throat warningly. He instinctively shied away from mentioning the great powers, except in a ritualistic context. Morris saw it differently. It was not as if the War Lord would come before he was ready. Every piece would have to be in place, every proper note precisely sung, before he would be set free again. That was God’s will.
“I wonder if it was not a waste to kill the Blue Shiekh,” Morris remarked, after some moments of listening to the honking, the rumbling of the city. “Such power. If he could have been brought to heel . . .”
“That one—never. He was a rogue agent of the Ground of Being. He would not understand what we’re about. He would have been brought into opposition against us. He had to be removed from the board. And in the Hidden World, he will be occupied with bliss.”
Morris looked up from spreading marmalade on a triangle of toast, but decided not to reproach Trevino for the use of diabolic terminology. The “Ground of Being,” the “Hidden World”—to Morris, anyway, this was the language of occultism, ergo the language of Satan. There was only Heaven and Hell after death, as far as Morris was concerned. “This orange marmalade with the little bits of peel in it—it’s so bitter. I can’t get used to it.”
“It comes from England. The British like things bitter or bland. Little in between.” Trevino looked at his watch. “I expected to be called to the meeting by now.”
“Adverse winds,” Morris said, dabbing his lips with a napkin. “Coggins’s plane was delayed. But he’ll be here. Is everything arranged in Carthaga? Any problems with the CIA? They have a station in Carthaga . . .”
“The CIA? No. ‘The Company’ is totally fuddled. They have no idea what we’re about. The president tells them as little as possible, of course—they know nothing about the great plan. Nor the British. ‘The Firm,’ at any rate, has almost no operatives in Carthaga . . .”
“A shame we can’t use a ready-made war, like Iraq.”
&n
bsp; “Not for the consecration of the seed-heads. No. We need something fresh.”
“By the way—this table, this balcony—it has all been swept?”
“I have antibugging devices about me always. Don’t worry, Phil. Even the Mossad is without a clue what we’re about. They have almost no one in Carthaga—there is no one to oppose us there. Scarcely anyone has even heard of that little postage stamp of a country. The first stage will come off immaculately—ah!” His cellphone was chiming. He took the tiny instrument from a pocket and put on a pair of glasses so he could read the text message on its even tinier screen. “I see that Coggins has arrived. The meeting is called; we’re to be there in an hour and a half. I have time to shave and change. I see I also have a call from our man in Iran. Probably asking what to do with the Britisher.”
“The Brit?” Morris yawned. Jet lag was a bitch. “Once they wring him dry, see that they kill him. And see to it they do it fairly soon.”
4
MERCURY RISING
A little south of Rasht, Iran
The smoke-wreathed minarets of Rasht were just in sight when Constantine, sitting between two gunmen in the backseat of a jeep, made up his mind to do something highly risky, quite possibly stupid, and with a good chance of being fatal.
He was fairly used to making that kind of decision. This time it came when the guy with the brown teeth, nattering to his heavily armed pals, used the Farsi word for kill while looking at Constantine. Not a good sign.
Constantine was still feeling weak after days of fasting—and after journeying so far out of body he’d nearly been unable to come back. His latent psychic abilities had grown somewhat over the years, but his capacity to read minds was still uneven at the best of times—local conditions, his own condition, and the mental ability of his subjects affected it. Right now he wasn’t picking up much from these thugs, maybe because they didn’t do much thinking. You can’t read what isn’t there. He sensed only a general air of malevolence. The rifles and their seizing him were no proof of anything—people in this part of the world carried rifles the way people in Manchester toted umbrellas, and suspicion was a way of life here. But Constantine was sure of it; he had to escape from these bastards before they got him behind locked doors, or he’d never come out alive.