Reverb (Story of CI #2)
Page 7
Mirza brought his attention around to matters at hand, ignoring the fact that Dr. Hosseini was staring at the fat black skull ring on Mirza’s middle finger. “Do we know anything yet?” he prodded.
Hosseini cleared his throat and looked away, possibly repeating a mental prayer to Allah to cleanse his mind from the influence this rock star’s wardrobe might have on his eternal soul. “I have news about the girl,” he announced. Mirza’s heart quickened.
Tarsa. She was the only female member of Ashavan, and was still in prison, awaiting sentencing, along with the other two remaining remembers of the band. Sami had let her use her talent in the band when no one else was willing to break Iranian law to let a girl sing. Sami loved her like a little sister. Mirza suddenly couldn’t swallow.
“And?”
“She’s been in mostly good health. There were a few visits to the infirmary for some vitamins and antibiotics. But they did let her mother visit her three weeks ago.” Hosseini chuckled. “They even let her mother bring in a pot of stew and some chocolates.”
Mirza felt his broad shoulders sag with relief. Tarsa was alive. It had been two months since he’d had news of her or Jalan and Ardalan.
“What about the guys?”
Dr. Hosseini helped himself to a chocolate from Mirza’s bowl, knowing that anyone else would have gotten a sour frown for the action. He carefully unfolded the purple foil and made sure Mirza watched him raise the treat to his pale lips. “The men are still alive as well. They each registered a visit to the infirmary within the last week. Jalan had diarrhea.” If the situation weren’t so serious, Mirza would have actually cracked a smile. But Hosseini slowly swallowed the chocolate, and that could only mean he was stalling.
“And Ardalan?”
“I’m afraid your other friend is not doing so well. He was brought in for convulsions. He’s now in a coma.”
Thousands of fiery pellets assaulted Mirza’s body and he fought back a good curse. Ardalan had been healthy as a horse when he went in to prison, playing soccer every night when he wasn’t practicing the keyboard. “What happened?”
“Of course no one will say,” Hosseini remarked dourly. “But it has to be drugs. They will try to make him confess, even if it means frying his brain in the process.”
The anger slowly drained from Mirza and he sank back into the unyielding tweed fabric. The tension of the day focused on a point in his neck and began to pound, each beat a tidal wave of sorrow.
We shouldn’t have been alone at the wedding.
Tarsa and Jalan and Ardalan should have been there, too. They would have been there. But they were in Evin prison, wasting away. Ardalan could be dying.
And Sami. For Mirza’s best friend, it was too late. The end had come, and the rest of them were left here without him.
Resolve swelled in Mirza’s chest and he set his jaw. “What can I do?” he asked lowly. This waiting was killing him. He knew what getting this information could cost Dr. Hosseini, being a member of Ansar-e Hezbollah and all. If they found out he was helping the three prisoners connected with Sami of Ashavan, it would probably be Dr. Hosseini’s neck on the chopping block.
But Mirza wished he could do more. It had been two months since Sami died, but Mirza wouldn’t forget him or the rest of Ashavan.
“Please, tell me what I can do,” Mirza repeated. “We can’t wait for Jaime to come. He tried everything, but they wouldn’t give him a visa. I talked to him last week and he’s stuck in the United States. No way we can send information out with him. We have to think of something else.”
Dr. Hosseini slowly shifted his eyes towards the Bible nestled on the wooden stand, then the Quran. “There’s nothing you can do,” he sighed gruffly. “They’re there because they’re apostates, just like you.” The words could have stung, but Mirza knew that Hosseini thought it was wrong to put a man in jail for their choice of religion. He just wouldn’t tell anyone else that. “If you bring yourself to their attention, they’ll come for you too.” The doctor’s eyes were dark, and Mirza didn’t take his words lightly. This wasn’t the first time he’d been warned; Hosseini knew they were watching him and Neelam.
“Only I can keep bringing information to you. When the moment comes, we’ll act,” Hosseini insisted. “I may know how we can get information to the West. That’s all I can tell you for now.”
And for now, that was going to have to be enough.
Except it wasn’t.
Jaime Malcolm, who they had met through Ashavan’s U.S. concert tours, couldn’t come because Iran wouldn’t give him a visa; he’d been supposed to help them rally attention from the big church in Chicago where Jaime worked and petition the Iranian government. But then, his church just fired him for supporting Sami.
All they had was Jesus.
And somehow, Mirza was sure, he was going to be enough.
10
Shoddy Security
TRUE TO HIS WORD, ALEJO DIDN’T LET any of the boogiemen from the train get her. Wara arrived safely at CI headquarters in his company about nine the next day. Just in time for pancakes.
She sat at the solid wood table in the largest cabin she had seen in her life, sheltered by pine and cedar trees and the shadows of the Atlas mountains. “Butterscotch and raspberry,” Rupert Cole growled in his deep baritone, sliding a clay platter onto the table in front of her. The chink of clay against hard wood echoed off the cabin’s cathedral ceilings. “And these would be asiago cheese and dark chocolate. Just a hint of cinnamon.”
Wara’s mouth watered, taking in her options of caramel sauces, violet fruit and cheese that smelled like an Olive Garden lasagna. “Rupert, thank you so much. I can’t believe I get to see you again. I’m happy we made it.”
Rupert Cole, ex-CIA operative, founder of CI, and pancake chef extraordinaire, smiled at her from under his bushy brown mustache, ice blue eyes almost twinkling. He wore a faded plaid robe and fuzzy slippers, just as he had at his ostrich farm in Bolivia. Did the guy keep a wardrobe of those things in all his houses around the world? Shiny splotches of pancake batter mottled Rupert’s robe and the bald patch in his dark blond hair glinted in the early mountain sunlight.
“And I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you here, Wara,” he told her again. “It’ll be up to you, but I can’t help but feeling you’re where you belong.”
He bustled off to the kitchen to refill the glass carafe of strong coffee just as Alejo strode into the dining room. After the nightmarish trip from Tangier, he looked freshly showered and quite chipper. Sandal told Wara he’d gone out for a run before coming in for pancakes.
Wara downed a large gulp of very hot coffee to hide the sour face she felt herself making. She hated waking up early. Was she going to have to rise before dawn to lift weights and go running? Isn’t that what secret agents did? A shiver of apprehension tickled its way up her spine. She really wasn’t cut out for this, was she?
Alejo leaned over to cheek-smooch her good morning, then slid into a chair next to her and began stirring milk into his mug of very dark coffee. He was just forking in a giant bite of caramelized pancake when a loud Farsi cry echoed from the hallway. Momentarily caught off guard, Wara blinked. She was still in Morocco, right? But that voice was Farsi, which Rupert had made her study for this trip.
Sandal, the Iranian woman who worked with CI and would be their guide going to Iran, stumbled into the room, eyes red and weepy.
“Rupert.” She nearly gagged on the words, leaning against the dining room doorway. “Come with me downstairs.”
Rupert didn’t say a word, just left the coffee carafe on the table and followed her down a stairway at one side of the dining room.
Upset by the emotion in Sandal’s eyes, Wara excused herself to sit in a hammock on the large wooden deck, waiting for news about the scene at breakfast. The Sandal she had met in Bolivia had been strong and confident, nothing like the fragile woman who had called for Rupert this morning. She still had the same stocky build and short black
braids. Her hairstyle, combined with the rhinestone-laden tracksuits she always wore, made her look a decade younger than her forty years. Rupert had told her that Tabor, the man who had been working with Sandal in Bolivia, was on assignment somewhere in Europe.
Even Alejo didn’t come out to check on her. The sun was lacing white rays through the cedar fronds in the backyard when she heard the glass door whoosh behind her. Sandal appeared, huddling her hands inside the sleeves of a royal blue track suit. Swatches of mascara darkened the half-moons under her eyes. She tried a little smile, then sniffed and approached Wara.
“I am so sorry,” Sandal said lowly in Spanish. “So sorry. I didn’t’ even get to greet you. I’m so happy you’re here.” She paused, biting off whatever she was going to say next. The stout Iranian woman didn’t sit, but paced to the porch banister, gaze on the mountain forest view.
“Is everything ok?” Wara ventured. She knew there must be a lot of secrets around here, things she couldn’t know about unless she was a real member of CI. But something obviously wasn’t right. Sandal turned to look at her, eyes still rosy.
“No, it’s not,” she sniffed loudly. “As I’m sure you can see. We lost…we lost a good friend. A luke, like me.” Wara remembered that the agents working with CI were called lukes, after a passage in the book of Luke where Jesus said he came to set the captives free. She swallowed hard tried to focus on what Sandal was saying.
“I can’t even tell you his name,” Sandal continued, pain flashing across her eyes. “Something went wrong on his assignment and he disappeared into some prison. We couldn’t find him, until it was too late. He died from rabies…maybe a rat bite.” Now Sandal was angry. And heart broken. “I’m going to miss him. He was only twenty-nine.”
Honestly, Wara didn’t know what to say. This was horrible news. She blurted as much out, and Sandal excused herself, promising to be back in touch after she’d composed herself.
The canvas hammock creaked as Sandal again entered the house, leaving Wara staring blankly into the distance. A guy who worked with CI had just died. In prison.
What was she doing here again?
There was no way she, Wara Cadogan, a nerdy linguistics major from Montana, was cut out for this. Claustrophobia began to climb its way up the walls of Wara’s life, surrounding her with the pressure of being somewhere she by no means belonged.
She couldn’t do this. What had she been thinking?
Next year I’ll be twenty-nine. Like the guy who died.
Someone came outside to call her for lunch and Wara entered in a daze, floating in her morbid thoughts of the brevity of being.
The flimsy screen door that led across the back porch of Rupert’s cabin shuddered then slammed, echoing across the otherwise silent incline of darkened grass leading down to the stream. Alejo padded in leather flip-flops across the porch, past the worn vinyl patio furniture; his destination lay a short ways down the hill, under a cluster of trees whose limbs gyrated in a swirling night breeze. The moonlight illuminated each pine needle spike with a glint of iridescent silver, and the soft rays filtered through the branches to speckle the ground with patches of champagne light.
Underneath the dancing branches, back to Alejo, Wara sat on a low wall of rough bricks, staring downhill. She had been lost in thought the entire day, barely paying attention to anything they discussed with Rupert. Wara had quickly made up an excuse to escape from everyone’s company after dinner, and Alejo had seen her slip outside into the darkened yard.
This was an hour ago, and Alejo knew he had procrastinated enough. In Bolivia, Rupert had given him a mission, or rather, a penance: Be the man Wara loves. Give back what you took from her.
For the past three months, Alejo had limited the accomplishment of his penance/assignment to speaking with Wara on the phone, trying to somehow bridge the gap from being the cold-hearted killer of the man she loved to some kind of acquaintance. But now, he realized, he really needed to bring some more focus to the thing. The incredible hurt in Wara’s eyes last night on the train had clued him in that their few little phone conversations, combined with Alejo’s visit to her home in Montana, had not moved him along near as far towards his objective as he had imagined.
She was afraid of him, didn’t trust him at all. You could probably even safely say that Alejo’s presence was killing her inside.
If Alejo were to accomplish the penance Rupert assigned him to make things right, he was going to have to step up his strategy big time.
He leaned silently against the deck rail and zipped his black hoodie, just watching her sitting there with slumped shoulders, arms bare in the cool evening breeze.
Despite all the assignments Alejo had been on around the world, this one from Rupert just might be a challenge. For starters, he could probably count on one hand the hours he’d spent in one-on-one company with another woman during the last decade of his life. And now he was supposed to make the woman he’d nearly murdered fall in love with him?
Alejo exhaled softly, brow wrinkled. Well, how hard could it be? He loved challenges, and here was one, falling into his lap. Of course, there was the risk of certain painful rejection, but what was that compared to the threats he’d faced before?
Dismemberment, imprisonment, torture.
Death.
He could handle this.
I need a strategy.
As a first matter of business, he would have to start acting like a normal guy. He’d studied them, after all, in his line of work. Even though he’d spent the entire last ten year of his life as an agent with the Prism, speaking obscure languages and occasionally offing bad guys, he had met a lot of regular people and seen how they lived.
Rupert had told him to be the man Wara loves, to take Noah’s place. Well, Alejo would be willing to bet that one of the primary reasons Wara had loved Noah was because he was nice. Girls like nice guys, right? Who tell jokes and carry their backpacks and hang out at coffee shops with them to play board games?
Alejo could do nice. He wasn’t really nice, but he wasn’t really an Uzbek sociology professor either, and he had pulled that off pretty nicely for six months back in 2014. Alejo’s strategy was already coalescing before his eyes. He stuck his hands in his pockets and headed down the hill towards Wara.
His footsteps were so silent that she didn’t even realize he was coming until he stood just behind her, at the edge of the small section of wall she was resting on. Her head swiveled to the side in a flash, saw it was him, and offered an indifferent smile.
“Wara.” He heard his voice as too loud in the darkness and tried to tone it down. “Will you tell me the truth if I ask you something?”
Her eyes drifted over to his and her nose wrinkled with that face she made when she was curious. “Possibly. What?” Alejo was pleasantly surprised; that wasn’t necessarily the answer he had expected.
“I want to know if I can sit with you for a second. Or do you want to be alone?”
She watched him. “You can sit.”
Alejo hoisted onto the mismatched bricks, finding the wall high enough that both of their legs dangled in the air above the long grass. The tops of some of the old bricks were jagged and hollow, exposing the metallic glint of used shell casings scattered inside the crevasses.
This little wall must be used for target practice.
Alejo slid over another foot closer to Wara, leaving a comfortable distance between them. They both stared straight ahead, eyes caressing the mix of pale light and darkness that was the forest.
“What have you been thinking about?”
She shuddered, then looked at him, fiercely. “That I am a wimp. I can’t do this.” Wara kicked backwards against the brick wall angrily, then let out a frustrated breath. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. You and Sandal…you are different kind of people than me. You’re professionals.” She gave a bitter little laugh. “I don’t know what I’d do if I were in jail, like that guy who worked with CI, whose name we don’t even know.”
“I know how you feel,” he said instead. At her muffled scoff, he steeled himself for what he had to do. In Bolivia, he’d opened up to her one night about the tragedy of his childhood friend Ruben and why Alejo worked with the Prism. It had felt like he was ripping out his insides piece by piece to barbeque them. He was so used to keeping his stuff to himself.
“I wasn’t born a killer, you know,” he heard himself say. Not exactly what he’d thought he’d say, but very true. She started, but was intently watching him. “I was just a university student when I got recruited to work with the Prism. I was actually kind of normal, working on a masters. I had a girlfriend.” Short little fling with another married student. Definitely not something he was going to share about today. “They brought me to the wilderness of Iran, Wara. We were dropped off with a bunch of uniforms who turned out to be Hezbollah. They taught us how to use weapons, make and disarm bombs. The first time I shot a rocket launcher I nearly peed my pants. Anyway, what I’m saying, is that I know all of this is scary. I wanted to change the world. It’s all I wanted. I wanted to do something about all the wrong in the world, and I found myself being handed semiautomatic weapons.”
Thankfully, Wara’s expression showed interest, not derision. It had been a scary time, especially after the horrible experience during university in Tehran that had so turned Alejo off to violence.
“I’ve done things that are wrong,” he continued, pushing away awful images of the past. “One hundred percent wrong. But what would you do when you see something awful happening, and the only way to stop it is to use violence? I’m still really confused. I’m here because I want to work with Rupert, but that means I very well might have to kill someone again. It’s still wrong. But I still think it’s a greater sin to sit there and do nothing.”