THE INCREMENT

by David Ignatius

  “You need to lie down,” said Karim. He could feel his friend’s body going limp as the paralysis set in. There were tears in Karim’s eyes as he laid Reza down on the couch. He brushed them away. His friend’s breathing was becoming shallower and he was beginning to whimper like a dog that wants attention. How could this be happening?

  Karim knew he should call a doctor. There was still time, perhaps. Reza groaned. Spittle was coming out of his mouth. Karim touched his hand. It had gone cold.

  “There, there,” said Karim. “You’ll be all right.”

  Tears were pouring from his eyes now. What had he done? How had he set this in motion? Karim thought of the American, Mr. Harry. Who was this man who had acted like his friend? He leaned over Reza, covering him like a blanket with his body. He felt his breathing, each rise and fall slower, and the sound more raspy. And then the breathing stopped. Still Karim lay there atop him, trying to prevent the life spirit from slipping away from his friend into the Mashad night.

  There was a sharp rap at the door. When Karim didn’t answer, the door blew open with sudden force and two dark forms surged into the apartment. Karim clutched the body of his friend tighter.

  “Get up, Karim, please,” said Jackie. She was trying to soften her voice, but there was an edge of tension. “We’ve got to go. Now.”

  Marwan stood by the door, holding his automatic rifle tightly at his side.

  “You killed him!” wailed Karim. “I trusted you. He was my friend. What did he do?”

  “I will explain it later. We have to go now. The car is downstairs. Come on.” She pulled at him, but Karim was a large man. She called for Marwan to come help.

  “Stop! Do not force me. Let me sit here a moment.” Karim’s head was cradled in his hands. Jackie stroked his back. Marwan pointed to his watch, but Jackie shook her head. They had to let the young Iranian find a center, or they would lose him.

  Another car had pulled into the driveway, lights out and coasting the last fifty yards. Hakim, keeping watch by the Mitsubishi van, saw it coming but he was too late. Through an open window of the black Paykan, a man in a black cloth cap fired once, hitting Hakim in the shoulder. Hakim spun, but before he could get off a shot of his own, a second shot hit him full in the head, producing a pulpy sound like a pumpkin splitting. The other man in the car, the Iranian intelligence officer with the carefully groomed goatee, let out a gasp. Despite his line of work, he had never seen one man kill another.

  Al-Majnoun walked toward the vehicle. Two more shots and the rear tires of the Mitsubishi were gone. The Turkmen driver was cowering on the front floor under the steering wheel. Al-Majnoun put his gun to the driver’s head and pulled the trigger, and then returned to the Paykan. Mehdi Esfahani was in the backseat, holding his gun in his hand but having no idea what to do with it.

  “Get out,” rasped Al-Majnoun. “Follow me.” He took a second pistol from his black briefcase and stuffed it into his coat pocket.

  The two men scuttled up the walkway toward Reza’s house. Al-Majnoun’s body was pitched forward as he searched for the rear entrance. He moved with the certainty of someone who knew the layout of the apartment. He found the rear door and gently forced it open. He put a mask over his face, pulling it down over the striated flesh. He was not a man, but another life-form.

  Al-Majnoun dove into the house, rolling a gas grenade toward the living room where Karim was still recovering, head in hands. The room exploded with automatic fire, but Jackie and Marwan were shooting randomly; they couldn’t see their target. As skilled as they were, they had been taken by surprise. They were already choking from the gas, and in another moment they could no longer fire their weapons accurately, or even focus their eyes.

  Al-Majnoun waited until they were incapacitated and then crept toward the living room. Jackie’s body was flaccid. She tried to move her gun, but couldn’t. Marwan also appeared to be motionless, but when Al-Majnoun moved toward him, he summoned a spasm of muscle memory and let off a spray of fire. One of the bullets caught Al-Majnoun in the leg. It drew a clean shot from Al-Majnoun’s automatic pistol, like the sound of a piece of plastic being ripped. The bullet hit Marwan in the chest; a second followed to the head. Al-Majnoun moved toward Karim Molavi’s inert body; he tugged at the clothing of the lifeless figure and listened for his heartbeat, to make sure he was still alive.

  Mehdi had lurked outside, but now Al-Majnoun called for him to enter the house. The interrogator tried to look composed, brandishing his pistol before him as if he knew how to use it. The gas from the grenade had dispersed now. Al-Majnoun pulled the gun away from Jackie’s hand and slapped her across the face.

  “Wake up, British lady,” he said in English. He slapped her again.

  Karim’s world had gone all foggy. He tried feebly to rouse himself, to aid the woman he still regarded as his protector. Al-Majnoun pushed him back on the bed.

  “Stay there,” said the Lebanese. “You are my prisoner.” He called Mehdi into the room. The Iranian approached slowly, looking at the carnage in the little room, two people dead, two helpless captives.

  Al-Majnoun had taken his second pistol from his pocket. The Lebanese killer’s face was throbbing and twitching, as if all the scars had come alive like so many worms. The look in his eye testified that he really was the Crazy One, that he needed one more act of mayhem before his play was done. Mehdi could see that the man was not in his right mind; not in any mind.

  “Don’t kill the boy,” he said. “We need his evidence. We need to interrogate him.”

  Al-Majnoun turned toward Mehdi. The smile on his face was that of a jack-o’-lantern, illuminated from inside by a flickering candle. He raised his pistol toward Mehdi Esfahani. There was a look of absolute terror in the eye of the Iranian intelligence officer, and perhaps a glimmer of realization now, too late, that the game had been something entirely different from what he had believed.

  “Al-Majnoun, what are you doing?” he screamed. “Al-Majnoun, please!”

  Before Esfahani could speak another word, the assassin squeezed the trigger.

  “You misunderstood,” said the Crazy One, pronouncing the postmortem on his victim. The body had crumpled to the floor in one motion, like a suit that has fallen off its hanger.

  Al-Majnoun wiped clean his first pistol, the one he had used to kill Hakim and the Turkmen driver outside, and Marwan here on the floor of the apartment. He put that gun into Mehdi’s soft hand, and wrapped the finger around the trigger. The second pistol, which he had used to kill Mehdi himself, he put into the hand of Marwan. He picked up the gas canister and put it in his pocket. He surveyed the room to make sure the tableau would read to the Iranian investigators the way he intended.

  Jackie squirmed on the floor, looking for a sharp object she could use to cut her wrist or impale her heart. That was the only thought she had left. She could not be taken prisoner. She had received that order of silence, and she was determined to obey it as a last command. But Al-Majnoun saw her, and slapped her again. In a sudden motion, he jerked her hands behind her and fastened them with a wire clasp. Then he continued with his inventory of the room. Karim sat on the couch, still staring at the body of his friend Reza.

  “What are you going to do with us?” said Jackie quietly. All she had left were words, to barter or provoke; or at least, to comprehend.

  “Let you go,” said Al-Majnoun.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. You’re not supposed to.”

  Jackie looked at the Lebanese man. The face looked like a composite of old surveillance photographs; it was an Identi-Kit drawing in which the pieces didn’t fit. She had been trained for everything but this. She wanted to understand the part that was real; the center line in this erratic and unpredictable skid of events.

  “How do we leave?” she asked.

  “There is a black car downstairs. My driver is waiting for you. He will take you to the border. Not at Saraghs where you entered. They will be looking
for you there. But at Kalat, to the north. It is only a hundred kilometers from here. Do you have communication?”

  “Yes,” said Jackie.

  “Use it. When you are in the car, call your people. Tell them where you are coming out. Have them wait on the other side. It is not an official border crossing, but the smugglers know it. My driver will take you to the other side. He has a gun. If they try to stop him at the border, he will shoot. Unless you are unlucky, you will survive.”

  “Who are you?” asked Jackie. “That man called you ‘Al-Majnoun.’”

  The assassin winced. The man with no face did not want to have any identity.

  “The man lied. I have no name, because I do not exist. I could have killed you and this boy, but I gave you life. Now it is time for you to go.”

  He cut her hands loose and pushed her and Karim Molavi out the door of the villa, toward the waiting car. She and the young man had no choice but to do as they had been instructed. If they waited here, they would surely die. If they went in the car as this madman proposed, they might live. They went down to the Mitsubishi. Jackie was sickened by the sight of Hakim. The pool of blood around his body had begun to congeal. Insects had already found the wound on his head and were feeding on the blood and tissue.

  Inside the van, the poor driver had bled across the little kilim pillow he used as a seat rest, the pool of blood seeping into the back of the van. Jackie began retrieving any items that might identify her and the other two as British agents, but Al-Majnoun pulled her away. When she resisted, he pointed his gun not at her, but at Karim, and she relented.

  “I am saving you,” said the Lebanese. “I want you to escape.”

  “Why?” asked Jackie.

  Al-Majnoun did not answer.

  The two got in the backseat of the Paykan. Al-Majnoun said a few words to his driver, to make clear that the delivery of these two to the border was now his only mission. Then he closed the door. The car turned sharply in the driveway and sped away, headlights extinguished.

  Al-Majnoun took one more tour of the bloody array at the villa and then made a call on his phone. A car arrived ten minutes later. Al-Majnoun slumped exhausted into the backseat. He reached into his black bag and removed his pipe; he kneaded a ball of opium carefully into the pipe and fired it with his butane lighter, drawing the smoke into the lungs and the blood and the head. The car sped away in the night, and Al-Majnoun floated away to a place where he truly had no name, and no mission.

  36

  KALAT, IRAN

  The black sedan rumbled north, up a long mountain valley toward Kalat. The moon was now full, bathing the landscape in an ivory half-light. The switchbacks and rocky hills all danced with shadows of the clouds, cast by the moonbeams. Karim was asleep, finally. Jackie was trying to stay awake. She had combed her darkened hair, and put on the chador to veil her face. She was shaking underneath the black garment, fluttering like a moth stuck on a pin. There were a few cars out on the road, but no cops. Eventually someone in the neighborhood would call the Mashad police, and they would be summoned. There had been too much noise at the house. Then, as the police began to realize what all these bodies meant, a desperate hunt would begin. But maybe by then they would be across the border.

  After they had been driving a half hour, Jackie took her GSM phone and called the operations room in London. The call was routed to Adrian at Saraghs, who was awakened from a dead sleep.

  “We’re coming out,” said Jackie. Her voice was in a dead register of exhaustion. “Not the way we came in, but another way. It’s called Kalat. It’s due north from Mashad, up in the mountains. It’s not a border crossing, but we’re going to crash it. Wait on the other side.”

  “Darling,” he said. He wasn’t supposed to talk that way, but he could not help himself.

  “Shut up. Did you get the exfil point?”

  “Kalat,” he repeated. “What time?”

  “I don’t know. Probably just after dawn.” Her voice was heavy with fatigue and sorrow.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No. I have lost two people.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Adrian groaned. “I’m sorry.”

  “The boy is alive. He’s with me.”

  “Did it work? The thing?”

  “I don’t know yet. I can’t tell. It all turned to shit.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “What the fuck is going on, Adrian? Who is Al-Majnoun?”

  Adrian didn’t understand the question and asked her to repeat it. She said a few words and then stopped. She had been talking too long. The phone connection wasn’t secure. There wasn’t time for Adrian to explain now, even if he knew the truth. She repeated the name of the place where she would be coming out and ended the call.

  The road rose toward Kalat. The town was topped with cliffs that were a natural fortress. The forces of the Persian warrior Nader Shah were said to have retreated here into the rocks to escape the hordes of the Turkmen conqueror Tamerlane. The driver had slowed. He was looking for his bearings.

  A rosy gleam behind the eastern hills signaled the coming dawn. Jackie woke Karim. As his eyes opened and he came to consciousness, a look of deep sadness showed on his face.

  “What happened to us?” he asked. “Why were all those people killed? Who was that man? Why are we still alive?” He was too sleepy not to say what he felt.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I just want to get you out of this place. That is the only way that any of this will make any sense. So please trust me a little longer, even though I don’t deserve it.”

  They passed through the little town center. There was a police station. The lights inside were on. Why were they up so early? The driver muttered a curse in Farsi. It was the first word he had spoken during the trip. The border was ahead, up a narrow road through the high hills. The driver proceeded past the rock-ribbed houses that lined the road, the residents coming awake. From a mosque toward the north end of town, they could hear the tinny amplified call to the Fajr prayer at dawn.

  The driver peered at the road ahead and then jammed on the brakes. There was a roadblock on the main route, a hundred yards distant. The figures of the policemen were indistinct in the dim light, but the barrier across the road was large. The driver cursed again. He backed up thirty yards to a turning, and took the fork to the left. It was narrow road, half dirt and half asphalt, and the Paykan shimmied and fishtailed on the rough surface. He was moving toward the high ground that would lead to the smugglers’ routes that were drawn in his mind.

  Jackie looked off to her right. They were even with the roadblock now. She hoped the police at their barrier might not care about the car on the side road. She thought that perhaps they had passed safely, but in the next moment she heard a siren and saw that a police cruiser had set off from the barrier, and then a second one.

  “Go, you fucker,” Jackie screamed at the driver. But he didn’t need encouragement. He gunned the car up the steepening slope, spinning out once as he rounded a bend but otherwise keeping the car under control. The two police cars were behind them now on the side road. They were both Mercedes sedans, bigger and faster than the Paykan. Every twenty seconds, the pursuers gained another ten yards.

  The black Paykan spun around a high curve and neared the summit of the ridge line. The border must be ahead. Either that or the road would come to a dead end, and they were finished right there. But the driver seemed to know where he was going. He was talking to himself now, in a staccato chatter of Farsi. They crested the peak, with the Iranian car bolting over a bump and into the air, and coming down so hard on its springs that for a moment the chassis seemed to sag. The driver gunned the car faster still.

  The road led down now, toward a ravine that was perhaps a half mile away. At the center was a dry riverbed that marked the frontier. There was a little bridge, blocked by a barrier, but off to the left and right were open tracks where a vehicle could pass across the riverbed and over t
o the other side. The police cruisers continued to gain ground. It was impossible to know which would intersect the Paykan first—the chase car or the approaching frontier.

  There was a sharp noise behind them. Karim and Jackie turned with a start and saw the gun firing from the passenger side of the lead police cruiser. It was an arc of bullets, barely aimed, but with each burst they bracketed their fire closer to the target.

  “Gun,” Jackie shouted toward the front seat. The driver didn’t understand. Jackie bounded forward across the seat bench and grabbed at the driver’s throat.

  “Give me the goddamned gun,” she screamed. The driver pulled something from inside his coat and tossed it on the seat. It was a German automatic pistol. The gunfire from the police cruiser was continuing. A few rounds had hit the thin steel frame of the Paykan.

  “Get down,” shouted Jackie to her passenger. Karim drew tighter to her, as if to protect her.

  “Get the fuck down,” she said, pushing him to the floor. She opened the window and began firing the Walther pistol. She was a far better shot than the Iranians, and with her second round she hit the driver of the first car. The cruiser spun away, but the second was behind, and the police inside were firing automatic weapons from both wings.

  Ahead was the riverbed and the border. A group was standing on the Turkmen side, their bodies shimmering in the rising light of morning. A helicopter stood waiting, its rotors rhythmically slicing the air. Two men stood at the head of the group, watching the approaching Paykan through binoculars.