Nature of the Game (25 page)

“No!”

“Don't worry: the car windows are smoked and my wall is high. Your nonexistence serves everyone's needs and the greater good of diplomacy. I understand how the bureaucracies in a country as complex as yours are forced to compete for the necessity of fruitful corresponding relationships.”

“With, for instance, Savak.”

“Of course, we all serve the same ends.”

“Of course,” said Jud.

“Which is why we agreed to help your people with a task and, in return, allowed them to give you to us.”

“We are all very grateful,” said Jud.

“Let me show you something.”

Alexi hurried from the room with Jud at his side, his silent staff trotting in their wake. When the entourage reached the courtyard, the guards whirled to scan the wall, their Uzis ready. Alexi led his parade into a large briefing room on the ground floor of a barracks. Stacked doors and piles of unopened boxes sat against one wall. The boxes contained dozens of varieties of locks and more than twenty different alarm systems.

All made in America.

“Ready for you to begin,” said Alexi. “However, a crisis has arisen. One that can only be solved by a person with the abilities your people assure us Jud Stuart possesses.”

“Let me help you as best I can,” volunteered Jud. There wasn't supposed to be a test.

Alexi led Jud to an office in the basement of the other barracks. The personnel stood at attention as Alexi swept through the crowded outer room to a closed and guarded door.

The windowless inner office contained a desk with a creaky chair, a battered manual typewriter, a worn leather couch. Files were scattered on the desk, its drawers were ajar. On the tile floor between the desk and the door was a dark stain.

A solid steel panel four feet wide and seven feet tall loomed in one wall. A keyhole of a kind Jud had never seen was the only break in the steel's smooth surface.

“A Jew built this years ago,” said Alexi. He frowned. “You are not a Jew, are you? You do not smell like one.”

“No,” answered Jud.

“Pity. Those people.” His lips were grim. “The man who had this office was a most trusted servant of the Shah. He guarded sensitive matters—nothing of American's concern. He had custody of the sole key for this safe. Soviet spies took it.”

“No!” said Jud.

“Yes. The safe must be opened. Our technicians will not guarantee the safety of any papers inside if they burn through. There is no one who can … ‘pick' is the word?”

“‘Manipulate' is better,” said Jud.

“Open the lock. You will do this for us. Before our other arrangement. Before we help you. Now.”

“Where is the man who had the key?” asked Jud.

“Unavailable,” said Alexi.

Nothing stirred in the basement room for a minute.

“If I do this,” Jud finally said, “I must work alone and undisturbed, or I won't succeed.” He shrugged. “Concentration.”

“The contents of that safe—”

“Will otherwise remain locked up forever.”

Alexi hesitated. Ordered Jud to unlock the steamer trunk. Tools lined the walls of the trunk. A bulging green duffel bag secured with a padlock filled most of the space.

“What is in that bag?” demanded Alexi.

“That, Excellency, is only for my end of our bargain.”

The lieutenant paled. The gorilla flexed his hands.

Alexi barked an order in Farsi. The gorilla put the duffel bag on the floor. He searched Jud's clothing pack, examined the steamer trunk of tools. When he was done, he shrugged.

“How long?” asked Alexi.

“Could take days,” said Jud; thought,
Play to his prejudices
. “They are tricky people.”

Alexi ordered the gorilla to push Jud's steamer trunk and pack inside the room—and to lean the duffel bag against a desk in the outer office: “Where it will be safe.”

“Ahmed speaks English. He will see to your needs,” said Alexi, nodding to the lieutenant.

They left Jud alone in the closed office.

Jud studied the steel panel: he had never seen a lock like that. He had no idea how to open it, no belief that he could.

He stared at the dark stain on the floor.

The desk had been rifled. Jud found pictures of children. A picture of a grave. A wallet with Iranian money, personal papers and photo IDs for a man in his fifties. The man had a wistful smile. The bottom drawer held three empty bottles of cheap vodka.

Jud sat in the desk chair. He stared at the safe; peered over the desk at the dark stain on the floor.

This was the office of a functionary. A trusted functionary, a watchman whose duties were crucial yet mindless, a passive post, an underappreciated job in a numbingly depressing room filled by a man invisible except in the ordinary moments when he performed his mundane task: to unlock the safe.

Jud walked around the desk; stared at the stain on the floor.

Then he opened the office door. Alexi and his entourage had departed, leaving only the office staff commanded by a nervous Lieutenant Ahmed. Jud called Ahmed into the inner office.

“You are the responsible officer,” said Jud. Ahmed paled. “It is up to us to get it open.”

“Yes, Excellency!”

“No matter what else.”

Ahmed blinked.

“The Soviet spies who took the key,” said Jud. “Did they use it to take secrets from the safe?”

“No one knows what the Soviets did. Ask His Excellency the General.”

“No. For he is above this. In this room, it is just us.”

Sweat beaded out on Ahmed's forehead.

“We must pay the price,” said Jud. “Of failure. Or success. Not Alexi: us.”

Ahmed looked at the stain on the floor.

“The man who kept the key, the man of this room,” said Jud. “He was a sad man.”

Ahmed nodded.

“And he drank,” said Jud.

“This is a Muslim country—”

“We are all men. We all live. We all die.”

Ahmed looked at the stain on the floor.

“What happened to the key, Ahmed?”

“He … he lost it!” blurted out Ahmed. “He got drunk and he lost it! We searched his office, his apartment, his car. He had nothing to do but sit in there and drink, and he lost one damn key!”

“Where is he now?” asked Jud.

Ahmed stared at the dark stain on the floor, said, “His Excellency the General … When confronted with failure, he … He is like lightning to implement corrective discipline.”

Jud ordered Ahmed from the room. And then tried to imagine the ridiculous: himself as an alcoholic. Nauseous. Clouded mind. Dizzy. Wanting to lie down.

The leather couch.

Jud lifted the cushions: nothing. No doubt they'd done that.

From his steamer trunk he took a long magnetic probe. Carefully, gingerly, he slid it in the cracks of the couch.

And pulled out an exotically cut steel key.

Grinning, Jud started to summon Ahmed. Stopped.

The hollow handle of a metal hammer in his trunk unscrewed to yield a camera. The man in the outer office expected noise, so he didn't worry as he pulled up the floorboards to expose an insulated wire. An alarm: predictable. And antiquated. It took Jud two minutes to splice a bypass device into the wire.

The key unlocked the safe.

He found stacks of American money. Letters from Swiss banks. Three silencers for pistols. Twenty-six passports issued from a dozen countries. Surveillance photos of scenes in the U.S., London, Paris. He photographed the passports and surveillance shots, plus documents stamped
TOP SECRET
in Farsi. He hid Savak's key with his camera in the hammer, shut but did not lock the safe to secure the alarm circuit, removed and packed his bypass, replaced the floorboards, spread a dozen lockpicks on the floor …

And swung open the steel door. The alarm rang and announced to the world the value of a good safecracker.

The Iranians loved him.

Alexi assigned three Savak officers to be Jud's constant companions. The four of them stayed in a lavish apartment on a boulevard named for a British queen. One of Jud's “aides” was always awake. Alexi gave Jud a wardrobe of civilian clothes.

Nights, Jud's escorts took him out on the town. The evenings usually ended in the New City district, an old section of Tehran famous for its bordellos. Jud's companions flashed their IDs and doormen bowed them in. Madames with change makers on their waists presented the
honored customers
with the most expensive colored tokens. The first night, they visited a house offering a selection of boys, but Jud quickly made his preference known. His companions always insisted on Jud's picking his girl first. Wall hangings and mirrors decorated the whores' rooms. Condoms waited on the bedstands. Jud assumed that his performances were being filmed.

Days, Jud trained seventeen Savak agents in picking locks and defeating alarms on doors he engineered from Alexi's American supplies and equipment from the steamer trunk. The students wore beards and long hair that obscured their facial features.

“Speak to them only in English,” Alexi told Jud.

The schoolroom was the lecture hall of a barracks inside Alexi's fortress. Jud sometimes held examinations in the basement. During one such underground exercise, screams reverberated down the stone corridor from behind a closed door.

“What is that?” Jud asked his pupils, who were nervously trying to pick locks they'd never seen before.

“We hear nothing,” said one student.

“Nothing,” agreed another.

The screams continued for thirty minutes. Then, after an hour's silence, came a surreal, rasping, echoed whisper:

“
Krelley harbay
”—please.

Five times a day came the wail of a mosque's loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer.

During the three weeks he trained his pupils, the closest Jud came to seeing other Americans was the day his escorts were lax and he climbed a ladder to walk along the top of Alexi's wall.

Jud stood above the gate, staring at the jumbled roofs of Tehran, modern skyscrapers, mosques and minarets, hovels and mansions, and open-air markets. The twin towers of the Hilton hotel looked like tombstones in front of the jagged stone wall of the surrounding mountains. Ten minutes passed before the elite guards in the garden saw him and yelled for him to come down. In the street below, the ragamuffins with old rifles sent up a chorus of conflicting shouts; several of them raised their weapons.

The guards immediately took Jud to Alexi.

“Why did you do this?” asked his formerly biggest fan. “You know the CIA is out there with cameras. Even they could spot you on the wall with the baboons at the gate screaming up at you.”

“Thought I'd fuck with them,” said Jud. “They won't know who I am, and it'll drive 'em nuts.”

And their pictures will eventually get into the right hands
, thought Jud.
Just in case
.

“I am not happy with this,
Sergeant
.”

“Won't happen again, Alexi.”

Three days later, Jud told Alexi that the students were sufficiently competent at their studies for Jud's work to end.

“Now it's my turn,” said Jud.

“Yes,” said Alexi, “perhaps it is.”

At first light the next day, Alexi and Jud piled into one Mercedes, bodyguards filled another.

“Remember, Alexi,” said Jud as their driver started his engine, “first we drop off the trunk. If I don't return Uncle Sam's equipment, my boss is liable to kill me.”

Alexi understood. They met Art in the underground garage. The gorilla carried the steamer trunk to Art's Ford. Jud's locked duffel bag stayed in the Mercedes.

“We haven't much time,” said Alexi as he walked Jud to where Art stood.

“I wanted to punch out clean on the trunk and say hi,” Jud called out to the blond American. Art kept his face blank, stuck out his hand. Jud ignored it, gave him a macho hug.

And whispered in his ear, “
In the hammer
.”

“Everything's on line,” said Art as Jud stepped back.

Alexi led Jud back to their car. The two Mercedes sedans roared out of the garage. Jud didn't look back.

They headed east from Tehran. After three hours, they transferred to army jeeps. Their road degenerated into a rutted dirt trail. Villages grew smaller, fewer, and farther between. The land angled up, from rocky, rolling desert to pyramid hills, eventually stopping at the edge of cold mountains.

It was late afternoon. They climbed out, stretched. The guards walked a perimeter, their machine guns sweeping over the big empty. Jud changed from his city clothes to rugged, nonmilitary wear. Alexi checked his watch.

“We are late, but of course, so are they.” He and Jud had said little during the eight-hour drive.

“I do not know why your superiors bargained for us to arrange this,” he said, “but I worry for you. As a general, I know that sometimes you must send good men where wise men would not go.”

“I've never been accused of being wise,” said Jud.

One of the guards shouted and pointed toward a gap in the rugged foothills. A ball of dust rolled toward them.

“Don't trust these people,” said Alexi, staring at the coming cloud of dust. “They are not civilized. They are not really people. The rules of modern nations mean nothing to them. They are like your American Indians, your Apaches,
n'est-ce pas?
Only we have yet to be able to put them in camps.”

“Reservations,” said Jud.

“Yes,” replied Alexi. “You should have reservations about this mission.”

A hundred yards from where they stood, the dust cloud swirled, parted. A dozen horsemen galloped forth.

“Kurds,” said Alexi, shaking his head.

They were stocky men on squat horses. Most of them wore fringed turbans and traditional garb for the extremes of desert and mountains. Their British Enfield rifles predated Hitler. They had fairer skin and lighter hair than Persians or Arabs. Legend says that when Solomon exiled five hundred magical jinn to the mountains of Zagros, the jinn first flew to Europe and abducted five hundred beautiful virgins. From this union came the Kurds.