The Natanz Directive (18 page)

The Grand Bazaar probably didn't have the benefit of road signs and billboards announcing its location back four hundred years ago, when the first merchant put up his tent, but now there was signage helping everyone from tourists to bankers to find it. Four hundred years ago, it was an outdoor market. Today it was housed in a remarkable domed affair with corridors meandering more than six miles and selling everything from copper and gold to cinnamon and coriander. You could borrow money in the bazaar or barter for cow's liver. You could buy a kite or a kitten. You could haggle over jewelry or hire a tailor. You could have your fortune read in one booth, drink coffee and munch homemade pastries in another, and negotiate a loan in another. You could see and do a lot of things in six miles' worth of booths and stalls. You could spend a week and not see everything.

I knew by Panahi's choice of side streets that he was headed for the north entrance to the bazaar. I said, “Circle around to the south entrance, will you?”

“Why?” he said. “We don't have any backup in place there?”

“I think I'll do some sightseeing,” I replied. He knew what I meant. I didn't want his backup. He made a couple of turns, fought through trench-warfare-like traffic, and eased to the curb of an especially drab concrete building.

“This is as close as I can get.” He nodded toward a wide arch that led into a maze of stone corridors. “Don't get lost.”

“Take care of those goats,” I said. I opened my coat and pulled out a stack of Iranian currency, rials worth about a hundred dollars. “Thanks. Keep the change.”

Panahi must have seen enough American movies to get the joke. “Take care, Mr. Moreau.”

I got out and stood on the sidewalk to watch Panahi and his truckload of goats drive away. I had no intention of entering the Grand Bazaar, though my stomach was growling from lack of food, and I would have paid good money for a bottle of water or a cold beer. Wasn't going to happen here.

Improvise,
Mr. Elliot had advised. And that's what I was doing.

I started walking. I took the long way back to Shariati Street. In the shade of a café awning, I took out my iPhone. Flipping through my list of old contacts, I found the address of a woman who probably wasn't going to be thrilled to see me; it had been ten years, and we hadn't parted on the best of terms. She wanted me to stay. I had to go.

But if anyone could provide me with a safe haven, even for a day, it was her. And if anyone could point me in the direction of Charlie Amadi, it was also her.

I hailed a cab and recited a pair of cross streets close to the address. We drove west on Azadi Street and past the central metro station with its statue of a scowling bearded man on a plinth. That was something you couldn't help but notice about Tehran, and probably the entire country: it was full of homage paid to grumpy geezers who looked like they hadn't been laid in years. If they had wanted an objective opinion, I might have suggested lightening things up a bit and turning some of those billboards into twenty-foot-high advertisements featuring girls in bikinis, like the Turks did. Just a thought.

I glanced out the rear window a couple of times, saw a logjam of cars and mopeds two blocks long, but nothing struck me as suspicious. Eleven minutes into our journey, the cab took a left on Jalilabad and halted at the intersection I had requested. I paid the driver in euros and got out. A stream of exhaust followed him down the block, and I watched for fifteen seconds. The cab hit a green light at the next intersection, made a right turn, and disappeared.

I stepped into the doorway of a four-story apartment building and watched the traffic for nearly a minute. Then I started walking. Two blocks took me into a neighborhood dedicated to small shops and tenements. I stepped up to a street vendor, bought a bottle of water, and ducked into the shade of a cherry tree.

I spent a minute taking the pulse of the neighborhood. Much had changed since I'd last been here. And not for the best. If other parts of Tehran were showpieces of “progress,” this area was a dead end of neglect.

The address I was looking for was a small market a half block farther on, located on the bottom floor of a forlorn two-story building. Long ago, that address had housed the Casbahye-Sorkh—the Red Casbah—one of the fanciest and hippest nightclubs this side of Bangkok. Now it was a freshly painted concrete shell with a colorful sign inviting locals to shop for the kind of things you might find in a 7-Eleven back home.

I looped my backpack over my left shoulder, keeping my right hand free, and crossed the street. A woman in a head scarf with grocery bags dangling from each hand hustled out the market's entrance, and I held the door open for her.

I crossed the threshold and halted. I peaked over the rims of my sunglasses and kept my face hooded by the bill of my baseball cap. Rows of canned goods and bags of rice crowded the shelves. A cooler filled out the far wall and glass doors opened onto milk cartons, water bottles, and soda. Fresh vegetables and fruit were arranged on a center island across from the counter.

A video camera faced the entrance and reminded me that there was always someone watching. It was virtually the same in every grocery store, train station, bank, coffee shop, and church in every major city in the world these days. All in the name of “national security,” two words whose definition had been manipulated to fit the call of a thousand politicians. How often I cringed when I heard people say they'd be willing to give up a “couple of freedoms” to feel more secure. Stupid, fearful sons-a-bitches didn't realize that it was their freedoms that spelled out their security, not the other way around.

I stepped up to the cash register. A swarthy-faced man about my age gave me a nod. He had flecks of gray in his curly hair, a broad nose, and even broader shoulders. Twenty years ago, he'd probably been a bouncer or a jackhammer operator.

“May I help you?” He spoke Farsi, and I was only half sure I'd heard him correctly.

“Leila Petrosian?”

The man's eyes widened when he heard Leila's name, and he pinned me with the kind of glare that was one part suspicious and one part highly protective. “Who's asking?”

“A friend.”

“A friend? I know all of Leila's friends. You aren't one of them.” He reached for the telephone.

“I wouldn't do that,” I warned in English.

“No? And why not?” the man answered in English.

“Because it would ruin his welcome,” a woman's voice informed him. The owner of the voice stepped through a curtain that separated the front of the store from the back. As sleek as a dancer, as strong as an athlete. Blonde hair curled around brown eyes that stunned you with their radiance.

Leila Petrosian.

If anyone would know where Charlie Amadi was, it would be Leila.

 

CHAPTER 14

TEHRAN, IRAN—DAY SIX

Leila Petrosian's pillowy red lips curved into a where-have-you-been? smile. I took off my sunglasses, folded them into my shirt pocket, and tried my best to match her expression. It had been a long time. And our relationship was exactly the kind that made it as hard to be together as it was to be apart. I didn't know how else to describe it.

Life in Iran might not have been kind to Leila, but the years had. Her skin was as smooth and flawless as ever, and the voluptuous curves she had flaunted as a young cabaret dancer made a simple cotton dress look like a fashion statement in a magazine.

“You look…” I paused, sifting through any number of adjectives that seemed inadequate.

“Amazing?” She tried to help, and her smile told me she was teasing.

“I was thinking
sensational
, but
amazing
works, too,” I said, smiling with genuine enthusiasm. This was the best I'd felt since leaving Washington, D.C.

I had met Leila three decades earlier, when she worked the floor show at a club called Sitta Al Sa'if. She was married. So was I. Back then, the nightclub scene in Tehran had made it a mecca of entertainment. Leila had proved as agile with money as she was in dance slippers, and by the time she was twenty-two she was part owner of the Red Casbah. But when the shah was chased out, the mullahs took over and shuttered all the nightclubs for inciting immoral and dangerous behavior. Immoral? Yeah, well, that might depend on your perspective, I suppose. But dangerous? The most dangerous things to come out of a night at the Red Casbah were hangovers and regrets.

The religious police raided Leila's club—the pious hypocrites had been some of her best customers—and when the raids couldn't shut her down, the government stepped in. They confiscated her bank accounts. They dumped her liquor stock down the sewer. They issued a warrant for her arrest. What kept Leila out of prison were her connections to the Armenian community. We tried staying in touch. I couldn't get in back in those days, and she refused to leave. She once told me, “If I give up on my country, I give up on myself. The same way you feel about America.”

After that, we met maybe a dozen times or so over the years. By then, she was a divorced woman. She wanted more from our relationship, but it wasn't possible. We didn't talk much about life under the heel of the Islamic regime, but every once in a while she'd tell me things. About the oppression. About the mood of the people. About the dwindling opportunities. It wasn't pretty. A land of progress and prospects had spiraled into a land of tyranny and stagnation.

I knew how risky it was meeting her like that. Risky for me, even more risky for her. But it was hard to resist. Here was a woman who made every day seem like a brush with spring. I hadn't seen Leila for ten years, not since surviving an assassination attempt in Kazakhstan. After that, I was called home permanently. I sent letters for a year, but she never returned them. I didn't hold it against her. There was no future. There never had been.

And now she was three feet away, and all I could do was stare.

The sparkle in Leila's eyes burned as mischievously as ever. The dress she wore hardly accommodated the Islamic dress code—Leila had no patience for the sad attempt of men to hold women to some standard they would never tolerate for themselves—and the way the fabric clung to her was a three-alarm fire waiting to happen.

“Rahim,” she said to the muscle-head attending the cash register. “If anyone comes looking for me, tell them I'm out running errands.”

Rahim shot me a jealous glare. I didn't need another enemy, so I said to him, “Relax. I'm just a guy visiting an old friend.”

Leila held the curtain open and beckoned me through. I followed her down the hall, trying my best not to get distracted by the obvious distractions of her exceptional legs and firm, round bottom. The hall doglegged around the corner, and she glanced back at me, her grin just a bit mocking. “Just an old friend, huh?”

“He didn't look like the kind of guy you'd want to piss off,” I replied.

“Rahim is very protective, that's all.”

We approached a shelf stocked with bags of rice and cans of mango juice. Leila grasped a bracket on the shelf and pulled. The bracket clicked and the rack of shelves swiveled, revealing a secret door. She passed through, and I followed.

We entered a room furnished like a miniature Fifth Avenue lounge. A narrow wooden bar, polished within an inch of its life, ran across the far wall. It was backed by a beveled mirror, and bottles of top-shelf liquor were arranged in front of the mirror. A velvet love seat and leather chairs were positioned over a Persian carpet. Soft light spilled from wall sconces made of smoked glass. Leila swiveled the secret door closed again and turned a dead bolt.

I took in the room and tried to make sense of it. “Side business?”

“I supply beverages of the alcoholic kind for private entertaining,” she told me. “You don't think running that little store pays the bills, I hope?”

I dropped my backpack onto a chair. Leila glanced at it but knew me well enough not to ask. Instead, she stepped close and clasped my hands. Her eyes smoldered with a look that brought back memories of long, sleepless nights and sweaty bedsheets.

“Jake, I missed you.”

It would have been so easy, and so wrong. I had Cathy, kids, and a life that had taken me far from the world I had known for all those years. Still, I told Leila what she wanted to hear, and maybe what a part of me still felt. “I missed you, too.”

She squeezed my hands and gave me a perceptive grin. “Thanks for saying that.”

Then she let go and leaned against the bar. She studied me now with the eyes of a long-time survivor of turmoil and uncertainty. “Okay, now that we've got that out of the way, tell me what brings you to Tehran? Business?”

“Business,” I said, gazing at the bar and the bottles. Liquor was contraband—strange for a city that had once been the cosmopolitan rage of the Middle East—so it was a safe bet that she was buying wholesale from someone with his hands deep in the smuggling business. And no one had his hands deeper in the rackets than Charlie. “I'm looking for Charlie Amadi, Leila.”

“Charlie!” Leila chuckled. Then the chuckled faded, and her eyes flashed with an odd and enticing mix of concern and interest. “Why in the world would you have business with a man like Charlie Amadi?”

“I need his help. It's important.”

“Important how?”

“I'm back on the job.” She at least deserved a certain amount of honesty. “Where can I find him?”

“You can't. He finds you.”

“I don't have that kind of time. Make it easy on me and tell me where he is.”

“Charlie doesn't like surprises, Jake.”

“He'll make an exception for me. We go back a long time.”

Curiosity and surprise fanned out around Leila's eyes. “I didn't know that.”

“Back when we were both young and stupid.”

Leila turned and stared at her reflection in the mirror. It was like she was trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle I had just scattered across her already difficult life. After a long moment, her gaze slid to mine, and I could see she'd made a decision.