The Shield of Darius (18 page)

“Nope. Don’t think so. We’re not in the ‘cleaning up after somebody’s mess’ business. If this isn’t going to pay big for us, we don’t want to touch it. Sorry we couldn’t do business.” He started toward the door.

“What are you going to do with me?” The Iranian’s question showed new alarm.

Falen stopped and turned toward him, hands in his pockets. “Nothing. I’m through with you. I imagine my associates will kill you.”

The defiance on Javad’s face turned to dismayed horror. “Why? I told you the operation was over. There’s nothing I can do to help you.”

“Exactly,” Falen said casually.

“Then why kill me? If you let me go, I’ll be leaving soon and won’t be in the way of anything you do. I might even be able to find something else for you that will pay well. We’re always starting something new.”

“Not interested,” Falen said. “We’ve got to get rid of you.”

“But we’re after the same thing! I won’t be any threat to you.” Javad was beginning to plead.

“Then think about it this way,” Falen said. “To use your own words, ‘you’re a nobody and won’t contribute much to the cause.’ Plus, I don’t like you. Amy’s dead, and I did kind of like her. You screwed up an okay person there. Anyway, what about the Jihad; the Holy War? You’ll die as a soldier of Allah.”

“I will die a fool!” Javad shouted. “You
are
CIA.”

“Nope. I told you, I’m a businessman.” He walked across the room and extended the plastic case to the Iranian who hunched on the cot against the wall.

“I was lying about this though. It’s no more than a very lethal drug. Give yourself about ten cc’s and you won’t feel a thing. I guarantee it’ll be better than waiting for your guards to come back. They’re not as nice as I am.” He tossed the case onto the cot and turned again for the door.

“You’ll burn forever in hell for this,” Javad spit after him.

Falen paused and turned. “That sounds like a very Christian concept. Burning forever in hell. But if there’s a hell, I suspect you’re right.”

Javad lunged against the chains, snapping like a rabid dog. “You’re as much a worm as that woman Trossen. Did you kill her? Did she offer you that pathetic body and beg you to play with it? Did you use her too, then throw her away?”

Falen’s right foot snapped up suddenly catching the Iranian squarely in the forehead with his heel and popping his head back. The man’s eyes blurred and he slumped backward against the wall. Falen lifted the plastic case from the bed, extracted the glass syringe and vial and slowly filled the cylinder. As Javad struggled to sit up, Falen grasped the man’s tangled hair firmly in his left hand and twisted his head back sharply.

“I was right about this stuff the first time,” he murmured, pinning the struggling Iranian against the bed. “You’re going to slowly rot into a stinking pile of shit.” He held the syringe menacingly in front of Javad, squirting a few drops onto his face.

As he raised the needle to sink it deep into the exposed vein of Javad’s straining neck, the man’s chain-shackled left fist crashed suddenly into Falen’s jaw, reeling him sideways onto the cot and jarring the syringe from his hand. Before he could recover, the other fist battered his right temple and he struggled to throw himself onto the floor out of reach of the manacles. But the Iranian had thrown his wrist chain around Falen’s neck and yanked it tight, tearing at the skin of his throat and choking his breath away. Suddenly the man’s legs were around him, pinning his arms against his sides and through eyes that felt they would burst from the squeezing noose, Falen saw Javad’s free hand rise high above his chest, flashing the dripping silver needle. The syringe started downward, accompanied by a room-shattering blast and the simultaneous splat of pulverizing flesh and bone. Falen gasped, certain the lethal injection had smashed into his chest, but the legs had gone slack and the chain around his neck released as Javad slumped against the wall.

As Falen’s eyes focused, they found one of Fisher’s guards standing in the doorway in a half crouch, his gun extended at arm’s length and braced tightly in both hands. The man didn’t say a word, but untangled Falen from the quivering body of the Iranian. Falen stood, then sat back on the cot as his legs buckled beneath him. The warm stickiness of Javad’s splattered head seeped down the back of Falen’s neck and he felt a sudden nausea grip his gut.  Fisher, thank God, monitored everything.

SEVENTEEN

The shock of seeing the embassy rising above the yellow brick wall across Takht-E-Jamshid had momentarily stunned Ben into paralyzing confusion and he slumped backward against the building behind him, wrapping the
chador
tightly about him like a black cocoon. The adrenaline rush of finding his way out of the bazaar was suddenly gone, drained by the discovery that he had mentally prepared for one maze and now found himself in another. He backed into the narrow alley from which he had emerged onto Takht-E-Jamshid and spent the rest of the night huddled in a corner, dozing fitfully and wandering the new maze in his mind. There were only dead ends.

When morning glowed pale pink in the East, the avenue began to move again with early traffic. First, tall red double-decker buses, then fleets of taxis – Fiats, battered English Fords and Mercedes, followed finally by a procession of private cars, a blessing granted to those who most faithfully supported the regime. Pedestrians hurried by, even the heavily-draped women seeming to glide along the paved walks at twice normal pace.

Ben needed a place to think and retreated back into the alley until he found a recessed alcove in one of the walls, the covered entrance to a back gate that appeared no longer in use. He slipped into the recession and crouched in a corner, pulling a cucumber from his food bundle and gnawing at one end while he mentally worked his way through the city. The sprawling home of over eight-million people spread from squalid poverty at its south end to opulent wealth in the northern suburbs along the foothills. South of the city center, abandoned brick ovens housed thousands of the very poor who eked out an existence by begging or scrounging through the garbage of the city’s more affluent districts. These people would be his salvation, so numerous that a lonely, ragged woman tottering along the street would go unnoticed.

The former embassy building and Takht-E-Jamshid were on the north edge of the city’s old downtown area, with the major hotels, businesses and government buildings south along Ferdowsi, Shah Reza and Sepah. As he recalled the street names, he knew that most must have changed since the Revolution. Surely streets like Shah Reza and Roosevelt had not survived the Ayatollahs.

Between the city center and the suburbs that climbed the lower slopes of the Elburz Mountains to the north, two wide avenues once carried the bulk of Tehran’s commuting traffic. The boulevard to the west, originally called Pahlavi, was lined with poplar and chinar trees and would also have been renamed. Pahlavi had been the family name of the deposed Shah. Shemiran Boulevard, to the east, ran up through the Davoudieh and Darrous districts where the old American Officers’ Club had once been. Ben was surprised that he remembered the city so well and realized that the sights, smells and sounds around him had opened dusty closets in his subconscious and pulled out a scrapbook of memories.

He struggled to recall the location of other embassies, but found these memories too deeply filed to retrieve. It seemed the British Embassy was also north along Shemiran Road. But they had probably closed their diplomatic mission. In fact, with the most recent aggressive posturing by Iran, most would be gone – except possibly the French who had re-established theirs a few years earlier after renewed oil negotiations. The Swedes and Swiss might still be around. And Japan and China, of course, with their dependence on Persian oil. But finding a friendly haven would be just a matter of dumb luck, and if he did, would they grant him asylum? Any one of them might turn him over to the authorities just to keep the peace. His only safe bet was to try to get out of the country.

Ben stretched his legs straight to relieve the cramping caused by his
badji
squat and reviewed his choices. All that lay south was 1000 miles of desert, and eventually the heavily guarded Persian Gulf. Unless things had changed dramatically in the past three months, tensions were higher there than they had been in years.

Three hundred miles west was the volatile Iraqi border where patrols were heavy on both sides to prevent incursions from one into the other. Turkey? When Ross Perot got his men out during the Revolution, they had gone through Turkey. Possible, but not good. The trek would mean long stretches of barren, uninhabited land where an old woman walking alone would attract attention.

To the east…? Ben tried to picture the map in his head but saw only a vast brown blur in eastern Iran. Mashad was somewhere to the northeast, but he couldn’t place anything due east of Tehran beyond Mt. Demavand, the 18,500 foot volcanic peak that dominated the city’s eastern horizon. Afghanistan formed the eastern border, if he remembered correctly, and Pakistan southeast stretching to the sea. Both would mean crossing country that was uncharted on his mental map and Baluchistan, the province that shared the border with Pakistan, was a hotbed of Islamic militarism – not a good choice. Or…north to the former Soviet Republics of Turkmenistan or Azerbaijan. They were certainly closest, going either northeast or northwest. If he went east, the road passed Mt. Demavand and looped up toward Mashad. He again retrieved his mental map and couldn’t picture any roads or rail lines crossing into Turkmenistan on the east side of the Caspian Sea. He knew they did on the west.

If he went northwest, he could go back to the square with the statue of Ferdowsi, follow Shah Reza Avenue – or whatever it was now called – out of the city past Mehrabad Airport to the village of Karaj. Then up through the canyon past the Karaj dam, and over the mountains to the Caspian’s southwest coast. He had been that way with the family, all the way up to Sepah on the former Soviet border where he knew a road crossed through a guarded checkpoint into Azerbaijan. At least it had thirty years ago.

Azerbaijan was not the most stable of the former Republics, with its continual squabble with Armenia. But the country had tried to distance itself from Iran in recent months and Ben probably had a better chance there than anywhere else. And there was the advantage of having been over the route before. He replaced the cucumber, pulled a soggy piece of
sangyak
from his bundle, smelling the mildew on it as he tore away a bite. He would find a way to go northeast through the mountains to the Caspian Sea, then over into Azerbaijan.

At dusk he made his way back to Takht-E-Jamshid and at the corner with Roosevelt, turned south through the evening crowd toward his former prison. Instead of following the narrow alleys, what the Iranians call
koochays
, he stayed on the main thoroughfares, easily finding the old hotel. Ben watched its blackened windows from across the street, quiet and apparently lifeless. No panic or alarm. If he slipped behind the building, he might be able to signal Jim. But the woman’s face in the lower window flashed again before him and he turned away, shuffling west into the heart of the city.

Pedestrians passed without suspicion, turning aside to avoid him. Alms, one of the great pillars of Islam, had taught them to ignore the poor rather than refuse them. A single old woman trudging along in a wrinkled
chador
turned their gaze as effectively as Ben’s true appearance might have attracted it. He again found Shah Reza Boulevard and left the lighted avenue to wind through narrow backstreets a block south, moving systematically toward the western side of the city where he knew the houses must eventually thin and turn into dry open brush land.

The night was again cloudy and moonless, darkening the narrow alleys to black tunnels. Midway down one
koochay
lined with high compound walls, Ben paused as two men appeared in silhouette at the far end, walking toward him with staggered steps.  He thought of turning back, of dodging into a doorway, but they had seen him and might view his retreat with suspicion. Pulling the
chador
tighter around his face, he shuffled forward, then snatched a breath and swallowed hard, realizing that both men wore the heavy blue uniform of the Tehran police.

As they approached he quickened his step, looking down at the trash-littered ground in front of him. The men slowed and babbled loudly in Farsi, sentences from which Ben caught only scattered words.
Khanoom
– woman
. Tenah
– alone.
Beeyaw’eed
– come. He felt his face moisten and mouth turn to cotton beneath the cloth cover, but pushed forward, then jerked away as one of the men grasped his shoulder as they passed. Ben crouched lower, tensing as he watched the dark figures move back beside him. Each had a pistol strapped about his waist and both reeked of alcohol. Ben wondered fleetingly why they would take such risks in a country where drunkenness was punishable by public flogging. The policeman laughed and one stumbled into his path, bending down and swaying his hips suggestively in the darkness as he chattered in Farsi. Ben stepped to the side and tried to push past, but the man again caught his arm and twisted Ben toward him. Almost instinctively, Ben’s knee shot upward into the policeman’s exposed groin. Before the gasping groan had died on his assailant’s gaping lips, Ben turned and, clutching his bundle of food between his knees, reached out through the
chador
with both fists clenched tightly together, hitting the other figure across the side of the head with a sweeping, crushing blow that reeled the man senseless against one of the compound walls. The first officer tried to straighten and Ben retrieved the food, then slammed his knee again into the man’s crotch, and a second time into his forehead as he jerked the head downward with both hands.

Wearing the
chador
more as a cape, he vaulted the slumping figure and raced for the end of the alley, dodging as he heard a slurred shout behind him, then the crack of a shot and the chilling whine of a bullet passing his ear. The second shot slammed into his left side just below the shoulder blade with the force of a swinging baseball bat. For an instant, that snapshot in time when fear slows the world to snail pace, Ben felt his whole body shudder and lurch forward in a dreamlike tumble. The blow spun him fully around and reeled him forward into the open cross street, dropping him facedown beneath a glowing streetlamp.

Sheer terror forced him back to his feet and propelled him across the lighted street into another
koochay
directly in front of him. No one followed. Either the street was empty or like elsewhere, nobody wanted to get involved. The policemen were too drunk or too badly hurt to pursue him and he fell behind a pile of crates midway down the alley.

Suddenly it seemed to Ben that he was not awake. There was nothing around him – no thought in his head – that fit together with any reality he could imagine. He was crouching in a
koochay
somewhere in Tehran, a place that he had known so long ago that it seemed little more than a dreamland. He was still partially wrapped up in a woman’s shawl and he had been shot. He shook his head to cast away the vision, peering hard into the darkness that surrounded him with desperate hope that something would appear that he recognized and understood. A car passed the entrance to the alley, the glow from its headlights racing down the wall opposite and disappearing into the blackness. But the brief illumination had been enough. This was no dreamland.

The blood was beginning to pool in his loose trousers and he leaned forward, feeling for the hole in his back. He could just reach it by wrapping his right arm across his chest and around his left side. The entry wound was surprisingly small, and there was little pain.  Just the throbbing ache of the blow and a hot stream of blood running down his back into his pants. He tore a strip from his pajama top, and forced the wad of cloth into the opening.

Slowly he drew a deep breath, expecting to hear the ominous sucking sound that meant a punctured lung. His lungs held, but the effort sent a searing knife across his chest and he exhaled with a gasp, groping for the exit wound. The bullet had not come out and he found its hard mass just beneath the skin under his left breast. Again he drew a careful breath. Just the arrow of pain and a crushing ache. No taste of blood in his throat.

The towel-wrapped bundle rested against Ben’s hip and he wondered how he had managed to hold onto it as he tumbled, then ran for the protecting
koochay
. Pushing again to his feet, he hugged it against his injured side, tightened the
chador
about his face and shoulders and lurched down the alley. At each intersection he paused to check the packing in his wound and crossed when the street was empty. Ten blocks from the site of his attack, a high mud wall had broken through in a gaping hole and he slipped into an enclosure filled with the rusting shells of abandoned automobiles. He peered into one, then another, finding each filled with the sleeping bodies and stale, unwashed smell of Tehran’s street people. Near the compound’s center, three ragged men and a woman cradling an infant against her breast hunched over an open fire. Ben skirted the circle, finally finding a small British Morris that was turned onto its top and remained vacant. One end of the roof had puddled with an inch of rainwater and he gingerly stripped off the
chador
and his loose trousers and soaked the blood-stained pants in the puddle. As he pulled his shirt away, the soggy wad tore painfully from his wound and he realized he had already begun to clot. Tearing the shirt into strips, he pressed a ball of material back into the puncture and bound it tightly about his chest. The ache was giving way to a deep burning that climbed his shoulder and stabbed down into his left arm. Ben squeezed what water he could from his trousers and draped them over an exposed floor brace, wrapped himself again in the
chador
and curled up in the other end of the Morris, slipping into unconsciousness. When he awoke, it was morning.