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“That’s enough,” I said. “Save your strength.”
“All the time she was talking they were cutting on Ghasem and he was screaming.”
After a few minutes, she added, “They came for me during the morning. When I got to the prison Ghasem was already on the gurney.”
She fell silent after that, and I held her as tightly as I could.
After we got her into a bed in the tu
“On the roof of the hotel. Do it now.”
I couldn’t get to the roof. I did find an empty room on the top floor that had a window I could open, so I used it. I sent everything I had photographed to Jake Grafton. Unfortunately, I had no way to get the data off the hard drives I had stolen. They were going to have to be flown out of Iran, then flown to the United States.
I sat there at the window looking out at the rooftops of Tehran. The buildings ran on and on, getting smaller and smaller, until they disappeared into the haze. All these people… and Ahmadinejad and Khamenei wanted to murder them, make them martyrs for the greater glory of Allah. I almost puked just thinking about it.
Unable to sit still, I went into the bathroom to steal some towels. There was a little mirror there; I stood transfixed, staring at the strange face I saw reflected in it. Bruised, scraped, with a goose egg on my forehead and an eyebrow cut that had leaked blood until it scabbed over, I looked like a creature from the fiery pit. Felt like it, too. Every muscle ached from the beating I had taken. I felt old and tired and defeated.
I wet the towels in the sink, then headed down the stairs to put them on Davar’s face.
Joe Mottaki and G. W. Hosein and their guys were there in the tu
“We thought-” he began.
I waved it away. “Have you talked to Jake Grafton?”
“Yes. He is sending a helicopter to pick up your hard drives.”
“One? Call him back. Tell him we’re hot to trot. Send three or four choppers to extract us all. We want out of this damned hole.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I should be dead, you know, like Ghasem,” I said to Larijani. “If you hadn’t showed up in the nick, I would be.”
Larijani didn’t say anything to that. His face showed no emotion.
We were sitting on folding chairs in the underground safe house. Davar was stretched out on a cot twenty feet away. Sheer exhaustion, plus physical and emotional trauma, had finally claimed her.
“How long have you been in country?” I asked Larijani, who sat there with his hands on his thighs, apparently thinking of nothing at all.
He had to tot up the time before he answered. “Ten years and seven months, this time,” he said finally. “I grew up here, left when I was twenty. Fought with the Israelis. They wanted me to come back, so I did.”
“How did you work your way into the i
His eyes shifted to mine. “Take a guess,” he said.
“Well, you pulled my chestnuts out of the fire. Saved my life, and I thank you for it. Saved Davar’s, too. Hell, I know that Ghasem was also glad to see you.”
“I blew my cover. Blew ten and a half years of sheer bloody hell. Are you worth it?”
I blinked.
“I don’t think that twit over there was worth it,” he continued slowly, his voice low and hard. “She wasn’t worth a day of it, I can tell you that. You-I am still trying to decide how many days of that ten and a half years you are worth.”
I couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I didn’t try. Just sat there looking at him. He was an ugly son of a bitch, no two ways about it.
He opened his hands and stared at them. “I had to be the competent, ruthless spy-catcher. That’s what the Iranians wanted and needed to protect their nuclear program. My bosses in Israel wanted a man inside who could protect the agency’s inside technical boffins, the men who were telling them precisely what Iran was doing and how they were doing it. So I found spies for the MOIS and al-Rashid, framed i
His eyes swiveled again to mine. “I murdered them, as surely as if I had pulled the trigger. Delivered them up for torture and agonizing deaths to enhance my reputation, so that I would be trusted. I
“What was the alternative?” I asked.
“Toward the end every one of them admitted whatever al-Rashid was accusing them of, just to end it.” He thought about that for a bit, then added, as if he couldn’t believe it were true, “And the bloody bitch believed them.”
His eyes left mine. After a moment he reached into a pocket and extracted a pack of foul little cigars. He pulled one out, then remembered me and offered me the pack. I refused.
“It’s a filthy fucking world,” he muttered.
When Larijani had his cigar going, he sat silently, savoring the smoke. His face was a mask that he had learned to live behind. I suspected that behind that mask he was weighing the sins of the world, and his own, on a scale with an exquisitely delicate balance.
Sometime later G. W. Hosein came in. He sat down beside me and whispered, “I talked to Grafton. He wants us to put the hard drives on the he licop ter, and Davar, if you can get her to go. But he wants us to stay. He’s going to need us on Jihad day, he said.”
Disappointment washed over me like a wave. I tried to keep control of my face, but it was difficult.
“That Grafton…” G. W. said.
I promised myself that if I lived long enough to see Grafton again, I was going to strangle him.
When Jake Grafton got home from Langley, he found Callie in the living room with two colleagues from Georgetown University. She introduced her husband to them. One, a woman named A
“Peligro?” Jake asked. “Doesn’t that mean danger?”
Professor Sanchez smiled. “I was in the service for a while and could never shake the nickname.”
“Oh,” the admiral said.
“I was in explosive ordnance disposal.”
The admiral’s smile widened to a grin.
“Professor Wolfe has read Dr. Murad’s manuscript,” Callie said when they were all seated. “She translated twenty or so pages, and Professor Sanchez has read them.” She offered the pages to Jake, who took them and sca
“This manuscript,” Sanchez began, carefully weighing his words. “This manuscript is easily the most original work on man’s relationship with God and the cosmos since Martin Luther wrote his theses.”
Jake Grafton glanced at Callie, who nodded her concurrence.
“The book is divided into twelve chapters,” Professor Wolfe said, “which expound upon and explain things like man’s relationship with God, man’s relationship with nature and his fellow man, and so on. The twenty pages are excerpts from four chapters and are, I think, extraordinary. Amazingly, the whole book is of this intellectual and literary quality. This book must be published.”
“What can you tell us about Israr Murad?” Sanchez asked Jake.
“He was a professor of comparative religion at a university in Iran.”
“Was?”
“He died under interrogation.”
Callie broke the silence that followed that remark. “Professor Wolfe would like to translate the whole work. Professor Sanchez wants to write a foreword. A former student of mine works for a literary agency in New York. Tomorrow morning I am taking the train to New York, and she and I will have lunch together. I hope that when she reads those pages, she’ll take Professor Murad’s book as a personal project and try to find a publisher.”