The Peregrine Spy (63 page)

“Then why have Belinsky killed?”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone had him killed,” said Frank. “And damned near had me killed.”

“Don’t be stupid. Every time a shot goes off in your neighborhood you want to blame me. First it was Beirut. Now here. Truly stupid. Killing you would be like killing myself. You are my only hope of getting to America.”

“Not you,” said Frank. “But maybe GRU.”

“You know the rule. We don’t kill each other. That can only lead to endless reprisal.”

“Someone had him killed.”

“Ask your Iranian friends,” said Lermontov. “Who would benefit … who would want Belinsky dead? Or you? Or my good friend Mr. Novak?”

*   *   *

On schedule and without resistance from the army, the
homafaran
took over Mehrabad Airport on Tuesday. In a show of force, the Imperial Bodyguard paraded through Tehran, setting off fresh rumors of a military coup. But the Bodyguard did nothing but march. The Bakhtiar government capitulated and had the airport fully operational by Wednesday. That evening, aboard a chartered silver and blue Air France 747, Ayatollah Khomeini with a large following of aides and international journalists took off from Paris. The next morning, without incident, they landed at Mehrabad.

Once again, the possibility of violence confined Frank to watching history unfold on television. This time, Gus joined him.

“This isn’t very Islamic of us, is it?” said Gus. “Sitting here with our skepticism hanging out, nursing our respective Scotch neat and vodka chilled. Mourning our own dead and watching the great unwashed greet their holy savior.”

The night before, Frank thought, I witnessed more than just the possibility of violence. And escaped alive. If I were still a Catholic, I’d want to go to confession. To be absolved … for what? For being alive. If Belinsky were alive, he’d be watching Khomeini’s descent from the heavens. Watching and understanding. I don’t understand. Maybe that’s why I’m guilty.

“Couple of chair potatoes,” rambled Gus, testing words against the vacuum. “Butts in one chair. Feet propped on another. Staring at the flickering tube.”

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” said Frank.

“Wonder what?”

“What kind of an intelligence agency we are. One of the most important days in the history of an important ally and we get our only information by watching television with audio in a language we don’t understand.”

“Better than being out there in that mess,” said Gus.

“I wish we had Anwar,” said Frank, “or someone, to tell us what the announcer has to say.”

“I think I’d rather not know.” The set’s color balance had blinked out soon after Khomeini’s plane set down. “I like it this way,” said Gus, “History should be black and white. Color makes it propaganda. Like what announcers have to say.”

“You may be right, except I’d like to know what the propaganda line looks like.” Better yet, thought Frank, not Anwar. Munair with his egg-shaped, blood-flecked stigmata and true-believer’s sensibility would make the ideal interpreter. But he knew Munair would be at the airport, as close to his Imam as possible. Anwar described himself as reasonably devout, and the reasonable part, the rational, skeptical part, kept breaking through. Munair would see the arrival of Khomeini with the eyes of a believer.

He’d been trying to keep Belinsky and the scene at the Damavand out of his mind. Now he wished neither Anwar nor Munair sat with them but Belinsky, alive, jaundiced skin but no bullet holes, understanding and explaining. Why did Christ die? He died for our sins. He felt some part of himself had died when Belinsky fell. His back muscles twitched. He thought of the blood of the flagellants on
Ashura,
the blood of the martyrs at Karbala. He had not been able to see the face of Ayatollah Khomeini in the full moon, but he saw his own image in the blood on the blue and white tiles of the Damavand’s dining room floor. He stared at his glass of Absolut and thought of hepatitis and alcohol. In Lermontov’s absence, he did not attempt to gulp his vodka but sipped it and held it in his mouth, hoping it would numb his mind.

He fixed his attention on a CBS camera crew among the crushed journalists trying to elbow their way closer to Khomeini. Before the day ended, somewhere in Los Angeles, with its eleven-and-a-half-hour time differential, Anwar and Mina would watch the scene he and Gus watched now. He wondered what they would think. He wondered if news of Belinsky’s murder had appeared in American news media.

He decided Gus might be right. The black-and-white color scheme worked well, at least for Khomeini and his hold on history. Frank knew his voice, but, except for photographs and posters, he had never seen him before. His black turban sat like a crown above the full white beard that framed his wizened face and fierce dark eyes. The Shah has gone, thought Frank. Long live the Imam. But before his phalanx of armed bodyguards could get him from the plane to the airport lounge, the jostling of the crowd knocked the black turban from his head, revealing the bald pate beneath.

“He’s not God,” said Gus. “He’s just a skinhead like me.”

Somehow an Iranian cameraman must have managed to fight his way into the lounge, where a heated argument flared among the revolutionary guards. Frank caught the announcer’s words,
“Maydan-e Shahyad,”
Shahyad Square, the towering monument in the vast traffic circle outside the airport on the main route into town. The television crews did an excellent job, cutting to a scene, evidently taken from a helicopter, of Shahyad Square, choked with people, then to shots of the mobs that clogged the roads, then to a Chevrolet Blazer surrounded by armed guards parked in front of the airport terminal. The announcer had to shout over the screams of the crowd. The camera next showed an armored personnel carrier bulling its way to the tarmac side of the airport lounge. A wedge of armed men opened the way for Khomeini to make his way into the military vehicle.

Revolutionary guards, aides in European-style suits and open-necked shirts, and one intrepid cameraman accompanied him. The personnel carrier made its way forward, carefully at first, then picking up speed at the edge of the crowd, heading to the far end of the field, where a helicopter waited, its blades slowly turning. They watched the Imam ascend again into the heavens.

The cameraman kept working, sweeping the interior of the helicopter. He focused on Khomeini, turban again in place, who chatted, amiably it seemed, with his aides. The camera switched to shots of the millions below as the chopper swung low over the city. They watched as the camera scanned what Frank later learned was the soccer field of a walled-in girls’ high school in the eastern part of the city, not far from Dowshan Tappeh. A media-savvy aide evidently arranged for the lone cameraman to leave the helicopter first, so the Imam’s arrival could be recorded live and, suddenly, in color, as the screen blipped in their front room.

“Propaganda,” said Gus.

*   *   *

The next day they watched Khomeini’s televised pilgrimage, again by helicopter, to Behest-e Zahra cemetery to lead a Friday prayer meeting in honor of the revolution’s martyrs.

“He’s got it,” said Gus. “Even if he is a bald old man. In my day they called it pizzazz. Charisma, that’s the word now. The old Ayatollah’s got charisma.”

He’s got it, thought Frank. Though he could detect nothing in the Ayatollah’s presence to account for it, the response of the multitude around him conferred it. The awed, uplifted faces. The screaming efforts to get close to him, to touch him. The cemetery appeared barren, graves dug in scrub desert. The wretched of the earth go to earth in this wretched landscape. How far from Nirvana? How far from Niavaran? What would happen to the Shah’s palace now? he wondered. Another man who overthrew the despot would move into his citadel. Khomeini would not. Whatever it is he’s got, thought Frank, he’s got it. Then he saw it. Yes, he has the people. And they have anointed him.

*   *   *

On Saturday morning, the depleted Jayface team seemed spent.

“We confront a new situation,” said the general, standing at the head of the table.

He cleared his throat, and Frank noticed for the first time that Munair worked a set of what Americans called worry beads.

“We must be prepared,” said General Merid, “to … how shall I say it … shift gears? Yes. The armed forces remain loyal, as they should, to the legitimate government. At present represented by Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar. But, who knows, another government soon may be named. Headed, so some people say, by a very devout leader of the National Front, Mahdi Barzagan. Captain Irfani, can you perhaps enlighten us?”

Munair looked from his beads to the general, then back to his beads. “No,” he said.

“Ah.” The general did one of his brief up-and-down toe dances. “Perhaps we need to seek guidance from General Kasravi. Major Sullivan, could you help us in that regard?”

Someone’s been priming him, thought Frank. General Merid seemed both better informed and more aggressive than Frank previously had known him.

“I could try to speak to General Kasravi,” Frank said.

“Good,” said General Merid. “Meanwhile, I should like each of us to begin to consider what role our group should play in whatever government the military supports. We will cut today’s meeting short to give each of us a chance to prepare comments on this question by tomorrow. Informal, verbal comments, but, if you please, well-thought-out comments on our role in loyal-ity to the government likely to be in power.”

The odd pronunciation struck Frank. “Loyal-ity.” It sounds as if his loyalty is divided, he thought.

“Thank you,” said the general. “That will be all for today.”

“What the fuck is he up to?” said Gus as Frank turned the Nova through the gates of Supreme Commander’s Headquarters for their return trip to Dowshan Tappeh.

“He’s your agent,” said Frank.

“God help me,” said Gus. “I’ve got a safe house meet with him tonight. I’ll see what he has to say about what he said.”

*   *   *

They had abandoned the Damavand in favor of the Kayhan Hotel, also close to the embassy but less risky than the scene of Belinsky’s murder. Frank asked Munair about his beads.

“No,” said Munair. “We do not call them worry beads.
Tassbead
. Mine are of stone, though today plastic has become common. We use them to count out thirty-three repetitions of
Allah-o akbar
. Since
Ashura,
many people now add
Khomeini rakbar
. ‘God is great. Khomeini is our leader.’ I love the Imam, but that is blasphemy.”

“Do you think the followers of the Imam go too far?”

“Yes.”

Frank again probed for a way to recruit Munair. “Soon,” he said, “we will have to leave. The Americans, the Israelis, possibly even the British will have to leave. We will have no ears and eyes. No bridge to the Islamic government. You could play a unique role.”

“I understand what you seek. But do not ask me again. I will talk only to you. Only as long as you are here.”

“That may not be for long,” said Frank.

“It should not. I have tried to warn you. And I told you often to warn Mr. Belinsky.”

“I warned him. Often. We were going to warn him again that night. But he wouldn’t listen.”

“Do you?”

“I’m listening” said Frank.

“Do you know what saved your life when the men in the ski masks shot Mr. Belinsky?”

He tried to respond. I hit the floor. I hid under the dead man. Maybe Belinsky saved my life. But a spasm of fear tightened his throat. His mouth turned dry, then tasted of bile. Finally, he managed to scratch out a mumbled “No.”

“Savak.”

“Savak?”
muttered Frank. “How could
Savak
save my life?”

“The last time we met, do you remember?”

Frank nodded and tried to remember.

“I told you certain members of
Savak
have formed a revolutionary
komiteh
called
Savama
and that some of these men kept watch on your Mr. Belinski.”

“Is that who shot him?”

“No. If it had been
Savama
members, they would have killed you as well as Belinsky. What happened at the Damavand may have been the last gasp of the Shah’s
Savak
. They were men angered by the way Belinsky embarrassed them by helping Major Amini escape and by collaborating with a Soviet GRU official, all without
Savak
being able to stop them. They thought that by killing Belinsky they could keep the
Savama
loyalists from killing you both as Hojatalislam Qomi Mohhammad had ordered in his
fatwa
.”

“But why?” said Frank. “What difference would it make?”

“It would mean that
Savak
officials loyal to the Shah were still in control.”

Frank shook his head, wondering if
Savak
members who shared General Merid’s strange notion of “loyal-ity” had saved his life.

“I’ll never understand,” he said.

“Of course not,” said Merid. “You are not Persian.”

Uniquely Persian. Frank remembered the phrase Anwar the Smarter had used.

“You’re right,” said Frank. “I guess I never will understand.”

“As I told you,” said Munair, “the real target of the
fatwa
was not Charles Belinsky but Ayatollah Shariat-Madari. And you did not meet with Shariat-Madari. Only Mr. Belinsky did. You were included in the
fatwa
only because of one man.”

“He was there,” said Frank. “The man with one arm.”

“Mr. Belinsky’s driver. He had driven Mr. Belinsky to the airport to help your friend Major Amini and his family to escape from Iran. He had driven Mr. Belinsky to meetings with the GRU agent he worked with. And after all that he drove Mr. Belinsky and you to the university. Only he had reason to see you both dead. And he prevailed with the Hojatalislam to name you both in his
fatwa.
”

“But he’s
Savak
agent,” said Frank. “Correct?”

“That is correct. At least for the moment. He will, I suspect, soon become
Savama.
”