The Peregrine Spy (73 page)

“Very funny. I wish the guys who shot up that place the other day had done a better job.”

“So does Rocky. Other hand, we have to thank Allah the guys who shot up the embassy today didn’t kill anybody either.”

“Could be the same guys,” said Bill.

“Maybe,” said Frank. “And may all our enemies shoot crooked.”

“Get Teasdale out of here.”

“How?”

“Look, I’ve got keys to a house one of our guys who got rotated home lived in.”

“Not my safe house.”

“Uh-uh. Your safe house is sacred. Nothing else happens there. This one is up the block the other way. Overcrowded as this place is, I been thinkin’ of givin’ you, Gus, couple of other guys a chance to camp out there.”

“With Teasdale?”

“I didn’t think about that till today. But if I don’t get him the fuck out of my sight, I swear I’ll kill him.”

“If walkin’ up the block with him will make life easier for you, I’ll do it,” said Frank.

“Thanks, good buddy. I stoked up the heater, and there’s hot water. We got two other guys up from our base in Isfahan that Rocky shut down a week ago. They lost the room they had to one of the families. Been sleepin’ on the floor.”

“Let’s get them in here with Gus. You can lay the deal out to them and why you want Teasdale in on it.”

“Poor guy’s sleepin’ on the floor. That’s the only reason I want him in on it.”

“Good. You lay it out that way to the four of us. Then I’ll go talk to Teasdale.”

“When you do, just tell him I gave you the keys. Teasdale knows I won’t do him any favors. Just tell him I picked out two guys, told you to pick out two guys. Gus’s your buddy. And you knew Teasdale was sleeping on the floor.”

Bill introduced the men from the Isfahan base as Fred Savage and Tim McDonald. Savage had the worn look of a man who has seen too much, drunk too much, and hidden too much. His ashen features sagged, giving his lean face a jowly look. McDonald had the rosy cheeks and fresh-scrubbed enthusiasm of the innocent abroad.

“A bed,” said McDonald. “What a beautiful thought.”

Bill’s instructions made clear the limits of their sanctuary, “Word is we’re outta here Saturday. They may want all of us down to the embassy the night before. So what you’ve got is a house, not a home. All meals, here. All daylight hours, here. Anything happens at night I know right where you are and there’s a phone. Incoming calls only. If I want you here, I’ll say just one word, ‘Now.’ You got it?”

Grunts and nods told him they understood.

“You walk up the block, together, after dinner. You get back here for first breakfast. Together. You got a good chance of runnin’ into neighborhood patrols between here and the house, so keep your cool. Don’t panic. Don’t run. Maybe they won’t bother you. If they do, do whatever they want. Be sure you’ve got ID, not that they’ll be able to read it, but they may want to look at it. The servants tell us they get real suspicious when they see anybody carryin’ somethin’, even if it’s just groceries. They’re nervous, and they have guns they don’t know much about. They don’t much like Americans, and most likely they don’t speak English. So figure on sleepin’ in your skivvies. Toothbrush, razor, whatever you think you need goes in your pockets or it doesn’t go. Got that?”

Frank repeated Bill’s instructions for Travis.

“I appreciate this, Major Sullivan. Sleepin’ on that floor started really gettin’ to my back.”

“We meet by the front door in ten minutes,” said Frank. “Got that?”

When the five men gathered at the front door ten minutes later, Travis T. carried a black leather bag.

“What’s that?” said Frank.

“Just my ditty bag,” said Travis. “I can carry it under my arm. No one will notice.”

“Hey, I spelled it out for you. There are hostiles wandering around out there. With guns. They see that ditty bag, they’ll sure as hell stop us.”

“Keep it down,” said Savage, and Frank realized they’d attracted attention from the others in the big front room.

“I have to take my bag,” said Teasdale. “I shampoo my hair every day. If I don’t, I get dandruff. I haven’t shampooed today. I can’t go to bed with wet hair. I need my hair drier.”

“Let’s get outta here,” said Savage, “before we blow the deal. Let him keep his fuckin’ bag.”

“Ease up, Frank.” Gus kept his voice low but emphatic. “And let’s go.”

*   *   *

The fifth house on the right, perhaps three hundred feet. The length of a football field, Frank told himself. The bracing night air quickened his senses. The streetlights flickered, casting a faint glow. He squinted to see as far ahead as possible and swiveled his head to look left, right, and over his shoulder. He spotted four armed men edging into the street from the shadows between two buildings.

“Company,” he whispered. “Keep walking.”

The patrol stopped and seemed content to watch them pass by. Then, one of the men called out, “
Be-bak-shid.
” How polite, thought Frank, hearing an expression he recognized. But a shot fired in the air punctuated “excuse me.” He’d also learned to recognize the AK-47. Each of the men had one. Whoever fired the shot did not have his assault rifle set on automatic. He wondered about the others. The raggedly dressed crew formed a semicircle around them. One man stepped forward and poked the barrel of his assault rifle under Teasdale’s arm.

“
On chi-ye?
”

“Just my ditty bag.”

Frank could not pick out the sounds that followed, but he could read the motion of the gun barrel, jerked upward in short moves.

“I think he wants you to open it,” said Frank. “Do it … real slow.”

Frank watched the pantomime played out by the two men: Teasdale smiled and held out the bag. Frank noticed his crooked, overlapping teeth. The man with the gun nodded and grunted. Teasdale unzipped the bag. The man peered in. He handed his weapon to a companion, took the bag from Teasdale and began to rummage inside it. In a moment he pulled out a black hair drier with a pistol-grip handle.

“In chi-ye?”
Whatever the words meant, the voice was loud and angry.

“He thinks it’s a gun,” said Frank.

“No, no,” shouted Teasdale. “It’s only my hair drier.”

“Calm down,” said Frank. He began talking slowly and earnestly to the man who held the hair drier, now pointed at Teasdale. He knew the man couldn’t understand his words but he hoped the tone of his voice and his slow gestures would convey his message: The hair drier posed no threat.

But, as he spoke, one of the other men moved closer. He was short and elderly, with gray hair poking out from under his black skullcap. Frank felt the icy muzzle of an AK-47 against his left ear. He smiled, he shrugged, he moved the fingers of his right hand through his hair and made a circular motion with his left.

“He uses it to dry his hair. What can I tell you? He’s very vain about his appearance.”

Frank pointed to the ditty bag and gestured to indicate that something more should be pulled from it. The man with the hair drier and the bag caught his meaning and tugged out the drier’s electric cord. Frank held out his hand and, after hesitating, the man dropped the cord into it. Frank hooked one end into the drier and went through the motions of inserting the plug into a socket made by his fist. He made a circular motion with the drier around his scalp, accompanied by a buzzing sound and a heavy exhale from his mouth. The men laughed, and he felt the icy prick of the AK-47 move away from his ear.

His peripheral vision caught a glimpse of the frightened, elderly man with a white beard and white hair sticking out from under a black wool skullcap. The index finger of his right hand cradled the trigger of his AK-47. My father, my executioner, he thought.

Smiling now, the men with the guns waved them on. They made their way to what Frank prayed was the right house. He climbed the eight stone steps and tried the key with the red mark on the top lock. It worked. He had just fit the unmarked key into the bottom lock when the rapid stutter of an AK-47 on automatic exploded behind him. He turned. The white-bearded man with the gun that had been in his ear a moment before now whirled in a circle. The weapon pointed skyward, spinning the old man like a top, his finger frozen by panic to the trigger. Safety off. Set for automatic fire. Frank tensed, cringed, tried to hold himself. But when the door swung open, his bladder betrayed him.

*   *   *

He’d found a washer and drier in the basement, tossed in a bar of soap from an upstairs bathroom, and, with a towel wrapped around him, dropped his shorts and pants into it. The smell of urine had already begun to make its presence felt in the gray winter-wool trousers. He thought of all the many ways he might kill Teasdale: with the AK-47 that had gone off moments after it had been in his ear; with Sergeant Abbas’s .45. But nothing seemed as satisfactory as beating him to death with his knuckles protected by his thick, bloodstained winter mittens.

He pulled the pants from the drier. They’d shrunk. But, as he tugged them on, he realized he’d lost enough weight during his time in Iran to accommodate them. He could zip the fly almost all the way up. He couldn’t button the top button, but he could pull his belt tight enough to cover the gap. At least they no longer smelled of urine, and he hoped they would soon get a chance to go back to their house for fresh clothes.

As the keeper of the keys, he claimed what he took to be the master bedroom. A double bed with a firm mattress. A private bath, where, for the first time in months, he soaked. He shaved. He brushed his teeth. Naked, he collapsed on the mattress, and he did not sleep.

A phone sat on the night table by the bed. The phone did not ring, but the phone bothered him. In his mind he could hear the phone ringing in the safe house, the phone he did not answer. Insistent. Someone knew he was there. He imagined a one-armed man dialing a phone, studying a scroll written in Farsi that might be his
fatwa,
firing a metallic machine pistol.

A
Wall Street Journal
reporter, or someone saying he was a
Wall Street Journal
reporter, had called Bill Steele at Dowshan Tappeh and at his home. And material about the agency’s operations in Iran had appeared in the
Journal
. Including material Rocky said no one had access to but himself and whomever he’d sent it to at Langley. Information is power, Rocky had told him once.
The ambassador may have fancier rugs than I do, but I control information
. And the information flowed through the communications room. Frank began to think about radio men. He thought about Teasdale. He wondered about radio men in the communications center at Langley. He closed his eyes and saw the image of a telephone. At first he mistook it for the jangling phone in the safe house. But this phone sat quiet. On a windowsill. The second-floor hallway of the air force guards’ bachelor quarters. Facing the street.

*   *   *

“He hates my guts,” said Bill. “That’s why he mighta done it.” He looked down at the black rotary-dial phone on the windowsill. “The regular air force guys who live here all have a personal code they have to ring in to call home. Local calls, no problem. Just dial. This is the phone the guys mostly use. I’ve heard Teasdale spends a lot of time on the phone, like he does in the bathroom, and look, this window looks right across at the safe house.”

“We may be jumpin’,” said Frank. “How would he get the number? How would he get your home number?”

“Let me tell you somethin’ about these communications guys. Some of them. Rocky gets them pumped up tellin’ them information is power. He controls the flow of information out of the embassy, so he has the real power. But guys like Teasdale think, ‘Fuck. We’re the ones who really control the information. Without us Rocky can’t cable shit.’”

“I don’t know,” said Frank. “Most of the communications guys I’ve gotten to know seem pretty decent,”

“Most are,” said Bill, “Then there’s the creeps like Teasdale. They get to thinkin’ they’re king of the hill, and it’s not a big jump to start scratchin’ around for other information like other people’s phone numbers. God knows, it’s not too tough to find. Phone numbers. Communications room. Emergency need to get in touch. They’re all there.”

Frank cautioned himself. “It seems to add up, but it doesn’t mean he did all that.”

“We can put him on the flutter box.”

Frank considered himself a skeptic about the polygraph. “Right now,” he said, “I think we, especially you, have too much else going on. Like getting our asses out of here.”

“You may be right.”

Soon after supper, Frank began to think the polygraph might be a good idea. The ringing phone barely intruded on his conversation with Gus until he heard Cantwell calling out, “Hey, Bill. It’s for you. Some guy says he’s from the
Wall Street Journal
.”

Frank crossed the room to Bill’s side, grabbed his elbow, and ushered him into the kitchen, where the receiver on a wall phone dangled on its cord.

“Take it,” said Frank. “Keep him talking as long as you can. Your usual dumb act, but try to find out why he thinks you’re here, how he got the number.”

Bill picked up the phone and said, “Yuh?”

*   *   *

“Same guy,” said Bill. “Yusef el Baz.”

Frank and Bill stood alone in the kitchen. Cantwell stood on the other side of the closed door.

“Same voice?”

“Think so.”

“What’d he say when you asked him how he got this number?”

“Said everybody in town knew about me.”

“How?”

“Said word was around. Reporters talk to each other.”

“That’s for sure,” said Frank. “How’d he call your name?”

“Mr. Steele.”

“He ever say, ‘Bill’?”

“I don’t think so.”

“William?”

“No.”

“Anyone call you William these days?”

“Hell, no. And for sure no one ever calls me by my full name. William Oliver Steele.”

“William Oliver?”

“Yeah. I hate it. Why you askin’ me all this?”

“You’re on a list somewhere. And I want to figure out how you’re listed on that list.”

“I don’t give a shit how I’m listed,” said Bill. “I want to find out how I got on the damn list. What do we do about this Teasdale prick?”