The Peregrine Spy (75 page)

Frank made his way down the front stairs, unlocked and opened the garage door, and watched Gus back in.

“What’s happening?” said Gus as he clambered from the car.

“They’re searching the house. Mostly for guns, I guess.”

“Leaving you alone?”

“I guess.”

“Good sign. Shall we mosey on up?”

“I’m tempted to stay here.”

“Let’s mosey.”

They entered the kitchen in time to see the man Frank had tried to communicate with open the refrigerator door. He bent to peer inside, closed the door, and started to turn away. He stopped and opened the door to the freezer. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of Absolut Frank had forgotten he’d left there. He feared he was about to see the remnants of his Absolut poured down the drain or smashed against the wall. The man studied the label.

“A-be,”
said Frank, somehow remembering the word for water. He wished he knew the word for bottled. He wanted to say “bottled water”.

“A-be?”
”

“Baleh.”

The man unscrewed the cap and sniffed. “Baad
a-be
.”

Frank pointed to the tap on the sink, nodded, and said, “
Baleh
. Bad
a-be
.” He could make no sense of the torrent of Farsi that poured from the man. Then he picked up two words: Evian
a-be.
The man repeated, “Evian.”

“Evian,” echoed Frank, nodding. Maybe that’s how Iranians say “bottled water.” The man screwed the cap back on the Absolut and returned it to the freezer.

*   *   *

They’d finished their swift packing and lugged their bags downstairs. Frank had changed pants, discarding the shrunken pair he’d had on the night an AK-47 had rested in his ear. The rest of what he’d decided to take he slung into the suitcase he would check through to Frankfurt. The carry-on held a change of socks and underwear and his toiletries. He suspected Gus had packed in much the same way.

“That’s the lick-and-a-promise school of preparing for a long journey,” said Gus. “Since our holy warrior friends didn’t pour your vodka down the drain, how ’bout we pour some down us?”

“It isn’t Scotch,” said Frank.

“For a sailor on dry rations, any port in a storm.”

*   *   *

They’d lingered over vodka, sipping and talking in fits and starts. Frank guessed that Gus’s mind was on home, his wife, Rome. His own thoughts flitted from Lermontov to the still active KGB mole in the agency and back again and again to the
fatwa
. Somehow the fact that a reporter for a major American newspaper knew about it worried him as much as the death warrant itself, giving it a wider currency than he would have thought possible. Munair had told him the
fatwa
placed an obligation on all devout Muslims, but Frank had not really believed the threat could follow him to America. Now it seemed to be already there.

“Well,” said Gus, “if we’re gonna get outta here, I guess we better get goin’.”

“Let’s go,” said Frank, pushing himself up from the Formica-topped table.

They left the vodka behind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Frank noticed a major change in the decor of the embassy cafeteria, the Caravansari. A huge photograph of Ayatollah Khomeini had replaced the full-color portrait of the Shah above the door.

Stripped of its liquor and luxury goods, the adjacent commissary served as a processing center. Lingering tear gas made the embassy uninhabitable for more than a few minutes at a time, and the consulate proved too small to handle the hundreds of Americans seeking exodus. He’d surrendered his passport, filled out emigration forms, and filed into the Caravansari. He and Gus soon discovered the extent of their luck in not having to arrive the night before.

Snipers had again attacked the embassy from rooftops across the street, but this time with nothing heavier than assault rifles. Islamic guards, assigned by Ibrahim Yazdi to protect the embassy, fired back from within the compound. Apparently, no bullets found flesh.

“The gangs that couldn’t shoot straight,” said Gus.

“They shot straight enough to take out the Bodyguard,” said Frank.

“True, but from what I hear we might have faced more danger from the food. Hamburgers and canned corn.”

“I’m glad we missed the bullets
and
the food.”

“What’s Rocky plan to do about Teasdale?”

Frank shrugged. “Bill Steele tells me Rocky’s arranging for the FBI to pick him up in Rome, take him in for questioning, put him on a flutter box, work up some kind of revealing-classified-information charge, and ship him back to the States.”

He realized he didn’t care what happened to Teasdale. No more than he cared about what might happen to the GRU and Aeroflot hustlers Belinsky had worked with. Belinsky had already been killed, not for his sins, but for his courage. He did worry about what damage the still-active mole in Langley might cause. He worried about might happen to Lermontov. He worried about himself and the death warrant he carried back to the states as part of his baggage. He felt naked without his passport. He’d surrendered all his
rials
and several hundred dollars in large-denomination American currency to the station’s administrative officer. A receipt gave him a good chance of getting the money back as expenses. He’d left many things behind: his tape recorder, erased tapes, notebooks, address book, scissors, anything that might cause problems when the Islamic militia searched luggage at the airport. He had no problem with anything he’d left, including the money he’d surrendered. But he kept checking his pockets to make sure he had his passport and then remembering he’d turned it over to an embassy employee he did not know in exchange for a Pan Am ticket to New York via Frankfurt and a bus assignment, number 8. He had his ticket home but felt he’d given up his identity.

A booming voice over a bullhorn startled him. “Bus number seven. All passengers on bus number seven, prepare to depart for the airport.”

“That’s me,” said Gus. “I guess this is it.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“All passengers for bus number seven, prepare to depart. Carry your own luggage on board. Stow it in the aisles.”

“We’ll have to have a class reunion in Washington someday,” said Gus.

“Sounds good,” said Frank, knowing it might never happen. They embraced. Gus hefted his suitcase and turned his back.

*   *   *

Still without his passport, Frank boarded the already crowded bus with a dozen or so people still on line behind him. He recognized it as a regular city bus and noted the large black-and-white photo of Khomeini taped to the front window. He scrambled over suitcases and several pet cages and caught an aisle seat next to a heavy-set man who already had fallen asleep. Lucky man, he thought. He soon realized his own luck as several latecomers found all the seats taken.

“Don’t worry,” hollered a male voice. “We’ll stand all the way to America if we have to.”

Subdued laughter underlined the tension of passengers fearful of snipers and mobs along the way. Frank knew the most direct route would take them by the gates of the university. He hoped for a detour. He heard a stir at the front of the bus. Three armed guards had boarded. Two remained by the front door. The third, tall, dark, and clean shaven, executed a difficult passage toward the back. Only when he leaned against a rail in the stairwell of the rear door and their eyes met did Frank recognize Anwar the Taller, carrying a G3 assault rifle, coatless in his blue
homafar
uniform but without the cap Frank had worn during the battle at Dowshan Tappeh. Very slightly, Anwar shook his head. Frank looked away.

The bus turned right, leaving the embassy gates, away from the direction of the military compound where for months a swaying, leaning building crane had teased his imagination with its defiance of gravity and its refusal to yield to the alternately frozen and muddy ground it stood on. He knew it must have toppled, yet a crazy hope lingered that it had somehow survived. But nothing had survived: not the military nor the government; not the friendships that had started to form; not the Shah. But the embassy still stands, he thought. A semblance of relations still exists between the United States and the government of Mahdi Bazargan. He glanced again at Anwar, remembering his warning of the civil war that might follow the takeover by Ayatollah Khomeini. He wondered if the embassy, or Bazargan, or Anwar the Taller would survive that. He tried to forget the crane as they turned left onto Pahlavi. The bus rolled across Shah Reza, which meant they would steer clear of the university. At the next major cross street, they turned, very slowly, to the right. He glimpsed an armored personnel carrier ahead of the bus. He noticed Anwar, finger on the trigger of his G3, checking the street through a glass partition on the door. As the bus picked up speed, he relaxed. His finger came off the trigger, and Frank saw him flick the safety.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Do you know the name of this street?”

After a hesitation, Anwar said, “Shah Nader.”

“Thank you.” His question reflected only a minimal curiosity about their location. He had wanted to establish a final point of contact with Anwar. His question had been a way of saying, “Thank you. And good-bye.” All his good-byes, even to Lermontov, had been perfunctory. Rocky had been absorbed by the problem of dealing with Teasdale. He’d enlisted the help of Cantwell and an American military doctor who prepared a hypodermic needle in a small room above the cafeteria. Teasdale seemed resigned to the idea of sedation. He appeared already numb, muttering again and again, “I understand. I understand. I understand.”

“You understand shit,” said Rocky. He turned to Frank. “Long flight home. Lotta time to think about a lotta shit.” He adjusted his hearing aid. “I got a hunch your buddy will make it to the States. And hook up. Maybe catch a mouse. Who knows? You might even find out the truth about all that. Or somethin’ like it. See ya around, boychik.”

Frank said nothing, suspecting Rocky would not hear his parting words. Rocky shook a fist in Frank’s direction, smiled, and popped a thumb straight up. A finger he might have expected, but Frank had never seen Rocky give anyone a thumbs-up. He returned the gesture. How sad, he thought, two grown men with so much unsaid between them and the best we can do is give each other a thumbs-up. A long flight home. A lot to think about.

Now he turned his attention back to their strange caravan. Leftist
Mojahedin
and Islamic revolutionaries protecting Americans from possible snipers who might or might not be
Feda’iyan
. Warm bodies and an overly protective heating system had made the bus stifling. Frank shrugged off his parka and removed his wool cap. The man next to him had begun to snore. He thought of Ali and the way he always had their Nova warmed and the windows steamed. The bus cut to the right, then made a dogleg left onto a street that soon would no longer be called Eisenhower. He caught a glimpse of the Shahyad Monument where millions gathered on
Ashura
. Armed revolutionaries ringed the otherwise empty square. He realized they’d encountered virtually no traffic. The revolution, he thought, has become a government. They had engineered the Americans’ evacuation well. They may make the trains run on time.

*   *   *

He changed his mind as he fought his way into the airport terminal. The two Pan Am 747s would carry over seven hundred Americans, plus flight crew, but the mob in the terminal must have tripled that. Adding the Iranians with automatic weapons, Uzis, AK-47s, G3s, and M-14s, to the Iranians behind various counters with no visible weapons, Frank estimated a ground-crew to passenger ratio of three to one. But the service did not rate a gold star. Three men with AK-47s herded them toward a long table: Americans on one side; a motley knot of Iranians on the other, with suitcases gaping like open-jawed alligators and belongings spewed between them. As he approached, he realized competing groups of Iranians each insisted on searching every piece of luggage, arguing among themselves as they went. The largest group ranged in age from teenagers to elderly men and in facial hair from scraggly chin whiskers to full beards. All wore green-and-red headbands and photos of Khomeini pinned to their coats. A younger group, mostly clean shaven and hatless, had apparently come from the collapsed military. The third group seemed more random in age and appearance. Frank noticed a few uniformed
homafaran
among them and suspected they might be
Mojahedin
. He wondered what had become of Anwar the Taller. As the contending groups tugged at the contents of bulging luggage, he wondered, too, if the chaotic scene before him previewed the civil war to come.

Then he saw Anwar, off to his right. Sa’id, also armed with a G3, stood next to him. Anwar nodded, then looked away. In a moment, the crowd swallowed them.

Several feet in front of him, Frank saw a fur-coated woman struggling to hang on to a pet cage. Two Iranians pulled awkwardly at the metal grill. The woman clung to the handle. “No, no,” she screamed in a piercing soprano. “You can’t take my poopsie poodle. What would poor li’l Chatterbox do without his Momsie-pooh?”

“Nah saag,”
cried an Iranian, again and again.
“Nah saag. Nah saag.”
The red-faced man standing with the woman began screaming at the Iranian so loudly and rapidly Frank could not distinguish his words. Despite his name and the battle raging around him, Chatterbox remained quiet, sedated, Frank suspected, like Teasdale. Frank wished he had a needle full of sodium Pentothol to jab into the poodle’s barking owner.

While one Iranian held fast, the other let go of the pet cage, poked a stubby finger into the man’s chest, and shouted over and over again,
“Saag. Saag. Saag.”
He’d gone from telling the woman no dogs could go on the plane to telling the man he was a dog. The scene promised to turn even uglier. Several Iranians hefted their automatic weapons. Remembering Belinsky, he thought of hitting the floor but realized he would be trampled if shots were fired and panic broke out.