Scorpion Deception

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Mellat Park,

Tehran, Iran

“You heard? We’re wanted by the police, VEVAK, everyone,” Ghanbari said. “Our faces are everywhere.”

“I know,” Scorpion said, leaning on the rail of the yellow metal footbridge over the lake in Mellat Park. His and Ghanbari’s faces were on the front pages of Abrar and the Tehran Times and all the major TV channels; wanted for murder in the killing of Farzan Sadeghi, an officer and a hero of the Revolutionary Guards, and Zahra Ravanipour, an employee with the AFAGIR missile command.

He had watched the news on the television at a chain restaurant, Nayeb Kebab, in Kaj Square. For a disguise, he was dressed in a floppy red outfit and a tall floppy red hat, his face covered with blackface, like something from a late nineteenth century minstrel show. He had bought the outfit from a costume shop near the Grand Bazaar, and thought he looked ludicrous. He was supposed to be Haji Firuz, the traditional Persian minstrel of the Red Wednesday festivities. While playing peekaboo with two small children who were with their parents at the next table, and shaking his tambourine, he kept one eye on the door and on the TV. He was tired. It had been a killer night and he needed to go to ground, but there would be no sleep anymore. Not till he left Iran.

The news announcer on the restaurant TV cut back to talk about the American forces in the Persian Gulf and rumors about Israel, then the scene shifted to a reporter interviewing a burly Iranian man in his fifties in an expensive suit, wearing glasses and a white dulband turban, his tie at half-mast. They were in a government office; the TV screen caption read: ABOUZAR BEIKZADEH, SECRETARY OF THE EXPEDIENCY COUNCIL.

Beikzadeh, stared into the camera and declared: “These innocent Iranians were good people. Patriots. Murdered by CIA agents and Zionist terrorists who wish to destroy Iran. They will be found out and justice will be done. We expect to have these criminals in custody by tonight and then we will seek out and destroy those who sent them. I call upon all citizens to be vigilant. I call upon the Basiji to go out into the streets to help us find these CIA criminals.”

Scorpion had already seen Basiji militiamen out in force on every street corner. Besides the police, VEVAK, Revolutionary Guards, and ordinary citizens, it meant at least 100,000 Basiji vigilantes looking for Ghanbari and him. He could feel a prickling at the back of his neck. The noose was growing tighter.

“Further,” Beikzadeh continued, “because of the actions of the traitor, Muhammad Ghanbari, acting with the unanimous consent of the Expediency Council and the Supreme Leader, I have this morning assumed personal command of the Revolutionary Guards.” He stared into the TV camera. “All traitors everywhere will be rooted out. The criminals will not escape,” adding that anyone seeing the foreigner, Laurent Westermann, or the fugitive CIA spy, Muhammad Ghanbari, was to contact the nearest Naja police office or Basiji militiamen at once. There was no mention of the incident at Dizin or any other casualties.

Although Scorpion had known from the instant he fired the shot that he couldn’t save her, seeing Zahra’s face on the TV, confirmation that she was dead, was like a kick in the gut. How many casualties had there been on this mission? Harandi in Hamburg. Glenn. Chrissie; all of the Gnomes in Zurich. Rutledge and Mini Me on the Costa Brava. Now Zahra. She had been right about him. Just knowing him was lethal, he thought. He’d been right to stay away from Sandrine. All he could bring her was grief.

He had spent the night into the morning moving, riding buses and the Metro, not keeping still or holing up anywhere they might try to track him. After midnight he went back to the dead drop in Laleh Park to see if there was anything for him in the public men’s room.

There wasn’t.

He had torn his Laurent Westermann passport and papers into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet, pulling his last available ID from his backpack. A red Republic of Ireland passport in the name Sean O’Donnell, a documentary filmmaker from Dublin. It wasn’t deep cover, but better than nothing. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.

He’d slept fitfully on the stone floor of the public men’s room, curled next to the wall, the stink in his nostrils, ZOAF pistol in his hand. He kept waking in the dim light of a single bulb at every sound outside. In the morning, he washed and shaved with cold water and tried to clean up as best he could. Looking at himself in the mirror, he understood that without a disguise he would be caught before the morning was out. That was when he thought of Haji Firuz. The one and only piece of luck he’d had in this whole operation was that it happened at Nowruz, the Persian New Year. He wondered whether Rabinowich had taken that into account when planning the op. Which reminded him, he had to find a way to let Langley know about Sadeghi.

When he walked out in the early morning, sunlight had been filtering through the trees. The park was green, the pathways empty and beautiful. He heard a bird singing and it felt unworldly. It seemed insane that everyone in Iran was hunting him and that he would in all probability die today or that they were about to go to war.

He’d caught a bus in Vali Asr Square. Watching the city traffic and smog getting denser by the second, he calculated that he could risk up to five minutes online before the Revolutionary Guards could track him, got off and went into an Internet cafe. There, using the VPN, he bounced a Chattanooga message to Shaefer via the server at the Revolutionary Guards military base at Lavizan, through Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. “Chattanooga” was the agreed-upon signal that meant he had terminated the Gardener. He could only imagine the cheers and big smiles, handshakes all around, when Harris-or the DCIA himself-presented it to the President. Except he couldn’t stop thinking about Zahra and didn’t feel much like cheering.

Shaefer had responded with coded instructions for the escape. A dead drop under the fourth seat, seventh row, in a cinema on Shahrivar Avenue in Chalus. At midnight a seaplane would taxi close to the beach, and as soon as he and whomever he was bringing were aboard, they would take off for Baku in Azerbaijan. Plus one more piece of information. A coded addendum from Shaefer that translated to: “Baylor full mob.” Baylor was the code word he, Rabinowich, and Shaefer had agreed to use for Israel. “Full mob” meant total mobilization.

He’d thought of Yuval then. The Israelis were using the crisis as an excuse to launch the attack they had long wanted on the Iranian nuclear facilities. They wanted to do it with U.S. forces still in place in the Persian Gulf to give them cover, whether the Americans wanted to or not. All hell was about to break out across the Middle East. He had to get out of Iran now.

He would get to Chalus under cover of the Red Wednesday celebrations that night, he decided, signed off the computer and cleaned any trace of having been there with his NSA software. He checked his watch, saw he’d been online four minutes fifteen seconds, and looked around uneasily. Just the usual crop of students online and teenagers playing video games; nothing out of the ordinary. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was pushing it. He left the cafe and was less than a block away when he spotted plainclothes VEVAK agents barging into the Internet cafe.

They had been faster than he thought. He hadn’t had much of a margin at all.

And now Scorpion knew he had to leave the restaurant. Despite his Haji Firuz disguise, a waiter near the kitchen kept looking at him, then away. When the waiter disappeared into the kitchen, no doubt to make a phone call, he left a stack of tomans on the table and walked out, not looking back for two blocks before heading down an alley and doubling back on the next street. He was waiting at a bus stop when he got the text message from Ghanbari to meet him on the bridge in Mellat Park.

Ghanbari had shaved his beard. Sporting sunglasses and a fake Tom Selleck-like mustache, he looked more like a sports car salesman than an academic.

“What about your colleagues?” Scorpion asked, eyes restlessly running over the families and young people, students mostly, playing or walking near the lake. Apart, it was dangerous enough. The two of them together was like a neon sign saying, Call the police.

“Under arrest or disappeared. My two closest friends, Koosha and Nader, are disappeared. I’m sure they’re dead. Beikzadeh and Kta’eb Hezbollah have taken over the al Quds Force, which means the Revolutionary Guards. The tail is wagging the dog. If they find me, I’m dead,” Ghanbani said, rubbing his hands over and over, as if they were cold.

“What about your wife and children?”

Ghanbari looked at him, his eyes stricken.

“We talked. She’s going to divorce me, denounce me. She’ll testify I’m a CIA spy, whatever they want. It’s the only way to protect her and the children. Later, when it’s safe, she’ll go back to her family in Isfahan. Inshallah-” God willing “-someday we’ll see each other again. But my parents!” he exclaimed. “They will think I’m a traitor. They will live with shame,” shaking his head. “I can’t do this.”

“I’m leaving Iran tonight,” Scorpion said. “Are you coming?”

“What are you offering?”

“Me? I’m not offering anything. I’ll get you out. Someone else will take it from there.”

“The CIA?”

Scorpion didn’t say anything. Ghanbari’s face knotted up.

“They force me to be a traitor. My own people.” He grabbed at Scorpion’s arm. “What will they offer me?”

“The Americans?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Depends on the value of the information you give them. Asylum, some money probably.”

“For a spy, you’ve been honest with me,” Ghanbari said, his face twisting. “Tell me the truth. They’ll use me up and throw me away, yes?”

Scorpion looked at him and at the sun sparkling on the lake. From the shore came the sounds of families and children’s voices. It’s like their last moments of peace and innocence, he thought. Not for the first time, he wished he were in another line of work.

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s hopeless. I should kill myself,” Ghanbari said, taking his ZOAF pistol out of his pocket and looking down at it.

“Then Beikzadeh and his kind win. Is that what you want?” Scorpion asked.

“What else is there for me?”

“Things change. I’ve seen things I never would have believed,” he said. “Besides, you can’t commit suicide on Red Wednesday.”

“Why not?” Ghanbari said.

“Bad luck,” Scorpion said, and smiled.

As the sun set at last, a smoggy orange glow like a fire burning over the skyline, Red Wednesday exploded. There were fireworks, bonfires, rockets, and firecrackers all over the city. Children dressed in costumes or black shrouds ran through the streets, banging spoons on pots and pans and going door-to-door. They banged their pans loudly and were greeted by beaming adults offering scoops of ajeel, mixed nuts and berries, and clear water to refresh them.

People wore new clothes and broke earthen jars shaped like animals that supposedly held last year’s bad luck, so only good luck would come in the New Year. Others went up to total strangers in the street asking them to untie a knot in their handkerchiefs as a way of taking away any bad luck. Young single women, practicing fal gosh, would eavesdrop on conversations of passersby in the street. It was said that one could tell one’s future, including the romantic future, from a scrap of conversation from the first passerby you overheard.

In every street, square, and park across the country there were bonfires where people of all ages, adults and children who were old enough, would jump over the fire, singing: “Zardi-ye man az to, Sorkhi-ye to az man.” My sickly yellow paleness is yours; your fiery red color is mine.

“You understand, this is early Zoroastrianism, thousands of years older than Islam,” Ghanbari said. “Rebirth of life after winter. That sort of thing. What are we waiting for?” he asked as Scorpion, still dressed as Haji Firuz, jumped and capered around him like a clown.

“That,” Scorpion said, watching a family with three children, parents, and grandparents parking their white Peugeot 4008 SUV in a lot on Sadaqat next to Mellat Park. He also kept an eye on two Basiji militia-men who were watching the parking lot and the street. There was a sudden crackling from a string of firecrackers as the family entered the park to join the festivities.

Scorpion draped an arm over Ghanbari, who wore a spooky Guy Fawkes type mask, as if they were drunken buddies, and making gestures like a fool, he pulled Ghanbari with him as they followed the family toward the park entrance. There were more Basiji militiamen at the entrance, but they ignored him and Ghanbari, focusing on a group of teenagers, one of whom tossed a firecracker into the park. Two of the Basiji grabbed the teenager. For tonight at least, being Haji Firuz was saving his life, he thought. But what about tomorrow?

They followed the family from the Peugeot down the path to an open area with illuminated water fountains and dozens of bonfires surrounded by crowds, singing and talking and taking turns making a running leap over the fire. People were clapping and laughing as if the crisis didn’t exist. There was a high whistling sound and a vertical stream of sparks as someone fired a rocket into the sky.

As the family from the Peugeot approached one of the bonfires, Scorpion accidentally bumped into the father, knocking a messenger-type bag off his shoulder.

“Bebakhshid, ghorban,” Scorpion apologized. “Khahesh mikonam,” please, picking the bag up off the ground and handing it to the father with a bow.

“Bashe, mersi, Haji Firuz,” the father laughed with a shrug. It’s okay, thanks.

“Mersi, mersi,” Scorpion said, shook his tambourine and danced a little jig for the children who giggled. He gestured for them to jump over the fire.

The father took one of his sons, a boy of about seven, and stood him about six or seven feet from the fire, then gave him a nudge. The boy ran at the fire, his tongue sticking out and jumped over and everyone cheered.

“Barikallah! Barikallah!” Bravo! Bravo! Scorpion joined in cheering. As the others in the family started their jumps over the fire, Scorpion nudged Ghanbari and they began to edge away in the crowd. They made their way on the crowded walkways, shadows from the flames dancing on faces as they headed across an open area toward a hedge near the edge of the park.

“What just happened?”

“We got ourselves a ride,” Scorpion said, nodding and shaking his tambourine at a group of preteens. On top of the tambourine he showed Ghanbari he was holding a car key he’d stolen from the Iranian man. “They’ll be busy here for a couple of hours at least.”

“Where did you learn to do something like that?”

“Remy le Panthere. Remy the Panther. He was from Cote d’Ivoire. Black, handsome devil; best pickpocket in Paris. He could strip your pockets clean in three seconds and you’d never know he’d been there. No gangs of Roma kids, no man and woman front-and-back team. Didn’t even need the kind of crude bump and grab I just did.”

“You spent time in Paris?”

“At the Sorbonne,” Scorpion nodded, glancing around before stepping through the hedge and out to the street. A moment later Ghanbari followed.

“You didn’t learn that at the Sorbonne.”

“No. The useful stuff I learned on the streets.”

They headed for the parking lot where the Peugeot was parked. Another minute and they were inside the Peugeot. Scorpion took off his Haji Firuz hat and put his ZOAF pistol with its sound suppressor next to him. As they headed for the parking lot exit, two Basiji militiamen stepped out of the shadows and waved them down. Scorpion’s eyes darted around. There were no other police or militia around. Ghanbari, next to him, looked terrified.

One of the Basiji motioned for him to roll down the window.

“Your papers, Haji Firuz?” the Basiji said.

Scorpion reached into his pocket and handed him some crumpled-up handful of rials.

“What’s this?” the Basiji said, his eyes suspicious. “Get out of the mashin.”

“Bashe,” okay, Scorpion said, and shot him in the forehead. He shot the second Basiji in the head a second later and drove out of the parking lot. From the park came the sound of firecrackers. Anyone who might have heard the shots probably assumed they were firecrackers too, he thought, driving carefully down the street and onto Niayesh Highway heading west.

“You killed them,” Ghanbari said, wide-eyed, looking at Scorpion as if he had just seen him for the first time.

“Yes.”

“Just like that. You just killed them and drove off like it’s nothing,” he said, breathing hard, like he had just been running.

“Would you rather be on your way to Evin Prison? I killed your enemy, Sadeghi, too.”

They drove on the highway, crowded with traffic. They had to get out of town and on the road to Chalus before there were roadblocks, which the police might be reluctant to do, he thought, causing massive traffic jams on the night of Red Wednesday.

For a time, Ghanbari didn’t say anything, then: “How do you live with yourself?”

“Look who’s talking? What did you think Asaib al Haq was doing in Iraq? Kissing Sunnis and Kurds-and American soldiers too? You probably have more blood on your hands than I do.”

The traffic eased as they took the cloverleaf south onto Yadegar-e Emam Highway past a big market, lit up at night for the holiday. There were fireworks in the night sky over Pardisan Park.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Ghanbari asked finally.

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Look, I never talk about this,” Scorpion said, eyes flicking up to the rearview mirror to make sure there were no tails. “But just this once. Because we’re on the run together. Did you see those people tonight in the park? All happy, enjoying the holiday, hoping for the best for the New Year? Just people.”

“Yes,” Ghanbari nodded.

“They’re closer to war than they can imagine. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, might die. Not just in Iran, but America, Israel, Europe, the entire Middle East. Mostly innocent people who just want to live their lives. The Gardener put all that at risk. Last night we brought justice and maybe a chance to prevent the war. If you don’t think that’s worth the lives of a few Basiji, then your moral calculus is very different from mine.”

They drove on through the night. Scorpion headed west toward Karaj, a suburb in the extreme northwestern corner of Tehran, then turned north on Route 59, the only road through the Alborz Mountains to the northern coast of Iran on the Caspian Sea. He drove at a good pace, taking the curves of the winding two-lane road through the mountains at speed. With any luck, in another hour or so they’d be in Chalus, and another hour or two after that out of Iran.

“It’s a shame we couldn’t drive this road during the day,” Ghanbari said. “This is the most beautiful road in the world. Steep green mountain slopes, clear rushing streams, waterfalls, rainbows. It can take your breath away.”

They drove for a while. Ghanbari tried to get news on the radio but everything was about Red Wednesday. Then Scorpion began to slow. They were in a deep narrow canyon. There was a glow of light coming somewhere from around the bend of the road ahead. He pulled to the side of the road, stopped and got out, taking the pistol.

“What’s wrong?” Ghanbari asked, getting out too.

“Not sure,” Scorpion said, walking on the edge of the road, barely the width of his shoulders. Below him was a drop of at least a hundred feet where a clear rushing stream ran tumbling over rocks. The air was clean-the first clean air he’d breathed since he’d been in Tehran-and the sky above the canyon was full of stars. He walked a hundred yards, then crossed to the other side of the road and began climbing the face of a rocky cliff. It was mossy green, and smelled of vegetation, and was wet with water trickling down the rock face. When he was up about twenty feet or so, he leaned out and was able to peer around the bend into the serpentine winding of the road through the canyon. The light was coming from a massing of vehicles a kilometer up the road. It looked like there were at least twenty of them.

“What is it?” Ghanbari called in a whisper from below.

“Roadblock,” Scorpion said.