Shock Warning

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Attired head to toe in the chador, Maryam moved through the streets of the holy city. Although it was not required, she also wore a veil pulled across the lower half of her face. If the Islamic dress code was going to make it easy for her to walk publicly and in disguise, why not?

Most of her strength had returned to her, which was a good sign and also a bad sign. Good for her, bad for Amanda, since it meant that Skorzeny had been keeping her alive and in reasonably good shape in order to deliver her to something far worse than death by paralysis.

It was possible that he had deciphered her background; after all, she had been trailing his man Milverton as long as Frank Ross had. Skorzeny left absolutely nothing to chance and he certainly would have moved heaven and earth to learn more about her. What protected her was that there was so little to learn.

Her parents were both dead. The Revolution had seen to that. Her father had been a scientist, her mother a professional woman, such as used to exist in the Shah’s Iran — a judge, in fact. But the Islamic Republic had no use for women in positions of authority over men, and so, despite the fact that she had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini when he first arrived back from Paris, the regime quickly soured on her and she was soon fired, demoted to charwoman where once she had held court.

Her father, too, was devoured by the Revolution, as someone who had held a privileged position under the Shah — he had been one of the earliest Iranian scientists working on the quest for peaceful atomic energy, all the rage in the 1950s. He had in fact spent some time at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory as a research fellow at Cal Berkeley, which was why he’d been forced to undergo a political cleansing process. At first, he went along with the charade, but soon enough no demonstration of ideological and religious fealty was enough — no matter how much he cast off his Western ways, forced the women in his family to conform to the new normal, or otherwise showed his enthusiastic support for the Revolution, it was impossible for him to be pure enough. One day the secret police came for him and she never saw him again.

Her mother died shortly thereafter, her dreams shattered, and Maryam was left to be raised by family under the strict supervision of the religious police. The last thing the Revolution wanted was an angry young orphan who blamed it for the death of her parents. But that was exactly what it got.

The mosque at Jamkaran was dead ahead. There was some activity in the square, as workmen were busily finishing a substantial speaker’s platform, which was flanked by two large video screens. Such spontaneous religious harangues were not uncommon in the Islamic Republic.

From the outside, the mosque resembled a smaller version of the Taj Mahal, its large central dome flanked by the pillars of the muezzin. Inside, there would be segregation of the sexes and in fact the women’s area had its own version of the holy well, to which, using pieces of string, the faithful could attach their written prayers to the Occluded Twelfth Imam, in the hopes that he would grant their wishes on the fateful day of his return.

She knew just what she was going to wish for.

Maryam listened to the conversations around her as she approached the mosque. Normally they were the usual idle chatter of daily life, but there was something different about this group — a tone of hushed, expectant reverence. From snatches of conversation, it was clear that some sort of awful battle between Islam and Christianity was taking place in central Africa. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead, and the battles were still raging.

She entered the mosque and made her way toward the women’s well, her written prayer clutched in her hand. When it came her turn, she knotted it into the strings that hung from the slats protecting the sacred waters below and slipped away. In the morning, the strings would be cut, the prayers would tumble into the well for Imam Ali to read, and the cycle of petition and penitence would begin again.

She emerged back into the light. Around the reflecting pool hundreds of people had gathered. It must be a holy man, she thought to herself, come to entertain and enlighten the Islamic tourists on a pilgrimage to one of the holy sites in Shia Islam. That was the reason for the low voices and reverential atmosphere.

The holy man was mounting the platform. An acolyte switched on the loudspeakers. Suddenly, Maryam realized whom she was looking at: none other than the Grand Ayatollah Ali Ahmed Hussein Mustafa Mohammed Fadlallah al-Sadiq, one of the most powerful men in the government.

“O Muslims!” he began. “Raise your voices in prayer, for today a great sign is to be given to you here at this holy place.”

The Ayatollah held up his right hand, its image clear and strong on the video screens. Everyone could see a black mark on it — the healed wound, complete with powder burns permanently embedded in the skin, from an assassination attempt many years ago, as the mullahs had struggled to consolidate their power after the death of Khomeini.

“Am I not from the province of Khorasan, as prophesied in the hadith? Do I not have the mark upon the right hand, as is written in the hadith? And do not all holy Muslims, Sunnis and Shia alike, accept that the great imam, Seyed Khorasani, will arise in the east to hand the holy banner of Islam to the Mahdi?”

An ululation went up from the women in the crowd, signifying the immanence of the moment.

“Is it not written that Khorasani must make the way clear and straight for the Twelfth Imam, in order to lead him into a world rent by death and destruction, by terror and oppression of Allah’s chosen people?”

A cry went up from the men, as one, full-voiced and throaty.

The Grand Ayatollah was a master speaker, and he knew how to play to a crowd. Maryam looked around and noticed that the mosque was entirely surrounded by the faithful, come to witness the holy miracle in the flesh.

“Today, in Africa, the faithful battle the forces of iniquity as the ummah rises up in righteous anger to slaughter the Christian descendants of the apes and pigs the world knows as the Jews. In the hadith of Sahih Bukhari, are we not instructed that the Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Muslims make war against the Jews and kill them, and until a Jew is hiding behind a rock and tree, and the rock and tree say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’ ”

“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

“O Muslims, surely the day is at hand!”

“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

“O Muslims, the time has come to bring about the coming of the Twelfth Imam!”

“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

“O Muslims, will you not join me? For I am no longer Ali Ahmed Hussein Mustafa Mohammed Fadlallah al-Sadiq…”

“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

“… but Seyed Khorasani, the living embodiment of the holy prophecy. Make way! Make way for the Blessed Mahdi, Abu’ Qasim Hujjat ibn Hasan ibn ‘Ali.”

At that instant, the vision of Mohammed that the Nigerians had seen appeared in the sky above the Ayatollah’s head. Maryam felt a chill pass over her as she, like everyone else in the square but the Grand Ayatollah, prostrated herself before the Prophet’s majesty.

It all made sense, thought Maryam, lying there eating the holy dust of the holy city. Not the vision — if that was real then there was no point to anything she was about to do. It was the end of the world and the world was just going to have to accept it.

But the resurrection of the Mahdi — that could be explained.

In the fall of 2009, the West had been astonished to learn that the holy city was also the site of a hitherto-unknown uranium-enrichment facility located on one of the Islamic Revolutionary Council bases nearby. The mullahs had, of course, lied about it to international inspectors and naturally the willing fool who ran the International Atomic Energy Agency was only too willing to accept their lies. He was, after all, a faithful Muslim, and taqqiya—bald-faced lying — was an acceptable practice when you were prevaricating with infidels. But the atomic energy program her father had begun for the Shainshah was finally about to bear a hideous, poisoned fruit.

That’s why Skorzeny had used her as a bargaining chip. When the first Iranian bomb exploded, what better propaganda coup could the mullahs have than to parade the daughter of the Shah’s greatest scientist, the father of the Iranian nuclear program — and blame it all on her family? She would at once be a heroine and a martyr, to be exhibited and then publicly executed in Evin Prison as a traitor to the Revolution and an object lesson for the masses.

Let the West cavil — the true believers in Tehran would have their apocalypse.

And so would Skorzeny. “Frank Ross” had been right all along — this was not the end times, this was the endgame of Emanuel Skorzeny’s long war against the West and its religions. If he had to subvert Islam to accomplish his ends, so be it. “Dying, you destroyed our life. Rising, you restored our life. Lord Jesus, come again in glory.” That was the Memorial Acclamation of Christian worship, now perverted to his will.

They had to stop it. And she would have to do what she could, no matter what the cost. Not to save the world — the world had no lien on her loyalty. No, it was to save her country, to save herself — and to save him.

A less likely pair could hardly be imagined. Both orphans, both killers, both lovers. Adrift in a world they never made, and battling another orphan who would unmake it forever.

She got to her feet as the rest of the crowd rose. She glanced from side to side at the other women, some of them veiled, some not, but all clad in the chador on this holy occasion. What were they thinking? Did they think of their mothers, those laughing, smiling women whose photographs they kept hidden and out of sight in the innermost recesses of their homes and their minds, the young college girls of the fifties and sixties of short skirts and tight sweaters and quick laughs, the mothers and torchbearers of two thousand years of civilization and high culture in the darkness of central Asia? The women who counted Jews and Assyrian Christians among their friends and neighbors, who drank in the bistros of Tehran and dined openly in the best restaurants and spent the summers at their fathers’ country houses on the Caspian, where they ate beluga caviar for breakfast and made love on the beach at night?

Subjugated now, all subjugated by an alien desert misogyny, imposed by force and maintained by terror.

“O Muslims,” shouted the Grand Ayatollah, pointing toward the holy mosque, wherein lay the holy well. “Your prayers are about to be answered!”