Banquo's Ghosts (16 page)

Johnson’s brow furrowed, and his eyes met the professor’s, showing he understood his dilemma. And Professor Yahdzi nodded, acknowledging the fact. Then said matter-of-factly, “They tell me that if my work is not completed on time, my wife and daughters will be terribly disappointed.”

All of Johnson’s panic evaporated. Something in him knew he owed it to this nervous wreck of a man to betray no surprise. Pretending everything was normal would be their bond. Their secret in this strange and awful place. The pretense of strength, almost as good as strength itself. Betray nothing, and you betray no one. Keep my secrets, and I’ll keep yours.

“Thank you for seeing me, Dr. Yahdzi,” Johnson said. “The last thing I’d want is to distract you in any way. Can we make it easier if an assistant showed me around, and I reserved my most important questions for you?”

“I think it’s only proper if I start you off on the right foot. Begin with me. End with me. What happens in between we can let God decide.” Johnson could tell the man meant what he said. But just then he glanced over Johnson’s head, a brief smile crossing his face; someone had come into the office. “Ah, our Between is here already!”

Yahdzi’s assistant was a young woman of about twenty-five, with a sharp nose and cheekbones that couldn’t possibly go any higher, her face complicated, even lovely. Sober and polite, she was the professor’s finest student at the University of Isfahan. Now assigned to him exclusively. Johnson took to her immediately, as she was called, deliciously enough, Yasmine. She followed silently beside him as Professor Yahdzi explained the various features at the Gonabad facility. The Jazz Man’s Al Jazeera film crew stumbled along behind taking some standard setups. In this building, that meant the double row of silver centrifuges under the banks of lights—the whirligigs that spun yellow cake into fissionable gold—as Dr. Yahdzi explained how this particular enrichment would never be pure enough for weapons, but energy and medicine instead. Johnson took notes, while the goons, ever present, hovered nearby. The Revolutionary Guards seemed more concerned about this woman doing a man’s job in the presence of strange men than the physicist showing state secrets or a scribbler taking it all down. And Johnson
wondered whether it was always like this for her—in class, in the street, every time she came to work?

When the whole group took a break in the facility’s cafeteria, the goons sat at a table to themselves, while Dr. Yahdzi, one table over, explained how much he had been instructed to show the Western journalist and where they were headed.

“We will be driving west, stops at Yazd, Zarrin Shahr, and north to Zanjan and Tabriz. In this way you can see a good sampling of our facilities—five out of twenty-five sites in a ten-day period. Some, of course, are not as remote as Gonabad, so I can guarantee you better dining,” he said with a wan smile.

He glanced at Yasmine, silently cueing her. “This is a rare privilege for a Westerner,” she said. “Even the IAEA hasn’t inspected the last two sites.” She handed him a glossy folder bulging with paper. “Here are briefing materials about the facilities we will be visiting. I think they will repay careful study.”

Then, from out of a manila folder, Yasmine slid some photos with Farsi captions, the English printed below on taped slips of paper. These were the facilities in question. Johnson flipped the photos over and saw a longer paragraph in Farsi typed on the back.

“Can we get these translated?” he asked Yasmine.

“I will for you,” she replied. “That one says, ‘Tabriz Number 3, built 1998.
Fabriqué en France.
’ Made in France.”

Johnson glanced at another photo, then flipped it over. But instead of an explanatory paragraph, another photo was taped to the back. Yasmine didn’t want to meet his eye. Nor did Dr. Yahdzi. He fidgeted, staring down at his lap. The second smaller photo showed a New York street scene in fuzzy black-and-white. He recognized it immediately. Abdul’s Delicatessen near his apartment in Brooklyn. The photo showed Giselle leaving through the glass door plastered with stickers advertising the
New York Post
, Boar’s Head Smoked Turkey, Marlboros, and Copenhagen Mint Snuff. She was beginning to unwrap a pack of cigarettes. It could have been taken yesterday. Johnson recognized the new Prada black techno suit jacket she had just bought. And her haircut was up to date, a short bob. It seemed his two guides felt personally
dirtied by all this. While from the goons’ table, one of the men met his eye boldly. A tiny smile crossed his eyes.

Johnson wanted to get up and throw a chair at him. He had never minded people assuming that he had his price—since he did—but he hated threats. They were insulting, premised on his essential cowardice. Although this was a new one. No one had ever threatened Giselle before. And that they would stoop to it—against a supposedly friendly, in-their-back-pocket journalist—told him more than he wanted to know about the medievalists, the supremacists and hacks who ran the show here.

He used to think evil was subtle, alluring even. He had come to realize that, more often than not, it was dumb and ham-handed. Its instrument not some silver-tongued Deceiver but a fanatic whose head was stuffed with idiocies and lies barely controlling his snickers over a threat to an innocent young woman. What was it that Bruce Meyer the lone Righty at that NYU panel said those years ago? “If they didn’t kill you or someone you love, it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

He had another urge to throw that chair. But they’d simply beat him and send him home empty-handed. He wasn’t going to betray any fluster right now, despite a flutter of panic in his chest. He even forced a smile. “You’ve given me a rare privilege, Dr. Yahdzi. And I’m going to take advantage of it the best way I can.”

T
he whole caravan left late that afternoon. Dr. Yahdzi and Yasmine returned to the lower office to collect some papers and books, but the Professor curiously avoided overloading his briefcase with printed materials, choosing instead to take his family photos off his desk, all of them. An odd gesture, as if he couldn’t bear to be without them.

At the entrance to the facility, the cab was nowhere in sight, and three small vans waited for them. They seemed to be trading up. The Al Jazeera news crew took one van. Jazril, Johnson, Dr. Yahdzi, and Yasmine the second. And six goons from the facility took the third, outfitting themselves from a fourth, large panel van nearby, unloading tents, sleeping bags, kerosene stoves, water, and food lockers. Then arming themselves: AK-47s, flak jackets, sidearms, wireless headsets, and what appeared to be night-vision goggles. What they needed all this hardware for Johnson couldn’t imagine, until Yasmine explained:

“Some nights we will not be staying in houses with beds or in villages with policemen. We want to keep Dr. Yahdzi safe. Their van has the big radio and cell phones.” And then he noticed that yes, their van was outfitted with a satellite dish. Not even the Al Jazeera news crew had that.

“What did you think of our briefing materials, Mr. Johnson?” Yasmine asked, pulling his attention back away from the preparations.

“Call me Peter. And sorry—I took a nap instead.” He hoped to elicit some warmth from her. Instead he got something chillier. She wasn’t impressed with him, and he read her eye, which said,
Lazy
man.

“I didn’t prepare them for my benefit, Mr. Johnson, but for yours. I
know
what’s in them. If your trip is going to be of any use to us, Mr. Johnson, you should too.” She put a particular emphasis on the honorific ‘ Mr.,’ almost scolding him. And it made him squirm. So maybe his time would have been better spent during that stolen hour trying to snooze on the couch in Yahdzi’s office.

In true Peter Johnson style he’d taken the Professor’s offer to lie down for a spell like a duck to water. But his racing mind didn’t let him sleep; the snapshot of Giselle was as real with his eyes closed as it had been when he had been holding it in his hands. He thought of Yahdzi and what they had in common—a picture to remind them both of the insidiousness of a regime willing to turn a man’s most intimate ties of blood and marriage against him, to make what should be a refuge from this world an instrument of coercion.

They piled into the van under the watchful eyes of their minders, the facility’s goons. The driver and Al Jazeera’s Jazz Man up front. Yahdzi and Yasmine in the next row of seats. Johnson behind them. And another empty row behind. But what struck him were the evil looks he and Professor Yahdzi received when Yasmine entered the van with them. Something visceral from the eyes of the guards, as though the three adults committed some mortal sin that no absolution could possibly put right. And Johnson could guess exactly what. Yasmine covered her body with a chador and behaved, compliant and submissive, but neither Jazril the Jazz Man, Professor Yahdzi, Johnson, nor their driver was one of her relatives. Though higher authorities, like Sheik Kutmar or Gul, might tolerate it in the cause of Johnson producing a favorable story, for the local goons the presence of Yasmine was in itself enough to make her obscene and profane.

One of the guards shouted something in their direction. An insult, or a warning, sounding like, “
Asanzan, bahdzan, sagzan
.” Spitting the words out in contempt. If Yasmine thought anything, she kept it to herself.

The three vans pulled out of the facility about dusk, as the sun showed them its final red eye and the shadows crawled from building to building. Johnson looked again for the surface-to-air missile batteries. He spotted two more this time. One was off a roadway cut into a hill, where the large green tubes sat on their tractor-trailer launching pads. The whole array carefully camouflaged to be invisible from the air and protected by overhanging rock. The other battery sat on its tractor-trailer backed into a cave. Unless you had your own eyes inside this fortress, you’d never know they were there. And that was the idea.

Johnson, the Professor, Yasmine, and the Jazz Man rode in silence for some time.

“What does
sagzan
mean?” Johnson finally asked. No one in the van seemed to want to answer him. The driver blew on an opal ring on his left hand, to fog it up with the moisture of his hot breath, then rubbed it against his thigh as if to polish it—clearly some sort of nervous habit. Jazril, the Al Jazeera man, pretended to read something in the failing light. Professor Yahdzi looked down and opened the briefcase on his lap searching for something without any real intention of finding it.

When Yasmine realized none of the men would speak, she answered for them. She turned back toward him. Coldly and calmly:

“
Sagzan
means ‘dog-woman,’ Mr. Johnson.
Bahdzan
means ‘bad woman.’
Asanzan
means ‘easy woman.’ ” She paused to take a breath, to glance at the two other men in the car with her, then back at Johnson. “The Revolutionary Guards were calling me a whore.”

He suppressed the urge to look into his lap like the others. Instead, he met her eyes and saw in them a brave defiance. A deep reserve of nerve.

“I’m sorry. I should have guessed.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “We can’t all be Scheherazade talking sense into those who have none.”

At this, Jazril rebuked her, and she gave him a rapid-fire response with a few darts of her own. Finally the driver shouted at everyone.
Unholstered his pistol and banged it on the steering wheel with one hand. That needed no translation: Shut up! This wasn’t just a driver, but another enforcer.

They all lapsed again into silence.

After a spell, she translated: “I told him, ‘Shut up, Pig-Boy.’ He said—”

But Johnson waved her off, “I get his drift.”

And Professor Yahdzi grunted at the Jazz Man in contempt, clearly siding with Yasmine. Al Jazeera’s Jazril was a pig-boy from a long line of pig-boys. They rode the rest of the way that night in silence.

Sometime during the night, all the vans pulled to the side of the road and shut down so everyone could catch a few hours of sleep. The Revolutionary Guards pitched a single tent some ways off the road, in the desert. One of the goons came forward, hammered on the window, and started shouting. Then furiously pointed at Yasmine. Apparently they wanted her to seclude herself out in the tent for the remainder of the night for decency’s sake. At first Dr. Yahdzi shouted at the man, telling him to go to the devil, but after a few moments as the goon’s face twisted in a gargoyle of rage, Yasmine put the issue to rest, touching the Professor lightly on the forearm.