Banquo's Ghosts (18 page)

What disturbed him most about what these men were doing here was that they did it all in a country where many women never showed their faces. Keeping their heads, ears, and mouths hidden in some obscene mockery of chastity. Those who strayed were called a dog-whore. Or forced to sleep in a tent. While these men who toiled down below were not people “to temptation slow” but still and every day subject to every temptation known to man. The first and foremost—to “inherit heaven’s graces”—actively lusting after the “power to hurt.”

And no one here, in this place—above ground or below—grasped the consequences of husbanding “nature’s riches,” what it meant to manufacture this madness on their own.

Except for Yahdzi, of course. He was the indispensable Iranian indigenous contribution—evilly coerced—thus a testament to force and intimidation as much as to native skill and know-how. Take him out, and all that was left in the equation was the will to power, a bunch of pious morlocks tending their hardware, praying to machines with murder on their minds. Leaving one last hope: if you could take out this one little cog, the whole juggernaut might grind to a halt.

The green ink was never far from his mind, but as Yasmine and her Professor chattered innocently, Johnson took dutiful notes, a good little
monkey scribbling like the very embodiment of Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil, writing down everything they said about “peaceful uses” and “medical applications” and “civilian electrical power” and other imbecilities. Johnson left the facility saying, “Thank you.” Jazril’s Al Jazeera crew got their video, and everyone got in their proper van, going up the great dragon’s throat, and thence out the tunnel mouth, under the eyes of the guards. Thankful they had looked at Medusa through Athena’s mirrored shield and lived to tell the tale.

As the caravan left Nantanz at midday, the centrifuges pumped away in Johnson’s mind, jumbled up with the words on those pages.
IT ’S UP TO YOU
. . . They retraced their trail from the great plateau on the planet of the construction robots. The sky above turned a sickly shade of yellow ochre. And the wind spun dust dervishes along the roadside. They didn’t make it as far as they wanted. Down through the tiled ghost town of Natanz, with its similar-sounding name to the Nantanz facility’s, and back down out of the mountains and into the desert. Only as far as the outskirts of a nameless village. A dozen concrete huts, no café, no Holiday Inn, and no heated swimming pool. The three vans pulled up just outside the town in a circle on the sand like a wagon train. They could clearly see the unpaved town square.

The Jazz Man said, “These are a very
pure
people.”

While Dr. Yahdzi warned, “Here, we must really behave ourselves.”

They wandered outside the van and thought about scrounging fire-wood for a campfire, but abandoned the idea as the wind picked up, streaming across the sandy ground, blowing yellow dust. They settled for ransacking the coolers for food, bringing bread and olives and hummus into the van to eat.

The goons went off to pray with the imam, whose ancient ancestor, one of them told Jazril, “converted Alexander the Great to Islam.” This, of course, absurd on the face of it, as Alexander and Darius preceded the Prophet by millennia. Still, many in this part of the world believed the Prophet’s influence reached back into the depths of time as well as forward.

The storm came like a great ochre wave, blinding any view of the cool, green mountains in the distance. The travelers felt the sun go down in the changing shades outside the car window, the ochre light slowly turning gray, then finally black. They could see houses in the village lit up, blurry lights barely showing through the storm, and hear under the sighing of the wind the chanting and the praying of many voices answering the imam.

But the voices faded as the wind moaned about the metal panels of the van. They ate a little and drank a little water by the light of a Coleman lantern. When it came time for Yasmine to cloister herself for the night in a tent that the Revolutionary Guards had set up, Johnson wondered out loud. “Is it really necessary? The storm—”

“Yes, it’s necessary,” she told him. “Especially here, in this village.” But even as she reached for the van door handle, the wind lowed to a near shriek shaking the van. Only a few yards off, Yasmine’s tent tore at its mooring, yanked its stakes from the ground, and took off, first hitting the side of the van with a thunderous clap and then sailing off into oblivion.

God seemed to have taken a hand. And silent glances were exchanged between Dr. Yahdzi and his assistant. A resignation to fate—she would stay. The storm erased those lights of the village, leaving blackness all around, even though the houses were only fifty yards distant.

The driver barked something out in Farsi, pointing at Johnson. Now what? Yahdzi translated, smiling: “He says you are a lazy bastard and you got to stretch out last night. He says you should take the front seat so Yasmine gets to be secluded in back.” They didn’t dare open the doors, so Johnson clambered up to the front seat and watched with some amazement as Dr. Yahdzi and the Jazz Man hung a prayer mat from the van’s safety handgrips, using the large paper clips from the briefing material as their hooks. Yasmine vanished behind the hiding cloth.

Johnson noticed the driver making what he guessed—so hard to see—was his ring-blowing motion. Johnson tried to ignore him, slumping, the van black inside with its lights out and the Coleman turned off. He could hear the others breathing. Over time, even as the
temperature dropped outside, inside the air grew stuffy. You could smell the acrid body sweat of the men.

Johnson’s mind swirled in a riot of conflicting thoughts. It seemed he could feel them pressing against his head, or maybe the storm affected the barometric pressure. In any event, he wasn’t going to sleep. What he would give for a few hours of blessed forgetfulness, a few hours without those green ink letters looming in his mind. Although for all he knew, they would disturb his sleep in grotesque porn-shop neon, flashing, taunting, glaring.

He stared ahead at the black windshield, listening to the millions of sand particles bouncing off it, faint tic-tacs, like they were in an insistent sleet storm. How precarious he felt inside the swaying van, with the tumult pounding him from without—and from within. Who was he to decide whether to kill a perfectly decent human being, on the slim basis of some inked up words?

Then, it came to him very clearly, a wave of relief washing over him: sure, he was imagining the whole thing! Why was he worrying himself? He could be here, as he had been so often in his life, literally just along for the ride. Learn something no one else knew, get a guided tour of exotic locales, and dine out on it for months back in Manhattan. Why was he ruining all that? There was even a cute bird along that he could try to charm out of her chador.
Relax, Peter,
he told himself.
Relax, and the whole predicament goes away.

The very next moment he pondered Banquo’s within-the-range-of-plausibility scenario and how one act could change the world. A Serb assassin. An archduke named Franz Ferdinand. Millions dead. Didn’t the Professor
want
him to do it? He recalled Banquo’s spiel that if he failed to act, he wouldn’t be able to drink away the consequences.

But he could try,
he gamely thought.
He sure as hell could try.
He shifted in his seat to turn on his side, facing the driver, and the words loomed again, DO IT.

As Johnson wrestled with himself, the driver stirred, as if uncomfortable. He reached to his hip, pulled off his holster, and methodically placed it on the dashboard. Johnson stared in horror at what he could barely see. He sat straight up in his seat and pressed against it as hard as
he could, trying to get as much distance from himself and that weapon in the dark, away from that talon of fate.

He imagined he knew what Belshazzar must have felt when those words appeared on the wall during his feast, damning his worship of false gods:

A half dollar, a half dollar, a penny, and two bits.
Except Johnson didn’t need a Daniel to interpret this sign for him.

He wrapped his arms around his queasy belly and sat buffeted in the night, the recesses of his mind calling up somehow that in Aramaic
parsin
had been a pun on Persian.

He closed his eyes tight for a long time, like he was in pain. He tried to picture what kind of gun sat in the holster. A small revolver of some kind. Yeah, the Dick Tracy gun straight from the Prop Master back in North Carolina. You pulled back the hammer and squeezed the trigger. Simple as
bye-bye bang. Now you know how close you have to be
. . .

He wanted to evade it but couldn’t: This was his sign. The debate over. He wasn’t imagining things. What they told him at Banquo & Duncan had been borne out. And now—and now the only question was
tekel
, the word for “weight,” interpreted by Daniel as “you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.” Would he be found wanting?

And he knew he had decided. He tried to tell himself he hadn’t. He told himself, sure, he could back out any time. But those felt like fake reassurances, like when he was about to go on a bender or cheat and tried to argue himself out of it, knowing all along he’d succumb to temptation. And this too was a temptation, more delicious than he ever imagined. To finally commit an act that
mattered
. Now only the question of courage remained. Of will. Of somehow arriving at the sticking point.

For a fleeting moment he worried about Giselle, but he trusted Banquo or Wallets would go to her. Help her through the aftermath. He felt that little twitch of fate, banishing all the doubts and inhibitions. The final rightness of his act. Slowly he reached out from his sitting position, achingly slowly. His fingers touched the dashboard.

Beside him the driver gently snored.

He waited a while, no idea how long in the murmuring dark, listening to the driver’s breathing. Finally he leaned forward and reached the holster on the dash, feeling the smooth molded leather. The holster was a snug grip, no safety clasp. The gun came away into his hand without any fuss. He held the gun up in front of himself, in a kind of homage. What had Banquo said about being in jeopardy the moment he arrived in this awful place? Everything he had always been was about to vanish. Say good-bye, Peter Johnson. And he thought to himself, “See you at the other end.”

“They’re all dead,” said a soft voice. “That’s why I keep their pictures.” Johnson shifted in his seat, looking aghast at the scientist behind him. Yahdzi looked right back, as if he knew everything passing in Johnson’s mind. “You’d be doing me a favor.”

Johnson felt an asthma clutching at his windpipe. The muzzle pointed, tremblingly, toward Yahdzi’s chest. The physicist looked passively back at him. Maybe he’d have done it himself long ago, given the chance. Suddenly Johnson was aware that the driver was staring at him too. Wide awake. Daring him to finish.

For a moment he wished he hadn’t picked up the gun but left it alone on the dash. Like in Banquo’s office. But he was adamant. Nothing personal, Professor. His finger curled around the trigger, surprisingly tight, just a little more pressure, just a little more, one last tug—

The van rocked, and there was more noise than simply the wind. The goons were back, heads wrapped in keffiyahs, violently slapping the van windows. A sharp crack, and window glass sprayed across Johnson’s face. The sticking point arrived. Now or never. He pulled the trigger and shot. Pulled it again and shot, emptying the chamber, round after round. Until a dozen hands came for him, dragging him into the screaming maelstrom of the night, punched, kicked, face in the dirt, the only way to know if he was facing down or up, gasping for air, shouts, and he went limp, giving in to the chaos.

As his body hoisted in the air, his mind drifted to Yasmine. Did he hit her by accident? He didn’t know, but he hoped she was okay.

B
anquo appeared in Trevor Andover’s office in Langley, Virginia, without a summons from DEADKEY to account for his actions. The inevitable plasma CIA-SPAN showed a news conference with the execrable Sheik Kutmar. He stood before the marble front of Parliament, the Majiles, his narrow face over a small microphone. This time the man wore a suit jacket and open collar, no robes. He was making his statement in Farsi for NITV, National Iranian Television, and a single Persian reporter translated immediately into Arabic on a Teletype line, and above the first type line, another real-time translation into English courtesy of CIA-SPAN. The Sheik knew he had somebody in the U.S. Intelligence Community by the balls, so he squeezed them softly and without malice in the smallest venue possible. You couldn’t hear the questions, just his answers: “As I said before, this man, this American journalist, was present at the incident. We’re checking his credentials. I have no information on the condition of the professor, Dr. Ramses Pahlevi Yahdzi, at this time.”