The Colonel's Mistake (20 page)

At over half a kilometer in length, Imam Square in downtown Esfahan was a vast space. The Grand Imam Mosque, with its enormous four-hundred-year-old dome and millions of hand-painted blue tiles, anchored the southern end. To the west stood an ancient palace; to the east, the Sheik Lotfollah Mosque, a delicate masterpiece built for a king’s harem. In between, hundreds of little shops were nested into an arcade that ringed most of the square.

When Daria and Mark arrived, it was near dusk. Several middle-aged men were rolling up red carpets in front of the Grand Imam Mosque—loading them into the back of a pickup truck while old women scurried around mouselike beneath their black chador robes, helping to clean up after the massive Friday prayer gathering. Farther away, clusters of young men and women in jeans sat talking by a fountain.

Daria passed by the fountain dressed in a colorful but ragged chador, her face fully covered by a red mask that looked as though it had been salvaged from a Mardi Gras parade. Mark observed that she drew a few amused stares and raised eyebrows along the way. Although some maybe mistook her for a gypsy, he figured that most recognized her as an Arab
bandari,
a woman from the southern coast of Iran—the daughter, no doubt, of smugglers and thieves.

She turned down a crowded alley that snaked off from a corner of the square near the Grand Imam Mosque. It smelled of rosewater and sweat, and was lined with shops that sold enameled brassware and hand-knotted carpets. Mark followed behind her from a distance, assessing the stares she attracted for signs that she’d been recognized. He saw none.

After turning down several more alleys, Daria slipped into a shop whose front window was obscured by ceiling-high stacks of folded tablecloths. A minute later, Mark ducked inside the cramped shop too. Near the rear of the store, a stooped old woman with crooked, wrinkled hands was securing a bundle of tablecloths with twine. Her back was to Daria.

“Fatima, I know you can hear me,” Mark heard Daria say. “I come in peace. I mean you no harm.
Salaam Aleykum
.”
Peace be upon you.
Daria pulled her red
niqab
mask away from her face. “We met six weeks ago. Do you recall?”

The woman wore a black chador pulled tight around her head. She lowered her gaze and kept tying her bundles, but now she handled the twine in a rough way that suggested she was sick to hell of dealing with people like Daria.

It wasn’t lost on Mark that Friday was a weekend day in Iran. And that it was nearly eight in the evening. And that this old woman had likely been fasting all day for Ramadan. Yet she was still working.

In the front of the store, another woman sat at a table, using a wooden paisley stamp and various brushes to apply paint patterns to a tablecloth in the making. Like the older woman, she too wore a black chador with a veil. But her paint-stained fingers were slender and smooth, pink and purple Nike sneakers poked out from beneath her robe, and the black fabric beneath her neck
was secured with a metal binder clip, a trend Mark knew to be common among young Iranian women.

When young Iranian women even wore the clumsy chador, that is. In a cosmopolitan city like Esfahan, Mark figured that a woman wearing pink and purple Nikes would only grudgingly wear even a light headscarf—the bare minimum allowed by law. She certainly wouldn’t wear a veil. Unless…

The young woman noticed him. “We don’t take deliveries on Fridays,” she said. “Especially not at this time.”

Unless she were grieving.

On his back, Mark carried a battered wood-frame porter’s pack laden with an enormous stack of dun-colored cotton fabric. The fabric fell down around his head as if it were a veil, obscuring most of his downward-cast face. He lowered the pack to the floor now, slowly closed the store’s front door with his foot, and began to scan the room for a weapon. The best he could come up with was the pointed end of a long paintbrush that lay on the table where the young woman was working.

“We don’t take deliveries on Friday,” the young woman repeated. “And give that back. I’m using it.”

“I apologize for the intrusion,” said Daria to the old woman, “but your husband and I worked on a design together and now I need to speak with him.”

In Farsi, the old woman whispered, “That will not be possible.”

“How many days is it?” called out Mark to the old woman. He spoke in broken Farsi.

She glared at him with undisguised hatred.

“You are in mourning.”

When Daria shot him a look, Mark gestured to the young woman. She’d just smacked her wooden stamp down hard on the
fabric. Daria appeared to study the scene for a moment. The stamp smacked against the fabric again. For forty days after a death, the family members of the deceased wore black. The old woman likely wore a black chador every day anyway, so evidently Daria—whose focus had been the old woman—hadn’t noticed that anything was amiss. She did now.

“Oh…I see.”

“They found your contact and killed him,” said Mark to Daria. Remembering how Peters’s apartment had been watched, he said, “This place is compromised. We should leave.”

“Yes, yes, go,” said the old woman. But this time her voice cracked with emotion.

“What happened?” pressed Daria.

“Go!”

“Fatima, Fatima…” Daria said and tried to put her arms around her. “You are not alone.”

Mark heard footsteps just outside the shop. He positioned himself behind the door.

Daria said, “I need to know where he took the package I brought him, Fatima. They’re after me too. I need your help.”

The door cracked open. Mark saw a heavily muscled forearm on the handle. Without waiting for the door to fully open, he swung the pointed end of the paintbrush up to where he guessed an eye would be. He connected—although he had no idea whether it was with a potential killer or an unlucky customer.

He slammed the door shut as the man he’d stabbed cried out in pain.

“We’re outta here!” Mark said.

“Fatima,” said Daria. “Please. I need to know where your husband took the package.”

Mark started running. When he got to the locked door in the back of the store, he threw his shoulder into it and popped it open with one quick push. Daria took off after him.

They ran through a series of dark, mazelike back alleys, until they came to a street crowded with people eating and celebrating the end of the day’s Ramadan fast. Within seconds, a green Peugeot screeched to a stop in front of them. A strikingly attractive woman of maybe twenty sat behind the wheel, gasping for breath. She wore a flimsy blue headscarf that barely covered any of her hair, but what Mark really noticed were her slender paint-stained fingers. He glanced down at her feet and saw purple Nikes.

“How’d you find us?” he asked.

“All the alleys lead to one exit. Get in.”

Mark and Daria did so. The young woman took off without a word, cut in front of an orange bus, then sped down Ferdowsi Street. By now it was dark. The unbroken lines of tall plane trees on either side of the street made Mark feel as though he were racing through a tunnel.

“The MEK is useless!” the woman said. “Fossils! You couldn’t have sent someone to protect him, to warn him? To watch the store? You use him for twenty years and then leave him to the wolves?”

“I’m so sorry about your father,” said Daria. “If I had known—”

“Why would he become involved with you people? Why?”

“I don’t have anything to do with the MEK,” said Mark.

They came to an intersection and the car jerked to a stop. In front of them, a pedestrian bridge that looked centuries old spanned a river. Brightly colored flags, illuminated from below by spotlights, fluttered near its entrance.

“Cross that bridge,” said the young woman. “If someone has been following us, it will force them to cross too, on foot, and you
will be able to see them. After that, you should be safe enough if you get off the streets.”

The bridge had two levels, each with multiple tiled alcoves. Yellow light from inside the alcoves spilled onto the river below. In the center of the bridge, a man was singing a plaintive song, his voice echoing across the water. Couples were out on the river in yellow duck-shaped paddleboats.

“When I last saw your father,” said Daria, “it was to give him a package. Do you know where—”

“Ashraf. He took your package to Ashraf, and then came back to Esfahan the next day. They didn’t kill him until a week ago.”

“Did he tell you what was in the package?”

“No. And I don’t want to know.”

“Thank you.” Daria gripped the young woman’s hand. “Please, be careful. I wouldn’t go back to your shop tonight, maybe not for a long time. If you want a place for you and your mother to stay, I can arrange it. You both may be in danger.”

“Find a way to get to Kermanshah,” said the young woman. “It’s six hundred kilometers west of here. Go to an Internet café called the Emperator and ask for Rahim. If it’s closed, ring the bell until he answers; he lives upstairs.”

“Who’s Rahim?” asked Daria.

“A friend of my father’s. He may be able to help you cross the border into Iraq. From there you’ll have to find your own way to Ashraf. Now go.”

“Are you sure we can’t help?”

“I said go.”

Washington, DC

Colonel Henry Amato sat to the right of James Ellis at a long oval conference table in the newly renovated White House situation room. Mounted on the sound-dampening fabric walls were six flat-screen plasma video monitors. To the sides of two of the monitors were smaller screens that displayed the date, the time, and the words
NSC/57 Top Secret
.

“This meeting is called to order,” said the president.

The vice president, the director of national intelligence, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the secretary of the treasury, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president’s own chief of staff, his national security advisor, and all the attendant advisors gave the president their attention. In the back of the room, the two watch officers responsible for running the technical show sat up a little straighter behind their computer screens.

“We’re here to discuss how to respond to reports that indicate Iran has mobilized more of their armed forces over the past twenty-four hours. James’s team…” The president gestured to his national security advisor. “…is going to bring you up to date on the latest.”

Ellis frowned and looked over his bifocals. “I’ll cede the floor to my assistant, Colonel Henry Amato.”

For the second time in as many days, Amato didn’t respond when prompted by his boss.

“Henry?”

“Sir?”

“Your presentation?”

Amato had just heard from the contractor he’d hired in Iran. The man had called from a hospital—apparently someone had stabbed him in the eye as he’d tried to intercept Daria and Sava.

Amato’s hope was that in the confusion, Daria hadn’t been able to figure out where the uranium had been taken after it left Esfahan. That would be the best outcome, one that might lead to her going into hiding.

“Of course.”

He stood up and walked to the front of the room. When he spoke, it was with something less than his usual confident precision: New intelligence reports suggest regular army troops and millions of Revolutionary Guard Basij paramilitaries have been ordered to gather weapons and food supplies…two of Iran’s Kilo-class submarines have been detected by the US Navy near the Strait of Hormuz…At this time, however, Iran’s military posture appears to be a defensive one. No troops are massing on the borders. The situation is something to watch closely, for sure, but still no cause for immediate alarm.

Iraq, Near the Iranian Border

Mark sat on an old truck tire in front of a boarded-up roadside store. In back of him lay a pile of empty oil drums and a bright tangle of abandoned concertina wire. He checked his watch.

“They’ll be here,” said Daria.

After what had happened in Esfahan, Mark figured the only hope he and Daria had was to move so fast that the enemy—whoever it was—couldn’t keep up. So they’d driven through the night to Kermanshah, and then instead of sleeping had pushed on to the border with Iraq—which they’d crossed in the dark where their contact Rahim had told them to. After that, it’d been hurry up and wait.