Silent Partner

by Leigh Brackett

  And he could not do anything about that but wait.

  He waited twenty-four hours, hanging around the hotel, drinking enough beer to float him in an effort to calm the nerves that threatened to leap out through his skin. And then Zacharian came back, looking twenty-four years older and red-eyed with lack of sleep.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  They sat beneath the plane trees, listening to the small gurgling fountain, smelling the roses. The pink sandstone ridge was beautiful against the clear blue sky.

  "I’ve gone through the reports from the field, trying to find something that would give a clue. I've spent hours in a helicopter looking over the whole route and the country to both sides and on beyond to Pasargadae. And there is nothing. Not one thing that looks organized or unusual. Small groups moving in with women and kids and the family flock, and that’s it.”

  "You’d better get some sleep,” Tony said.

  "Later. I just stopped by for a clean shirt. I want to go along and have a look at the security plans.”

  And he was gone again.

  It was nighttime and the sandstone ridge was purple-black when he returned. He was driving a slightly battered sedan with the word PERSEPOLIS decaled on its rear window.

  "Want to be a tourist again?” he asked

  "What are you going to do?”

  "The quick way hasn’t paid off, so I’ll try it again on the ground. And nobody pays any attention to a Persepolis taxi.”

  “Okay,” said Tony. “When?”

  “As soon as I wake up,” said Zacharian, and went to bed.

  27

  They left the hotel early in the morning. Zacharian drove. He wore a shabby striped suit and no hat. Tony sat in the back, clad in drip dries, sunglasses, and the indispensable camera.

  “Do you think some of Karim’s lot might be watching us?” Tony asked.

  “No. He doesn’t dare. It would be a dead giveaway if we caught on. Besides, I’ve made sure of it personally.”

  “Then why the masquerade?”

  “I don’t see any reason to go around waving a sign, and there’s no way of telling who’s watching what out along the road.”

  They went through the Koran Gate, into the hills and the winding passes. Zacharian drove slowly, to the intense exasperation of every other driver on the road. The heat grew. Tony put the window down and let the dry wind batter him.

  “You still don't have any idea what he might be going to do?"

  "No."

  “You really do believe he's alive?”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that since you put the idea into words, I can’t quite believe he isn’t.” He frowned out the window. “It’s creepy, you know? The last time I came this way Karim was driving.”

  The tawny desert shimmered in the sunlight. Black tents dotted it on each side, strung out at haphazard or clumped together in fair-sized encampments. Sometimes in the distance there was a walled village, and sometimes a line of men on camels appeared, half afloat on the mirage. The villages they passed through were gay with bunting and triumphal arches.

  At length the lion-colored bulk of Kuh-i-Rahmat was ahead of them. And it was as though the mountain knelt to hold Persepolis in its hands.

  Zacharian pulled off and stopped. From here it was possible to see the structure entire. The terrace of massive stone blocks seemed to grow almost naturally out of the mountain. At its back the cliff rose sharply to the ridge. The outer sides stood strong and square above the valley floor, crowned with ruins. Above all rose the columns of the Apadana, grand and lonely.

  The two men sat and stared until Tony's eyes hurt with the glare and he could sit no longer.

  “What is it you're looking for?”

  Zacharian said, “How the hell do I know?” He started the car, drove through the village and into the white dust at the foot of the terrace. Tony got out, prepared to play tourist to Zacharian’s guide.

  There was some chat in Persian while Zacharian bought tickets. Tony supposed that the custodians here knew all the boys on the Persepolis run and were curious about the new one. Apparently he satisfied them. He led Tony through the iron gate and up the wide, shallow steps of the double staircase, pitched so that the Great King might ride them on horseback. They reached the top and stood where Darius had once stood with the desert wind stirring his robes and the valley spread out below. There was a stillness here that had not been in Darius’ time. The wind made the only sound, blowing around beast-headed capitals, through roofless palace rooms and empty doorways where the stone-eyed kings pause forever in the act of going forth. Tony shivered slightly and followed Zacharian past Xerxes’ Gate to the Apadana.

  They climbed the northern stair, joining as it were the procession that marched on either side upward to the Audience Hall, paying tribute to the Great King at the New Year festival. The stunning height of the columns became apparent. They dwarfed the speaker’s stand which had been built between them. The weathered stone made the bunting on the stand look cheap and garish. A non-Achaemenid mobile generator unit squatted off to one side, forerunner of more equipment to come; the ceremonies would be broadcast live and filmed for later showing. Speakers of the PA system had already sprouted in unlikely places. Eastward, high on the flank of the mountain, the rock-cut tombs of Artaxerxes II and III caught the sun in their deep niches.

  Zacharian wandered, his gaze roving constantly from point to point; he was seeing the platform, Tony guessed, as it would be two days hence, with the bands and the flags and the VIP’s. Tony tagged along, getting increasingly hot, thirsty, and cross, and bored with ruins.

  They scrambled up steep tracks and had a look at both the tombs. The niches were cut deep and rose sheer on three sides to the top. Tony had never been wildly interested in tombs—the Valley of the Kings had depressed him unspeakably—but he made the pretense, peering at the carved fronts and then at the monolithic sarcophagi inside, his nose quivering at the smell of dust that never felt the sun. When they came out of the southern tomb, Zacharian said, “I’m going up top.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Tony, but he followed.

  They climbed again. There had been a mud-brick wall to guard this eastern approach, and the ruins of a guard tower still stood. Eventually they stood on the ridge, breathing hard in the hot wind. The strategic essentials were easily grasped from here, with the platform shrunk to a manage able size. Access to it was strictly limited: the grand staircase at the front, a chariot road at the southeastern corner that now served the station wagons of the archeological staff, the track they had just climbed, and a place at the northeast corner where an active man might make it up but certainly not unseen.

  Tony said, "They’ll have guards on all these places, to keep the crowds out. I don’t see how anybody could crash the gate . . . and nobody’s going to get there any other way without an official invitation.”

  Zacharian did not answer. He turned and examined the eastern slope of Rahmat, which came up like the back curve of a wave done roughly in stone.

  “Sure,” said Tony. “Anybody could climb that. But he’d still have to get down. And supposing he did—what’s he going to do when he gets there?”

  Zacharian was looking down at the terrace again. "Something he doesn’t have to get away from, that’s certain. The place is a trap. Let’s go.”

  They slipped and skidded down again and got back into the car. Tony was thinking of the hotel garden and cold beer, but Zacharian turned the other way.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To Pasargadae.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen out there. Why—”

  “I wish to see the country. I do not yet know what I’m looking for, and until I do, I am going to continue to look. I’m sorry if you’re tired because you’re going to be a lot more tired before you’re through.”

  “I don’t mind you biting your words, but you don’t have to take my head with them,” said Tony. “I was only asking.�
�

  It was a long, lonely road. The black tents were much more sparse than along the Shiraz-Persepolis stretch, where all the excitement would be. Zacharian drove faster because there was less to see, but he stopped several times to talk to people: villagers; shepherds; the custodian at Pasargadae, where there was nothing but a desert valley with the pure, hard sky stretched across it and a palace floor with a single standing pillar. A stork had built her nest on it, and aside from the custodian, she was all that moved in the landscape. Tony had a sudden hunger for the freeways at rush hour.

  They started back at last. The sun was low, and the colors it had leached from the rock began to appear again in shades of tan and ash-rose. The outlines of the hills were softened by a luminous haze, and the sky had lost its hardness.

  “Did you learn anything?" Tony asked.

  “Not yet."

  All the way between Persepolis and Shiraz the population seemed to have doubled since the morning. The rare river bottoms swarmed with camels, donkeys, goats, and sheep. Tents were still going up as families continued to move in from the desert. The villages in the dusk were full of lights and music and unwonted crowds. Zacharian studied it all with a yellow predatory eye grown slightly haggard.

  There was nothing new from Maktabi. Zacharian sighed.

  “Rest up, boy,” he said. “We'll do it again tomorrow.”

  28

  The only thing Tony saw to enliven the morning was a young gypsy woman riding a donkey. There was nothing unusual about that except that she was nursing a baby at the same time. The donkey trotted, the baby clung like a monkey to the long bare breast with the nipple firmly jammed into its mouth, and the entire assembly went up and down together at a slapping rhythm. Tony hoped the child had a taste for butter.

  Otherwise it was much the same as the day before. The traffic was heavier, mixed with military vehicles, and the roadside population was still growing; but there seemed to be no new element to interest Zacharian. When he reached Persepolis, he did not stop, and Tony thought for a few horrible moments that they were going to Pasargadae again. However, about three miles down the road he took the turn-off to Naksh-i-Rustum, where the Sassanids carved their fat horses and opulent kings on the cliff below the tombs of Darius and Xerxes.

  He stopped short of that. Between Naksh-i-Rustum and the main road were a village and a stream and a lot of empty land. Overnight a populous town had grown up here. Vendors had set up stalls; women washed clothes in the pools; children herded the family flocks. Zacharian halted on the bridge and sat studying the settlement.

  At last he said, “I just don't see it. Too many women and children, not enough men at any one place to make an attack force. Even if they all were armed, they’re too strung out, and their families are too vulnerable. And the feeling isn’t right. There's no tension, nothing hiding underneath. Just a lot of people on holiday.”

  “Maybe,” said Tony, “you’re wrong about Karim.”

  “Maybe I am,” said Zacharian, and drove back to Persepolis.

  The custodians regarded them with interest, and Tony wondered if they wouldn’t think it was funny that he had come back so soon.

  "I’ve told them you’re a teacher of ancient history,” said Zacharian, “visiting the shrines. So look worshipful.”

  They toiled up the double stair again, Tony wishing he had a horse like the Great King. Things were going forward. Sometime during the night a mobile crane had been trundled up beside the terrace, and it was now engaged in hoisting huge hooded cameras and sound equipment to the Apadana. The stillness was abraded by the cries of men and the clanking of the crane.

  They did the whole bit over again, the palaces, the great halls with their stumps of columns and broken floors, the carvings and the tombs. Zacharian moved like a sleepwalker, never speaking. It was as though he were forcing his mind to see what his physical eyes could not. They sat for a very long while on the ledge of Artaxerxes Ill’s tomb, staring out over the terrace. Then all at once Zacharian rose and went away, taking the path to the crest.

  He went so fast that Tony could not possibly keep up with him. When he did reach the ridge, Zacharian was standing in the wind like a triumphant bird of prey. His eyes blazed.

  “I see how it could be done,” he said. “Without an army. With no more than a hundred men. With less. I see why he had to wait. Look down there.” He pointed to the terrace. “A trap, I said, and it is. A great magnificent goddamned trap."

  Tony shook his head, uncomprehending.

  “What must you do in order to take over a province, a state, a country? What’s the essential?”

  Tony thought. There’d been enough of it done all over the world so the answer was not hard to find.

  “Get control of the government. And then—"

  “Never mind about then. Where will the government of Fars, or at least most of it, be tomorrow?”

  Tony looked down at the bright blot of the speaker’s stand on the ash-gray stone. His mouth gradually formed a round, astounded emptiness that tried to fill itself with words and could not.

  “Why not?" said Zacharian. “Look. The governor, the provincial officials, the top-ranking military brass, the police commissioner, the members of the Majlis, the representative of the shah, all there in one neat clutch like eggs in the nest.” His hand made a nervous circling motion. “Around them a crowd of lesser VIP’s, soldiers, an honor guard for the stand." He spread his arms wide. “Suddenly along this ridge a line of men appears, armed with high-powered rifles. They have everything down there completely at their mercy. Other parties of armed men take over the staircase and the access road. Meanwhile—”

  His finger stabbed at the speaker’s stand. “Everything is controlled from there. Someone on the stand is giving orders through the mouth of the governor, over the radio to the whole country. He may have a gun in the governor's back, but he will not kill, unless he’s forced to. Killing is not the object. It is only the threat of it that makes people obey—if not for their own lives, then for the lives of all that crowd of people who are at the mercy of the guns. The soldiers and police are ordered to surrender, and they do.

  “Then the man on the stand speaks for himself. He makes it clear that he has literally, bodily, taken over the government. He has hostages with which he hopes to buy a province. He asks for a peaceful parley with Teheran, warns of what will happen if he doesn’t get it. He arranges to clear the terrace and remove his captives to wherever he has planned to take them. Nobody is going to try shooting or dropping bombs on him as long as he has the physical possession of these people, and they are going to cooperate with him lest worse befall. Because now the tribesmen have their guns. Not enough to take the province by force, but enough to kill a lot of unarmed villagers.

  “And all it takes is a little time. The propaganda mills start churning, making it appear that this is a popular uprising. Interested governments recognize the new state and promise support. In the world’s capitals ten thousand spontaneous students march, chanting slogans and throwing things at embassies. A battleship of a certain color cruises up the Persian Gulf and Iraqi troops poise on the borders of Kurdistan. In Teheran, the government debates whether or not to slaughter these eminent men in cold blood, and each minute they wait makes the decision that much harder. What would you do if you had to make it?”

  “Jesus,” said Tony. “Christ.” The wind shook him, and he felt giddy. “Listen. Listen, Jake, how do they get up here, all those men with rifles?”

  “They come up the backslope. There’ll be a lot of people coming that way, to watch the ceremony from here. And they won’t have the guns at first. There’ll be a cache somewhere on Rahmat. They’ll get them on the way.”

  “And the ones down there, that take over the stairs and so on?”

  “Out of the crowds. Their guns will be hidden in carts and vendors’ barrows, in packsaddles, among household goods. It will all happen very quickly at a prearranged signal—perhaps the beginning of the page
ant.”

  "And who’ll be on the stand giving the orders? Karim?”

  "Certainly Karim, if he’s alive. If he isn’t, the second team will try. Why not? If they brought it off, they could get Mahmud Hassani back alive and be in business.”

  "I don’t know,” said Tony. "I’m no judge of anything.” The plan as Zacharian told it certainly had a diabolical simplicity, plus the fact that nobody would be expecting it. "Would it work, Jake? Would it really?”

  "It would sure as hell,” said Zacharian, "do for a start.”

  "You think Maktabi will listen?”

  "I don’t know. It’s all in my head. There’s no proof.”

  "Wait.” Tony gestured down the tumbled backslope of Rahmat. “If we could find the cache—”

  "Not us, Tony.”

  "Why?”

  "Assuming it’s there, it would take a regiment of men to find it in time. And someone will almost certainly be watching, making sure it isn’t disturbed. If people start scouring around, it’s a clear statement that we know what they’re planning. That would stop them trying it, of course, but we wouldn’t have a hope of catching anybody involved. So that will have to be Maktabi’s decision.”

  He looked at his watch and then led off along the ridge and down the steep path. Before they left the terrace, Tony looked back once and thought: He's right. A great magnificent goddamned trap.

  They drove back into Shiraz, and now Zacharian was overtaking everything in sight while Tony cowered.

  They had to wait half an hour for Maktabi. When he came, he listened, scowled, and listened again. Then he sat, obviously mastering an urge to throw Zacharian out of the office because he could not quite disbelieve.