I wondered now exactly why he’d been in such a hurry. Dan was only twenty-eight years old at the time. Phoebe was twenty-four. He’d never had a long-term relationship with anyone. No girl had lasted more than a few weeks.
Phoebe wasn’t pregnant; that I knew for sure. I knew it because I knew she hadn’t slept with him. Phoebe had never slept with any man.
She told me so herself. The revelation followed one of her arguments with Dan, who simply could not comprehend her chastity. She wasn’t old-fashioned, or frigid, or religious, and she certainly wasn’t prudish—far from it. Shapely, slender, athletic, she found pleasure in the dressing and display of her body, carried herself with considerable style and aplomb, and the way she flirted clearly showed she had no fear of men; she took a provocative pride in her purity.
So was she just a lofty and unconquerable tease, the Duran brothers’ Everest of Desire?
The truth is Phoebe’s self-restraint was touchingly sincere. Sex, she believed, had lost its mystery, and sexiness gone dead. She rejected wholeheartedly the hookup culture and its casual disdain for devotion and marriage. In a reversion to more chivalrous times, she conceived of matrimony as a noble undertaking, and making love as something close to sacred. She had resolved to give herself to only one man: the man she loved above them all, who proved himself most worthy. A man she could commit to unreservedly for life. The one whose heart she knew for sure was true.
She recognized the fairy tale quality of her quest. The anachronistic, countercultural quaintness. I suspect it was in rebellion to her father’s cynicism, his stonyhearted view that all we do is out of fear. For Phoebe self-control was the key to self-respect; she found a sense of dignity through freedom. Not the freedom to indulge every passion and pleasure, but a truer, deeper freedom—unchained from the mind’s addictions and the tyrannies of the flesh. She believed that she was more than brain and body.
Spirit, self-sacrifice, nobility, true love—antiquated notions from another world, perhaps, but that was the kind of world the willful Dutch girl wanted to live in. That was the kind of woman she chose to be.
WITH THE TRAFFIC MOVING SLUGGISHLY, I considered exiting my taxicab and striding up to Duran’s. I could easily haul him out the door and kill him on the highway. Show my reluctant driver how it’s done.
Like my brother, in his youth. Arshan would have demonstrated precisely how it’s done.
Arshan alone had raised me on the streets of South Tehran. Faraj and I—both fatherless—grew to worship him. A laat who lived by fist and knife, Arshan would slash his chest before a fight to show his fearlessness. Inspired by my father, whom God honored with martyrdom against Saddam’s Iraq, Arshan joined the Basij, then later advanced up through the Guard until the Quds Force took him. Soon enough his knife became the Rahbar’s brightest weapon—until the Old Man in Qum called him to lead his bold jihad.
As now he called on me.
This was not the time or place to take Arshan’s revenge. It would bring too much attention. Hordes of policemen hunting me down, helicopters, TV crews, cries of terrorism. The Old Man had requested that I find out who betrayed us, and to put off Allah’s justice until that task was done.
“Hold yourself in patience,” the noble Quran counsels, “‘til Allah doth decide.”
But still murderous thoughts returned, tempting me like the devil...
AWAITING THE CALLBACK FROM VINNY, I warily scanned the surrounding cars as the traffic continued its crawl. Drivers were growing increasingly frantic, afraid of missing departing flights or dreading the wrath of arrivals. Exhaust fumes clogged the idling air and tensions seemed to crackle. Horns blared. The cabbie cursed. The shriek of a white-lining moped shook me.
We’re all running scared, I thought. All of us, all the time, from one damn thing or another. And of course the Biggest Damn Thing of All could take you out any moment.
Maya had said these men would kill us. Fiore seemed to imply that was the least that they would do. If Dan really knew where this lotus plant grew, I began to wonder now if they wouldn’t torture him to find it.
That terrible thought gave rise to another: What on earth would I tell my mother when I finally arrived back home? That I was safe, she didn’t have to worry, but Dan was still out there on his own?
Years before, when Dan had disappeared without a word in Mexico, my mother grew sick with worry and sent me down to find him. As things eventually turned out, it was Dan who rescued me—bravely risking his life in the bargain.
I loved my brother for that. Owed him for it, too. And now I felt I owed him even more for something else.
I peered again at the picture: Dan looking sidelong at Phoebe, unable to pry his eyes away, while she and I gleefully smile for the camera. He had believed with all his heart that he was the prince of her dreams. He was the man most worthy of her. He was her one true love. Then his brother entered the picture and shattered the fairy tale.
Why had Dan popped the question so quick? The answer was clear as day. I had fallen in love with his girlfriend. She was falling in love with me. Dan was afraid he was losing her, afraid I would steal her away.
Shamefully, I attempted just that, prodding and cajoling her to follow me to Rome. But Phoebe, unable to choose between us, ended up choosing the one thing she knew: her freedom.
She ran away.
How else could such a doomed triangle have ended? Phoebe had seen it coming first and fled to her family in Holland. Dan in despair then vanished into Asia, and I in my misery soon lost myself in Rome.
We had all run away. From love, from pain. From fear.
I turned to stare again at the anonymous traffic, fingering the feathery slit on my throat.
Dan is my only brother, I thought. How can I run from that?
The ring of the cell phone jarred me. “Hello?”
“There’s a United flight to New York,” Vinny said. “Departs out of Gate 3 in one—”
“Forget it,” I said.
“Scusi?”
“Change of plan.” I pulled out the map of directions from Maya. “I need you to get me to a place called...
21.
Ashkhabad
“WHY IN GOD’S NAME,” Vinny cried over the phone, “would anyone want to go to Ashkhabad?”
The answer, I knew, was complicated, but what I told my friend very simply was this: I wanted to find my brother. A dig site in the desert near Ashkhabad was the last place he had been seen. Dan was in some kind of trouble, I said. I feared he was in danger of losing his life. And Phoebe might well be with him.
A quick check revealed no direct flights to Ashkhabad—or to any other city in Turkmenistan. “You’ll have to make a connection through Moscow,” Vinny said. “Aeroflot #76 leaves Rome at 23:00.”
“I can’t wait that long,” I told him. The police would be all over me, not to mention the Iranian. “Just get me somewhere in the region.”
He called back a few minutes later. “How soon will you be at Fiumicino?”
“Fifteen minutes?”
“Head to Terminal 3, just past Alitalia,” he said. “Turkish Airlines has a flight to Baku through Istanbul, leaves at 13:50.”
I looked at my watch. The flight left in 83 minutes. “Where the hell is Baku?”
“Azerbaijan, in the Caucasus. From Baku you can hop over the Caspian to Turkmenistan.”
All of it sounded the same to me—like the dark side of the moon. “Get me on it,” I said.
“Already done,” he said. Then he told me I would need a visa to enter Turkmenistan. I asked if he could arrange it. “Dubioso,” he said. “Visa there could take you weeks. Worse than North Korea.”
“I’ll have to deal with it in Baku,” I said. The main thing now was to get out of Rome.
I thanked Vincenzo for his help. “I owe you big-time, amico.”
“You owe me a car,” he said.
When the call ended, I asked the driver to take me to Terminal 3—but to Arrivals, not Departures, in case
the Iranians or the police were lying in wait. Then I opened Maya’s suitcase and took another look inside.
Most of her clothes had fallen out in the course of my escape. In the inner side pocket, I found the Ziploc bag with the pair of fried somosas. I gave the patties a sniff, then gave one a nibble. Onions, chilies, peas, potatoes. I hadn’t realized how famished I was. Suddenly it felt like days had passed since having that meal with Maya.
I scarfed down the two samosas.
Again I examined the brass lock sealing the outer pocket. These suitcase locks had always seemed so chintzy and useless to me, but this was a stubborn little devil, actually quite well-made. Without the combination or a bolt-cutter, there was no way I could open it.
Scars streaked the canvas where I had stabbed it with the letter opener.
I asked the driver, “Do you by any chance have a pocket knife?”
In the mirror, he eyed me warily, then slowly shook his head, “no.” I realized he must have overheard my cell phone call with Vinny.
The airport appeared ahead. I quickly decided to consolidate luggage; there wouldn’t be time to check Maya’s bag. After emptying out her remaining clothes, I crammed my little backpack inside her roller. It took a mighty effort to zipper the suitcase shut.
The cabbie headed to the lower level Arrivals in Terminal 3. It may have been my paranoia, but several times I caught the driver glancing in the mirror at me, as if he were memorizing my face. At the sign for Turkish Airlines, he pulled the taxi over.
“Thanks for the phone,” I told him cheerily. I added a ten euro tip to the fare, hoping to assuage his suspicions.
Scooping up the pile of Maya’s clothes, I extracted myself from the taxi. A quick scan revealed no Middle-Eastern maniac charging at me with a knife, and aside from a single traffic cop, there were no other policemen around. I dragged out the pink paisley roller and headed across to the doors. Slipping through the crowd of outpouring arrivals, I entered the building and dumped Maya’s clothes into the first available trash container. Then I found the escalator and started upstairs to Departures.
My heart banged like a drum. If Vanitar Azad was in the terminal, awaiting my arrival, it was more than likely he’d be waiting up here, keeping an eye on the street. I stripped off my jacket and folded it under my arm. Stepping up past some teenagers, I stopped behind an obese couple. When the escalator deposited us, I followed closely behind them.
The Turkish Airlines ticket booth was halfway across the concourse. Keeping my head down, I split off toward it, stealing anxious glances through the crowd.
There’s safety in numbers, I told myself. Surely it would be too risky to try to attack me here. The airport probably had more security personnel than any other place in Rome. I continued to reassure myself, and after waiting several minutes in the ticket line, searching among the bored faces of the many travelers around me, my anxiety began to dissipate, and my heartbeat settled into a tolerable clip.
It would take them a while, if they could, to trace my reservation. Less than half an hour had passed since Vincenzo had called it in. The flight was leaving in just over an hour—not much time to find me. The quick departure seemed to insure I would get off the ground alive.
I bought the ticket with a credit card, and ten minutes later I was checking my pack through security and stepping through the metal detector. By this point I had convinced myself there wouldn’t be any problem. I had been too paranoid. The Roman police hadn’t called out the dogs; they hadn’t even flagged my reservation. I began to doubt the Iranian would have bothered with it either. For all I knew, he may have already fled the country himself. Surely by now he had realized that I didn’t have what he wanted.
Other than revenge...
“Pardone, Signore.” The female baggage inspector had her white-gloved hands on Maya’s suitcase. “Is this yours?”
A sinking feeling came over me. “Yes.”
The woman hauled it up onto an examination table and began to unzip the lid. Maya’s hidden object had been spotted in the x-ray machine. Suddenly it occurred to me: If the Indian spy had kept a pistol in her purse, she may have kept another weapon in her bag.
I glanced back the way I came and considered making a run for it.
22.
The Object
BUCHAREST. ISTANBUL. ATHENS. SYDNEY. PRAGUE. CAIRO. Six departures from Terminal 3 within the next two hours. All of them heading east.
Allah be praised—Duran was not returning to America! Whatever he had found in the Hindi’s suitcase, he was taking it now to his brother.
But where?
I will make him tell me when I kill him, I thought. Right now I just need to get inside the terminal.
“Bucharest. Coach. One-way.”
“I...believe that flight is full, Signore.” The clerk checked his computer. “Si, I’m sorry. The next—”
“Istanbul, then.”
He eyed me quizzically.
I smiled. “Family on the Black Sea,” I said. “I can drive from either city.”
His gaze lingered a moment. He looked at his computer. “You have luggage?”
“Nothing to check.”
Another curious glance. “May I see your passport, please?”
I handed it over, wondering if the devil Duran had already made it through.
FOLLOWING A STRUGGLE WITH THE ZIPPER, the inspector had finally opened the suitcase and was now lifting out my compacted backpack, eyeing it curiously. She opened it and pawed through my tangle of clothes, and when she found nothing hidden among them, inspected the outer pockets. Uncovering no dangerous items there, she turned her attention to Maya’s roller. It didn’t take her long to locate the pocket under the lid. She asked me politely to open the lock.
“I forgot the combination,” I said.
“We must open,” she said. “You cannot open?”
“I told you, I don’t know the combination. I don’t even know what’s in—”
The woman looked away from me and called her supervisor. She asked for something in Italian I didn’t understand, but moments later, a portly, balding uniformed official came over with a steel-jawed bolt cutter.
The two of them studied the x-ray monitor. Then the man examined the zippered pocket and the tiny brass lock. Finally he held up the cutters and declared, “You can leave luggage behind, or”—he clipped the air in demonstration.
I glanced between the two of them and the bulging suitcase pocket, trying to make up my mind. What had they seen in the x-ray? A knife? A gun? Why had Maya taken the trouble to lock it in her bag?
It had to be something important. Maybe something she’d brought along to help her track down Dan. Had I dragged the suitcase all this way to give up finding it now?
Curiosity overruled fear. “Go ahead, cut it,” I said.
The supervisor grinned with perverse satisfaction. He leaned in with the metal shears and snapped the bar of the lock.
The woman stepped forward and opened the pocket.
The first thing she pulled out was a leather-bound sketchbook. My heart soared. I recognized it at once as belonging to Dan—he had kept one just like it when he lived in Mexico. The woman set it down on the table, then reached again into the pocket and pulled out a tall, narrow book bound with a green cloth cover. The book was very old, the binding frayed and loose. She laid the volume down atop the leather sketchbook. The gold lettering on the green cover looked similar to the writing beneath the lions on Maya’s stationery—what Dr. Fiore had said was Sanskrit.
Finally, the woman reached into the pocket and pulled out a heavy, hard-edged object, wrapped in a cotton T-shirt.
This is it, I thought. I’m done for.
She unwrapped the object and held it up in puzzlement. It wasn’t a gun, and it wasn’t a knife. In fact it wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before.
It was a small bronze antique of some sort, a kind of symbol or scepter. The thing looked as if it were designed to be gripped, a handle with f
our pointed prongs at each end, curved to form a pair of hollow spheres.
The portly supervisor examined it closely and asked me what it was.
“I don’t know,” I said, scrambling. “It’s just…a good luck charm, I think. My girlfriend brought it from India. She must have forgotten to unpack it.”
The female inspector eyed me skeptically.
With his fingertip, the supervisor poked the converging, pointed prongs. The way they were neatly pinched together rendered them perfectly harmless. “I think…is okay,” he said, handing it over to me.
I thanked him and hurriedly inserted the object into my backpack, along with the old text and the sketchbook. “Would you mind just getting rid of that suitcase for me? She doesn’t really need it anymore.”
They took it without a word of comment, as if giving away perfectly good luggage were routine. I hurried off to catch my flight, wondering what the hell I had just discovered in Maya’s bag.
23.
Someplace Safe
THE GATE WAS NEAR THE END of the main corridor. As I came within sight of it, I moved out of the streaming crowd to hide behind a phone kiosk and survey the waiting area. A boarding announcement was being read for the flight to Istanbul, stirring the rows of ticketholders slumped in their plastic seats. Most appeared to be Indians who would continue on to New Delhi. The rest were mostly Turkish and mixed-race Asian businessmen, along with some American and European tourists and a group of university students.
My eyes searched among them for the beard and the Hugo Boss, but no one fit the description. A quick scan of the surrounding areas also came up nil.
The Assassin Lotus Page 9
