The Assassin Lotus

by David Angsten

  I looked it over, impressed, then turned to him with a sudden thought. “When the men drove up, is this what you got from the truck?” All I had seen him pull out was the water jug.

  Faraj grinned. “You never know what to expect. Three times I was robbed in the desert. First time, I have no gun. Thief takes all my caviar. Second time, Afghan border, two Tajiks steal a prize Persian rug. With the Makarov, I shoot one, but still they drive away. Twelve-thousand Euro—poof! Then, a few months ago, I am sleeping at Murgab bridge. Four Turkmen try to rob my truck. But I chase them off…with this—” Faraj reached his arm back behind the seat and pulled out a short-barreled shotgun.

  “Holy smokes,” I said. The compact weapon looked nasty and efficient—a mechanical black barracuda.

  He handed it to me. “Is Russian, too. Riot gun. Pump-action, ten-gauge. One shell takes down three men.”

  I looked over the barracuda and compared it to the semi-automatic. The prospect of actually using either weapon brought an anxious lump to my throat. “Sounds like you recommend the shotgun, then?”

  He aimed his steady gaze at me. “I recommend we use both.”

  WE STOPPED IN THE OUTSKIRTS of Ashkhabad to fill up the truck with diesel. Faraj seemed to know the owner of the station and acted very friendly with him, but the Turkman’s dour, pitted face revealed not a hint of emotion. As one of his young sons filled up the tank, the man escorted Faraj to his office in the back, and minutes later the two emerged having agreed to a deal on the sturgeon. The man would sell the cargo of fish and caviar at Ashkhabad’s weekend bazaar, set to open the following day. Faraj would stop on his return trip to collect his take and a shipment of rugs.

  Three boys began unloading the truck. Faraj removed his two guns and led me into the field behind the station for an impromptu shooting lesson.

  When he offered me first choice of weapon, I opted at once for the pistol. The shotgun had a powerful recoil, he’d warned, and the buckshot a very wide spread. The gun I had shot in Mexico had been a rickety old revolver, and that had worked out all right. Faraj’s newer semi-automatic Makarov pistol looked to be a lot more effective.

  He detached the magazine, filled it with eight rounds, and slid it back into the handle. Then he showed me how to pull back the slide to charge it, and explained that I could carry the thing with the hammer down and the safety engaged. All I had to do when the time came to shoot was release the safety lever, aim at the target’s head or chest, and gently squeeze the trigger. The trigger would cock the hammer and fire.

  I watched him take several shots, targeting a pop can thirty yards away. He hit it on the fourth shot, and handed the gun to me.

  After taking some instruction in the proper stance—two hand grip, one foot forward, trunk leaning in, sight down the barrel—I took careful aim at a second pop can and gently pulled back on the trigger.

  Miraculously, the can disappeared—a bull’s eye on my first shot! But with three more bullets and another full magazine, I failed to ever hit the can again.

  Faraj decided not to fire his Russian riot gun—he said he had only a half a dozen shells left, that he had hoped to buy more at the bazaar. Also, he was afraid the shotgun was too loud and someone might call out the police. Still he gave a cursory lesson in how to load it and shoot—“in case I go down,” he explained.

  In case I go down. Sleep with the fishes. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Faraj had boasted of reading Shakespeare in college, but he clearly had picked up his hard-boiled English from watching old Hollywood movies.

  I was heading into battle with Bogart.

  44.

  Three Deaths

  IN LESS THAN HALF AN HOUR we were back on the highway, cruising southeast along the looming Kopet Dag. Though distant, the Iranian snow peaks looked threatening, a white-capped tsunami wave rising over the desert. We drove beneath them for an hour in silence. I kept eyeing my Makarov pistol and staring ahead at the road, fingering Oriana’s necklace like a string of worry beads. What would we find at the dig site, I wondered, the last place Dan had been seen? If the Iranians had already arrived there, they may have discovered where he went. And what about Sar and Oriana—was it possible they could still be alive? If I had to, could I shoot the Iranians? How would I feel if I actually killed one?

  Just past the town of Dushak, the highway bent northward, away from the Kopet Dag and deeper into the desert. The heat swelled and a wind sprang up, slinging swirls of dust. Soon great gusts jostled the truck, and sand streamed across the road in low, scudding waves. The highway’s contour shifted and blurred. Distance shriveled into fumes.

  Amid this mist we glided by a string of shrouded women, lethargically sweeping the asphalt. Grim sisters of Sisyphus, they eyed our passing like hooded ghouls, a road crew out of hell.

  Faraj drove on, unfazed. He said a sandstorm was raging somewhere north, deep in the core of the desert. “The wind there can lift a dune,” he said. “In the old days of the Silk Road, whole caravans were buried.”

  It was wonderful to have a student of history guiding my trip into Hades. “Pleasant thought,” I said. I asked if his phone was still in range.

  “Not out here,” he said. He glanced at me with a grin. “Why—you want to call your mother?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll want you to call her. Let her know where it is I’m buried.”

  He laughed. “I’ll make sure to mark the spot with a cross.”

  “Thanks, Faraj. She’ll appreciate that. What do I put over you—the crescent?”

  “Sure,” he said, still smiling. “But you must wash my body first and wrap it in clean white cloth. Like a proper Muslim burial.” He turned his grinning gaze back on the road.

  We passed another shrouded woman standing aside with her broom.

  Faraj’s grin slowly faded. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his cell, and after thumbing several buttons, handed me the phone.

  The display showed a single word, Madaar, along with its corresponding number. I looked at him.

  “Her name is Naseem,” he said. “She lives with my sister’s family in Tehran.”

  I stared at him a moment, then again at the word: Madaar. “Okay,” I said. Then I started adding another number to his phone. “Faraj?”

  He turned to me.

  “My madaar’s name is Ruth.”

  FARAJ GRIPPED THE SCORPION KNOB and grinded the truck down a gear. I noticed a tawny powder covered the hairs on the back of his hand. Although we had rolled the windows tight, dust and grit seeped into the truck, settling on every surface. Even the inside of the windshield was grimy. I tried to clear the glass with my sleeve.

  “We should have seen it by now,” I said.

  “Perhaps your map is wrong.”

  “This map is all we’ve got.”

  Following Maya’s hand-drawn directions, we had taken a double-rutted road off the highway and careered across the desert for an hour. The scrub had begun to thin into dunes, and all signs of humanity had vanished. Air dark with dust dimmed the sun to a milky stain. On the ground, rippled drifts lay thick across the ruts, muffling the sound of our tires and obscuring long tracts of the road.

  Choking on the dust, it felt as though we were slowly being smothered. Once again I took a look at Maya’s crumpled map. She had drawn three rivers that intersected with the road, but we had yet to encounter the first of them. I was beginning to wonder if they actually existed. “How can there be so many rivers in a desert?”

  Faraj was leaning forward over the wheel as he drove, straining to see through the dust storm. “The Murgab River is born high in the Hindu Kush,” he said, “but it dies down here in the desert.” He extended his arm and spread his fingers. “One birth, many deaths.”

  “I think the English word for that is ‘delta,’” I said. “But I never would have thought of finding—”

  The truck plunged. Faraj hit the brakes and grabbed hold of the shifter. We were dropping into a gully. I reached to brace mys
elf against the dash as we rolled headlong down the slope.

  “The first death!" Faraj cried.

  The truck swam down the sand embankment. At the bottom, we lurched to a stop.

  Faraj took the truck out of gear. The wind was calmer; you could hear the tappets rattling as the hot diesel idled. We were sitting on a dry riverbed of stones and gravel partly hidden under rippling waves of sand.

  “There’s no water,” I said.

  “Only in Spring. And this far out, for many years, I think there comes no water at all.” He turned to me. “But at least now we know where we are on your map.”

  I nodded; it was a relief—though my stomach still felt tickled from the drop. “Only two more to go,” I said. My eyes roved up the opposite embankment. “That is, if you can climb out of this one.”

  It took some skillful driving, but Faraj soon had us up the slope and once again rumbling down the ruts. Quarter of an hour later, we crossed the river’s “second death,” and shortly after that, rolled to the rim of the third. Undoubtedly, it was the deepest.

  Gusts whirled up from the gully. The two of us peered down through the smeared windshield. At the bottom of the ravine, rusted to tatters and stripped of its wheels, sat a long-abandoned VW van. We could barely see across to the opposite embankment, but the drop down the near side looked steep.

  Faraj hesitated.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “I can make it,” he said.

  He was channeling the Bogie of African Queen. “No way,” I said. “We’ll just get stuck down there. And there’s really no reason to.” I showed him Maya’s map. “Once you cross here, it’s only a short ride down to the site.” The road ran along the opposite rim for barely half a mile. “We can easily walk it,” I said.

  Faraj took the map and studied it.

  “If we’re on foot,” I added, “they won’t hear us coming.”

  He gazed out into the swirling dust. “We take water, guns, ammo.”

  I held up his cell phone. “Shall we leave this here for the one who comes back?”

  He took it, eyeing me as he slipped it into his pocket. “We are both coming back.”

  “Insha’Allah,” I said.

  “Yes. Insha’Allah.”

  45.

  Black Coffin

  IT SEEMED QUIETER DOWN BELOW in the shelter of the ravine. Blown sand skittered over the dry riverbed, while above us, gusts howled off the scarp. Having found no tire tracks on the windswept ridge, we were searching the calmer ground in the gully. I slowly circled the VW van, a half-century-old relic of the Sixties. The dazzling psychedelic paintjob had long faded into pale pastels, but love beads still swayed from its rearview mirror, and its shattered windows danced with ragged tie-die. I imagined a stoned tribe of expat hippies set out on the Ultimate Trip, lighting across Asia toward the promised land of India, seeking the permanent high of nirvana. Their quest had ended badly. Instead of reaching enlightenment, they had stumbled down into the trap of this gulch and likely wandered off to die or been waylaid.

  Just another casualty on the road to Shangri-la.

  Faraj called to me. I found him standing a short way down the riverbed, examining a set of tread marks in the sand. The wind was gradually erasing them.

  “You think it’s the Mercedes?” I asked.

  “They come from over there,” he said, pointing with his shotgun toward the far wall of the canyon. “I think they drive in, but cannot climb out.”

  The road up the canyon wall looked formidable. A four-wheel-drive jeep or sand buggy might have scaled it, but not a street sedan, not even a Mercedes.

  I peered ahead in the direction of the tracks. “Looks like they decided to drive through the canyon. They’re heading the same way as the ridge road on the map.”

  “We follow the car then,” Faraj said. He trudged off down the riverbed without a second thought.

  For some reason I hesitated, and for a moment I turned to gaze back at the van. Veiled in a fog of dust, the rotting shell of shattered dreams struck me as a kind of warning, a ghostly reminder of evils unforeseen. I reached for reassurance into the pocket of my coat and felt the cold metal of the Makarov. The hell with peace and love, I thought. I’m going to make it out of here alive.

  I plowed ahead into the wind. Faraj was barely visible less than fifty yards ahead. He strode with the shotgun ready in his hands like a Fed going after a mobster. His need to stop these killers seemed even stronger than my own. What was it drove him on? Rage over his torture in the Kahrizak prison? These men were not employed by the regime back in Tehran. They were working for some lone-wolf Ayatollah.

  Perhaps his inner demons simply needed a ready target, and these two cutthroats conveniently fit the bill. Whatever it was that drove him, I was glad he’d come along. His intensity helped to bolster my own courage.

  Despite the blowing sand, the tire tracks in the riverbed were fairly easy to follow, even over wide swaths of gravel and stone. Faraj’s footprints marked a steady beat between them, like notes for the drummer in a military march. While his fresh prints, I noticed, were fairly faint and shallow, the fading tire tracks had been quite deep. It occurred to me there might be more weight in the sedan than just the two men and a crate of caviar.

  We had walked less than fifteen minutes when Faraj came to a stop. He waited for me to catch up. I squinted into the wind.

  The black Mercedes hovered like a shadow in the dust.

  “It’s not moving,” Faraj whispered.

  We stared at it in silence for a full minute. If the engine was running, we couldn’t hear it in the wind.

  “You think they wait for the storm to end?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they got stuck.”

  Faraj started forward. “Only way to know.”

  “Wait,” I said, grabbing him. “We’re too easy a target. You come from that angle, over there. I’ll come from over this way. We’ll both converge on the car.”

  Faraj eyed me curiously, then nodded his okay. He lifted his shotgun and pressed the bolt button in the trigger guard. “Take the safety off your Mak,” he said. “If the men are inside, we must shoot them.”

  I peered through the wind at the hazy black mirage. “Just make sure it’s them you’re shooting.” Grappling my pistol, I struggled to work the safety lever down off the slide into the fire position. Then I pulled back the slide to charge the gun. My hands were sweaty and trembling. When I saw Faraj had noticed, I tried to cover up. “Don’t walk too far to the side,” I told him. “We need to approach from a 45-degree angle, or we’ll end up shooting cross-wise and likely kill each other.”

  He gave me another sideways glance. “You say you have not done this before?”

  I shrugged. “Call of Duty,” I said.

  Faraj squinted. “The video game?”

  “Bit of an addict in college.”

  Faraj grinned. I tried to grin back but couldn’t, and after one more anxious look at the car, the two of us split up. I snuck across the gully to the left. Faraj disappeared to the right. When I reached the edge of the riverbed, I started moving slowly toward the car. The contours of its ebony form gradually emerged. I was approaching the left taillight; Faraj would be approaching the right. The tinted rear window looked black as the trunk, with a thin, dull film coating all of it.

  Nothing moved.

  I crept closer, both hands gripping the Mak out in front of me. The gun was shaking absurdly. I tried to remember to breathe. Lifting a shoulder, I wiped the sting of grit from my eye. Sprawling thistle bushes scraped my feet. I kept glued to the doors of the car.

  Faraj had yet to appear. I paused for a moment to wait for him and guardedly observe the Mercedes. Its nose had nestled in a steep sloping dune, the base of the wall of the gully. In the wind I could hear no idling engine, nor detect any exhaust fumes. Indentations in the sand around the car appeared to be recent footprints. I moved slowly closer, straining to see where they led.

  A
thick gust suddenly swept past the car, and like an apparition, Faraj appeared, approaching the Mercedes with his shotgun. He glanced at me briefly but kept on walking. Right up to the passenger door.

  I started to call out to him.

  Faraj threw open the door, aiming his gun inside. I sighted down my pistol barrel, finger on the trigger.

  Nothing.

  No assassins. No shots. No screams.

  Faraj looked over at me and shook his head, “no.” I lowered my gun with a sigh of relief, and walked on over to the car. Faraj was looking in the passenger side. I opened the driver’s door.

  The interior reeked of cigarette smoke, the ashtray erupting with butts. I noticed two empty cans of caviar on the dash, and between the two seats, bread crumbs on a flattened paper bag, and three drained bottles of soda.

  The back seats were empty.

  Faraj picked a sheet of paper up off the floor. “Your map,” he said, handing it over. It was the same as Maya’s, but in a different hand, copied on a blank sheet ripped from Dan’s sketchbook. Oriana had made it when she pilfered the original from my backpack on the plane from Istanbul.

  Faraj opened the rear passenger door. A man’s white dress shirt had been tossed onto the floor. Faraj held it up to me, grimacing in disgust.

  I shuddered. The front and sleeves were covered with blood.

  It belongs to the one in the T-shirt, I thought. The smoker. The laugher. The wiry little runt.

  The only question now: Who had he killed?

  I peered warily into the blowing mist around us, wondering if he was out there. Footprints mottled the sand at my feet; I tried to discern a direction.

  “Jack?”

  Faraj stood at the back of the car, staring down grimly at something in the sand. Pulse pounding, I moved toward him, stepping through the mishmash of prints. On the ground below the bumper, upside down with its spike pointed skyward, lay a woman’s high-heeled shoe. I squatted down and gently extracted it from the sand.