The Assassin Lotus

by David Angsten

  “It’s a lie!”

  “Faraj’s father fucked your mother, and your father killed them both.”

  “Lies!”

  “Lies?” The razor edge of the crescent softly sliced across my belly. “Is that all you can say? Where’s the fancy words now? Quotes from the Koran? Tell me again how proud you are of your father, the shahid, the murderer who avoided jail by joining the Basij—”

  “Stop—!”

  “Just one of thousands slaughtered in the human wave attacks. Another nameless casualty in another pointless war.”

  “My brother said—”

  “Your brother hid the truth. He wanted to protect you. Your ‘piety,’ your ‘virtue.’ Your dream of becoming an imam. But your friend Faraj spilled it all out in his rage at you in prison.” The point of the crescent dagger pierced the skin beneath my ribs. “Yet still you refused to listen.” He was going for my spleen. “Still you refuse to see—”

  A CRY CUT THE AIR like the shriek of a hawk. Startled, I stopped to listen. The utterance had undoubtedly been human. A silence followed, then voices. Two men in an argument beyond the dune ahead. Not English—Persian? One voice accusatory. The other seeming to plead.

  I raced up the dune to its wind-carved crest. Peering over, I saw them in the shadowed depression below. A bearded man with two daggers—the Assassin, Ali Mahbood—was advancing over Faraj, who scrambled on his backside along a freshly dug pit.

  The pit resembled a grave. It lay at the base of an ancient ruin, a 20-foot-high stupa of creamy, crumbled brick. Rising roundly by tiers to a flat-topped peak, the great mound stood surrounded by a decaying courtyard wall, half drowning under undulated dunes. Two saddled camels stood just beyond the wall, indifferent to the goings-on within.

  Faraj had been stabbed and was bleeding. On his knees now at the edge of the pit, he seemed to be imploring the Assassin to spare him.

  Where was Dr. Fiore? I wondered. Already buried?

  My pulse pounded frantically, fear now riding on a razor’s edge of panic. I slipped off my duffel bag and pulled the kukri knife. The wooden handle slithered in my grip. My hand was shaking violently.

  MAHBOOD STOOD ABOVE ME, boot dagger in his left hand, my Damascene in his right.

  “I betrayed no one,” I said. “The Hindi...the American...it was they who killed Arshan.”

  “Of course. Your friends.”

  “No...I swear—”

  “They were listening, in Rome. To every cell phone call. That’s how they got our numbers—”

  “Who?”

  “Who?” He laughed. “The Christians In Action, you idiot. Your friends—the CIA!”

  STEALTH. SURPRISE. He doesn’t know I’m here.

  Staying hidden, I slid feet-first back down the slope and crept around the dune toward the stupa. The two men, concealed now behind the courtyard wall, became a pair of disembodied voices. I crawled to the wall and crabbed along its base, heading toward the place where I could breach it—a wind-blown sand-heap reaching to its rim. I scrambled up and peered into the courtyard.

  Mahbood now had his back to me, with Faraj at his feet. Holding daggers firmly in each hand, he spoke as if delivering a death sentence. Faraj stared up dazedly, too feeble to resist, his hands struggling in vain to stop his bleeding.

  The fear now came alive in me, the hairy worm erupting like a chrysalis in birth. Cracking, unfreezing, it burst in fluttering spasms through my belly and my limbs, wings beating frantically, urging me to run away—or take the plunge and fight.

  Now. The moment. What I had to do.

  88.

  Now

  THE FEAR TOOK ME WITH IT, an exhilarating wave, propelling me up over the wall and down the leeward slope. I charged toward the Assassin, raising up my kukri like a madman with an axe. All thought fled. The sudden storm of energy completely overwhelmed me. Surging like the rush of some enormous, flowing force, it carried me along with it, propelling me into what seemed a kind of parallel dimension. A tunnel out of mind. Dreamlike, yet real. At once floating beyond myself, watching from above, while racing in slow motion through a tidal wave of terror. Would I live? Would I die? Did it even matter? The only thing that mattered was to kill the Hashishin.

  Down hard through the skull—

  Faraj’s gaze shifted as he saw me rushing toward them. Mahbood sensed me coming and whirled—

  I brought the knife down hard and straight, but did not strike his skull. His Damascene dagger, its blade a crescent hook, caught the kukri with a clash and sheered the steel aside.

  The deflection sent me careening and the knife flew from my grip. I tumbled into the pile of sand dug up from the pit. Grit stung my eye. My vision suddenly blurred. Looking over I saw Faraj rise up to defend me, but Mahbood quickly turned and slashed the dagger across his chest.

  Faraj collapsed. The Assassin turned to me.

  A cold terror struck my heart. I am going to die.

  He moved slowly toward me. I tried to focus through the tunnel vision of my fear. His brow brimmed with sweat. The sun glared behind him and his face fell into shadow. Only his piercing eyes shone clear.

  The eyes darted toward my knife, half-buried in the sand. I leapt across and grabbed it, but when I tried to stand up, my left ankle gave way and the leg quickly collapsed. A warm numbness suffused my foot. Had the ankle somehow twisted? I looked down to see a gash across the backside of my boot. Blood was filling up the heel and leaking out the slit. Mahbood had slashed the tendon between the heel and the calf. The touch of his dagger had been so swift I’d neither seen nor felt it.

  He moved toward me now in silhouette, like an elongating shadow. Slowly, unhurriedly, as if in pity for me—or savoring my death. His gleaming eyes betrayed a kind of single-minded madness. The fervor of a predator intent upon its prey. The unflinching concentration of a psychopath.

  Soma, I thought. The man had drunk the Kool-Aid. He had the very same look on his face that Dan had displayed at the temple. Calm, steel-eyed certainty.

  Anand had warned me not to fight, not with him residing in that deep, dark place. Untrained, unskilled, now injured, I had only one chance against the invincible jihadi: goad him out of his god-like state and exploit his own ego to kill him.

  I scrambled away on my backside just as Faraj had before me, dragging my useless foot through the sand, clutching the kukri knife, until I backed against the cold mound dug up from the pit. Glancing into the gloomy hole, I saw that it was empty.

  The Assassin stepped before me, his daggers dripping blood. Full of strength. Sharp-weaponed. Irresistible in battle.

  My heart thrashed inside me like an animal encaged. My legs shook uncontrollably. I uttered some fretful noise like the bleating of a sheep.

  “You are slain already,” he said, his mocking voice serene.

  I pressed back against the mound and tightened my grip on the kukri.

  He glanced at the Gurkha knife and grinned. “Bravest of the brave?” He made a show of sharpening his crescent dagger’s edge by swiping his short blade back and forth across it. “Do you know what I do to brave men?”

  I flashed on Saar’s corpse.

  “Tell me something, Gurkha. Tell me if it’s true.” He tossed aside the short blade and felt his crescent’s edge. “Is it really better to die than be a coward?”

  He peered into my eyes, waiting for my reply.

  Do it now, I told myself. Do it now or die.

  I spit in the Assassin’s face.

  He stopped. Stunned. The gob of spittle trickling. Momentary disbelief transforming into anger. In that very instant, as he bristled into rage, I launched a punch with all my strength, aiming the kukri at his heart.

  The blade cracked through his ribcage, plunging deep into his chest, until it stuck in hard bone, a sudden, stony stop. Had it struck his spine? I did not try to pull it out, but backed away in horror.

  No blood at all came out at first. Everything seemed frozen. The embedded blade, the bulging eyes, the vis
age gaunt with shock. He stood for several seconds staring blindly into space. Was he dead? I wondered. What is it he sees? Hell? Paradise? The forbidden face of Allah? Or Buddha’s unknowable nothingness, his truth at last unveiled.

  Whatever secret he saw remained so. As the dark bloom of red blood spread out from the blade, the Assassin dreamily dropped to his knees and toppled face-down in the sand.

  My gaze rose dizzily beyond him. There, against the wall, hidden in its shadow, sat a meditating, red-robed Buddha. I had been so focused on Faraj and Mahbood I had not seen him sitting there before. Recognition came with a shock. Fiore’s white-bearded face had been bloodied and the neck of his robe torn askew. Despite the killing that just occurred, he remained cross-legged in the lotus position, and his puffy eyes stayed shut. He did not appear to be breathing. In fact he sat so utterly motionless I thought he was probably dead.

  Faraj stirred under the shadow of the stupa. I started crawling toward him. An excruciating spasm electrified my leg. Blinding light seared a spiky circuit through my head. The contraction of the calf muscle had torn apart the tendon, and the pang sent a shockwave through me. I cried out and collapsed. My body started trembling and I broke into a sweat. Struggling to endure the pain, clutching at the sand, I swallowed up gulps of air and gaped in concentration, writhing finally onto my back and glaring up at the sky.

  Please, please…

  I waited for it to subside. Clenching fistfuls of sand. The sky peered down indifferently, an icy eyeball blue, while the creamy mound of Buddha’s bricks, an upturned breast of stone, offered dry succor to the empty air, a gesture as vain as my pleading.

  Another shadow fell over me. A beardless silhouette, Mahbood’s dagger in one hand, a goatskin flask in the other.

  “Faraj.”

  He continued staring down at me. Sweaty, bloody, grimacing, he looked on the brink of death.

  “Water,” I begged.

  It seemed to take a moment for the word to reach his ears. As if his mind were miles away, mulling some unanswered question. Or wondering how he had come to be here, in the desolate Taklimakan, the Sea of Death those wary caravans so long avoided.

  At last he dropped beside me and opened up the flask. I sucked from the goatskin greedily. The slaking of my thirst helped divert me from the pain. But when I suddenly realized the liquid wasn’t water, I shoved the thing away.

  “Soma?”

  A delay before he nodded.

  The torn tendon throbbed, sending tremors up my leg, nudging me to the border of unconsciousness. I clung to the sand. Praying for relief. Until...miraculously, the pain began to fade. Heat radiated from my belly through my throat. The warmth seemed to calm my body down.

  I sniffed the concoction. Sweet, herbaceous milk. Of heaven, of water, of thousand-fold wealth, who the gods have made for their drinking, most sweet-flavored, invigorating, dripping, honeyed, causing happiness—

  I drank. Great gulps of it. The answer to my prayers. God’s gift to the Aryans. The Hashishin’s’ “pure drink.”

  Warm juice trickled down my chin. Nodding thanks to Faraj, I gave the goatskin back. Faraj drank the last of it, then wiped his milky mouth.

  I stared at him. At his mouth.

  A scar above his lip.

  Faraj saw me staring. He rose up on his feet.

  My gaze drifted down to the dagger in his hand. Then climbed back up to his face. The face began to fade. “Faraj?”

  “No,” he said, his voice far off. “I killed Faraj in prison.”

  The words sounded wrong. Distant, distorted, nonsensical. Was that a bloody grimace, or was he actually grinning? His face had lost focus. The light had grown too dim.

  “Vanitar,” I whispered.

  Then it all went dark.

  89.

  Nirvana

  I AWOKE TO A NEARLY LIGHTLESS SKY, an inky cobalt blue. The sun had sunk behind the dunes, yet light still lingered on the summit of the stupa, which glowed like a golden throne. The twilight seemed to magnify the strangeness of the place. A tranquil silence permeated everything.

  My leg was still in pain but the pain seemed more remote, as if the wounded limb had been somehow disconnected, or my mind been uncoupled from my body. Fearing movement might dissipate this palliative illusion, I lay perfectly still on my back in the silence, peering up past the stupa at the emerging moon and stars, and savoring the sensation of spaciousness they seemed to unlock within me.

  The night I crossed the Caspian Sea, the stunning sight of the stars above had triggered a kind of panic, a terrifying realization of the never-ending emptiness of space. Now I experienced a similar astonishment, but here, in the last remaining ruins of the kingdom of Shambhala, the awe that had gripped me that night on the boat was replaced with a blissful calm, and the dark infinity of the blueness above seem to lift my soul into heaven. Everything emptied out of me—pain, fear, regret, desire—all faded in a fusion of inside and out, as if thought itself had disintegrated and the act of perception dissolved. All that remained was the One: the deep, darkening, infinite blue, brightened with glittering pinpoints of light and the wink of my own lunar eye.

  Tat tvam asi. That am I.

  I HAVE NO IDEA how long my state of cosmic bliss endured. It may have been mere seconds. Or a minute. Or an hour. But now a sound came to my ears that narrowed my awareness. A soft swish, or lashing sound. Gentle. Or cruel.

  Welcome back, I thought. Back to the world of time and pain. Back to the dream of samsara.

  90.

  Irresistible in Battle

  “GO DEEPER,” he’d told Mahbood. But how much deeper? The white-maned monk refused to say. He would not condescend to speak with me.

  What illusion in the Buddhist mind makes them think they are superior? They who have no fear of God—who have no God at all! Instead they talk of emptiness, and sit and drone like crickets. They let the Chinese steal their country, and now they wander the earth like Jews. They say everything is nothing and nothing is everything, then hold out their beggar’s bowl and instruct us on compassion.

  The old one sits there, eyes downcast, staring at the sand. No doubt he sees the universe in every little grain. But had he not seen Allah’s hand in the killing of Mahbood? How the naïve American—yet again—had acted as an unwitting instrument of God? And how my life once more was spared, while yet another liar was cast down into Hell?

  No. The Buddhist won’t see what’s right before him. Like a child, he hides behind his eyelids, pretending he’s invisible, that blindness makes him safe and that darkness is the Truth.

  But Truth is the light that comes down to us from Allah. I could feel it at that very moment filling up my soul.

  Leaning down, I whispered a quote from the Koran into the old monk’s bloody ear. “Truth has arrived, and falsehood perished, for falsehood is by its nature bound to perish.”

  With that, I took up the shovel and slowly climbed down into the hole.

  THE SWISHING SOUND was Faraj—Vanitar—shoveling sand from the pit. His head bobbed up from the hole with each expelling toss. Yet he was working slowly, seeming feeble and fatigued. I’d seen how badly he’d been cut. What was it kept him going? His desire for the seeds? Or fear of that deep darkness he kept hidden in his heart?

  Lying face-up now in the sand where he had fallen, with a slit in his chest where the knife had been removed, the man I had stabbed was no longer a man: it was a lifeless corpse. Beyond it, Fiore sat locked in the lotus posture. He looked like a bloodied Buddha sculpture propped against the wall. Was he breathing? I couldn’t tell. I prayed he wasn’t dead.

  Vanitar had taken the kukri, along with the crescent dagger. But across the sand lay the dead man’s short blade, casually discarded, the goatskin flaccid beside it. Given that I could neither stand nor walk, Vanitar must have assumed I was no longer any threat. But why had he given me the painkilling soma? To keep me from passing out? Why had he not simply killed me to avenge his brother’s death?

  Suddenly
I knew the answer. There could be only one reason for keeping me alive.

  FIVE FEET. STILL NOTHING. Does the monk tell lies with his silence?

  I will go one foot deeper. If that does not uncover it, I’ll open Duran, slowly, in front of the old monk’s face. The mute may shut his eyes to it, but the screams will make him speak.

  DRAGGING MY FOOT, I crawled toward the dagger, a dull gleam in the dark. Spasms of pain triggered lightning in my head. I winced but kept on moving; it seemed I had no choice: do what I must to protect myself or Vanitar will kill me.

  My severed tendon flared with pain, but the thought of dying sparked no corresponding flare of fear. Fear had emptied out of me. There was only what had to be done. I may have been down in the muck of things, but part of me clearly was not.

  Another pitch of sand settled on the pile beside the pit. I heard a dull clank, and turned to see that Vanitar had disappeared into the hole. With his obsessive single-mindedness and reckless lack of fear, the Hashishin had dug in over his head!

  JUST PAST SIX FEET the shovel struck a rock. A black rock, or so it appeared, until I got down on my hands and knees and brushed aside the sand. The flat, polished stone surface gleamed in the twilight, reflecting my dark silhouette against the sky above. Feverishly I clawed away the dense sand all around it. Oblong, a foot in length, several inches deep, the object finally came loose. I held it up for a look.

  A box made of black jade. Intricately engraved. The sliding lid locked in place. A keyhole with no key.

  AS I REACHED for the short-bladed dagger, I heard a cry from the hole, a howl of pain and anger. I grabbed the knife and hurriedly crawled—on one knee—toward the pit. My best chance to kill Vanitar would come as he tried to climb out.