by Nathan Swain
“It looks like we’re going to Iran,” Eastgate said.
He turned to Olivia. “OK?”
Olivia was terrified. As with so many adults her age, Iran’s Islamic Revolution and hostage crisis symbolized oppression, fear and terror. She still remembered the frightening images on her television when she was a child of scowling white-bearded ayatollahs ranting about the evils of liberal capitalism, and Westerners being led blindfolded through the streets of Tehran as thousands shouted “death to the imperialists!” Despite the color of her skin, Olivia always associated herself with the imperialists, and Iran was forever etched in her psyche as a place of extraordinary danger.
But Pearl was right. The Flaming Sword would find navigating Iran just as difficult as they did. And the chance of meeting Sandwith and learning more about the Flaming Sword was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
“When do we leave?”
Chapter 47
Perhaps it was because of Samir’s ineptitude on the M11 or because London was so vast, but Eastgate and Olivia had underestimated the Flaming Sword. Within twelve hours of Eastgate disabling Samir’s car, Eastgate and Olivia had been located by Samir’s men. In addition to serving as an ad hoc security force, the men functioned as a mini intelligence network, tapping informants across the city for information. They uncovered the location of the safe house just after Eastgate and Olivia returned from the British Library.
Samir was in London less than two hours after he got the news. With Eastgate and Olivia in his sites, he salivated over his options. Assassinate the American with a sniper rifle. Torture him in front of her. Hold him captive for a ransom the size of Cambridge’s endowment. The official line would be that the US does not negotiate with terrorists. But frequently they did, and Samir believed they would negotiate with him, if it came to that, to save their golden boy soldier. Such kidnapping helped to finance groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban. It was also why the West would ultimately fail, Samir believed. It didn’t have the will to stand up to political intimidation.
The big problem for the West, according to Reso, who lectured Samir on the topic endlessly, was television. It started with the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1967. The surprise attack by the North Vietnamese devastated US morale. Americans were told by the government that they were winning the war. Then, that horrible footage and news of the Tet onslaught came over their televisions. The government’s propaganda had never been so blatantly contradicted by reality. The country rebelled. The people wanted out of Vietnam. Casualties were no longer an option. At that moment, every guerilla group or insurgent cell in the world knew that it could defeat the US, not in the field, but on the nightly news. “Win the news cycle, and you win the war,” is how Reso had put it.
Samir fantasized about the inevitable pleas for mercy he would hear from the American as he and four of his men stood at the ledge of the roof of the Hotel Andromeda, across the street from the safe house. His breath condensed and swirled in the chill night air. His thoughts then ran to Olivia. What will I do with her after she’s captured? Will father allow me to take her as a concubine? Or should I sell her to a Ukrainian sex trafficker or Afghan warlord?
The minute hand of his watch lurched forward. With a short intake of breath, Samir jumped. The American would be dead in five minutes. Olivia would be under Samir’s control. The Garden of Eden would be safe once more.
But Samir had not counted on Pearl. Just as the intelligence network of Samir’s father had tracked Eastgate and Olivia to the safe house, Pearl’s own web of informants across London began vibrating with counter-surveillance information. It was a circuit of relationships, favors and quid pro quos. Whoever had the most leverage received the best information.
When Samir swung down on ropes from the top of the safe house apartment building and crashed through its windows, the only hint of the apartment’s inhabitants were cartons of Chinese food sitting on the table, and a note, which read:
“Please help yourself to the leftovers.”
One of the men laughed hysterically at the note. Furious, Samir picked up a handful of egg rolls and hurled them at the cars parked on the street below.
Chapter 48
In the pre-war world, there were many ways to enter Turkey—from Greece or Bulgaria along the Mediterranean, or through Bulgaria or Azerbaijan along the Black Sea. Deadly conflict between Turkey and the Kurds made passage from Iraq and Syria more perilous. Still, it could be done with the right fixer.
For Eastgate and Olivia, each of those routes had its problems. Greece and Bulgaria closely watched the Turkish border. If they discovered Eastgate and Olivia, other EU countries—including the UK—would find out. Kurdish Iraq was secured by Kurdish and US forces, which Eastgate couldn’t trust. And Syria was adjacent to US ships patrolling the Mediterranean and to US ally Israel. As a result, it was crawling with US intelligence assets.
It was not as if Iran was an oasis of peace and security. The country’s Revolutionary Guard was training Shia insurgents to wreak havoc in Iraq. There were already reports of skirmishes between Iran and the US forces that patrolled the Iraq-Iran border. But Iran was Eastgate and Olivia’s best worst choice. It had become all but impossible for Americans to obtain a visa into Iran. The US had virtually no intelligence assets on the ground. If the US government was tracking Eastgate, they would most likely lose his scent in Iran. If they didn’t, he still had an advantage—he spoke Farsi.
Pearl outfitted Eastgate and Olivia with new passports and purchased airplane tickets on a commercial flight to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He used the credit card number of an old client, a Kuwaiti sheik, who had been dead for years. Thanks to Pearl, the account remained open.
From Tashkent, Pearl arranged passage to Iran across the Caspian Sea on an oil tanker, the Tamarind. The captain of the ship received a wire of $25,000 and was instructed to ask no questions about the mysterious couple occupying his cabin. Eastgate and Olivia posed as Canadian academics doing research. The fake identities cost Pearl $20,000.
But as the cargo ship arrived, it was not the details of their escape that occupied Eastgate’s mind. Despite everything he had told himself, and his best efforts to remain focused on the mission at hand, he could not help but think of the soft touch and glittering smile of Tadita Saatchi.
Chapter 49
Eastgate and Olivia emerged from Rah Ahan Square train station in the rough outer edges of south Tehran. An orange haze lingered overhead. The streets were clogged with a throng of cars spewing clouds of exhaust. The drab, coffee-colored Alborz Mountains to the north were barely perceptible through the fog.
“Not exactly Valhalla,” Olivia said.
“More like Gary, Indiana,” Eastgate observed.
Situated in the north of Iran, Tehran was chosen in the eighteenth century to serve as the capital of the Persian Empire. The isolation and economic ruin wrought on the country by the Islamic Revolution, an eight-year war with Iraq, and devastating sanctions imposed by the West, had clearly taken a toll on what was once among the great cities of the world.
The driver in the silver Peugeot who was supposed to meet them at the station never showed, so Eastgate and Olivia set off on foot down Valiasr Street—Tehran’s Champs Elysee. Valiasr ran north-south, dividing the city into affluent and poor, religious and less-religious. Thousands of sycamore trees lined the great boulevard on both sides. Street gutters carried snowmelt north from the mountains through the city. The water, which began its journey clear and fresh, turned a sooty brown as it flowed south through the crowded, smog-covered neighborhoods.
Eastgate scanned the intersection outside the train station. Every woman in sight was covered from head to toe with a flowing black chador cloth, and several were cocooned in manteau trench coats. Eastgate had served in Afghanistan and trained in Saudi Arabia and was no stranger to the suffocating attire of women in Islamic countries. But the women in Tehran managed to carry these sartorial burdens with flare. Several applied elaborate face ma
keup, with multi-colored eye shadow and bright red lipstick. Their eyebrows were expertly manicured, breaking in sharp right angles above chestnut brown eyes.
Olivia wore a black manteau over purple corduroys and a black blouse. A headscarf hung loosely over her long black hair. An old man towed a wheelbarrow of oranges down a path. Another, wearing lime green corduroys, played old Persian tunes on an ancient accordion to the bored commuters stuck in traffic. Olivia jogged to the intersection, ready to plunge into the city life, seemingly forgetting—for just a moment—the manhunt that had overtaken her life.
But she and Eastgate were stymied by a wall of traffic ten-lanes deep. Sensing their naiveté, a portly woman in a solid-black chador grabbed Olivia by the hand and lead them through the phalanx of speeding cars. To Eastgate, it seemed like the drivers were trying to hit them. One car sent the grocery bag of the woman flying, clipping it with its side mirror. The woman stood there for five minutes, cursing the car to scorn, leaving Olivia and Eastgate to navigate the last part themselves.
After walking for half an hour, they finally found a taxi in central Tehran. It was just in time. Watchful eyes canvassed the tiny streets and alleyways of the city center. Some belonged to protective mothers and aunties of religious families, hoping to catch their daughters—or better yet, the daughters of their neighbors—speaking too familiarly with boys. Most belonged to two more menacing groups: the Gasht-e Ershad, Tehran’s morality police who detained and reeducated young women who wore their hair too garishly or cut their blouses too low, and the Ettela’at, officers from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. With tips from the mothers and aunties, they knew about everything that happened in central Tehran.
It took another half hour of fighting traffic before their taxi reached northern Tehran. More posh than the dowdy and religious south, and less uptight than the city center, the neighborhood smelled like a mixture of oiled leather and rich spices. Residents were too busy with work to pry into the affairs of others. Like New Yorkers, Eastgate had been informed, northern Tehranis were experts at avoiding eye contact.
Eastgate wondered if Tadita lived nearby. Would he see her walking down the street right now? Would she recognize him after all these years? “Your golden retriever-good looks,” Tadita used to say about Eastgate’s blonde hair and easy smile. But a lot had changed since then.
They first met in Washington, D.C. at a party for summer interns. She worked as a docent at the Sackler/Freer gallery. He was a staffer for his Georgia congressman—a six-handicap client of his father.
Tadita’s parents left Iran as part of the diaspora of Iranian elite when the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah. Some Iranians came to the US. Others went to France or the UK. The Saatchis fled to Sweden.
Like so many Scandinavians, Tadita spoke several languages. She also thought all Americans were philistines. Her experience as a docent at the galleries, having to minister to the inane needs of the sneaker-and-fanny-pack set, only solidified her impression. Until she met Eastgate. She quickly realized that his boyish demeanor belied a sharp intellect and curious mind. Eastgate picked up some Persian instruction audio cassettes from the library. It’s all they spoke together. In a few months, he was able to carry on a conversation with her parents over the telephone. By August, he was writing her Farsi love sonnets on paper napkins over dinner.
But when September rolled around, their summer romance came to an inevitable end. Tadita promised to visit the US again soon. Eastgate spoke of surprise visits to Sweden. But nothing came of it. They both had a lot more runway in their lives before settling down.
Predictably, Tadita became an academic, locking down an assistant professorship teaching Medieval Persian Art at University of California, Berkeley. But Eastgate learned a few years ago from mutual friends that Tadita had abruptly left Berkeley and moved to Iran. It was shocking news. Tadita abhorred Islam. Her parents were secular Persians. Eastgate remembered Tadita saying she was more likely to join the church of a televangelist than follow the edicts of the Iran’s Supreme Leader.
Memories of their summer together, feelings of joy and regret and unanswered questions marched through Eastgate’s mind as the taxi sputtered to a stop in front of the hotel where he and Olivia hoped to rest.
Only a moment after checking into the hotel, the concierge handed him a handwritten note. It was Tadita’s writing. In an instant, Eastgate realized that his fixation on Tadita since arriving in Tehran was not just sentimentality. It was a premonition. The note read:
Dear Will,
You finally decided to visit me after all these years. Would you join me today for lunch at my apartment? No. Thirty, Kooshk e Mesra Street, North of Imam Khomeini square. 1 p.m.
Your devoted, T.
Chapter 50
Eastgate thought it was probably the ship captain who sold them out. He had taken a special interest in them from the start. Contrary to Pearl’s instruction to the captain that he ignore Eastgate and Olivia, it seemed that every time Eastgate looked up, the captain was watching, eyeing them suspiciously as he chewed on the nub of a cigar. Eastgate knew from past experience that merchant mariners were not to be trusted. They made their money smuggling contra band and bribing customs officials. Why had Pearl trusted this one?
“He probably speed-dialed a bureaucrat in the Iranian government the minute we docked,” Eastgate groused to Olivia.
What really puzzled Eastgate was Tadita’s involvement. How had she found out about them? Was she a friend or an enemy? Tadita’s disappearance from the US had been so mysterious, many of her friends thought she had been thrown in prison due to her subversive beliefs. But rumors circulated among Berkeley faculty that the reverse had happened—that she had undergone a religious conversion and now worked for the government as a high level official. The fact that her home address was in the central government district in Tehran seemed to support the theory.
As Olivia showered, Eastgate set off from the hotel to meet Tadita. It was not the kind of neighborhood in which a Special Forces soldier would normally choose to take an afternoon stroll. The shadow of the Ministry of Justice loomed overhead. Republican Guardsmen assembled in a nearby park. The streets bustled with men in business suits carrying briefcases. A bunch of bureaucrats, Eastgate suspected. But the term bureaucrat—which conjured images of bloated, weary paper pushers in the US—meant something very different here. In Iran, bureaucrats were murderers.
Still, there was little Eastgate could do to avoid trouble at this point. By now, his presence was well known to the authorities and whatever action they intended to take against him and Olivia had already been decided. He chose to be optimistic, to believe in Tadita.
Staring at the door to Tadita’s apartment, Eastgate’s heart raced. Did I feel this way the night of our first date? Was my heart beating even faster then, or have I lost my nerve over the years when it comes to love? Tadita cooked for him that night. Eastgate remembered the tangy aroma of saffron that filled the apartment. They lay on her futon couch for hours. She let her long, black hair fall down her slender back.
Fast forward ten years, it was a surreal feeling as Eastgate raised his arm and ordered the knuckles on his hand to scrape against the door. It must have taken only a few moments, but felt like an hour, before a woman, older but more beautiful than he remembered, opened the door, and with an ivory smile, and a brush of her long, black hair from her shoulder, said:
“Will, my darling, how wonderful to see you.”
Eastgate was buffeted with the cross currents of the past and present, his affection for Tadita, his doubts about her motives now and the intentions of her government. And then the familiar aroma of saffron enveloped his senses, inviting him to relax. “You’re in luck. Guess what I’m making for lunch?”
“Chelo Kabaab. You remembered.”
“Yes, but that’s not the only reason I made it,” Tadita said, arching her eyebrows. “It’s still the only dish I know how to cook.”
She laughed. Eastgate
smiled. She was as charming as ever. Hardly the personality of an apparatchik to the ayatollah.
“It’s almost done,” Tadita said, disappearing in her kitchen.
A Mexican telenovela played on the television in her living room, broadcast by Farsi I, the Dubai-based satellite television channel. Eastgate caught of a glimpse of himself in a full-length mirror on the wall. He had ditched his regular uniform of khaki pants and blue canvas button down for a stylish pair of gray slacks and violet cashmere V-neck sweater. His bifocals—which Tadita always loved, for some reason—sat on the bridge of his nose. Not bad for a man on the run.
Returning from the kitchen, Tadita removed the top of a silver tray as she walked. Underneath was a steaming pillow of saffron basmati rice sprinkled with red powdered Sumac and circled by grilled tomatoes. Next, she carried a soltani—two skewers of marinated lamb and beef kababs with onions and olive oil. She placed both skewers on the rice and expertly pulled them out while holding down the chunks of meat with a handful of bread.
“Do you still like doogh?” Tadita asked, carrying two glasses of the sour yogurt drink.
“It’s been a while.”
Tadita invited Eastgate to sit down but he continued to stand.
“You must have been shocked to receive my note today?”
“I didn’t receive your note. Professor Steven Larmer of the Ontario School of Botany received your note.”
She laughed. “You could never pass for a scientist.”
Eastgate moved closer to Tadita. “Oh no? Why not?”
“No patience,” she said, matter-of-factly, as if she was stating an objective fact and not mere opinion.
She knew him well, even after all these years.
Eastgate drew Tadita to him and wrapped his arms around her. The urge to brush aside her curls and kiss the skin on her neck, as he had done so many years before, was intense. Instead, he merely whispered in her ear.
