The Ayatollah's Money
Page 40
Chapter 40 – Assassins: The Colonel, The Lieutenant, and the The Private
The three Guard Elite Assassination Corps soldiers stood at the baggage claim area of Heathrow Airport, waiting with the other passengers who had been on the plane with them from Cairo. Just as there are no diplomatic relations and everyday communications between the countries, there aren’t any direct flights from Tehran to London. Colonel Aliaabaadi had brought his two top assassins with him on the mission, Lewy The Lieutenant and Priss The Private. Both of these guys were top-of-the-line badass, stone cold killers. For his final initiation into the Guard Elite Assassination Corps, Lewy had strangled a decrepit old camel with his bare hands, cut out its tongue, and eaten it right there in front of the rest of the graduation class. He had worked his way up from private to lieutenant through his successful assassination of three women who had claimed to be virtuous to other domestic flunkys from the central compound who, like Shazam, often were tasked to procure terrestrial virgins for Lesser Ayatollahs who, like The Big Guy, didn’t want to embarrass themselves when finally presented with their fortyvirginsforever harem of celestial virgins and required to perform their eternal and heavenly duties. These guys felt compelled to train on the terrestrial models, however imperfect they might be and however tiresome such training might be.
The number of Lessers varied at any one time according to the direction of the political winds. Lessers were advanced from the status of Much Lessers when and if they accomplished three requirements: they deposited an adequate sum of American dollars into the personal account of the Head Lesser; they did a really big favor for The Big Guy, like recruiting a North Korean crazy nuke scientist to come and work in one of the reactors for a while; and they found a hole in the economic sanctions blockade that allowed a shipment of some cultural necessity, toilet paper, say, to slip through and fill up the shelves of the city shops.
When there were a lot of Lessers in the ranks, the burden on the flunkies of finding training virgins could be quite heavy, and sometimes those flunkies less skilled in procuring this in-demand commodity had to resort to subterfuge. They would enlist women who they knew weren’t virgins, and attempt to train them to act like virgins, what with a lot of crying and acting afraid and stuff like that. Some of the women were good at acting, and some weren’t, and when one was found to be faking her virtue, depending on the mood of the Lesser who had found her out, she was taken out into the desert and placed at the disposal of the Guard Elite Assassination Corps. The student assassins could practice their trade on mannequins and dummies only so many times before they got tired and demoralized, and when that time came their instructors had to resort to the real thing, which sometimes happened to be a fake virgin. Lewy had been blessed with three of these opportunities, and at the completion of the third mission, had been promoted to Lieutenant.
At one time the instructors of the Guard Elite Assassination Corps Academy had attempted to provide their students with training fodder in the form of captured Israeli commandos, but that hadn’t worked out too well. Once, the instructors had amputated both arms and legs of one of these commandos before leading the Guard Corps student into the room for his real life training exercise, and the Israeli still had managed to kill the prospective assassin.
Priss The Private had only one successful assassination under his belt, that of one of the domestic flunkies in the central compound who had gotten caught watering down his Lesser’s stash of Absolute Vodka. This guy would siphon off half the bottle into empty coke cans, replace the vodka with water, and sell the vodka to the domestic of one of the other Lessers, who would pour it into an empty vodka bottle he'd gotten out of a dumpster behind the central compound’s maintenance area, and then provide his master with a medicinal ablution when the master had had a particularly hard day denying the female segment of the population some right or privilege afforded by divine fiat only to the male segment of the population. The thieving flunky had gotten caught when his counterpart flunky squealed on him because the thieving flunky's sister had slapped the counterpart flunky when he tried to take what was rightfully his in the stairwell of the laundry building where the sister perfected her career of ironing all the Lesser’s boxer shorts.
Priss had been given the assignment of assassinating the flunky as his final exam requirement for graduation into the Guard Elite, and he had carried out this requirement using an unusual method. On the day of the exam he and the condemned flunky had been taken into the Academy auditorium, per the usual procedure, and put on the stage in front of his classmates and instructors and a few of the Lessers who enjoyed this sort of thing. In front of them was a table on which ceremoniously were laid out the tools of the trade: piano wire garrote, US Army 45 caliber Colt handgun, Iranian version of the Bowie knife, short handled double bitted axe, and a small flamethrower. The candidate assassin had his choice of weapon. Priss wasn’t called Priss for nothing, and when he saw the table with the choice of weapons on it, he blanched, on the inside. He’d made it through the Academy so far on his brains rather than his brawn, and called on these brains now to get him out of having to torch the flunky to a crisp with the flamethrower, however much the little vodka thieving rat deserved it.
He closed his eyes, thought for a moment, opened them, and called his instructor to the stage, where he whispered something in his ear. The instructor looked shocked, but then smiled and nodded. He went to the podium where he removed the clear plastic sheeting that had been duck taped over it in case there was an excessive spray of blood from the victim, tapped on the microphone, and said, “There will be a five minute recess while we add another weapon to the selection on the table.” This was very unusual, and the other students and instructors turned to each other asking what was up. The Lessers in the audience didn’t like the delay because they knew they were supposed to be conducting important affairs of state and not hanging out here for recreational purposes, but the delay also intrigued them, so they hung around. Five minutes later three of the Academy instructors led a captured Israeli commando onto the stage, handcuffed and shackled at the waist, and placed him next to the weapons table. Again going to the podium the instructor said, “The weapon requested by the student has been added to the choices at the table," and he then retaped the plastic sheeting so that it covered the podium.
Priss went to the table, took the commando by the arm, and led him to the center of the stage where the condemned flunky sat tied on a wooden chair. Everyone in the auditorium wondered what was up with this performance, this being really unusual and interesting. Priss took a deep breath, leaned close to the Israeli, and whispered into his ear. When he finished he retreated ten steps and watched. The commando turned around, looked at the vodka thief, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and….in a single focused effort of will power….snapped the handcuffs apart, snapped each handcuff from the chain around his waist, crouched, and flicked out his right leg and foot, catching the flunky in his adams apple and crushing his larynx. The flunky gasped, choked and suffocated to death in two minutes, sliding from the chair, eyes wide open. The commando then ran to the table, grabbed the flamethrower, turned and jumped off the stage, ran up the center aisle of the auditorium blasting students and Lessers to the right and the left, and exited through the rear doors.
That was the last time the Academy ever let one of the students request a special weapon. When all the excitement was over the instructor went up to Priss and asked, “What in hell did you whisper to the Jew?”
“I told him I’d heard the guy in the chair behind him say that Woody Allen can’t write a funny joke, Albert Einstein was overrated in the brains department, Paulette Goddard couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag, Rodgers and Hammerstein were hacks in the songwriting department, and Marcel Proust couldn’t write a decent novel to save his life.”
“That’s all? You pretended the thief had dissed a bunch of famous Jews, and you got that result?”
“I a
lso said the guy in the chair claimed Israeli commandos fool around with their sisters, their mother, and some, with both.”
“That’s all?”
“That seemed to be enough, Sir. I didn’t want to irritate the guy too much.”
The upshot of the ceremony was that Priss passed his final exam, graduated magna cum laude from the Academy, and was posted to the Guard Elite as a Private. From that point on he didn’t carry out any more assassinations, but proved himself valuable to the Guard in the capacity of psychological warfare officer, and it was in that capacity that he had been assigned by The Colonel to the squad whose mission was to exact revenge on Laleh Khorram, retrieve the People’s money, and restore intact The Aya’s retirement nest egg. And that was why he stood watching the baggage carousel go round and round, standing shoulder to shoulder with all these nasty infidels in this nasty infidelish country of Church of England believers, waiting for The Colonel to tell him what the hell was going on and what he was supposed to do now. The Colonel was not big on communicating mission goals ahead of time, being a practitioner of that branch of retrograde employee management philosophy that believed keeping employees in the dark as much as possible left said managers with the largest quotient of control over said employees. When their bags appeared in front of them he said, “C’mon, boys, we got people to find, people to kill.”