Chapter 46 – The Killers Arrive
The boys from Tehran were met at the Charleston airport by Hablibi, who’d been sent down from Washington DC to act as liaison between them and American culture. The Iranian Embassy, such as it was in DC, a small sandstone building which had the insides of all the windows painted black, had sent Hablibi at The Colonel’s request. The Colonel hated the idea of giving even an iota of power to anyone outside the Guard Elite Assassination Corps, and especially to a diplomat, but his better judgment told him he had to rely on someone who had experience dealing with the American infidels on their home turf, this playground of all that was unholy and morally twisted in the world; this festering swamp of gluttonous mange that infected the planet, the lowly place ultimately destined to serve as training ground for that more perfect playground festooned with fortyvirginsforever for every true believer.
On the long plane ride over from London, Lewy The Lieutenant and Priss The Private had discussed that playground for several hours. Priss leaned close to Lewy and asked his older comrade and superior officer, “What’s with the number forty? Where’d that come from exactly; I’ve never figured that out or actually read it in the Koran? I mean, we’re talking eternal paradise here, the land of languishing pleasure and truth, where everything and everyone is perfect. How can one virgin be different or better than another? Perfection is perfection, right, so one perfect virgin should be enough to serve one perfect male believer.”
Lewy’s brain went into an overdrive of ambivalence at this, on the one hand wondering where such a weird thought had come from in this youngster, on another hand thinking it was kind of interesting in a perverted sort of way, and on a third hand hoping no one in the seats behind them or ahead of them had heard it, him guessing it wasn’t a common topic of conversation on planes flying between London and Atlanta, Georgia, the Peach State. Lewy doubted there was a single virgin extant in either of those tainted metropolises. It was a question that deserved an answer, however, him having responsibility for mentoring the younger assassin in all manners of life, from spiritual conundrums to practical methods of silent strangulation. He gave it his best theological effort, and said, “It’s like this. Eternity is a long time, right? And so performing our sacred duty of servicing one virgin, forever and ever, eventually might lead to a sense of monotony on the part of one or both parties. So when Allah set this system up way back when, him being a pragmatic guy as well as a perfectly spiritual guy, decided he couldn’t in all conscience bring his believers into this paradise with even the most remote possibility of creating dissatisfaction. He looked at it this way: it doesn’t matter if a guy does it twice a week, or four times a week or six times, it’s possible over the long haul of eternity that the guy might get bored. He figured out there had to be some variation in the banquet in order to keep perfect order in his perfect paradise. Ergo, there had to be more than one virgin per guy. It just goes to common sense.” And he opened another package of peanuts.
Priss thought for a few moments, interspersed with checking how many packages of peanuts he had left, and said, “Ok, so I see the point of needing some diversity and variation to keep the troops happy and peace in the kingdom. But why forty? I mean, if you do the math and multiply four times a week by forty babes and divide that figure into eternity, the answer isn’t THAT much different than if you multiple the four times a week by ten babes and divide it into eternity. Clearly the answer is four times as much fun, but when you put that into the big picture of screwing forever and ever, the difference seems inconsequential.” And he opened his last package.
At this juncture of the conversation, which again Lewy hoped was private and was not being recorded by someone in back of them holding an IPhone towards their seats, Lewy realized fully why Priss had been assigned to the psychological warfare branch of the Guard Elite and not the hit squad that actually did the strangling and the poisoning and the throat-slitting. He tried to wrap his head around Priss’s argument, but when he delved into the math and tried to ascertain the exact difference between getting laid four times a week by one chick for eternity and four times a week stretched out over forty chicks for eternity, things got gooey in his mind. Was the difference quantitative, or qualitative? How do you quantify eternity? What about the chicks? Do they perform differently if they have sole responsibility for satisfying the male than if they are one of a squadron of forty which collectively has that sacred responsibility? Lewy realized not only were these weighty matters indeed, but they may be more than his as yet unperfected mind could tabulate. He had no doubt whatsoever that when his day in this rat hole of an existence came to an end, perhaps with one of his victims turning the table on him with a greater level of skill and dexterity, and sticking the knife up under HIS ribs rather than being on the receiving end, he would transmigrate into a state of perfect thought and understanding, when the answer to Priss’s question would became crystal clear, as Allah always had planned and taught his children (male children). Lewy didn’t feel at all intimidated by Priss, or feel inferior in any way, him knowing that the duties of the assassination soldier always have been and always will be superior to those of the thinking class. He said in a way that told Priss the conversation was over, at least for the time being, here on a 747 in close proximity to 350 infidels with black ink flowing in their veins, “Don’t sweat it. Screwing a celestial virgin for eternity, whether it’s the same one or just one of a squadron of forty, is going to be great. It’ll be nothing like screwing a terrestrial virgin, nothing like that at all. MUCH better. We practice with the sludge here so we can try to keep up with the angelic ones over there. It’s our duty to try. Don’t get bogged down in details about dividing this into that and adding something to nothing. Doesn’t apply over there. It’s all good.” He looked sternly at Priss and continued, “What you have to worry about is getting over to there, and that takes doing a good job back here, killing people like all these sludge monsters we’re surrounded by right now. We got a mission to perform, which The Colonel is going to tell us about when we get to this sludge pond called Charleston. Be ready. Be strong. Be nasty.” And he smiled at the stewardess, asked, “Any more peanuts, hon?”
Hablibi hadn’t heard this conversation on the plane, so he didn’t have any clue as to what kind of guys he now had in his rental car driving down the expressway from the airport into town. When the Iranian ambassador to the US had given him this assignment two days earlier, telling him he had to babysit three guys from the Guard Elite Assassination Corps on a secret mission here, immediately he wondered what guys like that talked about. He knew what the guys in his office were like and what they talked about at the blacked out embassy, but he’d never met an assassin before, though of course he knew of their existence, and even had heard of the Guard Elite Assassination Corps. Were these guys normal or abnormal? How many people had these three guys killed? What was a normal quota for an accomplished, full-performance level assassin? Three? Thirty? A hundred? Jesus. Do they ever sleep when on a mission, or do they just fuel themselves with strange experimental drugs? Do they ever go to a soccer match, or eat out at a restaurant, watch a soap opera on TV? Do they have to pay taxes like everyone else? He was a little scared at the prospect of meeting them and having to teach them about American culture so they could be successful in their mission, but at the same time he hoped it would be interesting and maybe a little exciting to see them in action. His own job of spying on the infidels had its moments, but in large part it was boring, listening to peoples phone calls and reading their emails. Occasionally a package would come in that would have to be delivered somewhere, and he’d be told to put on his face mask and take it to such and such an address, and be reminded not to breath very deeply in the vicinity of the package, but that was about as exciting as things got for him.
As he took the exit off the expressway the thought occurred to him that if they were successful in their mission, and he was sure
the Guard Elite wouldn’t send out anyone that wasn't completely competent at their job, he might then be able to consider himself to be an assassin because he now was part of their team, even if only in a support role. Wow, to be both a spy and an assassin, that would be cool. Support personnel are very important; think of delta force teams without their cooks; they’d be nothing. Hablibi had been given a generous allowance by his boss for the mission, the boss not wanting to take a chance on offending anyone from the Guard Elite Assassination Corps, for obvious reasons. The team was flush and Hablibi decided he was going to blow the wad, so he headed for the Charleston Place Hotel on King Street, where he booked four rooms. He was a little apprehensive, thinking The Colonel and The Lieutenant and The Private usually slept on the sands of the desert, and may not be used to 3000 thread count silk sheets and feather pillows made from endangered avian species, but he didn’t know for sure, and didn’t want to err in the other direction by booking them into the relative squalor of a Motel 6 and thus offending them. He handed each of them their key card and said, “How about we all get washed up and meet in the lounge in an hour?”
The Colonel didn’t want to betray his ignorance and was smart enough not to say anything, but Priss said, “What’s a lounge?”
Lewy held up the key card and said, “What do I do with this?”
Hablibi looked from one to the other to the other and thought, ‘is this a good situation to be in or a bad situation?’ When his boss told him he was going to babysit some assassins on a mission he thought his boss was speaking figuratively. Now, he wondered. He got them into their rooms and settled, also wondering about the arsenal of sophisticated weapons they had stashed in their bags, and how they had gotten them through customs in Atlanta. An hour later the four of them sat in the hotel lounge and looked at each other when the cocktail waitress asked them what they wanted. Hablibi, the cosmopolitan sophisticate, said, “Cutty on the rocks with a splash of soda.”
The waitress looked at Priss, who looked at Hablibi and said, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
Lewy said, “Same.”
The Colonel wasn’t as intimidated by the waitress’s question as his associates and asked Hablibi, “What is Cutty?”
“It’s scotch. From Scotland. Very nice, try one.”
The Colonel was dubious, but decided to go with the flow, and nodded to the waitress, who said, “Four Cuttys coming up, gents.”
Hablibi said, “How can I help you? Everything has been very hush hush, no one told me anything.”
Priss and Lewy looked down at the table, observing their training to tell no one anything. The Colonel now had to decide what to tell Hablibi about their mission, hating every second of this but knowing he was a babe in the woods here and needed support. He realized it was time to tell his team exactly what they were doing here in this cesspool of a culture. The waitress had realized she had an unusual group on her hands and intuitively saw she could soak them for a few extra bucks, so she ordered doubles from the bartender, and now set them on the table, saying, “Let me know if you guys want some hors d’oeuvres, ok? We have some great fois gras on toast points, and grilled baby lobster tails on toothpicks.”
Priss said, “What’s hors d’oeuvres?”
Lewy said, “What’s fois gras?”
Hablibi, deferential to The Colonel and wanting to hear the mission said, “Good stuff. We’ll have some later.” He watched the reactions as they took their first pulls on the drinks: a set of bulging eyes, a cough, a look of amazement. Could have been worse.
The Colonel looked at his drink with surprise but not fear, and deciding to come clean and be succinct about it said, “We’re looking for someone here who stole money from The Aya. A woman. It’s our job to get the money back and, umm, exact retribution according to the laws of the state and the laws of Islam, in our case those being the same thing. That’s it.”
The key word The Colonel had uttered and that had registered with all three of the others was money. When you’re Iranian and you hear the word money coupled with the name of a government or religious figure, in this case those being the same thing, you think oil; and when you think of Middle Eastern oil you think in terms of lots of money, and those were the thoughts that entered the heads of Hablibi, Lewy, and Priss. Here they were in America, that den of iniquity, in search of money. The Ayatollah’s money. Holy shit!
All four guys took long pulls on their scotches and let it settle into a warm feeling in their stomachs. None of the three neophytes had had anything to eat since their peanut binge on the plane, and the alcohol went straight to their brains. Priss, the most vulnerable, said, “The Aya has money? Enough money that someone would steal it, and enough to send a team from the Guard Elite after it? What’s The Aya need with money? He’s a spiritual guy, the top spiritual guy.”
The Colonel did his duty and said, “It’s not The Aya’s money, it’s the People’s money The Aya is holding in trust for us until some date in the future when he’ll distribute it fairly and equally.” The other three nodded in understanding, looked at the glasses in their hands, sipped, and thought, ‘Scam money, and it’s here in this hellhole called Charleston, and we’re here after it, and Tehran is a long way away, and man, is this scotch good stuff.’
Hablibi, holding his liquor better than the others said, “Who’s the woman? She’s the key, right? We find her, we find the money. Then you do what you guys do.”
“Her name is Laleh Khorram, and I think she’s involved with some people here called June Enterprises, who are making a movie or something with some famous people in it. This movie thing is about someone who stole money from someone in the Middle East, and that lines up with this Laleh woman, who we know for sure is the thief. What we have to do is find out if she is here and is involved in the movie, and if she is, well then….”
Finally, the cat was out of the bag. They knew the mission, and it was a lot more interesting than any of them thought it might me. They figured it was someone who had stolen Iran’s nuclear secrets and was giving them to Satan's disciples. But this, The Aya’s personal stash, oh yeah, this was great. This had all sorts of potential. The question was, how much? How much had this woman taken? One million? Two? TEN? The Colonel’s explanation had been succinct but meaningful, and the guys had no more questions, for now. They sat back and dreamed. Hablibi motioned to the waitress, who came over. “Another round, hon. And some of that fois gras and lobster tails, ok? Double order.” His mind was working well: lots of money on the line here; good to motivate the front line troops; do that by showing them the good life, even if it had to be lived here in the cesspool of the world; scotch, hors d’oeuvres, and silk sheets to come. Yeah baby. Maybe tomorrow have a talk with the concierge, slip him a couple hundred of the Ambassador’s mission funds and see if he could round up a virgin or two for the boys. All he had to do was find out who these June Enterprises slugs were. Then find the girl. Easy. They’d never know what hit ‘em.
The Ayatollah's Money Page 46
