City of Whispering Stone

by George C. Chesbro

  “Those fuckers at Military Intelligence put a mail cover on Statler and me,” I whispered, suddenly short of breath.

  “I’m afraid so,” Zahedi said softly, moving closer to me. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, perhaps we can talk seriously. Colonel Arsenjani thinks you may know more than you think you do—or are telling us. You’d be well advised to cooperate.”

  “I’m all cooperated out,” I said, feeling drained but trying to gather enough strength for a quick killing attack on one of them. “I know what you’re after, but I can’t help you. I haven’t got the slightest idea who the GEM leader is. That isn’t what I was being paid to find out.”

  Zahedi scratched his head, grunted. “I wonder. There may be somebody you contacted, or who contacted you, who at least made you suspicious. Think about it.”

  “I have thought about it. I have no ideas, not even an opinion. Look, Mehdi, or Nasser, or whatever your name is—”

  “Mehdi is fine. Actually, I’m rather used to it.”

  “All right, Mehdi, here I am chatting with the cream of the SAVAK. If you couldn’t find the GEM leaders in all the time you’ve been working on it, what makes you think I could have done it in a few weeks?”

  “There are other questions we’re interested in,” Zahedi said, eyeing me intently.

  “Me too. Why didn’t you turn right around and fly back to New York after Firouz Maleki died? You must have known Ali would get hyper.”

  “I said we will ask all questions,” Arsenjani repeated softly, menacingly. “So far you are not doing well, Frederickson.”

  “Tough shit,” I said to Arsenjani. And to Zahedi: “You put on a great act for Ali and his boys, but now it’s over. Your cover was broken when John Simpson found out who you really are. It’s still broken, and all the king’s camels aren’t going to put it together again. You left tracks: Simpson found them, I found them, and in the fuutre somebody else is going to find them. Your career in the United States is over.” I paused, shot a glance at Arsenjani, who was quietly tracing patterns on the desk top with his finger, looked back at Zahedi. “By the way, how did Simpson find out you’re Nasser Razvan? And how did he make the connection so quickly between you and Orrin Bannon?”

  “Now we are getting to the crux of the matter,” Zahedi said sharply, pointing a long, bony index finger at my forehead.

  I didn’t know, but it was a question to which I’d been giving a lot of thought. Zahedi was too experienced and good to leave chicken tracks behind, even if he was in a hurry; yet John Simpson had gathered enough information in just a few days to get himself killed. I didn’t believe it was simply good detective work; there hadn’t been time. And it hadn’t been luck. Luck is one thing, walking on water something else again.

  “Obviously, somebody tipped him off,” I said. “There’s no other way he could have tracked Zahedi so quickly.”

  “Of course,” Arsenjani interjected impatiently. “But who gave him the information?”

  “Probably somebody in the SAVAK, Arsenjani. That’s a ho-ho-ho on you boys.”

  “Who?” Arsenjani snapped.

  “Hey, c’mon! How the hell do you expect me to know? I wasn’t the one who got tipped.”

  “You weren’t shown a list of SAVAK agents in the United States?”

  “No,” I said, puzzled.

  The question also seemed to take Zahedi by surprise. He turned to Arsenjani and spoke in Farsi, too rapidly for me to follow. But I was certain he was asking his superior about the list. Arsenjani shook his head impatiently.

  “I love it,” I said, grinning. “You mean there may be a list of SAVAK agents floating around somewhere in the United States?”

  “Never mind,” Arsenjani snapped. “If you weren’t shown such a list, then how did you find out so much?”

  “Riding a dead man’s coattails, and a little luck. I read Simpson’s notes and made a few guesses.” Arsenjani made a noise in his throat which I didn’t like; it sounded as though he were getting ready to spit me out. “C’mon, Zahedi,” I said quickly, “why didn’t you go back to the United States when you had the chance?”

  “Cholera,” Zahedi said after a long pause, ignoring a sharp glance from his boss. “I was exposed. Naturally, I had the best medical care, but by the time the disease had run its course the damage had already been done.”

  “Ali Azad had already hired Simpson, and somebody had put Simpson on your trail.”

  “Yes,” Zahedi said easily. “The rest is history.”

  It seemed half a lifetime since Phil Statler had come to me with his problem of a missing muscle act. I was very tired. I slumped in my chair and tried to look defeated, which wasn’t very difficult. I’d given up hope of ever finding out what had happened to Garth, and I was looking for an opening to get at one of my interrogators. “It’s just a damn shame the bright young star of the SAVAK can’t play spy at the university anymore,” I said softly to Zahedi, playing for time.

  “Well, as I said, I think your concern is premature,” Zahedi said pleasantly. “I enjoy working in your country.”

  The pale young man lighted a cigarette, coughed, then absently reached behind his boss for the carafe of water. Arsenjani grasped the younger man’s wrist and shook his head. It was a small gesture, almost imperceptible, but it bothered me enough to make the sweat on my body turn cold. Circuits were trying to close somewhere in the back of my mind. “If Garth and I don’t go back, there are going to be some nasty questions raised.”

  “Really?” Arsenjani said mockingly. “And who will raise these questions?”

  “Phil Statler, for one. Garth and I have a lot of friends. Sooner or later someone is going to dig up this whole mess. And Ali’s not stupid. There isn’t going to be any rousing welcome for Mehdi if I turn up missing, report or no report. You’d better hope Garth and I die of old age, because that’s the only thing anyone’s going to believe. Your American operation is blown no matter what you do. Since it won’t serve any purpose to kill us, you might as well let us go.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Zahedi said.

  I laughed nervously. “I thought I had a pretty good argument.”

  “You’ve imperiled a carefully planned operation,” Arsenjani said, real anger shimmering in his voice. “And nothing less than the security of our nation and the life of the Shahanshah is at stake!”

  “Imperiled, shit,” I said with a kind of desperate fury. “It’s ruined. Can’t you see that’s the point? This business was your game, not mine. You gambled and you lost; let it go now. Besides, you’ve given fair warning to even the dumbest revolutionaries that you’re breathing down their necks.”

  Zahedi was looking down, studying the toe of his polished jackboot, which he was tapping up and down. Arsenjani stared at me a long time; his dark eyes looked as if they’d been flash-frozen in his head. Finally he shifted his gaze to Zahedi and snapped his fingers. Two guards who’d been waiting outside the door marched in.

  “Take him out,” Arsenjani said softly.

  The presence of the guards surprised me, and I knew I’d waited too long. Still, I thought I might have a shot at Zahedi. I lunged out of the chair at him, but he was quicker—or I was slower—than I’d anticipated; he quickly stepped to one side and hit me on the side of the head. By then the guards were on me. I caught the first one with a stiff jab to the solar plexus. The second guard grabbed me around the neck. I twisted, bringing my knee up hard against the inside of his knee. That set him down. I crouched and spun, but it was too late; Arsenjani was on me like a cat. He parried one blow and brought the butt of his gun down on the top of my head. There was a sound like corn popping inside my skull. I listened to it for a while, then drifted off to sleep.

  16

  I came out of it to find myself tied and lying in the back of an army truck. My head felt twice its normal size, but there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage from Arsenjani’s expertly placed blow. The skin might be broken, but not much; Arsenj
ani had sapped me with loving care. That meant an accident of some sort was the next order of the day.

  The truck bumped along, and sand drifted in through the slats on the side: desert. But I had other things to think about. Something was going on inside my body that I didn’t understand. My head seemed to be growing larger instead of smaller, and this sensation of swelling was crawling down through my neck to my chest and stomach. My lungs felt as if somebody were scraping steel wool across them. Alternately burning and freezing, my body seemed to be floating above the boards, and my clothes were soaked with sweat. Some giant was squeezing me like a sponge. I smelled of fever.

  Then, without warning, everything inside me came loose; my stomach churned and I vomited, splattering a thick stream of yellow bile on myself and the rough floorboards of the truck. I rolled away from it and only succeeded in soiling the other side. The air inside the truck was suddenly thick with the fetid smell of disease and human waste.

  It wouldn’t stop gushing, and with my hands tied behind my back, I was in trouble—literally in danger of drowning in my own vomit. I’d completely lost control of my body functions; at the rate I was losing fluids, I knew it wouldn’t take long to die.

  Not that I particularly cared at the moment; dying seemed a perfectly reasonable means of escape from the smell and the agony. Still … death is a long time, and old habits are hard to break. I struggled up to my knees and braced myself against the lurching slats until the spasms finally passed. Then I aimed for a relatively dry area of the truck bed and passed out.

  I woke up when the truck braked to a stop. The only sound I could hear was a high-pitched buzzing in my ears; now my head felt like a huge balloon filled with rotten air. My vision was blurred, but there was a relatively clear central core, like the distant end of a tunnel. I watched down its length as a soldier opened the rear door. He didn’t like what he saw and smelled: he froze, his eyes wide with terror, then retched. A second soldier appeared, turned and started to run.

  “Halt!” a deep voice boomed in Farsi. The command was punctuated with a pistol shot that sounded to me like somebody spitting. An officer I hadn’t seen before moved into the end of the tunnel. He was wearing rubber gloves and a gauze mask that covered his nose and mouth. The two soldiers returned meekly, prodded by the baleful eye of the officer’s gun. The officer produced two more sets of gloves and masks, which the men put on.

  “Get him out,” the officer commanded.

  It was all surreal: the terrified eyes above the masks, the gloved hands pawing at my soiled and stinking body. The two men pulled me out of the truck and let me fall to the ground. My lungs felt like dirty rags, trying and failing to suck in enough air to feed my oxygen-starved body. The ringing in my ears grew louder. Something very dark and evil was growling in a corner of my mind, but it was impossible to hold a single thought for more than a moment and I couldn’t yet see what it was.

  The officer opened the cab of the truck, removed a knapsack and water bag and threw them down beside me. The water bag meant something to me, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. It could mean an end to the torture of my thirst, but my hands and feet were still tied. I opened my mouth to beg, but no sounds came out. The officer produced a field knife, stepped behind me and cut my ropes. Then the three men got back into the truck and drove away.

  I rolled my eyes and could see only sand. Finally my gaze fastened on the water bag. Suddenly, in my fevered mind, the water bag became a carafe on a desk in a police station. I remembered Arsenjani offering me a glass of water, watching me drink, then refusing Zahedi the same courtesy. And I knew.

  Cholera. Tainted water. Arsenjani, my smooth, thoughtful host, had given me cholera-infected water to drink. That had been his solution to the problem posed by a certain dwarf; the Iranian Government certainly could not be held responsible if I wound up with a case of cholera and died in the desert. After all, it was common knowledge that the cholera vaccine was only forty percent effective, no protection at all in the event of direct exposure. If they’d arranged something as neat for Garth, Ali just might buy the “report” he received from me attesting to Zahedi’s revolutionary activities.

  Rage stiffened my muscles and brought me to my feet. I staggered around in a circle, but finally managed to reach the water bag. It occurred to me that this water also might be contaminated, but I doubted it; the damage had already been done. It wouldn’t have made any difference to me anyway; my thirst was overwhelming.

  I opened the top of the bag and poured a few quarts over my face; some of it made its way down my throat, and that cleared my head a little. I stumbled a few steps and sat down hard on the packed sand. I heaved the bag over my shoulder and drank some more, then promptly vomited again. I might be able to put water into my body, but there was no way I could manage to keep it there.

  The thought of dying of cholera in the desert like an animal should have terrified me, but it didn’t. I tried to care and couldn’t. The cholera was striking with terrible, numbing swiftness.

  I tried to remember what I’d read of the disease: At the moment, germs transmitted by the contaminated water were making a shambles of the normal flora in my intestinal tract, turning the usually benign assemblage against its host. In the final stages the bacteria would be eating away chunks of my stomach and intestines—literally consuming my body. In the end, cholera killed by dehydrating the body. I was a dead man: treatment had to be immediate, and the chance of that looked rather slim from where I was sitting in the middle of the desert. I was about to become a statistic, a spent human bullet fired by the SAVAK.

  My body voided itself once again, and the reaction left a dull ache in my belly that worked its way up into my chest cavity and down into my legs. My vision now consisted of tiny bright pinpricks of light that burned flickering images on my fever-hot brain. I closed my eyes against the pain, then put my hands on the sand and shoved. Up on my feet, I leaned forward, trying to walk, then realized that I wasn’t walking at all, but only imagining it. I emptied the water bag and pressed my face into the wet sand.

  Then I began experiencing other hallucinations; I imagined I could hear the sound of an approaching jeep grinding through its gears as it wallowed through the sand. It struck me that Arsenjani was impatient, already sending his men back to see if I was dead.

  Rubbery hands grabbed for me, and I opened my eyes to find myself looking up into more masked faces, I struck out at the blurred images, grabbed for one of the masks, missed and sank down into an oblivion that smelled like the bowels of hell, and was me.

  17

  I dreamed. White-robed figures were bending over me, cleaning me when I soiled myself, sticking needles into my arms and legs, inserting tubes into my nose and throat. Between these recurring dreams was darkness, like a shutter banging up and down.

  Gradually the smell of my own body decreased and the rubber sack that was my head began to deflate. Finally the clear fever dreams merged into blurred reality. It occurred to me that I wasn’t dead yet, and that the needles in my arms and legs were real, as were the man and woman who took turns standing over me. In the beginning their faces were covered with the familiar gauze masks. Then, after a particularly long, dreamless sleep, I awoke to find the masks gone. They were both at the side of my bed, smiling down at me. The room smelled of flowers.

  “You’re going to be all right, Mongo,” the man said cheerfully.

  I tried to reply, but the muscles in my mouth and throat felt rigid, like stiff plastic. I managed to lift one hand, then went back to sleep. When I awoke again, I felt stronger. I sat up and would have spoken if there’d been anybody to talk to. The room was empty.

  There were a vase of flowers and a huge basket of fruit on a night table next to my bed. My mouth watered; it felt as if I hadn’t eaten anything in about ten years. I selected a large apple from the basket and bit into it; the juices from the apple squirted against the inside of my mouth, puckering the soft, sore flesh. I chewed slowly, savoring the exquisite
taste of the fruit, then closed my eyes. When I opened them again, a man was standing in the doorway.

  This one I knew. It was Darius: Khayyam, not the King. I wondered why I felt so little surprise at seeing him there; perhaps it was because I knew it all finally came down to a simple process of elimination. There couldn’t be many men with the personal stature to organize and lead an insurrection, to form and lead an organization like GEM. Darius Khayyam filled the bill.

  He strode quickly across the room and gripped my shoulder. “Mongo, my friend. Welcome back to the world of the living.”

  I put the apple down on the table and looked up into his eyes. They seemed harder, colder than I remembered. Or maybe I’d never really looked into them before.

  “So you’re the mastermind they’re trying to dig out of the woodwork. Son-of-a-bitch!”

  Darius’ smile was wan, bittersweet. “Yes,” he said distantly, “but I’m afraid that phase of the operation is over. They were close; very close.” His eyes came back into focus and he pressed the tips of his fingers together. “Now the game will get rougher. I hope our organization is up to it.”

  He pulled a chair up to the side of the bed, and I touched his arm. “Darius, do you know anything about my brother?”

  His eyes clouded. “SAVAK,” he said softly.

  “But is he alive?”

  “I’m sorry, Mongo. I don’t know.”

  “He could be alive?”

  “It’s possible. I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Is there anything I can get you?”

  “I’m hungry as hell,” I said. And I would keep my hopes up.

  “Food will be brought in a few minutes.” There was an embarrassed silence during whch both of us avoided each other’s eyes. Now, at what seemed the end, there didn’t appear to be much left to say. “I’m sorry you had to go through this torment, Mongo,” Darius said into the silence. “I did try to warn you.”