City of Whispering Stone

by George C. Chesbro

  Darius had never had a gun; he’d reached inside his shirt knowing that the move would cost him his life, hoping that the soldiers’ attention would be momentarily distracted from me. Now I had to find a way to take advantage of his sacrifice. I sprang to my feet and ran low against the barrier of the wall. The light swung back and forth, searching for me while bullets splattered against the rock face where I’d been standing only moments before. It was one of the few times in my life I’ve been happy to be a dwarf: there are a vast host of disadvantages, but being an easy target isn’t one of them.

  There didn’t seem to be anything beyond the lip of the platform but empty space, but there was no other place to go. Besides, I preferred killing myself on the rocks below to giving Arsenjani the satisfaction of having his men load me up with lead. I rolled the last few feet and dropped over the edge of the platform. Finding myself bouncing down a steep incline, I dug my feet and fingers into some soft shale, breaking my fall. The light swung out and evaporated in the darkness over my head.

  There was chaos on the platform. Men were running across the stone, firing at the shadows and one another until Arsenjani gave the order to stop. He spoke in Farsi. “He has to be somewhere in the rocks! Find him!”

  Finding me wasn’t going to be particularly difficult; a matter of a few minutes, at most. Even if I could somehow make it to the ruins below, I’d only be a moving target in the moonlight; small as I was, they had to get me eventually.

  The side of the mountain above me was now covered with soldiers converging on the sound of the gunfire, blocking the only route to the desert. Somehow, Arsenjani had known we would be somewhere on or in the mountain, and the sound of our voices had given us away. How he’d known where we’d be was another question I wasn’t likely ever to learn the answer to.

  But if I had to die, I still wanted to take Zahedi or Arsenjani with me. Killing Mehdi Zahedi would be a distinct pleasure, but Arsenjani was my odds-on favorite candidate; it was the SAVAK chief who’d given me infected water to drink, then left me alone in the desert to sweat, vomit and defecate my guts out. But in the end I’d take whichever man gave me the better opportunity.

  I inched my way across the mountainside, past the vertical line of the wall rising from the platform. A knot of soldiers on the lip of the platform to my left were shining powerful flashlights down into the gloom below. One of them carried a heavy climbing rope, which explained how they’d made it down to the ledge so quickly. I pressed back into the shadow of the rocks and remained there until the soldiers moved on to another position. I could just make out some of their conversation.

  “He must have fallen.”

  “Spread out across the top of the mountain; He may have gotten past us!”

  The line of soldiers silhouetted against the night sky on the crest of the mountain were no longer flashing their lights, and I was shrouded in darkness. That situation wasn’t going to last long; other soldiers were pulling searchlights into positions that would enable them to sweep the entire side of the mountain.

  I began inching my way up the edge of the wall on the right side of the platform. I crawled about a hundred feet, then stopped and peered over the edge. Arsenjani was directly below me, commanding the search operation. Mehdi Zahedi had just come down a climbing rope and was bending over the bloody corpse of Darius Khayyam. After a few moments he rose and went to Arsenjani’s side.

  A soldier emerged from the darkness of the recessed crypt, unzipped his fly and proceeded to urinate on Darius’ body. I studied that man very closely; he was tall, walked with a slight limp, and wore an army jacket that was too big for him. He’d become candidate number three.

  Arsenjani signaled for the lights to be turned on; it was time to make my selection. Perhaps sensing my presence, Arsenjani suddenly spun around and looked up. What he saw was a very angry dwarf sailing down through the arc of lights at his head.

  I was counting on Arsenjani to break my fall; and he did, nicely. Years of circus training had given me the control I needed; I drew my legs in, then snapped my heels forward at the last moment, catching him at the juncture of neck and jaw. I felt his neck snap under the force of the blow, and he was dead before he crumpled to the ground. I landed on top of him; still, the force of my fall had driven me into Arsenjani hard enough to daze me. I’d hoped to roll up in time to get a shot at Zahedi; but my brain insisted on seeing everything in pairs, and the air was crowded with bullets.

  “Cease fire!”

  It was Zahedi; apparently he felt it was good politics to save me for himself. The firing stopped and he came toward me, his automatic rifle pointed at my chest. I tried to fight off the dizziness and struggle to my feet, but Zahedi’s booted foot caught me on the side of the head, finishing the job the fall had started.

  18

  I came out of it spitting blood on the cold stone. When I rolled over on my back, my vision slowly cleared; the stars seemed close enough to touch, like candles that would flicker out at a wave of my hand. The Big Dipper was directly overhead, and it reminded me of the times when, as a child, I’d lain in night meadows looking at the stars and conjuring up other, less cruel worlds where staring at dwarfs was forbidden. It was all very depressing. More than anything else I wanted to sleep, even if that sleep lasted forever. Instead, I rolled over onto my stomach, moaning as pain flashed through my ribs. I quickly took stock. There was a lot of pain but, miraculously, nothing seemed broken, not even my head.

  Zahedi was standing over me, his lean face pale as death in the moonlight. Three soldiers kept him company. The rest of the soldiers were running in and out of the crypt. One of them had dirt all over his uniform; they’d found the secret tunnel.

  “How was it planned for you to leave?” Zahedi’s voice was cold and impatient, just like any New Yorker’s.

  “Flying carpet,” I muttered.

  He kicked me expertly, the toe of his boot digging into my shoulder hard enough to cause sufficient agony but not hard enough to break anything. I cursed and tried to maneuver into a position from which I could kick back; I stopped moving when I felt the barrel of a gun against the back of my skull.

  Zahedi bent down close to me. “I asked you a question: What was your escape route?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Zahedi gave a curt nod of his head. The gesture infuriated me more than the expected kick. Perhaps it was his youth, his cockiness, his knowledge that he was as much a prodigy in his field as Heifetz and Bobby Fischer had been in theirs. And he had the same awesome self-confidence. Nothing ruffled him; even after all the climbing, he still smelled vaguely of cologne, while I probably stank of fear.

  “How did you find us?” I asked.

  Zahedi smiled. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take the credit for that. It was necessary that we find your body as quickly as possible after you died, not only to cut down on the risk of contagion, but to make sure nobody else found you first and buried your body; that would have made explanations difficult. We sewed a radio direction finder into your clothing. Naturally, Khayyam didn’t know that when he picked you up. The direction finder was destroyed when your clothes were burned, but by that time we’d already found the house where they were keeping you. After that it was simply a matter of following the two of you until you led us to something interesting, like the aqueducts of Persepolis.” He paused and glanced up to make sure that the soldier behind me had his gun properly placed against my head. “You, Dr. Frederickson, were the Judas goat.”

  If he expected a reaction, he was disappointed. I was too tired and hurt to react. Besides, what he said was undoubtedly true. I felt sick.

  Zahedi pointed back in the direction of the crypt. “There are guns somewhere in there. We’ll find them, you know.”

  “Sure you will. The trouble is that what you find won’t be all there are.”

  “Then you shall lead us to the rest.”

  “No, I won’t, Zahedi. I can’t. They’re scattered all over the countryside. You won’t kn
ow where they are until the shooting starts.”

  “There’s not going to be any shooting.” He nodded in the direction of Darius’ urine-stained corpse. “The movement is now crushed, leaderless.”

  “C’mon, kid, you’ll never make general with that kind of sloppy thinking. You know as well as I do that Khayyam spent all his time in the United States; he was a planner, not a coordinator. That means there has to be somebody else right here in Iran who’s ready to take over. So you just keep looking over your shoulder, Mehdi, m’boy; that person’s going to be gunning for you, and I hope to hell he’s a good shot. You’ve got a GEM man in a high position in the SAVAK. It has to be; otherwise, Darius could never have known what was happening to me, much less found me so quickly.”

  The thin young man looked at me for what seemed a long time. Then he laughed sharply, turned and started to speak to his men in Farsi. It was a long speech, too complicated for me to follow even if I hadn’t been punchy. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I didn’t like the reception his speech was getting from the assemblage of soldiers. Their initial response was one of disbelief which rapidly shifted to anger. There were a few muttered curses and much swiveling of heads back and forth between the two bodies on the platform.

  I didn’t like that, nor did I like it when Zahedi finished his monologue, turned back to me and laughed again. I knew I was going to get a translation I didn’t want to hear, but there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it; I was the ultimate in captive audiences.

  “We’ve suspected for some time that GEM had infiltrated the SAVAK,” Zahedi said easily. “I don’t think we have to worry any longer.”

  “Make your point, you silly son-of-a-bitch. You’re not running for office.”

  “Ah, but I am, Frederickson. It’s just barely conceivable that this operation could make me head of the SAVAK. Besides, I think you already know what I’ve told my men; I can see it in your face.”

  “What you see is just good, healthy hatred.”

  “Arsenjani was your secret ally,” he said at last. “He was a GEM agent.”

  “Bullshit,” I said with a great deal more certainty than I felt. “Arsenjani poisoned me.”

  “Sure he did.” He spoke loudly, obviously wanting those men who understood English to hear. “And that’s how he saved your life: by leaving you out in the desert with nothing more than cholera in you. He knew you’d be found.”

  “If I’m found with bullets in me, you don’t go back to the United States. They don’t make young men head of the SAVAK for screw-ups like that.”

  Zahedi shrugged. “I think you’re only half right. I won’t be going back to the United States, but that, of course, will be Arsenjani’s fault. I’d rather be head of the SAVAK, and if I can convince His Majesty that Arsenjani was a GEM agent, that’s exactly what I may become.”

  “Do I detect a little personal ambition in your patriotic fervor?”

  “We’ve played games long enough,” he said, once more speaking to the gallery of soldiers.

  Zahedi called out a name and a soldier stepped forward. He was the tall man with the limp, loose-fitting jacket and weak bladder. Zahedi must have been reading my mind; picking that man as my executioner was the final outrage.

  “Shoot him,” Zahedi said evenly to the soldier.

  My mouth felt as if it were filled with sand, but I still managed to work up some spit, which I deposited on Zahedi’s boot. Zahedi casually wiped it off on my sleeve. The guard prodded me to my feet, cocked his rifle and lifted it to his shoulder.

  “Not here,” Zahedi said in Farsi. He pointed to a stone column at the foot of the mountain, near the edge of the city. “Down below; I’d like him to think about it for a few minutes.”

  And it would also save them the trouble of carting me down, I thought. Zahedi didn’t miss a trick.

  The future head of the SAVAK turned and spoke to the rest of the soldiers. Four of them picked up the bodies of Darius and Arsenjani. They carried the corpses to the edge of the platform, then to the right, where stone steps led down to the city. The other soldiers followed. Zahedi spoke a few words to the soldier guarding me; then he too went to the edge of the platform and disappeared into the darkness.

  I had no doubt that my executioner was a crack shot, and he was taking no chances. He put down the rifle, looped a rope around my wrists behind me, then took out a pistol, which he stuck into my ear. He pulled on the rope and my hands immediately went numb as the circulation was cut off. The precautions he was taking probably weren’t necessary. Sometimes I surprised myself, and I imagined I still had a little fight left in me if I dug deep enough; but for the most part I felt empty, haunted by the specter of Neptune’s death—and now Garth’s, if he wasn’t dead already.

  The soldier picked up his rifle again and prodded me in the back. I went to the lip of the platform and down the stone steps. He was good; with one hand holding his rifle and the other holding the rope trailing from my wrists, he never came closer than twenty paces.

  I decided the best thing I could hope for was a stab at dying with dignity. It was a hopelessly romantic notion, but I didn’t like the idea of groveling before some bastard who was going to piss on me when I was dead.

  The soldier dropped the rope when we reached the bottom of the mountain. I walked quickly to the stone column, stood with my back to it and mustered up a wide grin. The soldier stared at me for a few moments with his muddy eyes, then flushed angrily and put his rifle to his shoulder.

  The sharp report of a rifle shattered the silence, and my eyes snapped shut. My body quivered in anticipation of steel ripping through my brain; my muscles contracted into a single, tight knot that jackknifed my body forward.

  I waited for the pain, the numbness and tearing, the whatever; it didn’t come. I waited for a second shot, but still nothing happened. I slowly opened my eyes.

  The soldier, still gripping his gun, was slowly sinking to his knees. There was a hole in his forehead the size of a small fist where a dumdum bullet had exited. The bullet had mashed or broken everything inside his head, and his lifeless eyes had turned a bright crimson.

  In death, the soldier’s finger tightened on the trigger of the automatic rifle and the barrel spewed bullets. The gun barked wildly, the slugs biting into the sand and stone around me and whining off into the darkness. I had some mobility and might have tried to move around to the other side of the column. Instead, I crouched, hugging my knees and trying to make myself as small as possible; I wasn’t about to try to outguess the aim of a dead man.

  Then the magazine was empty, and the only sound in the city was a persistent ringing in my ears. Finally the soldier toppled over and the gun in his hand clattered on the stone. Now I had time to think of other things, such as the question of who had shot the soldier. And suddenly I knew who it had to be, even before the figure emerged from a cluster of rocks above and made his way quickly down the side of the mountain. I watched him as he reached the base of the mountain and began walking toward me. In the moonlight, Mehdi Zahedi looked even younger than before. But he was certainly a marvel, incredibly fast on his mental toes: for the benefit of the soldiers, he’d done his own little bit of truth-twisting.

  He came around behind me, cut the ropes on my wrists, then started to massage my arms. He didn’t even glance at the soldier’s body. It took me a long time to catch my breath, and when I finally did, I felt as if someone had stolen all the words from my head.

  “Shit,” I said to loosen up my tongue. “Damn, I wish Arsenjani were alive to see you become head of the SAVAK. Did he ever suspect that you were the GEM in his woodpile?”

  “Doubtful,” Zahedi said tightly. “If he had, I don’t think he’d have gone to so much trouble to try to put me back in place in New York. But you never knew with Arsenjani; he was suspicious of everyone. Can you walk?”

  “A lot better than I could if your man had shot me. My brother …?”

  “Your brother is waiting for yo
u out in the desert with your guide,” he said tersely.

  “Damn!” I shouted, slapping the stone column. And kept shouting: “Damn! Damn!”

  “Listen!” Zahedi said, lightly squeezing my arm. “There isn’t much time. The SAVAK has had your brother in a hospital, drugged, all this time. He was Arsenjani’s ace in the hole in case you couldn’t be manipulated. He’s been sick. He knows you’re going out together, but he doesn’t know that he’s a walking warehouse filled with SAVAK lies. He’s still weak and dopey. You’ll have to straighten him out.”

  “Oh, Christ, I’ll straighten him out,” I said, feeling more than a bit dopey with hysteria myself. “How did you rescue him?”

  He shook his head impatiently. “There’s no time to explain now. Suffice it to say that Arsenjani will get the blame. But we have to hurry. My men should have gone by now, but the shooting could bring them back.”

  Zahedi started to move off into the shadows on my right. I moved out after him and promptly fell on my face; my legs were vibrating like tuning forks. Zahedi came back and helped me to my feet. I did better the second time. We moved off to the right a hundred yards, then headed back toward the mountain. There were no sounds of pursuit.

  We reached the edge of the dead city and Zahedi pointed to a piece of broken column on the ground. “Rest,” he said. “I think we’re safe for the moment.”

  The muscles in my legs had stopped their spasms, but now it was my head that was shaking. Giddy with relief, I was hungry for the truth—all of it. “You,” I said. “Everything you said about Arsenjani applies to you. You’re the key to this whole thing.”

  He shook his head. “I’m just one member of a team of men trying to do what we know is right for our country before Pahlavi destroys it.”

  “Your father has to be GEM’s operational head in Iran, right?”

  “Yes,” he said, quickly glancing around him. “I suppose you may as well know all of it. He and Darius began planning this many years ago.”