by Bryce Adams
Soleimani’s intake of breath was audible through the speakerphone. “We didn’t lead him. We slaughtered him.”
“You picked the man, you gave him the mission, and he failed spectacularly in the attempt. Then you attempted to cover it up by launching an Iranian airstrike without my authorization,” Khamenei’s voice rose into a shivering tenor.
Soleimani met the Supreme Leader’s raised voice with subdued menace. “You made me kill him. He called me, and I heard it in his voice: something was done to him, and it shook him worse than six years on the Iraqi front or twenty more years killing for Quds Force. It was something that couldn’t be undone, and it had left him ready to wipe out half the Middle East. I suspect that you know what it was.”
The Supreme Leader nodded impatiently. “I asked you whether Jamsheed Mashhadi could die. You didn’t object at the time.”
“I never said he should die broken and alone. Even you had no right to do that, and I haven’t heard you deny anything yet.”
Khamenei said nothing. Instead, one of the ayatollahs leaned forward and tried to advance the conversation, asking, “General: what do you think it will take to assuage Assad and Hezbollah?”
“I have no idea,” Soleimani answered dismissively.
Khamenei spoke, dark eyes staring straight ahead into the shadows that lurked across the table past his wretched entourage. “Perhaps you should join me at the chateau so we can discuss the matter. Let’s leave diplomacy to the diplomats.”
Soleimani’s voice was flat. “Maybe later. I’m going to Beirut to deal with the Hezbollah secretariat personally, then I’ll fly to Damascus and deal with Assad, regardless of his temper tantrum. It’s time to end that civil war, even if I have to import ten thousand Revolutionary Guardsmen and conquer the whole damned country myself.”
Khamenei replied, “I trust you to your judgment, Qasem. Bring glory to Iran, and come back to us soon.”
“Maybe.” Soleimani’s line went dead.
Ali Khamenei, heir to the Imam Khomeini, Supreme Leader of the Revolution, Guardian of the Islamic Republic of Iran, servant of God and the Hidden Imam, snapped the fingers on his good hand, and his advisors showed themselves out.
A small man stepped out of the shadows, still in a dirty military uniform with Syrian emblems on the shoulder.
Khamenei motioned for him to sit, then said, “Quiet as always, my friend. I barely noticed you were here. Now tell me: you helped Ambassador Yazdi arrange the kidnapping?”
“Yes, Master,” the man calling himself Salman spoke in fluent Farsi, devoid of any fake Syrian accent.
“And you and Yazdi arranged the script for Mashhadi to read, and you made it sloppy enough to suggest Iranian handiwork.”
“Yes, Master.”
“And you ensured that Hezbollah freed him, then you helped him get back to Damascus and discover the document with my signature on it.”
“You know I did, Master.”
Khamenei studied his agent with something approaching morbid curiosity and said, “The bombing was unnecessary, you know. That was a very expensive embassy, full of decent people.”
Salman nodded, swallowing uncomfortably. “Agreed, Master. But Jamsheed—Colonel Mashhadi—finally seemed close to his breaking point. Once he found that martyr boy’s headband and put it on…you should have seen him.”
“I have seen him. Him and ten thousand boys like him, ready to die with a red rag around their heads, all because God has the sense of humor to run a worldwide holy war from a country with a second-rate army like Iran’s,” Khamenei chuckled.
“…As you say Master.” Based on his facial expression, Salman probably thought he’d be struck by lightning before he heard his Supreme Leader besmirch the holy legions of Iran.
Khamenei still smiled, as though the whole thing amounted to a joke. “But before the embassy went up, he made that phone call to my new secretary, telling us he intended to launch the weapons himself. That’s a phone call that my rivals will be whispering about for a very long time,” he murmured.
Salman hung his head. “Yes, Master. I’m sorry, I was downstairs when it occurred, and he only told me after the fact. I should have watched him closer. I didn’t know he would go so…far. Then it was just the two of us driving back to Hezbollah, and I thought maybe, between rejoining Haddad and arming the weapons, Colonel Mashhadi would remember his training.”
“Oh, I think he did.”
“Master?”
Khamenei held up his good hand firmly, like a magician ordering the universe to stand still. He’d learned the pose watching Khomeini, when he was a much younger man. “Once I discovered that the vain, jetsetting fool still existed, I crafted an entire plan that relied on breaking Jamsheed Mashhadi. I wanted him to know we’d betrayed him. Between his training and the period where my…associates…had him tortured in Evin Prison, I thought the betrayal would push him to kill that fool Yazdi and then complete his mission just to spite me personally. We’d parade some Iranian bodies to demonstrate he’d gone insane, you’d kill Mashhadi by the end, and Hezbollah would have the chemical deterrent we need to encircle Israel. It all seemed straightforward enough, after I nudged Soleimani into volunteering Mashhadi like it had been his own idea.”
Khamenei continued, “Instead,” he waved his hand so his black robe flourished, “Mashhadi reverted to his original training: the martyrdom speeches that we clerics shoved down those boys’ throats during wartime. Praise be to God, the upright and the most merciful, for inspiring brave Qasem Soleimani to go behind my back and scramble those warplanes. If Mashhadi had succeeded, the results would have been appalling for us; chemical weapons are vile, filthy things, and any country that uses them shall answer to God for it, not to mention the Americans.”
Salman’s strained face suggested that he’d just as soon not hear any more of his Supreme Leader’s private thoughts on the Tuva conspiracy. “And now, Master?”
The Supreme Leader stood up with a grunt. He was old, and it had been a frustrating day. Khamenei said, “Now I’d like some tea. Black. Indian, if we have any in the kitchen.” He paused and thought for a moment. “And ask your Syrian counterparts whether they made any unusual radio interceptions coming from western Syria in the last few days—especially any communications in English. I’d like to review the transcripts, if they exist.”
Salman left with an obsequious mumble. Tomorrow, Khamenei would give his personal agent another name and another mission, and Salman, or whoever he really was, would once again be the Supreme Leader’s favorite instrument. But tonight, Khamenei wanted nothing near him that even remotely smacked of the debacle in Syria.
Tomorrow, he would also have to telephone that idiot of a president the Iranian masses thought they’d chosen in the latest rigged election. Then he’d reassure his clerical peers that they were not about to be nuked by the Jews or the Yankees. And he’d have to speak with Qasem Soleimani’s superiors in the Revolutionary Guard High Command. The man had grown dangerously autonomous, and he knew far too much about what had happened to Jamsheed Mashhadi. Khamenei would also find out how long Guard generals had been empowered to launch airstrikes without consulting his office.
In the meantime, Khamenei paced over to the balcony so he could watch the lights of Tehran in the valley below Mount Damavand. They pulsed orange and yellow like the rows of control lights in the underground nuclear reactor at Fordow, close to Tehran. As he stood there, the hardened Fordow complex had ten thousand centrifuges spinning non-stop, refining crude uranium into weapons-grade plutonium. The day of days was coming, no matter what the Great Satan and the Zionists did to stop it.
As for the enemy’s role in Syria, he was sure Salman would find intercepts, and those would contain the code names of the enemy operatives who thwarted Iran’s ambitions. Let those insects laugh while they could. When it came to vengeance, Ali Khamenei knew it was a very small world, and he came from a long-lived family.
2012
November
A Long Weekend
Epilogue
Climate change and a bizarre cyclone event in the western Pacific made the monsoon hit Thailand hard that year, and linger unseasonably late. Ambrose had never seen it pour so savagely in November, and even when the rains stopped long enough to keep Bangkok from drowning, the Thai capital was still full of people who looked like they’d showered with their clothes on.
But unseasonable weather aside, the electrifying phenomenon of a monsoon in progress was something Ambrose knew well. As a young Foreign Service officer he’d sat at the exact same bar years beforehand, watching identical raindrops send sparks off the tops of transformers no larger than tailgating coolers, whose black wires snaked off into the steamy Bangkok night. In the flooding street, kids gleefully skipped through puddles of trash deeper than wading pools as they ran to help their parents hock barbecued squid and skewers of papaya.
Water vapor steamed off everything, and it made Ambrose exhale contentedly. Once in a while, it paid to be that single odd freak who loved humidity.
He turned to his drinking companion and said, “I remember the first time I saw rain like this. That was in Thailand too, actually, down on the coast. I remembered asking myself ‘Jesus Christ, is this how the entire world looks outside the U.S.?’”
Celestine Lemark, now going by the name Marie Lemosle, replied, “And what’s the answer?”
He raised a twitching eyebrow as he took a sip of sweet Thai whiskey, then said, “The answer is that the world only looks this good,” he gestured at the nearest flotilla of garbage, “when it’s behaving itself. A lot of people never get a chance to live someplace as nice as Bangkok when it’s drowned in watery garbage.”
“Like Syrians?” She took a drag off her cigarette, leaving a light stain on the filter from her subtle lipstick.
Ambrose took her cigarette and tasted her mouth on the filter. It reminded him of cardamom. He was trying to cut back, but that just meant he was forcing Lemark to light twice as many.
“I lived in Damascus for a summer, you know—State Department language grant so long ago that I won’t date myself by saying when. It was the prettiest old city I’d ever seen. The fucking place was drowning in tea houses, and flowering grapevines, and mosaicked mosques older than anything on my home continent. And we’ve collectively decided as a planet to stand aside and watch a man-child like Bashar al-Assad butcher all of it to keep his dead daddy’s throne.”
Ambrose made a fist that trembled all the way up to his elbow as he continued, “Every night, part of me thinks I should have taken our jeep, stolen some more guns, and headed right for Damascus to put a bullet in that son of a bitch.”
Celestine, or Marie, rolled her eyes playfully. She was a different creature when she started drinking. “The Syrian army would have killed you instantly, and another member of Bashar’s family would have continued the war with Iran and Russia’s blessing. I said you were a bad operative.” She lit another cigarette.
“Not fair. You can’t call me a bad operative for obsessing over Jamsheed, then also bash me for wishing I could’ve deviated from the mission entirely,” he said.
She leaned across the table to meet him until their noses were six inches apart. “Shall we talk about ‘deviating from missions’ for a moment?”
He raised up his hand to pause her, then changed courses to stop a passing waitress. Ambrose ordered another pint of whiskey in rapid-fire Thai while Celestine watched him with an expression somewhere between awe and pity.
Ambrose continued, “The first time you see me in two months, after I’ve saved you from al-Qaida, Hezbollah, sarin exposure, and an Iranian airstrike, you’re gonna lecture me about what went down?”
She stuck a finger gently into his chest, aware of how sore his fractured sternum still was. “I would in detail, if I thought you could stop being an asshole long enough to listen.”
“But you know I can’t, so here we are.” He poured and drank the last of the whiskey.
“Here we are.” She opened the new whiskey with one hand, snapping the sealed metal lid like it was nothing.
They drank quietly for a bit, looking at one another occasionally.
She broke the silence by saying, “Mossad put me on partial medical leave for three months, pending observation of whether my nerves really recovered from the sarin attack.”
“Good for you, but I’m an American. You’ll have to explain this quaint notion of ‘medical leave’ to me.”
She slammed a hand down on top of his. Ambrose hadn’t known how bad it was shaking until she did so. Celestine said, “It means I took a non-combat assignment here in Thailand, hunting down whoever targeted Israel’s Bangkok diplomats with bomb attacks several years ago. We suspect it was an Iranian.”
Ambrose’s face tried to go flat, but he felt his eyebrows twitching. “Jamsheed had a lot of fun here in Thailand. Israel’s lucky he could only smuggle in shoddy detonators from the Burmese black market.”
She swished a sip of whiskey around in her mouth before answering, “Once I learned you were in Bangkok, I mentioned your name to Mossad, and reminded them that you’re an expert on these things. Our organizations have agreed to a joint investigation…if I have an American to work with.”
“Sounds like easy money, since the man we’re investigating is most likely buried under a Syrian crusader castle.”
“That’s the first time you mentioned exactly what happened in Krak des Chevaliers.” She looked up at the ceiling fan and watched a couple of geckos fighting over a lady gecko before continuing, “So did you kill Mashhadi, or the airstrike?
Ambrose replied, “Airstrikes, you mean. Israel and Iran both took turns pounding that place.”
Celestine raised an eyebrow as she shook her head. “No, we didn’t. As soon as Gideon’s pilots detected the presence of unidentified aircraft attacking the castle, they aborted their run, even though they knew there’d be hell to pay once Gideon found out. As they fled, a single enemy fighter engaged them, and the IAF downed it. The Syrians’ own air defense system destroyed the rest. That disengagement is the only reason Gideon Patai hasn’t been discreetly hung.”
He tumbled his drink and smelled the hangover vapors wafting off it. “So you guys really don’t want that war with Iran, huh?”
She kicked back her whiskey without mixing any Coke into it the way you’re supposed to. She grimaced, showing good white teeth. Then she poured more whiskey and answered, “No more than they do, judging by the mutual silence in Tehran and Tel Aviv. We…misjudged that, I suppose. Now quit doing that misdirection thing and tell me what happened to Mashhadi and the sarin.”
He blew smoke out his nostrils. “Accidents happen, especially when you play with guns around pressurized gas canisters.”
“The definition of an accident is something that people weren’t planning.”
Ambrose scratched a mosquito bit on his neck, trying to look nonchalant. “Calling it ‘planning’ seriously overestimates me.” He raised up a finger on his left hand, which trembled less than his right one those days, and started counting with his fingers. “As soon as I saw the SCUDs, I knew Jamsheed would use them, so we were out of time.” Another finger. “There were too many Hezbollah men on-site to fight our way through; I’m not a soldier, and I had no idea how good you are in actual combat. Still don’t, come to think of it.” He held up a third finger, making a trident as he looked downward at his trembling hand holding its cigarette. “And I knew I couldn’t rely on beating him. My only hope was to get Jamsheed and as many Hezbollah as possible into an enclosed space and expose them to the sarin.” He made an unpleasant twist of the lips as he raised a fourth finger.
“And?”
“And I knew Gideon was lying about postponing the aistrike. We were living on borrowed time the second I blurted out where those Tuva canisters were. So I decided to get us out of there before your boss vaporized us.”
She smiled crookedly. “That worked.”
&
nbsp; “Damn right it did, lady.” He took a drag and frowned as he exhaled. “Alright, it sort of worked.”
Celestine threw her head back and laughed, the way smart people who don’t laugh very often laugh while they drink. “In that we survived, I suppose. Too bad you’re still lying about your motivations. Admit it: from the moment you rescued me, Tuva be damned, you were only out to kill Jamsheed Mashhadi. You lied to me, you killed people simply to clear a path to him, and you were ready to let Hezbollah get a stockpile of chemical weaponry if it meant killing a single lunatic who we now know was marked for termination by his own government.”
“Poor fucker,” Ambrose muttered, looking down into his drink.
“What?”
Ambrose kept his eyes on the table. “It’s nothing. I just…now that he’s dead, I’ve realized that I never really hated him. He was too fascinating for me to hate.” He held up the tip of his cigarette to demonstrate a point. “While I was a nerdy kid busy watching Return of the Jedi on rerun, he was a boy killing grown enemy soldiers with his bare hands. While I was in high school, somebody was tearing out his fingernails in an Iranian dungeon. Then what did he do? He became a virtuosic piano player and spent two decades training half of the goddamned Third World in how to make explosives that could take down the First World’s most advanced militaries.”
Ambrose poured some more sweet whiskey into his glass, unaware that his voice had gotten loud enough to draw the attention of other tables.
“And me?” he asked, smiling into the sweet brown whiskey, “I’ve been getting drunk. Even if I hadn’t inhaled a goddamned scuba tank full of sarin, I’m still a sliver of the man Jamsheed was, and I didn’t deserve to beat him. So yeah, ‘poor fucker’ is right.”
