Banquo's Ghosts (15 page)

Sheik Kutmar joined Johnson in the elevator for the ride up. He glanced once at the bent flower, but his face betrayed nothing. The elevator doors swooshed open, and Sheik Kutmar led him outside. Through
another set of glass doors and into a bright, luxurious sitting room. His Eminence sat on a gold brocade couch and stood up when they came in. Two security men in suits and sunglasses flanked the couch a step and a half behind the mullah. Another security man covered Johnson from the corner of the room, never taking his eyes off him for a second.

Sheik Kutmar stopped Johnson a few paces away from His Eminence and motioned for the bent red poppy in the cracked vial.

“Please, may I?”

Johnson gave it to him. Sheik Kutmar brought it to show the former president, kissing the fat man’s outstretched hand before presenting the gift. Moslemeen Sayyed nodded, gazing at it mildly, looking for all the world like a plump happy turnip in his purple robes. Then smiled as if the flower pleased him. He murmured a few words as if to bless it. Then his eyes strayed to a large vase on a table. It contained nothing but poppies—and not just red ones but yellow and black and blue and orange ones. In fact, Johnson didn’t think he’d ever seen a more wonderful display. Sheik Kutmar took the blessed flower stem and placed it carefully in the large bouquet, where the other stems kept it upright.

Moslemeen Sayyed spoke a few words clearly to the room, staring directly at Johnson. But it was Sheik Kutmar’s voice that told him what it meant:

“His Eminence says, ‘The strong stems uphold the weak ones.’ Would you care to sit?” He motioned to a chair by the great man’s side. Johnson approached and, as the mullah did not present his hand to be kissed, just paused for a moment. As the holy man bent to sit, Johnson followed suit, and so they reached the cushions together.

“Thank you for seeing me, Your Eminence.”

Every time His Eminence spoke, Sheik Kutmar translated directly, and every time Johnson replied, the Sheik did the same for him, his cold, calm voice precise and startlingly clear. The former president was nothing like his emissary, not aloof, but familiar and genuine. Like talking to an old family friend.

“It is our pleasure, Mr. Johnson. I apologize for your reception, but Persians are a passionate people. Especially when we feel we are in a new world. But the truth is, the new world is really just the old world we
know so well. Yet occasionally some event or realization is so strange and awful it breaks through our everydayness, and people don’t know how to behave. And then disagreements occur.” He waved vaguely to the windows, acknowledging the events outside. The turnip sighed.

“In the end, all passion fades; we get old and tired.” Here he pointed to himself and touched his white beard. “But you’re still young, like our people, and we must try to turn our sour days to . . . sour cream?” He indulged a smile, “Do you not have a similar saying?”

Johnson grinned and moved his elbow. “Indeed, we say, turning lemons into lemonade.”

At which point His Eminence Moslemeen Sayyed laughed and clapped his hands.

“Precisely!”

A tray of lemonade was brought as if from nowhere. The security men filled glasses. At an un-translated word from His Eminence, the security men poured themselves glasses as well, and everyone drank. Johnson savored it, as sweet and tart as life itself. Then His Eminence began to speak in earnest.

“I am very glad you didn’t give up or change your words as so many did when these larger troubles began. So many lost their bearings with regret and confusion, but not you. It was as though the terror in our world made you see clearer, and the truth of this rose up from your heart and soul for everyone to see.”

“You’re very kind, Eminence.”

The graybeard dismissed the remark with an easy shrug.

“Hardly. Kindness is not one of my vices. I leave that to women and the children of the West. Let them bathe in kindness. It is obvious to many people that you have obeyed the stirrings of your heart. I’m here to ask you whether you are prepared to respect our total individuality. And by that I mean Persia. By that I mean Iran. I’m here to ask you whether you are fighting for ethical norms, the relativism of civilizations, the complex mosaic of the world that can never be resolved. I’m here to ask you whether you intend to use your gift once more.”

Peter Johnson put down his half glass of lemonade.

“It’s what I do, Eminence. That’s what I do.”

The blue eyes of the turbaned man stared into him, with the hidden question of
Really?
shimmering below the surface. And so Johnson drove the nail home.

“I’m not here to uphold norms of any kind. I’m not here to answer questions or resolve problems. I’m here to raise questions that can’t be answered, pose problems that beg no easy solution. And demand answers only from those who have the power to push a button and end the world.”

This last bit seemed to finally satisfy the graybeard turnip in the turban; he glanced silently at Sheik Kutmar, an unspoken command.

“Well, then you should start right now, Mr. Johnson,” the Sheik told him. “Jazril Mahout and his crew were asked to stand by, and so the Al Jazeera people are here now. It’s high time he took you out into the field. That is why you’re here, after all.”

Yep, Johnson thought. That’s
exactly
why I’m here. But instead he merely said, “What of my luggage and laptop and so on?”

Sheik Kutmar waved off his concern.

“The hotel will be notified. We’ll send everything along.”

Johnson’s heart leapt. And now he knew for certain they were going to give him all the lemons he could handle.

T
he road to Lake Kavir-o-Namak in the province of Khorasan ran some four hundred miles due east and then south of the capital across a salt desert, a whitish crystalline pan that passed for a “lake” maybe a millennium ago. Some two hundred miles east of Tehran the highway was wide, blindingly sunny, and, at noon, nearly empty. Dun-colored hills stretched off into the horizon; a grove of fig trees stood near a rocky stream that ran by the highway. A shepherd led his goats to the water’s edge. The Jazz Man and the cab driver stopped for midday prayer on the road’s shoulder. The minivan carrying the camera crew pulled up behind. Then all the men got out, put down prayer mats, and faced southwest.

When Johnson balked at joining them on a prayer rug, the Al Jazeera man, Jazril, gave him a withering look. For some long moments the men knelt in prayer bowing and speaking as one. At last, they finished with a final “
Akbar
.” They stood and rolled up their mats, and everyone got back in their respective cars. When the taxi was rolling along the road once more, Jazril turned to him and said mildly, “Mr. Johnson, be warned. This behavior will not be acceptable when we reach the facility at Gonabad. Dr. Yahdzi is a very pious man.”

The facility at Gonabad! Would that they had reached it already! Johnson’s irritation faded to amazement the deeper they drove east and
then finally when they turned south toward the great lake. Fields of saffron flowers surrounded the road on either side, a magical carpet of pale violet petals stretching mile after mile, lazily nodding their heads in the hot breeze. The scent of saffron filled the air, making Johnson think of grilled shrimp or chicken turning that beautiful shade of yellow as the silken threads melted into the meat.

They reached the facility at about four in the afternoon. The guards at the checkpoint looked at the papers Jazril handed over and then got on the guardhouse telephone for a few moments. Regular Army? Johnson didn’t recognize the regimental chevrons. A soldier waved them through, and they drove slowly past the open water cisterns toward a cluster of buildings. The place was a fortress. Barracks, guard towers, anti-aircraft emplacements with flak guns. Johnson saw camouflage netting on the side of a low hill, a surface-to-air missile battery. With what looked like a Chinese crew.

But the four gorilla-faced guards at the facility entrance were pure Persian. In an adjoining room he was strip-searched. He’d expected this. Then the body cavities, and not by anybody half as nice as his Tehran doctor. No one spoke a word. Finally, they marched him down a flight of utility stairs and round long hallways. Down more sets of stairs into the subbasement. Around more corners until he was thoroughly lost. The guards opened a pair of double doors and left them open throughout the interview.

Beyond lay Yahdzi’s office. Dr. Ramses Pahlevi Yahdzi of the University of Isfahan. The office looked nothing like the one in Banquo and Wallets’ charade. The place was filled top to bottom with servers and computer towers. The physicist glanced from his desk, circles under his eyes beneath his spectacles. With his lab coat rumpled, he looked as if he’d slept down there for a month.

“They say you’ve come to kill me,” he remarked, nodding in the direction of the guards. Johnson started despite himself. “That you have photos of me on the walls of your study at home.” The doctor shrugged to himself sadly. “How anyone could discover that, I wouldn’t know.” The only objects on the professor’s desk besides a PC monitor were family photos. “Here, come see my pictures,” he said to Johnson, motioning to him to come behind his desk.

One of the murder scenarios from Banquo’s office came to Johnson, and he wondered in a panic: Was this
it
? This his chance? Why so fast? How about the gun? Or was there some other weapon he hadn’t noticed? Was this the occasion for him to use his bare hands? The thought nauseated him. Worst of all, the two guards had retreated back down the hall and now sat at a metal desk drinking tea and reading magazines. The signal?

And then time slowed down as in a car crash, an adrenalin-fueled moment-by-moment slide show, as if he were inhabiting one of those picture flipbooks that kids fan through with slightly different pictures to create the illusion of motion: he saw the tiny wiry hairs on the tip of Yahdzi’s nose and the squiggly red lines across the whites of his eyes.

When he blinked, the back of his eyelids flashed blood red. A rush of overwhelming failure washed over him: he didn’t know what to do. Didn’t have a clue. After all he’d been through, he was just going to exchange pleasantries, admire the man’s photos, and studiously ignore the man himself, the engine of radical Islam’s greatest leap forward since—when? Since Mohammed conquered Mecca? Since the Muslims took Spain? Since the Ikhwan rampaged through Saudi Arabia, creating the predicate for a Wahhabi petro-state? So Johnson stood on the precipice, staring into irrelevancy, perfectly useless to all and sundry. His grand plan? Sit on his thumb, admire the snaps, and have a cup of tea.

He followed Yahdzi’s hand, dark creases across the pink-mocha palm, directing him toward the pictures. Each one leapt at him in a different way, telling a slightly different story, each adding to the previous:

First a black-and-white: Yahdzi and wife as a young couple. Yahdzi in a suit jacket, no tie. Smiling broadly in more carefree times. A tall slender woman stood beside him. She had an alluring, self-possessed gaze, elegant and pretty—a woman, indeed. Husband and wife, their eyes full of hope and anticipation at the wonderful future that lay ahead of them: those magical plans people make when all they see is clear skies to the horizon.

Next: Yahdzi and wife at the seaside with a new addition—a three-year-old girl holding one of her parents’ hands on either side, this
picture in the stilted colors of 1970s-era photography. Mama held a baby in her free arm, her eyes a little surprised at how things turned out. Not disappointed but not overjoyed either.

Another: everyone older now, a glossy group portrait. The two daughters, seven and four, rapscallions. The older daughter looking like her mom, everyone sitting close together in a photography studio smiling aggressively for the camera. Happy, prosperous, even blessed.

Still another: A group shot again, everyone about five years older. Standing outside. The background showed a Spartan trailer in a bleak landscape, a house that looked like it was hauled over miles of desert, streaked with dust. Yahdzi’s wife leaned into his shoulder. One of her fingers gripped his forearm. But all those blue skies were long gone over the horizon of her life, hopes and dreams that never seemed to materialize. And you could see as much in the lines around her eyes.

Last of all: just his wife. Standing. Her arms hanging by her sides, hands empty. Inside some sort of scientific facility: concrete walls, cold neon lighting making her olive complexion slightly green. Horror show. She looked unnatural, forced and strained. Johnson was drawn to her eyes again. Gleaming dark brown eyes that faded seamlessly into her pupils. He saw something new there. He saw what he thought was alarm. The road of life had taken an unexpected, irrevocable turn and not for the better. Yes,
fear.

Why include this picture of all pictures? Unless it had some point. Unless—in a flash Johnson understood. This man was no fanatic. Jazril the Al Jazeera man was full of it. The professor was a hostage. And
terrified
. You could see it in the gray pallor of his face. The way he tapped his fingers on the desk. A facial tic blinked at Johnson, and what was really frightening—Yahdzi knew about it. Each time the spasm jerked his face, his fingers as if by instinct began to rise to calm the tic down, knowing all the while it wouldn’t help.