Banquo's Ghosts (17 page)

“It’s all right. I’ll be fine.” And with that she exited the van into the custody of the religious police.

The three hours of sleep passed slowly. Johnson dozed off and on, curled up on his seat, his mind occupied with Yasmine and the insults hurled at her. What must it take to bear such contempt, not to suffer a catastrophic internal loss of confidence? Then, his imagination took over as he drowsed.

Despite himself, he suddenly saw Yasmine’s dark lips speaking words to him, words he couldn’t make out but knew were meant for him alone, enticing him to some delicious moment, shrouded and veiled—but more satisfying than any he ever knew. What Jo von H said of him once in pure admiration, “Peter, you’re a dog through and through.” So true.
A quality considerably more plausible before three wives, the downward slope of middle age, and the alcoholic’s inability to focus on the task required even when a young woman was available to focus his mind.

When the vans started their engines at dawn, they caught Johnson in mid-snore with Yasmine sitting beside Yahdzi as she had before.

She looked back at him. Over the back of the seat she held out the briefing materials once more. Thirty solid pages, single spaced in a manila folder. “Please don’t forget about this.” Reality banished his reveries. There were few things Johnson hated more than a nag. He sat there, slowly coming to his senses, rubbed the rheumy white gunk in the corners of his eyes, worked a tongue around a cottony mouth. His joints groaned from being cramped all night. God, how he hated being told what to do. First thing in the morning, or any time. When he took the damn materials from her, the whole bundle fanned into his lap, falling to the car floor with a rush and a slap.

“Christ.”

Yasmine turned away in disgust. The man was hopeless. Johnson sighed in defeat. A nagging harpy lurked somewhere in the heart of womankind; it queered the romance every time. Cheat on him, rob him blind, ignore him—anything but tell him what to do. Over decades, he slowly came to realize you couldn’t achieve real intimacy without give-and-take that included—tragically—being told what to do. Realized too late. Too late for his first marriage, to Jo von H when they were kids. For his second, marrying a classical dancer he thought he would dominate by virtue of his worldliness and a preponderance of knowledge. Giselle’s mother. Françoise turned out to be the worst of all, and he couldn’t help smiling. What a bobcat. Like Mother like Daughter. And even for his third, to the mature and sensible Elizabeth Richards, art curator, who had always told him that, when he died, she—not the others—would be the widow.

Briefing materials, Mr. Peter. Remember? He retrieved the splayed folder from the floor. Then sat with them in his lap, staring stupidly out
the windows. He hated reading in a moving car. Presently they left the desert, and the vans climbed into mountains. Very slow going, as the roads were single lane, barely wide enough for a tractor-trailer with its long turn radius. The air cooled as they followed the road ever upwards, a thousand feet, then two thousand, then three. Pear orchards clinging to the steep hills showed their fruit in the September sun, then thick copses of trees and patches of bare rock, a running mountain stream. A doe and her Bambi gingerly stepped across the rushing water.

The papers in his lap seemed as dull and worthless as pretty much any briefing materials ever stuck under his nose on any junket anywhere in the world. Perhaps man didn’t feel a universal hunger for freedom, liberty, and “All-the-Shrimp-You-Can-Eat Night” at Red Lobster, but he sure as hell felt the all-consuming urge to disseminate propagandistic, barely readable briefing materials. It united every government in the world—liberal capitalist, Afro-kleptocratic, Communist, Islamist, Euro-socialist. The one true God.

Johnson’s eyes began to glaze over—the poorly produced cheap grainy pages, dense Courier type all running together—when he noticed something unusual. A single letter bracketed in faint green ink. He thought he had seen that before, and sure enough, flipping back three pages, he saw another. He flipped ahead and found yet another, then another. He was wide awake now. He stared at the back of Yasmine’s neck, at the all-covering folds of her green chador. Coincidence? The same color green as the pen. She was looking resolutely ahead.

He began to piece the letters together. Flipping ahead frantically now. More letters faintly bracketed. N-O. N-O-
C-H
. N-O-C-H-
O
.

NO CHOICE.

Another series spelled out: KILL HIM.

And then another, simply: DO IT.

Johnson’s breath came fast. He thought he was going to have an asthma attack
. I-T-S-W.

IT’S WHAT HE W.

He was through one side of the folder. There was more; several paper-clipped sections. He moved to the next. P-T-O-Y-O-U. He
flipped to the next. Nothing. What the? IT’S WHAT HPTO YOU? IT’S WHAT HE PTYO U? He worked it over and over but could make no sense of it. When he dropped the damn thing earlier did he lose something? Or maybe mixed up the order? He flipped through all the pages, his eyes searching for the faint green ink. Maybe on the backs of the pages? He turned them upside down. He went through from the beginning, making sure he had everything. But there were no other marks. He wanted to reach up and shake Yasmine, demanding, “What about—?”

But what did he want?
The message was obvious.

Last of all picking up with the text P TO YOU.

UP TO YOU.

He sat bolt upright in his seat, as though the message had frozen him in an electric current. Dr. Yahdzi was absorbed in the contents of his briefcase, flipping from one family photo, one Kodak moment to another. Touching the framed pictures as though they were flesh and blood. Yasmine clearly heard him going through the papers—how could you miss it? But she didn’t turn, said nothing. And he interpreted her silence as a confirmation, a kind of command.

Banquo had said, “You’ll have to allow the situation to mature, ripen.” Is this what he meant? What the hell was Johnson supposed to do with this rotten peach? Attack the physicist bare-handed and hope the driver shot one of them in the struggle? Wait for another sign from heaven?

Johnson barely noticed the distance they had traveled. As they entered the tiled and stucco town of Natanz, a single peak loomed over their heads. “Vulture Mountain,” Dr. Yahdzi explained, looking back at Johnson. “It’s told the troops of Alexander the Great killed Darius III somewhere close by.” And Johnson strained for some hint in that seemingly innocuous historical observation. Was he supposed to play Alexander to Yahdzi’s Darius? To keep the vultures at bay? Nothing seemed innocuous now.

He began to pay attention again to the passing scene. The caravan rumbled through an almost empty town, a ghost town of closed shops and no real street life. A few women head to toe in black, faces covered, walking along the cobblestone streets. They passed a number of walled mosques, then left the town behind; ten or fifteen miles onward they reached a plateau and the long straight road to the Nantanz Enrichment Facility.

The road broadened out, fully two-lane now so as to accommodate opposing traffic. A cluster of concrete buildings to the left, flat like square pancakes.

“The original uranium separation pilot plant,” Yahdzi said. “No point in going through there—it’s an antique. They’ve cannibalized most of the equipment for other projects.”

Their van reached a traffic circle, a large one enclosing the everpresent concrete open water pond, common to nearly every nuclear or industrial facility. Johnson smelled a stink coming up from the water—sulfur, rotten eggs—was some of it sewage? Run-off waste product? Somehow they’d missed that at the Banquo briefings.

Coming up on the right, another six buildings, pancake-style again, but the interesting area lay behind it on a raised berm, maybe a quarter mile square, like a huge, flat, fortified hill. There a small army of men busily toiled away, steam shovels and huge Kubota bulldozers moving earth, cranes dropping scrap into huge dump trucks to be carted away. Even at the distance of a thousand yards Johnson could tell the earthmovers were enormous, with fifteen-foot tires and many cubic yards of hauling space. They would make quite the impression at even the most well-appointed Monster Truck Show. They roved
about the top of the mound like intent yellow construction robots, back and forth, belching exhaust.

And yet nothing much to see at ground level. Clearly, the workers were in the finishing stages of some large underground installation and now packing earth over the top.

“That’s where we’re going,” Yahdzi told Johnson, pointing straight ahead. The entrance was a huge tin-roofed affair like a long airplane hangar. It sloped down, the roadway vanishing into the ground. The concrete mouth larger than the double barrels of New York’s Holland Tunnel, but it was traffic-controlled in a similar way, red light/green light. With a fortified checkpoint and a heavy-gated barrier with yellow and black warning slashes.

The first two vans pulled up to the guardhouse. The van with the goons stayed behind in the hangar. For a few moments, Jazril the Jazz Man dickered with the security personnel, while the open concrete tunnel mouth waited to swallow them all. Then the gated barrier slid sideways, and the two vans were cleared to descend.

What Johnson saw that day was what many people since have come to see only in photographs, video pictures, and blueprints, which convey little but curious technological stainless-steel forms, like sci-fi art. The high-capacity, high-purification centrifuges. Much more elaborate than the ones at Gonabad. A forest of tubes stretching down one side and up the other, all humming at once. Twenty-four hours a day. Three hundred sixty-five days a year. Taking radioactive material, whether in rough cake form or slightly processed, breaking it up, spinning it ’round and ’round, separating the heaviest elements, making it purer and purer. Until at last it could be packed into a nice little baseball and put to God’s divine purpose.

What you felt when you walked down one side was the raw power of spinning cycles, a steel whirling dervish of scientific ecstasy: not in the peaceful Sufi staves of devotion, but in the Mahdi’s righteous anger at all things not-of-Islam,
not-of-submission
. A throbbing wrath ready to
rip the heart from the very earth and show it still alive and pumping to the stars.

One of Shakespeare’s sonnets came to mind, driven into Johnson’s head eons ago by a master at Bradford Grammar Public School. The teacher’s excruciating exertions lasting him a lifetime. He closed his eyes and repeated it to himself: