Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (32 page)

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.”

“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.”

Celestine poured half of his whiskey into her empty glass, with all the deliberateness of someone who had gotten excellent grades in chemistry. Then she stared off into Bangkok’s steam and neon.

Still not looking at him, she asked, “And what
about
that sarin you inhaled, Mister Hayes?”

He locked his fingers together and squeezed them tight, trying to stop the tremor in both forearms. He replied, “I took my antidote in time, but still…Celestine, that was a
lot
of gas, and it was my second exposure to the shit. The doctors on our naval base in Bahrain thought my nerves would heal, but once they saw I wasn’t about to die on them, they got me out of there pretty quickly. Nobody at the base wanted to be responsible for answering questions about why an American civilian was getting on-site physical therapy for a nerve gas attack. So Wayne appeared with a big fucking check and told me to keep my head down for a while.”

Ambrose opened a battered leather wallet and produced a purple and yellow bank card. “And since for some reason I never closed my Thai bank account, I bought a one-way first class ticket from Dubai to Bangkok on Air Emirates, and then told Wayne to find me if he could.” He shrugged. “Now that I’m here, I might as well stay for a while. The hospitals are good, I like the weather, and apparently now I’ve got a foreign consultancy with the Israelis. Things have been worse.”

Celestine sighed, “You read an entire dossier on me before reaching Syria, but I volunteered to work with you again, and I don’t even know who you are.”

Ambrose picked up her hand and shook it without letting go. “My name is Ambrose Rutherford Hayes, and I’m from Astoria, Oregon. On my dad’s side I’m a direct descendant of one of the worst presidents in American history. My mom is pure Scandinavian, like a lot of Astorians, and I grew up speaking Norwegian around the house. I haven’t been back to Oregon since my older sister was dying of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2002, but I still call my parents twice a year, on Christmas Eve and Norwegian Constitution Day.”

“Norwegian Constitution Day?”

He smiled. “It’s a thing. Drink up.”

They kept drinking until they had the courage to brave the monsoon, when they both went their separate ways. Ambrose never apologized for lying to her in Syria. Above them, triple-arcs of lightning turned the storm clouds purple and provided accents to the golden Buddhist stupas that punctuated the Bangkok skyline. Neither of them noticed that Ambrose had left a wrinkled photograph at the bar, under an empty whiskey bottle. It showed a boy with sad eyes, standing on top of a dead man and holding a Kalashnikov, wearing a bandanna with a slogan that eventually robbed the world of a very good piano player.

Dedications

To my parents, Ron and Barb, who made the foolish parenting choice of always saying they loved me and wanted me to be happy.

Special thanks to people who read the early draft of this book, including Gabe Le Chevallier, Michael Ferguson, and my dad. I look back on that draft with chagrin, and you were all instrumental in delicately telling me that it I shouldn’t quit my day job. Big, big thanks also go to Jacob Bartruff, who designed the maps in the front of this book, in addition to giving me a very uplifting initial take on the second reader’s draft of this book.

Lastly, extra special thanks to my lovely partner, Sarah, who put up with the world’s most annoying breed of animal: the aspiring writer.

Last-lastly, thank you for reading this. If you didn’t make it this far, well, thanks for trying anyway.