Too Bad to Die (25 page)

I
an was lying in the fetal position on the floor of the German safe house. He'd been bound and gagged and thrown into a windowless storeroom. Eight inches from his face were the staring eyes of the NKVD operative who'd trained a gun on him in the lorry so unwaveringly last night—the one who'd kept the oil lamp upright while he listened to Erich and Ian talk. There was a large and ragged hole in his chest where the paratroopers' bullets had torn away the flesh around his heart. The storeroom was dark, but Ian could still make out the gleam of the man's dead eyes and the stench of his blood.

He had not slept. The noise from the far side of the wall—the main room where Zadiq was forced to watch his son be tortured during the long hours of the night—made the idea of sleep obscene.

Ian tried to inch away from the corpse, but his limbs were too numb. He was as heavy and useless as a beef carcass suspended from a butcher's hook.

Zadiq was sobbing now. Exhausted words spewed out in English and Armenian. Did the bastards realize he didn't speak German? That the brutalities they were practicing on Arev could never force his father to confess in a language they would understand?

And then he heard Erich's voice. The German agent was foolish enough to try to intervene. Ian hadn't heard him or his partner Tomàš in hours. Had they been sent out of the safe house?

Had they met up with the Fencer?

His blood quickened suddenly at the thought. Then his excitement died. If the paratroopers could contact their Nazi handler without the use of a radio, there was nothing for Alan Turing to intercept. Nothing for Gracie to report. Nothing that might spur a hunt for a missing Commander Fleming.

Your prospects for survival were always dim, Mr. Bond.

It was possible that Zadiq would have killed him in the end; but it was certain the Nazis would.

He heard the tramp of booted feet cross the uncarpeted lino floor. The storeroom door was pulled open. The searing stream of daylight hurt his eyes. He squeezed them shut, gagged mouth in a rictus.

He was hauled to his feet, which failed to support him. He fell to his knees and toppled sideways onto the Armenian's corpse. Two men lifted him now and dragged him passively from the storeroom and into the normalcy of a November morning. He cracked his eyelids, willing himself to endure the light and take in the scene. Three of the paratroopers were seated at the kitchen table. One of them had made coffee, but there did not seem to be much food shared between them. Their helmets were off and their rifles were stacked on the floor nearby.

Arev was suspended by his wrists from a ceiling rafter. His hands were bent at a bizarre angle, as though the wrists were broken. He was naked, and strips of his skin had been flayed from his buttocks, his ribs, his groin, and his face. Ian slipped on a wad of flesh discarded on the floor and saw too late that he had trod on Arev's scrotum. The boy had been castrated during the night. Gouts of blood trailed down his legs.

Ian glanced at Arev's face. The painful thinness of the skull seemed unspeakably poignant now—because it screamed of his youth. All the years he had yet to grow. Ian saw that he was either dead or unconscious. The paratroopers seemed indifferent to the boy now, so perhaps Zadiq had given them something they valued.

Ian looked around for the NKVD leader.

Zadiq, too, was naked.

He was seated awkwardly in a kitchen chair whose seat had been hacked out, so that his genitals dangled through the hole. His legs were tied to the chair legs, and his arms were stretched behind him and tied to the chair back. Ian could see the strain in his shoulders and the hideous vulnerability of everything else. The hair on the man's chest was grayish white, sparse, pathetically aged. Zadiq's head was hanging and he did not lift it as Ian was dragged across the room.

One of the paratroopers—Ian thought it was the first he'd glimpsed last night, an apparition with a gun in the darkened doorway—held a length of chicken wire in his right hand, the kind used for temporary fences in the field. It was tacked to a piece of wood maybe eighteen inches long, a sort of makeshift paddle. As Ian watched, the paratrooper swung it sharply under Zadiq's chair. The chicken wire tore at the man's dangling genitals. Zadiq screamed.

There was a second chair near the NKVD commander. The bottom had been hacked out of it, too. Ian guessed sickly who it was for.

He'd regained enough use in his legs and arms to struggle, at least, when they began to tear off his clothes.

—

“A
MBASSADOR
W
INANT!
It is an honor, sir, to welcome you here.”

Abolhassan Diba rose from his chair behind the handsome pearwood desk and offered his hand. He spoke French—almost his first language, Winant guessed. He knew very little about the Iranian business magnate, other than that he had been educated, like so many aristocratic Persians, in Switzerland and France.

French was the universal diplomatic language. Out of courtesy, Winant fell into it immediately.

“The honor is all mine, sir. To receive me without proper notice—no appointment—”

“It is nothing,” Diba said. “Please—if you would consent to take a seat.”

Winant had tracked his elusive quarry from the Park Hotel—which Diba owned, but only frequented at meals or during the evening nightclub hours—to this office building a few blocks to the north and west. At six stories, it was one of the highest buildings in Tehran, and Winant was surprised to see an elevator waiting in the lobby. They were rare in Persia. The lift operator informed him that Diba had been the first entrepreneur to bring them from Europe to his country.

“I hope you are finding the Park Hotel comfortable, Ambassador?” the man inquired politely.

“Perfectly. It's a lovely place.”

“You have everything you require?”

“And more.” Winant clasped his hands over his knee, a characteristic gesture. “I regret that I have been able to spend so little time in your beautiful establishment. But the duties of the conference . . .”

“I understand. Perhaps when this dreadful war is over, you will pay a visit to Iran solely for pleasure.”

“I hope I may. But it is about the conference that I have come to speak to you this morning,” Winant said. “I am presently serving as ambassador to Great Britain. I divide my time in Tehran between President Roosevelt and the British Embassy, consulting with Prime Minister Churchill. Are you aware, Mr. Diba, that the Prime Minister brought several members of his family with him?”

An expression of hauteur descended on the handsome face; the black brows lifted imperiously. The French became, if possible, more formal and florid. “I am. I had the very great pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mrs. Randolph Churchill a few evenings ago. I shall not soon forget so divine an experience.”

My God, Winant thought. He thinks I'm an asshole. That I'm here to tell him no Persian should presume to talk up a lady like Pamela.

There's diplomacy, for you.

“I'm relieved to hear it,” he said, with conscious warmth. “You may be of immeasurable service to the government of Great Britain, Mr. Diba—and to the Churchill family.”

“If I may assist you in any way—”

Winant summoned his most respectful French. “You are undoubtedly unaware that Mrs. Randolph Churchill has been decidedly unwell in recent days. In fact, those closest to her fear that she has been deliberately poisoned.”

“Ambassador Winant, I hope you are not suggesting—”

“Not by anyone at your magnificent hotel, of course,” Winant added, with a placating gesture. “But perhaps by . . . someone she encountered there.”

“I am desolated to hear of it,” Diba returned. He rose from his chair and came around the pearwood desk. His hands were folded behind his back, and he began to pace before the electric fire—another innovation he'd probably introduced to his country. “Is Mrs. Churchill in any danger?”

“She was discharged from a private nursing home this morning, and we have every reason to believe she is on the mend.”

“May I inquire what poisoned her?”

“Chloral,” Winant said. “Probably administered without her knowledge, in a drink.”

“She took only champagne in my presence,” Diba said. “Pol Roger 1928. A favorite vintage of Prime Minister Churchill's, I understand. I had it brought from the cellar by one of my personal assistants. And uncorked, I might add, by that same man at the craps table. He poured it out for us under my eye. I certainly suffered no ill effects from drinking it.”

“So, unless the poison was put into the bottle in France itself . . .”

“Mrs. Churchill cannot have been sickened in my company.”

“The idea is so ridiculous, Mr. Diba, that I did not for one second consider it,” Winant said. “But I still hope you may help me. When you parted from Mrs. Churchill, did she go directly into a taxi?”

“I cannot say. She encountered an acquaintance, you see, who claimed a dance, and swept her away from the craps table.”

“Ah,” Winant said.

Diba looked at him piercingly. “I imagine you are familiar with the gentleman, as he is a member of your delegation.”

“Is he, indeed?”

“Yes. I cannot quite recall the name. You understand, it was mentioned only a few times in my presence. An introduction . . . from Mrs. Churchill to myself . . .”

Winant waited, a benign smile of inquiry on his face.

“A river,” Diba said suddenly. He snapped his fingers in a thoroughly Gallic gesture. “Yes, that is it. The man had the name of a famous river. Not Thames, but . . .”

“Hudson,” Winant said.

Disappointing. He already knew Michael Hudson had talked to Pamela that night. It was Hudson who had confronted her with the German codebook.

“And you know of no one else? You did not observe Mrs. Churchill at any other point in the evening?”

Diba shook his head regretfully. “I did not. The press of business . . .”

“Of course.” Winant rose and offered his hand to the Iranian. “Thank you for your time.”

“It is nothing, Ambassador. Tell me—” Diba hesitated. “If I were to dispatch a bouquet of flowers to Mrs. Churchill—it would not be regarded as an impertinence?”

“It would be regarded, Mr. Diba, as the very highest mark of esteem,” Winant returned.

—

T
HE CROWD
assembled in the
zurkhaneh
was entirely male. Although the covered wrestling arena was only a few blocks from the Park Hotel, it was centuries distant in both style and substance.
Koshti,
or wrestling, was the most cherished sport in the Caucasus—and every Iranian province had its own type, rooted in folklore and tribal custom. The Mazandarans preferred
loucho
; the Golestans,
tourkamani
style. In this place, however, it was
Pahlavani
wrestling that ruled. It was no accident that
Pahlavani
wrestling was named for the Shah's tribe, or that it was considered the “official” wrestling school. For years, it had been a religious practice as well as a contest. Religion and dictatorship, Siranoush reflected, went hand in hand in Persia.

She was no stranger to wrestling. It was as common in the town squares and fields of Armenia as it was in Iran. But in the sepia-toned memories of her childhood—increasingly fragmentary and elusive—the grappling men were usually in bars. Knocking over chairs and breaking heads. In Iran, wrestlers were the mercenaries of the diplomatic world. The equivalent of Nazir's pit diggers. They took money from all comers. Sold their knowledge and their fists. They carried messages and guns for anyone willing to pay, no questions asked.

Here in the arena, they were kings. And she was an interloper.

There were serving women, of course, moving among the men. But even their eyes swept Siranoush with disapproval. The men were more vocal. She descended the sloping aisle between the ranks of seats, toward the sunken octagonal pit, where two young wrestlers—naked above the waist, sweating profusely and swaying—fought for submission. She ignored the catcalls, hissing, and guttural insults. She did not speak Farsi. Ignorance—and her obvious Western dress—might protect her.

She was looking for Dutch.

The Polish pilot still had a room at the Park Hotel. She had left a note for him at Reception only forty minutes ago. But it was the hotel bartender—who had an eye for a pretty blonde—who told her where Dutch went most days. He was gambling on
koshti
with Bond's money and doing quite well for himself. In fact, the bartender suggested, he might stay in Tehran indefinitely.

She raked the crowd, looking for the Pole. Easier than it might seem, because the
zurkhaneh
was divided into specific sections: athletes sat on one side of the sunken pit; musicians on another. The audience was confined to a third.

Dutch was gray-haired and clean-shaven, and he insisted on wearing a Polish Air Force cap that was as threadbare as the Shroud of Turin. She picked out the cap first, in the third row of seats up from the pit's edge. Like most of the men, he was looking at her instead of at the wrestlers.

At that moment, a pair of hands seized her by the shoulders and turned her roughly around. A young Iranian, obviously drunk. His fingers slid up to the nape of her neck and seized her hair in a painful grip. With a grin and what was probably an insult, he dragged her back toward the door.

She had been trained for stupidities like this.

She allowed herself to be dragged for a few seconds, then twisted like an eel and kicked the man hard behind his knee. His leg doubled beneath him. He let go of her.

She turned and looked for Dutch.

He had torn himself away from whatever bet he was nursing and leapt for the aisle. Before her bruiser could force himself upright, Dutch had reached them. For an instant, she thought he might slug the man in the jaw. She caught his wrist in midair and said, “Mistake.”