Banquo's Ghosts (25 page)

“Nice shoes.”

And to Peter Johnson’s everlasting shock, Miss Morningstar’s bright eyes shone out from between the slash in her burka. “Marjorie! Please! Get me the hell out of here!”

“
Walk
toward the taxi stand.” This from the other woman, who was a little tall for a dame, Robert Wallets in his own chador, covered from head to toe, his voice urgent and his words clipped. “When you see Yossi’s taxi, bolt for it.”

They turned their backs on him, facing the goons in the shadows of the awnings. Johnson began to weave his way across the crowded plaza. Thirty steps from the line of taxis, twenty-five, twenty. He peeked briefly over his shoulder, only to see the goons from the bazaar moving out from under the shadows. Johnson froze again like an idiot.

Then gunfire erupted all around him. Marjorie’s and Wallets’ guns spat fire from the folds in their robes, hosing down the five goons dogging them, some spun around from the force of the rounds, others doubled over. And Johnson didn’t stay to watch more.
Time to die? This moment?
Hell no. Run!

And he did—in an absurd hunched-over way, like the guy who stumbles out to the driveway for the morning paper in his slippers and bathrobe only to find that he’s walked into an NRA shooting range.

People and cab drivers were screaming, diving for cover—where was Yossi? Then he saw him. The short, dark man emerged from the driver’s seat of his cab with a stripped, stockless AK-47, firing toward the military police, who scattered like a herd of cats. Johnson dived into the backseat of the cab, his nose flat against the vinyl seat, feet still sticking out the door.

A lull in the gunfire and Yossi shouted at him, guttural, indecipherable yelps, and yanked at his legs. He was trying to pull him out of the car’s backseat. Johnson started to fight and kick. Then it dawned on him. He’d jumped into the wrong cab.

He no sooner stood up than Wallets descended on him and tackled him into the back seat of the right taxi, lying on top with his elbow in his back. Johnson tried to stick his head up, but Wallets yelled, “Stay down!” Doors slammed, and the cab lurched forward, gunfire crackling again. The back window shattered, showering them in cubes of glass, like costume jewelry baubles. Otherwise they benefited from
Inshallah
marksmanship, one of the region’s great contradictions in terms.
God Willing, we’ll hit something.
Wallets let fly a farewell burst of suppressing fire through the empty back window.

Then they were moving, hurtling into traffic. The taxi barreled through the streets, past dun-colored buildings and storefronts. Wallets in the back scanned for anything coming up behind. Yossi twisted the rearview mirror so he could get a good look at their important passenger. He seemed to be laughing.

“Nice rubber shoes. You buy in Mahabad bazaar?”

“Yes,” Johnson croaked, his voice parched. “You can tell everyone I got my nice blue shoes right here in . . . . in Mahabad.” During four minutes of wild driving it seemed they’d given everyone the slip. For the moment, at least. Wallets began to methodically squeeze and knead Johnson’s neck, running his fingers wherever the skin was exposed. Johnson, now sitting upright, objected, “Hey—what the . . . ?”

“Don’t argue. Take off your shirt,” Marjorie told him from the front seat.

The searching, merciless hands ran up and down his body when suddenly Wallets found something in the soft roll around his middle.

“Okay, got it,” he said to Marjorie.

The car slowed, then pulled up to the curb. They seemed to be in an abandoned part of town, with empty stores and weedy rubble-strewn vacant lots. “Stick your belly over the seat,” Wallets commanded.

“What?”

“Just do it.”

Johnson bellied up to the bar. Marjorie wrenched around in her seat, and her arm clutched him close. A knife appeared in her free hand and went straight for Johnson’s gut.

“Wait!” Johnson pleaded.

“Don’t move,” Marjorie told him.

Wallets pressed the weight of his body against Peter’s back, jamming him in tight. Marjorie leaned on Johnson’s gut with her other arm, just working with her wrist—one quick cut into Johnson’s love handle, then going back for another.

“Got it,” she said. She showed Peter: a sliver of metal about the size of a grain of rice, slimed with blood. A chrome seed. And Johnson grasped at once, some sort of tracking device. A solid week of foot beating had proved to be more than enough distraction. Kutmar and Yasmine could’ve given him a suppository, and he’d never have noticed. But then it occurred to him maybe Wallets’ team picked up its frequency and tracked him too. “Is that how you found me?”

“We hef ahr vayz,” Marjorie said, in a comic German accent. “Let’s just say, we’re very happy you didn’t lose your pants.” She glanced at the slimy chrome seed as if wondering what to do with it, and then scanned the vacant weedy lot. Three bone-thin dogs were scavenging the rubble for rats and garbage. Her eyes flitted about the glass shattered inside of the cab. A bottle of water and two greasy kabobs still on their crushed paper napkins lay on the dashboard, crammed up against the vents and cracked windshield. Yossi’s abandoned lunch.

She grabbed for the kabobs, stripping them off their sticks. Then stuck the chrome seed in one lamb chunk and tossed the lot out her window. The dogs looked up and smelled it at once. They ran as a pack to the fallen meat.

“Time to go.”

And Yossi drove with even more abandon this time.

“Helicopters and roadblocks,” Wallets kept saying. “Choppers and blocks, that’s what’s going to get us.” He kept craning his head out the window to look for aircraft overhead. And they all strained to see as far as they could into the distance, where a shimmering heat distorted the horizon, to look for a telltale checkpoint.

They drove among buildings again, the outskirts of another populated area. Suddenly they pulled up to a locked garage with ancient gas pumps. Another car waited on the concrete apron, newer, a fast Audi, no broken rear window.

“Time to switch,” Wallets ordered. “Though we shoulda changed the profile. We’re still four people. Minus one chrome chip.”

Four hours later they pulled down an alley in a new town and quietly stopped. The long shadows of afternoon stretched across the buildings. They hustled Johnson out, and he hobbled through a metal door. It clanged shut behind as they climbed metal stairs—fire stairs, lit occasionally by naked bulbs. The place felt like some sort of factory. The sound of whirring from the landing above grew louder as they approached.

“Here, put this on so we can get across the floor to the office without drawing too much attention.”

Marjorie handed him his own burka, and Johnson cloaked himself in a woman’s robes, even his head with the niqab, covering his face except for the eye slit. He labored his way up, barely able to see, to the third
landing, where they paused. They stood before a back door, the fire exit to some kind of assembly line. They could hear the sound of machines whirring on the other side, like the thrum of a thousand bees all humming at once. The door was marked, first in Farsi script,

The name of this town, Johnson realized. Farewell, Mahabad.

then below in French,
and finally English,

“Ready?”

Johnson nodded. The Turk pulled open the door and led them inside. A triple row of long tables ran before them in sweatshop fashion. At each station a sewing machine and a woman, clad head-to-toe, doing piece work. The work was simple: sewing labels onto garments, burkas, the noise of a hundred sewing machines deafening. Huge stacks of burkas waiting for the labels stood in one corner, in scarlet and yellow and aquamarine. When one or two women looked up from their butterfly stitches, the Turk glowered and pointed harshly at them over the noise. Their eyes fell, and they went back to work. In seven long seconds, the Turk led them through the sweatshop to the overseer’s office, a few steps up on a raised platform, a long glass window overlooking the floor.

Once inside the office, Johnson found a chair by a desk furthest from the long windowpane, feeling totally exposed. When the door shut, the thrumming diminished by half. But he didn’t feel any safer. The Turk ignored everyone and immediately opened a Dell laptop, which began its power-up dance. Wallets slumped in one corner, as far from the window as possible. Marjorie found a first-aid kit under another desk and came over to look at Johnson’s feet.

“What the hell is this place?” Johnson asked.

“You mean besides our safe house?” Wallets remarked, then muttering, “to the extent anyplace here is
safe
.”

“It’s the All-Iran Burka Company,” Marjorie’s voice came through her hood, “just like it says on the door.”

“Except Iran no make burkas,” spat Yossi without looking up from his computer. “Just steal them from Label Makers.”

“Huh?” Johnson was totally lost.

Marjorie dabbed the cuts in Johnson’s feet with a cotton swab. “They can’t make enough burkas here to satisfy demand or the mullah’s edicts, never have. Just like soap or toilet paper. They buy and import the burkas from Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, and a few hundred thousand from a factory in northern Israel. But they don’t want to admit they can’t do it, so they sew on fake labels. ‘Made in Iran.’ Then everyone feels better.”

Johnson digested this. It seemed nearly incomprehensible to him that the country couldn’t produce the one thing pious men made their women wear. But then again, who’d invest in an Iranian company if it weren’t selling oil? Nobody. No return.

“What are we doing here?”

“Right now you’re going to heal up,” Wallets told him.

“What about them?” Johnson nodded in the direction of the work floor. He hated the thought of so many seamstresses a few feet away, any of whom could pop their heads in the door. Uncover their ruse. With only a single closed door and the cloth of a burka between them and discovery.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. Nobody works. The place is empty.”

As if on cue, the whirring of the sewing machines stopped almost as one. The seamstresses rose, filing out the front door of the sweatshop, punching out their timecards as they went. When all were gone, the burkas came off with one big
whew!
and Wallets lit a cigarette. Yossi picked up the phone on the desk and began what immediately became a contentious conversation, his voice becoming more and more heated the more he talked.

“I assume you realize the Iranians let me go,” Johnson said at length.

“A gamble,” Wallets blew smoke up toward the ceiling in a long column. “They could have made a big deal of your capture, but they risked catching hell from the international press for holding a journalist.
Sure, they’d called you a spy, but they call
everyone
U.S. spies. So they rolled the dice. Played you back into our hands.”