The Shield of Darius (17 page)

SIXTEEN

The Galen Broom seizure moved along even faster than Falen had expected and within ten days of Javad’s call to his contact in Salt Lake City, Falen had all the information he needed to confront the carpet merchant. Following instructions from Fisher, he drove west out of Washington on I-66 past Manassas to the Markham, Virginia exit and turned south. At Hume he took Highway 635 west toward Huntly to the mailbox Fisher had described; a plain black box mounted on the spoked iron wheel of an ancient hay rake. Taped to the wheel was a rectangular red and white sign that declared “NO TRESPASSING! THAT MEANS YOU!”

A hundred yards down a dirt lane to the left, a nondescript frame farmhouse stood in a grove of ragged maples. The house was freshly painted, white with gray trim, but there were no signs of occupancy. No dogs or cats. No chickens scratching below the open hayloft of the barn that stood behind the house.

Falen tried the front door and as Fisher had assured him, found it open. Inside, the entryway divided into a hall that ran straight into the back of the house on the left, and a stairway that climbed directly in front of him on the right. He took the stairs, turned right along a short hall at the top and pushed open the door of the last room. The Iranian sat on a low cot diagonally across to the left as Falen entered. His left wrist and right ankle were shackled to the wall, the cuffs linked by lengths of sturdy chain to steel rings, welded solidly onto a strip of boiler plate that stretched along the baseboard of the room. The rings were spaced to allow the prisoner to lie or sit on the cot without being able to reach wrist and ankle together. The room was warm and stuffy and the prisoner’s shirt was open, showing a braided gold chain about his neck that held a small circle of hammered bronze. In the corner along the window wall stood a table and television set. Otherwise, the room was empty.

As Falen entered the bedroom, Javad looked up vacantly, showed mild surprise at seeing a new face, and straightened defiantly on the cot.

“Are you going to tell me what the hell’s going on here,” he demanded. His clothes bore the wrinkles of days of continuous wear and his dark face bristled with ragged whiskers.

“I suspect you already know,” Falen said, leaning against the wall by the door and folding his arms.

“I don’t know anything,” the Iranian snapped back. “Those other guys haven’t said a word to me since I got here.”

“What do you want to know?”

“What I’m doing here. Why am I being held?”

“It’s sort of a trade. You take someone. We take someone.”

Javad looked at Falen with steady, sullen eyes. “I don’t like riddles. Tell me what you want of me.”

“I think you understand very well,” Falen said, standing erect again and thrusting his hands deep into his pockets. “I’m talking about Galen Broom, Arthur Ramirez, Benjamin Sager and the others you kidnapped.”

The Iranian showed a flicker of surprise, but quickly masked it with an irritated scowl.

“You’re crazy. You’re also in very big trouble. I’m an American citizen and have rights that protect me against this kind of thing.”

“Of course you do,” Falen said. “You have the right to talk to me, or the right not to. If you choose to talk, I’ll listen. If you decide not to, you’ll find I don’t give a tinker’s damn about your rights. In fact, we’re in a situation here where rights don’t even enter into the picture. You cooperate, or you’re gone. It’s that simple.”

“Don’t threaten me,” Javad hissed. “I am a very influential businessman in Philadelphia and I’ll have my lawyers on you in a minute.”

“I know exactly who you are,” Falen said. “Unfortunately, no one else knows
where
you are. You’ve just disappeared, and unless you cooperate with me, you’ll disappear permanently.”

The man turned and spit defiantly onto the floor beside the cot. “You don’t frighten me. You wouldn’t dare do anything to me.”

Falen smiled calmly. “You don’t seem to understand, Mr. Esfarjahni. That is your real name, isn’t it? Esfarjahni?”

The Iranian was silent and Falen continued.

“You see, this isn’t some kind of bargaining thing we’re starting here. I don’t have the time or patience for that. And don’t fall back on this ‘I’m an American’ bullshit. Don’t think of yourself as being in the United States. You’re in what I’d prefer to call ‘deep shit’, and that’s exactly where I’m going to leave you unless you help yourself out. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Javad laughed smugly. “What are you going to do? Beat me? Throw me in jail? Try to use me to negotiate for something?”

Falen shook his head. “Nope. Nothing that primitive. You’re dealing with sophisticated people here.” He drew a slim plastic case from the pocket of his jacket and snapped it open in front of the Iranian, showing him an empty hypodermic and a small vial of clear liquid.

“I’m not sure what this is, exactly. Some kind of biological thing. But the people I got it from tell me it’s nasty stuff. One dose and within two or three minutes, your whole body begins to burn like somebody poured hot lead into your veins. By morning, you’ll be covered with open, running sores, and then your skin’ll just rot away from you. You’ll

go blind, your tongue will swell until it chokes you…unless you die of thirst first. After awhile, the guards won’t come in here to give you anything because you’ll stink like a pile of moldy shit. If you can’t find a way to kill yourself sooner – and believe me, you’ll try everything you can think of – you’ll be dead within three days.”

This time Javad did not laugh.

“You government guys can’t kill me. You don’t dare take that kind of risk.”

“Government? Who said anything about government? I’m a businessman like you. And I guarantee you, if I have to kill you – which I won’t hesitate to do – I’ll make it as painful as I can.”

“I’m not telling you anything,” Javad said darkly, eyeing the plastic case.

“Let me help you start then,” Falen offered. “First of all, I might as well tell you Amy won’t be coming back. She got upset with your little marriage charade and decided she wasn’t going to be used like that anymore. She’s with us now. And we’ve already visited with Baktiar…. He was happier than hell to tell us everything we wanted to know. He’s a lot more committed to money than to country and we didn’t find it hard to make some deals.”

As Falen talked, he watched Javad’s face and hands for the slightest twitch of response. There was none. The Iranian sat still and expressionless, looking coldly at his interrogator.

“We’ve been following your shipments too, Mr. Esfarjahni. This last one from Majorca went through the Suez and up to Bandar Abbas in the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Broom took his trip a few days early, by the way, and your Europe team almost missed him. But Baktiar did a good job of checking him out in a hurry, and you got to him just in time. I got to hand it to you. You’ve got a slick operation. Broom’s in Tehran with the rest of them.”

The Iranian started to speak, then stopped. As Falen had hoped, questions were beginning to gnaw at his curious conspirator’s brain.

“This sounds like a CIA fairy tale to me,” he said finally. “Someone’s been lying to you.”

Falen laughed and took the clear vial from the case, holding it up against the afternoon sun from the bedroom window to inspect its lethal contents.

“That’s a stupid answer, Javad. And it doesn’t help us get anywhere. We’ve been following your little group for months now, and know how you fly the merchandise from Bandar Abbas to Mehrabad Airport, then drive them in vans to the old Rubaiyat Hotel on Kushk Street. Broom’s about number twenty-nine by our count. And you were going to add Amy. But she’s out of the picture.”

For the first time, the Iranian’s hands began to fidget along the edge of the cot. “If you think we’ve been taking so many people, why haven’t you stopped us?”

“Why?” Falen said casually. “These people aren’t of any particular interest to me. Like I said, I’m a businessman, like your friend Baktiar. It’s the money I’m interested in.”

“The money?” Javad raised his chin and looked skeptically down his nose at Falen.

“Yup. I trade in weapons, people, information. If someone wants to buy, I find a way to sell. You have a nice little deal here and we’re taking it over.”

The Iranian sniffed. “You’re CIA. You smell and look like CIA.”

Falen snapped the plastic case shut and leaned again against the wall, folding his arms.  “Think whatever you like. But if I’m CIA, why haven’t I stopped you by now? Why let you go on taking these people?”

The Iranian looked away out the window for a moment, then back at Falen. “Probably because you can’t stop us. You know if you tried, we’d tell everyone what we’ve done. And if the public learned there are thirty Americans being held in Iran, they’d have your heads.”

“If the public knew about this, they’d probably scream till we blew your pathetic country off the map, with all the other shit you guys have been up to.”

“Not with thirty Americans spread out at all the strategic points. To save them, the people here will sell this whole country and you with it.”

Falen nodded, smiling. “A clever idea. But we could have stopped you anytime. We missed the first two or three, but we’ve been watching your whole operation since you took Gabler out of Denver. We know about the ones you got earlier from our man inside.”

“If you know so much, why didn’t you take
me
earlier? I think you just learned about this and are trying to squeeze me for more than you already know.”

“You oughta be able to tell from what I’ve said that we know just about everything. But we don’t touch anything that’s high risk. We wanted to watch your operation for awhile to make sure it was safe. You’ve gotten better at it over time, and the way you handled Sager, Ramirez and Broom convinced us that it was time to move in.”

Javad laughed dryly. “Your man inside must not be very good. Otherwise you’d know that we’re through. Broom was our last.”

“We lost our inside man two months ago,” Falen said. “What do you mean, through?”

“If you’re telling me the truth about the Trossen woman, as soon as they find out she’s not coming, the others will be moved.”

Falen shrugged. “We can ship to other locations. Just give us your price, tell us who you want, where and when you want them, and we’ll have them there. We’ve now got the contact in Passports that you lost, so we can get what you need.”

“Thirty’s all we want,” the Iranian said, apparently deciding that Falen
did
know enough to be candid. “Five in six locations when we get them placed.”

“Won’t your plan work better with a few more?”

“Thirty’s probably more than we need. And we’ve got more than Americans. But you are the worst. One, fifty, a hundred…it doesn’t matter. We learned with the embassy takeover in ’79 and from watching your other messy wars that the great weakness of American is that it won’t willingly sacrifice a single civilian, even if the whole nation’s being held hostage by that one. You call twenty Afghan civilians killed by a rogue soldier ‘unfortunate collateral damage,’ but when one American life is at risk, you change your entire attack plan. How will they find thirty in six different places all over Iran? When they couldn’t get one out of the Hay Madi district of Beirut years ago, how will they rescue thirty from the heart of Islam? We learned from holding the Embassy that people get the most excited about hostages that come from their own cities or states, or from their own race. We’ve even got mothers.” Javad raised his manacled hand and held the small bronze shield up at eye level. “When we announce the Shield of Darius to the world,
we will have this country in chains
.”

Falen’s mind sorted through the Iranian’s statements like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, examining their shapes and fitting them into place in the pattern. He was still a few pieces short.

“As long as they’re held in secret, you’re vulnerable. As far as anyone in this country’s concerned, these people just disappeared and are probably dead. Hostages aren’t worth much unless people know they’re being held.”

Javad’s lip curled into a sardonic smile. “They’ll know,” he said. “If an American ship in the gulf attacks one Iranian gunboat – or if the Israelis hit a single reactor, they will know.” His voice began to rise with revolutionary fervor. “Every American will learn that to fire upon Iran is to kill an American. To kill a neighbor, or a mother, or a man with a family. They will know that these are people from their own neighborhoods. People of influence. They will see that the power of the Shield is not in the number of our swords, but in how sharply and painfully a single blow against us is delivered to your own heart.”

Falen took a deep breath and released it in a sigh of resignation, pushing slowly away from the wall.

“Well, I can see we’ve missed an opportunity here. It sounds like your business is pretty well taken care of without us. Unless, of course, we could sell you a replacement for the Trossen woman.”

“You won’t have time. I’m supposed to deliver her to Paris a week from tomorrow. We don’t need her. We just want her out of the way. She’s a nobody and wouldn’t add much to our cause. When I don’t arrive with her, they’ll immediately send the hostages to their new locations.” He again grinned at Falen. “Since you have her, I imagine we could make some arrangement with you to dispose of her for us.”