Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

“What just happened?”

“We got ourselves a ride,” Scorpion said, nodding and shaking his tambourine at a group of preteens. On top of the tambourine he showed Ghanbari he was holding a car key he’d stolen from the Iranian man. “They’ll be busy here for a couple of hours at least.”

“Where did you learn to do something like that?”

“Remy le Panthere. Remy the Panther. He was from Cote d’Ivoire. Black, handsome devil; best pickpocket in Paris. He could strip your pockets clean in three seconds and you’d never know he’d been there. No gangs of Roma kids, no man and woman front-and-back team. Didn’t even need the kind of crude bump and grab I just did.”

“You spent time in Paris?”

“At the Sorbonne,” Scorpion nodded, glancing around before stepping through the hedge and out to the street. A moment later Ghanbari followed.

“You didn’t learn that at the Sorbonne.”

“No. The useful stuff I learned on the streets.”

They headed for the parking lot where the Peugeot was parked. Another minute and they were inside the Peugeot. Scorpion took off his Haji Firuz hat and put his ZOAF pistol with its sound suppressor next to him. As they headed for the parking lot exit, two Basiji militiamen stepped out of the shadows and waved them down. Scorpion’s eyes darted around. There were no other police or militia around. Ghanbari, next to him, looked terrified.

One of the Basiji motioned for him to roll down the window.

“Your papers, Haji Firuz?” the Basiji said.

Scorpion reached into his pocket and handed him some crumpled-up handful of rials.

“What’s this?” the Basiji said, his eyes suspicious. “Get out of the mashin .”

“Bashe,” okay, Scorpion said, and shot him in the forehead. He shot the second Basiji in the head a second later and drove out of the parking lot. From the park came the sound of firecrackers. Anyone who might have heard the shots probably assumed they were firecrackers too, he thought, driving carefully down the street and onto Niayesh Highway heading west.

“You killed them,” Ghanbari said, wide-eyed, looking at Scorpion as if he had just seen him for the first time.

“Yes.”

“Just like that. You just killed them and drove off like it’s nothing,” he said, breathing hard, like he had just been running.

“Would you rather be on your way to Evin Prison? I killed your enemy, Sadeghi, too.”

They drove on the highway, crowded with traffic. They had to get out of town and on the road to Chalus before there were roadblocks, which the police might be reluctant to do, he thought, causing massive traffic jams on the night of Red Wednesday.

For a time, Ghanbari didn’t say anything, then: “How do you live with yourself?”

“Look who’s talking? What did you think Asaib al Haq was doing in Iraq? Kissing Sunnis and Kurds-and American soldiers too? You probably have more blood on your hands than I do.”

The traffic eased as they took the cloverleaf south onto Yadegar-e Emam Highway past a big market, lit up at night for the holiday. There were fireworks in the night sky over Pardisan Park.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Ghanbari asked finally.

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Look, I never talk about this,” Scorpion said, eyes flicking up to the rearview mirror to make sure there were no tails. “But just this once. Because we’re on the run together. Did you see those people tonight in the park? All happy, enjoying the holiday, hoping for the best for the New Year? Just people.”

“Yes,” Ghanbari nodded.

“They’re closer to war than they can imagine. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, might die. Not just in Iran, but America, Israel, Europe, the entire Middle East. Mostly innocent people who just want to live their lives. The Gardener put all that at risk. Last night we brought justice and maybe a chance to prevent the war. If you don’t think that’s worth the lives of a few Basiji, then your moral calculus is very different from mine.”

They drove on through the night. Scorpion headed west toward Karaj, a suburb in the extreme northwestern corner of Tehran, then turned north on Route 59, the only road through the Alborz Mountains to the northern coast of Iran on the Caspian Sea. He drove at a good pace, taking the curves of the winding two-lane road through the mountains at speed. With any luck, in another hour or so they’d be in Chalus, and another hour or two after that out of Iran.

“It’s a shame we couldn’t drive this road during the day,” Ghanbari said. “This is the most beautiful road in the world. Steep green mountain slopes, clear rushing streams, waterfalls, rainbows. It can take your breath away.”

They drove for a while. Ghanbari tried to get news on the radio but everything was about Red Wednesday. Then Scorpion began to slow. They were in a deep narrow canyon. There was a glow of light coming somewhere from around the bend of the road ahead. He pulled to the side of the road, stopped and got out, taking the pistol.

“What’s wrong?” Ghanbari asked, getting out too.

“Not sure,” Scorpion said, walking on the edge of the road, barely the width of his shoulders. Below him was a drop of at least a hundred feet where a clear rushing stream ran tumbling over rocks. The air was clean-the first clean air he’d breathed since he’d been in Tehran-and the sky above the canyon was full of stars. He walked a hundred yards, then crossed to the other side of the road and began climbing the face of a rocky cliff. It was mossy green, and smelled of vegetation, and was wet with water trickling down the rock face. When he was up about twenty feet or so, he leaned out and was able to peer around the bend into the serpentine winding of the road through the canyon. The light was coming from a massing of vehicles a kilometer up the road. It looked like there were at least twenty of them.

“What is it?” Ghanbari called in a whisper from below.

“Roadblock,” Scorpion said.

Zanjan,

Iran

They ran out of gas four kilometers outside Zanjan. It was an hour before dawn and the sky behind them had a violet predawn light just outlining the tops of the mountains. Scorpion told Ghanbari to wait in the Peugeot and began walking alone toward the city on the empty road.

The roadblock on the road to Chalus was like a cork in a bottle. For a second Scorpion had briefly flirted with the idea of using the gasoline in the Peugeot’s fuel tank as part of the explosive for a car bomb, but the narrowness of the canyon road and the number of vehicles and the amount of force at the roadblock made it impassable. They would never reach the Caspian Sea.

“How did they know we were coming on Route 59?” Ghanbari had asked as Scorpion made a careful U-turn on the narrow road and headed as fast as he could back toward Karaj.

“It’s logical,” Scorpion said, darting a glance at Ghanbari, his face shadowed by the light from the dashboard. “It’s the only road through the mountains. They know with everyone in the country looking for us we have no choice. We have to get out of the country.”

Ghanbari nodded.

“So now what?”

“Plan B.”

“Which is?”

“Iraq,” Scorpion said, driving faster as the road became straighter coming down out of the mountains. When he reached Karaj, he got off the highway to avoid the highway interchange where there might be another roadblock. Instead, he used dark back streets on the outskirts of Karaj, the bonfires all burned out and nearly everyone gone to bed by now, to zigzag his way to the Karaj-Qazvin Freeway. He drove onto the freeway and headed west toward the Iraqi border.