“Marg. Sag madareto begaad,” said Yaver. May a dog fuck your mother.
He spoke the words with more disdain than real anger.
“Back off. I know what I’m doing.” Daria clicked the cuffs tight.
And then, for a brief moment, everything was silent. So silent that Mark could hear the wind in the orchard and Daria’s breathing. A small flock of starlings settled in a nearby field.
“I’m not your enemy,” Mark said to Yaver, although as soon as he said the words, he was hit with a powerful feeling that no, he actually was this guy’s enemy. “I came here because I thought we could work together.”
Yaver gave him a who-gives-a-shit look, then suddenly stepped to the left and popped Tural hard on the side of his head with the butt of his AK-47. The hit was sharp and professional, and Tural collapsed.
“What the hell?” said Daria, turning.
“I change the plan.” Yaver stooped down to retrieve Daria’s pistol, which had fallen near Tural’s feet. With one hand he removed the magazine from the gun and threw it fifty feet away, into the field of lemon trees. “On knees, both of you. Hands to heads.”
“I gotta give it to you, Daria. You sure can pick ’em,” said Mark as he knelt. “This guy’s a real winner.”
Tural started to moan so Yaver kicked him and told him to kneel next to Mark, which he did.
Daria just stood there. “Yaver, I told you we didn’t bring him here intentionally.”
“Hands to your head, Daria joon. Now.”
Mark studied Yaver. His gun hand was steady and his eyes were boring into Daria. This clearly wasn’t the first time he’d ordered people around like this.
Daria put her hands on her head and dropped to her knees. “He was following us, Yaver. I tried to lose him in Baku and I thought for sure I’d lost him in Astara…I did my best, I didn’t mean to bring him here.”
Yaver searched each one of them from behind, keeping his AK-47 aimed at the back of the head of the person he was searching. When he came to Mark, he removed a bundle of hundred-dollar bills from each of his front pockets—$20,000 total.
“Thank you for the tip. Very generous.”
Then Yaver produced a cell phone and dialed a number, keeping one eye on his phone and the other on his prisoners. In Farsi, he read off the date, time, and GPS coordinates, said that he had Mark Sava and Daria Buckingham in his custody and was requesting instructions. Mark thought he sounded like a highly trained soldier communicating with a superior officer.
“You bastard,” said Daria to Yaver. “You’re not MEK, you’re a plant.”
Yaver stared blankly at his three captives as he held the phone to his ear, waiting.
By now it was oppressively hot. Mark could feel trickles of sweat running down his neck.
“Was that your work in Astara?” asked Daria. “And in Baku?”
“I understand,” said Yaver, speaking into his phone, which he then snapped shut. His face hardened as he slipped the device into his back pocket.
Mark had seen executions before. He knew the look professionals got before they pulled the trigger, the way their eyes deadened, as though they were looking at a paper target.
He saw that look now and wondered where the hell Decker was.
“How much are the Iranians paying you?” Mark asked, stalling. Before Yaver could answer, he added, “You should know that I have evidence that Iran was directly involved in Campbell’s assassination. And if you kill me, that evidence will be transferred to the CIA within a day.”
“You lie, tokhme sag—” Seed of a dog.
“I’m willing to make a deal. That money you took, it’s only the beginning. I’ll give you thirty thousand more, in cash, to let us walk.”
Mark still had nearly that much hidden in the Lada back on the road.
Yaver paused. “This money, where is it?”
“First we need to come to an understanding.”
“There is no understanding. There is no deal. There is only—”
Tural suddenly jumped up, fully panicking, and began to run, prompting Yaver to fire two expertly placed shots into his head.
The instant Yaver turned, Mark ran at him, lunging for his neck with his bound hands. They both fell, rolling in the dirt as Daria sprinted away.
Mark tried to ram his head into Yaver’s face, but he wasn’t strong enough to keep his grip on Yaver’s neck and he wound up falling back in the dirt. He gripped the barrel of the AK-47 and pushed it away from his body just as Yaver fired off a few rounds. The barrel was hot and it seared Mark’s hands.
“Drop your weapon!” yelled Decker from about fifty feet away.
Mark struggled to keep the barrel of the AK-47 away from his body as Yaver yanked on it. He dropped to his knees and jammed the barrel into the dirt.
The crack of a pistol rang out. Decker hit Yaver’s leg.
Then Daria came back. In her hands was the pistol that Yaver had thrown away. She jammed the magazine she’d recovered into the grip frame, aimed quickly, and fired two shots. One hit Yaver in the gut, the other in his chest.
Yaver fell to his knees and Mark wrenched the AK-47 out of his hands.
40
As Yaver lay there moaning, curled up into a fetal position on the ground, Daria watched Mark pull back the action on the AK-47, confirm there was still a bullet in the chamber, then switch the rifle to semiautomatic with a flick of his finger.
He pointed the AK-47 at Yaver’s head. Daria noted his hands were steady, his mouth set in a sneer. A couple of veins on his forehead had popped out.
“Patch him up!” he yelled to Decker.
Decker knelt down and started ripping Yaver’s shirt into strips to use as a field dressing.
Daria stood a few feet away holding her pistol.
“Put it down,” Mark ordered.
Daria looked at her gun hand. She’d never shot anyone before. It was an awful feeling.
“Now!”
She eyed the AK-47 in Mark’s hands and, for the first time, was afraid of him.
“Take it.”
She handed over the pistol and he flipped the safety on without even glancing at it.
Yaver’s eyes were open, but they were glassy and unfocused. His mouth was moving, but in such a way that he looked like a starving baby bird asking for food.
“Fuckitall, he ain’t gonna live,” said Decker.
Mark wedged Daria’s gun into his waist belt, then yanked his $20,000 and Yaver’s cell phone out of the dying man’s back pockets. When he pushed the button for recently dialed calls, no numbers appeared.
Decker finished packing the chest wound, raised Yaver to a sitting position, wrapped it, then started working on the gut wound.
“Who is he, Daria?” asked Mark.
She heard the question but was too dazed to respond. Mark gripped her arm.
“You’re hurting me.”
“Who is he? And spare me the bullshit version.”
“I knew him as Yaver Mustafa. Until now I thought he was loyal to the MEK. I came here to ask him whether he knew anything about what happened in Baku and Astara. I wasn’t lying to you.”
“How long had he been a member of the Astara cell?”
“Maybe a year.”
“And before that?”
“I was told was he used to work in Tehran exporting carpets, and that his brother was executed by the regime for organizing protest marches. He had money and he helped bankroll a lot of resistance operations. Which was probably why we weren’t more suspicious of him than we should have been.”
Decker finished with his second improvised dressing and gave it a hard yank so that it was tight around Yaver’s waist. There was more moaning.