“Why have we not been told of this weapon before?”
“There was no reason. Just as there is no reason to be any more specific today.”
“When then?” the Syrian asked.
“At our next meeting; Sunday, May fourteenth,” the general returned. “Israeli Independence Day. Three days before our invasion begins.”
On a street set back from the square in front of the royal palace, a van with traditional Islamic markings was parked. Such vans were a fixture in the streets of Tehran, though most couldn’t have said what they were, other than some version of public works.
In the back of this particular van sat a pair of men working amidst the most sophisticated recording equipment available in the world. Months before, the Mossad had managed to plant bugs throughout the royal palace, a new kind of bug with a built-in jamming device that made finding it by any kind of electronic sweep impossible.
In spite of all this, extraordinarily few dividends had been paid, as General Hassani spent little time speaking of anything they could truly make use of. The men in the van had not seen the delegates enter, so the meeting itself came as a complete shock. The man wearing headphones had started scribbling notes as was his routine, but quickly his hand began shaking too much to keep it up.
The bastards were going to destroy Israel!
The man wearing the headphones knew all the procedures and precautions. He knew he should have continued to listen patiently, even with the meeting winding down. But time had become the crucial factor in his mind, hours the issue now instead of days.
“Get us out of here!” he ordered the agent working the recording meters and levels.
“What?”
“Get behind the wheel and drive!”
“But we’re supposed to—”
“I don’t care! Do you hear me? I don’t care! Get me to the relay point. Get me there fast.”
Evira was regaining her strength. Monday had marked her third morning in the small room, and each had seen her awaken able to do more. She was exercising regularly on the dusty floor now, working flexibility back into her wounded side and neck.
Kourosh had been there with her breakfast each morning when she awoke, some bakery goods stolen from the first batch placed out in a store window six blocks away. Two mornings back he had also managed to find coffee, but it had cooled by the time he brought it up to her. She found herself following his flight through the cracks in the boards over the window, amazed at how he took to the streets as if he owned them. He bounded gracefully about with each gutter and sidewalk crack stored in his memory, long hair flapping about to the whims of the wind.
Kourosh had made a world for himself in the streets, but all the same he had become as dependent on her as she had on him. She knew he had failed to answer all her questions at once out of fear he might return from one of his jaunts to find her gone, no longer in need of him. Evira would have told him not to worry, except she knew it wouldn’t have changed anything. Trust was something that did not exist in the boy’s life. So their strange relationship was based on needs that were different for each but for the present were strong enough to keep them together.
She watched from the window now in expectation of his bouncy return down the street. Thus far he had provided her with several hastily drawn maps of the royal palace. Different sections were sketched on individual sheets of gray cardboard, drawn elaborately and exaggerated the way drawings in his comic books were. To see the whole of the palace and the sprawling grounds enclosing it, Evira needed only to arrange the cardboard sheets together like a puzzle. It was a huge white stone and marble structure built by the Shah less than twenty years before, surrounded by an outer retaining wall stretching fifteen feet high. Within the grounds, besides the palace there was a school, a guards’ barracks, and an older palace that had been transformed into office space with the construction of the newer one. The main entrance was inside the front wall, accessible only by a drive that circled round a hilly garden to prevent the gates from being rammed. There was a servants’ entrance located near the school on the northern side and a guards’ entrance near the barracks on the south.
The inside of the complex had been constructed with celebrations in mind. The front door opened onto a huge two-story ballroom, complete with skylights. A service entrance on the northern side opened onto the kitchen, with the formal dining room situated between this and the ballroom. The sleeping quarters on the second floor had been divided into separate wings for children and adults, the children’s bedrooms facing the east while the adults’ faced the south.
Nothing in the drawings gave her a notion as to how the palace might be penetrated. For this she would have to rely again on Kourosh, as she would for finding a time when the general was inside.
No longer requiring as much sleep to heal herself during these long hours, Evira found herself bored. She picked up one of Kourosh’s comic books and skimmed through it, amazed at how the same things appealed to children of all cultures. She had finished one and closed it when something caught her eye: a stamp of the bookstore where it had been purchased — Steimatzky, the largest chain in Israel. Strange. The anomaly seemed small, but Evira had learned long before that nothing was small. She inspected his horde of comics and found the same was true for all of them. It was no fluke. Every issue had been purchased at the Steimatzky chain.
Kourosh bounded into the room while she was still inspecting the comics, and she looked up at him embarrassed, as if she had violated his privacy.
“Superman’s my favorite,” he told her, and she noticed he had a tightly wrapped package beneath his arm. “I got a surprise for you.”
“A good one, I hope.”
“Wait until you see it!” He placed it atop a pair of crates and started to undo the string.
“Kourosh,” Evira called to him. “Who was it who taught you how to speak English?’
He turned to her and raised his eyebrows. “The students, like I told you.”
“Were they the same students who gave you the comic books?”
“Yes. Does it matter?”
“No. It’s just that, well, I know English, too. I can pick up where they left off.”
He turned excitedly from his chore of unwrapping her surprise. “Could you really?”
“It would be my pleasure. It’s the least I can do for you after all you’ve done for me.”
He looked suddenly sad. “I miss them.”
“Miss who?”
“The students.”
“The ones who were killed back at the plastics factory?”
“No, the ones who gave me the comic books, who taught me English. They haven’t been around in a while.”
“Say something in English for me,” Evira requested, even more intrigued.
Kourosh’s expression turned suddenly playful. “What do you want to hear?” he said in better English than she would have thought possible.
“Anything.”
The first few lines he spoke were enough to confirm what she suspected but could make no sense of. She was good with languages. Learning them, recognizing tone and intonation, came naturally for her. Which was why she was sure that Kourosh had learned his English from Israelis!
“How many students?” she broke in suddenly.
“Oh, plenty. All haters of injustice and poverty.”
“And you didn’t meet them until …”
“I don’t know. Six months ago, maybe nine. I met them through the others in the plastics factory.”
“But you don’t see them anymore.”
“I go but they are no longer there. They used to meet in a building not far from here, but it’s deserted now. It looks like no one was ever there.”