It was the question Medhi Nazarour had dreaded hearing. It would be foolish to tell him too much. It could be a fatal error.
"I... must do as my brother says."
The words came to Medhi as if spoken by another. He barely recognized his own voice; it sounded weak and afraid. But the big American made no attempt to stop him or question him further, and before he knew it, Medhi was back inside the house and moving on soundless feet toward the back stairway that led upstairs to his room.
Medhi Nazarour detested himself and his weakness. He detested his love and physical addiction for the little packet of heroin that awaited him, hidden in his room.
But he needed the blissful release that the drug provided. It was his only escape from the horror that had become his life during these past two years of exile with his brother.
Medhi had been able to handle his addiction back in the days before the revolution in Iran. That was when he had been a successful physician appointed to the Shah's personal court. But now his entire existence revolved around that little packet of white powder and the bliss that was his at the stab of a syringe.
As a doctor in Iran, it had been possible for him to dose himself with small amounts of the purest heroin from his own practice. But here in the United States, he had no access to pharmaceutical narcotics, and was at the mercy of his brother, Eshan, who had become his sole supplier of the powder since they had fled Iran. Eshan had American connections that Medhi knew nothing about. These connections furnished Eshan with the drugs that his brother craved. Medhi's addiction had increased dramatically as the quality of what he injected into himself decreased, and he was forced to take more and more.
The doctor reached his room, padlocked the door behind him, and went directly to where he had hidden his kit.
He had done what needed doing.
Now he could step out of this horror.
He began preparing his fix, heating the spoonful of white powder over the candle flame, the syringe held at the ready.
The horror was for men with the strength to face it. Men like his brother, Eshan. And the big American fighting man, Colonel Phoenix. It was their horror now.
Medhi's only real concern, which he also wanted to escape thinking about, was that Eshan's safety be insured. Medhi could not bear to think of facing reality without heroin. And by warning the American as he had, Medhi was sure that he had helped ensure the odds for his and Eshan's survival. And poor Carol's.
Medhi Nazarour held a firm, instinctive conviction that the fate of all of them rested in the hands of the big American.
Whoever he was.
9
Mack Bolan turned away from the confrontation with Medhi Nazarour with several answers to the puzzle that was tonight's mission.
He now knew, for instance, that the reason Carol Nazarour had not responded to his knock at her door when he had been on his security tour with Rafsanjani was that her husband had ordered her heavily sedated, and Rafsanjani had locked her in her room as an added precaution.
Yeah. A great marriage.
And Bolan knew Medhi Nazarour's motive in coming to Bolan, even if the good doctor had evaded the issue.
Dr. Nazarour was a junkie. Bolan had seen enough, of the type in his two bloody miles through the Mafia hellgrounds. The eyes, the body language, a doctor who sweats at night — the guy was a walking advertisement for stiffer drug controls.
The trouble was, for every answer, more questions seemed to pop up behind it.
Like what exactly had Dr. Nazarour been warning him against? Who was it who was working with Yazid's hit squad from the inside?
In this short hiatus before the bloody storm, Bolan could not ignore the other questions screaming for answers. It was time for another talk with General Nazarour himself. It was eyeball-to-eyeball, lay-the-cards-on-the-table time. Bolan stepped up his pace toward the front entrance to the house.
He had taken four steps when the small object landed at his feet.
He halted, crouched, reached for the Auto-Mag rather than the Beretta. Then a closer inspection revealed that this was not danger.
The object was a woman's low-heeled shoe with a folded piece of paper tucked inside.
Bolan retrieved the shoe, and faded back against the deeper shadows close to the house. The paper was white stationery; Bolan detected a faint whiff of exotic perfume on the night air as he unfolded it. He read the note, obviously written in hurried feminine script:
In back of house right now.
Please. Tell no one. C.N.
Bolan tossed the shoe behind a thicket, pocketed the note, and moved cautiously around toward the back of the building. He unleathered Big Thunder.
So Carol Nazarour, if the note was to be believed, had not taken the sedative as ordered by her husband.
Bolan smiled to himself in the darkness.
Yeah.
He'd had the lady pegged as a special kind of woman, and she was proving him right.
He found her waiting for him under an ancient tree beside the rear of the house. She looked like a pretty college student. Jeans, the same leather jacket as before, and a canvas backpack slung over her shoulder. Her perfectly sculpted face beneath that breathtaking head of hair was taut with anxiety.
Bolan holstered the .44 and approached her, touching her lightly on the arm for obviously needed reassurance. He nodded at the backpack. "Running away from home, Carol?"
"Please. I'm an American citizen. I want to get out of here." Her voice was a desperate plea. A visible shiver coursed through her. "I don't want to leave the country with...these people."
Bolan recalled the shivering fear of Medhi Nazarour only moments before. "Life with the general must be a real bowl of cherries," he grunted.
"It's worse than you could imagine," she told him bluntly. "I stopped trying to run away after the first year. He usually sent Rafsanjani after me. Once they tracked me across Europe. I thought I'd got away. Rafsanjani waited until I was in line at the Frankfurt airport. After he had me alone, he had me...beaten. But always with leather gloves so there were few marks or bruises."
Bolan felt a red-hot rage building deep in his gut. "Why didn't you take off earlier tonight when I gave you the chance?"
"Because I thought you were one of them! Rafsanjani did that to me one time. He offered me a chance to leave. When I started to leave, he said it was only a test. And I had failed. So I was beaten again."
"But now you know that I'm not one of them, is that it?"
"Yes. Medhi, the general's brother, told me who you are and why you're here.''
"I met Dr. Nazarour."
"He's the only one I can even halfway trust around here," said the blonde. "I feel sorry for Medhi, but I don't always trust him. He's a slave to his brother. He'll do whatever the general tells him."
Bolan was working at cooling the burning anger that was ripping at his insides. Rage would do him no good when the fighting began. It would only get him killed.
"How did you fall in with these creeps?"
"I was an army brat," she said simply. "And a rebellious one at that. A real terror. A real ignorant little jerk who was too stupid to trust the wisdom of her parents. Dad was stationed with the NATO forces in Turkey. So was Eshan.
"I didn't fall in love with Eshan so much as I fell in love with his image. He wasn't in a wheelchair then, of course. That happened during the revolution, just before we had to flee the country. Before we started this life on the run.