“How many individuals are on the aim point list?” asked the president.
“Eight, beginning with Dr. Kermani. They represent our best estimate of what constitutes the top nuclear minds in the country. If we can eliminate these people from the equation, the Iranians could be set back several years on top of the time it will take them to rebuild the infrastructure damage we’ll inflict.”
“This is one of the many reasons why we’re not consulting with the Europeans,” added the national security advisor. “We choose the aim points, we take all the blame and all the backlash. We’ll get hammered for it, and it might mean we’ll be ceding the initiative on some foreign policy goals for the next few years, but we’ll just have to live with that. It’s better than the alternative. Aim point accepted.”
Everyone else concurred.
“Aim point confirmed,” said the president.
46
Mark and Nuriyev drove south in Nuriyev’s old white Volga toward the foothills of the Kopet Dag Mountains, which paralleled the border with Iran. It was desolate country, dotted with only occasional clusters of small houses, and the scorched hills made Mark long for the relative luxury of his apartment in Baku.
After a half hour they turned down a dirt road where chickens roamed free. The little whitewashed houses all had rusting corrugated-metal roofs with satellite dishes nailed haphazardly to their sides. Laundry lines had been strung between stunted palm trees.
Nuriyev pulled up to the last house on the street. A shiny blue BMW 3 Series was parked out front, and two little girls were chasing a big cream-colored Alabai dog and laughing. Nearby a camel poked its head out from a backyard that had been fenced in with old doors.
Nuriyev announced that they’d arrived at his uncle’s house. And that his uncle was a smuggler.
“Of?”
“Mostly alcohol and Western cigarettes. That they bring to Iran.”
Mark wondered what ‘mostly’ meant.
“They have—”
“Who is they?”
“My uncle and his family. They have an arrangement with the border guards.” Nuriyev muscled the steering wheel as he parked. “If Alty crossed into Iran, he may have turned to them for help.”
As they approached the house, a stooped old man appeared in the front door, beneath a cluster of dried chili peppers that had been nailed to the top of the doorframe for good luck. Although it was hot out, he wore a long-sleeved Turkmen robe under a soiled North Face vest. His face was creased with deep wrinkles, his mouth set in an unfriendly frown.
Nuriyev put his right hand over his heart and dipped his head a bit.
The old man didn’t reciprocate. After standing in the doorway for a while, as if to block their entrance, he simply said, “Well, you must come in for tea.” He turned, with little enthusiasm, into the house.
In the main room, floor pillows, shiny with hair grease, ringed a large red Turkmen carpet. Mark detected the smell of both cigarette and opium smoke. In a corner, an intricately carved opium pipe sat next to a paraffin lamp. The sole piece of furniture was a low table, reinforced with several pieces of scrap wood, on top of which sat a decent-sized LCD Sony television. A boy of about ten sat in front of it, watching two American professional wrestlers beat each other over the head with chairs.
Nuriyev’s uncle gestured to the floor. “Sit.” He called loudly for tea, and his wife appeared, wearing a bright yellow-and-blue headscarf. Behind her stood the two girls who’d been chasing the dog on the street.
Mark wondered whether Decker had visited this house. He scanned the room for signs of Deck as Nuriyev and his uncle discussed the price of cottonseed oil and the recent inflation crisis.
“He likes us to smoke,” said Nuriyev in halting English, interrupting Mark’s thoughts.
“I quit cigarettes,” responded Mark, also switching to English.
“He means the opium.”
Even if staying sharp hadn’t been a factor, which it was, Mark didn’t trust himself with opiates. It had been over twenty years ago, but for a short time he had been a heroin addict — the result of being abducted and interrogated for months on end by the KGB. The idea had been to get him hooked and then withhold the drug to entice him to talk. The tactic would have worked if he’d had anything of value to tell his captors. Since then he’d stayed away from the stuff.
“Tell him I’m sick and that tea will be more than enough.”
Sounding embarrassed, Nuriyev said, “I already tell him I am sick.”
“Then I guess I caught what you had.”
Nuriyev’s uncle looked unhappy about the refusal. Mark figured the old man needed his fix but didn’t want to violate some unwritten rule of hospitality by smoking alone. The tea soon came, brought out in a metal thermos. Mark accepted a cup and a cube of sugar.
Switching back to Turkmen, Nuriyev said, “I must tell you this is not entirely a social visit, Uncle. Do you remember my brother Alty?”
Nuriyev’s uncle placed three cubes of sugar into his tea and listened with a bored look on his face as Nuriyev launched into a mostly fictional account of why he thought his brother may have crossed into Iran.
“Have you seen him recently?” asked Nuriyev.
His uncle began to cough, and then he took a Camel cigarette — a rare luxury in Turkmenistan — from a pack that lay on the floor by his feet. “Your father is a stubborn man.” He rolled the cigarette between his tobacco-stained thumb and index finger. “Surely you know that he would not allow Alty to visit us.”
“I am here.”
“And does your father know?”
“I am not my father.”
Nuriyev’s uncle lit his cigarette with a wooden match, which he then blew out and carefully placed on top of an overflowing ashtray. “I have not seen your brother. If I do, I will send word.”
“What about Murat?”
“My son has not seen Alty either.”
“They used to be friends.”
“Your father ended that.”
The power went off, causing Nuriyev’s uncle to yell something about a generator to his wife. Then he turned to Mark. “Every day at this time the electricity goes off. But does it ever go off in Ashgabat? No, there they have all the electricity they want. Nobody cares about the villages.” A minute later a loud engine started rumbling, the television came back on, and the house began to smell of diesel exhaust.
“Alty told me that Murat came to see him at the British Pub one year ago,” said Nuriyev. “They have been in contact since then, I’m sure of it.”
The old man took a sip of his tea.
Nuriyev said, “I need you to ask Murat about Alty.”
“You don’t tell me what I need to do.”
Nuriyev lowered his head. After a time he said, “I am not telling you, I am asking you, Uncle. I am asking you to help me.”
Mark waited a moment for Nuriyev’s uncle to respond. But the old Turkmen just sat there smoking like some debauched Buddha, so Mark stood up.
“Enough of this crap,” he said in English. With one kick, he sent the old man’s tea thermos and pack of Camel cigarettes sailing across the room. The thermos hit the far wall and splattered tea everywhere, and the cigarettes flew out of their box. Switching to Turkmen, he said, “I’m here as an observer from the United Nations, as part of a group that is monitoring opium trafficking. Alty is important to us, for reasons I don’t intend to discuss with you. If you want to stay in business, you’ll help us find him. If you don’t, I’ll have your pathetic smuggling operation shut down tomorrow.”