“Soon I will start cutting. Your fingers, your eyes, your dick, your asshole. I’ll keep you alive so you can watch as I cut you down to a stump. If you still don’t talk, I’ll pick up children from the street and kill them in front of you until you tell us what we want to know.” He spoke with the quiet confidence of someone who was absolutely insane.
“Don’t let him do this, friend,” said Blue. “Help me to stop him. He’s mad!”
Decker passed out. When he regained consciousness, he was being dragged down into the dank pit. They stuffed him in the safe and slammed the door shut.
The sound of his unsteady breathing reverberated in the small space. After a while, the air warmed up.
Decker’s father was a big man, with strong arms. He felt his father’s arms around him now, followed by the strange sensation of having reentered his mother’s womb, of ending where he’d started.
It’s over.
At least the path forward was now clear. He still had his teeth. He could kill himself by tearing open his wrist. The sodium pentothal was still coursing through him; it probably wouldn’t even hurt if he did it now.
Decker twisted his head to the right and put his mouth to one of the air holes. He didn’t want to do it. He loved this world, loved his family, loved himself, loved being alive. But he didn’t have a choice. He had to do it soon.
Before they came back for him.
59
Mark eyed the fence surrounding Ayatollah Bayat’s estate. Made of decorative wrought iron, it was ten feet tall and topped by sharp black spikes. He figured it would have taken Decker an effortless two seconds to vault right over it.
It was one in the morning, and he was standing in an alley across the street. He was tired. He tried to do a few last-minute stretches. Crap, he thought. He was too old for this.
He tried to rile himself up by thinking about his ransacked apartment in Baku and the loss of his book.
Nothing, no anger whatsoever.
He remembered the call from Decker’s father. Do this for him, do it for Decker’s mother, do it for Decker.
He eyed the spikes on top of the fence again.
Or not. Suffering through god-awful, heart-wrenching tragedy was just part of the human condition. It wasn’t his job to try to fix everything for everybody.
Then he thought about what Daria would think of him if he backed out.
Shit, he was really going to have to do this.
A couple of minutes later, he heard the sound of squealing tires and crunching metal. Then the horn of the stolen Paykan began to wail. That would be Daria, he knew. Evidently she wasn’t having any last-minute doubts.
The German shepherd guard dogs that had been released at midnight started snapping their jaws and barking like crazy. Mark counted three of them racing off. The two guards by the front gate also took off at a run.
Mark couldn’t see the Paykan on the opposite side of the estate, but if Daria had done her job well, the guards would find it lodged in the fence. Spray-painted on the hood, in Farsi, would be the words Death to the Guardian Council! and Independence, Freedom, Iranian Republic!
Another guard emerged from the black woods, sprinting to the front of the mansion.
Mark eyed the fence one last time, ran at it, and found a purchase for his feet on the intricate scrollwork about halfway up. Spikes jabbed into his chest as he tried to swing his body over the top. The crotch of his pants ripped, and the five-inch knife strapped to his ankle got caught on one of the spikes.
It took him a few seconds to kick himself free.
He hit the grass and felt a sharp pain in his kidneys as he fell on his back, but in an instant was up and racing across the open lawn toward the mansion.
Within seconds he had reached a gutter downspout. The copper was green with age and anchored into the brick. He began to shimmy up as best he could.
Voices were screaming out from the site of the Paykan accident.
Although he was wiry and strong, Mark nevertheless kept slipping down until he found he could gain more traction by wedging his foot between the gutter and the wall.
About halfway up, he noticed handprints other than his own — visible because they had disturbed the copper’s green patina — going up the length of the downspout.
The space between the handprints was huge.
He imagined Decker running at the wall, leaping up and grabbing the downspout ten feet off the ground, then scaling the rest within seconds.
Mark felt himself slip. If the guards had half a brain, he thought, one of them would do a perimeter sweep soon. He strained to shimmy up the rest of the way. Lifting himself over the lip of the gutter nearly proved too much. By the time he was actually sitting on the tile roof, he was exhausted, but he forced himself to keep going until he reached the ridgeline.
The first of the three chimneys was ten feet away. He checked his watch — thirty seconds behind schedule — then removed a small penlight from his pocket and inspected the exterior of the first chimney, looking for a sign from Decker. He inspected the flashing and tiles around the chimney, pulling them back, looking for a piece of paper, or anything that Decker might have left behind. He pulled himself up over the top of the chimney and stuck his head inside.
Nothing.
Below him, the guards were trying to push the Paykan off the fence. He could see them clearly, which meant they could see him too, if they chose to look up.
An inspection of the exterior of the second chimney revealed nothing, but this time, when he reached his hand into the blackened interior, he felt a collection of loose wires. The wires had been affixed to a piece of metal protruding from the interior of the chimney. When he tugged on the wires, there was resistance, as though something were tied to the end of them.
Mark pulled up a small waterproof gear bag with a shoulder strap, detached it from the wires, and stuffed it into his backpack.
Police sirens drew near.
One of the guards who had left the front gate returned to his post, putting him in a direct line of sight to the gutter downspout.
From his backpack, Mark pulled out a glass liter bottle filled with gas and screwed off the cap. He took a rag, twisted it into the narrow mouth of the bottle, held the bottle upside down for a moment to saturate the rag with gas, lit the whole contraption with a lighter, and threw it.
The Molotov cocktail arced over the edge of the roof, leaving little airborne droplets of fire in its wake. It crashed into a walled courtyard that abutted the side of the mansion opposite his exit route.
Cries rang out from inside the mansion. When the guard by the gate ran off to investigate, Mark took off across the roof, running as silently as he could on the tiles. He crawled down spiderlike from the ridge and, without pausing, swung his body over the edge. His feet found the gutter downspout, and he slid down quickly, so quickly that he lost his grip halfway down.
He landed on a bush, dazed but still able to move, then pulled himself to his feet and sprinted across the lawn, making no effort now to avoid detection. Halfway across, he heard barking and glanced to his right. A lone German shepherd was coming at him at top speed, snapping its jaws. Mark tried to sprint faster, but his legs wouldn’t respond — it was as if he were running through water. The fence was only a few strides away.
He turned and threw his forearm up just as the German shepherd lunged. The dog took his forearm in its jaws and bit down with an intense pressure that sent spikes of pain shooting up his arm even through his makeshift armor — five metal school rulers lashed together with surgical tape under a leather jacket. He was knocked to the ground. The dog growled and shook its head, trying to grind its teeth in deeper.