Dean Ing by The Big Lifters

Author:The Big Lifters
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Kosrow Nurbashi had not kept a hit team in place through naivet6, and he knew how Great Satan infected young men even while they denied it. In an Iranian village, surrounded by the faithful, they would not dream of doubting a mullah’s inspired decisions. Here, he had exactly three dedicated lunatics left, and instead of replacements from home, only excuses. Well, he would use what he had and then return, beat thornbushes for new recruits if he had to.

And those recruits, on American soil, would doubtless begin to show the same American infection as the present crop. They might refrain from questioning an order aloud, but Nurbashi sensed unspoken questions. It was therefore essential to justify some of his orders—without seeming to. He justified placing Majid Hashemi’s holy suicide ahead of Golam Razmara’s with a lie, claiming that Golam was not ready.

Golam was as ready as any to perform the Peel necessity, fired with holy ardor, stoked with faith. But Golam had another talent. He charmed unquestioning allegiance from a slip of a girl, Zahra Aram. Zahra’s surveillance work bordered on the magical though she had the distressingly expensive habit of flying back to be near Golam after each mission. It was the price extracted by old-fashioned girls.

Nurbashi paid without complaint. Thanks to her findings, he could send any of his three remaining zealots to dispatch John Wesley Peel with an excellent chance of success. He would not send Golam Razmara on any suicide mission so long as the girl performed her task so well. It was an irony rich enough to delight Nurbashi: Golam’s success with the girl denied him the right to blow himself to paradise—for now. Nurbashi gave the Peel sanction to homely little Majid Hashemi instead, in a ceremony worthy of Allah’s greatest warriors; gave him a thorough private briefing, gave him a fistful of cash, and finally the keys to a Buick.

The only visitor to this ceremony was a man known to Farda’s young members as “Hassan,” except that twice that night, Golam heard the mullah call him Winthorp. Golam did not give it much thought at the time, but he got the distinct impression that Hassan Winthorp was some sort of half-caste academic.

The following night in Lansing, doling out snippets of that meeting to Zahra though he would never divulge the holy ceremony to a mere woman, Golam toyed with her black tresses and looked wise. “Yes, Hassan Winthorp is without doubt an academic,” he repeated, lowering lashes as long and as beautiful as Zahra’s own.

Zahra, who did not much care at the moment, faked interest for the same reason she faked orgasms. “From the university?”

“Not from ours,” he replied. “But I would know that above-it-all smirk anywhere.”

“Perhaps a gynecologist,” she said, and gathered from Go-lam’s reaction that hers must have been strictly a woman’s joke. Golam was in no mood for jokes anyhow. Zahra gathered that his funk grew from the mullah’s choice of another young man, Majid Hashemi, for some unspecified holy task.

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