very much. Abdollah Khan had released Hakim from banishment for this day only, then sent him back to Khoi in the northern part of Azerbaijan near the Turkish border where he had extensive mining interests. “All Hakim has ever wanted was to go to Paris to study the piano,” Azadeh had told him. “But my father wouldn’t listen to him, just cursed him and banished him for plotting…”
“It’s not Hakim,” Erikki said, his eyes much better than hers. “Oh!” Azadeh squinted against the wind. “Oh.” She was so disappointed. “Yes, yes, you’re right, Erikki.”
“There’s Abdollah Khan!” There was no mistaking the imposing, corpulent man with the long beard, coming out of the main door to stand on the steps, two armed guards behind him. With him were two other men. All were dressed in heavy overcoats against the cold. “Who’re they?”
“Strangers,” she said, trying to get over her disappointment. “They haven’t guns and there’s no mullah, so they’re not Green * Bands.” “They’re Europeans,” Nogger said. “You have any binoculars, Erikki?” “No.” Erikki stopped circling and came down to five hundred feet and hovered, watching Abdollah Khan intently. He saw him point at the chopper and then talk with the other men, then go back to watching the chopper again. More of her sisters and family, some wearing chador, and servants had collected, bundled against the cold. Down another hundred feet. Erikki slipped off his dark glasses and headset and slid the side window back, gasped as the freezing air hit him, stuck his head out so they could see him clearly, and waved. All eyes on the ground went to Abdollah Khan. After a pause the Khan waved back. Without pleasure.
“Azadeh! Take your headset off and do what I did.”
She obeyed at once. Some of her sisters waved back excitedly, chattering among themselves. Abdollah Khan did not acknowledge her, just waited. Matyeryebyets, Erikki thought, then leaned out of the cockpit and pointed at the wide space beyond the mosaic, frozen pool in the courtyard, obviously asking permission to land. Abdollah Khan nodded and pointed there, spoke briefly to his guards, then turned on his heel and went back into the house. The other men followed. One guard stayed. He walked down the steps toward the touchdown point, checking the action of his assault rifle. “Nothing like a friendly reception committee,” Nogger muttered. “No need to worry, Nogger,” Azadeh said with a nervous laugh. “I’ll get out first, Erikki, safer for me to be first.”
They landed at once. Azadeh opened her door and went to greet her sisters and her stepmother, her father’s third wife and younger than she. His first wife, the Khanan, was of an age with him but now she was bedridden and never left her room. His second wife, Azadeh’s mother, had died many years ago. The guard intercepted Azadeh. Politely. Erikki breathed easier. It was too far away to hear what was said - in any event, neither he nor Nogger spoke Farsi or Turkish. The guard motioned at the chopper. She nodded then turned and beckoned them. Erikki and Nogger completed the shutdown, watching the guard who watched them seriously.
“You hate guns as much as I do, Erikki?” Nogger said.
“More. But at least that man knows how to use one - it’s the amateurs that scare me.” Erikki slipped out the circuit breakers arid pocketed the ignition key.
They went to join Azadeh and her sisters but the guard stood in the way. Azadeh called out, “He says we are to go to the Reception Room at once and wait there. Please follow me.”
Nogger was last. One of the pretty sisters caught his eye, and he smiled to himself and went up the stairs two at a time.
The Reception Room was vast and cold and drafty and smelled of damp, with heavy Victorian furniture and many carpets and lounging cushions and old-fashioned water heaters. Azadeh tidied her hair at one of the mirrors. Her ski clothes were elegant and
511 fashionable. Abdollah Khan had never required any of his wives or daughters or household to wear chador, did not approve of chador. Then why was Najoud wearing one today? she asked herself, her nervousness increasing. A servant brought tea. They waited half an hour, then another guard arrived and spoke to her. She took a deep breath. “Nogger, you’re to wait here,” she said. “Erikki, you and I are to go with this guard.”
Erikki followed her, tense but confident that the armed peace he had worked out with Abdollah Khan would hold. The touch of his pukoh knife reassured him. The guard opened a door at the end of the corridor and motioned them forward.
Abdollah Khan was leaning against some cushions, reclining on a carpet facing the door, guards behind him, the room rich, Victorian, and formal - and somehow decadent and soiled. The two men they had seen on the steps were seated cross-legged beside him. One was European, a big, well-preserved man in his late sixties with heavy shoulders and Slavic eyes set in a friendly face. The other was younger, in his thirties, his features Asiatic and the color of his skin yellowish. Both wore heavy winter suits. Erikki’s caution soared and he waited beside the doorway as Azadeh went to her father, knelt in front of him, kissed his pudgy, jeweled hands, and blessed him. Impassively her father waved her to one side and kept his dark, dark eyes on Erikki who greeted him politely from the door but stayed near it. Hiding her shame and fear, Azadeh knelt again on the carpet, and faced him. Erikki saw both of the strangers flick their eyes over her appreciatively, and his temperature went up a notch. The silence intensified.
Beside the Khan was a plate of halvah, small squares of the honey-rich Turkish delicacies that he adored, and he ate some of them, light dancing off his rings. “So,” he said harshly, “it seems you kill indiscriminately like a mad dog.”
Erikki’s eyes narrowed and he said nothing.
“Well?”
“If I kill it’s not like a mad dog. Whom am I supposed to have killed?” “One old man in a crowd outside Qazvin with a blow from your elbow, his chest crushed in. There are witnesses. Next, three men in a car and one outside it - he an important fighter for freedom. There are more witnesses. Farther down the road five dead and more wounded in the wake of the helicopter rescue. More witnesses.” Another silence. Azadeh had not moved though the blood had left her face. “Well?”
“If there are witnesses you will know also that we were peacefully trying to get to Tehran, we were unarmed, we were set upon by a mob and if it hadn’t been for Charlie Pettikin and Rakoczy, we’d probably be - ” Erikki stopped momentarily, noticing the sudden glance between the two strangers. Then, even more warily, he continued, “We’d probably be dead. We were unarmed - Rakoczy wasn’t - we were fired on first.”
Abdollah Khan had also noticed the change in the men beside him. Thoughtfully, he glanced back at Erikki. “Rakoczy? The same with the Islamic-Marxist mullah and men who attacked your base? The Soviet Muslim?” “Yes.” Erikki looked at the two strangers, hard-eyed. “The KGB agent, who claimed he came from Georgia, from Tbilisi.”
Abdollah Khan smiled thinly. “KGB? How do you know that?” “I’ve seen enough of them to know.” The two strangers stared back blandly; the older wore a friendly smile and Erikki was chilled by it. “This Rakoczy, how did he get into the helicopter?” the Khan said. “He captured Charlie Pettikin at my base last Sunday - Pettikin’s one of our pilots and he’d come to Tabriz to pick us up, Azadeh and me. I’d been asked by my embassy to check with them about my passport - that was the day most governments, mine too, had ordered nonessential expats out of Iran,” he said, the exaggeration easy. “On Monday, the day we left here, Rakoczy forced Pettikin to fly him to Tehran.” He told briefly what had happened. “But for him noticing the Finnish flag on the roof we’d be dead,” The man with Asiatic features laughed softly. “That would have been a great loss, Captain Yokkonen,” he said in Russian.
The older man with the Slavic eyes said, in faultless English, “This Rakoczy, where is he now?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere in Tehran. May I ask who you are?” Erikki was playing for time and expected no answer. He was trying to decide if Rakoczy was friend or enemy to these two, obviously Soviet, obviously KGB or GRU - the secret police of the armed forces.
“Please, what was his first name?” the older man asked pleasantly. “Fedor, like the Hungarian revolutionary.” Erikki saw no further reaction and could have gone on but was far too wise to volunteer anything to KGB or GRU. Azadeh was kneeling on the carpet, stiff-backed, motionless, her hands at rest in her lap, her
lips red against the whiteness of her face. Suddenly he was very afraid for her.
“You admit killing those men?” the Khan said and ate another sweetmeat. “I admit I killed men a year or so ago saving your life, Highness, an - ” “And yours!” Abdollah Khan said angrily. “The assassins would have killed you too - it was the Will of God we both lived.”
“I didn’t start that fight or seek it either.” Erikki tried to choose his words wisely, feeling unwise and unsafe and inadequate. “If I killed those others it was not of my choosing but only to protect your daughter and my wife. Our lives were in danger.”
“Ah, you consider it your right to kill any time you consider your life to be in danger?”
Erikki saw the flush in the Khan’s face, and the two Soviets watching him, and he thought of his own heritage
