I thought, my inner bitch snapping her fingers in his face as I spoke. Surprisingly, Vayl was the one who kept his temper. He said, “A great deal of Jasmine’s plan tonight rotates on your ability to convince our target that he is a target, but not of our country. That, indeed, we have come to help.”
“We don’t know much about him beyond the fact that his name is FarjAd Daei,” I added. “And that he’s sort of the Martin Luther King Jr. for his people. Which would explain why the Wizard wants him dead.”
“Why is it the good ones always die young?” Cole wondered.
“Generally it is because the bad ones have been in charge far too long and they are reluctant to release power,” Vayl said.
Score another one for the Master of Understatement,
I thought. But I gave Vayl a smile. He had a very European way of sliding up on a subject that I’d only recently come to appreciate. Maybe it had something to do with becoming one of those subjects. I said, “Well, look, I don’t know how long we can keep this guy
alive
. I don’t expect him to stress the retirement system around here, for sure. But we have to, at least, keep him safe until the Wizard is no longer a threat.”
“So has the plan changed?” Cole asked.
“Not much,” I said. “We set up just like for the assassination. We know the event’s not private, so the three of us can enter the cafe as arranged. Vayl goes to the bathroom early. When FarjAd exits the main room to relieve himself, the two of us follow, bag him without the previously planned fatal blow, hustle him out the window to Asha’s waiting car, and hide him at Zarsa’s house until it’s safe for him to go home.”
“And Zarsa’s okay with this?” Cole asked, slicing a narrow look at Vayl.
“She’s practically frothing at the mouth for a chance to help,” I said.
Cole gaped at me. “You
talked
to her? When?”
“Today. She’s a mess, you know.”
He blew a breath through his teeth. “Well, Christ, who the hell can live here for long and not be? I haven’t seen so much pain in one place since I watched that training video on torture.”
We were silent, conceding the point. Which was why we heard so clearly the knock at the door. “That’ll be Asha,” I said. “Everybody ready?”
The guys nodded. Though I didn’t expect violence, I’d geared up for it. After leaving Bergman I’d gone back to my room, dug into my weapons bag, and pulled out my usual array of guns and blades. Grief sat in its customary shoulder holster. Grandpa Samuel’s bolo was snug in its hip sheath. Since my holy water carrier had been converted to a chew toy, I now wore wrist sheaths for throwing blades on both arms. Knives on the left. Stars on the right.
Since Vayl and I had both been the victims of thrown blades on our last mission, I’d used our downtime to raise my own proficiency in that area as well as swordplay. Now I was confident I’d increased my ability to keep enemies at a distance, which was always my main concern.
Bergman had also outfitted us with his latest improvement on group communication devices. For receiving audio we still had the tiny hearing-aide type devices that fit into our ears. But for transmitting, we’d graduated from mint-style gadgets that stuck to the roofs of our mouths to much smaller stick-on items that looked remarkably like beauty marks. Mine was adorable and went in the crease of my left cheek, a la Marilyn Monroe. Vayl had placed his just above and to the right of his lip. Cole had started with his on the end of his nose which, while hilarious, made you want to recommend a good dermatologist the second you saw him. So in the end he’d put it on his chin. The result — now, instead of hearing our comrades in the woofer range of surround-sound stereo, they sounded more like themselves.
We went to the door and I let Asha in. I expected an uberawkward moment when he and Vayl met. But Asha took care of that problem right away. “So you belong to Jasmine,” he said in his melancholy voice. It somehow delivered Vayl his deepest condolences without bearing a trace of malice toward me.
Vayl let out a bark of laughter as he shook Asha’s hand. “Indeed. I am honored to meet the Amanha Szeya. Your legend is vast.”
“And unearned as of late,” Asha said. He turned to Cole. “And you, young hero? Do you also belong to Jasmine?”
Though Cole sent me a quick, searching glance, he grinned at Asha and said, “Not even close, buddy. I’m a free spirit. But if you know any beautiful lady Amanha Szeyas who’d like some company . . . point the way.”
Asha smiled, lighting up the entire room. I instantly felt better. Surely everything would go according to plan tonight. Just because Asha had smiled.
Chapter Thirty
I
t did seem at first as if we were charmed. We arrived at the cafe in plenty of time to get good seats near the bathroom so no one would notice when we slipped away. Vayl sat across from me at a small white table, giving us each a full view of the room. Without hesitation, Cole settled in the seat beside mine. If we’d been in America, I suspected he’d have gone so far as to rest his arm across the back of my chair, give Vayl that challenging stare I’d seen him send a couple of times when he thought I wasn’t looking. But Cole knew the rules in Iran. A casual touch in our country could get us jail time in this one. So he kept his hands on the laminate and behaved.
Even more miraculously, most of the people attending the evening’s festivities spoke English, so Vayl and I didn’t feel lost in a sea of gibberish. They didn’t say anything worth overhearing. Asked after each other’s families. Commented on the weather. But their nods, their smiles, and that hand gesture I’d first seen at the hanging, all pointed to a bigger, more exciting conversation going on just under the surface.
The evening started to go wrong when the owner and his pals began unrolling the blinds that had been tied at
