16

I came out of it to find myself tied and lying in the back of an army truck. My head felt twice its normal size, but there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage from Arsenjani’s expertly placed blow. The skin might be broken, but not much; Arsenjani had sapped me with loving care. That meant an accident of some sort was the next order of the day.

The truck bumped along, and sand drifted in through the slats on the side: desert. But I had other things to think about. Something was going on inside my body that I didn’t understand. My head seemed to be growing larger instead of smaller, and this sensation of swelling was crawling down through my neck to my chest and stomach. My lungs felt as if somebody were scraping steel wool across them. Alternately burning and freezing, my body seemed to be floating above the boards, and my clothes were soaked with sweat. Some giant was squeezing me like a sponge. I smelled of fever.

Then, without warning, everything inside me came loose; my stomach churned and I vomited, splattering a thick stream of yellow bile on myself and the rough floorboards of the truck. I rolled away from it and only succeeded in soiling the other side. The air inside the truck was suddenly thick with the fetid smell of disease and human waste.

It wouldn’t stop gushing, and with my hands tied behind my back, I was in trouble—literally in danger of drowning in my own vomit. I’d completely lost control of my body functions; at the rate I was losing fluids, I knew it wouldn’t take long to die.

Not that I particularly cared at the moment; dying seemed a perfectly reasonable means of escape from the smell and the agony. Still … death is a long time, and old habits are hard to break. I struggled up to my knees and braced myself against the lurching slats until the spasms finally passed. Then I aimed for a relatively dry area of the truck bed and passed out.

I woke up when the truck braked to a stop. The only sound I could hear was a high-pitched buzzing in my ears; now my head felt like a huge balloon filled with rotten air. My vision was blurred, but there was a relatively clear central core, like the distant end of a tunnel. I watched down its length as a soldier opened the rear door. He didn’t like what he saw and smelled: he froze, his eyes wide with terror, then retched. A second soldier appeared, turned and started to run.

“Halt!” a deep voice boomed in Farsi. The command was punctuated with a pistol shot that sounded to me like somebody spitting. An officer I hadn’t seen before moved into the end of the tunnel. He was wearing rubber gloves and a gauze mask that covered his nose and mouth. The two soldiers returned meekly, prodded by the baleful eye of the officer’s gun. The officer produced two more sets of gloves and masks, which the men put on.

“Get him out,” the officer commanded.

It was all surreal: the terrified eyes above the masks, the gloved hands pawing at my soiled and stinking body. The two men pulled me out of the truck and let me fall to the ground. My lungs felt like dirty rags, trying and failing to suck in enough air to feed my oxygen-starved body. The ringing in my ears grew louder. Something very dark and evil was growling in a corner of my mind, but it was impossible to hold a single thought for more than a moment and I couldn’t yet see what it was.

The officer opened the cab of the truck, removed a knapsack and water bag and threw them down beside me. The water bag meant something to me, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. It could mean an end to the torture of my thirst, but my hands and feet were still tied. I opened my mouth to beg, but no sounds came out. The officer produced a field knife, stepped behind me and cut my ropes. Then the three men got back into the truck and drove away.

I rolled my eyes and could see only sand. Finally my gaze fastened on the water bag. Suddenly, in my fevered mind, the water bag became a carafe on a desk in a police station. I remembered Arsenjani offering me a glass of water, watching me drink, then refusing Zahedi the same courtesy. And I knew.

Cholera. Tainted water. Arsenjani, my smooth, thoughtful host, had given me cholera-infected water to drink. That had been his solution to the problem posed by a certain dwarf; the Iranian Government certainly could not be held responsible if I wound up with a case of cholera and died in the desert. After all, it was common knowledge that the cholera vaccine was only forty percent effective, no protection at all in the event of direct exposure. If they’d arranged something as neat for Garth, Ali just might buy the “report” he received from me attesting to Zahedi’s revolutionary activities.

Rage stiffened my muscles and brought me to my feet. I staggered around in a circle, but finally managed to reach the water bag. It occurred to me that this water also might be contaminated, but I doubted it; the damage had already been done. It wouldn’t have made any difference to me anyway; my thirst was overwhelming.

I opened the top of the bag and poured a few quarts over my face; some of it made its way down my throat, and that cleared my head a little. I stumbled a few steps and sat down hard on the packed sand. I heaved the bag over my shoulder and drank some more, then promptly vomited again. I might be able to put water into my body, but there was no way I could manage to keep it there.

The thought of dying of cholera in the desert like an animal should have terrified me, but it didn’t. I tried to care and couldn’t. The cholera was striking with terrible, numbing swiftness.

I tried to remember what I’d read of the disease: At the moment, germs transmitted by the contaminated water were making a shambles of the normal flora in my intestinal tract, turning the usually benign assemblage against its host. In the final stages the bacteria would be eating away chunks of my stomach and intestines—literally consuming my body. In the end, cholera killed by dehydrating the body. I was a dead man: treatment had to be immediate, and the chance of that looked rather slim from where I was sitting in the middle of the desert. I was about to become a statistic, a spent human bullet fired by the SAVAK.

My body voided itself once again, and the reaction left a dull ache in my belly that worked its way up into my chest cavity and down into my legs. My vision now consisted of tiny bright pinpricks of light that burned flickering images on my fever-hot brain. I closed my eyes against the pain, then put my hands on the sand and shoved. Up on my feet, I leaned forward, trying to walk, then realized that I wasn’t walking at all, but only imagining it. I emptied the water bag and pressed my face into the wet sand.

Then I began experiencing other hallucinations; I imagined I could hear the sound of an approaching jeep grinding through its gears as it wallowed through the sand. It struck me that Arsenjani was impatient, already sending his men back to see if I was dead.

Rubbery hands grabbed for me, and I opened my eyes to find myself looking up into more masked faces, I struck out at the blurred images, grabbed for one of the masks, missed and sank down into an oblivion that smelled like the bowels of hell, and was me.