Pride and relief rattled her senses. Everything suddenly felt surreal. From her father’s phone call from Canada last night that scared the crap out of her, to holding that secret in from David through their intimate night and this morning. She should have told him the chilling message. To hell with her father’s warning not to. In reality, her not telling David had nothing to do with the promise she made to Michael Sevani one way or the other. She loved David Badalian and this was not the time to burden him with worry. 

She rushed down filthy, littered concrete steps to the lower level where she parked her Peugeot two hours earlier. Inside the massive, dank structure the clack of her heels magnified a loud creepy echo. A chill swept through her. An unpatrolled parking garage was no place for a woman alone. Ava glanced at her watch. 12:20 P.M. Fear wouldn’t have entered her mind in the first place if not for Michael’s ominous warning.

Last night she caught the uncommon relapse to his Persian accent that accompanied the urgency in his tone. She wondered if the almighty Dr. Michael Sevani realized his voice quivered as he put her on alert.

 “I’ve made some very bad alliances with terrible people. I believed they paid well for my expertise so they could do good with it. I don’t have time to explain,” her father told her. “Bear with me, Ava. I must sound vague. I don’t think this line is secure. Do you remember the businessman who lectured in Berlin on environmental concerns two years ago? He and I appeared together at the International Consortium? He showed a special interest in you and your hospital. I don’t want to say his name.”

Good, because she didn’t want to hear his name. Michael Sevani waited until she whispered, “I remember.” Her heart pounded.

“All right then.” He took a loud breath. “I’m his houseguest. I don’t know for how long. No one is to know. Understand? No one, especially David. My host is protecting me from very powerful, very evil people.”

The phone in her hand shook against her ear. “How in the world did you…”

“I-I’m being watched…followed. They want…they want my formula. I can’t say more. Our friend is taking care of it. Ava, we’re working together to help our country while our people fight. But…our friend said you, too, are now in danger. That’s why I’m calling. He said you must get out of Germany as soon as possible.

“These awful people will get to you and use you. But our friend...he’s away and cannot speak with you right now...he wants to help you. He has arranged for someone to contact you tomorrow at the hospital. They will have a fake passport, money and a plane ticket for you. Go with them, Ava. Come to Canada now, but stay away from my home. People watch it. Come to our friend’s house where we can guarantee your safety.” Then softly her father added, “I truly am sorry I’ve put you in such danger, Ava. I love you, dear child.”

The phone went dead.

Ava had collapsed onto the tan leather recliner behind her. She stopped breathing. She had never before heard the words I love you from her father, and they had to come in a veiled threat on her life?

David had walked into the room at that moment. She pushed the cell phone down alongside the chair cushion. Beads of moisture from his shower clung to his taupe skin and rippled muscles. Mischief played in his hazel eyes. With a towel wrapped like a turban over his long wet hair, he swaggered into the room in his favorite comedic role of dashing Arabian Knight…naked.

Only this was no Arabian fairy tale.

She couldn’t even force a laugh. David picked up on that and immediately sobered.

“Sweetheart. You’re pale as a ghost. Are you sick again? I’ll get an icepack and some crackers.”

He didn’t wait for her protest, so she didn’t. If he believed morning sickness could also occur at night, she had no reason at the moment to confirm or deny.

They’d been engaged six months. They talked about having children someday, but she never convinced herself that it was sensible to begin a family with them both in their late thirties. Saying it out loud, telling David she had a baby in her belly, eased the trepidation only slightly. The dry heaves began five days ago.

Since their engagement, secrets between them just did not exist. But there was no way in hell Ava would dampen David’s excitement with an obscure story from her estranged father. Even a scary one. David was on the eve of achieving his dream. A Chicago hospital had offered him a medical training position. If Michael Sevani was entrenched in a predicament that somehow involved helping “our country…our people,” then  he was on his own, by damn.

Iran.

Iranian students took to the streets several months ago to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the uprising between pro-reform activists and the loyalist Basig. David’s frustrated anger unnerved her as he watched it unfold through amateur online footage.

From the day of June 12^th and the sham presidential election last year, David sat long hours visiting online blogs filtering illegally out of Iran.  He had justified concern for relatives still living there.

“Did you hear what that bastard said?” David had shouted. “He said those countries who don’t like the way the election turned out, he’ll slam their heads against the ceiling. What a shithead.”

Ava knew she wouldn’t change his mind when she told him that these events were in God’s hands and his worry would do nothing but heighten his blood pressure.

Now it was her own blood pressure soaring since her father’s emotional forewarning. Maybe she had been wrong. Heated events roiling in Iran were not just in God’s hands. Michael Sevani, the biochemist, and Dirk Brown, President and CEO of Epic Inline, Incorporated, were mixed up in some dangerous scheme to aid Iranian dissidents and she knew there was nothing godly about that.

Thank goodness David’s visa to the United States had at last been appended onto his passport. He was fulfilling his dream. He would be too busy for Iranian politics.

More importantly, David could not know of her father’s warning concern for her safety, even after she learned what Michael Sevani had done to put himself…and her…in danger.

TWO

David Badalian had been so animated and apologetic when he literally ran into Ava in the hospital halls. He had looked down at her with the handle of a wet mop clasped in his large fists, his handsome face cracked by a self-conscious grin.

“I know you,” he had told her. “I took your picture a year ago in northern Italy. We were at a sand volleyball tournament! You were for the opposing team!”

She had laughed. “That is the saddest, most creative come-on I’ve ever heard.”

Over coffee in the hospital cafeteria, David told her his parents came from Assyrian and Armenian bloodlines. Ava wondered just how much coincidence was at play here, both of them having been born Christian in Iran. She didn’t believe there was any chance in hell he could know her. He was good looking. She would have remembered. Weeks later he showed her the proof.

Now, inside Frankfurt airport’s parking garage, nausea crept up on her.  She hurried along the row of cars to the green Peugeot. Ava had taken the day off from the hospital to drive David here. She would not go to there now despite her father’s instruction. Someone may be there waiting for her. Someone sent by Dirk Brown. She refused to be caught up in her father’s troubles especially if Dirk was involved, even though that warning message kept pressing on her chest. What the hell was going on?

The theme from ER played from the hollows of her purse. She rummaged blindly until she felt the cell phone. With her thumb, she flipped it open and had it to her ear in one motion.

“Guten tag,” she said, surprised at the trembling in her own voice.

“Dr. Sevani. Thank goodness I reached you. I know you’ve got the day off, but about half an hour ago a young boy arrived here with serious trauma to his leg.” It was Janice, head of the pediatrician nursing staff.

“Isn’t Dr. Lester on duty?” She frowned, reaching for her keys in her sweater pocket.

“The boy’s parents insist you treat him. They said you saved his life last year when he had pneumonia. His leg is pretty bad, doctor.”

She could feel her heart rate pick up. Over the phone, even abstractly discussing a patient’s condition was against regulations. But the state of Janice’s nerves were clear in her voice.

“All right,” Ava told her. “I’m just leaving Flughafen Frankfurt. Is the boy stabilized?”

“We’re working on that. We’ll be waiting for you. Thank you, doctor.” 

Now she had no options. A patient needed her. Ava had to get to the hospital. She hoped no one would waylay her with some sort of foolish escape-to-Canada plan. The mere thought teetered on the edge of ridiculous drama.

The self-possessed Dr. Michael Sevani’s paranoid imagination could be going berserk. If his story was all a charade, she would kill him. His phoned wolf-cry made it impossible for her to share David’s excitement over finally realizing his dream.

Ava opened the door of the Peugeot and scooted behind the wheel. She rested her forehead on the hard steering wheel and took deep breaths. The car was empty. Without David her world felt empty. She could still smell him, their sex last night and this morning. With the back of a finger, she brushed away a burning tear. Her earlier feeling of loss now mixed up with feelings of abandonment, anger, resentment and disgust.

The abandonment was with David and that wasn’t fair. It was selfish envy because his dream of life in the United States had materialized without her. But that was only temporary. Right? 

The feelings of anger, resentment and disgust roiled inside solely because of her father. She was angry that he had crossed over the security wall she had built with her on one side and Michael Sevani on the other. She resented his intrusion into the passionate, frenetic life she had with David Badalian, and she was disgusted and royally pissed that her father was in coercion with...had dragged out of the muck of her past...Dirk Brown. 

All she could do for herself now was not miss David so much and definitely not think about her father. She would help this little boy whose parents trusted her.

Once at the hospital, she would make a conscious effort not to expect someone to approach her and hand her a fake passport, money and a plane ticket. The imagined scenario was absurd…except for the tone in her father’s voice. She sniffed and turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the parking space.

Glancing into the rearview mirror, she caught her breath. A red Citroën jetted straight out from its slot five cars back. Tires squealed as the car turned toward the exit. Right behind her. The two men inside seemed very intent on the tail end of her Peugeot.

Of course her father’s call monopolized her imagination. She shook her head and drove out into traffic leaving Frankfurt and onto the autobahn. She was headed for Angelika-Lautenschlager-Klinik on the Heidelberg University medical campus where, among other crucial activities, she chaired pediatric medicine.

Her father’s words resounded in her brain. What kind of formula had he perfected that would get him watched and followed? And even more ominous, how did he expect to work with the pipeline tycoon Dirk Brown to help revolutionaries in Iran? From his hiding place in Canada, how could Michael Sevani do anything for the people of Iran? Those dissidents were many months into a fresh, bloody defiance of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that bastard Ahmadinejad, and the Revolutionary Guard. She understood the passion of wanting to help. She felt it herself and heard it from David every day. But if Dirk Brown was involved in the plan to aid Iranian revolutionaries, you could bet he would somehow benefit from it.

Five kilometers onto the autobahn, her side mirror exposed the red Citroën two cars behind her. She pressed down on the accelerator. One hundred twenty kilometers an hour, that damned red car continued to zigzag around traffic to keep her in sight.

Her imagination be damned. People were following Dr. Ava Sevani. Irritation fumed its way up her cheeks, right alongside her mounting fear.

THREE

East St. Louis, Illinois, USA

One Month Earlier

Harry Coomber stared at the bathtub, at the iron stains he never bothered to remove, patient, waiting to be sure the convulsive vomiting was done. He gripped the large bath towel across his naked thighs where he sat on the toilet, his upper body hunched over like that of a feeble, dying man. Dribbles of puke strained through the soaked towel and put tiny splats on the tile between his feet. He had quit using the toilet to puke in after that first chemo treatment. Bending low over the toilet bowl made both ends squirt with each vomit convulsion.

Before he walked out the door from that first treatment, the hospital gave him a six-pack of adult diapers to take home. Gave him? What a joke. Hospital’s don’t give away anything. Once he got the bill, he saw that six-pack of diapers cost him twenty-five bucks. Hell, he could have bought five six packs of Budweiser for twenty-five bucks. Besides, no way was he gonna wear them damn diapers.

Then the simultaneous puking and shitting started. That first time it took him all afternoon to clean up after himself. By the time he got enough strength back to get out some rags and turn on the faucets the mess had started to dry. Now he put on a diaper soon as he got home from the treatments.

But, after today, no more treatments, no more diapers, no more sore ass. His job at Epic Inline, Incorporated had terminated late last month. Some squealer at the giant pipeline company told Human Resources Harry was dealing in the parking lot after work. HR listened to Harry’s side and handed him the pink slip. Don’t think he didn’t tell them where they could stick that slip.

That night he wrote a letter to the company CEO; put in there every way life had fucked him over. First he sacrificed his son in Afghanistan and then the Army turned around and sent Jeremy’s remains and his medals to a mother who had had nothing to do with her son the past ten years. Harry told that fucker CEO whatever-his-name-was what he thought of Epic, too, a man dying of cancer about to lose his insurance.

Sure, he could go to a Cobra plan. Epic had to offer that according to the law, but Harry couldn’t afford them high payments. What’d they think he was, rich or something?  Besides, when his Epic insurance ran out, what insurance company would take him on while he painfully died of pancreatic cancer? None, that’s who. He was screwed, so screw them. Screw them all.

Standing at the sink, Harry wiped his mouth on the wet washcloth and slowly raised his pale blue eyes to the mirror. He stared at the oozing red sores splotching his skinny neck and crawling up into his hairline. Doc said some people lost their hair from the treatments. He said a few got what Harry had, a face that looked like somebody unloaded a shotgun on it. He had to stay out of the sun too, which meant he couldn’t work even if he hadn’t been let go because somebody squealed on him.

He wasn’t very pretty in the first place, what with the elongated face he blamed on his Kentucky ancestry. All the Coomber men wore that craggy face with the permanently sun darkened skin and cynical turn on their thin lips. He had straight reddish orange hair with a lot of gray in it that he combed over toward the right to cover a deep widow’s peak. He kept his thick sideburns carefully groomed. He had the Coomber Adam’s apple on a long skinny neck. He credited that apparition for giving him a surprisingly deep voice for a guy wasn’t given a big body to go with it. Shit. None of that mattered much anymore.

The thought of a yellow traitor really pissed Harry off. He’d only been doing drugs for the pain, goddammit. If he wasn’t so goddamn mad, so deep in need to bring revenge down on all those who had done him wrong, he would have jumped off the Cairo Bridge by now, right into the Mississippi, float downstream maybe as far as the bayou.

Harry was steaming mad and out of beer the day he considered the Cairo Bridge. He headed out the door for the tavern. Jed’s Corner Tap was just a block over. Out on the sidewalk he met the mailman, who handed him the letter that would gratefully change what he had left of his sorry life.

FOUR

Four Days Earlier

Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Roxana Hind swerved her bicycle around a young man in blue jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt. Stylish little punk, the way his fire-engine red scarf draped artfully around his neck. Silly kid had a cell phone glued to his left ear, while his right arm clutched his man-bag tight to his hip. He didn’t have a clue how close he came to getting clipped where he’d stepped onto the bicycle path right in front of her.

A crisp northeast breeze slapped her cheek as she glanced up at the Gothic arch of the carved granite entrance to University Hall where she cut across the quad of McMaster University. The Arabesque-styled arch resembled the Askariya shrine’s entryway in the town of  Samarra. Every day the University’s arch made her feel homesick.

In Samarra, Iraq, the Shi’a holy shrine’s golden dome was all but obliterated by a bomb. She sometimes wondered if people outside the tribes did this and kept the holy war between Sunni and Shi’a alive.  It was a war American presence could not squelch. Today, the world wanted to believe life had settled down in Iraq, but Roxana knew better. Suicide bombings had already ramped up again with word American troops would soon pull out.  After centuries the truth remained: savagery between tribes only changed by methods used.

Roxana pedaled her bicycle hard toward Friday prayers at the stadium combat room.

Chemistry lab had run overtime with that substitute professor bumbling his way through. The regular professor, Michael Sevani, hadn’t been seen in nearly a week. She worried. He had not called her cell phone once in that time. If he didn’t reappear soon, she would lose her job.

Roxana was embarrassed. Her third year as a biology student and she still lived on campus. This year she shared her space in the cramped room with a freshman. Roxana needed a job and enough money to get into off-campus housing like other upperclassmen.

A fellow student gave her a phone number. He told her she could make good money if she wasn’t too much of a prude. Roxana recognized the taunt, but she was desperate. She called the number. It felt uncomfortable sitting alone at the campus Starbucks waiting for the man who told her he’d be wearing a brown ball cap and had a grey beard. But the uneasiness evaporated when he sat down and pushed an envelope toward her. Inside was two thousand American dollars. 

Her job was to keep an eye on Professor Sevani, get as close to him as possible, even into his bed, and to report everything about him “Except the size of his pecker,” the man bluntly instructed.

Dr. Sevani thwarted her open flirtations at first, but he was a lonely old man who appreciated the tease of well-rounded breasts. During one of the Sunday afternoon political debates between Iranian and Iraqi campus activists, Roxana thrust her chest against Professor Sevani, yelling in his face. The top buttons on her shirt had been left undone, and her movement exposed a lot of flesh. His gaze met the simmer in her dark eyes with equal anger…and lust, which they consummated an hour later behind the locked door of his office.

Roxana was lonely too. With the professor, she could freely and intelligently debate politics. They shared a passion for their Iraqi and Iranian differences and settled them with naked bodies entwined. She missed him. For three weeks they had been as close as a student and professor on the same college campus could be on the sly.

Every other day Roxana reported on her conversations with Professor Sevani. She met with gray beard once a week, and she would receive another two thousand dollars. The last time, the tall man scared her when he grabbed her wrist and pulled her close to his face. Anger seethed from his pores as he ordered her to make the professor tell her where he kept his secret formula.

That night, Roxana teased, grasping Sevani’s penis, not allowing him entry until he told her about his secret formula.  He moaned like a child being denied a cupcake. “How do you know about that?” He had grabbed her shoulders and brought her face close to his lips. “It’s highly lethal and undetectable. That’s all I will say. No one can find where it’s hidden.” Then he brought their open mouths together and she was re-submerged in the throes of sweaty, simmering sex. That he had just confessed such a thing to her, carried their lust to a higher level. She thrust herself onto him and rode them both to a groaning magnificent climax. 

She reported the confession to gray beard, believing he would be happy with her. Instead, he was infuriated she had not learned the formula’s whereabouts. He refused to pay her. The next day Professor Sevani disappeared without another word to her.

Now thinking of that confession-inspired orgasm she felt flushed and tingled where she shouldn’t be tingling when about to enter the temporary mosque for Friday prayers. She lifted the water bottle from its holder on the bike and took a long gulp.

Roxana hated praying in the gymnasium combat room. But the number of Muslims on campus had grown rapidly since her enrollment three years ago. School administrators had been forced to move Islamic worship from the overcrowded student center to the combat room. Here, the walls and floors were deeply padded so no one would get hurt during its normal use as a place for training fighters. The irony was not lost. Even non-Muslims recognized the prayer location as a form of censure.

Of course, worshipers no longer brushed one another’s shoulders as they knelt and bowed in their prayers, but cramped conditions were nearly as bad in the combat room as they had been in the student center. Some worshippers were forced to kneel on their prayer rugs in the aisles and along the walls.

She took another greedy drink and replaced the water bottle into its holder. She couldn’t take water with her into the prayer room, nothing but a prayer rug, which she didn’t have with her today. She pushed dark hair back under her orange hijab and glided the bike toward the bicycle stand.

Roxana swung a blue-jeaned leg back and over the bike’s seat, ready to stop and park. All at once, she felt consumed by fierce, searing pain. A hot hammer of lightning smacked hard between her eyes. Her sight blurred, dimmed, disappeared. Her leg muscles seemed to melt and dump her onto the concrete sidewalk. Her left calf hooked the bicycle pedal and the bike crashed down on top of her. A torch became lodged in her throat. Then the scorching fire leapt through to her brain. Her brain felt like someone was running a jackhammer through it. The pain stole her breath. She clawed at the cement walkway with such force her nails snapped backwards. The hard surface tore flesh from her fingertips and was left with long, jagged red stains as Roxana tried to crawl away from the agony, edge her way out of her own body.

And then she did. Thanks be to Allah.

The sky was beautiful blue and everything below was so bright and clear. She saw herself lying there and people came running and everything was okay. It was good. Life would go on just fine without her. The prayer room would now be less crowded by one.

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