X-Men Mission: Opera Redux -The Epilogue.

[x-farouk.livejournal.com]

The loose ends get frayed.



Sal'yany on the Kura was a small city, rustic by Western standards. It was not near any of the oil or gas reserves of the country, nor the new government backed farming initiatives. It was a quiet place in Azerbijain, unremarkable save for a series of hot springs and a traditional riverside getaway. It was, in fact, the perfect place to be quietly forgotten.

Of course, that wasn't always possible, and as the boots smashed in the door of the house by the river, it served as a reminder that being forgotten only worked if the only ones that cared about had neither the time, energy or resources to bother remembering.

Amahl Farouk was not without resources.

To his credit, the man inside the house did not attempt to rise, or even to bolt upright at the crash. He quietly set aside the Quran he was reading, marking his place with a worn piece of silk, and settled himself more comfortably in his chair, waiting. Fate, justified punishment, the will of Allah? It didn't really matter why he'd been found.

"Let me be clear, Mr. Verdiyev," Farouk said without a preamble as he entered the room. Trotsky, clad incongruously into a uniform of an Azeri army captain silently took up a position by the door, his eyes dark and coolly appraising.

"You will not live out the week."

Farouk's lips quirked in weary disgust as he took in the surroundings and he wiped the nearest stool with a handkerchief, before sitting down with a soft sigh of relief, the cane dangling idly in his hand.

Selim raised his eyes to look at the stooped, wizened old man that had come as Death's herald to his door and said nothing, feeling a strange peace descend upon him.

Amahl fixed the former Mossad asset with a flat, cobra-like stare that was both pitiless and terrifying detached, as if he was already looking at a dead man.

"I don't say this to threaten you, Mr. Verdyev. I say it as a simple fact of life. It was only a matter of luck that I beat the Israelis here. And no doubt they will correct that shortly."

Farouk shrugged. "From what I had been given to understand you are an operator of some experience. Which leads me to posit two things. One - you must understand that you have been played for a fool and a patsy. I don't know what was offered to you and who offered it, but I doubt that you embarked on this venture knowing that your were being cast in the role of a sacrificial lamb."

He was fudging the truth a little. There was always the possibility that the man was a shahid, a martyr wannabe. But given all the facts the possibility was vanishingly small. For one, he would have probably self-immolated by now.

"You are now a liability on a colossal scale for a great many people." Farouk smiled coldly. "I already mentioned your former employers. Mossad is not, generally, known for turning the other cheek. You set them up and they WILL have their due."

He paused, but the other man remained silent and preternaturally still, the long slender fingers splayed gracefully on the ornate cover of the Quran, lips moving in silent prayer.

Amahl shrugged, unimpressed. "But, perhaps even more troubling for you, is the fact that you now represent an existential threat to the people who used you. You are their last loose end."

Farouk rose, leaning heavily on his cane and thrusting his face toward Selim. "I am not offering you life. I am not offering you escape. And I am not even threatening you."

Farouk's teeth showed in a slow deliberate smile of a sated predator. "I am offering you revenge, Mr. Verdiyev. I am offering you payback from beyond the grave. Give me the name, and I will see that you have the last laugh."

The pause stretched and Farouk's eyes narrowed. He could bluff and would, but he never liked doing so. Much safer to just tell the truth. Among other things it makes the lies all that more effective when they come.

The Azeri no doubt worked out who he was. Mossad dossier painted him as a man who had spent most of his life in the shadow world. In fact the very idea that someone with his experience found himself so neatly pupeteered into a dead-end already narrowed the field of suspects dramatically.

And the identity of the Alamut's hatchet-man was not exactly a secret among these circles. Thus Verdiyev presumably knew that if it came to it, Farouk could break his mind like an egg and get the information the hard way.

Or could once.

"My father was SAVAK, Professor Farouk. I dare say that I know better the habits of the Mossad than you do." Selim sighed quietly. There was no fear in him, or the righteous zeal of martyrdom. More quiet resignation. He had fled, certainly, and hid. He was a man, and no man wishes to die senselessly.

But for almost thirty years in Iran, first as a terrified student who watched his family dragged to execution, himself and his brother spared only by the intervention of an imam friendly with them, his soul had become gnarled and scarred; hard against fear of death.

"You think that I have been fooled, Amahl? Made into the scapegoat? Bah, your Alamut is more limited than its reputation would have people believe, it seems." The man actually gave Farouk a wan smile. "I was given a chance to fulfill a lifelong wish, and sadly, it failed. But that one chance was more than people such as you or I normally get in a lifetime. Drink?"

"I didn't realize that we were on the first name basis, Mr. Verdiyev." Farouk ignored the proffered glass, and remained standing, coldly contemptuous.

He abhorred un-professionalism.

The man in front of his just admitted voluntarily participating in a scheme that could have resulted in a nuclear war. Apparently because he missed his mother.

"I don't believe in chances, fate or coincidence. I believe in work and planning and, above all, leaving one's personal issues outside the game. You gambled, Mr. Verdiyev. You took a chance and, for all your hateur, you WERE, in fact, suckered. Someone saw you coming a mile away and all that remained was to apply a bare minimum of leverage for you to walk into the eternal darkness, and yet be content."

Amahl shook his head in admiration for whoever was pulling Selim's strings.

"And in the end you will die for nothing. Worse than nothing, because when the dust settles all who you thought to bring low will emerge that much stronger from the fog of what you have wrought. In fact..."

He paused, his eyes suddenly distant and hooded. "Hm..."

"What?" Sleim asked in spite of himself. "What is it?

Farouk glanced at him and Selim flinched from the faint pity he saw in his face, flinched as he hadn't from the disdain or the promise of pain.

"In fact," Amahl continued softly "I wonder if that hasn't been the point all along..."

He looked down at the dead man in front of him, feeling nothing for Verdiyev, but letting the empathy show in his eyes.

Such were the wages of letting one's emotions rule their mind.

Be it Xavier that risked everything for one mutant because it was 'the right thing to do,' or the walking corpse in this room who allowed his own dreams and hopes so much rein that it was only a matter of time until someone used them to lead him straight to a slaughterhouse.

"You might believe so, Amahl. Who's to say, really? If I am a puppet, it is by choice, to advance my own goals. Perhaps you play the same game with the Alamut." Selim filled a glass from the side board and took a swallow before sitting back down. "But you're wrong if you think I've had the opposite effect."

He put down the glass and tapped the cover of his Quran. "Ahmadinejad is not a fool, but he relies on the language of one. Which means he draws his support from them. He will use the raid to drum up more support inside Iran, and to tighten his control a little more. The IRG will be more arrogent, less cautious with their abuse of power, and with each new turn of pressure, the cracks with lengthen and widen a little more. Ah, if only..." He drained his glass in one movement.

"One dead IDF soldier. That's all it would have taken. One body that I could have identified as absolutely and certainly a son of Israel. Ahmadinejad's supporters would have forced him into precepitious action. He understands the danger, but thanks to his retoric, they do not. One dead Jew and Iran would have mobilized for war. And what a war it would have been. The IRG on the front line, ready to finally bring the battle to the Infidels."

He smiled darkly. "The Americans and the Israelis would have to take turns slaughtering them in waves. The Americans would force it to remain conventional, rolling through the tanks, and when the dust settled, it would be the liberal remains; former royalists, neo-shah fanatics, academics and young people of too much ideal cobbling together a government and starting the trials to the false, smiling faces of a NATO occupation force; Iran a puppet to the West for the next decade."

Another long pause. "And she would still be ages better off than she is now, shackled to a savage age by illiterate fanatics and power-mad fools."

The man was mad, Farouk suddenly realized. He probably spent decades dreaming, constructing elaborate scenarios, imagining whole worlds where his insane plans went off perfectly and achieved his goals.

He lived in his fantasies for so long he finally couldn't bear not to play God. It would be no use to argue with him.

No use reminding him that before the Revolutionary Guard died there would probably yet again the human waves of children and conscripts, not the least among whom his supposed liberals.

No use asking how he felt about Hezballah cells being activated in the US and mobilizing the Lebanese Shia.

No use querying his touching belief that the US public would support a grinding offensive through Iran's mountains staged from barely stable Saudi Arabia. Especially with Iran demonstrating conclusively that Israel started the war in the first place.

And with McKenna in the White House, that the US wouldn't buckle under the threat of the Hormuz Straight being closed, the oil tankers sitting idle and the American schools being turned into abbatoirs by the warriors of God.

There was no use.

And so Farouk tapped his cane against the floor and said neutrally, "An ambitious undertaking."

"Breaking a government? You might say so. Ahmadinejad is a creature of the IRG. His response would have to be completely out of scale with the destruction of the powerplant to satisfy his followers and let him remain in power. That would be enough to force the hands of the West." He shook his head. "But that opportunity has passed."

"No plan survives the contact with the enemy, they say." Farouk commiserated distantly.

"Still, I find it curious that you are indifferent to the fact that you might have been set up to fail from the start by your allies. And please, let's not bother about the denials, we both know you couldn't have done this on your own."

"Set up to fail? Only by the worst of luck did I fail, Amahl. Even the Americans wouldn't be arrogent enough to anticipate no casualties. As for the reprecussions, I know my country. No matter what, it would have broken the IRG's control at the very least."

He sighed. "And since I am already dead, what care does a spirit have for secrets? I was approached a year ago. A man with a curious offer. He asked me what was the one thing I truly wanted? I told him and he went away. A week later, he came back, and said that he represented the Kingmaker, who had decided to grant my wish. The help was minimal at first, a few contacts and files that gave me a stronger and secret line to my Mossad handlers. I'd been betraying Iran to the Jews for over a decade, hoping they might be able to topple the theocracy. But then, the mutant came."

Selim paused, and picked up the book. "It was like an answer to a prayer. A Russian, an odious man, sold him to the Defense Ministry. He could turn the weak and marginal uranium that had been scraped from the market into the finest ore. Iran's dream for a nuclear program, suddenly in reach. When they took him to Saqqaz six months ago, the pieces were in place. Just a few subtle changes in my report to the Mossad about a mutant, with his ability to make uraninum out of lead or copper, still fit the other whisps of intelligence they had found. No reason to doubt something that seemed verified by multiple sources. Israel had to go in."


"Whether the Kingmaker is a man, a group, a religion, even a ghost, I don't know. I met only a representative; as plain as Irani as you could imagine. Whatever it is, the mutant was sent by it. Knowing that I could do the rest. A misplaced faith." He placed the Qoran on the chair and sat on the floor in front of it. "Misplaced faith... you can go now, Amahl. Shoot me as you leave, or send the Mossad assassin - it doesn't matter any more."

Luck and faith. The man still didn't understand. He'd been outplayed and out-thought so thoroughly that he would go to his grave thinking that it was impossible. A perfect pawn.

Farouk turned away and jerked his head in denial at Esteban's quirked eyebrow and an unspoken question. Not worth the bullet or the effort

Let Shavit have his moment of bitter triumph.

Without a backward glance the Alamut spy-master left Selim's house and its doomed inhabitant, his mind already busy on the new piece of the puzzle.