We didn’t fuck them, the bozo insisted. We just promised to get Earphone off the street and out of their pockets. Earphone?

Their mackdaddy. Their pimp.

Pimps, anything at all to do with pimps, on his watch.

They’d been more than wrong. They didn’t know how much he wanted the story to run. If it had, Mean Man wouldn’t have been able to send him looking for Hoseyn. If it had, Goodwin would have known what he’d done to her. She would have learned he’d flubbed her out of the sky. And then, knowing that, she surely would have pulled out of the Hoseyn mission.

He wanted them to run his photo at that Wizards game. Blow my cover. Come on now. Blow my blue sky.

You didn’t need a hammer when Mean Man had a friendly in that newsroom. Was it Don Grady? Was it Gordon Bray? These names got tossed around. For once, Will didn’t know. He knew he was tired. He knew Goodwin wasn’t. Every day they worked together, watching her bright and true reminded him. He wasn’t the Chair. He was the floor underneath it.

GIHON   AUGUST

17.   THE UNMAPPED
TUMBLED REGION

They crossed the border west of Bazargan under a gibbous moon. Turkey lay flat behind them, Iran short ahead uninhabited. The pack on Mary’s back was light, her vest heavier. Will’s ruck weighed easy on his shoulders. They’d depend on Kurd itinerants, their sense of terrain, and useful caravanserais. They would move at night and sleep the day.

She expected no trees but they were here. Cypress was prevalent. In the Iran she’d imagined it would be oven-hot. Instead, she was walking through an improbably agreeable August. Not far north were the mountains of Armenia, west was Turkey’s peak called Ararat. Noah was said to have landed there. They would travel south to the Karun River, once called Gihon. The Garden of Eden was its headwater.

For now fields roved the hills before them. They used a trail along flowering wheat. She liked the rustling of stalks, a shimmer sound that created a trance. The deal was, no communication until they were close to the truck. Now, about twenty kilometers in, Will’s back turned for the first time and he stopped. He took her hand and traced the number two on her palm.

He guessed two minutes until they reached it. She nodded, and they picked up the pace.

Soon enough, there was the pickup, an old Khodro. It was parked against an outbuilding she couldn’t see too well. Up closer, it looked as if it might house a threshing floor. So this was it. They both surveyed the surroundings to find nothing. Will opened the driver’s door. She unfastened the key from under the passenger seat and handed it to him. The old engine tracked up.