Breath of Hell (Harry Bauer Book 8)

by Blake Banner

  We picked our way, stopping and starting, past the Osmaniye coffee shop, the Eczane drugstore and the Süleymanoğlu Inşaat just-about-everything-and-anything-you-can-imagine-shop, which had just that in the window, and a little more out on the sidewalk: from old TVs and bicycles to tubs of paint, sheets of Styrofoam and plastic tubes for plumbing. There was even a guy leaning on the doorjamb wearing a djellaba, and a hongma on his head, smoking a cigarette.

  She turned right then up another narrow street that was bustling with women buying fresh produce from grocery stores where the fruits and vegetables were stacked high in crates out on the street. Interspersed with the stores there were terraced cafés where all the customers were men. I wondered briefly if it had dawned on them that they had taken half the fun out of going to bars if you were only ever going to meet other guys there. Then I remembered you could only buy booze after ten PM, and you were limited to three pints per person. So there went the other half.

  We turned into a narrow, cobbled street and she followed it to the end, where it met a broader avenue. A red sign on the wall opposite the intersection said it was Cöreki Street. There she turned in and parked. I kept going, past a shop selling cheap, plastic toys for kids, and found a place to park in the shade of some large trees.

  In my mirror I saw the colonel climb out of the Jaguar and enter a two-storey building with a large patio covered by an awning. At first I thought it was some kind of a restaurant, but I turned the car around so I could park facing the building she’d entered, and noticed the minaret at the back, and it slowly dawned on me that she had gone into a mosque.

  I felt my skin go cold and clammy. My stomach burned, not just with anger, but with a nauseating fear; a fear of something that made no sense, and which I could not understand. I took several photographs with my phone.

  I waited ten minutes and saw the colonel emerge again, accompanied by a guy in a djellaba and a hongma, and another guy in jeans and a black leather jacket. The guy in the djellaba had a big beard and was probably somewhere between forty and sixty, it was hard to tell. The guy in the leather was probably in his mid-twenties. They stood at the gate talking for another five minutes, I took a few more shots, then the colonel and the younger guy got in the Jag and pulled away.

  I followed.

  I let them get well ahead of me and followed them east, past the hippodrome along Fikret Yüzatli and then down 56th Street, dodging the crazy traffic, the kids on bikes and the people who spilled from the sidewalks apparently unaware that there was traffic on the roads, unaware, in fact, that there was any distinction between the sidewalks and the blacktop which at times were paved the same.

  At 58th Boulevard she turned right and headed south. Here at least the road was asphalt and the sidewalks were paved, but the people were as abundant as ever, and as reckless about traffic. We snaked along, among buildings that all looked like they’d been thrown up in the ’70s, plastered with advertisements, miniature billboards and signs stuck in windows. I had no idea what they were offering, but I figured it was everything and anything from dental services to legal, employment agencies and private investigators.

  Pretty soon the road forked. The left branch made a right angle and the boulevard continued, semi-pedestrianized, with restaurants and pavement cafés lining the sides. Here the Jaguar came to a stop and I saw the colonel and the guy in the leather jacket climb out and cross the sidewalk toward a restaurant with a red sign that read, Ekin Simit Evi. I pulled in to a side street on the right, parked the car and made my way back to where I was within sight of where they sat. I saw they had taken a table on the terrace and the colonel had her back to me.

  I glanced around. I had two options. There was a café across the road that also had a terrace. Getting there and sitting outside both risked being seen. The other option was the Simit Sarayl, which was right next door. The front was open and I could sit just inside, in the shadows, keep an eye on them and avoid being seen myself. I stepped inside and ordered a coffee and a kebab.

  I waited a while, but they just seemed to be talking, so I took out my cell and called the brigadier.

  “Harry, any news?”

  I smiled to myself. “Hi, honey, yeah, I’m finally here. I am currently sitting on a terrace having a coffee and a kebab on 58th Boulevard. You wouldn’t believe how busy it is at this time of the evening. Not cold at all.”

  “I gather you can’t talk freely.”

  “Well, to be perfectly honest, darling, I am not sure, but personally I would rather not.”

  “All right, have you any news?”

  “Oh, absolutely. The weather has been gorgeous and the sun has been blazing. And you should have seen the sunset. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

  His voice became tense. “You’ve seen Jane?”

  “Technicolor.”

  “Have you still got eyes on her?”

  “Oh certainly, sweetheart, ever since sundown. Where have we been? Well let me see, I think the best thing is if I send you some photos. The mosque was of particular interest. It really is quite spectacular. Hang on a sec’, sweetheart…”

  I sent him the photographs I had taken, then put the phone back to my ear. He was very quiet.

  “I have to tell you, honey, I have no idea what is going on.”

  He was silent a little longer, then, “Have you been able to hear anything?”

  “No, not yet, but I’m hoping to do a bit of swimming soon.”

  “This is very unsettling. Is she speaking Turkish or Arabic to this man?”

  “I was wondering the same thing. Did she ever tell you she could do that?”

  “No, and it’s not on her CV—résumé—which you would rather expect it to be, all things considered.”

  I laughed, like he’d said something funny. “No argument there. I mean, it makes you wonder, sweetheart, doesn’t it? Do we ever really know anyone?”

  “I need to think about this. I am not sure how objective I can be at the moment. Is she there now?”

  “About thirty or forty feet. But you know she’s not alone in that, darling.”

  “She’s still with the young man in the leather jacket?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t agree more.”

  “Stay with them. See where they go, if anyone joins them… You know the drill.” I heard him sigh heavily. “I am going to have to leave this up to your discretion for now, Harry. I am afraid I have been rather wrong-footed and I can’t trust my own judgment. Keep me posted.”

  I sighed back. “I know how you feel, kid. I feel the same way.”

  “Should I relieve you? Send somebody else?”

  “Nah, I won’t be here long enough. And besides, if that job has to be done, then I don’t want anybody else to do it.”

  “No, no, I suppose not.”

  “We’ll talk soon, sweetheart.”

  “Yes, talk very soon.”

  I hung up and sat staring from the shadows at the blonde head just fifteen or twenty feet away. After a moment I saw her lean forward and something changed hands, after which she placed something in the pocket of her jacket. The guy in the black leather stood and I watched him cross the sidewalk. When he got to the road he hailed a cab and drove away.

  I called the waiter and paid, and carried my kebab back toward the Corolla. I could see the colonel speaking on the phone to somebody. I sat on the hood of my car eating, waiting for her to do something. I had assumed that when the guy in the leather jacket left she would follow. But she didn’t. What did happen was that five minutes later, as I was stuffing the last of the kebab in my mouth, a Q7 pulled up, two of Yushbaev’s special forces goons jumped out of the back and went to where the colonel was sitting. The Q7 took off again. The goons spoke to the colonel for a moment, she got up and they followed her to the Jag.

  I tailed them south down to the Kennedy Highway which ran along the coast. I settled in about ten cars behind them and followed through the dense, evening traffic, among the flow of headlamps, as far as the
port at Türkmenistan Park, and there they turned north up Namik Kemal, under the railway bridge and into the kind of neighborhood where even hope can’t give you a solid reason to keep trying. Squalid and run-down was what you got after giving this place a face-lift.

  The Jag turned the wrong way into Küçük Langa and pulled up outside a grotesque gray, three-storey building with dead, gray-green glass panels all over the second and third floors, and dirty gray granite all over the first floor. The entrance was on one side: a cavernous gaping maw of an arch with encrusted dirt on the floor, possibly last year’s vomit, among crates of empty bottles and various other kinds of filth that was hard to identify.

  I crawled past as the three of them climbed out and went inside. I watched double doors swing open onto a dimly lit room that, at a glance, looked like a nightclub which had not opened to the public yet. Then I was past and couldn’t see anymore.

  I found a space a hundred yards down the road, parked my car and sat wondering. Was she delivering whatever the guy in the black jacket had given her, to some contact in the club? Were they separate errands? And why the hell was she doing errands for Yushbaev anyway? More to the point, and more worrying, was this new? Was this the first time she had run errands for him on her own? If not, maybe the two goons who were with her now were not watching her, but guarding her. They were her bodyguards.

  My mind struggled to make sense of it. She was one of the founders of Cobra, the brigadier had known her and trusted her for years. And he was not some simple, naïve teenager. He was a longstanding senior officer in the SAS who had seen it all and done it all. How could she have pulled the wool over his eyes so completely?

  And yet, there she was, in the club, holding whatever it was the guy in the black leather jacket had given her. And the image came back to my mind of the colonel on the yacht, just before she’d left, her hand on Yushbaev’s shoulder as she kissed his cheek. It had come so naturally to her. All of her behavior, since she had been spotted in Puerto Banus, in Marbella, and while I had been following her here in Istanbul, all of it had been so relaxed and natural. It spoke to one thing, one thing I could not accept—did not want to accept—that she had been a double agent for years. She was intimate with Yushbaev, she was one of his operatives and had been planted not only in the Air Force, but with Cobra.

  I felt sick to my stomach with a sense of rage and betrayal. But forcing myself to look beyond that, if I was right, if it was true, the consequences for Cobra, for all its operatives and for the brigadier and myself would be catastrophic. Unless…

  I looked down the street at the entrance to the club. A sign in neon lighting flickered and came on above the door. It said Rio de Janeiro Copa Cabana Club. A hot slow burn started in my belly and I spoke the words aloud to myself.

  “Unless I kill Yushbaev and her.”

  Fourteen

  I got out of the car, slammed the door and shouldered my way through the crowd. I moved into the entrance arch and found a set of large, double doors. I pushed through them into a foyer that was carpeted in stained, dirty red. Over on the right there was a cloak room with a black wooden counter. On my left there was an empty ticket booth and to the right of that there was a stretch-belt barrier. I ignored it, entered the foyer and looked around.

  Behind the ticket booth there was a red-carpeted staircase that rose to the upper floors. Over on my right, across the foyer, were the johns, and straight ahead of me was another set of double doors which I guessed led to the bar and dance floor. I crossed and pushed the doors open. The place was big, dark and even uglier than the exterior.

  The bar itself was a large square in the middle of the floor. At the far end there was a dance floor flanked by two large cages where I figured naked women would probably dance. The rest of the place had dark purple wall-to-wall carpet, a plethora of low tables and chairs, and walls painted black. The ceiling was peppered with what looked like lenses, which I imagined projected colored lights and lasers. There was nobody there so I let the doors swing closed and made my way up the stairs.

  Up on the second floor there was a small landing that led immediately to a broad lounge with a bar. Like the rest of the place, it was empty. The windows, a dirty gray, overlooked the street below. There were low tables and chairs scattered here and there, and either side of the bar there were large double doors. I pushed one open. It gave onto a broad, semicircular balcony that overlooked the bar and dance floor below.

  I went back to the empty lounge and made my way to the far end. There I saw the johns, and to the left of them a short flight of five steps up to a heavy, wooden door with a brass plaque on it that read, Özel. I thought about it a moment and decided that özel meant private in Turkish.

  I climbed the steps, and with a hot burn in my belly I knocked. The door opened and one of Yushbaev’s boys stood looking down at me. He produced a frown of confusion that turned into a cumulonimbus scowl before he growled, “Tchyo za ga’lima?”

  I smiled and nodded. “Hi, I’m looking for Jane. Is she here?”

  He spat elaborately at my feet, “Otva’li, piz`dad err`mo!”

  I didn’t need to speak Russian to knew that he wasn’t saying he liked what I’d done with my hair. His expression suggested it was more about my sanitary condition and the gender of my face. Perhaps, if I had been serious about achieving some credibility as a woke, twenty-first-century guy who was in touch with his feminine side, I might have invited him to have a full, frank and searching dialogue. But in my view, woke men are second only to vegans in nutritional value, and I have no feminine side, so I flexed my knees slightly and drove my fist into his balls in a very savage uppercut. As he bent forward, with his jaw hanging open in painful astonishment, I smashed a right hook that traveled all the way from my feet, through my hips and my waist right into his dangling chin and shattered his jawbone.

  I stepped over him, where he lay whimpering on the steps and said, absently, “See? That’s what you get for calling a guy an Otva’li, piz`dad err`mo.”

  I was in a small lobby with a desk and a couple of chairs. To the left of the desk was a door. I took hold of the handle, turned and pushed. It was an office, and not a particularly large one. There were a couple of grimy open windows that looked out over a filthy back alley. In front of the window was a desk and behind the desk was a man in a shiny, gray, double-breasted suit. He had curly black hair that was so thick with grease he probably didn’t need to wear a hat in the rain. He had insolent black eyes with long black eyelashes, that were staring at me and wondering about ways to cause me pain. He was not alone in the room.

  Leaning against the window frame was a man who was not yet fat, but he was working on it and had mastered flabby with an “A” grade. He was wearing jeans and sneakers and a dirty gray T-shirt that hung over his belly like a tent. He’d lost the hair on the top of his head, but the ring he had around the back, from ear to ear, was thick, greasy and curly, like his friend’s.

  Leaning against the wall, just seven or eight feet to my left, regarding the world with an air of easy superiority, was the other one of the two Russian boys. This one must have been descended from the Rus, because he was easily six four, had platinum hair and very pale blue eyes. He gave me the kind of astonished frown his friend had tried on me and muttered something that sounded very like, “Ty che, blyad?”

  The fourth person at the meeting was Colonel Jane Harris of the United States Air Force. She sat in a burgundy vinyl armchair, staring up at me not so much in astonishment as in fear. I smiled down at her.

  “Hello, Jane."

  She didn’t say anything, but the big blond snarled, “Idi syuda!” Which must have meant something like “Come here,” because he came at me, reaching for my collar with both hands. Then he growled, “Po ebalu poluchish, suka, blyad!” Which I figured meant he wanted to dismember me and eat my heart.

  I let his fingers grip my lapels before I stepped back. Fights need to be short. They need to end quickly and decisively. So as I ste
pped back I brought both forearms down hard on the crook of his elbows and hugged them in toward my chest. His forward motion helped, and before he knew what had happened I had driven my right fist into his oncoming chin.

  A decent blow to the chin, however big or tough a man is, will put out his lights, and it did that for Ivan the Rus. I gave him a gentle shove and let him drop in front of the door, effectively locking the colonel in the room.

  The whole thing had taken no more than two seconds. Now I smiled at the guy behind the desk and stamped hard on the back of the Rus’s neck. His legs jerked and kicked for a couple of seconds, then he lay still.

  The guy by the window was still gawping. I had taken two strides before he started fumbling behind his back with his right hand. I took a handful of his collar with my left hand and a handful of his crotch with my right and pivoted him out of the open window. He only had time for a high-pitched squeak before he hit the alley with a sickening thud. The colonel was hunkered down now, grabbing at the Rus’s cream linen jacket and trying to pull two hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight away from the door.

  The guy with greasy hair had lost the insolent look in his eyes. He was getting to his feet with both palms held out and pushing at me as he yammered something inarticulate. I raised my right knee and drew the fighting knife from my boot.

  “Do you,” I said loudly and deliberately, “speak English?”

  He shook his head rapidly. “No English, no English.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  I took a long step forward and drove the blade deep into his heart. He gasped and fell back into his chair. I wiped the blade on his shiny jacket and walked back to the door, where the colonel stopped dragging at the Russian’s jacket and stared up at me.

  “I think you have some explaining to do, Jane.”

  She shook her head. I nodded.

  “I’m going to tell you what we are going to do. I am going to take your arm and shove a Sig Sauer P226 in your side, and we are going to walk quickly, without causing a fuss, to my car. There, you are going to get behind the wheel and drive us to my hotel. We will go up to my room and there, while we wait to be collected and taken home, you will tell me in minute detail what the fuck is going on.”