Liar's Candle

by August Thomas

  LIZA

  Penny freezes.

  That thing’s a silencer.

  “Well,” Connor begins, “actually . . .”

  Penny looks desperately around. A fallen steak knife? Anything?

  “. . . she’s . . .”

  There’s no time.

  Penny presses her palms to the underside of the table. In one swift, muscle-jarring movement, she stands up.

  The table cracks up against Liza’s jaw, sending her sprawling across the tiles.

  “What the hell?” Connor lurches to his feet.

  “Ow!” Penny rubs her smarting wrists.

  The table rolls on its side, place settings and cutlery crashing to the ground.

  Liza lies motionless, blood dribbling from her sagging mouth every time she exhales, her ponytail a brown crescent against the tiles. Her jaw sits at a strange angle.

  “Are you insane?” Connor rounds on Penny. “She’s on our side!”

  “She was going to shoot you!”

  Connor turns. The gun still rests in Liza’s limp hand. Connor drops to his knees. “No,” he mutters, “this isn’t possible. A Makarov?” He examines the gun. “PB silent pistol. This is Russian.”

  Penny’s heart is pounding, her arms still stinging from the effort. “Is she—some kind of assassin?”

  Connor’s cheeks are blotchy red. “What do you think, the CIA has teams of assassins waiting in vans all over the world, ready to deliver like Domino’s pizza?”

  “I don’t know!” Penny shouts back. “Do you?”

  “This—” Connor points furiously at Liza and her silenced gun. “This is not normal.”

  “Did you say the gun was Russian?”

  “Let’s just say it’s the gun you’d carry if you wanted Russia to get blamed.” Connor rubs the back of his neck. “Real GRU officers don’t walk around with name tags that say, ‘Privet! I’m a Russian spy!’ ” Connor pulls up the lids of Liza’s eyes. “Out cold. I think you broke her jaw.”

  Penny crouches down beside him on the tiles. “What now?”

  The veins stand out in Connor’s neck. “Let’s see what else she’s got.” An empty holster for the Makarov is clipped to Liza’s belt. Connor checks every pocket of her cargo pants, making a careful row on the tiles: a coil of what looks like a guitar string but with grips at each end, a cheap prepaid phone that still has plastic wrapping on the screen, an eight-round Makarov magazine, and a pack of what looks like breath mints. Connor sniffs it cautiously and makes a face.

  “What is it?” Penny leans closer.

  “Cinnamon.”

  Penny’s hands are clammy.

  Connor rocks back on his heels. “She’s not Russian. And she’s not Turkish intelligence. I’d almost say we’re looking at some kind of private contractor. Except—” He shakes his head. “She knew the sign and countersign. She knew the location, which means she read and decoded the messages. She knew Christina’s name!”

  Something clicks into place.

  “Christina?” A cold weight sinks through Penny’s chest. “Christina is your boss?”

  Connor turns to her. “You’re scaring me.”

  “At the palace, Melek Palamut asked if Christina sent me.”

  “She what?” Connor stares. “No. That can’t be. No one outside the Agency should even know who Christina is.”

  Penny’s voice shakes. “You knew I’d knocked out Palamut’s Chief of Staff. But no one could have known that except Melek and her people. Who told you? It was Christina, wasn’t it? Who told you where to find me? Who knew what junkyard I’d be at? Was that Christina, too?”

  “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “It proves Christina is cooperating with Melek. How else could she have known?”

  Connor looks sick.

  “Who told you I was a terrorist? Christina, right? Did she even tell you why?”

  He hesitates. Then, “No.”

  “Connor.” Penny feels a terrible certainty, even as her mind forms the question. “Was your boss the one who told you to get into that car?”

  Connor’s face goes perfectly blank.

  “She was, wasn’t she?” Penny feels a deep chill scrape down her arms. “Did she have the access code for your ECRP?”

  He is motionless.

  Penny swallows. “Did anyone else even know?”

  For a moment, neither can speak.

  “When I sent the message to Christina from the library,” says Connor slowly, “the police arrived . . . what? Less than ten minutes later?”

  “Looking for foreigners.” Penny’s heart pounds.

  “A bomb. The Turkish police.” Connor looks down. “And then she sends us Liza.”

  “I can believe that Melek Palamut would do anything to protect her father. But why would Christina want us dead?”

  “It’s Zach. It all leads back to Zach Robson. Christina sent me to interrogate you because you were our only link to him.”

  Penny slides onto her knees. “If we’d died like we were supposed to, it would have been a dead trail.”

  “Whatever Zach was looking for, whatever he found, Christina wants every trace destroyed.”

  “Including us.”

  They’re both quiet for a moment.

  “We’ve got to run.” Penny’s head throbs. “The Canadian Embassy’s on the other side of town—or there are the Brits—”

  “Christina probably has eyes on all of them.” Connor shakes his head. “So will the Turks. We’d be dead before we got in the door.”

  “If we could just get out of Turkey—”

  “Palamut’s people will be watching all the airports, all the borders.” Connor snorts. “Except maybe Syria. They don’t seem too good at that.”

  “What could be worth all this?” whispers Penny.

  “The only person who can tell us that is Zach Robson.”

  Their eyes meet.

  “Well?” says Penny.

  “No.” Connor’s forehead creases. “Absolutely not.”

  “Think about it! You said they’ll be watching all the other borders. What’s the one place nobody would ever expect us to go?”

  “Because it’s suicide!”

  “We’ll die anyway if we stay here!”

  Connor makes a face. “I’d rather get shot than have my head chopped off.”

  “At least if we run, we might buy a little time. And Zach’s the only person who can help us!”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Whatever information Mehmetoğlu gave him, Christina and Melek are so scared of it, they’re prepared to do anything to stop it getting out. What’s big enough to scare the President of Turkey’s daughter and your boss?”

  “Even if that’s true, how exactly are you planning to break Zach out of Mor Samuel? We’ve got two lousy guns!”

  “Maybe we don’t have to actually get Zach.” Penny’s breath is coming fast now. “Maybe the Hashashin will bring him to us.”

  “If they bothered to drag him all the way to Mor Samuel, they’re not just going to let him go.”

  “Do you know how to contact the Hashashin?”

  “Why? You got ten million bucks’ ransom to spare?”

  “Do you or don’t you?”

  He shrugs. “They recruit a lot on ExciDox.”

  “That disgusting app?”

  “That disgusting app.”

  Penny makes a face. “So be it.” She picks up the assassin’s prepaid phone.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “It’s our only chance.” Penny hits download. “We tell the Hashashin that we’re prepared to make a deal. They give us Zach. We give them something they want even more.”

  “More than a captive CIA officer? Like what?”

  Penny hands him the phone. “I can think of one thing.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, the yellow-and-black graphics of the ExciDox app glow on the prepaid phone. A beep, as the Hashashin’s message decrypts
.

  Penny exhales shakily. “They sent the address. Mardin, tomorrow. The nearest town to Mor Samuel on the Turkish side of the border—neutral ground. Nine a.m.”

  “Well,” says Connor, “either they just took the bait, or we just did.” He snaps out the SIM card and tosses Liza’s phone into the fountain. He walks over to where Liza still lies sprawled on the tiles and picks up the PB pistol.

  “Connor, don’t!” Penny hurries over. “It’s not like she’s going to talk. And if the cops find a dead body, they’ll come looking for a murderer.”

  Connor unclips the empty holster from Liza’s belt, fixes it to his own, and tucks in the PB pistol. “That’s why we’re going to make it look like a burglary. Help me put her in recovery.”

  “What?”

  “Roll her on her side, so she won’t choke on her own blood. We don’t want her to miss all the fun she’s going to have with the Turkish police. There we go.” Connor picks up the contents of Liza’s pockets and shoves them in his own. “Come on.”

  Penny glances back at the illuminated clamshell thrones and shakes her head.

  Connor grabs a painted concrete dolphin centerpiece and lifts it speculatively. “Should do.”

  “Souvenir? You know, most people just buy a carpet.”

  “You’ll see.”

  They jog down the little hallway to the door, which Connor leaves ajar. “Now,” he says, “run.”

  He hefts the dolphin and sends it smashing into the alarm box.

  The alarm system howls back to life, beeping like hysterical sonar.

  “Score.” Connor grins and takes off.

  A moment later, he has caught up with Penny. They run through the warm darkness, toward the steep dirty glass of Ankara’s central bus station.

  23

  * * *

  CONSPICUOUS

  ANKARA INTERCITY BUS TERMINAL (AŞTİ)

  21:09 LOCAL TIME

  Penny and Connor shell out cash for two tickets for the 21:35 to Mardin. Penny leads the way across the terminal, toward the Lost Luggage counter.

  “I don’t like all these policemen,” Connor mutters.

  “There are always more after an attack. These guys look practically asleep. That one’s even got a glass of tea.”

  “If you’d just let me grab a suitcase—”

  “What are you, a kleptomaniac?”

  “It’s tradecraft!”

  Penny leads him up to the grubby white Lost Luggage counter. “At least these ones are already lost.”

  The counter attendant, a slight young man, pushes thick hipster glasses up his nose. “Tourists!” He regards Connor and Penny with the bug-eyed enthusiasm of a keen student who has finally, wondrously found someone to practice on. “Welcome, hello, yes, please?”

  “Bonsoir!” Connor booms in a cheery voice thoroughly unlike his own. “We lose bag. Big bag. You find?”

  Penny and the counter attendant both stare at him.

  The counter attendant speaks in slow mo. “Is your name on the bag, sir? Your name?”

  “No name.” Connor wags a finger at Penny in pantomime reproach. “Silly girl.”

  Penny glowers.

  “Ah.” The young man’s smile is growing fixed. “What color, sir?”

  “Big bag,” repeats Connor with conviction.

  “Okay.” The young man beckons them through the door behind the counter. “Follow me.” They pass shelves of tidily stacked luggage. The young man opens the door to another, much dingier room. “Here, sir, miss. Bags without name.”

  A single bulb lights a heap of twenty suitcases on the bare concrete, mostly battered black or faded plastic. A plate-size blue-and-white evil eye has been nailed to the far wall.

  Connor kneels by one of the least shabby looking suitcases, a black duffel bag. It offers a fuchsia evening gown, several bikinis, a Qur’an, and a brochure for hoverboards. Connor clicks open a tattered maroon canvas suitcase, revealing several men’s suits, a pair of blue pajamas, and a well-thumbed stack of Playboys. He grabs a clean white shirt.

  “Sir, you cannot—”

  “Un moment!” Connor lunges for a dusty plastic roll-along adorned with cartoon apples and bananas. “Alors . . .” A couple of flowery blouses spill out.

  “Connor,” says Penny through her teeth.

  “Sir!” The attendant darts forward. “You can’t—”

  Connor stands up with the fruitcase and presses a fifty-lira note into the young man’s hand. “Merci.” He beckons Penny. “Allons-y.”

  “You want more? Only twenty lira, sir? For the one with the magazines?”

  With one hand on her shoulder, Connor propels Penny out the door, tugging the suitcase along behind.

  “What in Dieu’s name was that?” she whispers.

  “Old trick,” says Connor in his normal voice. “Keep it in mind. Being conspicuous makes you less suspicious. If you’re colorful enough, they’ll remember the act, not your face. Here’s the ladies’ room. Change fast.”

  In the bathroom stall (an honest-to-goodness Western-style toilet, thank God, not pit-style), Penny wipes a damp paper towel across her head and neck. She perches on the closed lid and unzips the fruit-print suitcase. It’s like a time capsule. Stale jasmine perfume rises from the neatly folded, eye-wateringly colorful clothes—what the stylish middle-class conservative girl was wearing ten years ago. Everything that can be ironed has been, down to the flowery underpants and black sports bra, neatly creased into quarters. What is it about Turkish women ironing their underwear? Fatma does it, too. Penny yanks on a pair of black leggings, only a few sizes too tight. “Shirt.” Penny digs down in the luggage. She pulls a green tunic over her head, and a faded blue-jean jacket over that.

  In the outer pocket of the suitcase, she finds four head scarves: three wallpapery cotton prints, and one clearly for “best”: blue Bursa silk, brilliant as a Bukhara dome, nearly six feet long.

  Her fingers curl around the rough coolness of the scarf. It’s the obvious, practical disguise. But she never wears a head scarf in Turkey, unless she’s sightseeing in a mosque. Fatma doesn’t. Plenty of the Turkish women she worked with at the Embassy didn’t “cover,” even the devout ones.

  These days in Turkey, the choice to hide your hair sometimes has as much to do with politics and what the Turks call mahalle baskısı—neighborhood pressure—as it does with God or private piety. It’s as coded, as loaded, as black lipstick, a gold cross, or a six-gallon cowboy hat. Choose to cover a certain way, and strangers assume you’re a gözleme-frying, mantı-pinching housewife loyal to Palamut, and his party’s trademark middle-class, Sunni Islamist conformity. Even if you’re a physicist with a PhD, an engineer, a professional cellist, a single mom. A scrap of polyester can surround a multitude of thoughts.

  Don’t cover, and—though you pray five times a day, give alms, and fast for Ramadan—plenty will call you godless or just treat you like a slut. It used to drive Ayla crazy. Penny can remember Ayla ranting over sugary midnight Turkish coffees on Tunalı Avenue, “Palamut doesn’t own my Islam! He doesn’t own my faith!”

  Seconds are slipping away. Hand-wringing is a luxury she can’t afford. Penny loops the blue silk around her head as best she can. Ayla showed her how, but Penny hasn’t mastered the art of draping a head scarf gracefully. Like tying a scarf à la Parisienne, which she also can’t do, it’s trickier than it looks.

  “What were you doing in there?” snaps Connor when she emerges. “We have to run. The bus leaves from Bay 14.”

  They hustle through the crowded station. Connor buttons his new shirt up to the neck and makes to loop his tie.

  “Hey.” Penny touches his arm. “I think the night bus to Mardin is business casual.”

  “Point taken.” He stuffs the tie into his trouser pocket.

  They step outside at Bay 3. The heavy, warm darkness of the night folds around them like a feather duvet, soaked with the sweet reek of gasoline fumes. They hurry onward.

  Across the flood
lit parking lot, three police vans pull up. At least thirty armed policemen file out.

  Penny freezes.

  “Keep walking normally,” hisses Connor. “It could have nothing to do with us.”

  They walk as fast as they dare. Bay 8, Bay 9, Bay 10.

  “Come on!” Connor urges. “Almost there!”

  Bay 14. Pacing beside the wheezing orange Peygamber Otobüsleri bus is a ticket collector with a face like a malevolent walnut.

  “Geç kaldınız!” he rebukes them—you’re late! His husky eastern accent turns the k into a phlegmy fricative. He marches them to their seats at the back of the close-aired bus, apparently last upholstered in the seventies. Connor takes the window seat and immediately stoops down below window level, as if adjusting his shoelaces.

  Penny moves to sit beside him.

  “Bi dakka,” says the ticket collector suspiciously, holding up a finger. “Is the yabancı your husband?”

  “He’s my cousin,” Penny replies. She’s never had any problems moving around Ankara with Zach or Matt, or any of the other guys from POL. But then she was an obvious foreigner. Her Americanness won’t protect her anymore.

  “Cousin?” The old man is clearly reveling in his tiny dictatorship. “Oh, no. Not on this bus, my girl. You cannot sit with him.”

  “But—”

  Penny catches Connor’s eyes. His message couldn’t be clearer: Do not make a scene.

  Through the tinted window, Penny can make out police running into the terminal building.

  “You sit here.” The old man points Penny to an empty seat beside a woman with a shiny black bob. She could be a bureaucrat or an academic—plump, tidy, middle-class. The woman nods cordially. Penny flings herself into the seat and slides as low down as she can.

  The bus rolls toward the exit, and Penny starts to relax.

  A policemen runs up, shouting. The bus creaks to a stop.

  Penny’s nails dig into the seat cushion.

  “I’m late already,” grouses the bus driver. “What do you want?”

  “It’s a red alert, abi!” calls the young officer; he looks all of eighteen, a beanpole schoolboy. It’s ingratiating of him to give the driver the honorific abi—“big brother”—when amca—“uncle”—is so obviously more appropriate. “We’re checking all the buses for terrorists.”