Liar's Candle

by August Thomas

  “What if they weren’t stolen?”

  “You don’t have a shred of proof,” says Connor.

  “But Eylo said they did. Straight from the Kurdish guys who drove the trucks. Cold, hard, incontrovertible proof of Christina’s involvement, and how she used the State Department to deliver weapons to the Hashashin.”

  “So these Kurdish terrorists—sorry, peace activists—are supposedly running around with secret information that gives them enormous leverage over the CIA?” demands Connor. “And you’re telling me that hasn’t leaked?”

  “Their HQ in Diyarbakır got hit by a shell.” Zach ducks to dodge a bulge in the tunnel roof. “Mehmetoğlu managed to save just one copy of the proof. And until the party, he’d been in hiding.”

  “Why didn’t Eylo go to the press?” demands Penny. She stumbles on a crack in the rock.

  “Eylo’s noses aren’t the cleanest. The evidence could be blown off as a malicious hoax. So they needed someone above reproach to break the story to the world. Someone people would listen to. An American government whistle-blower.”

  “Oh, sure,” Connor snaps, “ ’cause CIA officers are known for our snappy press releases. Haven’t these guys ever heard of a journalist?”

  “That’s what I thought,” says Zach. This part of the tunnel is as wide as a school hallway; they can walk side by side again. “But you’ve got to remember, these guys grew up in Turkey. Journalists in this country are liable to end up tortured in a jail cell. They insisted it had to be me.”

  “What did you do?” asks Penny.

  “I told Eylo if they wanted to play ball, I’d need hard proof ASAP. They agreed. The problem was, how? Now I’m being tailed every time I go outside—sometimes one guy, sometimes two. Could be the Agency. Could be the Turkish government. Could even be the Hashashin. Whoever it is, there’s no way in hell I can arrange a meeting. My comms are all Agency systems, and if they catch me using a burner phone, I’ll be guilty until proven innocent, even if they can’t trace what I sent.”

  Penny’s pulse races. “So how did you get the information?”

  “Well . . .” Zach holds the lighter closer to his face. She can see he’s smiling. “I’m under suspicion anyway, so I put on a show for the Agency to watch. That’s where you come in, Penny. Davut Mehmetoğlu was one of Eylo’s leaders. Used to be a pretty progressive politician—until Palamut screwed up his life and got him on the terror watchlist. He’s gotten pretty friendly with the PKK since then—the kind of guy who would trigger an instant alert back at Langley. He wanted to meet me somewhere under U.S. protection. So I had you put him on the guest list. I knew MacGowan and Christina would let him come, just to watch what I’d do. Mehmetoğlu loved the idea of meeting at the party. He thought it would be hysterical—the Turks see him at the Embassy party and freak out that the Americans have suddenly swung wildly pro-Kurd.”

  “Wait,” says Penny. “You had me put a guy you knew had PKK ties on an Embassy guest list?”

  “Denize düşen yılana sarılır.”

  Connor sounds exasperated. “What?”

  “No Turkish, huh?” Zach grins. “I see Christina sent you well prepared.”

  “It’s a Turkish proverb.” Penny takes a deep breath. “He who falls into the sea will clutch even a snake.”

  Connor isn’t amused. “Who’s the snake in this scenario?”

  Zach ignores him. “The plan is, me and Mehmetoğlu, we just hang out and chat, then he goes home, and Langley’s pissed and disappointed.”

  Connor sounds impatient. “What about the information?”

  “Keep your shirt on, soldier. I knew all eyes would be on me and Mehmetoğlu. So I had Eylo slip someone low profile onto the guest list, too. Peace activist. Not Kurdish herself. Daughter of some big banking family—someone above reproach. She’s on the up-and-up—a true pacifist. She had no idea what it was all about—just that she was supposed to give my courier the proof.”

  “How did the peace-activist lady get the proof?” says Connor. “I thought Mehmetoğlu had it.”

  “Mehmetoğlu couldn’t meet her publicly—it would destroy her reputation. They overlapped going through security at the Embassy. He slipped it to her then. Everything went perfectly. The lady gave my courier the proof. But before I could retrieve it . . .” Zach shrugs. “Boom.”

  “Zach!” Penny cries. “You mean you didn’t get the proof?”

  “I didn’t.” There’s something funny about the way he says it.

  “Mehmetoğlu’s text message.” Connor comes to a dead halt. “Good luck to the girl with the flag.”

  Penny stops dead.

  Zach squeezes her hand. “I knew I could trust you, Penny.”

  He’s obviously expecting her to melt. But his presumption knocks the breath out of her. “Why didn’t you tell me? Jesus Christ, Zach!”

  “Did anyone question you, after the attack?”

  “Well—”

  “And were you honestly able to answer that you didn’t know anything about what I’d been doing?”

  “I guess, but—”

  “What were you thinking?” says Connor. “Using an unwitting civilian as a courier? She could have been killed!”

  “This is between me and Penny.” Zach’s voice is soft. “I knew I could trust her.”

  “But, Zach, this doesn’t make any sense.” Penny can hardly speak. “Nobody like that talked to me at the party! And even if they did, how on earth did you think I would remember some stranger when I didn’t even know to be on the lookout for one?”

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t expect you to remember. The information’s on a microchip.”

  “What is this, 1985?” snaps Connor.

  “This isn’t the Gulf we’re talking about,” retorts Zach. “Eylo is a grassroots Kurdish peace group. We’re lucky it’s not on microfilm. Or fucking cuneiform.”

  Penny is glad it’s too dark for Zach to see her face. Her voice comes out hardly more than a whisper. “When, exactly, were you planning to tell me about all this?”

  “Well”—Zach’s voice is gentler than usual—“I was planning to ask you out for a drink, after the party. A real date.” He puts his arm around her waist. “Kind of overdue, don’t you think?”

  “I’d say,” says Connor drily. “Since you’d been reporting her to us as a close and continuing intimate partner for two weeks. Care to explain that?”

  Zach’s voice is urgent: “Penny, the courier was told to ID herself to you with the code word luck—”

  “Excellent choice,” mutters Connor. “No risk of misidentification with something as rare as that.”

  Zach ignores him. “It would have been a woman, a Turkish woman.”

  “Zach, I got a concussion. I can’t really remember—”

  “Try, Penny. Think!”

  Penny gropes forward in the blackness. The hard, uneven floor of the tunnel slopes slowly downward. She tries to keep her teeth from chattering.

  The party.

  A Turkish woman.

  Smoke and pain and Matt and Ayla and Melek Palamut and the screaming toddler and the blaring saxophone . . .

  Her memories slide steeper than the floor, piling into chaos.

  No. No. Before all that.

  “Try remembering the party from the start, step by step,” suggests Zach. “Every person you talked to.”

  Penny screws up her face. “I was with Ayla Parlak. Everybody kept making fun of me for the flag, but they were all people from the Embassy—” She turns to Zach. “Did you really let me win bingo on purpose?”

  “Brilliant, right? How could your contact miss the girl with the enormous flag?”

  “Like a target on my back.” Penny’s mouth feels like cotton. She wishes he would take his hand off her.

  “Keep thinking,” Zach urges.

  Penny takes a deep breath. Thinking of Ayla makes her stomach hurt as if she’d swallowed broken glass. “Ayla and I went to get ice cream. And—” She gasps. “The girl in t
he ice cream truck.”

  Zach can hardly contain himself. “The girl in the ice cream truck?”

  “She wished me good luck. But, Zach, she didn’t give me anything, except the ice cream. Not even napkins!”

  “Are you sure?” Zach’s voice is hoarse with intensity. “Think, Penny! It would’ve been something small. An unusual coin, a pin, a flash drive—”

  “I’d remember if a girl in an ice cream truck handed me a flash drive, Zach!”

  “There must have been somebody else.”

  “Ayla wished me good luck.”

  “Who?”

  “My friend. You know, the Public Diplomacy intern. From New Jersey?”

  “Not her,” snaps Zach. He grabs her arm so tight his nails dig into her skin. “Think, Penny!”

  “Zach, you’re hurting me!”

  His grip tightens. “You must remember.”

  “Wait.” Connor stops dead. “Do you hear that?”

  From farther down the tunnel floats the sound of muffled laughter.

  35

  * * *

  DERINKUYU

  “And now we come to the final stop on our tour,” a booming, Turkish-accented male voice declares, with the unmistakable synthetic charm of Tour Guide English. “I’ll give you a clue: it was a lot more popular than the chapel!”

  “Is it where they made the wine?”

  Chuckles.

  “Mr. George has a single-track mind!”

  More chuckles.

  “This is the ancient—excuse me—tuvalet of the underground city of Derinkuyu. You know, the little boys’ room? Eighth century AD!”

  An Australian voice: “But, Sully, how did they get decent plumbing six stories underground?”

  “Excellent question, Mrs. Cochrane! The ancient Christians of Derinkuyu, they were very clever—almost as clever as Sully!”

  Appreciative giggles.

  “So they tapped into the natural springs! Like the ones at the hotel spa last night. And we all know how much Mr. George here enjoyed those! Especially with all these beautiful ladies, eh?”

  This must be an easy crowd. Their laughter carries down the tunnel.

  Penny can make out faint light against nubbly stone, fifty feet down the tunnel. She rips her arm away from Zach and breaks into a run. She’s not even sure which she’s trying to escape—the smothering dark, or the sudden, sickening certainty that the information on that microchip meant more to Zach than her safety. More than her life.

  She runs harder toward the growing yellow light.

  She remembers Zach’s warmth beside her on the Ankara citadel in the sunset. The sense of safety he created. The way he carefully exposed just enough of his weaknesses so she could rush to his defense. How she felt at once that she could trust him.

  His own words gouge into her: An intelligence officer specifically trained to manipulate vulnerable people.

  Was that all it ever was?

  Did he ever give a damn about her? Or did he just need a courier he could control, somebody too dumb and too desperate to be cared for to start asking inconvenient questions?

  She rounds a corner in the tunnel, stumbling over a row of plastic orange warning cones into the startled stares of twenty tourists.

  “Come out of there!” exclaims a man in alarmed Turkish. Penny follows the voice to a large, amiable-looking middle-aged man in a Red Sox T-shirt and an official guide badge that reads SÜLEYMAN AKARSU. The guide, Sully. “That part of the underground city is yasak! Hurry! It’s very dangerous!”

  “We—got lost,” blurts Penny in English, at the same time that Zach says, “There was a landslide.”

  “You’re American?” says Sully in English.

  “We were hiking—” begins Zach.

  A seventysomething woman in baggy khakis exclaims in a Bronx accent, “That young man’s hurt!”

  “I fell,” says Connor quickly, cradling his bloody right hand. “I’m okay, ma’am.”

  “I’ve been a registered nurse for forty years, and take my word for it, young man, you are not okay. And you!” Her bifocal gaze locks on Zach. “That knee! Sully, is there a first-aid kit on the bus?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Reid.” Sully turns to the group. “We’ll proceed back to the exit.” He turns a concerned face to Penny, Connor, and Zach. “Did you come with a group?”

  Penny’s mind races. “We’re . . .”

  “Couchsurfing,” Zach supplies without hesitation. “Junior and me”—Zach nods to Connor—“we always talked about going to Turkey. So when my girl here graduated, and Junior was on leave, we were, like, only one life to live, right? We figured we’d hike—”

  Sully looks incredulous. “Didn’t you take a map?”

  “I thought my phone would work, but the signal out here isn’t happening.”

  Mrs. Reid turns back to Connor. “Make sure you elevate that hand until I can get a better look. And keep constant pressure on it!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ll telephone an ambulance as soon as we reach the surface,” says Sully.

  “That’s really not necessary, sir,” says Connor. “I’m sure Mrs. Reid is all the help I’ll need.”

  The yellow electric lights strung along the hollows in the low ceiling illuminate a medieval city in troglodyte miniature, carved room by room out of the crumbly tufa rock.

  Filled with the sweet smell of perfume and sunscreen, the subterranean air doesn’t feel so cold. Everything has been carved from the living rock: benches and beds growing like mushrooms from the walls and floors. Penny tries to keep her head down. What if someone recognizes her?

  One large, pretty lady, the one Sully called Mrs. Cochrane, pats Penny on the arm. “You must have taken an awful spill, darl.”

  Penny forces herself to smile. “I was lucky.”

  They climb a long stone staircase, so narrow Penny grazes her elbows against the rough walls.

  Mrs. Cochrane sounds winded. “The tour company offered to evacuate us, after the tragedy in Ankara. Almost half our group left, but I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”

  “Are we really six stories down?”

  “That’s what Sully says. It’s a good thing you found us, darl. These tunnels are supposed to go on for miles. You see those?” Mrs. Cochrane points to what look like enormous granite millstones, rolled to the side of the passageway. “Gates. Sully says when the invaders came, the Byzantine Christians would hide down here for months.”

  “Months?” Penny is suddenly painfully aware of hundreds of thousands of tons of stone on every side.

  “Kept ’em safe.”

  The last passage dumps them out into a bright parking lot. Mrs. Reid sits Zach and Connor on a bench in the shade of a lone tree. She flutters purposefully between them, applying iodine, ice packs, and bandages. The sky is cloudless, droneless blue. Mrs. Cochrane inspects lurid painted bowls and strands of flowery oya lace at the souvenir stall. Meanwhile, a trio of redheaded sisters take selfies with a camel, presumably imported from Saudi for the benefit of tourists.

  “This is nasty,” exclaims Mrs. Reid. “It goes right through your hand!”

  “I fell on this huge old nail,” says Connor through gritted teeth. The lines across his forehead are deep, his sunburned neck shiny with sweat. How has he tolerated the pain for so long?

  “Do you know how lucky you are not to have crushed a bone?”

  “That’s Junior for you—Mr. Indestructible.” Zach looks tanned and relaxed, his usually deep voice a dude-bro drawl. Somehow he’s found time to ruffle his hair and undo the top buttons of his shirt, as if he’s about to seek enlightenment and kombucha on some mountaintop.

  Penny hovers at a distance. She can still feel the bruises on her arm where Zach’s fingers gripped.

  “Hey there.” Zach saunters over to her and drops his voice. “No lurking. It looks weird.”

  “What if somebody recognizes me? All it takes is one. If Melek or Christina find out I’m alive before we ca
n get to Istanbul . . .”

  “Penny Kessler’s dead, remember? You’re Emma Bleecker from Ann Arbor.”

  “My face was on the cover of every newspaper, Zach! What are the odds that nobody recognizes me?”

  “The bangs help a lot. People see what they expect to see.” Zach rubs her shoulder. “You got this.” He’s cranking the charm up high. “Look, Pen. About what happened in the tunnel—”

  Sully strides up beside them. “The bus heads out in a few minutes. You sure you don’t want me to call a taxi? Or an ambulance?”

  Penny pulls herself together. “Where is your group headed?”

  “We won’t be passing back through Nevşehir, I’m afraid. We stop at a caravanserai, and then straight on to Istanbul.”

  Penny holds out two of the hundred-lira notes Connor had given her when they first reached Mardin. “Do you have three extra seats?”

  36

  * * *

  ALLIES

  HUBER MANSION, KALENDER, ISTANBUL

  13:39 LOCAL TIME

  “Why not?” demands Melek.

  Far up the European shore of the Bosphorus near the Black Sea, the colossal wooden Huber Köşkü, was built for a pair of nineteenth-century German arms dealers. Like most men in dirty businesses, they liked their home lives pristine and orderly. Newly restored and cooled by breezes off the water, their former mansion is Melek’s favorite of the presidential residences in Istanbul. She used to come here for peace. This time, she’s here for privacy.

  “Melek Hanım, with all due respect, such measures are not necessary.” The air force general on the phone is flying a perilous course between reassurance and condescension. Life would be a whole lot simpler if the children of the powerful didn’t have access to their daddies’ contacts lists. But given President Palamut’s paranoia about “traitors,” the general can’t afford anything less than complete obsequiousness. “The Hashashin terrorists could not possibly survive such a crash. The Americans even fired extra strikes, to make sure.”

  “Isn’t it possible that the terrorists had parachutes?”

  “They were flying far too low. Besides, Apaches are not typically equipped with—”