The Natanz Directive

by Wayne Simmons

  I unbuckled. Stood up and stretched. Lauflin turned in his seat and held out a steel thermos. “Sandwich?”

  “Thanks.”

  There was a cooler between their seats. Lauflin popped it open. The sandwiches were wrapped in tinfoil. He handed me two. “My sister made these. Can’t say with what exactly. But I’ve had worse.”

  Some endorsement. I thanked him again and went back to my seat. I ate both sandwiches so fast that the taste eluded me. I sipped my coffee and watched the morning of my fifth day on the job open up below me. I saw fishing boats and a cruise liner.

  Morning painted the water emerald green.

  We were descending over the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul, on the flight path into Nuri Demira International Airport. Our flaps squealed. The landing gear whirred, and the wheels clunked into place. We passed over the beach, our shadow spilling across the Turkish coastline.

  The pilot eased us onto a runway reserved for planes of lesser size and import than the steady flow of commercial flights coming from all corners of Europe and the Middle East. We landed with little more than a jostle and taxied toward the terminal.

  “We’ll get you as close as we can,” Lauflin said, “But you’ll still have a bit of a walk. The tower wasn’t real thrilled with our flight plan.”

  “Imagine that,” I said, as the plane came to a halt on the tarmac. I slipped my gun under the seat and stood up. I felt naked without the Walther, but only a fool would have tried to slip a gun past the very suspicious folks in Turkish customs. Besides, the streets of Istanbul were a virtual cesspool of illegal weapons, so arming myself again would be matter of a phone call or two.

  Lauflin wasted no time cracking the hatch and dropping a foot ladder to the concrete. There was a maintenance tech and a service truck waiting for them. That struck me as unusual for a plane this size, but then everything was striking me as unusual at this stage of the game.

  “Thanks for the lift.” I handed my headset to Lauflin and gave Darby a brief nod.

  “Have fun,” he said.

  Oh, yeah. A barrel of laughs. I climbed down. The hatch closed behind me.

  I walk to the terminal without looking back and followed a group of businessmen inside. I passed through security and entered the line for customs, a bedraggled guy with no luggage. I showed a Canadian passport identifying me as Darrell Swan, a businessman from Toronto, got the usual please-give-me-a-reason-to-stop-you look from the customs agent, and merged with a dozen other travelers into the main terminal.

  Things were going well. Or, given my rather cynical view of the world: too well. My internal alarm sounded. Careful, Jake. Watch your six.

  And sure enough, there was good reason. I stepped outside. My plan was to hail a taxi, just another weary businessman eager to get to his hotel, but I didn’t have time even to reconnoiter the cabstand.

  A line of Turkish policemen had fanned out across the walkway, and they were systematically inspecting passports. Okay; but why weren’t they stopping any women? And why did they seem to be targeting men who looked like they’d just dropped in from Europe or America? Couldn’t have anything to do with my recent arrival, could it? Just a coincidence, right? Sure. Absolutely. If only I believed in coincidence.

  I stopped and leaned into the shadows cast by a nearby pillar. It was a lousy hiding place. One of the policemen looked in my direction. He was a large man for a Turk, and his uniform didn’t fit him worth a damn. But he had a strong voice, and all his colleagues heard him when he shouted, “There he is. Arrest him.”

  He was pointing at me.

  CHAPTER 10

  NURI DEMIRA INTERNATIONAL, ISTANBUL, TURKEY—DAY FIVE

  Like a school of piranha, the Turkish airport police swarmed in my direction, oblivious now to the crowds exiting the terminal. They had their target. Ten of them in black uniforms with silver accents and black ball caps, POLIS embroidered across the front. Hands on their holstered pistols. Advancing. Clumsy, but calm. One spoke into a handheld radio, and his face was etched with urgency.

  I glanced back into the terminal. The glass reflected four more cops jogging my way. Nix that option.

  To my right, cars and buses zipped along the passenger-pickup lanes. A three-story wall topped with a glass walkway ran the length of the road on the opposite side. No place to run. It didn’t look good. All I could think about was the mission.

  My guts knotted in anger. The cops had had plenty of warning; hell, they’d probably received an engraved invitation from someone. Which meant one thing: my operation’s security didn’t have a hole, it had a goddamn chasm.

  The question was, why the police? What had they been told about me to warrant such a display of authority?

  I knew one thing. Istanbul was no place to be arrested. Even Mr. Elliot would be hard pressed to spring me from a Turkish prison. And for all I knew, the DDO wanted me arrested; what better way to put an end to my mission. Wiseman knew I was bound for Turkey. He might not have known when or where, but he wasn’t stupid. And if he was working the other side of the fence, then my problems were bigger than a gaping hole in my security.

  I’d spent less than a second mulling my predicament, and that was too much time to waste. My feet were taking me away from the converging police and into a new wave of travelers disgorging from the terminal. I saw a hotel van waiting for anyone registered at the Istanbul Regency; the driver was standing outside the van. The motor was running. Hijacking the van was a long shot, but I wasn’t averse to a long shot.

  I had made up my mind and was about to make a break for the bus when I heard a car horn blaring. I glanced over my shoulder. A black Mercedes sedan appeared from behind a line of buses, breaking every moving violation in the airport. It caromed over a speed bump and past the cabstand. I heard shouting and saw people scattering.

  The car turned my way. The driver hit his horn again. Every muscle in my body tensed. I reached for my Walther, knowing full well I’d left it on the floatplane. I was calculating the distance between the hotel van and the Mercedes when I saw the diplomatic plates on the front bumper. American.

  The Mercedes screeched against the curb. Dark-tinted windows masked the interior, but the front passenger door swung open even before the car came to a halt. A man shouted, “Conlan! Get your ass in here.”

  The well-coordinated police line disintegrated into a mob, running and yelling in a garble of Turkish and English. I heard the word Halt! and several others that didn’t sound quite so polite.

  So I had a choice between an American-embassy vehicle that had pretty much shown up out of nowhere and a dozen or so very unhappy Turkish police. Now that I thought about it, calling it a “choice” probably wasn’t fair.

  I sprang for the sedan and dived through the open door. I landed headfirst on leather as supple as newly crushed velvet. I was still scrambling for a handhold when the driver stomped on the accelerator and the Mercedes shot from the curb. Very fancy driving. I folded myself onto the seat and jerked the door closed.

  I tossed a backward glance. The policemen had slowed to a jog, their expressions rippling with disgust. The Mercedes bore diplomatic plates; there was no point trying to stop us. I did a split-second inventory. This one had my heart racing, if you could call seventy-two beats a minute racing. My baseball cap was missing. That pissed me off.

  I glanced across the seat.

  The driver was in his late twenties. He had straight blond hair falling midway over his ears, a slender build, a pressed suit, and a perfectly knotted tie. He might have looked like a surfer, but he guided the Mercedes with the expert touch of a NASCAR racer.

  Without taking his eyes off the road, he extended a hand. “Trevor McCormick. American embassy. Or maybe that was obvious.”

  I shook it. Dry. Firm. Cool. If this was the enemy, he was very good. If he wasn’t, then I was in good hands. I was betting on the latter.

  “That was quite a welcoming committee back there.” McCormick checked his mirrors and switched la
nes. We gained speed as we turned onto the overpass linking us with Ataturk Boulevard, heading north from the airport and into Istanbul. Thirty seconds.

  “Who are you?”

  “Just a guy doing his job,” he answered.

  “Just a guy doing his job. Is that a fact? A guy who shows up with his diplomatic plates and takes pity on a poor sucker tap-dancing with the Turkish police.”

  He rolled his eyes my way, said, “Consider this an unofficial favor from a friend back home.”

  I could have asked, Who? but that would have been a dumb question. The chances of his knowing “who” were exactly none. Plus, I already knew who. It wasn’t General Rutledge; Tom didn’t keep company with the State Department. Mr. Elliot, on the other hand, kept company with anyone who mattered when it came to his guys. I said, “Never mind.”

  McCormick chuckled. “Somebody with some juice, that’s for sure.”

  His nonchalance did little to put me at ease. First, a rat within the MEK had tried to grease me in Amsterdam. And now, the Turkish cops. Any other day of the week, they wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about a guy like me. Unless, that is, they were spoon-fed bad intel. Maybe I’d been pinned with an international warrant, or maybe someone was calling in a favor. A very big favor. And if that was true, it had to be someone very high up the food chain.

  Could have been Wiseman. Or someone close to him. If so, he’d have to play his cards close to the vest and avoid any clumsy moves.

  Could be Moradi. If so, he was playing both sides of the fence, and that didn’t sound like Moradi.

  “I’m reaching under my seat,” McCormick said.

  We locked eyes for three seconds. “Go ahead and reach,” I said.

  He did. No jerky movements, no change in facial expression, no blush or blanch. Eyes on the road. Easy in, easy out, and came away with a shoulder harness fitted with a 9 mm pistol. Another Walther PPK/S. How much better could it get! He handed it over. “A Walther guy, huh? I didn’t know they still made those.”

  He grinned. I scowled. “Hey, don’t get smart, kid. This is a man’s gun.”

  He was still grinning, so I said, “Silencer?”

  “They said you’d ask.”

  “Too predictable for my own good.”

  He reached down again and came away with a flat cardboard box the size of a safety deposit box. “Ammo, silencer, the works. Oh, yeah, and a back-up phone. Just a precaution. Take a look.”

  McCormick returned his full attention to the road and gave me a chance to examine my new toys without the commentary. I started with the iPhone. Did an app check. The five or six I needed and a shitload more I didn’t. Excellent. The aluminum silencer fit the Walther like a sucker on a stick.

  McCormick followed the wide boulevard through the western sprawl of the city. High-rises towered over low neighborhoods and city parks. Although Turkey was a proud Muslim country, its attitudes were decidedly relaxed, judging by the billboards showing women in bikinis. Not that I minded.

  Out of habit, I glanced into the passenger-side mirror. A BMW motorcycle darted behind a cargo truck trailing us by four car lengths. The rider wore a black helmet with a tinted visor and black leathers. If the guy wasn’t following us, he was following someone else. Or maybe he was just an asshole who thought the entire road was his playground, traffic be damned. I doubted it; not the way my luck had been running.

  I knew one thing. Riding blind behind a truck was a dangerous thing for a guy on a motorcycle. Unless he was hiding.

  “You see him?” I said to McCormick.

  “The Beemer tucked in behind the truck like some kind of stunt rider?”

  “That’s the one.” I was supposed to be deep cover and now it was like my itinerary had been broadcast on the evening news. “What was your plan?”

  “The plan was a safe house.” He shrugged. “Won’t do much good with that guy on our tail, I don’t suppose. Let’s see what we can do about that.”

  McCormick engaged the cell phone attached to the center console and activated the voice control. He said, “Chelsea.”

  The phone replied, “Dialing Chelsea.”

  McCormick snatched the phone from the console and put it to his ear. “We’re being followed. BMW motorcycle. Single rider.” He listened for a moment, replied, “Okay,” and dropped the phone back into the console. He glanced my way. “Got it covered.”

  He accelerated, switching into the fast lane and moving three cars ahead. Then he eased back into the traffic lane and took the O-3 interchange east. The motorcycle didn’t miss a beat, staying three cars back and looking far too obvious.

  A quarter of a mile ahead, a dump truck merged onto the interchange, and McCormick said, “That’s our guy.” Not five seconds later, a white van fell in behind us, and McCormick’s cell phone rang. He punched the speakerphone and said, “That’s us behind you. The Mercedes.”

  “What else would you be driving?” a voice from the dump truck quipped.

  “Got the bike?”

  “Yeah, I got him. A real yo-yo.”

  “Let’s play.”

  McCormick kept the phone alive. He checked his mirrors. The BMW jumped one car; now he was two back, including the white van. When McCormick saw this, he pulled the Mercedes to the left, gained speed, and slipped in front of the dump truck. The guy on the Beemer responded, jumping the van and settling in behind the dump truck.

  McCormick barked into the cell phone, “He’s all yours.”

  Two things happened simultaneously. The white van slid into the fast lane and came up next to the motorcycle, boxing him in behind the dump truck. At the exact same moment, the bucket of the dump truck jerked upward, the rear gate opened, and a curtain of dirt sloughed off the back and onto the road.

  The motorcyclist had nowhere to go. As the dirt rained down over him, he had no choice but to put the bike down. The bike tumbled through the wall of dust, smacked the pavement, and disintegrated. The rider slid across the concrete on his back and spun to a halt in the soft dirt.

  I tipped my head back and laughed. “I love you guys,” I said.

  McCormick shrugged. “It’s not usually this exciting.”

  I glanced out the back window again and saw the white van skidding to a stop. Two men in civilian clothes jumped out and jogged in the direction of the fallen biker.

  “They’re with us,” McCormick said with a grin. “U.S. Marines and OJKB detailed to the embassy.”

  OJKB. Özel Jandarma Komando Bölüü. Turkish Special Forces, and the very last people on earth you’d want interrogating you. “I have a feeling our friendly biker is going to wish he’d followed someone else,” I said.

  “I can pretty much guarantee it,” McCormick said. He took the O-3 south into old Istanbul.

  I was tempted to ask McCormick exactly who in the embassy he worked for, but I decided to respect his anonymity. All manner of people were assigned to the embassy besides the boot lickers from State. DIA. CIA. NSA. FBI. It was a cook’s stew of more or less meaningless acronyms. It was no wonder nothing ever got done. But I had to give McCormick credit: he had acquitted himself well.

  At the next intersection, he cornered onto a busy thoroughfare and a collection of mixed neighborhoods. An open market on one corner, a mosque on another, a meeting hall on yet another. I could see that we were headed for the tip of the peninsula.

  McCormick made a right at Kennedy Street, a wide boulevard that paralleled the coast of the Sea of Marmara. The Mercedes slowed as we approached a three-story hotel at the end of the block. The building was a simple boxy structure slathered in white paint with pastel-blue trim. Plain and dowdy: perfect for a safe house. We parked outside the entrance. A sign read: HOTEL MARMARA.

  “It’s not five-star,” McCormick said, “but it’s got plenty of what you need most. Security.” He handed me a business card. “Tell the front counter I sent you. They have your room ready.”

  “You coming in?” I asked. There were two points to this question. If he said ye
s, it told me the American embassy wanted me watched and more people knew about my arrival than was healthy; that was not Mr. Elliot’s style. If he said no, then I could take a deep breath and maybe even enjoy a drink and a hot shower.

  “Why? You need a chaperone?” He shook his head and his expression turned serious. “Duty calls. I want to see if our mysterious biker has a name.”

  “And maybe you could ask him real politely who his employer is,” I said. McCormick grinned. “Thanks for the lift.”

  We shook hands, and I let myself out.

  The Mercedes pulled away and disappeared around the corner.

  I walked empty-handed into the hotel, realizing how good a change of clothes would feel right about now. The lobby was floored with terracotta pavers and wainscotted in pink tile. Palms and lush plants grew from planters fired a brilliant blue. Arcs of light painted the walls beneath amber sconces. The tropical colors and garden fragrance gave the lobby a relaxed, festive ambience.

  I told the front desk clerk that McCormick had sent me. He didn’t ask for my name and didn’t bother with ID. He just handed over a key card. “Room 203. Enjoy your stay,” he said simply.

  I decided on the drink before the shower, and said to the clerk, “There a place nearby where a man could get a drink?”

  The concierge overheard my query and hurried over. “Yes, sir. A drink? Right this way.” He pointed to an arched door that led to the hotel restaurant. “It’s not fancy, but it is comfortable.”

  “That’s all I ask.” I followed the tile floor to an open staircase that rose to a mezzanine. I took a corner stool at the bar, close to a wall of beveled-glass windows that allowed a view of the greenway on the other side of Kennedy Street. The silvery waters of the Sea of Marmara trundled toward the horizon.

  The bar looked like a cross between an Irish pub and an English public house, all dark woods and brass, beveled glass and Tiffany lamps. A huge mirror ran the length of the bar, and shelves of liquor bottles reflected in the glass. Wine goblets and cocktail glasses hung from overhead racks.

  It wasn’t crowded, but then it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.