There were three men and a woman gathered around a tall, round table and perched on backless stools. They were speaking Italian, which wasn’t a huge surprise. Istanbul had always attracted the Italian tourist, though these four didn’t strike me as the tourist kind. The men were casually attired, but they looked more like locals. The woman wore a loose, blue dress cinched around her waist, and its plunging neckline immediately caught my attention. A pair of very nice legs caught my attention shortly thereafter.
There were three guys tending bar, and that seemed a bit excessive for this time of the morning, but maybe they were expecting a rush of unkempt Americans fresh off a car chase. The one intently polishing a glass was quintessentially Turkish: heavy mustache, meaty shoulders, thick neck, and looking semidapper in a red vest over a white shirt and black trousers.
His buddies were hunched behind the bar, one skinny and amped up, the other calm and build like a welterweight. Both fussing with glasses and liquor bottles, and looking preoccupied.
The barkeep put his glass and polishing cloth down and set his elbows on his side of the bar. “What’ll you have?” he asked in English as guttural as the broken water pump in my dad’s old Chevy.
“Whiskey sour. Maker’s Mark.” Eleven in the morning; what else?
The barkeep nodded and got to work.
Me? I got to work thinking about my next step. Sending a status report to Rutledge could wait. I had transportation to arrange out to Field 27, and the thought of renting a car was making more and more sense. “Trust no one” had taken on new meaning over the last twenty-four hours.
I felt confident that Wiseman would deliver the C-17. If he or someone in his office was intent on bringing me down, then I’d know the moment I landed in Iran. I half expected the landing coordinates I’d given DDO to be compromised; it was just a gut feeling. I hoped I was wrong.
My arrangement with Roger Anderson was another matter. Roger was not in the business of screwing people over. The HALO gear would be there when I arrived at Field 27. I could check that off my list.
On the other hand, I didn’t know quite what to make of the MEK. Someone had ambushed a car carrying the head of their Amsterdam chapter, and Moradi could easily have been killed. Why would they do that? If it was a ruse, it was a damn risky one. If someone didn’t care whether Moradi lived or died, then the MEK had real problems.
I took a deep breath. I heard the woman at the table next to me laughing, a deep, melodious laugh that reminded me of Cathy. The woman’s very nice legs also reminded me of Cathy, and I let my imagination wander for a moment. I looked at my hands and imagined my scarred fingers slipping down Cathy’s spine to the small of her back, then lower. I imagined her scent and her …
It was the skinny, nervous bartender who placed a napkin on the counter and set the whiskey sour in front of me. Wrong! Dead wrong. Three decades of training and black-ops insanity threw up about a dozen red flags. I reached out and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. I yanked him across the bar, hard.
“What the fuck!” he hissed.
The bar went silent. Everyone was looking—everyone except the barrel-chested Turkish barkeep who had originally taken my order. He was nowhere to be seen.
I stared into the skinny one’s eyes. Twitchy. Very twitchy. He had the rank odor of nervous sweat about him. It wasn’t hot in the bar. Not hot enough to sweat. The other one, the welterweight partner, made a quick move toward the end of the bar, and I shouted, “I’ll break his neck.”
He froze. My eyes flicked his way. “I’ll break his neck. And then I’ll find you and break yours. Please tempt me.”
He didn’t. Not an amateur. Not a seasoned pro, but worthy of my attention.
“What’s going on?” one of the Italians at the table said.
“Shut up! And don’t move,” I snapped. I could do the thing with my voice that pretty much froze people in their tracks, and he did exactly as he’d been told.
With my free hand, I snared the cocktail glass. I held it up to my nose. There was nothing to smell, but I knew. I’d bet my next paycheck on it, if only I was on someone’s payroll. I held the glass up to the skinny one’s face and jammed it against his very prominent nose. “Drink it,” I said. “Drink every drop.”
He shook his head. Panic: I could see it sweeping over his ugly, olive-colored face. “No. Why?”
“Because I want to see how long you last. A minute. Five minutes. Maybe ten. Now drink it,” I said in a low, dusty voice. He struggled, but he was no match for my strength, and certainly no match for my annoyance. I jammed the glass against his lips, sloshed the liquid into his mouth, and he immediately spit it back out. “What kind of poison?”
“Ricin. I’m sorry.”
I let the drink tumble to the bar. The glass splintered. I dragged him onto the bar. I pulled out the Walther. The woman at the table gasped, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her to shut up. The welterweight made a dash for the door. I wanted to shoot him in the back, but this was not the time or place for gunplay.
I put the barrel of the gun against the skinny one’s temple. I knew I had less than ten seconds before all hell broke loose. “Who do you work for? Tell me!”
“I’m a believer,” he said. “Kill me. I know my fate.”
“I don’t need to kill you. When your employer finds out how you botched this job, he’ll use something a lot more painful that a bullet.” I smashed his head into the bar top and stowed the gun in my jacket. I pushed away from the bar, took a last glance at the Italian woman’s legs, and walked out. At least the morning wasn’t a complete loss.
CHAPTER 11
ISTANBUL, TURKEY—DAY FIVE
So much for the Hotel Marmara. And so much for a stiff drink and a hot shower. I was probably better off without the drink, now that I thought about it, but the shower still sounded damn good.
I stepped from the bar into the lobby, walking as if I had all day. Of course, the welterweight had just sprinted out the door ahead of me, so it was hard to be completely nonchalant. The bellhop, the concierge, and the guy at the registration desk stared at me as I crossed the tile floor, my shoes as soundless as my breathing. The elevator music playing in the background seemed louder. The song sounded vaguely familiar—like a Viennese waltz I might have heard on my honeymoon—but then that was the whole point.
“Sir?” The concierge hurried my way. I studied his face. The worry lines were genuine. So was the imploring tone of his voice. “Is everything all right?”
Maybe the look on my face wasn’t as unreadable as it should have been. I’d been caught off guard. Not enough to cost me, but enough to remind me that I’d been out of the game for five years. You’re a step slower, Jake, and you might as well admit it.
Admitting a shortcoming isn’t a bad thing, Mr. Elliot used to say. We all have limits. Know what they are; know when they’re about to kick your ass; know how to lessen the blow. It’s the man who thinks he’s infallible who ends up with the bullet in his head. Yeah, or a lethal dose of ricin in his Maker’s Mark. Not a respectful way to treat a man’s favorite whiskey.
“Lousy service,” I said to the concierge. My mouth was dry. I tasted something metallic on my tongue. A headache squeezed the front of my skull. My guts felt like they’d been shredded. All good signs. All reminders that I had better right the ship and right it damn fast before my mission went any further south on me.
Back home, I was a regular at a gym frequented by government types, mostly agents from the various arms of Homeland Security. Free weights had always been my thing. Outside paramilitary work took a devastating toll on the mind and the body, and staying in shape wasn’t just my rule; it was Mr. Elliot’s rule. When the body goes, the mind and spirit aren’t far behind. In my line of work, if the mind and the spirit falter, you’re a dead man. I believed that back then, and retirement hadn’t dulled the belief.
These days I liked testing myself against the young carnivores hanging around the place; it was a testoste
rone jungle, and I had to admit that I hadn’t tired of the competition. Yeah, I could still do the weight, but not the reps. And these days, my routine took fifteen minutes longer than it had ten years earlier. The upside was that I knew more about the limitations that Mr. Elliot had talked about, and I also knew more about maximizing my strengths. I guess that’s called experience.
“Is there anything I can do?” he said.
“You could hail a cab for me,” I said.
“Right away.” He hustled out ahead of me. I still had three pressing needs: nourishment, sleep, and a few minutes of privacy when no one in the world knew where I was. I was running on empty.
I stopped at the door and looked back at the guy at the registration desk. I said, “Turn back the sheets in my room for me, will you? I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
Of course, I had no intention of returning, but I didn’t want them alerting Trevor McCormick to my sudden departure. If I needed the help of someone from the American embassy again, it would be on my terms, not his. I honestly didn’t believe that McCormick was a party to the Maker’s Mark incident, but his hotel of choice clearly wasn’t the safe house it was intended to be.
I went outside, stopped, and scanned for any sign of the welterweight. He didn’t look smart enough to muster a counterattack after the fiasco at the bar, but failure motivates people in strange ways. Especially when the people holding you accountable have a low and often deadly tolerance for failure. The MEK definitely fit that description. And now I was wondering if the Revolutionary Guard or someone else inside Iran was onto me. If there was a traitor inside the MEK, it was very likely that he or she was betraying me to the Iranian government, and their influence had few boundaries.
I stepped past the entrance. There were three taxis in line along the carriage drive, a yellow one, a green one, and another yellow one. The concierge was at the head of the line, holding open the back door of the first yellow one. I walked over to the second cab instead, the green one.
“Green’s always been my color,” I said when I saw the confused look on the concierge’s face. It was just a precaution, but I planned on taking every precaution going forward.
I ducked into the back. The cabbie glanced back at me, a thick, fleshy man with round glasses. His English had a second-grade quality to it, but my Turkish was preschool at best. He said, “Where to?” and it was all I could do to put the two words together.
“Old town. Hotel Sultanhan.”
His expression in the rearview mirror said, You’re leaving one hotel for another. Who does that? But he merely shrugged and said, “A fine choice, sir.”
He put the cab in gear and drove. I had stayed at the Sultanhan two decades or so earlier, when I was negotiating an arms deal with a very nasty group of Syrians. Small and classically Turkish, it was a stone’s throw from places like the Blue Mosque, Sofia, and Topkapi Palace, all the hot spots for American and European tourists. Very easy to blend in.
But it wasn’t the Sultanhan that interested me; it was a tiny motel two blocks away, where I’d met the Syrians. Quiet, indiscreet, and completely off the grid. Exactly the kind of place I needed before my rendezvous at Field 27.
I closed my eyes for five seconds.
Inventory time. Pulse? Fifty-four. Acceptable. Breathing? Normal. Head? A little woozy, but clear. State of the mission? Despite everything, more or less on track. Allies? Two, rock solid. The rest, questionable at best.
I opened my eyes. The Istanbul skyline filled the cab’s windshield. Where had all the skyscrapers come from? From a distance, modern Istanbul looked like Chicago or Seattle. Closer, a maze of red-tiled roofs, gold-domed mosques, and needle-shaped minarets signaled the Istanbul of old: “old” meaning ten thousand years in the making and still as vibrant and broken as it had been in the days before it was even called Istanbul.
The cab jogged along Peykhane Cad in a battleground of traffic. He cut off at Piyer Loti and snaked along behind a tourist bus until he came to Piere Loti Cad and a carriage drive in front of the hotel. I handed him an American twenty-dollar bill and climbed out.
I stared at the whitewashed facade, the arched windows, and the narrow balconies and remembered the company I had kept there for three nights. It seemed like another lifetime, and yet I could recall every detail. The Sultanhan was meant for romance and quiet dinners with just the right woman, not for international intrigue. But that was then.
I waited for the cab to disappear from sight, then crossed Piere Lot to Boyaci Ahmet and spotted the Column of Constantine. It wasn’t much, but you couldn’t take your eyes off it. It was a stone tower rising a good hundred feet into the air that you realized was constructed nearly two thousand years ago by a Roman emperor. It looked its age, but was even more impressive for it. A crowd of people and hundreds of pigeons clustered around it.
For me, it signaled a cobbled alleyway on the far side of the square that led to a two-story, shacklike building called the Burnt Column Inn. It sounded quaint, but it wasn’t. I walked through a rickety screen door into a shoebox-size lobby where a woman in a head scarf was working an ancient-looking adding machine.
I should have been surprised at how good her English was until I calculated the number of Americans and Europeans she had to deal with every day. “Room?” she said.
I nodded. “With clean sheets.”
She smiled at this. I didn’t know if the smile meant, Of course the sheets are clean, or, What the hell are clean sheets? She said, “How many nights?”
I held up one finger. She smiled again and said, “Euros?”
“Dollars.” She nodded. The price was eighteen dollars per night. I gave her twenty-five and said, “No calls, please.”
The room key was actually a key attached to a plastic card that read “23.” Room 23 was a flight of stairs up and down a narrow hall. I passed a community restroom and realized my shower wasn’t going to be as private as I’d hoped. I plunged the key into a standard dead-bolt lock, pushed open a hollow-core door, and stepped into a room that smelled of lavender and curry, a very odd combination.
I didn’t care. I walked straight to a four-poster bed, built high off the floor, and pulled back the covers. The sheets sparkled they were so white. Hallelujah. I took the Walther from the shoulder harness and laid it on the bed. I set the alarm on my iPhone for 1500 hours and set the alarm in my head for the same time. I plugged the phone into a wall socket, knowing that even with my Mophie it could be a long haul before I was able to charge it again.
I could hardly get my shoes off before I stretched out on the bed, fully clothed. I gripped the Walther in my right hand and closed my eyes. Sleep was instantaneous and dreamless. My internal alarm woke me up two minutes before the iPhone’s alarm sounded. Two hours wasn’t much, but I felt 100 percent better.
I retrieved my iPhone. It was 0800 in Washington, D.C.
I activated an app called the Listening Bug. It was a sweeper program. I wasn’t expecting to find anything in a room in the Burnt Column Inn, but the way my luck had been going, I did a thorough scan anyway: bed, lamps, window frame, closet. All clear.
Mr. Elliot first. I punched in the new number he’d given me during our last session. It rang four times—twice longer than usual—which meant he was tracking the call via GPS. He answered, saying, “You’re not at the Hotel Marmara. Trouble?”
“My middle name these days,” I answered. I backtracked, starting with a quick account of the attempted poisoning. I rehashed the unexpected police reception at the airport and my introduction to Trevor McCormick, and ended with the motorcycle rider tracking us from the airport. “Your guy was Johnny-on-the-spot at the airport, and he handled the bad guy on the bike about as well as a man could. Maybe too good. You sure about him?”
“Shit, man, if you can’t trust him,” Mr. Elliot replied, “then we’re fucked. I trust him like I trust you.”
Good enough, then. I said, “Alright. Then I need him for the ride out tonight. Can you arrange that
?”
“Already done,” he said. Over the course of our thirty-plus years together as case officer and operative, I’d heard him say “already done” maybe a couple of hundred times. It didn’t mean exactly that; it meant, You can count on me. Don’t give it a second thought. And I learned never to give it a second thought, because he always came through. Always.
“Good.” I filled my lungs. He waited. “I was a split second away from drinking that drink.”
He read my mind. “Five years is a long layoff.”
“No excuse.”
“No excuse at all,” he said matter-of-factly. “But it begs the question, do we move to another option?”
He didn’t mention what that other option was, but I knew what he was getting at. That I pull up stakes and return home with my tail between my legs. Meaning, the HUMINT part of the op inside Iran failed. Because of me. Wasn’t going to happen.
“I’m still in,” I said calmly.
“You sure? There’s no pressure from this end.”
Total bullshit. I fold and I’d never be able to look Mr. Elliot in the eye again, not to mention my relationship with General Tom Rutledge. But pressure had nothing to do with it; neither did my self-esteem. I’d been charged with developing indisputable intel supporting military strikes and covert assassinations inside the most dangerous country on the planet. Imagine coming home and telling my kids I couldn’t hack it. A superpatriot no more. No chance.
“It’s a go,” I said. “I’ll wrestle a gorilla if I have to.”
Mr. Elliot chuckled. “I’ll put your driver on full alert. Give him thirty minutes’ notice.”
“Roger that.” We hung up. I powered up the videoconference app and dialed General Rutledge’s number. The call went through a series of clicks—security cues—and Tom answered. He was wearing a black warm-up jacket. “Caught me on the way to a tennis game,” he confessed, as if me being here in full-op mode and him being in D.C. playing tennis just didn’t feel right. “News?”
The Natanz Directive Page 10
