by Helena Maeve
“Is that Jules’ work?” she asked, gesturing to his right hand. He’d tried to conceal it, but she must have noticed it when they came in.
“No.”
“Hm.”
Klaus cleared his throat. “Everything ready for tomorrow?” He was all business again, as if the past moments hadn’t happened.
“You’re going out on the eight-fifteen to Cairo,” Sezin confirmed. From a voluminous red handbag, she pried out two manila envelopes. “Tickets and identification. Jules sends her regards.”
Arthur gaped. “Jules is your cobbler?”
Of all the professions he would’ve thought to assign his former jailer, the art of forging documents was far, far down the list. Patience didn’t seem like her strongest suit, just like forbearance wasn’t his.
“I mean,” he added, floundering under the combined force of Klaus’ and Sezin’s stares. “Thought she wanted nothing more to do with me.” She’d seemed to take genuine pleasure in the knowledge that he was no longer her problem.
“Order came from Robin,” Klaus explained, as though that was all there was to it, and turned back to Sezin. “And for tonight?”
“Oh, I assumed you’d wish to paint the town… But in case you didn’t, here.”
Arthur caught the card as it glided across the table. “Dr. Birdal?”
“Safe house,” Klaus explained softly.
“And an excellent dentist,” Sezin supplied, wagging one bony finger and pouring tea with her other hand. The colorful, ruffled sleeve of her chiffon chemise rode up as she manipulated the pot, revealing shiny, puckered skin—a burn scar, if Arthur had ever seen one. “Now tell me…are you two aware that you have acquired a tail?”
Arthur’s stomach dropped somewhere in the vicinity of his knees. “What?”
Klaus clasped his shoulder to stop him glancing back at the sprawl of the tearoom behind them. “I had an inkling.”
“And you led them here?” Arthur balked.
Spies didn’t let other spies be compromised. They needed a network of helpful, like-minded individuals to persist regardless of the threat. Otherwise they couldn’t operate.
“I hope you’re not worried for my sake.” Sezin propped her elbows on the table. “Section and I are old friends. As long as you are here, you run no risk. But…”
“We can’t stay here forever.”
Sezin nodded sagely. “Not if you hope to be on your way to Cairo tomorrow morning and not lead the British straight to Robin.”
Truth be told, Arthur couldn’t care less where tomorrow found him as long as it wasn’t in Section custody. He had only to think back to the Cottage, with its stone-faced interrogators and supposedly harmless rigging, to guess that capture would be a painful experience.
Klaus sipped meditatively at his tea. “There is a back exit, no? Through that door…”
“Yes,” said Sezin. “But it leads to a dead end.”
“Not if you go through the shop next door. Do they still sell shoes?”
Sezin smiled thinly. “Cruises.” To Arthur, she said, “You’ll never see a street in the world with higher turnover. Rumor has it the travel agency also runs a gambling den upstairs…”
“Rumor?” Klaus repeated.
“My sources are inconclusive. It may not be a permanent affair.”
“I’d rather not get the Turkish mafia involved,” Arthur put in, for however little his vote seemed to count.
Klaus had yet to release his shoulder. He rubbed a thumb into the fabric of his hoodie, the gesture at once absentminded and oddly affectionate. “Gambling is still illegal here, right?” he asked, of Sezin.
She nodded, snowy white strands of hair escaping from the knot at her nape. “Shall I arrange a ride?”
“For Arthur, yes.”
“I don’t need help,” Arthur protested.
“I heard you were shot in the knee,” Sezin noted crisply. “You’ll be better off with a driver.” She was already reaching for her old fashioned flip phone, oblivious to the disbelief painted across Arthur’s face.
Klaus thumped his empty glass on the table. “Sezin, it was a pleasure.”
She smiled, peeling back thin lips to reveal two rows of small, bone-white teeth. “Take care of this one. I hear Robin has great plans for you, young man.” She turned toward the window as the call connected, speaking in rapid-fire Turkish.
Arthur felt like Dorothy stepping into Oz. He rose when bid.
“Now what? Klaus, I don’t understand—”
“Now,” Klaus said, slotting their hands together, “we give MI6 a little excitement.” He didn’t so much yank Arthur through to the back of the café as trust that he wouldn’t resist when tugged along.
Arthur didn’t.
Chapter Eleven
Chaos overtook the floor when Klaus shouted that the police were coming.
Card and chip alike flew as the players jumped from their chairs. Drinks spilled over the dusty floor, glasses shattering underfoot. Arthur flattened his back to the wall and hoped no one noticed the bouncers slumped over downstairs. Klaus had knocked them out quickly, but they’d had no time to hide the bodies with SIS agents in hot pursuit.
“Window!” Klaus shouted over the din of raised voices.
“What?” Arthur had heard him the first time, but he was banking on to the tenuous hope that Klaus would rethink the suggestion on reflection.
“Window,” he said again, grasping Arthur by the arm and pushing him out onto the narrow balcony. The rear of the building overlooked a stone courtyard. Cardboard boxes lay crammed in a crumbling pile on the ground.
“No,” said Arthur. “Klaus, I, c’mon—”
Klaus darted a glance over his shoulder. “Yes.”
The last thing Arthur saw before they went over the iron railing was two men rushing into the room. The agents noticed the window just as Arthur and Klaus took a shortcut to ground level.
Impact knocked the breath out of Arthur’s lungs. Cardboard bent and scuffed beneath him, but, improbably, didn’t yield.
“You’re bloody insane!” he roared, as Klaus rolled to his feet.
“Why do you think I got this job in the first place?”
Arthur knocked his proffered hand away. “Fuck, I don’t need your help—”
“Good for you.” Klaus grabbed his wrist all the same, pulling him along before Arthur so much as managed to get his bearings.
He didn’t fully grasp the sense of urgency until he heard the heavy thud of impact behind them.
One of the agents must have opted to take his chances with gravitational forces.
Klaus pushed through the throng of well-heeled gamblers and frantic organizers, hauling Arthur behind him until they broke out into the swarming crowds of Istiklal Street. For a big guy, he wove between gawping tourists with surprising ease. It was harder for Arthur to follow—already the pace was doing a number on his knee, pain shooting up his thigh with every step—but he did his best not to fall behind.
Escaping Robin’s clutches was one thing. Escaping his long reach only to wind up in Section custody didn’t seem like such a great trade.
Heart hammering in his throat, Arthur chanced a glance over his shoulder. Sure enough, one of the agents was close on their heels. And he was catching up fast, too bloody quick for Arthur to outrun.
“Is this all the plan you’ve got?” he bellowed, to Klaus.
“Have a better idea?”
“Streetcar?”
Klaus raised his gaze. He was tall enough that he could see over the crowd without much difficulty. “Could work.”
They hurried their steps, zigzagging through the slow, lumbering horde until they were right on the tram tracks, running almost parallel to the trolley car. For a moment, the SIS agent was on the wrong side of the vehicle, concealed from view. Klaus squeezed Arthur’s fingers, once, and grabbed hold of the steel bars on either side of the door to hoist himself up from the ground.
The last thing Arthur heard as the t
ram drove one way and he hurried the other, was the conductor’s scandalized objections pitched high over the clamor of the crowd.
He went from running to sauntering along with the throng, doing his best to conceal the drag of his foot along the pavement, and put up his hood. Don’t look, don’t look.
Of course he looked.
The red tram rolled sullenly along, parting the mob like a knife through butter. Catching up to it fast was the same MI6 agent Arthur had spied in the crowd earlier. He didn’t even stop to scan the faces around him for some trace of Arthur. He’d swallowed the bait.
Arthur spared a thought for Klaus and what might become of him if he was caught. He won’t be. But if he was, how far did Robin’s influence extend, exactly, and what were the odds that Section would allow an asset known to have aided and abetted a fugitive walk away unscathed?
Istiklal Street was hilly and the streetlights bright enough that if Arthur strained his eyes, he could glimpse the red streetcar over the pedestrian throng.
A flash of movement focused his efforts.
It was Klaus, exiting the tram as clandestinely as he had boarded it in the first place. The MI6 agent was nowhere to be seen. A good three hundred feet separated Arthur from Klaus. Were the boulevard empty, it should have been easy to make up. Klaus’ long strides could surely cover the distance in a handful of seconds.
Arthur saw him scan the tight cluster of tourists and shoppers all around him. He didn’t seem to know where Arthur was.
This is your chance.
The red tram disappeared over the crest of the hill. Arthur waited until he couldn’t see its shimmering lights before turning away and blending into the mob.
* * * *
Step one in making sure one flew under the radar was a decent disguise. Arthur took care of that at the first clothing shop that displayed its wares on hangers outside the storefront. He helped himself to a leather jacket and a pair of sunglasses, moving fast so as not to attract attention.
He had never been to Istanbul before, but when it came to petty theft, he was pleased to discover that the same rules applied as anywhere else.
Step two was appropriating enough cash to keep him under the radar. He picked a tourist for his mark, easing his wallet free and vanishing before the poor man knew what was happening. Two blocks away, Arthur ditched the wallet, credit cards and all, and hung onto the cash alone.
It wasn’t a lot, but it was a start. Add the forged papers from Sezin to his little stash and things were starting to look up.
Step three was finding a way out of Istanbul—ideally over land and headed south—but that could wait. His knee throbbed fiercely with every step and he was out of breath, out of shape. He needed to regroup.
Regroup or rethink? He dismissed the nuance as unimportant.
A fast food joint down the block struck him as a perfectly inconspicuous location. There was no reason for Section operatives to assume he’d stop for a burger while he was running for his life. Klaus might feel differently, but they had lost sight of each other. He wouldn’t know to look for Arthur between sticky tables and vinyl booths.
Arthur picked a table that faced the door, his back to a wall decorated with stenciled M’s. His stomach rumbled as he tore into his greasy supper. If six months earlier someone had told him his idea of freedom would one day taste of puffy white buns and gloppy, melted cheese, he would have laughed. Now, Arthur mostly felt like weeping.
He sipped his Coke down to the dregs, swirling the fast-melting ice cubes in the paper cup. Getting out of town would be easiest by car—no predetermined route, no fellow passengers to suspect. But he didn’t have the cash for a rental car.
Larceny had served him well enough so far and he could always try hot-wiring the Audi if Sezin hadn’t arranged to have it moved yet. Anything bolder and he might end up in police custody. It would be child’s play for MI6 to arrange for his—unofficial, under the table—handover after that.
The last thing Arthur wanted was to make his jailers’ lives easier.
With a cursory glance around the restaurant to check that no one was watching, he plucked out the manila envelope and his dwindling cash reserves, and spread them over the table.
Two hundred lira in tens and fifties wasn’t much. Perhaps he should have hung onto the wallet after all. Inside the envelope from Sezin, Arthur found a fake British passport for a Cal Hooper. It was a faithful copy. The picture had been lifted from his actual ID, but all other information—down to his date of birth—had been forged. Arthur committed the details to memory, just in case. If he found a ride to Antalya, he could always escape to Syria. No need for passports or explanations there, but a consistent story never hurt anyone.
A business card fell out when he made to stuff the forged paperwork back into the envelope.
Recep Birdal, dentistry shone in embossed lettering on the front. The address printed at the bottom didn’t ring any bells for Arthur. It wasn’t worth a second glance.
Dr. Birdal’s safe house wasn’t the place he needed to be right now.
Under the white neon above his table, Arthur folded the card in two and tore it along the crease, first into halves, then fourths. He swept up the paper flakes and unloaded them into the icy water at the bottom of his Coke. He sealed the plastic lid on top for good measure. It didn’t feel particularly cathartic.
The choice before him was the same leaving the restaurant as it had been on the way in.
* * * *
Daylight crept slowly over the rooftops, lengthening the shadow of houses and trees over the pavement. Arthur didn’t have a watch. The precise hour didn’t matter, as long as it was before eight o’clock.
The city was slow to wake around him, as though hungover from last night’s revelry.
Intellectually, Arthur knew that it was naive to think that fifteen million people could all follow the same biological rhythm. There were likely to be early risers in the cars that lumbered down the mostly deserted streets, and there were night owls.
There were dentists who harbored fugitives and old ladies who tangoed with British spies for the hell of it.
A bee buzzed by his ear, as urgent as an alarm clock.
Arthur sighed and pushed away from the vine-wreathed wall of a three-story apartment building. Across the street, Dr. Birdal’s house still seemed to be locked for the night. He let himself in through the front gate, careful to keep the noise to a minimum. There was surely a more surreptitious point of ingress, but Arthur hadn’t been able to find it during his stakeout and with the sun coming up he couldn’t afford to wait.
Tall stone walls fenced the property on all four sides, with a cast iron gate at the front. The lock was ancient and, as Arthur had discovered when he’d scoped out the villa during the night, easily forced open. The courtyard within was about what he would have expected of a safe house, here or back home—clean, but unremarkable, with a few modest shrubs struggling to flower in the harsh glare and balmy temperatures. Bird droppings pocked the flagstone path to the door.
Arthur glanced over his shoulder. The street was barren, but someone in the upper floors of the apartment building across the street could be peering out of their window. He raised his fist to the wood just as the lock clicked open.
Klaus stayed well in the shade of the house, but Arthur took one glance at him and knew that he hadn’t slept a wink.
“You look terrible,” he offered in lieu of hello, sorry I went MIA.
Klaus did not reply. He didn’t invite him in, either, but Arthur figured that was in the cards and stepped over the threshold. The cool interior of the villa elicited a small shiver.
The door swung shut behind him. Arthur felt the hair on the back of his neck stand at attention but refused to swing around like some frightened animal. He wasn’t backed into a corner.
He’d decided to come back all on his own.
“I thought they got to you.” Klaus sighed.
Arthur hummed. “Did you really?” Somehow, he
had trouble believing Klaus would burn the midnight oil at the safe house if he thought there was a chance his quarry had fallen into the wrong hands.
“Nice jacket,” said Klaus, sidestepping.
“Nice digs. I really like the mosaic, it’s very—”
The last time Klaus had manhandled him, Arthur had nearly blown their cover for shitty gas station food. This time, the motive was far more reasonable. The press of his forearm across Arthur’s windpipe also hurt a little more than handcuffs around a numb hand.
“Easy,” Arthur started, holding up his hands. “Easy. I come in peace.”
Klaus paid him no heed. “Were you planning this all along?” he snarled. “Were you?”
“Planning what? My great escape into a city I don’t even know?”
The protest was flimsy and Arthur knew it, but it was hard to think when Klaus was so close, fury swirling in his bloodshot eyes. He was still wearing last night’s clothes, albeit without the tweed vest. He looked like he might have tried to lie down in them, his white shirt wrinkled like parchment paper.
Klaus had bulk and strength on him, but somehow Arthur didn’t have to struggle much to push him off.
“I came back, didn’t I?” What more do you want? “I’m like one of those stupid, mangy mutts that you try to throw out, so you drive it into the middle of nowhere and they still find their way home,” he shot back. Belatedly, he wondered if Dr. Birdal lived in this house and was somewhere close by, listening in on their spat. Shame hadn’t been enough to silence Arthur for a while now. “What, did you think I was happy being somebody’s special delivery? I don’t know Robin. I never asked to work for him, to be rescued… This is all you.”
“Why not turn yourself in, then?” Klaus’ voice was low and dangerous, but there was more than a semblance of common sense in that question.
Arthur didn’t have an answer. Short of trying to argue around his real motives, he did the next best thing and tipped forward, seeking Klaus’ lips with his own.
Klaus caught him by the shoulders, stopping him short. “No.”
