Hard Rain - 03

by David Rollins

  ‘I’d like to ask you some questions about Adem Fedai. You know this man?’ I enquired.

  Masters pulled a small snapshot of Fedai and showed it to him.

  ‘Yes, he live here.’

  ‘Does he still live here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘I see him in one week.’

  ‘You saw him a week ago?’

  ‘Yes. He give money for the room. I tell you this already.’

  ‘You told who? Us?’

  ‘Polisi.’

  ‘Would you mind showing us his room, Mr Ocirik?’ I asked.

  ‘I show polisi already.’

  ‘We are different polisi, Mr Ocirik,’ said Masters.

  ‘There is nothing to see. He has only a bed.’

  ‘Has he taken his clothes?’ asked Masters.

  ‘No. His clothes are there.’

  ‘Has he gone away before? Left for a week or more?’

  Ocirik didn’t get it, the overhang on his bus-shelter-sized brow furrowed with confusion. Masters repeated the question a couple of times in different ways until the meaning sank in.

  ‘Yes, sometimes he go away.’

  ‘When does he need to give you more money for the room?’ Masters asked.

  ‘He must give money in three weeks.’

  ‘Did he always pay rent one month in advance?’

  Ocirik shook his huge, bony noggin. ‘I no understand.’

  ‘Did he always pay rent by the month?’

  Ocirik shrugged. It was clear this was one 300-pound language barrier we weren’t going to push through.

  ‘I couldn’t help but overhear,’ said a man who’d been sitting nearby sucking away on a water pipe. ‘Perhaps I can help?’

  ‘That depends,’ Masters said. ‘You speak Turkish?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he replied with a smile, indicating his Turkish-language newspaper and tucking it under his arm. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘We want to know if his lodger always paid rent a month in advance.’

  ‘Okay,’ said the impromptu interpreter. He put our question to Ocirik, and Ocirik gave him an answer. ‘He says no – the man usually pay his rent after two weeks.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Masters.

  ‘Anything else I can ask him for you?’

  ‘Ask Ocirik whether he’ll change his mind and open up the lodger’s room for us,’ I said, giving Ocirik my public-relations smile. ‘Just in case he’s wavering on the point.’

  The stranger put it to Ocirik.

  ‘Ocirik says he’ll change his mind if the lodger doesn’t return and his rent falls due.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I agreed. Masters and I had no legal means of forcing him to comply anyway.

  Another man almost as big as Ocirik, but maybe only half his age, came up and tapped him on his shoulder. This had to be Ocirik’s son. The younger man – K2 to the old man’s Everest – pointed impatiently to a couple of crowded tables across the courtyard. Ocirik said, ‘I must go now.’

  ‘Anything else?’ asked our interpreter.

  ‘Well, we’d like two apple teas and a water pipe with cappuccino-flavoured tobacco,’ Masters told him.

  ‘Sure. I get for you,’ said Ocirik, there being nothing wrong with his menu English.

  ‘Before you race off . . .’ I said to him.

  Ocirik grunted.

  ‘You see Fedai, you call.’ I held out my card and added a little mime to get this request over the line.

  Ocirik examined the card before slipping it in his pocket. ‘I call,’ he promised, walking off into a cloud of tobacco smoke.

  Masters thanked the stranger for his assistance. He gave us a nod, deposited a couple of notes on his table and left.

  ‘Cappuccino-flavoured?’ I asked her.

  ‘Can’t you smell it? The tobacco’s flavoured here. You can get all kinds.’

  ‘So this is what, a carcinogenic Baskin-Robbins?’

  Masters shrugged. ‘When in Rome . . .’

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said, taking a seat.

  ‘I don’t. The last time I smoked was when I was last in Istanbul.’

  ‘When you met the colonel.’

  Masters ignored the comment. ‘So, what do you make of Fedai?’ she asked instead.

  ‘I think he’s lying low somewhere. Maybe he got scared and thought someone might want to hang Portman’s murder on him. I think he’s coming back here, or intended to come back. Otherwise, why bother paying a month’s rent in advance? He’d have just skipped.’

  Masters thought about it, then said, ‘He might have paid to give himself a head start, and make everyone think he was coming back.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  Ocirik’s gargantuan offspring brought the water pipe and picked at the nuggets of burning tobacco with a long pair of tongs. Masters then sucked on the pipe so that its water reservoir bubbled away and the tobacco glowed orange and then red. The tea appeared, brought by another waiter.

  ‘If it’s okay with you, I want some time off tonight,’ she said, blowing smoke at the empty table beside us.

  ‘I’m not your boss,’ I informed her. I sipped the apple tea and it reminded me of Doctor Merkit.

  ‘No, but I’m giving you the courtesy of letting you know.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ I said. It wasn’t, but there was nothing I could do about it anyway. If Richard Wadding was what Anna Masters wanted, then I’d misjudged her. I doubted that, but my options on that score had been cut to zero.

  ‘So, that means you’ve got the night off, Vin. What are you going to do with it?’

  ‘Pack.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘We’re going to Incirlik Air Base.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve done all we can here. Maybe the people Portman and Bremmel were dealing with can throw some light into the darkness for us. The upgrade on these F-16s seems to be the only real link that I can see.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Masters with a nod.

  ‘What’s that like?’ I asked, gesturing at the water pipe.

  ‘Like inhaling cappuccino-flavoured smog on a cold day.’

  ‘He’s not right for you, Anna.’

  ‘And I suppose you are?’

  Sixteen

  It had stopped sleeting by the time we left Ocirik’s, the cloud cover low and grey and appearing to sink under its own weight. The lunchtime crowds were out in force now, huddling against the cold and dodging occasional sheets of water thrown across the sidewalk by vehicles driving through puddles. The cop car had gone.

  Masters, I noticed, had turned a shade of green that didn’t go with anything except maybe a toilet bowl and a lie-down. ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  She nodded, but I wasn’t convinced. I checked the street for Emir, but couldn’t see him or his vehicle anywhere, so we headed to the point where he’d dropped us off, a short distance down the road.

  A couple of guys walking out of a shop with their heads down bumped into us. I was about to apologise when I recognised one of them – the interpreter from Ocirik’s. He gave me a clear view of the butt of a handgun, removing it partially from his jacket. This told me an apology for bumping into him was probably unnecessary.

  A van pulled up beside us, the door flew open, and Masters and I were hauled inside by half-a-dozen hands. The door slid shut and we were forcibly pushed onto the floor, the muzzles of various pistols thrust into our faces as the van accelerated away with a lurch and a squeal of wheelspin.

  ‘Hey! What the hell –’ Masters demanded.

  ‘Shut up,’ came the reply, from someone out of sight behind me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said, ignoring the advice.

  We’d been abducted, obviously, but by whom and for what purpose I had no idea. I counted seven faces behind the guns. All had dark Mediterranean-type complexions, were all male, and all were as relaxed as if abduction was something they did every day of the week.
‘You going to tell us what this is all about?’ I asked the interpreter.

  ‘Like he said,’ the interpreter whispered, gesturing at the man behind me with a flick of his weapon, ‘shut the fuck up.’

  A man beside him raised his pistol, backhand, coiling for a downward strike into my face. The interpreter put his hand on the guy’s arm to stop the follow-through. Something told me I should not misconstrue this as an indication that the interpreter was in any way an ally. The something telling me this was the silencer he had begun twisting onto the end of his H&K Mk 23.

  I felt a couple of hands searching my pockets. Masters was getting the same treatment. They found what they were looking for and began passing around our shields.

  ‘I told you they were OSI,’ said the interpreter once the wallet had gone around the van. Masters’ credentials were tossed back on her chest. Mine were kept.

  ‘Wimps,’ spat someone else.

  ‘Yafa is going to love this one,’ said someone, leering at Masters.

  ‘I hope she let us watch,’ added another.

  Their accents were thick and varied. I wondered whether they spoke English because it was the common language between them. What did that observation tell me? That they were some kind of mercenary militia?

  A few of the men began to chuckle, though none of the weapons were removed from our faces. The interpreter took out his cell phone and dialled a number. He spoke to someone in a language that didn’t sound like Turkish, but I could’ve been wrong. After a brief conversation, he ended the call and put the cell away. The van took several violent lefts and rights, throwing all of us around. It then suddenly slowed and I felt the van sway and bump like it was going over a gutter. It sped up briefly before coming to a stop with locked wheels and a crunch of gravel and earth.

  The door slid back in its rails, letting in the gloom of the day, as well as a little rain. Masters and I were pushed out of the vehicle. I recognised the Bosphorus and the smell of seawater and diesel oil that came with it, but apart from that I had no idea where we were in relation to the rest of the city. The cloud cover was now low enough to reach up and touch, and the city skyline had been consumed by it. I looked around. We’d been driven into the back of a kids’ playground, the swings and various monkey bars empty and silent in the steady drizzle. Nearby was the grey marble wall of one of the many mosques that crowd Istanbul like Starbucks do American cities.

  Another vehicle was parked close by, a large black Jaguar, a man and a woman leaning on it. There was no sun and yet the guy was wearing sunglasses, which meant he was either a rock star or an asshole. My money was on the latter. He was also wearing hiking boots, black cargo pants and a Yankees-branded hoodie. He moved like a pro boxer approaching the ring – slightly stooped with ropey shoulders that rolled as he walked. A silver matchstick protruded from his tight lips.

  His partner was a woman, a brunette, and better dressed. She carried a small black umbrella to keep the rain off her layered, shoulder-length dark hair. She wore a fitted black leather jacket zipped to the neck, expensive jeans and black leather boots. Her fingernails were painted to match her Ferrari-red lipstick, her eyes were large and black with no discernible pupil. I could imagine her hanging out in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. For a reason I couldn’t put my finger on, she also looked by far the more dangerous of the two.

  ‘What have we here?’ asked the man as he and his companion circled us like a couple of hungry sharks.

  ‘You’ve got trouble,’ I said, as calmly as I could manage.

  Beside my ear I heard the double click-click of a pistol’s slide being pulled back and released. ‘Shh,’ said a voice close enough for me to sense warm breath against my neck, smell the garlic on it.

  One of the men passed my ID over to the guy with the toothpick.

  ‘So, you are American. OSI. You are air force.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You may answer.’

  ‘This guy wants me to shut up, and you want me to answer. I wish to hell you people would make up your damn minds,’ I said.

  Someone slapped the side of my head – hard. Once the marbles between my ears stopped rattling, I turned to the guy who did the slapping. ‘Do that again, Mac, and I’ll stop your heart.’

  A couple of his buddies responded to my apparent foolhardy attempt at machismo with an appreciative smile and a nod.

  ‘What is your interest in Adem Fedai?’ asked the man with the toothpick.

  I noticed his woman taking a special interest in Masters. She buried her nose in Anna’s hair, inhaled deeply and then raised her head, eyes closed like she’d breathed in the intoxicating scent of heaven itself.

  ‘I told you Yafa would like her,’ said one of the men to a buddy.

  ‘Who the fuck are you people?’ I demanded.

  Another slap came from my blind side, this one nearly taking my head off. I turned. The guy smirked, daring me. I opened and closed my mouth to clear the ringing and lifted my shoulders up and down – keeping the motion slow and painful. Then I whipped back around and snapped out a short, sharp punch, aiming for the soft flesh an inch below the man’s ear. I drove a cocked knuckle into it. The asshole immediately fell to the ground and began to convulse, the whites of his eyes showing in their sockets. A cold steel muzzle jammed into my nose, pushing my head back.

  The guy on the ground began frothing at the mouth as a couple of his buddies dropped to their knees to attend him. They were swearing and speaking in a mixture of languages, wondering what the hell had happened to their pal.

  ‘What have you done to him?’ asked the interpreter.

  ‘Kept my word.’

  ‘You have stopped his heart?’

  If they wanted to save the guy’s life, I knew what they had to do. I also knew that they’d better hurry up and do it. I heard one of them say the magic words ‘heart attack’.

  ‘You might try CPR,’ I suggested.

  ‘Shut you face,’ said the toothpick guy.

  One of the men took my advice anyway and began pushing down on the patient’s sternum and then administering mouth-to-mouth. The patient responded pretty quickly. He groaned and moved his arms and legs slowly. The guy must have been fit. Within a minute, he was sitting up, tears pouring down his cheeks. Except for the two guys covering us with pistols and the woman with the lips, everyone else was attending to their comrade back from the dead.

  ‘Not bad for a wimp,’ Masters said under her breath.

  ‘So, you are a tough guy, eh?’ the woman whispered in my ear.

  I said nothing, mainly because I happened to note a formidable set of brass knuckles now gracing her right fist. One of the men covering us laid a steel barrel across my ear so that I could feel the cold metal. Satisfied I’d received the message to do nothing other than flinch, the woman swung a punch into my ribs that sent a white ball of pain exploding into the space behind my eyes. I doubled over and gasped for breath that refused to come.

  She bent down and hissed, ‘If you will behave, I will become playful, yes?’ The woman gave my ear a lick. ‘Now, Adem Fedai . . . tell us why you are interested in this former Mossad agent.’

  The coughing I had to do to get my lungs working again hid my surprise. Adem Fedai – an ex-Mossad agent? I felt the warm comfort of Masters’ hand on my shoulder and heard her ask our captors, ‘How do you know he’s ex-Mossad?’

  ‘Only we will ask the questions,’ the woman replied.

  ‘Not if you want answers,’ I said, slowly getting to my feet, trying hard not to show the pain.

  ‘Be careful, my friend,’ cautioned the guy with the toothpick. ‘Yafa does not like men, and you have annoyed her. I would not like to be you.’

  I hoped the bitch hadn’t added another broken bone to my growing collection.

  ‘We have been search for this Adem Fedai for six months,’ said the toothpick guy. ‘We trace him to the water-pipe shop and have been watching his home. We were about to move on him when he disappear. Then Tu
rkish police watch his home. We did not know why. Then you came along asking questions. You are military police. What is your interest in Fedai?’

  The police had managed to keep the Portman and Bremmel murders out of the press, so maybe these people didn’t know shit. Or maybe they did know and were just spinning us a bunch of crap. The woman who slugged me because she didn’t like men had now pulled out a compact and was touching up those lips of hers like she’d just ordered a drink.

  ‘We are investigating the murder of a colonel in the United States Air Force,’ I informed her. ‘Fedai worked at the scene of the crime. But he has disappeared, as you said. We just thought we’d see where he lived and smoke a little coffee-flavoured tobacco while we were at it.’

  The Yafa woman and the toothpick guy exchanged glances – I guessed, wondering whether or not to believe me. ‘Where else will you look for him?’ asked the woman.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘And if I knew, I wouldn’t say.’

  ‘We could make you talk.’

  I shrugged. ‘Lady, making me talk is easy. It’s making me shut up that’s the hard part.’

  ‘True,’ said Masters.

  ‘You will be quiet.’

  Toothpick and Yafa went into a huddle with the guy who’d been our interpreter back at Ocirik’s. I used the opportunity to eyeball the rest of these guys. They were all confident and cool, with the certain swagger that comes from killing enough people that you no longer think too much about it.

  ‘We wish to offer our apologies for these methods,’ said the interpreter, suddenly all sweetness and light. ‘We will return you to the place we took you from.’

  I was about to tell them not to worry about it, that we’d catch a cab, when the Yafa woman walked up to Masters, took her in her arms and kissed her hard and full on the lips.

  Seventeen

  We watched the van move away from us and merge into traffic. ‘I think she liked you,’ I said.

  Masters was as angry as I’d ever seen her. ‘Thanks for your understanding.’

  I went to put my hand on her shoulder but the move was a little too sudden for my rib, and it let me know in no uncertain terms. I winced.

  ‘You okay?’ Masters asked.