Accidental Encounters

by George Friesen

  “Special operations is only a euphemism for the illegal drug trade of the company.”

  The scorn in her voice finally put him over the edge. “I think you had better leave!” he ordered.

  She rose from her chair, her head held high, and started walking toward the door. Suddenly, a crazy impulse overwhelmed his better judgment. He wanted to humiliate this proud woman.

  “Wait!” he called out just as she reached the door. “I will reconsider helping your cousin on one condition. You must understand that I am reluctant to jeopardize my standing with Omer Tilki over some small matter. He prefers to use his political influence to sway decisions on lucrative business deals. However, I will intervene on your cousin’s behalf if you are willing to pay me a price.”

  She paused at the door and turned toward him. “And what is that price?”

  “That you agree to be my mistress. I would find an apartment where we could meet discreetly. Your parents and my wife would never need to know.”

  Fury contorted her face. “You disgust me! Have you no shame or honor? You are a disgrace to your family!” She seized an umbrella from the stand near the door and rushed toward him, thrashing him over the head and shoulders. He held up his arms to protect himself, finally wresting the umbrella from her hands. But she continued to attack, biting and scratching, causing him to fall back on his desk. His hand closed over a paperweight and he struck back, once and then twice, hitting her on her temple. She crumpled to the floor, silent, motionless, barely breathing, blood oozing from her head wound.

  He stood there in disbelief, staring at her body. What madness had possessed him! It had all happened so quickly, and now his life was on the verge of ruin. Even though she was still breathing, he could not call an ambulance. But he could not dispose of her body on his own. He would need help.

  Sitting down at his desk, he concocted a plausible story. She had tried to kill him with a gun that she had pulled from her purse, and he had been forced to defend himself by beating her over the head with his paperweight. He always kept a small firearm hidden in a secret compartment in the top drawer of his desk. After carefully wiping his fingerprints from the weapon, he placed it on the floor beside her outstretched hand. Then he called the night guards.

  Chapter Thirty

  In the tightly regulated world of Ottoman Trading Company, business meetings are normally held on Monday mornings in the conference room on the fourth floor of corporate headquarters at 80 Nuruosmaniye Caddesi. Smaller meetings sometimes occur in the fifth-floor office of Omer Tilki, the elder son to whom the patriarch, Emir Tilki, has yielded responsibility for daily operations of the firm.

  By choice, the patriarch serves as chairman, limiting his role to attendance at monthly board meetings, making important strategic decisions for the firm, and supporting his favorite philanthropies. He still has an office next to his son’s on the fifth floor, but it is rarely used.

  Ozmen had a sense of foreboding as he rode the elevator up to the fifth floor. He had been summoned to the office of Omer Tilki on a Wednesday, which was most unusual. Although he prided himself on being methodical and reliable, recently, a number of his projects had gone awry.

  He stepped out of the elevator into a large reception area bathed in afternoon light underneath a glass dome. Exquisite tiles with geometric designs covered the walls. Rare Turkish and Persian carpets converged on a central design in the parquet floor. In the center of the reception area was a large elegant desk—a gift from one of the last sultans of the Ottoman Empire—at which was seated a young man, who softly spoke into an intercom, announcing Ozmen’s arrival. Two large men in business attire stood on either side of the lacquered, paneled double doors leading to Omer Tilki’s office, their arms folded across their chests close to the guns concealed inside their suit jackets.

  Ozmen heard the response on the intercom. “I will let you know when to send him in.”

  The failure of the receptionist to invite him to sit down while he waited confirmed his unease. Controlling his inclination to shift his tall frame from one foot to the other, he folded his hands in front of him and stared impassively at the carpeted floor, then at the tiled walls, and finally at the two guards. He brushed aside the idle thought that they would someday be his executioners. Had he not served the company faithfully for many years? Did it not have an obligation to him?

  Twenty minutes passed before the double doors opened to admit him to a rare audience with Omer Tilki, who was seated behind a large antique walnut desk inlaid with silver and ivory.

  “Please sit down!” A man of medium height, Tilki seemed taller than he actually was because he held himself stiffly erect. He had the bearing and clipped manner of speech acquired attending an academy for military cadets in his youth. His hair was now silvery gray, but the flesh on his face was firm. His mustache obscured the thin line of his lips, but his eyes were hard and angry. This was not a man to be trifled with.

  “Well, Ozmen, what do you have to say for yourself?” Omer Tilki lacked the courtly mannerisms of his father, even though in ruthlessness, there was little to choose between them.

  “In reference to what, sir?” Ozmen feigned deference to avoid further provoking the chief executive’s wrath but resented it. He was, after all, a man of forty with the title of vice president for special operations and was accustomed to issuing orders to others.

  “Shall we start with a little police matter? I was visited yesterday morning by Inspector Adem Polat of the Istanbul Police Department, inquiring whether a missing woman, Professor Hayat Yilmaz, had visited our offices last Thursday. I summoned the receptionist on the ground floor, who said that no one of that description or name had checked in at the reception desk during office hours. Anyone wanting admission after 5:00 p.m. has to ring the doorbell to be let in by one of the night guards. They were off duty on Tuesday morning so that I had to wait until the evening to interview them, which is just as well in view of what I discovered.”

  Ozmen swallowed hard, anticipating what came next.

  “Apparently, a shopkeeper across the street, interviewed by Inspector Polat, thought he had seen a woman ringing the doorbell at our office entrance around 6:00 p.m. when he was locking up for the night, but he could not remember what she looked like. However, one of the night guards remembers admitting a woman who wanted to see you. She had introduced herself as Hayat Yilmaz. Why did she want to see you?”

  “I can explain everything. She wanted my help in getting the release of her cousin Husayin Yilmaz, the captain of Light of the East. He was arrested by the Greek Coast Guard after they boarded the ship and discovered an illicit arms shipment.”

  “That was most unfortunate. Our Syrian customers are unhappy because they did not receive the weapons they ordered, and we are unhappy because we did not receive our normal payment in heroin. Moreover, one of our cargo ships has been impounded indefinitely. But tell me, why did she come to you? Did she know you?”

  “Yes, since childhood. Her father and my father had shops next to each other at the Grand Bazaar. We were classmates at university and even became betrothed.”

  “But you never married. Why? You had known each other since childhood.”

  “She broke off the engagement because she disapproved of some of my activities. She discovered that I was peddling heroin, mostly to foreigners visiting Istanbul. She wanted me to stop, but I would not because I needed the money to finance my studies.”

  “Did you remain friends after the engagement was broken off?”

  “No, she said that she never wanted to see me again, and we did not.”

  “Yet when she rang the doorbell to this building after all these years, you admitted her. You are a married man with three children, Ozmen. Are you tiring of your wife and looking for a diversion?” Tilki’s thin lips twisted in a sneer.

  Ozmen’s face flushed at the half-truth in what Tilki said. But it
was more complex. “It is not what you might think. I have always regretted the way our friendship ended.”

  Except it had been more than a friendship. He had once loved Hayat as a young man. Then a few days ago, that love had turned to hate.

  “You are a sentimental man, Ozmen. It does not pay to be soft in our business. So what happened when she came to your office on the third floor? The night guard said he had heard loud voices. Did you argue?”

  “When she explained the reason for her visit, I told her that there was little I could do for her cousin. She then threatened to expose Ottoman Trading Company to the Turkish authorities. She had heard enough from her cousin to convince her that our legitimate business is merely a front for our narcotics trade. I pleaded with her to be reasonable.”

  Ozmen might be a sentimental man, but he had always been a good liar. It was a trait that had facilitated his rise up the corporate ladder. To save his own skin, he twisted the facts about Hayat’s visit without skipping a beat. The softening of the hostility on Tilki’s face showed that he had scored an important point in his own favor.

  “The registry of the Golden Horn Shipping Company is murky so that it cannot be easily linked to Ottoman Trading Company. However, if I intervened on behalf of her cousin with the Greek Coast Guard, their suspicions about our company would be aroused. She said that traces of heroin had been found on Light of the East.”

  “So how did she get that information? The seizure of the ship occurred only a week ago.”

  “She did not say.”

  “You must have been aware that this dangerous woman was one of the leaders of the demonstrations against our proposals to develop Gezi Park! Yet you let her into your office. How do you explain your bad judgment?”

  Ozmen remained silent. Any argument made in self-defense would be futile and might only stoke Tilki’s rage.

  “When the night guard came to your office door, he found this woman on the floor, bleeding profusely from a head wound. You told him that she had pulled a gun on you and you struck her with your paperweight to protect yourself. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “The guard said he saw a gun lying on the floor when he first came, but it later disappeared.”

  “I put it in my desk.”

  “Or perhaps you planted the gun yourself.”

  Ozmen winced under Tilki’s contemptuous gaze. “Here we have a well-educated woman teaching at a local university, formerly attached to the Turkish delegation to the United Nations in New York. Carrying a gun in her handbag? It does not seem plausible. So what really happened?”

  Perspiring, Ozmen let the words spill out of his mouth. “She was screaming at me … telling me what scum I had become … betraying my family and my religion. She attacked me with an umbrella, which I tore from her grasp. But she kept coming at me, scratching and biting. I slapped her, but she kept shouting at me. Then I lost control … and picked up the paperweight and hit her on the head. I did not think I had hit her hard, but she was unconscious and bleeding.”

  “Then you asked for the assistance of the two night guards to take her down the elevator into the basement while you cleaned up the mess in your office? Fortunately, no one saw them.”

  “I also needed to decide what to do with her. I could not call for an ambulance. In the end, I decided I had to get rid of her as we have done before with others.” Ozmen looked meaningfully at Tilki, who seemed unperturbed by the reference to prior executions.

  “Through the secret tunnel leading from the basement to the Bosporus?”

  “Yes. I swore the two night guards to secrecy. They threw her body into the Bosporus just before dawn.” He said it calmly, without emotion; but inwardly, he felt numb. What kind of monster had he become? He barely recognized himself.

  Tilki answered that question for him. “You are a cold-blooded bastard, but under the circumstances, you did the right thing. We do not want a vocal university professor getting on television to denounce Ottoman Trading Company or its affiliate, Galata Heights. We must protect our role in the consortium planning to redevelop Taksim Gezi Park.”

  Tilki drummed his fingers on his desk top while he thought out loud. “I think it is time to transfer ownership of Golden Horn Shipping to another shell company. It must disappear without a trace. As for Captain Yilmaz, I will speak to my father about using his political connections to get an exchange of Yilmaz for a Greek held in a Turkish prison. He has clearly been too talkative. Once he is back in Turkey, we can arrange an accident.”

  Ozmen began to breathe more easily. Tilki was regaining his composure. Fearing for his own life had been premature. He helpfully volunteered, “I will also speak to the personnel director about transferring the two night guards to another office to keep them away from that pesky police officer. I think there may be two openings in our office in Azerbaijan.”

  Tilki stared at the ceiling, ignoring Ozmen. “Thinking of Inspector Polat, we should also move swiftly to get him removed from this case. My father will have to use his political connections again to have this done. This will not please him. He prefers to use his political influence to catch bigger fish, such as a permit for a lucrative construction project, rather than to protect small fish like you.”

  Then Tilki focused his gaze once more on Ozmen, and when he finally spoke, his voice had a sharp edge. “We also do not want the police to question you about your former romantic involvement with Professor Yilmaz. If the police look for a motive for her murder—an old lovers’ quarrel, for instance—and her parents tell them about her former engagement to you, you could become a suspect. I think you need to take a long trip. To Mexico City, where we are renewing our former ties with Diego Alvarez. He once did business with Abdullah Catli.”

  “Has Alvarez responded yet to the proposal that we left with Murat in New York? I think he planned to use that new employee, Bigelow, to carry the message to Alvarez.”

  “Yes, Alvarez will be meeting with Murat in New York in early September—next week in fact. You should be there. They have spoken by telephone. Alvarez accepts the broad outline of our proposal to ship heroin and cocaine from Mexico to the British market. The Serious Organised Crimes Agency has scored some regrettable successes recently in intercepting our vehicles carrying drugs from the European continent to Britain via the Chunnel. We need to establish an alternative route, shipping directly from Mexico to Britain via the Port of Liverpool.”

  “That was my idea,” Ozmen said, hoping to ingratiate himself. “You may remember—”

  Tilki cut him off. “We must make absolutely clear to Alvarez that we do not want to compete with Los Zetas in the American market. I may join your meeting via teleconference. We may want to arrange a few small shipments into the United States only to test whether we are using the right methods. But the big prize is the British market. Once we have refined our technique of concealing brown sugar within refined sugar, we can extend this strategy to the German market as well.”

  “Brown sugar?”

  “Yes, that is American slang for heroin. Now, after the New York meeting, you should go to Veracruz to coordinate with Alvarez and his associates on the details. Nothing must be allowed to go wrong. We must repair our distribution system, which has encountered a number of setbacks recently—the boarding of the Light of the East in the Aegean Sea and the interception of one of our vehicles in London, to mention just two.”

  Ozmen rose from his chair, sensing the meeting was coming to an end.

  “One more thing, Ozmen, before you leave. You should not become too relaxed on your trip. Your recent performance has been unsatisfactory.” Tilki almost shouted, “The Ottoman Trading Company has not survived and prospered for nearly three centuries by making mistakes. If anything goes wrong with our new venture, I will have your head. Quite literally!”

  Amateur Sleuth

  Chapter Thirty-One

 
; Ozmen pretended to doze on his cot, and Bob crouched against the wall, his head bent. Only Dave seemed awake with his thoughts. He got up to stretch his legs and silently paced up and down the length of the small room. He wondered what had ever possessed his brother to take a job with the Ottoman Trading Company—a very peculiar employer, as he had discovered when Bob had come to him six weeks ago to ask for a large loan. Bob had been with his employer for only eight months when the loan request was made, and Dave had done some due diligence.

  A quick internet search had turned up some surprising information. An established trading company founded in the early eighteenth century, it had, over time, diversified into a broad range of products: foodstuffs, shoes, carpets, and in recent decades, electronics, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. Headquartered on the Nuruosmaniye Caddesi in the Fatih district of Istanbul, its operations had spread globally to Beirut, Dubai, Karachi, Baku, Hong Kong, Marseille, Rotterdam, London, and New York.

  Family-owned, the company was obviously well-connected politically. The website had carried a photo of the family patriarch, Emir Tilki, at a reception with Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister. Most senior executives in the company had the same surname, Tilki, suggesting a very tight-knit hierarchy dominated by the patriarch’s sons, brothers, and nephews.

  Most references to the company on the internet referred to business deals in the public domain. Its owners clearly preferred to keep a low profile, discreetly on the edge of the social whirl of Istanbul’s business elite. But there were two references that had intrigued Dave. An article on the history of Turkish trading companies noted that OTC had been founded as a slave trader before slavery had been abolished in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.

  The second article reported that the patriarch had been questioned during the investigation that followed the sensational car crash at Susurluk in 1996, which only his friend—a Turkish member of parliament, Sedat Bucak—had survived. Other occupants of the Mercedes-Benz who had died in the assassination attempt were Abdullah Catli, a notorious heroin trafficker and killer; his mistress, a former beauty queen; and the deputy police chief of Istanbul. The scandal had been Turkey’s Watergate, revealing the deep linkage between the illicit drug trade and the Turkish state. But no charges had been laid against the owner of the Ottoman Trading Company, who, in the following eighteen years, had avoided even a whiff of scandal.