Blown Circuit (5 page)

It happened in the blink of an eye. One moment he was helpless and the next he had reached beneath him for some kind of gleaming blade. It must have been tucked flat into the back of his towel because I hadn’t seen it in the takedown. He came up fast and furious with his left arm slicing towards me. It was all I could do to leap away. Even then I felt his razor-sharp blade shave the hairs off my forearm.
Just lovely,
I thought.
A knife.
I really, really didn’t like knives.

Jean-Marc arched his back and leapt onto his feet. He was brawny, but he was also fit as was evidenced by the move. It required strong legs and a limber back and excellent abdominal muscles to jump up like that. In that moment, I realized that I may have underestimated him as an opponent. No doubt he’d done martial arts training of some sort, judo, or grappling of some kind. I had no idea why he had turned on me, but I was in for a fight.

I stood back, dancing on the balls of my feet on the slick floor, loose and ready. I hadn’t been hit yet and I didn’t want to be, given the weapon Jean-Marc was now brandishing. It wasn’t a regular knife. It was a short saber with a forward-curved blade and a bone hilt called a
yatagan
. In my brief time in Turkey, I’d already seen several of them for sale in shopkeeper’s windows. The sword had probably been hidden behind one of the stone basins prior to my arrival at the hammam. The yatagan’s single-edged, hand-forged steel blade gleamed in the mist. It was short enough to be concealable, but long enough to provide a good reach. I had little doubt that a single swipe of its high-carbon steel would be fatal. The trick would be, not getting hit.
 

Jean-Marc didn’t waste time talking. He let the blade speak instead. I twisted to my left watching him swing the glinting steel through the space I had occupied only a moment before, his wet towel making a stretching snap as he moved. I was thankful that he was still wearing it. I guessed he’d brought a spare towel to choke me with.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about this?” I said.

“I am sure, Michel.”

I continued to back up toward the marble octagon in the center of the room. Go to a knife fight without a knife and the number-one thing you want is a gun. Barring a gun, second choice is room to move. I didn’t need Jean-Marc swinging his yatagan at me with one hand while some well-meaning wall held my back in place for him. I stepped backward, Jean-Marc matching my step.

“Jean-Marc! What the hell are you trying to do to me, man?”

“It is not you, Michel. It is the job.”

“What job?” I asked.

Jean-Marc smiled.
 

“Killing you, my friend.”

Chapter 8

I
FELT
THE
adrenaline surge through my body as he said the words. I’d struck his groin and flipped him on his back, but the Frenchman was tough, I gave him that. Whatever damage I’d been able to inflict, it hadn’t been near enough. Jean-Marc parried forward with the blade, scything by my shoulder for a second time. I glanced back, counting two more steps behind me before I hit the marble octagon in the middle of the room. I knew I couldn't keep backing up. Defense may keep you alive, but it doesn’t win a fight. I wanted to know, scratch that, I needed to know why my colleague was attacking me. And that meant I needed to go on the offensive.
 

But Jean-Marc didn’t need to know that. Better for him to think he had me. I counted another step backward. Jean-Marc grinned like a man possessed, sweat glistening on his forehead. The guy seriously wanted to hurt me, there was no question about that. He darted forward and thrust his yatagan down again. I turned, spinning on my left heel. Even so, I felt the blade connect with the tiny hairs on my arm for a second time. Any closer and he’d have me. I needed a plan.

That’s when I saw the old guy sneak out of the smaller hammam room. He had confused expression on his wet, wrinkled face. Jean-Marc must have followed my eyes. An essential rule of hand-to-hand combat is that you carefully control your eye contact. Just as an askance look can tell you what your opponent might do next, your eyes also telegraph your every move. But in this case, I didn’t mind Jean-Marc being distracted. I wanted him to be. I could use that to my advantage. Except for the fact that I hadn’t anticipated his response. Not entirely anyway.

Jean-Marc scythed around with the blade and connected with the old guy’s throat, just below his right ear. He parried forward far enough to ensure solid contact and continued spinning in a viscous arc, slashing the old man’s throat from ear to ear. The poor guy fell to the floor, bleeding out like a geyser before he could even scream. Crimson blood sprayed the walls. And Jean-Marc’s momentum carried through to me, big drops of blood glistening off the yatagan’s blade.

Now I was curious, but more than that, I was angry. Why had he gone after a civilian? Two possibilities: either the old guy wasn’t a civilian or, more likely, Jean-Marc didn’t want to leave any witnesses. And that’s why being mad was a problem. Because being mad could compromise my judgment. And in a life-and-death situation, compromised judgment kills as quickly as a bullet.

“Are you sure you don’t want to share whatever it is you’ve got on your mind?” I said.

“There is nothing to share, Michel.”

Michel. The way he said
Me shell,
with a long e and soft c, it sounded like a girl’s name. It didn’t matter, I wasn’t taking the bait. Jean-Marc slashed down with the yatagan, the tip of his blade millimeters from my heart. I actually felt the hot humid air part as he scythed through the move.

 
The way he slashed the sword told me something about him. It told me that Jean-Marc was a bit of a one-trick pony. Sure he was solidly built with a massive upper body. And he was pretty quick too. I knew that he’d crush me if he got me into a hold. But I hadn’t seen any real grace out of him since he’d flipped off his back to a standing position on the floor. Some guys are like that. They know a few good tricks, but not a whole lot more. That was my advantage. Now I needed to seize it.

I took my final step backward as Jean-Marc parried forward again. Except it wasn’t a step. It was a leap. I leapt up onto the marble octagon directly behind me, my toes gripping the smooth wet marble as I landed in a crouch. The truth was, I almost slipped. Wet marble surfaces aren’t to be toyed with, but neither are knives, so I was two for two, and more important, I was still standing.

The leap took Jean-Marc by surprise, I could tell because his balance was thrown off as he slashed downward missing me handily. He was leaning forward. Not far enough forward that he was in any danger of falling over, but far enough forward that he was off balance, if only slightly. The other thing working to my advantage was the blood. The hammam floor was now slick with the old guy’s blood and Jean-Marc had just stepped into a river of it.

I was in an awkward position because of my improvised backward leap, but I wasn’t helpless. Far from it. Still, I was going to have to adjust. I’m already tall and having an extra twenty-four inches of height, while great for the view, wasn’t helping me at that moment. So I sunk low on my left leg and planted my foot firmly, letting go with my right leg in a massive front kick. The chest would have been the obvious target—easier to hit—but I didn’t want to go for the chest. I didn’t want this to keep going on and on. I wanted to end it. So I aimed for the bottom of Jean-Marc’s square jaw putting every ounce of my nearly two hundred pounds behind it.

I regretted the move the instant I did it. I knew what the result was going to be, and I had jumped the gun. There was information I needed to get from Jean-Marc, but I didn’t think I was going to get it now. The kick was too focused. Too well planted. I felt the ball of my foot connect with the stubble of his chin, forcing his head back. But it didn’t stop there. The kick was too powerful and I followed through with it all the way.
 

I felt resistance, and then a crack, like what you hear when someone cracks your back. Except it was the cracking of Jean-Marc’s neck. The human neck has a decent range of motion back and forth, but it’s not infinite. And it’s no match for a well-timed blow aiming to obliterate it. With that crack, I knew immediately that I had delivered a lethal blow. My foot had severed Jean-Marc’s head from his spinal cord as surely as if he had been hung. He stopped breathing before he hit the blood-soaked floor.

The yatagan fell from Jean-Marc’s outstretched arm, landing with a metallic clank. I stepped off the marble slab carefully avoiding the old guy’s blood to check what I had done, but it was as I expected: Jean-Marc’s wide blue eyes had already started to glaze over. It was the same with the old man. He was still bleeding out, but more from gravity than anything else. I checked his pulse even though I could see that his heart had stopped beating.

The whole thing made me angry. Angry at the waste. Angry with myself for jumping the gun. I checked the old man’s hammam towel to ensure he wasn’t hiding anything that might point to his presence there, but there was nothing. He seemed to be exactly what he appeared. A civilian. Then I checked Jean-Marc’s hammam towel. Nothing there either.
 

So far I had avoided stepping in the slick of blood covering the floor, and I wanted to keep it that way. I didn’t need the local police following my bloody footprints around the block, but I wasn’t about to walk out unarmed either, so I grabbed the yatagan off the floor. Then I picked up my water bottle and the amulet and strode out the swinging door.

Chapter 9

B
OTH
THE
ANTEROOM
containing the shower and toilets and the lobby were empty. No sign of the heavyset guy. No sign of the guy folding towels either. I opened the changing room and quickly dressed. After that I picked up both backpacks, my plastic bag, and the yatagan, and a few seconds later I was on the street.

The first thing I did was duck into a nearby doorway and pull out my Swiss Army knife. I had a decent vantage of the hammam and nobody was converging on it yet. I cut a one-inch slit into the bottom of the left strap of either pack. Then I pulled out the tracking beacons I found there and crushed them beneath the soul of my shoe. I knew that the packs were equipped with the long-range beacons so an agent could be located in an emergency, which, under the circumstances, was exactly what I didn’t want to have happen.

I stuffed the smaller daypack into my larger pack. Then I cut a makeshift scabbard for the yatagan out of the towel. I wrapped the blade and slipped the yatagan deep into the long front pocket of my cargo shorts, pulling down my T-shirt to conceal the hilt. Moments later I was back on the street. The city had come to life since I’d entered the hammam, the scent of freshly grilled lamb and diesel hanging in the air. Men walked by with enormous loads on their backs while street sweepers pulled carts of trash, vendors selling everything from vegetables to tobacco to Turkish Delight in the narrow cobbled alleys.

I was wound up like a clock. I had just killed a man, taken a life. It was something I’d been trained to do, yet something I’d never actually done. But I’d done it now, Jean-Marc’s lifeless body was testament to that. And though I wasn’t proud of what I’d done, I didn’t feel sorry for it either. Because the die had been cast. It had been him or me.

What I needed to do was manage the aftermath. I needed to ensure that I wasn’t being followed and I needed to know why Jean-Marc had turned on me. His behavior had thrown my entire relationship with the CIA into question. I didn’t know whom I could trust.

I replayed the events over in my mind from the beginning. Jean-Marc had sat down. He had said it was hot. He had told me that the authorities were looking for me. He had asked me what I had found.

The Eye. I had shown him the Turkish Eye.
 

I took the Eye out of the plastic bag. Looked at it. I still didn’t see what he had seen. But whatever it was, it had been important to him. It had been important enough to try to kill me. But what was it? There was nothing about the thing that was remarkable. No code. No message. Just clay. Glazed, kiln-baked clay, shiny on one side, rough on the other. I thought about it. Then I bent low as I passed an iron hitching post and smashed the amulet down hard.

It broke in two and I immediately saw that a thin transparent strip held the clay together. Gotcha. I turned in to a smaller alley and went to work separating the shiny transparent strip from the clay. The strip looked like it was made from some kind of heat-resistant material and I removed it easily from the clay. But what was interesting was what it said. Typed on the face of the strip was a message.

The message read:
 

TelD CaNtIVE OON SHEPs

If the amulet was a message from my father, it seemed pretty obvious what he was trying to say. He was trying to disguise what he was writing behind poor typing, but with a few simple substitutions, a T for an H, an N for a P, an I for an E, I thought the meaning was pretty clear:
 

HELD CAPTIVE ON SHIPS

Why it was ships plural, and the word “ON” was misspelled, or how he had managed to bake a tiny transparent silicone strip into a piece of pottery while held captive on a ship, I had no idea. Still, taken as a whole, the message made sense. It did, however, beg a logical question. If the message was indeed from my father, had he received outside help? I flipped the strip over. On the other side it said, “
Sipahi Caddesi
.” I didn’t know who, if anyone, was helping my father. I couldn’t even be certain that the message
was
from my father, but I did recognize
caddesi
as the word for street. After quickly consulting my iPhone, I headed to the Grand Bazaar.

M
Y
CAP
PULLED
low over my eyes, it didn’t take me long to reach the bazaar’s pedestrian-choked Byzantine gates. The Grand Bazaar was, in essence, a huge collection of alleys in old Istanbul that had been covered with an arched roof hundreds of years previously. The walkways were lined with shops on either side, the tiled floor as uneven as the alleys that had predated it. Incense burned and touts cried out for business, scimitars and spices shared shelf space with the usual array of imported souvenirs.