The Red Room (28 page)

“Israelis and Iranians. That’s reliable.”

“If we interrupt a defection, the Israelis will not be pleased.”

“I’m way too stoned for that,” he says.

Her laugh echoes. She rises onto her tiptoes and kisses his cheek. For a moment, neither knows what to do next. “I will go to the ferry,” she says.

“Relax,” he says. “Deep breath. At all times be yourself. At no time—”

“—be who they expect.”

Knox hears something grumble from deep in his throat. He’s grateful no words have come out.

G
race finds it difficult to reconcile the beauty and tranquillity of the Bosphorus with her current assignment. A sense of impending dread and impatience feels misplaced among the churning green waters, the bobbing boat traffic, the stillness of both shores. Men have fished these waters since before Christ. The Crusaders crossed this way, as did the Romans and the Greeks before them. Western civilization’s storytelling origins connect to these twin shores, and though thousands of years behind that of her own Chinese culture, she can’t help but respect the history.

Indeed, she’s left with no choice but to appreciate the few minutes for the respite they offer. A lungful of sweet air, a study of the silver beads of rainwater as they plunge from the awning’s edge to the deck and splatter. The murmur of Turkish. A child’s self-conscious laugh.

It ends too quickly with her feet working furiously to fight the crowds. She window-shops, using the glass as a mirror in which to search for predators. As she catches sight of her own reflection, she understands herself, believes in her abilities, defines herself through this work in ways her forensic accounting cannot. The fieldwork strikes a balance that suits her, allowing her to exercise two sides of
her being. Yin and yang. Her father would be proud, would understand, while her mother would fear for her and counter any justifications Grace might have with concerns for her safety.

But it is exactly that, her safety or the threat thereto, that thrills, that excites, that boils away the tedious hours of searching spreadsheets for inconsistencies and leaves behind a hard layer of purpose.

She boards the return ferry so late that she has to talk the deckhand into reopening the chain that blocks her way. She has yet to spot a tail but knows she will not if Mossad are involved. Knox has made a decent plan, but it can be easily defeated if there’s a team surveilling her. She heads toward the electronics shop cautiously, still stinging from her last visit and Dulwich’s presence. Xin had obviously betrayed her to the man—something she would have considered impossible. It’s an odd and indifferent world, she thinks, when the only person left to trust is John Knox.

By the time she climbs into a taxi in Tepebasi, she can’t sit still. She itches all over. Her throat and mouth are dry. Her feet are sweating and her eyes sting.

She circles the block on foot twice before entering the shop and confronting the young man behind the counter for a second time. She locks the door behind her.

“What did you discover about this pacemaker? Why have I not heard from you?” she asks. Her underlying confidence and intention cause the kid to lean back from the counter separating them. She was the last person he expected.

She leans across the counter. “What was found inside this device?” The chill resulting from Knox’s suggestion that Mashe Okle’s death, now or later, from his apparent heart condition will result in Knox being a scapegoat, has not left her. Perhaps the pacemaker is to cause a stroke, or permanent disability; for Knox, perhaps for her, the result will be the same.

For her and this kid, it is as if they are picking up an ongoing conversation. But he has no desire to participate. From the looks of him, he’d as soon vaporize than face this fire-breathing woman with her bloodshot eyes and sour expression.

“Programmed with a timer? What makes it different?” She considers other possibilities. Mashe’s passing of his business card and his emphasis of its importance suggests it must carry the spycraft, leaving the pacemaker as a weapon against Mashe. “The battery contains compounds that respond to radio waves? Depletes the charge?”

The mention of radio waves wins a tell—the kid’s right eyebrow twitches perceptibly.

Adrenaline floods her veins and she vaults the counter, terrifying the young man, who outweighs her, is taller by nearly a foot and has a sizable reach on her. But he cowers as she takes him one-handed by the front of his shirt and, dropping her purse, pushes him out of his chair and against the wall. He raises a hand defensively and she gut-punches up under his ribs.

“Tell me what you told our people about it.” She knees him in the groin. She wishes the punishment didn’t feel so good, wishes she didn’t want to keep going. Three or four more blows, and he’d be on the floor unconscious. The urge is so great she has to battle it to prevent herself from losing the information she’s after.

A blink of light on the wall makes her knees go weak. She drops, bringing the man down with her, a response conditioned by training and instinct. The immediate thought is of a rifle scope’s lens. But a second look out the shop and across the street tells her it was likely the face of a cell phone. She focuses in on a strongly built man with a phone to his ear.

John was right. She’s been followed.

The impossibility of it won’t allow consideration. Her brain won’t
go there. She took every precaution boarding the ferry; circled the block twice. Never an inkling of a surveillant.

How?
she wonders.

Her heart is working so fast, pounding so hard that she can’t get a word out. She has the boy gagged with her palm, his ear lobe twisted and ready to be torn from his skull in a bloody mess. In a nanosecond, she relives her exchange with Knox, the ferry rides, the tram and funicular.

“Oh, my God!” The man outside didn’t follow her here; Dulwich didn’t follow her here.

She stares into the eyes of her captive, awaiting confirmation.

Terrified, he looks away.

Grace’s immediate thought is to stop John, but first there’s the agent watching the shop from across the street and the witness on the floor whose allegiances are well known.

“A GPS chip,” she says in Turkish, although she’s asking him a question. “You found a GPS chip inside the pacemaker.” Dulwich hadn’t been told by Xin, he’d followed the GPS signal. The man outside didn’t follow her, he’s been watching a store indicated by the same signal.

The boy cowers. She reaches for his throat; it’s a mistake. He reacts primordially, knocking her arm away, rolling and elbowing her in the chest as he struggles painfully to his knees. He reaches into an open drawer overhead. There’s a glint of a blade. Grace arches away from the box cutter as it swipes within an inch of her chin, so close it cleaves away a wedge of her hair. The severed strands rain to the floor. The loss inspires rage, more so than a nick or the drawing of blood. Grace blocks the man’s forearm, grabs his wrist and bites into his flesh like a hungry dog. He screams and releases the box cutter. Grace drives a tight fist into his nose, flattening it. Chops him
below the chin, disrupting his airflow, then slaps him twice, side to side. His broken nose gushes blood; his eyes roll. She slaps him again.

“Who else did you tell?” she demands, stretching to reach her purse.

“Hong Kong. I swear. Only Hong Kong.” No name. Oddly, it’s what convinces her he’s telling the truth.

“Doors, front and back. Any other way out?”

When he hesitates, she raises her bloodied fist a second time.

“Below,” he says. “Romans.”

Through the gray glass of the display cases, and out through the equally gray windows to the street, she sees the agent approach the shop. His patience tested, he wants a closer look. She knows such training. When he sees the empty shop, he will call it in and kick the door open. She has, at most, a few seconds’ head start.

“Stairs?”

The shopkeeper’s eyes direct her to a beaded doorway.

She’s fumbling with her phone as, descending too quickly, her feet slip out from under her. She hits the cellar floor bruised and hurting. Using the phone as a flashlight, she takes in low stone arches and a cobblestone floor connecting them. Stone walls form small bins and narrow stalls, which are now filled with crusted furniture and rusting paint cans. The projected light casts a sterile cone out into the dust kicked up by her rapid movements. She hurries through an ancient arch, then backs out because it dead-ends in clutter.

Has he trapped her?

She shines the light to the left of the stairs; hears the crash of the front door coming open. Another arch. Beyond it, another dead end.

Voices from above. The rattle of plastic beads. Grace quiets the light and pockets the phone in her shouldered purse.
Think!

The lights go on. Two lights. Compact fluorescent bulbs, a faint yellow as they warm to their brighter setting. Grace ducks through
an arch, moving away from the stairs, facing a low wall of mortared brick and rock added centuries after the Romans. To her, it marks the start of another building. She has an image now of an alley overhead, a cluster of four structures sharing an interlocking cellar, the livestock sequestered beneath the living space as a source of heat.

It follows that there would have been a ramp to street level. Whether that exit still exists is anybody’s guess, but much of the furniture appears to be too large for the stairwells and, as she comes across a crumbling single-horse buggy, its leather cracked and mouse-eaten, her hopes rise. She crosses beneath one building to the next. Here, the low stone archways are of a wider design. The distant light, now a pale luminescence, fails to reach around corners.

Her stalker has gone silent, expertly navigating the treachery of the cellar’s contents. He could be two feet behind her; the knowledge puts her head on a swivel and sends her heart into her throat. Sweat catches her ribs and rolls sticky beneath her breasts. Increased distance equals increased darkness. The air smells of rodents and rust.

She ignites her phone, as much for the light of its screen as to check its signal. No bars. Making it dark again, she slips it away and uses the fading mental image to avoid twin stacks of sagging cardboard boxes, turns sideways to negotiate the narrow aisle between. Burned as a gray blue into the complexity of her optic nerve is the graphic of wooden handles collected into a whole. Gardening tools: spades, forks, a hoe, metal rakes.

Behind her, the bump of a leg against a cardboard box. Mingled with her panic is disbelief—how could he be so close? How has he caught up to her so quickly? She stumbles with the surprise.

From a pinprick in the dark pours blue light as her pursuer switches on a penlight. The light—only the light—lunges. Grace defends with a block. A flash of sparks. A jolt of electricity. He’s got a Taser. She chops the man’s arm and stumbles back, tripping over
her own feet but catching herself before fully falling. Throws a basket at him as the device whines, recharging.

Her hand wraps around wood. She lifts the spade from her waist with both hands and stabs for the light. She connects. He belches. The light aims skyward, illuminating cobwebs and gobs of cement frozen between seams. Returning her blow, the man knocks the spade from her hands with such force that it flies into the darkness and crashes. The high-voiced squeal of rats and the scampering of scratching nails on the stone send chills through her. Something hits her ankle and she hops and screams.

The whining of the device stops. The man lunges. Grace crashes, grabbing whatever is nearby and raising it between herself and her attacker. She feels the object drive into him, hears his raw cry.

The device clatters to the cobbles. The penlight rotates through the air like a spinning baton. In the strobe light, she catches the flashing image of the man; he’s clutching a pitchfork, its blade embedded in his left thigh.

As the light hits the stone, it goes dark. Grace has the presence of mind to retrieve her purse as she leaps past the staggering man. She collides with a stack. Another. Dust and cobwebs consume her. She spits and coughs and claws at nothing, running, falling forward, fighting against the sticky spider webs most of all. She hates spiders.

She’s struck in the back. Stabbed by a tine of the pitchfork, aimed at only the sounds she’s making in the dark. Her side clenches into a painful knot. She’s on the stone floor and crawling. Hears him dragging his leg as he comes up from behind her.

Somewhere ahead, the air glows a shade other than black. She’s drawn to that change. But he’s on foot and she’s on hands and knees and the accountant can work out the equation: he’s closing on her.

Grace reaches out blindly with both hands, searching. Backs
herself into a narrow, angled space between the rough wood of the crates and lowers her head like she’s carrying out afternoon prayers.

The sound of his panting and the dragging of his leg draw closer. He has lost the sound of her, the sense of her, and he’s professional enough to turn that into caution. She smells him now—sour, slightly metallic from the bloody wound. Perhaps he smells her, too, for he stops.

There is no sound. It is a vacuum of space, without light, without so much as a hum or crackle. They are locked in a three-thousand-year-old vault playing a child’s game of who can hold his or her breath the longest.

Grace’s lungs burn. Her diaphragm convulses in sharp attacks, begging for air.

She feels it too late—a single bead of sweat runs down her jaw from her hairline to her chin. It settles, grows fat and falls as loudly as a cymbal crash.

E
xcuse me, sir?” Besim pleads with Knox, desperate to correct his impression of Knox’s request.

“Just so,” Knox says. He’s not going to argue strategy with a limousine driver.

“Please allow me to—”

“No.” Knox leaves it at that. “The Holiday Inn. Hurry, please.”

It’s true they won’t be watching the hospital for Victoria, but Knox is a marked man. With each assault, his enemy has escalated its effort to abduct him. With Mashe Okle’s “Get Out of Jail Free” business card hot in his pocket, Knox doubts they will be any less forgiving.

He pulls up his pant legs and scratches loose the scabs from the bruised welts on his shins, crying out regardless of his effort not to. Besim checks the mirror. Knox has to pull the scab from his right leg to get the wound open. Blood trickles down both shins.

Just right.

The car slows and pulls to the curb. Knox looks for the hotel.

Too soon,
he thinks.

“Please, the address once more?” Besim is turned, looking back between the front seats.

“The Holiday Inn,” Knox says, unreservedly impatient and demanding. “It’s right there north of the hospital.”

Only as the driver’s left arm swings around does Knox rehash a laundry list of do’s and don’ts. Do thorough background checks on even the most inconsequential contacts. Don’t ever become complacent in the field.

A bright flashlight beam stings Knox’s eyes as a red laser dot finds his chest. The Taser hides well in Besim’s gloved hand. Knox feels the impact—two needles shot at ninety-five miles an hour, capable of piercing two inches of fabric.

But not a passport.

The windbreaker’s myriad pockets save him. It’s the sheriff with the Bible in his pocket; zipped into his jacket’s internal chest pocket, a space meant for his phone, is his passport. It has taken the hit from the Taser’s darts. Knox rolls against the stubborn door. Locked by Besim, it doesn’t open. Knox reaches for the knob as Besim ejects the Taser’s dart cartridge, converting the device into a stun gun. The man’s fluidity and speed tell Knox all he needs to know: this man is not a career limo driver.

The door comes open. Knox falls to the curb. Besim dives between the seats, lunging and leading with the Taser. He makes contact, but Knox feels nothing. The Taser has not had time to recharge.

Knox is up and on his feet. His right pant leg is hoisted, his shin bleeding badly. Pedestrians coming toward him jump out of his way, which is not what he wants; he could use the cover of a crowd.

Besim proves himself agile and fast as he claws his way across the backseat and out the open door. Knox’s legs are no match for such a man; he is certain to lose this race.

His gift is forethought, the ability to see around corners. The small Taser will be used to buy the owner thirty seconds to flee the scene—or search the victim. Besim is on the team that’s pursuing Mashe Okle’s dead drop in a humane manner, not the team aiming to put a bullet in the back of their subject’s skull. It’s all the information Knox needs.

He prepares himself for defeat, an anathema.

The three flags hanging off the building at a forty-five-degree angle signal the finish line. He will accept defeat only once he’s there.

He’s suddenly looking down the wrong end of the telescope—thirty meters becomes three hundred as an ill-advised glance back confirms Besim is up and shoving pedestrians aside like they’re Styrofoam. Knox has ten meters on the man and twenty to go. Eight and eighteen. Six and fifteen. The math doesn’t hold up; he won’t make it.

A dozen thoughts crowd his brain, none acceptable—holler for help; turn and fight; use a human shield to take the next attempt with the stun gun. Knox works the slalom to avoid giving the man an easy shot, but he stretches out the distance to the flags by doing so. He uses a mother and stroller effectively and is able to move for a few meters in a straight line. But he feels Besim closing, hears him yelling at pedestrians to get out of his way and shouting, “Police!” in a bid to promote himself as an authority.

The stun gun may be the least of it, Knox realizes.

Unable to get up any head of steam because of his injured shins, Knox is bracing himself for the inevitable when the gods of chance give him a gift. Traffic is at its standard-issue Istanbul standstill; a private car has seized upon an open space at the curb and is being loaded far from the three flags at the hotel entrance. The hotel bellman wears a narrow-waisted black collarless jacket with silver frog
button loops and tuxedo pants with a satin stripe down the side. His narrow head hides itself in an oversized purple fez with a gold tassel that has lost most of its sheen, like the unkempt tail of a nag long since put to pasture. The placement of the car shortens Knox’s destination by ten meters or more. He eyes the man’s jacket again as he crashes into him, screaming that he needs a hospital. Clings to the bellman, panting, sweaty, his blood-covered leg echoing the alarm.

“Nightingale Hospital! Please! At once!”

Besim stops and is immediately shoulder-bumped by a pedestrian who didn’t anticipate the obstacle. The collision half spins him, leaving him scowling over his left shoulder at Knox as the two meet eyes. He radiates a predator’s determination, tries but fails to contain his seething frustration.

Knox allowed himself to trust the man. Chastises himself for that oversight. Wonders if there’s any way to catalogue the damage done by his planning sessions with both Grace and Victoria in the backseat. What pieces of the plan, if any, are out there? How much does Besim know?

Damage assessment is critical, but there’s no time. The bellman has called over a pair of his fellow bag handlers; because of the availability of the luggage cart, the three install Knox on its platform like a trio of doting aunts. A group of Turks forms around the injured Westerner, and one rough-faced man has the audacity to stab Knox’s shin painfully with a probing finger. The bellman slaps out, pushes away the curious offender.

His head swimming, Knox has a memory of his brother, Tommy, pulling him along an uncooperative sidewalk in their Radio Flyer wagon. It’s a painfully vivid and present image, so overwhelming that for a moment he’s transported back to Hamtramck beneath the clattering leaves of seasonal maples, shedding their leaves for fall in
a sound eerily reminiscent of the plane trees that rattle overhead. The sound stitches with that of a siren blaring, and Knox realizes he’s lost more than a few seconds.

“Police!” Knox hears a new voice enter the mix. Besim is coming in for another pass.

Knox grabs the sleeve of the bellhop that rescued him—Furkan, his name badge reads—and pulls him down. “No badge! Not police. He is who hurt me!”

Furkan’s head snaps up in Besim’s direction; the bellhop comes around the moving luggage rack with alacrity and gets up in Besim’s grille, demanding to see his identification—

An instant later, Furkan sinks bonelessly to the sidewalk, a limp pool of flesh and fabric. The man’s collapse is so immediate and frightening that his fellow workers attack Besim as a unified tag team, driving him back into a parked car in a resoundingly aggressive move that pins and punishes Besim while simultaneously searching him. The Taser that dropped Furkan clacks to the concrete, followed by Besim’s cell phone, which breaks into pieces. A black leather wallet falls. It is snatched up and opened.

Besim steals it back in a flash and makes the two men pay for their insolence, the first with a sprained knee, the second, a stunned solar plexus. Besim bends for the phone, but Knox is off the cart. He kicks the phone beneath the parked car. Besim levels him, shoving Knox onto his back; Knox’s head strikes the concrete. Besim empties Knox’s pockets like a pickpocket, transferring the contents to his own. Throws open the Scottevest and flattens the nylon mesh lining to inspect the contents. Is given pause by the closeness of the approaching siren. Leaving Knox’s passport and money clip on the sidewalk, Besim keeps the rest as he slips away, blends into the growing crowd and disappears.

Knox rolls to Furkan, who is coming awake. Knox stretches for
the cell phone, pockets it as the wounded bellmen cuss in English, still trying to help Knox. Any one of them might be a candidate for the ambulance as it pulls up, but it’s Knox who’s tended to, his shins dressed with bandages before he’s loaded into the back of the step van.

Furkan was down for less than a minute. He’s groggy but on his feet and trying to help the paramedics, one of whom is a woman wearing a white lab coat and low black heels.

“Thank you!” Knox calls out to Furkan. The young man rubs his forehead; he’ll be nursing a powerful headache. He manages a slight nod.

The ambulance’s rear doors close with a bang.

—

W
HEELED
INTO
EMERGENCY
on an ambulance gurney, Knox slips undetected past a man who could easily be an agent waiting outside. Knox averts his face—currently obscured by an oxygen mask—while celebrating his decision to complicate his means of arrival. It looks like it’s paid off.

In the distance, he spots a group of male nurses smoking cigarettes, their backs pressed up against the building’s façade. Any of the staff could belong to the same team as the man watching the emergency room doors. Knox is battling a small army.

Installed in an examination area sectioned off by a drape, Knox goes to work, painfully stripping down to his bare torso and pulling on the hospital gown left for him. He checks his phone—nothing from Victoria. Considers switching out SIM chips, but fears his original chip can be traced. Can’t afford the delay of being put into the medical system.

He peers out and spots a line of wheelchairs on the far side of a chaotic, crowded nurse’s station. Bundles the heavy windbreaker
and his shirt into a football beneath his left arm. His chest wound chooses this moment to be a violent offender; he stifles his own complaint, burying the pain. Whenever possible, hide out in the open. Knox approaches the nurse’s station and stands, waiting for attention.

When no one pays him any, he takes a business card from an acrylic stand and moves on, down the hall toward the restroom, passing the line of wheelchairs. Uses the facilities. Takes a seat in one of the chairs and, placing the bundle on his lap, wheels his way past the nurse’s station and along the corridor. When the elevator doors open on the eleventh floor a few minutes later, there’s an unexplained empty wheelchair in the elevator car, looking lost and forlorn.

True to her word, a text arrives from Victoria. She’s in position to call Akram. Knox, head down, wears the patient frock, carries the windbreaker bundle under his arm. He limps slowly down the hall—doesn’t have to fake it—ears pricked for the strains of “Brown Sugar,” Akram Okle’s ringtone for Victoria’s phone.

The next people to grab him will find his pockets empty. He will be tortured, possibly to death, for the location of the business card Mashe Okle passed him. A card he no longer has. Referring such people to other agents will only infuriate them and intensify the level of questioning. His presence here, then, has little to do with benevolence: it’s a matter of self-preservation. Survival of the fittest. Knox has an angle to play, a way to avoid a fatwa and turn the agents back onto Mashe.

But he must get face time with Mashe, and he must make sure any agents wanting him see that he does. Without personal contact, his plan goes bust.

Victoria, fueled by greed, walked into the snare. Her association with Knox and her history with Akram may put her at risk, something Knox wants to avoid. He’s counting on Akram’s incoming calls being monitored and traced. She is on their radar—electronically
tracked. He believes she has led agents back to the hospital. They have observed her entering. Knox’s exchange of texts with her has confirmed his presence here and has hopefully focused attention on the cardiac ward; with any luck, they are monitoring the cardiac ward using the hospital security cameras. Possibly there’s a doctor or nurse working with them.

Despite the wall stickers advising all persons in the hospital to turn off cell phones, Knox hears the opening riff of “Brown Sugar” from down the hall. He’s still too far away to pinpoint the exact room—but he’s moving closer. He pushes his agonized legs faster, finally raising his chin and daring to show his face to the security cameras.

Knox stops abruptly.

From the end of the hall, David Dulwich looks back at him.