The Red Room (30 page)

T
he heel of his shoe is used to eliminate the fisheye lens in the upper corner of the elevator car. Knox slams his thumb against the buttons, lights up three consecutive floors below him. After an empty stop, he’s joined by several nurses and an orderly tending to a young girl in a wheelchair. They all look at him when the elevator makes the next stop and Knox doesn’t depart. They disembark at lobby level. Knox rides to the first of three marked basement levels.

He moves quickly for the nearest exit. It’s all timing now. They can’t cover every exit, every street.

He’s comfortable with his chances. His shins feel surprisingly better; he’s found the right balance of meds. He’s through the exit and into a dark, underground parking garage before he can blink. Ducking, Knox works his way through the parked cars and light trucks, hoping to avoid closed-circuit cameras, though he doubts their existence due to the gloom.

At the exit, he stops to shed the pajama gown, pulls on his shirt, dons the windbreaker and hurries up a concrete ramp to join the crowd on a busy sidewalk. He’s all sparks and electricity, his motor
red-lining. It’s a high that blows away the pain meds, sending him into a giddy mental frenzy that results from this life-threatening game of hide-and-seek.

Two intersections north, he circles the block fully and uses a variety of methods to surreptitiously check for ground surveillance. It’s a fool’s errand—a small mobile team can easily follow him without detection. But he knows the drill, and he stays with it before mixing with the crowds at the Sisli Mosque plaza where he and Grace stood only days earlier. It feels much longer ago, and Knox wonders for a moment at the outcome had they never pursued the switched FedEx package.

He pictures Mashe Okle’s forty-five-minute procedure. The man walks out of the hospital with a GPS in his chest and leads the Israeli Air Force to the location of his thorium research bunker, none the wiser about the protection he’ll be rendering. The Israelis will be able to track him for ten years, kill him at a moment’s notice.

Knox enters the Holiday Inn minutes later. Heads toward the booth by the alternate exit.

No Grace.

I
t takes Grace time she doesn’t have to find the hospital’s staff lounge. It’s down a fluorescent corridor thirty feet beneath street level on S2, flanked on either side by men’s and women’s locker rooms where no security cameras cover the toilets and showers. Here she finds an abundance of hospital gowns, rubber gloves, masks, hats and shoe covers. She dons a green jumpsuit, waits for two cleaners to leave, and follows closely behind. By the time she’s left all this behind and is on the street again, she’s confident she has avoided detection.

She finds Knox in the restaurant booth drinking black coffee. Either the pain or the meds or both have spread fatigue onto his face. He tries to smile for her.

The bench seat is plastic, the lighting environmentally friendly, the buffet picked over. Grace shifts back and forth, unable to get comfortable.

“Making it a few blocks up the street is very different from getting through Customs.”

Knox flinches in agreement but doesn’t speak.

“Perhaps Besim—”

“He’s working for the Israelis.” He explains the end of his ride in terse, muttered sentences.

“It’s not possible,” she says. “I booked Besim, not Dulwich. My arrangements, not his. Dulwich wanted it this way.”

Knox grimaces and shrugs. Indifferent. “Fucking Sarge.”

“My phone!” she says, still stuck on how an employee of the Israelis had ended up her driver. “The Red Room. When they switched the phone. My new model allowed full surveillance no matter the SIM chips I used. When I called to book my driver . . . they rerouted the call.”

“Let’s save the CSI for later,” he says. Again, she misses the reference.

“He got the business card?”

Another smirk.

“He didn’t get the business card.” A statement she mulls over. “But if Besim works with the Israelis, then why did he tip me off to the man watching my apartment? A man we assume also to be Israeli.”

“We make too many assumptions.”

“Your theory doesn’t explain anything,” she complains.

“They wanted to sell you—us—on Besim’s loyalty.”

It hits her in the center of her chest. She wants to contradict him. Prove she knew what she was doing as a solo field op. Can’t. “I believed.”

“They underestimated you. If Besim hadn’t given you that guy, we’d never have picked up on the FedEx. It backfired on them because you’re way better at your job than they are at theirs.”

He’s trying to console her. It works. She has a great deal to learn yet, she thinks.

The waiter arrives. Grace orders coffee. Knox waves him away.

“Thorium,” Knox says.

“Need To Know,” says Grace. “The Iranians have always claimed peaceful use. Looks like they could claim that, however much they lied. A thorium reactor will not save the world, but it could nearly eliminate contamination. This would be a true game changer, John. Licensing such technology—the revenues would be staggering. Perhaps make up for shrinking oil reserves.” She lowers her voice additional decibels. “For the Israelis to bomb such research would be a public relations nightmare for decades to come.”

“So some benevolent billionaire—the Israeli equivalent of Richard Branson—with ties to the government, or at least a faction of the government, hires Primer, or Dulwich—who knows?—to find a way to exclude the thorium reactor from any future attack.”

“We didn’t need to know,” she says. “What did you mean by ‘faction’?”

Knox ignores the question, instead informing her there’s been a shift change at the hotel. “When your luck turns, it’s hell turning it back. More like a supertanker.”

“If I had any idea what you were talking about, it would help.” Between the medications and the beating he’s taken, it’s a miracle he’s conscious.

He sips from her coffee. “Shift change. The bellmen, too, I imagine.” He drinks more and sets down the mug.

There’s an American woman complaining to her husband at the salad bar. Looks like it might be her first time at one. The husband has little tolerance; he moves toward the cherry tomatoes, putting the cough screen between them.

“Another inconvenience,” Knox says, then adds, “‘If it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have no luck at all.’ I prefer the Cream cover, in case you were wondering.”

A waiter delivers a lamb shank. Knox has half of it gone before Grace can wave the waiter back and order the salad bar. His mouth
full of food, Knox shakes his head vigorously at her choice. Orders fish for her. The man writes down the order as he walks away.

Grace knows this particular John Knox personality. He has not shown it in a while, but he can be a confounding, frustrating and sarcastic man—and then there’s the John Knox that goes beyond even that.

This is the man she now faces.

“What I meant by faction was hawks and doves. Think about it: what are we doing here, Grace? You and me? Why us?”

“You explained this yourself: if it carried any Israeli fingerprints, Mashe Okle would have run back to Iran.”

“I was wrong.”

“You are definitely high.”

“Extremely.”

“Okay. Wrong, how?”

“All these guys we’ve been fighting, even the ones trying to kill us: they’re the same, but different. Two sides of the same coin. Hawks and doves. The hawks, the ones in charge, want every reactor, everything and anything to do with enrichment bombed back into the Stone Age. But there’s a catch—they would love to get their hands on any shopping list being couriered by top nuclear scientists in the hopes it gives them all the more evidence to start bombing tomorrow instead of being made to wait. That desire includes taking out possible couriers in hopes of recovering the list.

“The doves,” he continues, “seek the higher ground, but lack the political capital to convince others, so they hire—my guess—David Dulwich, not Rutherford Risk, because they know him. Someone who knows of him, or knows him personally. Let’s call him the client.” Knox meets eyes with her. His are so glassy they look ready to run, so bloodshot it’s amazing he can keep them open. “The client finances the op. No connection back to the doves. Not ever. Two
different sets of players on two opposite sides of the ball, and all on the same team. And us, you and me, in the middle.”

He returns to eating ravenously.

“Explain your reference to bad luck, please.” She has grown weary.

“The Chinese put way too much faith in luck,” Knox notes through a mouthful of food. “You should learn to care less about luck.”

She waits him out.

“An errand,” he says. “We need to run an errand.”

He wants to tease her into anger, or worse, begging. But he forgets how well she knows him.

“Can I do it for you? I would be happy to.”

He stops chewing. She wishes she had her phone’s camera at the ready.

“We should do it together. I don’t want to get separated.”

Grace relaxes. Hoping it doesn’t show. Knox has finished the lamb by the time her fish arrives. It’s the head and all—looks straight out of the Bosphorus. She doesn’t think she wants to deal with it until Knox fillets it for her. She tries a bite, and then consumes the remainder too quickly. Looks up to see him smiling. He has food in his teeth. He’s traded the coffee for a beer. This is the dangerous John Knox.

“He should have told us,” Knox says.

She’s the one with the mouthful. She tries to answer with her eyes.

“The Need To Know makes sense.” He’s talking to himself. “Here’s what I think: I think our friends to the south of here were divided on this issue. I would bet their faction in Istanbul is completely off the books—resources back home, but not on the clock. I think some higher thinker saw a way to contract a third
party—us—to do their bidding. No official involvement if it goes south, because official involvement could expose the bigger . . . fish.” He looks at her plate. “The fact that these bombs are indeed about to fall. The higher thinker doesn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater—the thorium project. This guy knows Dulwich somehow. Everyone knows Sarge. Appeals to his sense of patriotism, of higher good. Deep down, Sarge is a pussycat. Plus, he waves some serious change in his face. Sarge takes the bait. Uses the Red Room to sell it to both of us and to switch our phones. We buy into Rutherford’s involvement. And here we are.”

“If we had done as he—”

“Don’t go there.” He sips the beer. Then gulps. “We went where we went.”

“It’s my fault.”

“Nonsense.”

“I put us on that plaza.” She has to raise the question if he won’t. “Now that we know?”

“Sarge has his work cut out for him. First, he’ll have to explain why there’s no microdot on the hospital business card I gave him. Then he’ll have to talk them into letting us walk. We’ll likely be watched until whatever it is they have planned happens. After that, they can let us be.”

“You talk as if we’ll be allowed to board a plane and leave.”

“A train,” he says, correcting her. “But yeah, I get it. That’s where the errand comes in.” He signals for the check.

His overconfidence makes her uneasy, despite that she finds his courage under fire seductive and alluring. Her defenses lowered, she feels prepared to cross an unthinkable line. If they get out of here, she’s going to ask Dulwich for reassignment.

The bill paid, Knox moves surprisingly well on his injured legs as he leads her into the busy hotel lobby. “In case . . . in the event
we’re separated,” he says, “Besim didn’t get the business card. As I was going down, I slipped it into the right coat pocket of a bellman named Furkan.”

She lowers her voice to a whisper. “What might be Iran’s nuclear shopping list? In a bellman’s jacket pocket? What if he finds it? Discards it?”

Knox shrugs. “I’m more concerned that he may have worn his jacket home. But I doubt it. It’ll be on a rack in the basement.”

“The errand.”

“Yes.”

“Furkan.”

“Pinned to the jacket. A name tag.”

“Our free pass.”

“Nothing is ever lost, only misplaced,” he says. “We’ll find—fuck, fuck. And double fuck.”

She follows his line of sight.

“The receptionist?”

Knox has already swung his head in the direction of the street. A cab pulls to the curb. The driver climbs out at the same time as three others, all Caucasian—including the driver.

“She may have made me. An American hotel! The nerve!”

Grace pulls him away from the front doors. “Quickly!”

He tugs back. “This way.”

“We cannot stay.” They walk briskly, a pace just short of jogging.

“We won’t get another shot at the card. Our only plan, Mashe’s only plan is for us to use that card, to play that card.” She wants to argue, but he calls her. “You got anything?”

They’re engaged in a tug-of-war; she toward the hallway of boutique shops that likely leads to another outside exit; he to the right of the elevators and a green exit sign that depicts a little man running. It strikes her as absurdly symbolic. Stairs.

Finally, she gives in, allows him to drag her along. Her capitulation is based on one thing: she has no plan whatsoever. His plan, regardless how reckless, is better than none. Ahead of her, Knox lumbers down the stairs, stiff-legged but surprisingly fast. She’s angry that she has to work to keep up with him, furious that she’s gone along at all.

The bang of the door upstairs promises a fight. Knox is not going to turn himself in.

“Two to one,” she says.

“Yep.” As they exit the stairwell into a musty hallway that smells of cigarettes, Knox says, “Nothing permanent.”

He’s studying a highway of wrapped pipes overhead. Ethernet, telephone, power and bell wire. Tube lighting. Green skin.

“Twelve o’clock,” she says.

Two men wait at the long end of the dim hallway. Knox and Grace move slowly toward them. The idea is for these two to block egress—shield the only apparent choice of exit besides the door she and Knox have just come through.

That implies others coming from behind.

Knox is in bobble head mode. She feeds off his intensity. He appears to be assaying the building’s structural components. “Ha!” he says, steering her through the first door to their left. It looks like a backstage dressing room in a seedy rock club.

“Block it,” he says calmly.

She drags a file cabinet across the cluttered floor, knocking a coffeemaker to the ground. Wedges a chair beneath the doorknob. All combined, it might buy them a few seconds.

Behind her, Knox is rifling through a hanging rack of black sport jackets. She joins him, starting from the far end.

“Name tag: Furkan,” he reminds her.

“Right pocket,” she says, letting him know she pays attention to what he says.

He bounces awkwardly to her side and slaps the far wall. He’s back in the line of jackets before she manages to speak. His slap has called the dumbwaiter.

“A lift?”

“For laundry carts. But it’ll do.”

The first charge at the door rings out. She was wrong: ten seconds, at best.

“You knew.” She fails to contain her astonishment. “About the lift . . .”

“Old building. Low-gauge, high-voltage power line.” He points up to a thick black cable overhead. He followed it into this room.

They are nearing each other at the center of the rack when Knox stops abruptly.

“Go,” he says, eerily unemotional.

She moves to the specialized lift. Hauls out the empty laundry cart; it pirouettes on its wheels.

Knox searches the black jackets.

The door blows open behind a determined kick. A man enters. Caucasian. Perhaps not ex-military, but conditioned. Trained. If there was a chance for talking this out, it has passed. The look in his eye is all attack.

Knox spins and pulls down the manually operated door. Something flutters across her vision as Grace is trapped in darkness. A clunk; the groan of electricity. The lift ascends.

It takes her a moment to register the image seared onto her blindness—the flashes of white lingering in her vision like the pop of a camera’s flash.

A business card. The business card.