With one outboard down, I rapidly lost speed. Either I was going to sink, or they were going to catch me, but I didn’t know which would happen first. I glanced at my watch. It had been five minutes since I’d discovered the bomb and the freighter was still happily anchored. I focused on the far shore. I knew that I could still make it. I just needed a little luck. Scratch that, I needed a lot of luck. And that was when I heard a muffled bang.
It wasn’t a gunshot. It was thunderous, lower in tenor. It sounded as though maybe the bomb had finally blown. I glanced back from my leaky boat, except there wasn’t much to look at. A column of smoke ascended from the deck of the old freighter, but not much else. A low wave passed over the bow of my own boat and I knew I was taking in too much water. I had to throttle back. I did a bit. Not enough to take me off plane, but enough to lessen the impact of the next bit of rough water. As I glanced back again, my pursuers gaining, I realized that though surrender might not be much of an option, it might be all that I had.
Then the bomb really blew.
The sky lit up behind me as a tremendous ball of fire ascended into the air. It was followed by a blinding white light and an incredible percussive blast, deafening, like an angry hammer of God. The lights behind me slowed. They were no longer gaining; in fact, I could actually see them turning to check out the explosion. And I knew that was a mistake. Because a blast like that does something when it happens below the water. It displaces it. And I was sure that a hell of a wave was coming. If the shooters took it bow first, they’d be swamped.
I was two hundred feet from shore. Close enough to swim if I had to. If there was a wave, it would take a few more seconds to make it across the strait. It wasn’t going to topple buildings or anything. But it would do a pretty good job of slamming my little boat around. I braced myself. The shore was a hundred and fifty feet away. A hundred feet. Then I lost sight of the boats behind me as the sea rose in a wall of black water.
Not good. I didn’t want to get slammed into the concrete seawall. It would probably break every bone in my body. At the very least it would knock me out. But there wasn’t much I could do either. I looked up at the skyline of the old city rising above me, minarets reaching skyward. It was up to a higher power now. Or dumb luck. I felt the sea drop away below the Zodiac’s stern, the giant following sea filling the low-riding hull with salty water. There was no point in staying with the boat now. It had been picked up beneath me. My job was to not be crushed by the monster swell.
The cold sea hit me like a freight train, ripping me from the boat and propelling me forward with its fierce power. I caught a glimpse of the near shore. There were shops and cars and carts and lights, and an instant later, they disappeared from view as the foaming black sea pulled me under. I had no idea which way was up in the cold black water as it tossed me like a rag doll under the wave. Finally, lungs bursting, I felt my head pierce the oily surface of the sea.
Gasping for air, I looked up to see a lamppost before me. I reached forward, grappling it with both hands. There was debris in the water all around me, but I held on for all I was worth, muscles straining as the wave wrenched me back, the surge of water receding from the boardwalk. A second wave crashed in, but it was milder than the first. By the time the third wave had hit and left, the floodwaters had begun to recede. It was not yet dawn and the waterfront was deserted. I wasted no time picking myself off the cobblestones and heading out into the last of the night.
Chapter 4
I had been in Istanbul for less than twenty-four hours at that point. Straight from the frying pan into the fire. Happily, the flight from Vietnam had given me a brief opportunity to recuperate from my mission in China. The flight had been mercifully empty after the Singapore leg, meaning I could bed down in the full middle row of the wide-body airbus. Airline blanket pulled firmly over my head, seat-back display off, I tuned out completely as we crossed Asia and the Middle East.
Lying there, I’d considered what I knew about my missing father: One, he worked for the CIA in a covert capacity. Two, he was still missing. And three, and perhaps most importantly, he had been taken hostage by the Green Dragon Organization. I didn’t know what else to call the Green Dragons. Terrorists? A global energy monopoly? A rogue cult? Whatever they were, they had him, although, somehow, he was still managing to communicate with us. But he might not be able to do so for long. That was why I’d had to move so quickly. And that was why I was in Istanbul now, to find the man whom I’d not long ago given up for dead.
Istanbul is the only city in the world to straddle two continents. The Bosphorus Strait runs down the middle of it separating the European side where I stood, from the Asian side to the east. I was in the old city now, the Sultanahmet neighborhood, known for its twisting cobblestone streets and elaborate mosques. I had sustained a few scrapes and bruises from my late-night swim and my clothes were soaking, but so far, the few people about seemed more concerned with running down to the area flooded by the wave than looking at me.
I pushed ahead to my rendezvous. My cargo shorts, mercifully sewn from a quick-dry material, were already airing out in the new dawn, but I couldn’t say the same of my T-shirt. I passed an early morning street vendor fiddling with his display of counterfeit merchandise and traded him a twenty-lira note for a collared T-shirt and a ball cap. I changed into the new shirt in a nearby alley, pulling the cap low over my eyes. Even though the day was brand new, Istanbul was waking quickly, the morning call to prayer echoing through the streets.
The ghostly five-times-daily call to prayer blasted through megaphones on minarets was among the more exotic of Istanbul’s street sounds. The muezzin singing into his microphone to rouse the faithful had an otherworldly tone to it. I quickened my pace because I wanted to be off the street before the city fully awoke. More than once I got the feeling I was being tailed, but after circling around, I chalked it up to nerves. My rendezvous was at a local Turkish bath, what the Turks called a hammam. I needed to get there and get out of sight.
It didn’t take long to find the place. A peeling, painted metal sign up a narrow street identified the Ozkok Hammam. The problem was, my rendezvous wasn’t for more than an hour and the place was closed. I doubled around the block to ensure I hadn’t been followed and tried the hamman door again. It looked as if I had a wait on my hands. Fortunately, the bakery across the street was open, the smell of freshly baked pastries hanging in the air. There was already a line at the counter, a few early rising customers seated at the tables out front.
I took a seat at one of the tables with my back to the wall. It gave me a good vantage of the hammam and an easy exit should I need it. The customers drank tea served in short, bulbous glasses. I flagged down the server to place my order. She had long, slightly mussed, dark hair and was out of breath. No one could say that she wasn’t attractive, but it was her eyes that struck me. They were deep and dark and radiant, and somehow contemplative, even though she was obviously run off her feet between the bakery in the back and the café out front. I muddled through the few words of Turkish I’d learned from my guidebook to order a coffee and a bottle of water.
After that, I turned my attention to the crowd. So far, I had seen no indication that I had been tailed. A few early morning people walked up and down the narrow street, but there were no familiar faces among them. No, for the moment at least, I was fairly certain I was clean, and that meant it was as good a time as any to examine what I had found. Not the photos and the scarf and the like; the lab would have better luck with those things. No, what I was interested in was the ceramic disk that had popped out of the sconce — the amulet.