Alone in the corner, I removed the disk from my pocket. I knew what it was. The disk was a Turkish Eye — an amulet to ward off evil. Glazed on one side in white and blue and black, it was thought that in a situation where people may mean you harm, the Eye, or nazur, as the Turk's called it, had your back. It was such a popular symbol in Turkey that, though I had only been in the country for a short time, I had already seen them everywhere, from sidewalks to gift shops. I had even seen the symbol on the tail of a commercial airliner as I arrived at Atatürk airport.
The question was, why hide one in a lamp? I turned the amulet over. The back of the Eye was unglazed ceramic, nothing more, nothing less. There were so many of these ceramic disks around, I doubted that they were even manufactured locally. They had probably shipped in from China, just like me. What I needed to do was figure out what was so important about the amulet that my father had chosen to hide it inside a lamp? I ran my fingers over the disk’s glazed surface carefully placing it back in my pocket. Then I leaned back and nearly fell out of my chair.
It was the bread that did it. An avalanche of sticky buns over the top of my head. Which I could have lived with, if it hadn’t been followed by the coffee. I jumped up, but not quickly enough. The coffee spilled all over me. I didn’t get burned, but I was well decorated, nonetheless.
I looked up.
“Üzgünüm. Are you all right?”
It was the server. The pretty one with the deep dark eyes.
“Great,” I said, brushing myself off. “How about you?”
She didn’t answer me. Instead, she passed me a towel and got down on the floor to pick up the bread. I helped her, picking up a few of the pastries. She glanced back at the counter. The line had dissipated, but there were still a few people there.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll get the rest.”
“Teşekkürler. Thank you.”
The server left and I finished up with the buns, placing them on my table. I had no idea whether they were still destined for the display cabinet, but I wanted my coffee more than ever. I checked my watch. It was 5:30 AM. I still had an hour until my meet at the hammam. It had been a productive evening, but I was fooling myself if I thought it had gone smoothly. Someone did not want something on that ship coming to light. Maybe they were concerned about that giant tuning fork. Why else blow up the boat? My father’s message had led me straight into the middle of something big.
I thought about pulling the amulet back out of my pocket, when my coffee arrived for the second time. This time it was accompanied by a red plastic bag containing a two-liter bottle of water and a huge pastry that I was pretty sure I hadn’t ordered. The server smiled at me.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I didn’t order this.”
“The bread is on the house,” she said. “For the ceiling.”
“The ceiling? You mean up there?” I said, pointing at the cracked plaster above.
“No. The spill-ing,” she said drawing out the word.
“Got you,” I said. The pastry was the size of a loaf of bread.
“Do you want some?”
“Why not?” she said. She pulled up a chair. “My break. The other worker came.”
“Your English is good,” I said.
“My English is terrible, my coffee is good. You must try.”
I tried the coffee. It was served in a tiny cup and was as black as mud. There was no cream or sugar, and though I didn’t normally drink coffee that way, I decided to give it a go. I was glad I did. It was good. No, it was great. Smooth and dark and hardly bitter. But mostly it was strong. Very strong.
“What is wrong?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your face, it looks like you are drinking poison. Did I say that right, poison?”
“Yeah, you said it right.”
“So you think my coffee is poison?”
“No, no, I just don’t usually drink it black. Your coffee is good.”
“Good then. How is the bread?”
I took a bite.
“Bread’s great.”
She flicked her hair out of her eyes and reached over and broke off a piece for herself. I made her to be in her late twenties. With her high cheekbones and full lips, she was striking, yet relaxed, as though she didn’t know the effect she had on others. She wore a deadpan expression with just the hint of a smile on her lips. I liked her. I liked her slim build and her deep, liquid eyes. I liked her button nose. And for some weird reason, I particularly liked that she wasn’t overly concerned that she had spilled coffee all over me. She was sorry, yes, but she wasn’t fawning. It was refreshing. As if she accepted that sometimes things just happened, and that I should too.
“Well,” she said. “I work now.”
She squeezed my hand and got up, brushing loosely past me. I smiled back at her, enjoying the warm glow of a chance encounter with an attractive stranger. A part of me worried that I might be being played, but I rejected the notion. I hadn’t been followed. I was clean. I glanced behind me again, but she was busy behind the counter. Then I saw the hammam door open across the street. I dropped a bill on the table, picked up my bottle of water, and went to meet my fate.
Chapter 5
The hammam door had opened from the inside. Initially I was surprised there was anybody there at that early hour, but I suspected that, like a gym, there would be people who would go before work. I’d never been to a Turkish bath before, so I wasn’t up on the protocol, but when a greasy, heavyset man stepped out of a small booth to offer me a checkered cotton towel and a numbered key, it seemed fairly obvious that the first order of business was to strip down. A row of tiny wood-paneled changing rooms lined the white plastered lobby. I stepped past a thin man patiently folding towels and into the first changing room on my right.
I knew I was in the right place from the moment I opened the door, because my backpack was there waiting for me. The red, low-volume climbing backpack had been given to me before I left Vietnam. They had gussied the gear up for me since my last mission. The pack had been modified from the stock with a Kevlar backing and a sheet of interlocking ceramic plates. The intention was to make the back panel of the pack bullet resistant, which might turn out to be useful, though I was in no hurry to find out. I had left the pack at the hostel I had stayed at the night before, but apparently my unit leader wanted to make sure I had access to it right away. Inside the pack, I carried my usual complement of supplies: a couple of changes of wick-dry clothes, a camera, a Swiss Army knife, sleeping bag, flashlight, emergency blanket, and the like.
What was new to me was a field-issued iPhone complete with an anonymous, local SIM card. It was an experiment. If I thought that my position wasn’t compromised, I was free to use the device. Hard-lined Internet café access was still less traceable, but it was thought that, at the beginning of my mission at least, the iPhone, with its anonymous SIM, might offer a measure of convenience. The iPhone also provided a direct link to the CIA tech team in Virginia, a fact of particular interest to me since I had been informed that Mobi Stearn, the crack civilian engineer to whom I owed a debt of gratitude for his work on my previous mission, had also been recruited.
The iPhone was modified with, among other things, a bug detector and a hard on/off switch that interrupted the power supply to ensure that the unit couldn’t be tracked when I didn’t want it to be. It was also preloaded with a guide to the region that I would need.