Beside him stood Jean-Marc, another backpacker in my unit. Jean-Marc was dark, swarthy, and French, or at least he spoke with a French accent most of the time. I didn’t know where he was from, but given that the CIA employed him, I had to assume some allegiance to America. Jean-Marc was a little shorter than Crust, but a lot more muscular. Not the kind of guy you wanted to meet in a dark alley.
“Hey,” I said.
I kept my voice to a whisper, but it was still louder than I would have liked.
“How was your evening?” Crust asked in his Scottish brogue.
I hesitated. I wasn’t sure how to answer that. Especially with the old man in the other room.
“I don’t know yet,” I replied.
“Progress?”
“You could say that.”
I picked myself up and sat back down next to the basin beside Crust and Jean-Marc. Then I turned on the water faucet, lowering my voice yet again.
“Did you check out the fireworks?” I asked.
“You betcha,” Crust said. “You need to keep a low profile, friend.”
“I found some things,” I said.
Crust raised a finger to his lips.
“Later,” he said. “I trust you found your pack? Jean-Marc will bring you up to speed. Listen to what he has to say. Stay strong.”
Then Crust picked himself up and left the room.
“Bonjour, Michel,” Jean-Marc said as Crust disappeared out the swinging door.
Great, I thought. He was speaking French again. In my limited experience with Jean-Marc, his mind was on serious matters when he spoke French.
“Bonjour, Jean-Marc,” I replied.
“Il fait chaud. It’s hot.”
No shit, Sherlock, I thought. But I scolded myself. I was being too harsh. Jean-Marc was my point man on this mission and though he’d mildly irritated me since we’d met in Hong Kong, I knew I’d better get over it. I wasn’t sure why he rubbed me the wrong way. It probably had something to do with his stare. It was the way the guy made eye contact. He didn’t just look at you. He overstayed his welcome. He drilled a hole right through your skull with his eyes. And now he wanted to talk business. Right away. He was as amped up as a Kentucky racehorse.
“The authorities are looking,” Jean-Marc said. “They know the explosion in the harbor last night was not an accident. They have an image of you on CCTV.”
Jean-Marc’s voice was low, low enough that nobody could hear it over the running water, but I still didn’t like talking about it in there. Of course, Crust had chosen the place.
“Do they have my face?”
“We do not know. Maybe so. Our information came from a contact inside the Turkish Police. But we cannot help you here in this country. It would damage your cover.”
“I get it,” I said. “I’ll figure it out.”
“So?” Jean-Marc said.
“So what?” I said.
“So what did you find?” Jean-Marc asked.
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t know why, but I was feeling cagey. Probably because he’d blown my perfect hammam buzz.
“Last night. What did you find?”
I eyed the door to the smaller room. Water gurgled loudly into the basin beside me. There was no way the old guy could hear us.
“An Eye,” I said.
“An eye? What kind of eye?”
“A Turkish Eye. One of the ceramic things.”
Jean-Marc didn’t respond to that. He just sat there quietly. I didn’t really expect him to say anything. What could he say? It was too random. I dipped my bowl into the stone basin and poured a cool splash of water over my shoulders.
“Can I see this Eye?” Jean-Marc said.
I reached into the plastic bag and pulled out the ceramic oval, handing it to him.
“Here’s looking at you,” I said.
I wasn’t kidding. In the steam the Eye almost seemed to be looking back at Jean-Marc, probing his thoughts. I heard a splash and turned my head to see that the old man had dumped an entire bucket of water on the heated slab in the smaller hammam room. Then the old man lay down on his belly, the soles of his feet facing toward us. I was starting to feel restless so I decided to stretch my legs. I stood and walked toward the doorway of the smaller room, poking my head inside.
As I thought, it was the same as the main room, except smaller. It looked like the hammam equivalent of a private room at a nightclub. A more intimate space for those high-powered hammam nights. Sure, I’ll take two bottles of Dom Perignon with my steam bath, I chuckled quietly to myself. I was so amused by my comedy routine that I nearly mistook the garrote that dropped around my neck for a change in the light.
Chapter 7
I didn’t mistake the garrote’s grasp, though. It wasn’t made of piano wire or leather. It was a simple checkered hammam towel, rolled tightly along its length, but I knew from the moment I felt its clutch, that I wouldn’t be looking at cotton towels the same way ever again. I hadn’t been paying attention, not really. I’d let the heat and the steam dull my senses. But I was paying attention now. Mainly because I couldn’t breathe. The wet cotton towel was cutting into my throat like a barbell. I forced myself not to think about the lack of oxygen. It took discipline to ignore that I was suffocating, but if I played my cards right, I had enough oxygen to do what I needed to do.
Standard move when somebody is choking the life out of you is that you reach for your throat. Try to get your hand between whatever is doing the choking and your neck. Try to turn the tables on your assailant. The problem is, unless you have some kind of opening, unless the guy who’s choking you somehow lets you in, there’s no way to get a grip on the garrote. Your natural response to save yourself by grabbing whatever it is that’s choking your neck, ends up killing you.
I knew it could happen, I had heard about it happening, and I wasn’t about to let it happen to me. So when I felt my windpipe almost crease in half, I didn’t reach for my throat to stop it. No. I turned my right shoulder a little to get into a decent position, cupped my hand down and hit a quick reverse-groin strike. It wasn’t going to kill anybody, but if I did it right, it was going to buy me some time.
The blow was glancing, but my assailant eased up, if only momentarily. It was enough time, however, for me to sink into my knees and bend my back forward before launching into an explosive backward head butt. Now a reverse head butt was a risky move, and I knew it. I had to hit my assailant with the hard part of my skull, just below the crown of my head, and I had to connect with something a little softer on him. Preferably his nose, or his cheekbone, or maybe his jaw, but, and this was the difficult part, not his teeth. If I connected with his teeth, I’d have a lacerated skull. And hitting the right part of your opponent when you can’t see what you’re aiming for is not for the faint of heart. Of course, neither is being strangled to death.
I got lucky because the back of my head connected with one of the softer parts of his anatomy that I was going for. I knew because I heard the impact. It was like a cabbage being hit by a wood bat. But the guy wasn’t down. I could feel that. The brief interval of shock did, however, give me the opportunity to get my hands over the garrote. I grabbed it overhand because I figured it was the only way I would be able to sneak my fingers in and I was right. I felt the garrote loosen as I sunk down on my left knee and pulled over my right shoulder.
The trick now was speed. Speed and finesse. I used my momentum and the garrote to my advantage, pulling my aggressor all the way over. It was a smooth move and the garrote, which a moment before had been my biggest problem, became my biggest asset. My attacker didn’t let go and it turned into a perfect handle to hammer him smack down to the floor in front of me. A second later I was staring into the eyes of Jean-Marc. I breathed in deeply, holding my fist above his throat, ready and willing to crush his trachea. And then I made my first mistake.