There were three men and a woman gathered around a tall, round table and perched on backless stools. They were speaking Italian, which wasn’t a huge surprise. Istanbul had always attracted the Italian tourist, though these four didn’t strike me as the tourist kind. The men were casually attired, but they looked more like locals. The woman wore a loose, blue dress cinched around her waist, and its plunging neckline immediately caught my attention. A pair of very nice legs caught my attention shortly thereafter.
There were three guys tending bar, and that seemed a bit excessive for this time of the morning, but maybe they were expecting a rush of unkempt Americans fresh off a car chase. The one intently polishing a glass was quintessentially Turkish: heavy mustache, meaty shoulders, thick neck, and looking semidapper in a red vest over a white shirt and black trousers.
His buddies were hunched behind the bar, one skinny and amped up, the other calm and build like a welterweight. Both fussing with glasses and liquor bottles, and looking preoccupied.
The barkeep put his glass and polishing cloth down and set his elbows on his side of the bar. “What’ll you have?” he asked in English as guttural as the broken water pump in my dad’s old Chevy.
“Whiskey sour. Maker’s Mark.” Eleven in the morning; what else?
The barkeep nodded and got to work.
Me? I got to work thinking about my next step. Sending a status report to Rutledge could wait. I had transportation to arrange out to Field 27, and the thought of renting a car was making more and more sense. “Trust no one” had taken on new meaning over the last twenty-four hours.
I felt confident that Wiseman would deliver the C-17. If he or someone in his office was intent on bringing me down, then I’d know the moment I landed in Iran. I half expected the landing coordinates I’d given DDO to be compromised; it was just a gut feeling. I hoped I was wrong.
My arrangement with Roger Anderson was another matter. Roger was not in the business of screwing people over. The HALO gear would be there when I arrived at Field 27. I could check that off my list.
On the other hand, I didn’t know quite what to make of the MEK. Someone had ambushed a car carrying the head of their Amsterdam chapter, and Moradi could easily have been killed. Why would they do that? If it was a ruse, it was a damn risky one. If someone didn’t care whether Moradi lived or died, then the MEK had real problems.
I took a deep breath. I heard the woman at the table next to me laughing, a deep, melodious laugh that reminded me of Cathy. The woman’s very nice legs also reminded me of Cathy, and I let my imagination wander for a moment. I looked at my hands and imagined my scarred fingers slipping down Cathy’s spine to the small of her back, then lower. I imagined her scent and her …
It was the skinny, nervous bartender who placed a napkin on the counter and set the whiskey sour in front of me. Wrong! Dead wrong. Three decades of training and black-ops insanity threw up about a dozen red flags. I reached out and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. I yanked him across the bar, hard.
“What the fuck!” he hissed.
The bar went silent. Everyone was looking — everyone except the barrel-chested Turkish barkeep who had originally taken my order. He was nowhere to be seen.
I stared into the skinny one’s eyes. Twitchy. Very twitchy. He had the rank odor of nervous sweat about him. It wasn’t hot in the bar. Not hot enough to sweat. The other one, the welterweight partner, made a quick move toward the end of the bar, and I shouted, “I’ll break his neck.”
He froze. My eyes flicked his way. “I’ll break his neck. And then I’ll find you and break yours. Please tempt me.”
He didn’t. Not an amateur. Not a seasoned pro, but worthy of my attention.
“What’s going on?” one of the Italians at the table said.
“Shut up! And don’t move,” I snapped. I could do the thing with my voice that pretty much froze people in their tracks, and he did exactly as he’d been told.
With my free hand, I snared the cocktail glass. I held it up to my nose. There was nothing to smell, but I knew. I’d bet my next paycheck on it, if only I was on someone’s payroll. I held the glass up to the skinny one’s face and jammed it against his very prominent nose. “Drink it,” I said. “Drink every drop.”
He shook his head. Panic: I could see it sweeping over his ugly, olive-colored face. “No. Why?”
“Because I want to see how long you last. A minute. Five minutes. Maybe ten. Now drink it,” I said in a low, dusty voice. He struggled, but he was no match for my strength, and certainly no match for my annoyance. I jammed the glass against his lips, sloshed the liquid into his mouth, and he immediately spit it back out. “What kind of poison?”
“Ricin. I’m sorry.”
I let the drink tumble to the bar. The glass splintered. I dragged him onto the bar. I pulled out the Walther. The woman at the table gasped, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her to shut up. The welterweight made a dash for the door. I wanted to shoot him in the back, but this was not the time or place for gunplay.
I put the barrel of the gun against the skinny one’s temple. I knew I had less than ten seconds before all hell broke loose. “Who do you work for? Tell me!”
“I’m a believer,” he said. “Kill me. I know my fate.”
“I don’t need to kill you. When your employer finds out how you botched this job, he’ll use something a lot more painful that a bullet.” I smashed his head into the bar top and stowed the gun in my jacket. I pushed away from the bar, took a last glance at the Italian woman’s legs, and walked out. At least the morning wasn’t a complete loss.
CHAPTER 11
So much for the Hotel Marmara. And so much for a stiff drink and a hot shower. I was probably better off without the drink, now that I thought about it, but the shower still sounded damn good.
I stepped from the bar into the lobby, walking as if I had all day. Of course, the welterweight had just sprinted out the door ahead of me, so it was hard to be completely nonchalant. The bellhop, the concierge, and the guy at the registration desk stared at me as I crossed the tile floor, my shoes as soundless as my breathing. The elevator music playing in the background seemed louder. The song sounded vaguely familiar — like a Viennese waltz I might have heard on my honeymoon — but then that was the whole point.
“Sir?” The concierge hurried my way. I studied his face. The worry lines were genuine. So was the imploring tone of his voice. “Is everything all right?”
Maybe the look on my face wasn’t as unreadable as it should have been. I’d been caught off guard. Not enough to cost me, but enough to remind me that I’d been out of the game for five years. You’re a step slower, Jake, and you might as well admit it.
Admitting a shortcoming isn’t a bad thing, Mr. Elliot used to say. We all have limits. Know what they are; know when they’re about to kick your ass; know how to lessen the blow. It’s the man who thinks he’s infallible who ends up with the bullet in his head. Yeah, or a lethal dose of ricin in his Maker’s Mark. Not a respectful way to treat a man’s favorite whiskey.
“Lousy service,” I said to the concierge. My mouth was dry. I tasted something metallic on my tongue. A headache squeezed the front of my skull. My guts felt like they’d been shredded. All good signs. All reminders that I had better right the ship and right it damn fast before my mission went any further south on me.
Back home, I was a regular at a gym frequented by government types, mostly agents from the various arms of Homeland Security. Free weights had always been my thing. Outside paramilitary work took a devastating toll on the mind and the body, and staying in shape wasn’t just my rule; it was Mr. Elliot’s rule. When the body goes, the mind and spirit aren’t far behind. In my line of work, if the mind and the spirit falter, you’re a dead man. I believed that back then, and retirement hadn’t dulled the belief.