These days I liked testing myself against the young carnivores hanging around the place; it was a testosterone jungle, and I had to admit that I hadn’t tired of the competition. Yeah, I could still do the weight, but not the reps. And these days, my routine took fifteen minutes longer than it had ten years earlier. The upside was that I knew more about the limitations that Mr. Elliot had talked about, and I also knew more about maximizing my strengths. I guess that’s called experience.
“Is there anything I can do?” he said.
“You could hail a cab for me,” I said.
“Right away.” He hustled out ahead of me. I still had three pressing needs: nourishment, sleep, and a few minutes of privacy when no one in the world knew where I was. I was running on empty.
I stopped at the door and looked back at the guy at the registration desk. I said, “Turn back the sheets in my room for me, will you? I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
Of course, I had no intention of returning, but I didn’t want them alerting Trevor McCormick to my sudden departure. If I needed the help of someone from the American embassy again, it would be on my terms, not his. I honestly didn’t believe that McCormick was a party to the Maker’s Mark incident, but his hotel of choice clearly wasn’t the safe house it was intended to be.
I went outside, stopped, and scanned for any sign of the welterweight. He didn’t look smart enough to muster a counterattack after the fiasco at the bar, but failure motivates people in strange ways. Especially when the people holding you accountable have a low and often deadly tolerance for failure. The MEK definitely fit that description. And now I was wondering if the Revolutionary Guard or someone else inside Iran was onto me. If there was a traitor inside the MEK, it was very likely that he or she was betraying me to the Iranian government, and their influence had few boundaries.
I stepped past the entrance. There were three taxis in line along the carriage drive, a yellow one, a green one, and another yellow one. The concierge was at the head of the line, holding open the back door of the first yellow one. I walked over to the second cab instead, the green one.
“Green’s always been my color,” I said when I saw the confused look on the concierge’s face. It was just a precaution, but I planned on taking every precaution going forward.
I ducked into the back. The cabbie glanced back at me, a thick, fleshy man with round glasses. His English had a second-grade quality to it, but my Turkish was preschool at best. He said, “Where to?” and it was all I could do to put the two words together.
“Old town. Hotel Sultanhan.”
His expression in the rearview mirror said, You’re leaving one hotel for another. Who does that? But he merely shrugged and said, “A fine choice, sir.”
He put the cab in gear and drove. I had stayed at the Sultanhan two decades or so earlier, when I was negotiating an arms deal with a very nasty group of Syrians. Small and classically Turkish, it was a stone’s throw from places like the Blue Mosque, Sofia, and Topkapi Palace, all the hot spots for American and European tourists. Very easy to blend in.
But it wasn’t the Sultanhan that interested me; it was a tiny motel two blocks away, where I’d met the Syrians. Quiet, indiscreet, and completely off the grid. Exactly the kind of place I needed before my rendezvous at Field 27.
I closed my eyes for five seconds.
Inventory time. Pulse? Fifty-four. Acceptable. Breathing? Normal. Head? A little woozy, but clear. State of the mission? Despite everything, more or less on track. Allies? Two, rock solid. The rest, questionable at best.
I opened my eyes. The Istanbul skyline filled the cab’s windshield. Where had all the skyscrapers come from? From a distance, modern Istanbul looked like Chicago or Seattle. Closer, a maze of red-tiled roofs, gold-domed mosques, and needle-shaped minarets signaled the Istanbul of old: “old” meaning ten thousand years in the making and still as vibrant and broken as it had been in the days before it was even called Istanbul.
The cab jogged along Peykhane Cad in a battleground of traffic. He cut off at Piyer Loti and snaked along behind a tourist bus until he came to Piere Loti Cad and a carriage drive in front of the hotel. I handed him an American twenty-dollar bill and climbed out.
I stared at the whitewashed facade, the arched windows, and the narrow balconies and remembered the company I had kept there for three nights. It seemed like another lifetime, and yet I could recall every detail. The Sultanhan was meant for romance and quiet dinners with just the right woman, not for international intrigue. But that was then.
I waited for the cab to disappear from sight, then crossed Piere Lot to Boyaci Ahmet and spotted the Column of Constantine. It wasn’t much, but you couldn’t take your eyes off it. It was a stone tower rising a good hundred feet into the air that you realized was constructed nearly two thousand years ago by a Roman emperor. It looked its age, but was even more impressive for it. A crowd of people and hundreds of pigeons clustered around it.
For me, it signaled a cobbled alleyway on the far side of the square that led to a two-story, shacklike building called the Burnt Column Inn. It sounded quaint, but it wasn’t. I walked through a rickety screen door into a shoebox-size lobby where a woman in a head scarf was working an ancient-looking adding machine.
I should have been surprised at how good her English was until I calculated the number of Americans and Europeans she had to deal with every day. “Room?” she said.
I nodded. “With clean sheets.”
She smiled at this. I didn’t know if the smile meant, Of course the sheets are clean, or, What the hell are clean sheets? She said, “How many nights?”
I held up one finger. She smiled again and said, “Euros?”
“Dollars.” She nodded. The price was eighteen dollars per night. I gave her twenty-five and said, “No calls, please.”
The room key was actually a key attached to a plastic card that read “23.” Room 23 was a flight of stairs up and down a narrow hall. I passed a community restroom and realized my shower wasn’t going to be as private as I’d hoped. I plunged the key into a standard dead-bolt lock, pushed open a hollow-core door, and stepped into a room that smelled of lavender and curry, a very odd combination.
I didn’t care. I walked straight to a four-poster bed, built high off the floor, and pulled back the covers. The sheets sparkled they were so white. Hallelujah. I took the Walther from the shoulder harness and laid it on the bed. I set the alarm on my iPhone for 1500 hours and set the alarm in my head for the same time. I plugged the phone into a wall socket, knowing that even with my Mophie it could be a long haul before I was able to charge it again.
I could hardly get my shoes off before I stretched out on the bed, fully clothed. I gripped the Walther in my right hand and closed my eyes. Sleep was instantaneous and dreamless. My internal alarm woke me up two minutes before the iPhone’s alarm sounded. Two hours wasn’t much, but I felt 100 percent better.
I retrieved my iPhone. It was 0800 in Washington, D.C.
I activated an app called the Listening Bug. It was a sweeper program. I wasn’t expecting to find anything in a room in the Burnt Column Inn, but the way my luck had been going, I did a thorough scan anyway: bed, lamps, window frame, closet. All clear.
Mr. Elliot first. I punched in the new number he’d given me during our last session. It rang four times — twice longer than usual — which meant he was tracking the call via GPS. He answered, saying, “You’re not at the Hotel Marmara. Trouble?”