“Street market today,” the cabbie says, ending the call. “Many apologies. I forget the day it is.”
“Near here?”
“Up the hill. Quite near.”
“Up the hill?” Grace has played contrarian, assuming that, like Knox, her pursuers will head downhill.
“I take you there?” The man wants Knox out of his cab. Smells trouble.
“You take me there,” Knox confirms. He wants Grace in the backseat with him. And he wants any one of the personnel pursuing her, too. Wants to confirm them as Iranians, wants to tune up someone to rid himself of the adrenaline poisoning him. Experiences a pang of guilt: he should have protected her from this ever happening.
Knox’s phone vibrates. “Yeah?”
“Police emergency line.” It’s Dulwich. “Woman speaking English says kidnappers are after her. Said she’s near a bull.”
“Bull!” Knox says to the driver. “Cow. Steer.”
“Yes. I tell you already. This is Kadiköy market.”
“Got it,” Knox says to Dulwich, ending the call. His mind is stuck back on Dulwich having access to voice traffic on Istanbul’s police emergency line. Can that be explained by Kamat’s or Xin’s involvement? Does it suggest outside resources available to Dulwich?
Knox drops more liras onto the passenger seat. “Fast!”
30
Traffic is Grace’s enemy. Stopped with dozens of other pedestrians, she awaits a light change at a three-way intersection of wide avenues. The island in the center of the interchange is the destination, but the longer the light drags out, the more it feels to her as if she’ll never make it.
Adrenaline has given way to fatigue; her blood feels poisoned. The people are well dressed; Gap and Abercrombie anchor the intersection on opposite sides of the square. She clutches her phone, her lifeline. The emergency operator’s English was atrocious. Grace’s Turkish failed her. Grace told her she could see a bull, a sculpture of a bull. The woman operator told her to go there and wait. Help is on its way. At least that was what Grace thinks she said.
The man rudely pushing his way toward her clearly has other plans.
Grace tries to summon her strength, but while the physical power feels within her reach, her emotions are taxed. She is empty, unable to find a spark to light her will. She knows the terms to describe the psychological disconnect of hostages, has read the case studies; she saw these things firsthand on the Shanghai op. Her abduction was less than an hour long. How could it have affected her so?
And yet, she wants to sit down on the curb and tuck into a ball and hope no one sees her. She’s broken free and escaped; she’s beaten the odds. But this man aims to crush any hope she has of victory. She doesn’t think she can survive a second abduction. A part of her is tempted to run into the speeding traffic and take her chances, stocking feet and all.
The changing of the traffic light robs her of this option. It results in a footrace; the fresh legs of her pursuer against her own elephantine limbs. The police expect her at the rendezvous. It’s impossibly far.
And then a hallucination. Of all the faces she might have invented as her savior — her longtime lover, Lu Jian; her cadet training officer; her father — it is John Knox she envisions coming toward her through the undulating mass of pedestrians. It must be a hallucination because he doesn’t see her; he looks beyond her, his face caught in a stony expression. She angles in his direction, trying to catch his eye, struggling with vertigo amid the riot of people spinning around her.
“The taxi’s waiting across the intersection,” Knox says.
It sounds like Knox, but the man walks past without so much as a glance in her direction. Grace spins, trying to get a look back, but is turned again by a collision with a stranger. Finds herself facing the giant bull, realizes she’s only yards from the curb. The statue is a massive bronze beast in the exact center of the island. Curious tourists surround it.
Feeding her fantasy, she glances across to the far side of the intersection: a waiting taxi. Coincidence? The mind of the hostage is susceptible to all kinds of impressions; she supposes she must have spotted the taxi before inventing a Knox who instructed her to go there.
The crush of pedestrians disperses at the curb. Taxi or not, she’ll never make it. She knows better than to look back, to let her adversary know she’s on to him. It would only hasten his attack. But she forsakes her training and glances over her shoulder.
Gone.
She only looks for a split-second, but it should have been enough. Now she looks left and right, expecting him to come at her from another angle.
Car horns sound well back. The knot of pedestrians ahead begins to move; the traffic light is in her favor. She steps off the curb, the asphalt warm on the soles of her feet.
31
Wrists crossed and held low in front, protecting the sternum. Chin averted to the side, in case his opponent’s head snaps forward, a rare but painful unintended consequence. A quick step to his left like a defensive tackle in a stunt. Knox plants the block perfectly, lifting the small but sturdy man fully off his feet and laying him back onto the street. His head hits concrete with an audible thud.
Knox drops his right knee into the man’s crotch. There’s no mistaking the parts caught between his patella and the asphalt. A good percentage of his two hundred and twenty-seven pounds are balanced on that knee.
It’s not the wallet that interests him — leatherbound fiction. Nor the 9mm handgun in a belt holster, which Knox removes, ejecting the magazine with one hand and skidding the weapon deeply under a truck that has stopped to allow the pedestrians to cross. The flurry of car horns doesn’t bother him; in truth, his focus is so intense, he barely hears anything but the blood whining in his ears.
It’s the man’s phone he wants, his data. Ones and zeros that connect this man to another, and he to she, and she to it. It’s the “it” he wants. Needs. The “it” may put this all into perspective, something Dulwich is clearly loath to do. If the data suggest Iranians, so be it. But if Israelis or another faction, it moves the five minutes with Mashe Okle/Nawriz Melemet into far more dangerous territory — the arenas of international politics and national security, a zone in which friends and allies are no more than conveniences. Though he doesn’t want to, Knox must consider the possibility that Dulwich and/or Primer have entered into this op naively, that he and Grace are now in too far to abort but may have been set up, intentionally or not, as scapegoats.
The inside zippered pocket. Knox has the phone practically before the man’s facial skin stops dancing from the contact with the pavement. He’s off him and moving. Elapsed time, seven seconds. Knox continues in the direction, away from Grace, alert for others like this one, who now lies unconscious in a thinning intersection.
He passes a yogurt shop, a jeans store, a window with more discount electronics than anything in Times Square. Crosses at the next intersection, reducing his height by bending his knees and taking longer strides. Same old tricks. Same old circus.
As he nears the far curb, the taxi jerks to a stop. Knox rounds the vehicle and climbs into the back, throwing his arm around her without saying a word. It’s Dulwich driving the cab.
Grace clings to Knox like a child.
32
Who is this?” Victoria Momani comes out of the chair at the small desk in Knox’s hotel room. Her eyes narrow; her shoulders square, lifting her chest and reminding Knox of a tropical bird announcing its claim on territory.