“Not a chance!” It had crossed my mind but I’d dismissed it. “She probably knew you were in Odessa from your constant phone calls. Got Vladimir’s henchmen to track us and pay off the VIP airline guy in Odessa, maybe. Then all she’d have to do was hop that flight from Moscow with the cousins and sit there waiting for us — slick as snot. Good thing it happened to get in late, spoiling her plans. Otherwise she and the cousins would have been our welcoming committee. My guess is she thinks we’re in Istanbul and she might have planted something in that duffel bag.”
“Like what? A bomb?” Anna jeered. “You are paranoid.”
“Not a bomb, but a GPS device like a phone. And, if you think I’m paranoid, why don’t you explain just how she ended up in Istanbul anyway?” I stopped myself. The last thing we needed was an argument about passports, customs, gangsters, spies and bombs in front of a Middle Eastern airport and a taxi driver who may as well speak Russian. The operative words are pretty much the same in any language. Taking a deep breath, I turned to the driver and asked in English for a recommendation of places we might spend a few days relaxing by the seaside.
“Ah, the Turkish Riviera, such beauty, such luxury, but not so close to here.” The driver pulled out a map and showed us the various places we could end up. We settled on the closest viable port, a place called Marmaris. According to the driver, it hosted cruise ships and ferries to Greece. It was also a long way from any airport, meaning our documented electronic trail would go cold in Dalaman.
We each took a bench in the taxi-van and bedded down for the drive to Marmaris. I awoke a few times and watched a dry tortured mountain landscape, lit by a sliver of moon and starlight, sliding by. I longed to see it during the day or even right then, but my exhaustion and headache had me down for the count. By the time the van’s pulling up and parking awakened me, the sky had started to lighten over scrub covered hills.
The driver arranged a place for us to stay, in an apartment-hotel near the old town. We checked in and I slipped into a virtual coma until early afternoon.
TWENTY-TWO
It was day one in Marmaris.
By the time I crawled out of bed and shuffled to the patio, the sun was at its highest and impossibly intense. I acknowledged it with a reflexive groan and made for the not-so-great indoors.
Anna came in from who-knows-where. Her tiny Nikon was swinging from her wrist and on her face was a smile that looked like it had always been there. “Finally you are up! This place is amazing, Jess. It is ancient. There are ruins.”
“Coffee… need coooffeee.” I zombie walked toward her, arms outstretched. Turns out it was coffee, Kiev style: instant in oily tap water.
I spent the afternoon inside. Using the Dell’s Wi-Fi, I grabbed hit-and-miss Internet access from any number of insecure and randomly appearing wireless networks. It wasn’t a network environment I was about to do anything in but web-surf.
A Web search confirmed what I pretty much knew about Marmaris; it provides a back door to Europe via the Greek island of Rhodes and numerous ferry crossings. That is, if one carries a Western or free world passport to get into Europe visa-free. Obviously, the Greeks on the other side were well aware of their backdoor status. They were ready and able to deal with the flood of refugees scheming up ways to get in. Getting through with Anna would be like breaking into Fort Knox. Even had her passport not been compromised, she would have had little or no chance of getting a visa without significant money and, more importantly, connections. Seeing as how the only Turkish land border with the European Union just happened to be in the neighborhood of where we had last seen The Skater, our options were truly limited.
Hours of frustrating research, free-jacking mercurial open networks, enlightened me to the fact that Anna’s Turkish tourist visa would expire in two months, rather than the three months Turkish immigration had granted me. When that happened, she would either be illegal in Turkey or applying for an extension with a passport that would, by then, undoubtedly have her flagged as a terrorist. Either way, the clock was ticking and it was imperative to reach Canadian soil before time was up. I didn’t need to wait the half hour for Google maps to load to know that between Marmaris and Canada lay a lot of seawater. Not only that, but countries that would deport Anna back to Russia in a heartbeat if she came near them.
Seen head on, our goal was relentlessly straight forward — get Anna to Canada without getting killed or getting caught. I worried that maybe Gavin was right about me. In pontificating emails he’d been sending with increasing frequency, he liked to compare me to, “A climber at the foot of Everest. Her goal, the imagined summit. Her irrational anticipation of success overshadowing any consideration of failure and driving her more so than the reasons for doing the crazy act in the first place!”
Bla, bla, bla, I thought. Then again, having finally gotten us stranded in a down-market Middle Eastern tourist trap, all out of options, I had to think that maybe my kid brother was onto something. I suppressed the niggling insight that all of this had really not been just about Anna, but also about me. It’s easier to risk it all when there’s nothing in it for me, or so I thought.
The few grand I had left in my pocket wasn’t going to get us far. We couldn’t just hop on a flight to Toronto. The Skater had drained Anna’s bank accounts then bought and filed charges against her. Anna’s passport was a Trojan horse. A visa was impossible. Not only was getting away not going to be easy, it wasn’t going to be cheap. Passage, legally on a freighter, would be more cash than I had; illegally, it would be more than that by a long shot and infinitely risky. Of course, I would also have to make the right connections, and if Odessa was any indication, I was less than successful engaging smugglers at that level.
It was dark inside the apartment-hotel and twilight outside by the time I looked up from the computer. We had a ground floor suite with a patio backing onto a canal full of small boats. Mostly wooden skiffs layered with so much colorful paint that they looked like iced cakes. Blood red Turkish flags with white crescents contrasted with lush greenery and raw stone walls. I had a sense of being somewhere very warm, and a long way from home. Brightly hued, delightfully fragrant flowers were everywhere. Birds called out in a last-minute cacophony before being subdued by the night. Not too far away, through a hedge of some plant that only grew indoors in pots back home, I heard what sounded like a hundred gamelan players warming up. Watching the shadow of the horizon climb scrub covered hills outside of town, I found myself thinking of Kiev and its ice and hostility, an infinity to the north and a lifetime ago.
Anna came in the front door with food she had found at little stores willing to take the American dollars I’d hoarded from cash machines in Ukraine. Practicing English, she told me about the ancient town she’d strolled through, and how much she had enjoyed it. I smiled at her effort, knowing how hard it was to function without one’s native tongue. I could only imagine what it was like for a Russian using English to communicate with Turks.
I flipped open the Dell and started in on what I’d dug up with my research. “There’s really no easy way out of this. You aren’t allowed in or over or through any country from here to Canada, and there’s a lot of ocean in the way. Nobody’s going to let you on a commercial plane or boat without a visa, and when your mother gets your passport tagged internationally, and believe-you-me she probably has by now — especially knowing you’re outside the CIS — it’ll become less than worthless in pretty short order.”