Blown Circuit Page 2

  Another shot rang out. But it didn’t hit an inflation tube this time. It hit my starboard outboard. Whoever the shooters were, they were equipped. They had to be reading my heat signature. It was the only way to see the engine in the darkness from that far out. Smoke rose from the outboard almost immediately. Then it whined loudly before dying. No doubt they had gotten lucky and hit the oil pan. Putting out the pump would be enough to seize up the pistons really quickly.

  With one outboard down, I rapidly lost speed. Either I was going to sink, or they were going to catch me, but I didn’t know which would happen first. I glanced at my watch. It had been five minutes since I’d discovered the bomb and the freighter was still happily anchored. I focused on the far shore. I knew that I could still make it. I just needed a little luck. Scratch that, I needed a lot of luck. And that was when I heard a muffled bang.

  It wasn’t a gunshot. It was thunderous, lower in tenor. It sounded as though maybe the bomb had finally blown. I glanced back from my leaky boat, except there wasn’t much to look at. A column of smoke ascended from the deck of the old freighter, but not much else. A low wave passed over the bow of my own boat and I knew I was taking in too much water. I had to throttle back. I did a bit. Not enough to take me off plane, but enough to lessen the impact of the next bit of rough water. As I glanced back again, my pursuers gaining, I realized that though surrender might not be much of an option, it might be all that I had.

  Then the bomb really blew.

  The sky lit up behind me as a tremendous ball of fire ascended into the air. It was followed by a blinding white light and an incredible percussive blast, deafening, like an angry hammer of God. The lights behind me slowed. They were no longer gaining; in fact, I could actually see them turning to check out the explosion. And I knew that was a mistake. Because a blast like that does something when it happens below the water. It displaces it. And I was sure that a hell of a wave was coming. If the shooters took it bow first, they’d be swamped.

  I was two hundred feet from shore. Close enough to swim if I had to. If there was a wave, it would take a few more seconds to make it across the strait. It wasn’t going to topple buildings or anything. But it would do a pretty good job of slamming my little boat around. I braced myself. The shore was a hundred and fifty feet away. A hundred feet. Then I lost sight of the boats behind me as the sea rose in a wall of black water.

  Not good. I didn’t want to get slammed into the concrete seawall. It would probably break every bone in my body. At the very least it would knock me out. But there wasn’t much I could do either. I looked up at the skyline of the old city rising above me, minarets reaching skyward. It was up to a higher power now. Or dumb luck. I felt the sea drop away below the Zodiac’s stern, the giant following sea filling the low-riding hull with salty water. There was no point in staying with the boat now. It had been picked up beneath me. My job was to not be crushed by the monster swell.

  The cold sea hit me like a freight train, ripping me from the boat and propelling me forward with its fierce power. I caught a glimpse of the near shore. There were shops and cars and carts and lights, and an instant later, they disappeared from view as the foaming black sea pulled me under. I had no idea which way was up in the cold black water as it tossed me like a rag doll under the wave. Finally, lungs bursting, I felt my head pierce the oily surface of the sea.

  Gasping for air, I looked up to see a lamppost before me. I reached forward, grappling it with both hands. There was debris in the water all around me, but I held on for all I was worth, muscles straining as the wave wrenched me back, the surge of water receding from the boardwalk. A second wave crashed in, but it was milder than the first. By the time the third wave had hit and left, the floodwaters had begun to recede. It was not yet dawn and the waterfront was deserted. I wasted no time picking myself off the cobblestones and heading out into the last of the night.

  Chapter 4

  I HAD BEEN in Istanbul for less than twenty-four hours at that point. Straight from the frying pan into the fire. Happily, the flight from Vietnam had given me a brief opportunity to recuperate from my mission in China. The flight had been mercifully empty after the Singapore leg, meaning I could bed down in the full middle row of the wide-body airbus. Airline blanket pulled firmly over my head, seat-back display off, I tuned out completely as we crossed Asia and the Middle East.

  Lying there, I’d considered what I knew about my missing father: One, he worked for the CIA in a covert capacity. Two, he was still missing. And three, and perhaps most importantly, he had been taken hostage by the Green Dragon Organization. I didn’t know what else to call the Green Dragons. Terrorists? A global energy monopoly? A rogue cult? Whatever they were, they had him, although, somehow, he was still managing to communicate with us. But he might not be able to do so for long. That was why I’d had to move so quickly. And that was why I was in Istanbul now, to find the man whom I’d not long ago given up for dead.

  Istanbul is the only city in the world to straddle two continents. The Bosphorus Strait runs down the middle of it separating the European side where I stood, from the Asian side to the east. I was in the old city now, the Sultanahmet neighborhood, known for its twisting cobblestone streets and elaborate mosques. I had sustained a few scrapes and bruises from my late-night swim and my clothes were soaking, but so far, the few people about seemed more concerned with running down to the area flooded by the wave than looking at me.

  I pushed ahead to my rendezvous. My cargo shorts, cleverly sewn from a quick-dry material, were already airing out in the new dawn. Back at the safe house in Vietnam, I had come upon a roll of duct tape and stuck a six-inch strip of the stuff to the left leg of my shorts like a lucky charm. I figured you never knew when it might come in handy. But even though my cargo shorts were drying, my T-shirt was soaked. I passed an early morning street vendor fiddling with his display of counterfeit merchandise and traded him a twenty-lira note for a collared T-shirt and a ball cap. I changed into the new shirt in a nearby alley, pulling the cap low over my eyes. Even though the day was brand new, Istanbul was waking quickly, the morning call to prayer echoing through the streets.

  The ghostly five-times-daily call to prayer blasted through megaphones on minarets was among the more exotic of Istanbul’s street sounds. The muezzin singing into his microphone to rouse the faithful had an otherworldly tone to it. I quickened my pace because I wanted to be off the street before the city fully awoke. More than once I got the feeling I was being tailed, but after circling around, I chalked it up to nerves. My rendezvous was at a local Turkish bath, what the Turks called a hammam. I needed to get there and get out of sight.

  It didn’t take long to find the place. A peeling, painted metal sign up a narrow street identified the Ozkok Hammam. The problem was, my rendezvous wasn’t for more than an hour and the place was closed. I doubled around the block to ensure I hadn’t been followed and tried the hamman door again. It looked as if I had a wait on my hands. Fortunately, the bakery across the street was open, the smell of freshly baked pastries hanging in the air. There was already a line at the counter, a few early rising customers seated at the tables out front.

  I took a seat at one of the tables with my back to the wall. It gave me a good vantage of the hammam and an easy exit should I need it. The customers drank tea served in short, bulbous glasses. I flagged down the server to place my order. She had long, slightly mussed, dark hair and was out of breath. No one could say that she wasn’t attractive, but it was her eyes that struck me. They were deep and dark and radiant, and somehow contemplative, even though she was obviously run off her feet between the bakery in the back and the café out front. I muddled through the few words of Turkish I’d learned from my guidebook to order a coffee and a bottle of water.

  After that, I turned my attention to the crowd. So far, I had seen no indication that I had been tailed. A few early morning people walked up and down the narrow street, but there were no familiar faces among them. No, for the moment
at least, I was fairly certain I was clean, and that meant it was as good a time as any to examine what I had found. Not the photos and the scarf and the like; the lab would have better luck with those things. No, what I was interested in was the ceramic disk that had popped out of the sconce—the amulet.

  Alone in the corner, I removed the disk from my pocket. I knew what it was. The disk was a Turkish Eye—an amulet to ward off evil. Glazed on one side in white and blue and black, it was thought that in a situation where people may mean you harm, the Eye, or nazur, as the Turk's called it, had your back. It was such a popular symbol in Turkey that, though I had only been in the country for a short time, I had already seen them everywhere, from sidewalks to gift shops. I had even seen the symbol on the tail of a commercial airliner as I arrived at Atatürk airport.

  The question was, why hide one in a lamp? I turned the amulet over. The back of the Eye was unglazed ceramic, nothing more, nothing less. There were so many of these ceramic disks around, I doubted that they were even manufactured locally. They had probably shipped in from China, just like me. What I needed to do was figure out what was so important about the amulet that my father had chosen to hide it inside a lamp? I ran my fingers over the disk’s glazed surface carefully placing it back in my pocket. Then I leaned back and nearly fell out of my chair.

  It was the bread that did it. An avalanche of sticky buns over the top of my head. Which I could have lived with, if it hadn’t been followed by the coffee. I jumped up, but not quickly enough. The coffee spilled all over me. I didn’t get burned, but I was well decorated, nonetheless.

  I looked up.

  “Üzgünüm. Are you all right?”

  It was the server. The pretty one with the deep dark eyes.

  “Great,” I said, brushing myself off. “How about you?”

  She didn’t answer me. Instead, she passed me a towel and got down on the floor to pick up the bread. I helped her, picking up a few of the pastries. She glanced back at the counter. The line had dissipated, but there were still a few people there.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll get the rest.”

  “Teşekkürler. Thank you.”

  The server left and I finished up with the buns, placing them on my table. I had no idea whether they were still destined for the display cabinet, but I wanted my coffee more than ever. I checked my watch. It was 5:30 AM. I still had an hour until my meet at the hammam. It had been a productive evening, but I was fooling myself if I thought it had gone smoothly. Someone did not want something on that ship coming to light. Maybe they were concerned about that giant tuning fork. Why else blow up the boat? My father’s message had led me straight into the middle of something big.

  I thought about pulling the amulet back out of my pocket, when my coffee arrived for the second time. This time it was accompanied by a red plastic bag containing a two-liter bottle of water and a huge pastry that I was pretty sure I hadn’t ordered. The server smiled at me.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I didn’t order this.”

  “The bread is on the house,” she said. “For the ceiling.”

  “The ceiling? You mean up there?” I said, pointing at the cracked plaster above.

  “No. The spill-ing,” she said drawing out the word.

  “Got you,” I said. The pastry was the size of a loaf of bread.

  “Do you want some?”

  “Why not?” she said. She pulled up a chair. “My break. The other worker came.”

  “Your English is good,” I said.

  “My English is terrible, my coffee is good. You must try.”

  I tried the coffee. It was served in a tiny cup and was as black as mud. There was no cream or sugar, and though I didn’t normally drink coffee that way, I decided to give it a go. I was glad I did. It was good. No, it was great. Smooth and dark and hardly bitter. But mostly it was strong. Very strong.

  “What is wrong?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your face, it looks like you are drinking poison. Did I say that right, poison?”

  “Yeah, you said it right.”

  “So you think my coffee is poison?”

  “No, no, I just don’t usually drink it black. Your coffee is good.”

  “Good then. How is the bread?”

  I took a bite.

  “Bread’s great.”

  She flicked her hair out of her eyes and reached over and broke off a piece for herself. I made her to be in her late twenties. With her high cheekbones and full lips, she was striking, yet relaxed, as though she didn’t know the effect she had on others. She wore a deadpan expression with just the hint of a smile on her lips. I liked her. I liked her slim build and her deep, liquid eyes. I liked her button nose. And for some weird reason, I particularly liked that she wasn’t overly concerned that she had spilled coffee all over me. She was sorry, yes, but she wasn’t fawning. It was refreshing. As if she accepted that sometimes things just happened, and that I should too.

  “Well,” she said. “I work now.”

  She squeezed my hand and got up, brushing loosely past me. I smiled back at her, enjoying the warm glow of a chance encounter with an attractive stranger. A part of me worried that I might be being played, but I rejected the notion. I hadn’t been followed. I was clean. I glanced behind me again, but she was busy behind the counter. Then I saw the hammam door open across the street. I dropped a bill on the table, picked up my bottle of water, and went to meet my fate.

  Chapter 5

  THE HAMMAM DOOR had opened from the inside. Initially I was surprised there was anybody there at that early hour, but I suspected that, like a gym, there would be people who would go before work. I’d never been to a Turkish bath before, so I wasn’t up on the protocol, but when a greasy, heavyset man stepped out of a small booth to offer me a checkered cotton towel and a numbered key, it seemed fairly obvious that the first order of business was to strip down. A row of tiny wood-paneled changing rooms lined the white plastered lobby. I stepped past a thin man patiently folding towels and into the first changing room on my right.

  I knew I was in the right place from the moment I opened the door, because my backpack was there waiting for me. The red, low-volume climbing backpack had been given to me before I left Vietnam. They had gussied the gear up for me since my last mission. The pack had been modified from the stock with a Kevlar backing and a sheet of interlocking ceramic plates. The intention was to make the back panel of the pack bullet resistant, which might turn out to be useful, though I was in no hurry to find out. I had left the pack at the hostel I had stayed at the night before, but apparently my unit leader wanted to make sure I had access to it right away. Inside the pack, I carried my usual complement of supplies: a couple of changes of wick-dry clothes, a camera, a Swiss Army knife, sleeping bag, flashlight, emergency blanket, and the like.

  What was new to me was a field-issued iPhone, complete with an anonymous, local SIM card. It was an experiment. If I thought that my position wasn’t compromised, I was free to use the device. Hard-lined Internet café access was still less traceable, but it was thought that, at the beginning of my mission at least, the iPhone, with its anonymous SIM, might offer a measure of convenience. The iPhone also provided a direct link to the CIA tech team in Virginia, a fact of particular interest to me since I had been informed that Mobi Stearn, the crack civilian engineer to whom I owed a debt of gratitude for his work on my previous mission, had also been recruited.

  The iPhone was modified with, among other things, a bug detector and a hard on/off switch that interrupted the power supply to ensure that the unit couldn’t be tracked when I didn’t want it to be. It was also preloaded with a guide to the region that I would need.

  I dropped the wet daypack containing the evidence I had gathered and stripped down, wrapping the light, checkered cotton towel around my waist. A Turkish bath was essentially a steam room, so I knew it was going to be hot in there. I decided to bring the bottle of water in with me. The backpacks I fi
gured I’d leave where they were, but regarding the amulet, I wasn’t so sure. I decided to drop it into the plastic bag with the water on the off chance that I could figure out what it meant.

  I locked the flimsy changing room door behind me, and the thin guy directed me to a door at the back of the lobby. I was glad I wasn’t wearing anything more than a towel, because the warmth hit me from the moment I stepped inside, rising steam making it difficult to see the white marble floor and walls through the mist. There were a few benches in the long rectangular space, with showers on one side of the room and toilet stalls on the other, like a locker room at a swimming pool.

  I could see a second door entering the hammam proper, steam curling out from underneath it. I decided to rinse off briefly before going into the next room. I turned on the single faucet, the cool water feeling strangely good on my skin in the warm room. A shower also gave me a chance to survey the space. One of the things they pounded into us back at the Farm was the importance of being aware of your surroundings. Entry points, exit points, places for an adversary to hide, the whole thing. From my vantage, I could see the Turkish toilets through their swinging doors and the long benches to the left of me. Short of squeezing up through the sewer, there was no other way into the room.

  I turned off the shower, refastened the cotton towel around my waist, and picked up my plastic bag. The misty glass door into the next room was so wet with condensation that water rolled down it in little rivulets before hitting the steam rising from the crack at the bottom of the door. I was still a good forty minutes early so I was in no hurry. I took a final cool breath and pulled open the door, a wall of hot steam billowing out to greet me as I entered.