“Hello,” I said hopefully.
“Hello to you too.”
I opened my other eye. The pain in my head was sharp and constant, like a hangover that just wouldn’t quit. My contact was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, nothing so fashionable as the tailor-cut pantsuit she had had on the night before, but she looked good, her hair still damp from her morning shower. I remembered the contact code.
“Turkey is a fine bird,” I said.
“Not if you prefer fish,” my contact replied crisply.
Her accent was as thick as I remembered it being at the bakery. English was obviously not her first language, and by the time she had said fish, I was already thinking that I needed to talk to whoever was responsible for coming up with that ridiculous code. She beat me to it.
“What is this stupid code?” she said. “Turkey is a country. That is it.”
“No, the food turkey,” I said, defending the indefensible. “The bird.”
“Ahh,” she said, as if she was getting it. “Like Turkey food. You like Turkey food?”
“Only on holidays.”
My contact grunted.
“Then enough with the stupid bird,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“Like somebody beat on my head with a bat,” I said.
“It was a whiskey bottle,” she corrected.
I felt at my chin and found a bandage there.
“It may leave a scar. I don’t know. They drugged you,” she said.
“I gathered.”
I needed to tread very carefully. I didn’t know what she’d discussed with Jean-Marc, and I didn’t know why they had arranged to meet in person. I didn’t know whether this woman had any connection to the Dragons at all, except that she’d been Jean-Marc’s last point of contact. Most significantly, I didn’t know why she had been surveilling me at the bakery. No sense beating around the bush.
“Back at the bakery. Why were you following me?” I asked.
“Slow down,” she said.
“I need to know why.”
“Fine. It was a tip.”
“A tip that I like coffee?”
“A tip that an American spy was going to blow up a Turkish freighter. I followed you from the Galata Bridge.”
“How did you know I would go to the bakery?”
“I got lucky. I saw that where you were going was not yet open. I thought that perhaps you would return to the bakery to wait. I showed the man in the back my ID. He let me take over from there.”
“Why?” I asked.
“We at MIT, we like to know who we are doing business with, Mr. Raptor.”
I was happy to hear her say the name. It suggested that my cover might still be intact. I was well aware that MIT in this case did not stand for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The acronym, as I understood it, stood for Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı. It was the Turkish National Intelligence Organization — basically their version of the CIA.
“Of course you do,” I nodded.
“Great. I am glad we have the introductions out of the way. Now clean yourself up.”
My contact rose from the opposite bed and walked through a low doorway leading down a set of stairs. I was in some kind of third-story loft. The room was bright, windows on all sides. I pulled myself out of the single bed and onto the ceramic-tiled floor. The floor, like the walls, was white, giving the place a clean look, but not a modern one, the workmanship was too haphazard for that. I walked out of a glass door and onto a rooftop deck. It was dusty outside, the morning sun already heating the day. On three sides of me were gritty fields spotted with olive groves and partially constructed homes. On the fourth side, to the west, was a village, maybe a mile and a half away.
That said, I had no idea where I was. I decided to take a shower. I located the bathroom and, sure enough, there was a modular shower unit. I stripped and stepped inside, turning on the water. The shower head was a little low, but the water was hot and it washed away both the grime and some of the pain in my aching head.
Whatever it was they had drugged me with, it hadn’t worked out. Maybe because I’d only taken a sip of the beer, it hadn’t put me out fast or completely. But the fact remained that somehow the men at the bar had been alerted to my presence. They were waiting for me. I soaped up and considered my next move. I was undercover now. My immediate goal was to get close to my contact. Close enough to determine whether she was on the Dragon payroll. If so, I could leverage that relationship to learn exactly which city the Dragons intended to destroy with the Tesla weapon. Then I could stop them.
I grabbed a towel and stepped out of the shower, studying myself in the mirror. My face was bruised from the hard right that Azad had landed. It was a little swollen, but at least I didn’t have a black eye. I was more concerned about my chin. I hung my towel over my shoulder and gently pulled off the gauze to take a look. Fortunately, the cut wasn’t deep. Nothing that a butterfly bandage couldn’t handle.
“Raptor.”
“I’m in the shower.”
I heard footsteps on the ceramic tile and my contact opened the door. She looked me up and down. I guessed the Turks weren’t big on privacy.
“Hurry. We eat breakfast. Then we work. Take this.”
She handed me a new butterfly bandage.
“Thanks. Can I have a moment first?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, I’m wearing no pants.”
She looked at me as if I was an alien, which I put down to a language issue. Then she shrugged and walked away.
Chapter 19
Breakfast was on the veranda overlooking a rolling garden. The Turks knew how to do their safe houses. There didn’t seem to be anybody else around, but there were fresh tomatoes, and cucumbers, and golden loaves of bread. There was also freshly churned butter, black olives, goat cheese, and a glass carafe of dark amber tea. No coffee that I could see, but I figured I’d make do. I sliced myself a couple thick pieces of bread and assembled a sandwich, my contact staring back at me from behind her oversized sunglasses. I realized at that point, that though she had taken to calling me “Raptor” per my code name, I still didn’t have a name for her.
“What should I call you?” I asked.
“Meryem,” she said. “You may call me, Meryem.”
“OK, Meryem. Can I pour you a cup of tea?”
Meryem nodded and I poured two glasses of steaming, dark amber chai. Meryem had hers black. I dumped a few spoonfuls of sugar in mine.
“What do you know of my mission?” she said.
It was exactly what I had been dreading. A direct question that required a direct answer. I had only one move. To play the silent type. But she took my silence for an admission.
“Don’t play that game with me. Your sloppy attempt at contact ruined an operation I had been working on for six months. I let that monster touch me,” she said.
“Monster?”
“Azad. The Kurd I was going to marry. Six months. Six months I worked to nail that criminal and you walk in and destroy my operation,” she said.
“I didn’t exactly just walk in. You knew I was coming.”
“So did they, didn’t they? You come in shorts and a T-shirt? How could they miss you? The group you sat with, both of those men worked for Azad's organization.”
“Organization?”
“Kurdish crime family. That’s what you call them in America isn’t it? Family? Mob?”
“Wait. You went undercover as a mob bride?”
She took a sip of her tea. “I did,” she said. “For my country, Turkey. Not the bird.”