I was in an awkward position because of my improvised backward leap, but I wasn’t helpless. Far from it. Still, I was going to have to adjust. I’m already tall and having an extra twenty-four inches of height, while great for the view, wasn’t helping me at that moment. So I sunk low on my left leg and planted my foot firmly, letting go with my right leg in a massive front kick. The chest would have been the obvious target — easier to hit — but I didn’t want to go for the chest. I didn’t want this to keep going on and on. I wanted to end it. So I aimed for the bottom of Jean-Marc’s square jaw putting every ounce of my nearly two hundred pounds behind it.
I regretted the move the instant I did it. I knew what the result was going to be, and I had jumped the gun. There was information I needed to get from Jean-Marc, but I didn’t think I was going to get it now. The kick was too focused. Too well planted. I felt the ball of my foot connect with the stubble of his chin, forcing his head back. But it didn’t stop there. The kick was too powerful and I followed through with it all the way.
I felt resistance, and then a crack, like what you hear when someone cracks your back. Except it was the cracking of Jean-Marc’s neck. The human neck has a decent range of motion back and forth, but it’s not infinite. And it’s no match for a well-timed blow aiming to obliterate it. With that crack, I knew immediately that I had delivered a lethal blow. My foot had severed Jean-Marc’s head from his spinal cord as surely as if he had been hung. He stopped breathing before he hit the blood-soaked floor.
The yatagan fell from Jean-Marc’s outstretched arm, landing with a metallic clank. I stepped off the marble slab carefully avoiding the old guy’s blood to check what I had done, but it was as I expected: Jean-Marc’s wide blue eyes had already started to glaze over. It was the same with the old man. He was still bleeding out, but more from gravity than anything else. I checked his pulse even though I could see that his heart had stopped beating.
The whole thing made me angry. Angry at the waste. Angry with myself for jumping the gun. I checked the old man’s hammam towel to ensure he wasn’t hiding anything that might point to his presence there, but there was nothing. He seemed to be exactly what he appeared. A civilian. Then I checked Jean-Marc’s hammam towel. Nothing there either.
So far I had avoided stepping in the slick of blood covering the floor, and I wanted to keep it that way. I didn’t need the local police following my bloody footprints around the block, but I wasn’t about to walk out unarmed either, so I grabbed the yatagan off the floor. Then I picked up my water bottle and the amulet and strode out the swinging door.
Chapter 9
Both the anteroom containing the shower and toilets and the lobby were empty. No sign of the heavyset guy. No sign of the guy folding towels either. I opened the changing room and quickly dressed. After that I picked up both backpacks, my plastic bag, and the yatagan, and a few seconds later I was on the street.
The first thing I did was duck into a nearby doorway and pull out my Swiss Army knife. I had a decent vantage of the hammam and nobody was converging on it yet. I cut a one-inch slit into the bottom of the left strap of either pack. Then I pulled out the tracking beacons I found there and crushed them beneath the soul of my shoe. I knew that the packs were equipped with the long-range beacons so an agent could be located in an emergency, which, under the circumstances, was exactly what I didn’t want to have happen.
I stuffed the smaller daypack into my larger pack. Then I cut a makeshift scabbard for the yatagan out of the towel. I wrapped the blade and slipped the yatagan deep into the long front pocket of my cargo shorts, pulling down my T-shirt to conceal the hilt. Moments later I was back on the street. The city had come to life since I’d entered the hammam, the scent of freshly grilled lamb and diesel hanging in the air. Men walked by with enormous loads on their backs while street sweepers pulled carts of trash, vendors selling everything from vegetables to tobacco to Turkish Delight in the narrow cobbled alleys.
I was wound up like a clock. I had just killed a man, taken a life. It was something I’d been trained to do, yet something I’d never actually done. But I’d done it now, Jean-Marc’s lifeless body was testament to that. And though I wasn’t proud of what I’d done, I didn’t feel sorry for it either. Because the die had been cast. It had been him or me.
What I needed to do was manage the aftermath. I needed to ensure that I wasn’t being followed and I needed to know why Jean-Marc had turned on me. His behavior had thrown my entire relationship with the CIA into question. I didn’t know whom I could trust.
I replayed the events over in my mind from the beginning. Jean-Marc had sat down. He had said it was hot. He had told me that the authorities were looking for me. He had asked me what I had found.
The Eye. I had shown him the Turkish Eye.
I took the Eye out of the plastic bag. Looked at it. I still didn’t see what he had seen. But whatever it was, it had been important to him. It had been important enough to try to kill me. But what was it? There was nothing about the thing that was remarkable. No code. No message. Just clay. Glazed, kiln-baked clay, shiny on one side, rough on the other. I thought about it. Then I bent low as I passed an iron hitching post and smashed the amulet down hard.
It broke in two and I immediately saw that a thin transparent strip held the clay together. Gotcha. I turned in to a smaller alley and went to work separating the shiny transparent strip from the clay. The strip looked like it was made from some kind of heat-resistant material and I removed it easily from the clay. But what was interesting was what it said. Typed on the face of the strip was a message.
The message read:
TelD CaNtIVE OON SHEPs
If the amulet was a message from my father, it seemed pretty obvious what he was trying to say. He was trying to disguise what he was writing behind poor typing, but with a few simple substitutions, a T for an H, an N for a P, an I for an E, I thought the meaning was pretty clear:
HELD CAPTIVE ON SHIPS
Why it was ships plural, and the word “ON” was misspelled, or how he had managed to bake a tiny transparent silicone strip into a piece of pottery while held captive on a ship, I had no idea. Still, taken as a whole, the message made sense. It did, however, beg a logical question. If the message was indeed from my father, had he received outside help? I flipped the strip over. On the other side it said, “Sipahi Caddesi.” I didn’t know who, if anyone, was helping my father. I couldn’t even be certain that the message was from my father, but I did recognize caddesi as the word for street. After quickly consulting my iPhone, I headed to the Grand Bazaar.
My cap pulled low over my eyes, it didn’t take me long to reach the bazaar’s pedestrian-choked Byzantine gates. The Grand Bazaar was, in essence, a huge collection of alleys in old Istanbul that had been covered with an arched roof hundreds of years previously. The walkways were lined with shops on either side, the tiled floor as uneven as the alleys that had predated it. Incense burned and touts cried out for business, scimitars and spices shared shelf space with the usual array of imported souvenirs.
Shouts and screams echoed down the maze of corridors as I proceeded past the stalls of antiques and rugs and jewels until I eventually found my way to Sipahi Caddesi. Pushing through the crowds of backpackers and garden-variety tourists, it wasn’t long before I found a shop specializing in the product in question — Turkish Eyes.