“Stop running,” Leila ordered. “You’ll have a heart attack at your age!”
Rand slowed to a trot, feeling his heart racing. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Captain Iznik in pursuit at a slower pace. As soon as the limousine came into view, he saw Omar and their driver in conversation. The slender man smiled and spoke to Rand. “You’re just in time. I was speaking to Aytekin about starting back soon. It’s a long drive, but I hope we can make a brief stop at Troy so Leila can see it.”
Rand’s eyes were on the driver, and he saw a pistol snake out from under his coat. “My time is short,” the man said in broken English. “I want the chip.”
Omar’s eyes widened. “I can’t believe this.”
“You’ve killed two men for it already,” Rand told the driver. “That’s enough for one weekend.”
Aytekin saw Captain Iznik hurrying across the field toward them. He swung his weapon in that direction and Rand struck out at his arm, sending the shot wild. Then he and Omar both grabbed him as Iznik drew his own weapon.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Your killer,” Rand told him. “Aytekin set the bomb in Thadder’s car in Istanbul and skewered Plato Berk this afternoon.”
“What was his motive?”
“A computer chip. Want to tell us about it, Omar?”
Rand and Leila went back to Sevret’s inn after the police had finished. Omar came with them as they waited for a replacement driver to take them back to Istanbul. As was often the case, it fell to Rand to fill in the story’s missing pieces.
“Omar told us back in Alexandria that he was a designer of computer chips who traded in Oriental rugs in his spare time. He was bringing a carpet here to present as the prize in the final camel fight and asked us to come along. Perhaps he felt that having a staid British couple by his side would hide the true nature of his trip.”
“Which was?” Sevret asked.
“To sell his design for a highly advanced computer chip to the highest bidder. Once I remembered his occupation, I knew that had to be the reason. Why else would various governments and their representatives come all the way down here? Why else would Rolf Thadder have removed a quantity of cash from his consulate safe?”
“Why here?” Beth Sevret asked. “Such a deal could have been closed on a street corner in Istanbul.”
“I wondered about that myself,” Rand admitted. “But then I realized that Omar must have a preferred buyer down here. I remembered the carpet he’d offered as a prize in the final match. It was square, while surely the carpets used as prayer rugs are always rectangular. They must be, because a Muslim kneels on it and prostrates himself during his devotions. Omar’s rug was square, and what I’d taken for a geometric tree-of-life design was actually his design for an advanced computer chip.”
Omar spoke for the first time. “It was foolish, I suppose, but in my business there is a need for secrecy. I had the carpet hand-woven to my design and carried it with me quite openly. I even felt secure enough to leave it in the trunk of the rented car with a driver I barely knew. A thief would be looking for a tiny chip, not a prayer carpet. And if someone did steal the carpet it would be meaningless to him without a knowledge of its true importance. Since the chip’s function involved weapons-launching, I approached a number of smaller governments without the resources to develop such technology themselves. Mehmet’s government offered the most, but Berk and Thadder were still in the running. If Thadder stole the money to buy it, he may have been operating independently of his government. It mattered not to me.”
“But how did you know that Omar’s driver killed them?” Leila asked Rand.
“We must assume only one killer was involved. Of the few countries that knew about Omar’s chip, would more than one resort to assassination rather than paying cash for it? I don’t think so. But if the same person killed Thadder and Berk, that meant the killer had to be in Istanbul yesterday to plant the bomb in Thadder’s car. The police suspected he might have come here. That was why they asked to interview everyone who drove down from Istanbul yesterday. You’ll remember four people raised their hands, the two of us, Omar here, and the truck driver Jobar. The three of us could not have planted the bomb because Aytekin picked us up at the airport and we drove down here at once. Jobar might have planted the bomb, but he couldn’t have killed Plato Berk. He had to be with his camel in the arena when Berk was skewered. The same holds true for Mehmet, of course. He had to be near his camel during the fight. The Sevrets here were roaming the grounds, but they couldn’t have been in Istanbul to plant the bomb because they were busy here with their food preparation.”
“I was near the arena too, to award the prize,” Omar reminded them.
“But your driver wasn’t. And Aytekin didn’t raise his hand when the police asked to question those who’d come from Istanbul yesterday. Why not? Because he was fearful of police questioning. I noticed him earlier, over by his car, polishing it. Later I found discarded food on the ground there. Aytekin recognized Plato Berk in the crowd and went after him, pulling the food from his skewer so he’d have a weapon. The gun would have made too much noise. I imagine Berk drove down this morning, keeping out of sight after what happened to Thadder.”
“Would Aytekin have killed Jobar too, for winning the carpet?” Sevret asked.
Rand shook his head. “He never knew about the carpet or he’d have stolen it during the night. He ran out of possible buyers to kill so he had to go after Omar himself, imagining he carried the chip in his pocket.”
“Do you?” Leila asked the slender man.
“No, no, it is under lock and key. I brought only the carpet.”
“And now the wrong man has won it,” she observed. “What will that poor farmer Jobar do with it?”
Rand had an answer for that. “It is not the carpet but the design. Before the last fight I saw Mehmet take a picture of it. I imagine for the money he paid, he decided a camera was more trustworthy than a camel.”
Customer’s Choice
by Brendan DuBois
After taking a break from his series work to write a “big book,” a thriller which imagines bow the world might have been different had JFK lived (see Resurrection Day), Brendan DuBois is back at work on his Lewis Cole mystery novels. EQMM takes pride in the New Hampshire author’s accomplishments, for he debuted in our Department of First Stories in 1986, and now writes for many other magazines, including Playboy.
About ten minutes after Clay Wilson backed his van up the gently curving driveway to the large house on the lake, he knew it was going to be a long and dreary day, due to two things.
The first was that when he started unloading his photo gear from the van, the lady of the house — Chrissy Tate — refused to help him. Oh, he wasn’t expecting her to hump in the long, heavy cardboard boxes with the tripods and light gear, but it would have been nice if she had been at the door, opening it up for him while he trooped in and out of the home. Instead, after a quick and bubbly handshake and hello, she had gone back to the long granite counter in the well-lit kitchen, where she sipped a tall glass of orange juice and leafed through a thick Ethan Allen furniture catalogue. Even with her back to him, he knew the attitude. He was invisible, he was hired help, he didn’t count. And hired help can wrestle with the front door on their own, thank you very much.
The second was what he saw when he got into the wide living room with the floor-to-ceiling windows that boasted a grand view of a thick green lawn that ran down to the lake’s edge. Down on the black-blue waters was a dock that had a moored powerboat and sailboat bobbing in some slight swells, adjacent to a white-shingled boathouse. In the living room the furniture looked like it had been purchased and placed by five-hundred-dollar-an-hour consultants. The flooring was beige carpeting by the entryway and tan tile by the window, where a brass telescope rested. There was a television set the size of a Buick on the far wall, along with a fully-stocked wet bar and shelves that held knick-knacks, trophies, and photographs, and not a single book.