A taxi waits, a dark figure looming in the backseat.
Knox throws open the door. She climbs in. Knox says, “Go!” in Turkish. The cab rolls.
“Well?” Knox says.
Grace looks straight ahead as she shakes her head.
“Nothing?”
She repeats the gesture.
“No procedure scheduled?”
She looks into his gray-green eyes, chameleon eyes, sometimes blue, sometimes nearly brown. Lets him know that she’s as puzzled as he.
“Then why? Why the package?”
She has no answer that will satisfy. She can run them in circles, but imagines he’s already there with her, coming back around in an endless loop that will begin to ring like feedback in his ears. No easy explanation. No concise meaning or rationale for a probable agent tracking the movement of a shipment of medical supplies, but too many coincidences to discount.
Knox is taking them in the direction of his hotel. The cab leaves the busy streets for back alleys. The Chinese know how to keep their cities clean and free of litter. The Turks could learn a thing or two from them, Grace thinks.
“The package could be something pertaining to an earlier procedure,” she suggests. “The pieces must fit. They are not random.”
“Sarge knows,” he says accusingly. Emphatically.
“We are expected to operate blind.”
“Because he knew we might have questions,” he says. “Questions he doesn’t want to answer. So the real question is: why doesn’t he want to answer them?”
The cab pulls over. They stand on the sidewalk across from the Alzer Hotel.
“The client sent the package,” Knox speculates. “There’s a courier in the hospital who’s supposed to get something from the package to Mashe. It can all happen inside the mother’s hospital room — a controlled environment.”
“Protected by bodyguards,” she said. “They were afraid maybe I was planting a listening device, a camera. Just now. At the hospital.”
“But if this is about an exchange, then why the Harmodius and my five minutes with Mashe? What’s the point?”
“Electronics hidden in the sculpture?”
“No. They’ll X-ray it as part of the authentication. It has to be clean. Even so, what could be gained? Why do they need those five minutes?”
“I agree. I do not see the purpose of our involvement.”
“You need to contact Sarge.”
Her neck makes a pop, she spins her head so quickly.
“Use Xin to track him. I won’t contact him electronically. I understand how that could compromise us all. But in person? In the right setting? That’s different. If he fires us, he fires us. We need answers.”
“It is a mistake, John. We need first to know who Mashe is. My trail, the electronic trail, is nonexistent. But the brother…”
“Will never tell me anything,” Knox says. “And to ask…”
“There must be someone who knows this man!”
In his mind’s eye, Knox sees a woman opening a door for him. Sees her plaintive expression as she realizes she has betrayed him to the Jordanian police.
“Maybe there is,” he says.
21
When Knox picks up the voice mail, he extends the iPhone to arm’s length, studying it as if it’s from another planet. He’s so nonplussed he doesn’t hear the message clearly the first time, only the woman’s voice; he has to start it again. Takes it off speakerphone and puts it to his ear. The SIM chip in the device is the phone number he uses for op contacts. He routinely checks it for text and voice messages.
He considers himself calm and rational, avoids emotional response and drama as much as possible when on the job. But he knows he can’t keep his heart out of his decisions or his head out of his motives. He doesn’t take kindly to coincidence; he’s programmed toward paranoia when it rears its head.
Years ago, inside a hotel room in a distant province of China, he complained to his roommate that hotel housekeeping had failed to leave complimentary bottles of filtered water; less than three minutes later, there was a knock, and the water was delivered. Coincidence? Only if the word is spelled “eavesdropping.”
But how could anyone have eavesdropped on his thoughts? He didn’t actually tell Grace that gallery owner Victoria Momani might be able to shed light on Mashe Okle. Yet it is her voice speaking cryptically from his phone.
“Orhan’s minis. Before fourteen.”
She is in Istanbul. His stomach turns.
This is an in-and-out, a week tops.
Knox didn’t give her his number, but her phone trapped his original incoming call. This shows him she is facile and a quick study. But what does she want?
He’s overreacting; he was going to have to contact her anyway; she has done him the favor.
But he thinks back to the water bottles in the hotel regardless.
Shit!
The cryptic message can be taken one of two ways: she doesn’t want others to quickly or easily know the location of their meet; or she wants Knox to take her precautions as an indication that this is between the two of them when she’s actually leading him into a trap. As she’s betrayed him once already, she doesn’t have history on her side.
Quickly he switches SIM chips, starts walking while searching the midday traffic for an available taxi. He never uses the op SIM chip anywhere near his lodging in case callers intend to trace his location through a GPS fix. He’s up near Vatan Lisesi, a high school well away from the Alzer Hotel, when he dials.
Grace answers on the second ring.
He says, “‘Orhan’s minis.’ Mean anything to you?” He only has twenty minutes to make the rendezvous. He’s counting on Grace.
“Orhan Pamuk,” she says. The name resonates with Knox, but he can’t place it so he stays quiet.
Knox has it. “The writer.”
“The Nobel laureate. Correct.” She sounds as if she is barely tolerating him. “Dr. Pamuk has said his novel My Name Is Red was inspired by Islamic miniatures.”
“Orhan’s minis,” Knox says. “Where do I find them?”
“Stand by,” she says. He hears her nails spiriting along a plastic keyboard. “Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum. Down by—”
“The Topkapi.”
“Terzihane Square, more accurately.”
“I know the museum.”
“What do I need to know?” she asks.
A dozen wisecracks fill his head. He says instead, “Making progress. Might have Xin track this number for the next two hours.”
“John?”
“Just as insurance.”
He ends the call before Grace becomes all motherly.
Entering the palace grounds, Knox proceeds through immaculate landscaping over grouted stone, gets the impression of a cloister or an Oxford garden. With the sounds of the city reduced to a distant hum, he hears a bird sing brightly and marvels at the age of the massive tree that leans in an ungainly fashion against the sign directing him to the museum entrance. A four-foot-tall pottery urn rests against ground cover. The interior courtyard housing the museum has the feel of a monastery. A confluence of architectural devices and methods causes Knox to think Turkish Tudor.
Once inside, the museum is warm colors, tapestries and dioramas. Dark wood posts support the ceilings. The smell of lanolin is in the air. He passes ancient brass bells, stone sundials and Asian armor.
“The Turks must have had superior eyesight to do such intricate work,” Knox says, speaking over the shoulder of Victoria Momani. If she’s a spy, she’s not a very good one; she’s more interested in the displays than Knox’s arrival.
And he answers himself: perhaps a very clever one.
He has taken his time. He questions if the man with the newspaper tucked under his arm, a man currently studying a tin incense burner, is in fact listening to the recorded guided tour. Has the audio player been replaced with a two-way radio? Maybe Victoria isn’t paying attention to him because the others surrounding him are.