Yet the opposite is just the opposite — she wears a bull’s-eye, front and back. The only upside: she finds it impossible to fear a faceless enemy. Her situation fuels paranoia, suspicion and distrust, but she’s not afraid.
Three corridors, a lot of weaving through the chaos of medical practice, and Grace arrives at a set of stairs on the north side of Nightingale. Orthopedics. She hesitates, hoping for someone using the stairs. It pays off. She follows behind two nurses. They leave her at the landing on nine. Her feet pick up the pace of her descent automatically. She pulls on the reins. Anxiety produces boogeymen, jumping out at her unexpectedly. They don’t come; it doesn’t happen. Her thoughts settle: of course it doesn’t happen. They’re waiting for her at the bottom in order to limit her options. Either just before she leaves the building, or on the other side of the exit door.
On the second floor, she leaves the stairwell, rejoining a hospital ward. Pediatrics. She feels the cameras burning against her shoulders like the sun after too long on the beach. Think!
Only three entities could be monitoring the hospital security cameras: the Israelis, the West or the Turks.
The Israelis will want to protect her and John, will want to see their pacemaker op through to its rightful completion. Western agents will want the contents of the business card, and will go to great lengths to obtain it. The Istanbul police, if present, will want answers about the murder of an innocent taxi driver. The accountant sees the cameras as two-thirds against her, so abandons any consideration of appealing directly to them.
Considering it more dangerous outside than in, yet feeling eyes upon her and unable to leave, Grace begins to feel dizzy. As she was once taught, she free-associates, something that does not come easily nor endure for very long.
Hospital. Health. Patients. Doctors. Healing. Chaos. Order. Patience. Panic. Operations. Prescriptions. Tests. Privacy. Tears. Crying. Diagnosis. Terminal. Cancer. Viral. Bacteria. Flu. Insurance.
She has it: a way out.
54
The heel of his shoe is used to eliminate the fisheye lens in the upper corner of the elevator car. Knox slams his thumb against the buttons, lights up three consecutive floors below him. After an empty stop, he’s joined by several nurses and an orderly tending to a young girl in a wheelchair. They all look at him when the elevator makes the next stop and Knox doesn’t depart. They disembark at lobby level. Knox rides to the first of three marked basement levels.
He moves quickly for the nearest exit. It’s all timing now. They can’t cover every exit, every street.
He’s comfortable with his chances. His shins feel surprisingly better; he’s found the right balance of meds. He’s through the exit and into a dark, underground parking garage before he can blink. Ducking, Knox works his way through the parked cars and light trucks, hoping to avoid closed-circuit cameras, though he doubts their existence due to the gloom.
At the exit, he stops to shed the pajama gown, pulls on his shirt, dons the windbreaker and hurries up a concrete ramp to join the crowd on a busy sidewalk. He’s all sparks and electricity, his motor red-lining. It’s a high that blows away the pain meds, sending him into a giddy mental frenzy that results from this life-threatening game of hide-and-seek.
Two intersections north, he circles the block fully and uses a variety of methods to surreptitiously check for ground surveillance. It’s a fool’s errand — a small mobile team can easily follow him without detection. But he knows the drill, and he stays with it before mixing with the crowds at the Sisli Mosque plaza where he and Grace stood only days earlier. It feels much longer ago, and Knox wonders for a moment at the outcome had they never pursued the switched FedEx package.
He pictures Mashe Okle’s forty-five-minute procedure. The man walks out of the hospital with a GPS in his chest and leads the Israeli Air Force to the location of his thorium research bunker, none the wiser about the protection he’ll be rendering. The Israelis will be able to track him for ten years, kill him at a moment’s notice.
Knox enters the Holiday Inn minutes later. Heads toward the booth by the alternate exit.
No Grace.
55
It takes Grace time she doesn’t have to find the hospital’s staff lounge. It’s down a fluorescent corridor thirty feet beneath street level on S2, flanked on either side by men’s and women’s locker rooms where no security cameras cover the toilets and showers. Here she finds an abundance of hospital gowns, rubber gloves, masks, hats and shoe covers. She dons a green jumpsuit, waits for two cleaners to leave, and follows closely behind. By the time she’s left all this behind and is on the street again, she’s confident she has avoided detection.
She finds Knox in the restaurant booth drinking black coffee. Either the pain or the meds or both have spread fatigue onto his face. He tries to smile for her.
The bench seat is plastic, the lighting environmentally friendly, the buffet picked over. Grace shifts back and forth, unable to get comfortable.
“Making it a few blocks up the street is very different from getting through Customs.”
Knox flinches in agreement but doesn’t speak.
“Perhaps Besim—”
“He’s working for the Israelis.” He explains the end of his ride in terse, muttered sentences.
“It’s not possible,” she says. “I booked Besim, not Dulwich. My arrangements, not his. Dulwich wanted it this way.”
Knox grimaces and shrugs. Indifferent. “Fucking Sarge.”
“My phone!” she says, still stuck on how an employee of the Israelis had ended up her driver. “The Red Room. When they switched the phone. My new model allowed full surveillance no matter the SIM chips I used. When I called to book my driver… they rerouted the call.”
“Let’s save the CSI for later,” he says. Again, she misses the reference.
“He got the business card?”
Another smirk.
“He didn’t get the business card.” A statement she mulls over. “But if Besim works with the Israelis, then why did he tip me off to the man watching my apartment? A man we assume also to be Israeli.”
“We make too many assumptions.”
“Your theory doesn’t explain anything,” she complains.
“They wanted to sell you — us — on Besim’s loyalty.”
It hits her in the center of her chest. She wants to contradict him. Prove she knew what she was doing as a solo field op. Can’t. “I believed.”
“They underestimated you. If Besim hadn’t given you that guy, we’d never have picked up on the FedEx. It backfired on them because you’re way better at your job than they are at theirs.”
He’s trying to console her. It works. She has a great deal to learn yet, she thinks.
The waiter arrives. Grace orders coffee. Knox waves him away.
“Thorium,” Knox says.
“Need To Know,” says Grace. “The Iranians have always claimed peaceful use. Looks like they could claim that, however much they lied. A thorium reactor will not save the world, but it could nearly eliminate contamination. This would be a true game changer, John. Licensing such technology — the revenues would be staggering. Perhaps make up for shrinking oil reserves.” She lowers her voice additional decibels. “For the Israelis to bomb such research would be a public relations nightmare for decades to come.”
“So some benevolent billionaire — the Israeli equivalent of Richard Branson — with ties to the government, or at least a faction of the government, hires Primer, or Dulwich — who knows? — to find a way to exclude the thorium reactor from any future attack.”