Blown Circuit (21 page)

To reach me with the gun, the guard had to hunch down low. I recognized him as one of the guys who had captured us back at the mosque. His front tooth was chipped and he was off balance, extending the weapon just beyond his comfort range. His finger wasn’t resting on the trigger either, but just behind it. True, he probably could have gotten his finger to where it needed to be, but it wasn’t there yet.
 

I didn’t seize the opportunity because I didn’t see the upside. At that point the situation wasn’t life or death. It was still cat and mouse. Kate obviously still wanted something from me, or she wouldn’t be pulling me back out of the hole. And I wanted something from her too—I wanted to know how far she’d gotten. Not the theatrical version, but the reality. I judged that the better move was to play along.

I got up, sending Meryem a look that I hoped told her to stay calm. The guard covered me as I rose. Then a second guard took over at the hatch. The first guard led me back up the rear stairs to the salon. I started to think about how I could play the situation to my favor. The boat was sailing west, but it was still the middle of the night and we were a long way from anything, the world as black as ink except for a billion twinkling stars.

I entered the salon to see Kate standing at the front of the space where the big windows raked forward. Faruk leaned at the bar, poring over the triggers. It was my first decent look at what we’d found. Each trigger consisted of an arrangement of cams and gears that would make a watchmaker proud. They were held together in what looked like titanium frames, about three feet long. There were thin metal caps on one end of the frames and fatter metal caps on the other, bundles of wire emerging from them. By virtue of the port in one of the thin metal caps, it looked as if the triggers daisy-chained together, forming one long device.
 

“Sit down, Michael,” Kate said.

Faruk laid the trigger back down and retreated down the corridor to the rear of the vessel. The guard remained at the door.
 

“I’ve been cramped into a ball since you dumped me down that hole. Hard to sleep that way. I’d prefer to lie down.”
 

“We need to talk,” Kate said.

“Well, if you’re not going to let me sleep, then get me a coffee,” I said. “And a sandwich. Make it a club.”

Kate nodded to the guard and he spoke into his collar mike in Turkish. I guess he doubled as the waiter.

“Now please,” Kate said. “Sit down!”

I stepped across the salon and took a seat on the far leather couch. It was firm and cool, the thick cream-colored leather fragrant with its factory scent. There was a matching ottoman on the floor and I put my feet up on it. Might as well be comfortable.

“Thank you for leading us to the triggers.”

“I’d say it was my pleasure, but it wasn’t.”

“I can see that you don’t trust me, Michael, and I can’t say I blame you. But I’ve been thinking about our dinner,” Kate said.

“So have I,” I replied. “That’s what made me hungry.”

“I feel I owe you an explanation,” she said.

“Let’s be clear. We don’t owe each other anything, Kate. You don’t owe me and I don’t owe you. Not a damn thing!”

“There’s something I haven’t been telling you, Michael.”

I laughed. “Is that supposed to surprise me?”

“There’s something I haven’t been telling you about your father.”

I stared her down. I wasn’t in the mood for more games.

“Stop playing me, Kate.”

“We had an affair,” she said.

“What are you going on about?” I said.

“Your father and I,” Kate said. “We had an affair.”

I had heard her correctly, so there was no point in asking her to repeat herself. I had also completely lost my appetite.

Chapter 39

I
T
DIDN
’
T
TAKE
long for my sandwich to arrive. A second soldier carried it over from the corridor behind me. Lightly toasted sesame bread with grilled-chicken, lettuce and tomato, cut into four triangles, each speared with a fancy toothpick and topped with a pickle. There was a coffee too, with cream and sugar on the side. But I had no desire to eat or drink anymore. Not after what I had heard.
 

“It started not long after we met, on the job, in China,” Kate said. “At first it was casual. Just two people who worked closely together letting off stress. Enjoying the moment. But it grew. We…shared something. But I didn’t want to be a home wrecker, Michael. I knew your father was happily married. So I ended it.”

I thought about what Kate had said. Thought about my dad. Thought about my time with her.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

Kate smiled. “Your father is an attractive man, Michael. He’s fit, experienced, smart. Is it so hard to believe that he’d be attractive to a younger woman?”

“No,” I said.

“Then what is it you don’t believe?”

“You,” I said.

“Why not?”

“The timing. It’s convenient isn’t it, Kate? To tell me about this now. To tell me when you want something from me.”

“It’s the truth, Michael.”

“Really?”

“He called me his Camden Star.”

 
I felt my stomach knot up a little, but betrayed no emotion. At least I tried not to.

“When I asked him why, he said it was something about the time he’d spent in Camden Town. In London. It’s where I was born you know. I don’t know what he meant by it exactly.”

I didn’t now what he meant by it either. I took a bite of my sandwich. The chicken was flavorful. Slightly spicy. I liked it. I liked it almost as much as I hated the image in my mind’s eye of Kate and my dad.
 

“Why did you bring me here, Kate?”

“Why else, Michael?” She smiled. “The book.”

Kate reached between the crates and removed Tesla’s journal from the bar. It looked as worn as ever, even in the low light. The raked windows of the salon had blinds drawn over them to prevent the light in the salon from interfering with navigation. I felt some wave movement, but nothing the big yacht couldn’t handle as we droned forward into the night.

“Come over here,” Kate said.

I was beyond feigning indifference. I wanted to see what had caught her attention just as much as she wanted to show me. I picked myself up and took a seat beside her at the bar. Kate turned the journal to the first page.
 

“I’ve been over it several times. It makes no sense.”

“Are we going to start at the beginning?” I said.

“Sure,” she said.

She opened the leather-bound journal.
 

“You know what the first pages look like. The olives, the arm, the statue. Then we get down to the island, the theater, all that stuff is now clear.”

“How do you know that?” I said.

“Because we found, or let me rephrase that, you found what we were all looking for.”

“Mistake,” I said.

“That you found what we were looking for?”

“That you assume this Bayazidi guy who hid the Device was that limited in his thinking.”

“Occam’s razor, Michael.”

“The simplest solution is probably the correct one? Maybe true most of the time, but not necessarily true when you’re dealing with someone who’s trying to fool you.”

“So what are you saying? That everything you’ve discovered so far—the tower and the triggers—were simply designed to get us off the scent?”

“I’m saying that whoever intercepted the Tesla Device and subsequently re-hid it, wasn’t necessarily leaving us bread crumbs to find it again in this diary.”

“Then why write it at all?” Kate said.

“Easy,” I said. “To kill us.”
 

Kate looked at me quizzically, her brow briefly furrowed with concern.

“Whoever wrote this thing is leading us into a trap,” I said. “They planted the journal as a red herring. To eliminate the threat.”

Kate smiled.
 

“You’re going to have to work harder than that to fool me, Michael.”

I smiled back. Maybe, I would, maybe I wouldn’t. But I’d introduced the notion of doubt. The idea that we might not be on the right path. The idea that some clues in the journal might be decoys. And that was all I needed to do right then. I needed to shake Kate up enough that she wouldn’t entirely trust her next move.

 
“You don’t want to help me find it, fine,” Kate said. “But the next step is in this journal. Right here.”
 

Kate opened the aging pages to a map of the coast, a town depicted on it front and center, like a map of old. I didn’t know the name of the town, but I remembered the drawing. It had a huge, double-moon harbor with a pear-shaped peninsula separating either half and tiny, ink-drawn boats taking refuge in each calm bay.
 

“The town of Bodrum,” she said. “We’ll make landfall by noon. Is there anything you want to tell me before we get there?”

“Sure. Meryem says that you’re going to murder a bunch of folks. Maybe a whole city of them,” I said.

“Blow up a city? Not without a reason, Michael. Why on earth would we do that?”

“I don’t know. Why would you say you were going to?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t,” Kate replied.
 

The way she said it, matter-of-factly like that, I almost believed her.

“The final component of the Device is somewhere in this town. The map proves it,” Kate said.

Kate thumbed to the next page in the journal. I saw a figure of a man. A very pained, very distraught man. But I also saw a possibility. I kept my expression neutral.
 

“Now, as I said before,” Kate said. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

I thought about it.

“If you want my help with this, I want Meryem released from that God-awful storage locker. Get her something to eat. And I want another coffee. A full pot this time. And I want some damn room to work. You give me that, we can talk.”

“Whatever you need, Michael,” Kate said. “But know that I’m watching you.”

I drew one of the crates near, peering at the titanium triggers inside. Kate took both hands off the journal, pushing the crate back over the bar.

“Not so close,” she said.
 

I smiled and Kate gave the guard a nod, pointing me toward the stern of the ship. No way. I shook my head and pointed outside.

“Meryem first,” I said.

“Fine,” she said to me. “Watch him like a hawk,” she added to the guard.

Chapter 40

T
HE
SUN
WAS
not yet up, but the sky had begun to lighten to a deep purple behind us in the east, the Fox throwing a decent wake in the low rolling sea. I judged that we were cruising at fifteen knots, close to maximum speed for a big yacht. The launch I had taken to the island with Kate hung from the deck above on two davit cranes. There wasn’t enough wind to put a chop on the waves yet, but if the seas got any bigger, I knew that what I had planned would be impossible.
 

“Worked here long?” I said to the guard behind me. It was the same guy who had hauled me out of the storage locker in the first place. The one with the chipped tooth.

“Long enough,” he said in thickly accented English.

“Your English is good,” I said, pausing as I turned. “What happened to your tooth?”

“I bit an American,” he grunted.

I hoped he was joking, though he didn’t strike me as a particularly funny guy. He prodded me down the stairs toward the rear deck. It wasn’t a great position to be in. I was five steps above the deck and he was two steps above me, the barrel of the H&K assault rifle at my back. I felt the boat roll in the waves. It was my opportunity, so I went for it. I tripped. I dived headlong down the steps, cartwheeling off my left arm to absorb some of the impact, while I rounded my shoulder and tucked into a ball, rolling once across the deck below. I could have landed in a crouch, but I didn’t. I landed flat, face down, because I needed to sell it. I needed him to think that I was knocked out.

The guard let out a grunt and pounded down the stairs after me, the ship pitching and yawing. I took a risk then. I assumed that with the ship rolling about as much as it was that he would have to take at least one of his hands off the gun, preferably the right one, to steady himself on the wall. With that thought in mind, I sprang up from my prone position, flipping around to meet him. Either I’d be quick or I’d be dead.

I was right. He held himself upright with his trigger hand on the stairwell. I lurched forward and grabbed his weapon by the barrel, pulling him down the last three stairs, directly over top of me. He landed on his back, his head to the stairs, his weapon across his chest. There was no time to celebrate. I needed to finish what I had started. Going directly for the weapon was one route, but I was more interested in immobilizing him than getting into a tug-of-war. So I grabbed his right arm, one hand on his wrist, the other on his elbow, and pushed down, cranking him like a Model T Ford. He flipped over on his belly immediately, the gun below him. After that, I lightened up because I pretty much had the situation under control.

“I don’t how many people you’ve bitten, friend. But you move, you make even a squeak, and that tooth of yours will be the least of your problems,” I whispered.

I still needed the gun, so I stepped forward levering his arm against my right leg. That left my right hand free to fish the rifle out from under him by the strap. Once I had hold of the gun, I pointed the barrel directly at the back of his head.

“Take off your shirt,” I said.

He struggled beneath me, removing his navy blue long-sleeved shirt. It took him a moment, but he got it.

“Good. You like to bite things, right?”

He nodded.

“Bite your shirt.”

I saw the look of confusion in his face, but he did it. He balled the shirt up and put it in his mouth.

“Chew,” I said.

 
I think he thought I was kidding, so I put a little more pressure behind the gun. He chewed it. In point of fact, I didn’t want him to eat his shirt, but I wanted him to have something to think about other than getting away from me. I held the barrel of the Heckler and Koch firmly to the back of his head.