Deception (13 page)

She watched apprehensively as Yildirim lowered the steel cable, letting it out a few jerky feet at a time so that the sound of the gears would not attract undue attention. Her suspicion that someone would come on deck and catch them was near certainty. Yildirim had assured her that there was no cause for concern. Double-checking the ship's equipment, as the crew prepared to disembark at the end of a cruise, fell well within his purview. Hannah supposed that made sense. If she hadn't felt so wound up, she supposed, then she wouldn't have been worrying so much.

But she
was
wound up. Her blood was pumping through her veins, making her insides feel loose and shaky. Her face felt hot. For the first time in longer than she could remember, she had a craving for a cigarette.

Yildirim leaned over the side of the ship, checked the cable's progress, let out another foot for good measure, and then straightened. He nodded. Hannah stepped forward cautiously. Farther out on the water, ferries and ocean liners slipped stealthily through the night.

As she looked over the railing, her spirit quailed. The drop was not far—even if she lost her grip on the cable, she would tumble only a dozen and a half feet—but the water looked brackish and chilly. As a matter of course she had always avoided chlorinated swimming pools. And now she was going to immerse herself in this polluted water …

She swallowed, with a click.

Then put her hands on the cable—it was oily; her hands would be filthy from touching that cable—and let him help her put one leg over the side.

She was wearing a pair of shorts and a tank top. Her purse, doubly wrapped in a plastic laundry bag from her cabin's closet, was slung across her chest like a knapsack. Would the plastic bag keep the water out? Her money and traveler's checks and passport and jewelry and a change of clothes were all inside that purse, along with a few miscellaneous items that had been in there already: the
Chronicles
book, her pills, her makeup. Without the purse, she had nothing.

Before raising her other leg, she shot a glance over her shoulder. The quay was filling with people. Once she had reached the water, she would need to take a deep breath and swim underwater for at least fifty feet, or the people would see her. Her eyes moved to the end of the dock—past the assembling crowd and the crane jibs and the white fingers of light coming from the customs office. If she could get that far, she would be safe. But she would not be able to do it with a single breath. At some point, she would need to rise to the surface to take a second breath, and hope that nobody was looking at that particular spot of water at that particular instant.

No, no, no
, she thought petulantly.
I don't want to. You can't make me.

A few seconds passed. She remained frozen, one leg hiked over the railing, both hands clutching the steel line.

Then Yildirim was urging her other leg up.

She took a deep breath and threw her weight forward, onto the cable.

4.

Keyes and Dietz stood inside the customs station, looking out at the ship as the passengers disembarked. A pair of customs agents checked the passengers' papers as they came off the gangplank, then steered them into a different section of the building. Behind the
Aurora II
, the Bosporus glittered dully.

After a few moments of watching, Keyes looked back into the rear of the station. Leonard was there, jangling car keys in one hand. When the woman came off the ship, she would be ushered into this room by one of the customs officers. Then Keyes and Dietz would take over, following Leonard out a rear exit, into a waiting car. The local authorities would not interfere. Two hundred dollars had taken care of that. Somehow, this suddenly struck Keyes as funny. The budget for the Project was astronomical; and yet a mere two hundred dollars, for this most crucial part of things, had been more than sufficient. A minute smile tugged at his lips.

In a moment, they would have the woman. Then he could go home, and get back to the business of business.

He looked out the window again, at the passengers filing slowly forward, and the smile slipped away.

Something was wrong.

No. Everything had been set up just so.

But the feeling remained. The woman was no amateur, after all. She had not gotten this far by chance. And she would not walk right into their clutches, now—not without putting up a fight. But how? There was nowhere for her to go.

Suddenly he wished he could see the other side of the ship, the side facing away from the dock.

For another moment, he stood, fighting the impulse to leave the customs station. Then he turned to Dietz.

“Wait here,” he said, and headed for the door.

5.

Docks were like snowflakes, Keyes thought as he stepped outside: all the same, yet all different.

This one was light on the fish smell, for which he was grateful. During his childhood he had spent enough time on fishy-smelling docks in New England to last him for the rest of his lifetime. It was heavy on bustle and chill (somehow a dock could be chilly even on the warmest evenings) and slippery concrete.

He took a few steps toward the
Aurora
's stern. He would not be able to see around to the ship's port side, no matter how far down the dock he walked. But he would be able to see where the woman went
after
she had come off the port side, if she came in this direction.

Where had this idea come from? He didn't know. Logic was hardly involved. In all likelihood, he was just tired. But there was nothing to be lost by strolling a few dozen feet down the quay, by checking things out, to be on the safe side.

Someone in the city was singing: a high, ululating trill that set his nerves on edge.

When he had gone perhaps forty feet, he turned to look back. Beyond the tangled cranes, the passengers were still filing slowly off the ship. The ship itself looked remarkably diminutive, from this small remove. To his right was the Bosporus, chopping in the evening breeze; to his left, beyond the fringe of buildings, the sprawling city.

It wouldn't do to get too far away. When they took the woman into custody, things would happen fast. He would not want to be left behind.

But he turned and strolled a little farther anyway.

Here, at the end of the dock, was a low chain-link fence. By the fence were people. There were two or three—men, he thought; just sitting, smoking and drinking. Vagrants, or dockworkers taking a break. Either way, he didn't feel comfortable walking into their midst. He had come far enough.

He stopped walking again, then raised a hand to rub at his eyes. His instincts had been wrong. There was nothing down this way except the men and the fence.

When he took his hand from his eyes, he saw the woman.

She had appeared very near the fence. She looked like a wet rat—staying low to the ground, dripping and sleek. A shimmering trail led from her feet to the water's edge.

He blinked. Yes, it was a woman. She was moving directly toward the vagrants, or whatever they were. She was saying something. They answered with muted laughter. Then she was bending down—still very near to the ground, so near that she might have been only a shadow—and slipping through a tear in the fence.

Had he imagined it? His eyes were tired; his brain was tired.

No. He saw her again, through the fence now, straightening up on the other side. She was holding something. Epstein's formula?

For a moment, he hesitated. Then he moved forward.

TWELVE

1.

Hannah was freezing.

As she'd gone through the fence, she had scraped her arm. Now, half jogging across an empty lot beside the dock—heading toward an alley that seemed to feed into the city proper—she cradled the arm into her body. The scraped, chilly flesh was stippled with goose bumps. There would be fresh scars, she thought, right beside the old pale ones. Her body would become a canvas, telling the story of her various hardships in a rainbow of welts and blemishes. Thirty years of salons, seaweed wraps, and massages had left her flesh too tender for the real world. Now her body was receiving a wake-up call.

Once she had reached the alley, she drew herself to her full height. Her hands scrabbled at the plastic bag around the purse, tearing it off. Her hands were shaking, but she tried to ignore that. She would change out of the wet clothes right here, in this relative privacy—pedestrians passed by the mouth of the alley, but didn't seem to be glancing into the darkness. Her hair would still be damp when she got into a cab, but there was nothing to be done about that.

The water of the Bosporus had been oily. She could smell it clinging to her skin. Upon opening the purse, she spied a vial of perfume, seized it with her shaky hands, and splashed a drop into her palm. The palm moved behind her ears, under her neck, touched the inside of her wrist. The perfume went back into the purse. She reached for the change of clothes—

—and then some overpowering intuition made her glance back over her shoulder.

A man was hurrying across the lot. Moving in her direction.

Fear took her in a strong, crushing bear hug; suddenly she was no longer cold.

2.

Keyes had the cell phone to his ear before he remembered that it was useless.

He jammed it back into his pocket with a curse. All the preparation in the world—all the resources and the employees and the feng shui and the 900 MHz cell phones using spread-spectrum technology—all a waste of time.

For a moment, he was torn by indecision. He was unable to contact his men. Should he follow the woman himself, on foot, or head back and let Dietz know what had happened?

There was no time. Already she was moving away again. She had seen him.

He gave chase.

By the time he reached the alley, the woman was gone. A wet trail showed her path toward the sidewalk. Keyes moved past a pile of garbage that reeked of rotten spices. Mingled with the stench was the incongruous odor of perfume. Would the woman really have paused, at that crucial moment, to apply perfume? He couldn't believe it.

His first impression upon reaching the street was that the city looked far more modern than he had expected.

Reckless drivers, horns blaring, wove in and out of throngs of jaywalkers. The sun had gone down, but women walked on the street with not only their faces and shoulders uncovered, but also their arms, legs, and a fair amount of thigh—thoroughly liberated Muslims. Hot-pretzel vendors kicked pigeons out of their way as they wheeled their carts backward through cramped streets. To his right was a Pizza Hut; to his left, a McDonald's.

His second impression was that the woman had already disappeared.

Not possible. His eyes moved down to the trail of water, snaking away into the crowd. He followed it, bulling his way forward.

There—a yellow taxicab, half a block away. The back of the woman's head was visible through the rear windshield. The cab was idling in the heavy traffic.

Then the traffic opened up, and the cab pulled away.

Keyes turned, looking for a cab of his own. Since arriving, he had not changed any money. He had only American dollars. But a taxi was there, one of a large fleet of taxis, so he hailed it anyway. He slipped into the backseat and then delivered a line that made him feel suddenly absurd: “Follow that cab.”

The driver looked at him blankly. He pointed, gesturing. “Follow,” he said. “Please.”

The driver nodded, and the cab jerked forward.

He had left the meter untouched, meaning that he would try to gouge Keyes when the ride was finished. Keyes leaned back in the seat, holding his breath without realizing it.

At the next light, the woman's cab turned right. They followed. The street narrowed as pavement gave way to cobblestones; fast-food joints were replaced by European-style cafés and boutiques. They turned again, and suddenly clotheslines crossed from one overhead window to another. A man in a three-piece suit blocked their way. Beside the man was a donkey cart—a shocking juxtaposition. The driver leaned on his horn. The man in the suit and the donkey cart got out of the way; the driver goosed the accelerator and slipped between them.

For almost a full minute, they drove at a good clip. Now there were fewer cars, more carts; the streets narrowed further, and the architecture turned antiquated. Then the woman's cab was slowing again, blocked by a stream of Japanese tourists coming out of a recessed doorway. They had reached the famed Kapali Çarşi: the Old Bazaar.

In the next moment the woman was leaving her cab, ducking past the Japanese, losing herself in the crowd.

Keyes threw open his own door, ignoring the driver who called after him. One good cheat, he thought fleetingly, deserved another.

3.

Stepping into the covered main passage of the Old Bazaar was like stepping back in time.

The air filled with the odors of brass polish, incense, sweat, roasting lamb, and oil; the smells of exhaust and hot pretzels fell away. The local Turks wore turbans and veils, as compared to the modern clothing that Hannah had seen on the streets outside. There were Kurds, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Japanese, Americans, Germans, French. The wood-floored hall was crowded with silver and gold, amber, leather, carpets, platinum, silks, samovars, stuffed cobras, antique firearms, and everywhere the lilt of vendors hawking their wares:

“Genuine weapons from the Ottoman Empire! Swords and daggers, mother-of-pearl on the sheaths! Replicas of fine revolvers!”

“Handcrafted silver serving trays! Fine silks and cloths, pillows and gowns, robes and veils, souvenirs, bargain prices!”

“Copper and brass! Hand-beaten pots! Ceramics! Sterling silver! Kilims, Sumaks!”

Hannah plunged into the crowd, casting a glance back to see if the man was following. What was he? FBI? A U.S. Marshal? Or just an overeager local customs authority? The doorway leading to the street already was lost behind the crush of people. But she thought that she caught a glimpse of the man, plowing into the sea of humanity, still on her trail.