Straits of Power

Salih got in back in the Mercedes. Felix would drive. Costa was tasked to drive the chase car, with the enlisted man in the front passenger seat. The attendant punched a button and the garage doors at the back of the building opened onto a side street. Traffic was heavier now, because it was getting late in the day and the weekend was starting.

With the driver’s door ajar, sitting, Felix reached out and offered to shake the attendant’s hand. He switched back to Turkish to close the deal politely.

“Cok tessekur ederim. Allaha ismarladik.” Thanks very much. Good-bye.

“Gule gule,” the attendant said. So long. “Hosca kalin.” Stay safe.

Chapter 35

Felix could feel his heart pumping almost as hard as it would in combat. In a way, he was in combat. He was trying to negotiate downtown Istanbul traffic in the middle of evening rush hour. The clock on the armored Mercedes’s dashboard, which he’d synchronized to his digital watch, said 5:57 P.M. They still had a lot to do before picking up Klaus Mohr at eight.

An auto coming the other way, ignoring the lane-dividing line, almost sideswiped Felix as it used a momentary opening on his side of the street. Horns behind Felix blared — at him, for not driving aggressively enough. An accident would cause delays and draw unwanted attention, and make Felix and Salih very vulnerable. Felix wasn’t concerned so much about personal injury. With the vehicle’s hidden armor, on top of its regular air bags, he and Salih were protected. The danger was hurting someone else in a crash, or hitting a reckless pedestrian.

“The ride’s surprisingly smooth,” Salih said.

Felix glanced at him in the rearview mirror for an instant. “Good engine mount. You’d never know the power under the hood. And good shocks. Not too stiff, not too mushy.” Both men used English — but accented either Portuguese or Turkish — as the language they had in common according to their cover stories.

They drove on, following a long-preplanned route. Felix tried to keep an eye on the banged-up Hyundai a few cars behind him, but it wasn’t easy. And Salih couldn’t keep looking out the rear windshield to give him status reports. Though the car was soundproof, a trained observer could still read their lips and watch their movements inside the car; Salih staring backward a lot would be a sure tip-off that he was doing spy tradecraft.

The odds of a tail at this point were much higher. They’d had to sacrifice their anonymity when they rented the cars, and associated themselves with Awais Iqbal and thus with Klaus Mohr — this step was essential, so that they would appear genuine to German consular security and could pick up Mohr, and Salih could take him to the party that Iqbal had promised. If Mohr has been compromised, Felix thought, hostile action could break out at any moment.

Besides the Germans and their Russian friends, there were also the Mossad, and Turkish counterespionage forces, to worry about. The chase car did its best to watch for a tail and protect the Mercedes’s rear. But the chase car itself might have a tail. A few sudden turns would help to check. Felix and his chief had talked this all through in rehearsals.

At a street Felix was waiting for, he made a sharp right as the cars in front of him ran the red. He circled the block of stores and apartment buildings slowly. His eyes refocused constantly between the steel-and-flesh obstacle course ahead of the car and his mirrors that let him look behind. Sometimes he had to jam on the brakes, or floor the accelerator. He worked the gear shift constantly, mostly moving more slowly than a man could run; a heavy, armored auto had a lot of momentum needing precise control. He and Salih were thrown forward against their seat belts, or shoved back against their headrests, over and over. Felix made another right turn, this time driving with traffic that had the green.

He slowed for a wayward pedestrian. Shit. In the rearview mirror, he saw that a delivery van behind him wasn’t stopping. That driver hit his brakes and skidded half sideways, blocking oncoming traffic, and more brakes squealed. Angry drivers everywhere made rude gestures at Felix.

“You have to stop being so nice to people in the road,” Salih said. “No one expects it, least of all that person you were afraid of hitting.”

“Yeah,” Felix said. “I need to drive more like the locals.”

Salih threw his head back, raised his eyebrows, and made a loud tsking sound to show sharp disapproval and also remind Felix — by using proper Turkish body language — whom they were not supposed to be: new arrivals. Salih put a hand over his mouth and murmured, “You are a local. Been living in Istanbul a year, remember?”

Felix caught himself almost nodding American style, but stopped the give-away gesture. He and Salih had to stay fully in character, living their parts every moment. Felix was supposed to be a war refugee, long acclimatized to the ways of Istanbul. My defensive driving habits might ruin everything. He made a sudden, unsignaled right as the light went red in his face. He gunned the engine, scattering natives in the crosswalk.

“Better,” Salih said under his breath.

Felix didn’t answer. He was too busy watching other cars. The Hyundai was up ahead. Felix had gone in a circle not just to watch for anyone following his vehicle, but to get behind the chase car for a while, and become the chase car himself.

With his right hand he patted the MP-5 laid on the seat next to him, covered now by his windbreaker. The feel of its hard metal contours under the thin nylon cloth reassured him; he’d inserted a thirty-round magazine and now there was one in the chamber. The Mercedes, like the Hyundai, had firing ports concealed in the doors. They were covered by a synthetic-fiber cloth akin to Kevlar, which stopped bullets from one side but allowed a weapon muzzle to be shoved through from the other side — this feature of executive-security customized autos went back twenty years.

They arrived at their next destination. Felix double-parked. He cracked the driver’s door and slid out before he could be sideswiped and squashed. He jogged into a tobacconist’s. Using some of his Turkish paper money, he bought a prepaid calling card, then jogged back to the Mercedes. Traffic now was such a mess that he had to squeeze in on the passenger side, then slide awkwardly over the MP-5 and the transmission hump and gearshift grip to get into his seat.

This time, gamely, he returned the rude gestures of other drivers. Some shouted insults. Felix was glad he didn’t understand much Turkish. He saw Salih stifling a guffaw.

“You don’t want to know what some of them called you.”

Felix nodded his head down once, to agree.

A couple of blocks later, Felix and the other driver ground to a halt: The chief in the Hyundai had stopped, also double-parked, and was buying himself a calling card at a newsstand kiosk on the sidewalk.

Two lights farther on, the Hyundai made a hard left. Felix didn’t follow. Instead he watched for trouble, then continued straight ahead. He wanted to become the lead car again. He came to a traffic circle, as expected. He went around twice, again to check for a tail, and to let the Hyundai get in a good position a few cars behind him. A panel truck worked its way in between them. He and the chief lost sight of each other.

Unless commandos burst out of the back of that truck and start firing antitank launchers at us, we’re fine. Again Felix patted the MP-5; Salih wore his under his jacket, also loaded now. But then Salih doesn’t have to drive. Felix switched on the air-conditioning. He was working up a sweat, just dressed in shirtsleeves.

He came to another cross street he knew to expect. He turned and drove into a municipal parking garage, while the Hyundai circled the block. Salih stayed in the car with the doors locked, to make sure no one tampered with it.

Felix, relying solely on the knife concealed on his right calf for self-defense, stretched his legs and walked as casually as he could out of the garage and into a crowded local Internet cafe. He knew the World Wide Web had been badly fragmented by the war. But Turkey was a forward-looking, technology-loving country, and everyone here was wired or wireless. Despite international firewalls and broken cross-border server connections, the Internet