quiet confidence; they’d been briefed to let Mohr feel he held center stage, while reassuring him that they’d come well prepared and could handle every aspect of the high-risk defector rescue. Mohr saw this, and after a few bites quickly perked up.
“What time are your keepers supposed to collect you?” Felix asked.
“Midnight. How did you know they’d do it that way?”
“Professional surmise. That’s how we’d handle it if we were them. Then they take you to the safe house?”
“Yes. More surmise?”
“That, plus the info Iqbal could get to us.”
Mohr thought for a moment. “Now I understand better. He asked me certain specifics, indirectly.”
Felix nodded, then told him things that had stopped being secret anyway. Again, Mohr needed to know that the Americans were competent… plus, it wouldn’t hurt to pointedly remind him of who his friends were. “When your brothel acquaintance fled town after that attempted Mossad hit, it really put our side on the spot. Your last message to us got through, but the lady’s comm plan with you went out the window when she did. Let’s just say other assets were called into play, and it was rough when we found out the consulate had you under close confinement. We did what we could in a hurry. The main thing is, it worked.”
Mohr nodded. Everyone finished eating and put the dirty dishes aside. They huddled around a glass coffee table. Costa took writing tablets and pens out of his gym bag. Porto produced a cigarette case and a lighter, lit several cigarettes, and let them smolder in a couple of handy ashtrays.
“Use single sheets of paper,” Felix told Mohr, “placed directly on the glass, to leave no impressions on the underneath sheets of a pad…. This is flash paper. Touch it with a burning cigarette, it’s useless ash in a split second.”
“I understand.”
“Now, we have very little time for you to tell us everything you know about this safe house, the people who’ll be in it, and this unusual equipment of yours.”
Chapter 36
At first Felix had trouble believing the things Mohr said his equipment at the safe house could do. This set off red flags immediately. Felix’s orders were to insist on a summary of what Mohr offered the Allies. He was to judge how forthcoming Mohr behaved now that a gesture of good faith had been made to him — by the U.S. sending the SEALs — and abort the extraction at once if anything at all seemed fishy. Force protection came first. Felix and his team were not to unnecessarily endanger themselves, Salih or Parker, the captured German minisub, or USS
But sitting on the couch in the suite, Mohr rattled off unclassified research going back decades. He referred repeatedly to Albert Einstein’s own expression from the 1930s, “spooky action at a distance.” To check this all out, Felix sent Porto to use an Internet pay terminal with its choice of search engines, to verify that these published theories and lab experiments were real. The suite itself had good computer equipment, but Felix had no intention of even touching it. Porto came back, and reported that everything Mohr had said was true.
Meanwhile, Costa went downstairs, retrieved the Mercedes by using the claim check Felix had given him, made sure to elude any tail, and then drove to the quiet top level of a different garage. He exchanged the license plates on the Mercedes for a different set from his gear bag, then used special aerosol cans to put a lot of dust on the car, and road dirt around the fenders and wheel wells. This step was necessary since the Germans surely knew the Mercedes from when it had picked up Mohr; when Costa was finished it looked very different. He put on a disguise, drove the car into the underground garage at the Hotel Mercure, and went back upstairs.
It was getting late, and the briefing had to end. In an unused bedroom with a private bath, Klaus Mohr stripped and took a shower. He dressed again, and combed his hair, but left his hair slightly damp on purpose. Back by the bar, he took a few puffs of a cigarette, then swirled some Turkish liqueur in his mouth and spat it out in the kitchenette sink.
During the briefing, the SEAL leader Felix had sent men off to run errands now and then; some of them returned and some didn’t. The briefing involved a lot of sketching of the safe house, answering piercing questions from Felix’s chiefs about the Kampfschwimmer and their weapons, and thinking through each step of a hasty assault. Mohr gave a detailed description of what his field-equipment modules and special tool kit looked like. Salih discussed with him, at length, the personalities and attitudes of the individual Kampfschwimmer in the team they’d be going up against.
Extensive map work followed, choosing routes of approach and escape, picking places to meet if the team got split up, and deciding where Mohr should wait — somewhere well outside the line of fire.
Now, Felix looked Mohr up and down.
“Remember, Klaus, you’re a warrior, and you aren’t alone. We’ll be right behind you. Just make sure you don’t lose that knockout pen, and for the love of God don’t use it on yourself by mistake.”
“Yes.”
The chief named Costa and one of his men departed, to get a head start. Then Felix put on a false beard and eyeglasses, so the guards wouldn’t recognize him from before, and told Mohr to give him five minutes. Felix and the other SEALs walked out.
In the suite, the radios still played and the call girls still watched TV. It was just before midnight. Mohr left and took an elevator to the lobby. One of the bodyguards from the consulate came into the lobby by a different elevator from the underground parking garage. Without a word Mohr followed him, and got in the back of a dark blue BMW luxury sedan. As Felix had told him to, he sat behind the guard who was in the front passenger seat, and he didn’t buckle his seat belt.
Felix drove the dirtied-up Mercedes while Porto used the front passenger seat and Salih sat in back. Costa and his enlisted man were in the Hyundai. Mohr had said the safe house was in a run-down neighborhood on the far side of the Old City. The Kampfschwimmer team and their gear were due to be back from their latest field test by eight P.M., to allow for possible delays in their getting there to meet Mohr. Felix was unhappy because this precluded his team from arriving at the safe house first, to ambush the Germans unawares while still outside, or to even just send a point-man observer to do a head count and size things up.
Felix worried that the schedule had been set by the Germans for exactly this reason. Maybe they’d been tipped off to expect an attack tonight — perhaps tipped off by Klaus Mohr himself, or perhaps because Awais Iqbal was a double agent really owned by the Germans, not the CIA. Felix knew nothing of Iqbal but hearsay. Mohr’s unclassified technical references, since they were public information, by their nature didn’t conclusively prove yet that he deserved Felix’s trust; they just suggested that he might be of very high value if he was honest about his achievements and actually meant to defect.
To reach the Old City, the German driver with Mohr and the German chase car — a black Mercedes — were on the Ataturk Bridge. Mohr had predicted this, saying he’d realized from previous trips that the driver’s supposedly random choice of which bridge to take across the Golden Horn fit a pattern. Four vehicles now made an odd motorcade amid the traffic on the bridge: Mohr’s car was first, followed by the German chase car. Felix’s Mercedes followed the other Mercedes, and the beat-up Hyundai followed Felix. The Germans, while still in the New City, had already used standard techniques to locate and evade a tail. Felix was prepared for this: As long as Felix and Porto, or Costa in the Hyundai, held contact on the Germans’ black Mercedes chase car, they could rely on it to keep them within range of Mohr’s BMW. As long as Felix trailed the chase car, not Mohr, and worked with the Hyundai for mutual support, the American cars could avoid being spotted by the Germans, and could also better check that they weren’t themselves being tailed.
On the bridge, with no cross traffic, their positions were locked in and Felix could take stock for a minute. He knew his reinforcements were already in place across the bridge. A highway, Kennedy Cadesi, ran like a giant U along the whole shoreline of the Old City peninsula. It could take the Germans close to the safe house by a long route, but one where traffic moved very fast — making it too easy for assassins with armor-piercing rounds to do a
