The four remaining Americans checked their watches and then stood or sat quietly, listening to the rain pelt the window.
TWO
The man the Americans had dubbed Target One sat at his regular bistro table at the sidewalk cafe in front of the May Hotel on Mimar Hayrettin. Most nights, when the weather was nice, he stopped here for a shot or two of raki in chilled sparkling water. The weather this evening was awful, but the long canopy hung over the sidewalk tables by the staff of the May kept him dry.
There were just a few other patrons seated under the canopy, couples smoking and drinking together before either heading back up to their rooms in the hotel or out to other Old Town nightlife destinations.
Target One had grown to live for his evening glass of raki. The anise-flavored milky white drink made from grape pomace was alcoholic, and forbidden in his home country of Libya and other nations where the more liberal Hanafi school of Islam is not de rigueur, but the ex — JSO spy had been forced into the occasional use of alcohol for tradecraft purposes during his service abroad. Now that he had become a wanted man, he’d grown to rely on the slight buzz from the liquor to help relax him and aid in his sleep, though even the liberal Hanafi school does not permit intoxication.
There were just a few vehicles rolling by on the cobblestone street ten feet from his table. This road was hardly a busy thoroughfare, even on weekend nights with clear skies. There was some foot traffic on the pavement around him, however, and Target One was enjoying himself watching the attractive women of Istanbul pass by under their umbrellas. The occasional view of the legs of a sexy woman, coupled with the warming buzz of the raki, made this rainy night especially pleasant for the man seated at the sidewalk cafe.
At nine p.m., Sam Driscoll drove his silver Fiat Linea calmly and carefully through the evening traffic that flowed into Istanbul’s Old Town from the outlying neighborhoods.
The city lights sparkled on his wet windshield. Traffic had thinned out more and more the deeper he got into Old Town, and as the American stopped for a red light, he glanced quickly at a GPS locator Velcroed onto the dashboard. Once he reconfirmed the distance to his target, he reached over to the passenger seat and wrapped his hand around his motorcycle helmet. As the light changed he did a long neck roll to relax himself, slipped the crash helmet over his head, and then lowered the visor over his eyes.
He winced at what was to come, he could not help it. Even though his heart was pounding and nearly every synapse of his brain was firing in the focus of his operation, he still found the perspective to shake his head and talk to himself.
He’d done a lot of nasty things in his days as a soldier and an operator, but he had never done this.
“A goddamned fly swat.”
The Libyan took his first sip from his second glass of raki of the evening as a silver Fiat headed quickly up the street, some eighty yards to his north. Target One was looking in the opposite direction; a beautiful Turkish girl with a red umbrella in her left hand and a leash to her miniature schnauzer in her right passed by on the sidewalk, and the seated man had a great view of her long and toned legs.
But a shout to his left caused him to shift his attention toward the intersection in front of him, and there he saw the silver Fiat, a blur, racing through the light. He watched the four-door shoot up the quiet street.
He expected it to shoot on by.
He brought his drink to his lips; he was not worried.
Not until the car veered hard to the left with a squeal of its wet tires, and the Libyan found himself staring down the approaching front grille of the car.
With the little glass still in his hand, Target One stood quickly, but his feet were fixed to the pavement. He had nowhere to run.
The woman walking the miniature schnauzer screamed.
The silver Fiat slammed into the man at the bistro table, striking him square, running him down, and sending him hard into the brick wall of the May Hotel, pinning him there, half under and half in front of the vehicle. The Libyan’s rib cage shattered and splintered, sending shards of bone through his vital organs like shot from a riot gun.
Witnesses at the cafe and on the street around it reported later that the man in the black crash helmet behind the wheel took a calm moment to put his vehicle into reverse, even checking the rearview mirror, before backing into the intersection and driving off toward the north. His actions seemed no different than those of a man on a Sunday drive who had just pulled into a parking space at the market, realized he had left his wallet at home, and then backed out to return for it.
One kilometer southeast of the incident, Driscoll parked the four-door Fiat in a private drive. The little car’s hood was bent and its front grille and bumper were torn and dented, but Sam positioned the car nose in so the damage would not be evident from the street. He stepped out of the vehicle and walked to a scooter locked on a chain nearby. Before unlocking it with a key and motoring away into the rainy night, he transmitted a brief message into the radio feature of his encrypted mobile phone.
“Target One is down. Sam is clear.”
The Ciragan Palace is an opulent mansion that was built in the 1860s for Abdulaziz I, a sultan who reigned in the midst of the Ottoman Empire’s long decline. After his lavish spending put his nation into debt he was deposed and “encouraged” to commit suicide with, of all things, a pair of scissors.
Nowhere was the extravagance that led to the downfall of Abdulaziz more on display than the Ciragan. It was now a five-star hotel, its manicured lawns and crystal clear pools running from the facade of the palace buildings to the western shoreline of the Bosphorus Strait, the water line that separates Europe from Asia.
The Tugra restaurant on the first floor of the Ciragan Palace has magnificent high-ceilinged rooms with windows affording wide views of the hotel grounds and the strait beyond, and even during the rain shower that persisted this Tuesday evening, the bright lights of passing yachts could be seen and enjoyed by the diners at their tables.
Along with the many wealthy tourists enjoying their exquisite meals, there were also quite a few businessmen and women from all over the world, alone and in groups of varying number, dining in the restaurant.
John Clark fit in nicely, dining by himself at a table adorned with crystal, fine bone china, and gold-plated flatware. He’d been seated at a small table near the entrance, far away from the grand windows overlooking the water. His waiter was a handsome middle-aged man in a black tuxedo, and he brought Clark a sumptuous meal, and while the American could not say he did not enjoy the food, his focus was on a table far across the room.
Moments after John bit into his first tender bite of monkfish, the maitre d’ seated three Arab men in expensive suits at the table by the window, and a waiter took their order for cocktails.
Two of the men were guests of the hotel; Clark knew this from his team’s surveillance and the hard work of the intelligence analysts employed by his organization. They were Omani bankers, and they were of no interest to him. But the third man, a fifty-year-old Libyan with gray hair and a trim beard,
He was Target Two.
As Clark ate with his fork in his left hand, a maneuver the right-handed American had been forced to learn since his injury, he used a tiny flesh-colored hearing amplifier in his right ear to focus on the men’s voices. It was difficult to separate them from others speaking in the restaurant, but after a few minutes he was able to pick out the words of Target Two.
Clark returned his attention to his monkfish and waited.
A few minutes later a waiter took the dinner order at the table of Arabs by the window. Clark heard his target order the Kulbasti veal, and the other men ordered different dishes.
