Deception (15 page)

Then Yildirim was coming into the station, not looking anywhere but at the floor. He moved past them, toward the exit in the back.

3.

The distance between Old and New Istanbul is considerably greater than the width of the slender strait that separates them.

On the European side of the Bosporus lies the Old City, steeped in tradition and history. The Asian side, paradoxically, features modernized, Western-style suburbs. Fast-food restaurants, gourmet shops, and trendy clubs flashed past the taxi's windows. Dietz noted a car dealership, then a shopping mall. Then the houses shrank, crowding closer together, growing poorer-looking, and there were no more car dealerships or shopping malls to be seen.

As they cruised past ramshackle wooden houses, Dietz's impenetrable eyes remained fixed on the little yellow car in front of them. The little car was slowing down. It was turning into a narrow alley between two of the humble wooden houses. Dietz grappled for the words he wanted—too many years had passed since he'd last spoken the language—then found them. “
Yavaş gidin
,” he murmured to the driver.

They drifted slowly past the alley; he saw Yildirim leaving the car.

After another hundred yards, Dietz instructed the cabby to pull over. He paid his fare in dollars, left the cab, and then stood for a moment, thinking.

It was a stroke of luck—if his instincts about Yildirim proved right, if indeed the man was about to lead him to the woman. It meant he would not need to risk harming Leonard or Keyes when he took her. Harming these men might have opened a rather messy can of worms, which he would much prefer to leave closed.

Nor was it the first stroke of luck, in the past few days. If Keyes had not tapped Dietz for this particular assignment, he would not have found this unexpected chance. He might have been forced to spend another year, or five, or ten, sitting on his farm and waiting for an opportunity to make a fortune large enough to impress Elizabeth Webster. Perhaps he would have needed to wait forever.

Yet Keyes
had
tapped him. And he had done it, for whatever reason, beneath the radar, outside of official channels. So when Dietz made his move, he would face no opposition except the rest of this rag-tag band Keyes had assembled … which seemed, as far as he could tell, to consist entirely of Leonard. To a man with Dietz's experience, Leonard offered little reason for concern.

The night was warm, stirred by a balmy breeze. Despite the modesty of the neighborhood, there was something pleasant in the air: a sense of community, of honest hard work. No matter where in the world he went, it was always the same. The poorer neighborhoods, despite everything, often emanated more contentment than the wealthier ones. Or perhaps it was only an illusion. Perhaps the contentment, if one actually lived here, would be revealed as resignation.

In the direction from which he had come, two children were taking turns with a single skateboard. Otherwise the street was deserted. Supper time, of course. The locals were settling down for the evening. Back in the city, the nightlife would be just gearing up; but out here, the day was already finished.

Dietz moved toward the children and then past, giving them a wide berth. Upon reaching the alley that held Yildirim's car, he cast his eyes around again. The children were moving away, laughing. An emaciated gray alley cat sat near the car's fender, looking at Dietz with one ear flicking.

For a moment, he looked back at the cat. Then he moved to the car and tried the door. Unlocked. A quick search revealed an empty pack of English Ovals, a dog-eared map of the city, an ashtray filled with butts, and little else.

He straightened, closing the door softly. The house on his right was dark and quiet—deserted; abandoned. The house on the left had a light twinkling behind white curtains. That was where the man had gone.

From his shoulder bag, Dietz withdrew the modified S&W Model 39 and the suppresses. The suppresser was nearly as large as the 9mm gun itself; the combination of the two, once he had screwed them together, felt unwieldy. But Dietz was accustomed to handling the silenced gun, unwieldy or not. The S&W Model 39—known as the Hush Puppy, thanks to its handiness in silencing guard dogs—was the regulation firearm used by U.S. Special Forces and Navy SEALs. It was also the weapon with which he had kept himself in training, during the long stretches of inactivity on the farm.

A car was moving down the street. He pressed himself back into the shadows, holding the gun by his side, watching.

It was another taxicab. As he watched, a woman came out of the back of the taxi. She stood for a second, half bent, exchanging a word with the driver. Then the taxi was pulling away. The woman took a moment and then moved up the walk of the house. She was a youngish woman, pretty if bedraggled, who looked exhausted.

So his instincts had been right, after all.

He kept watching as she looped a strand of hair behind one ear and knocked on the door. He strained to hear the exchange, but the wind took the voices, dashing them.

Then the woman was moving into the house. The door closed behind her.

Dietz licked his lips. He began to slow-breathe, six seconds in and six seconds out, preparing himself for what he was about to do.

FOURTEEN

1.

The driver hit the meter and then turned to look at Hannah.

She didn't meet his eyes. She reached into her purse, dug around, and found her watch. The Cosmograph Daytona had been a gift from Frank; at one point, it had been worth a pretty penny. But it was possible that the dunk in the water had ruined it. She handed it forward. “Okay?” she said.

The man took the watch, inspected it, held it to his ear. Hannah opened her door and stepped outside, clutching her purse against her chest.
Take it or leave it
, she thought.

A moment later, the cab was pulling away. So he had taken it.

Her eyes moved to the number on the shabby mailbox before the house. It was the address Yildirim had given her to memorize. But would he still help her, now that she didn't even have a wallet? Would he still believe that she could deliver the money she had promised?

It would have been nice to present a more authoritative façade. But she was in poor shape—the wet had traveled from her clothes and through her skin, into her bones. The scratches on her arm had turned an ugly red. In all likelihood she looked the way she felt: like a beaten, abandoned stray.

She closed her eyes, held them shut, then opened them and moved up the front walk of the little house. She hooked a lock of hair back behind one ear and knocked on the door. A moment passed.

“
Evet
?” a voice said.

Hannah licked her lips. “Hello?” she answered.

She heard locks being opened. The man who had answered the door was slim, Filipino, with wary eyes. He stepped aside, and Hannah entered.

The front room featured a kitchen and dim living area, with a television set playing music videos, a sagging couch, and a small dining table. Two children knelt on a carpet in front of the set. To Hannah's left, a woman was standing over a stove. Framed examples of calligraphy hung on the walls between white-curtained windows. There was another room past a cracked-open door; she caught a glimpse of bunk beds. Four people lived here, she thought, in this space that was roughly the size of her walk-in closet back in Chicago.

Yildirim was nowhere to be seen. The children were looking at her curiously. The woman by the stove hadn't turned.

The man waved negligently at the couch. Hannah went and sat, holding her purse tightly in her lap.

After a few moments, the children began to speak in quiet Turkish. The man disappeared into the back room. The woman set one pot aside, and put another on the burner.

For two minutes, Hannah sat motionless. The smells from the stove were spicy and exotic; her stomach turned over lazily. She wondered if there was a bathroom where she could wash up. She didn't see one. Perhaps in the back room. She could ask. But she was loath to cause trouble, or draw attention to herself. She could wait.

How long would it take Yildirim to get here? She wanted to be on a plane, back to the States. Come what may, she was ready to go home.

When the two minutes had passed, she opened her purse. She removed a compact and looked at herself. Not surprisingly, she looked frightful—her hair a greasy tangle, her face smudged and puffy. She found a fresh Kleenex and wiped at herself, then found a tube of lipstick and began to apply it.

Suddenly, the children were kneeling in front of her. They were both girls, she realized with a small jolt, whose hair had been cropped short. They stared at her with huge, dark eyes. Hannah looked back stiffly. In the next moment, one girl was reaching for the compact. Hannah glanced at the woman to see if she would curb her child. But the woman was focused on the stove. There was no help there. Hannah let the girl take the compact; then the other girl reached for the lipstick.

The woman turned from the stove and looked at her daughters. She said nothing. She returned her attention to her pots.

Hannah leaned back into the couch, watching the girls play. Now that she was sitting still, exhaustion was catching up with her. She could almost steal a nap right here …

She shook her head, and straightened. Yildirim would arrive soon. Then she would move on.

The girls were laughing. They had traded treasures, and now the first daughter was putting on lipstick. Hannah smiled at them faintly. She reached into the purse, brushed past the book, and found a pair of nail scissors.

She waited, snipping absently around her cuticles.

2.

Leonard had made friends with one of the maids: a chubby, sunny-faced woman who seemed only too happy to linger around the dock speaking with him, although it was now well past sundown and everybody else from the
Aurora
had gone.

Keyes, watching again from the customs station, wondered if the woman believed that Leonard was a child. Perhaps that was why she was so willing to answer his questions. Then he wondered if
he
would have believed that Leonard was a child, had he not known the truth. It was hard to say. Once one knew a truth, he thought, it was nearly impossible to forget.

He heaved a sigh. Everything had gone wrong—so spectacularly, unexpectedly wrong—and time was leaking away. Nearly two precious hours had been lost at the police station before Keyes had found the person to whom he was meant to pay his bribe. Upon returning to the dock, he had discovered that both the woman and Dietz had vanished.

But Leonard and the maid kept chatting leisurely, as if there was no hurry whatsoever.

Keyes checked his watch, and kept waiting.

At last, Leonard separated himself from the woman, all smiles. As he walked over to Keyes, his good humor fell away. He came close and spoke in a low voice:

“His name is Yildirim. The chief security officer on board.”

The man Dietz had followed away from the dock, he meant. Keyes grunted encouragingly.

“Cathy says—”

“Who?”

“Cathy. The maid.”

“Yes.”

“She says that Yildirim was friendly with another maid on board the ship, named Bascara. Usually, when they come into port, he goes to the woman's house for a meal with her family. According to Cathy, it's a custom.”

“‘The woman's house,'” Keyes repeated.

Leonard's smile winked back. “I've got an address,” he said.

3.

Later, when she thought back on it, Hannah could reconstruct what had happened in the small house in the Western suburbs; but at the time, none of it seemed to make sense.

One second, she was sitting on the couch, holding the cuticle scissors and watching Yildirim. Yildirim had just come from the back room—he had been there, it seemed, since before her own arrival—but he had paid no attention to her beyond a single tight nod. He was busy flattering the woman by the stove, who giggled at his attention. It was odd to see this side of Yildirim, she remembered thinking. It was odd that such a taciturn man would be so open and friendly to the Filipino woman, when he had been so chilly with Hannah herself.

In the instant before everything stopped making sense, that was how it had been: Yildirim and the woman by the stove, Hannah on the couch, the children back in front of the TV with their treasures in hand, the husband still in the back room, out of sight.

Then the knock had come at the door.

Yildirim had stopped joking with the woman. Hannah had sat up on the couch, catching his eye. He'd held her gaze for a moment, then turned and said something under his breath. The woman abruptly swept up her children, scolding them into the back room.

And then Yildirim was checking a pistol, which had materialized seemingly from nowhere.

Hannah started to come off the couch. He waved her back and moved to the door, the pistol held by his thigh, straight-armed. Then things took a turn toward absurdity, toward surrealism—or so it seemed at the time.

Yildirim, by the door, swayed on his feet. A tiny hole had appeared in his back. Hannah saw it, but didn't believe it, for it made no sense. The door was still closed. How had the hole appeared? Her mind clamored for an explanation. Perhaps there had been a mouse in his pocket, she thought ridiculously. And perhaps the mouse had chewed its way out, very suddenly, through his back.

Yildirim sat down, hard. He made a sound like
oomph.
There was also a hole in the door, Hannah saw. Another mouse?

Then the door was no longer there.

Now she was coming off the couch in a panic. But as soon as she had gained her feet, she froze. A man had stepped into the house. He held something bright and shiny in one hand, trained on her. He was a large man—a
huge
man, she thought in that first shocked moment, as wide as he was tall, and moving with an eerie, confident grace.

He drifted across the dim room, the thing in his hand still trained on her, and stepped into the back of the house. Then he whispered something. It was an intimate whisper. He knew this family, Hannah thought. He had made a deal with them, hadn't he? She and Yildirim had been betrayed. This man, whoever he was, had been one step ahead of them. He whispered to the family in the back room—