Straits of Power (31 page)

There was still the danger that his loyalty was suspect, and that he was being entrapped.

The worst of it was that only Mohr himself understood what would really have to be done to halt Pandora. His rescuers, if they even arrived, had no idea of what was truly called for, and no conception of how narrow the margin of time had suddenly become.

Mohr tried to redirect his concern and doubt into a difficult masquerade: He was supposed to be bound for a lecherous night on the town, to lustfully celebrate his legal separation from a now thoroughly estranged wife. He was supposed to also be on the verge of the final fruition of his astounding technical genius, putting into practical effect breakthroughs he’d spent his entire career on.
Hurrah for the Fatherland! Long live the kaiser!
Mohr felt bitter about how he’d been used for years by the coup conspirators, and about how he’d let himself be used.

Someone came into the lobby from outside. Mohr looked up hopefully, his chest tight—but it was only a minor consulate employee.

A few minutes later one of the guards at the outer gate came inside. Again Mohr held his breath. The man popped into the rest room near the lobby, then went back to his post.

Mohr couldn’t help but glance at the clock. It was 8:25.

The desk guard read his mind.

“Probably just traffic.”

Mohr nodded. He hoped so. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

The gate guard came inside again. Mohr’s heart skipped a beat. But the guard murmured to the desk guard about something Mohr couldn’t hear. Neither of them even looked in his direction. They murmured together further. Mohr shifted his attention to the doors. He reminded himself that to act impatient at this point would be normal.
Not
being annoyed by the delay could give him away. He heard the desk guard typing on his computer.

The gate guard went to the armored glass doors leading back outside. Mohr felt utterly crestfallen. He swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple hurt, making a noise he was sure both guards could hear. The gate guard stopped abruptly. He turned to Mohr, with the door propped half open against his back. Now Mohr could barely breathe.

“Herr Mohr, your ride is here.”

Mohr almost wobbled, weak kneed, as he got up. He realized with a mix of exhilaration and fear that the gate guard was standing there to politely hold the door for him.

A Mercedes-Benz with a driver and another man in front idled by the curb, in the restricted parking zone outside the consulate compound’s security wall. A third man, with dark skin and a thick black mustache, was standing on the sidewalk. He was shorter than Mohr by at least twenty centimeters—about eight inches—and had a heavier, stockier build.

He saw Mohr, smiled, approached, and greeted Mohr in fluent German. They got into the back of the Mercedes, and fastened their seat belts. The driver barged his way into traffic.

“Herr Iqbal again sends his apologies. I think you’ll get everything you expected without him, though. I intend to take good care of you.”

“You speak German very well.”

The Turk sighed. “I used to live in Frankfurt. I was a building engineer.”

Mohr wasn’t sure what to say next. Was this supposed to be some sort of code he hadn’t been told about? Who knew what messages hadn’t gotten through to him the past few days?

“The consulate guards know where I’m going, but I don’t myself. Where
are
we going?”

“Hotel Mercure.”

Mohr was impressed—one of the finest in Istanbul.

The driver narrowly beat a red light, and a pedestrian made a rude gesture. The driver mumbled something that sounded vaguely like Italian but wasn’t. The other person in front grunted in response.

“These men work for you?”

“Rent-a-guards, like the car. Refugees from Portugal.”

“You speak Portuguese?”

“I talk to them in English. They understand it enough.”

Mohr nodded. The motion was jerky; his muscles were tight from nerves.

The Turk took a calendar book out of a jacket pocket, and made some notes in the back with a felt-tip pen. He held the book open in his lap, well below the level of the car windows, and aimed it at Mohr. Darkness had fallen, and the New City streets near Taksim Square were well lit. Enough light came into the car for Mohr to see.

Mohr saw, for some reason written in English, “Quiet until hotel.” Then he understood. The Turk had used English to make it look like an improvised phrase book meant for the bodyguards.

Tradecraft every step of the way. God knows who’s following us besides my own security backup . . . 

No. They’re
not
my own anymore. From here on, other Germans are the enemy.

Once back in the hotel suite, Felix turned on the stereo. He tuned the radio to a Turkish talk show, and turned the volume up until it was very loud. The enlisted SEAL did another sweep for bugs: clean. A buffet of food had been laid out at the bar area during their absence, along with a big urn of coffee.

Klaus Mohr sat on a couch, next to Salih. No one spoke. Costa arrived; he’d left the Hyundai in a public garage nearby. He whispered gently in Felix’s ear, “Two cars were tailing you. Both had two occupants. Looked like German toughs. One car parked in the hotel garage; I expect that’s the one that’ll pick up Mohr later. The driver’s sitting, I guess to be on call in case this party ends early or Mohr doesn’t like it. The other car’s circling, as if to keep up roving surveillance around the hotel.” He quickly told Felix the make of the cars, their colors, and their license-plate numbers. Felix memorized the information and shot Costa a thumbs-up.

Costa had a remarkable knack for vehicle surveillance and countersurveillance—one reason he was on the team. Costa had also had an unfair advantage over the Germans. Felix drove Mohr and Salih from the consulate to the hotel using a preplanned route with features that would force any tailing vehicles to exhibit tradecraft—which would show to someone with Costa’s trained eye. And since both SEAL cars knew the route to the hotel, they could sometimes split up and then get back together, giving Costa relative mobility even in traffic. But the Germans needed to stay glued to the auto with Klaus Mohr, if they were to provide Mohr with constant protection while in the streets.

Soon Chief Porto and four more enlisted SEALs came in, singly or in pairs. The whole team was assembled.

The house phone rang. Salih answered, spoke, hung up.

He grinned.

There was another knock. Salih went to the peephole, then opened the door to the suite. Three very attractive, well-dressed young women came in. Salih talked to them rapidly in Turkish, and offered each a large amount of cash. The women seemed surprised, but not for long. They took the money, giggled, piled plates with food from the buffet, and went into one of the bedrooms and closed the door. Soon Felix heard male voices and music coming from there, in between the Turkish men speaking on the radio, and the muffled noise of the Japanese next door—both sexes now, sounding very intoxicated.

Our own call girls are watching a movie or TV show.
One of Felix’s teams had been tasked to arrange for the high-class hookers, by asking around among local taxi drivers for a recommendation, suitable for entertaining a diplomat, and then making a pay-phone call. Felix went into the other two bedrooms, and turned on music on the radios, different stations. He turned on more music in the kitchenette next to the bar and buffet.

Porto took small tools from his bag, opened the hallway door halfway, and worked for a minute on the electronic lock. He let the door slam shut. An enlisted SEAL went through the door to the bedroom area and closed it behind him; Porto put his ear to that door. Satisfied, he stepped back, glanced at Felix, and nodded. The internal door was soundproof, as advertised.

“It’s okay to talk now,” Felix said in English. “Don’t raise your voice above the radios. I made them loud in case we missed any bugs. Just let the Turkish chatter and the music flow, and talk under it.”

“What did you do to the door?” Mohr asked.

Felix hadn’t expected the question. Then he remembered that Mohr was supposed to be a techie. “The lock has an electromagnet, right? And all room locks are wired to a central processor, so hotel people can change key-card combinations from downstairs when someone checks out.”

“Yes.”

“The door acts like a sounding board. When vibrating, trace currents from that lock could be used to eavesdrop on this room.”

Mohr smiled weakly, interested in the shoptalk but taken aback by the need for such heavy precautions. “I had not considered that.”

“We did. Part of our job.”

“And those women?”

“Iqbal promised you an orgy. They’re the orgy. Just in case someone unfriendly is keeping tabs from in the lobby, or bribed one of the reception clerks. Everything has to look legit, so we don’t raise any alarms too soon.”

“You seem to have thought of everything.”

“Now is where we start to get more free form.”

“What do you mean? Who are you?”

Felix sensed that Mohr was becoming depressed.
Here he is at last in American hands, and instead of bugle calls and parades it’s all so furtive and matter-of-fact. Parker and Salih told me to watch for this.

Felix wasn’t sympathetic. He had to stay suspicious of the guy. This meet could still be a setup. Felix needed to act a part, and he psyched himself up. Parker had told him bluntly to
use
the drama of the moment—the initial contact—to establish rapport in case Mohr was genuine.

“Allow me to introduce myself. Lieutenant Felix Estabo, U.S. Navy SEALs.” Felix shook hands with Mohr as warmly as he could, and gave him his most sincere, endearing smile. “You have no idea how much we and our government appreciate everything you’re doing, Klaus.” He used Mohr’s given name to speed their bonding. “Call me Felix, please.”

“Yes, all right, Felix.”

Felix introduced the members of his team, and Mohr shook hands all around.

“Let’s dig in. We need the sustenance. Klaus, why don’t you go first.”

Everyone loaded plates and grabbed hot coffee and started eating. The SEALs made sure to behave with 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

A
t 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
Challenger
without at least some up-front testing of Mohr’s credibility.

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.

This is all what my bodyguards will expect.

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.

I’ll have to find out the hard way.

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 rolling drive-by hit. Felix thus expected that Mohr’s car and its trailing escort would use local streets that cut straight inland across the peninsula, since in the Old City maze, skirting the tangled warrens of Istanbul’s grand bazaar, they’d be better able to make sure no one was following Mohr. Felix was plagued by a similar concern, that he’d picked up an undetected tail, or series of tails.

The Mossad is a main factor. Their tradecraft is superb and they’d have access to a large supply of vehicles if they wanted. They might be on us right now and we wouldn’t know. I’m praying they won’t interfere with us trailing the Germans, since from their angle we’re possibly about to do their work for them by getting rid of Mohr one way or another.

Felix’s heartbeat started to rise. They were almost over the bridge. Soon he’d know if the Germans took the Kennedy Cadesi or local streets after all—this was essential to his plan to separate Mohr from his bodyguards soon without alerting the Kampfschwimmer. If he’d misread German intentions, and they did go onto the highway, the whole extraction plan would almost certainly collapse.

When it happened, it happened fast, because Felix and all his men knew that once they sprang their trap, every second counted. They had to do it early, soon after the Germans came off the bridge, before their choice of paths became too varied, and coordinating the SEALs’ redeployments would become a mad and iffy scramble.

For the first time, Felix and his men used their radios. The radios were digitally encrypted, and broadcast their spread-spectrum signals in a radar frequency band—the transmissions bounced around intervening buildings better, and were also much less likely to be overheard.

Felix got right behind the German chase car, but then lagged back, allowing space to open up. He pressed his radio’s talk button, said a single word in Portuguese, and released the button. He heard two one-word responses quickly: The reinforcements were in position, and no Turkish policemen were visible. Felix pressed to talk again, and gave the go-ahead signal.

A taxi came out of a side street and T-boned the German chase car. The impact was loud enough that Felix heard a
bang
even through his own car’s soundproofing. The momentum of the impact swung the German vehicle at an angle and carried the taxi into the middle of the intersection. A gypsy cab came from the opposite direction, and swerved and screeched to a halt in front of the German car, barely missing it. Felix floored the accelerator. The armored Mercedes rear-ended the German, hard enough to deploy air bags in Felix’s and Porto’s faces. Felix coughed from the dust kicked up.

The drivers of the Istanbul taxi and the gypsy cab—both SEALs—got out and started shouting at each other, and at the Germans in the chase car. Felix and Porto also got out. Broken glass from smashed headlights and taillights littered the street.

To passersby, yet another Istanbul fender-bender pileup had just occurred. Auto horns blared.

The SEAL chase car, the Hyundai, added to the ruckus by driving onto the sidewalk to bypass the wrecks.

The noise and chaos behind Mohr were impossible to miss. His driver halted in traffic, cursing, the moment he realized the chase car had been involved in a bad accident. The bodyguard in the front passenger seat reached for his radio, and Mohr reached for the special pen. Felix had said to just touch it to the skin at the back of the neck. He leaned forward, as if to speak to the bodyguard, and applied the pen. He belched to cover the slight hissing sound it made when pressure on the point activated the injection spray.

The driver finished putting the gearshift in park. He looked backward as Mohr leaned toward him.

“Wass?”
What?

Mohr pointed in the other direction, ahead of the car. The driver, confused, turned to look, and in that instant Mohr got him with the pen. Seconds later, both men were slumped forward against their shoulder belts, heavily sedated, with no needle marks on their necks. The compressed-air-powered, high-pressure spray drove the sleep drug through their epidermis, and capillary absorption did the rest. Mohr palmed the hip flask Felix had given him, and while pretending to see what was wrong with his driver and bodyguard, got high-proof schnapps on their chins and down their clothes. With a handkerchief he wiped his fingerprints from the empty flask, leaned farther forward, wrapped the bodyguard’s right hand around it, and rested the sleeping man’s hand in his lap. Still using his handkerchief, he unlocked the right front door.

An old brown Hyundai pulled up on the sidewalk next to Mohr’s BMW. Mohr recognized Chief Costa; he’d been expecting him. With help from an enlisted SEAL riding with Costa, they moved the pair of Germans to the BMW’s backseat without taking them out of the car. Mohr switched to the Hyundai while the enlisted SEAL took the BMW driver’s seat.

Salih, speaking rapid-fire Turkish, reassured pedestrians that no one was badly hurt. More SEALs, passengers in the gypsy cab and the taxi, joined the accusations and wild gesticulating that raged back and forth in German, Turkish, and Portuguese. Two of the SEALs, hamming up concern, reached out to calm the German driver and bodyguard. Felix knew both SEALs held knockout pens. The Germans staggered, increasingly woozy.

Salih shouted in Turkish. Felix knew he was supposed to be saying. “They’re going into shock! Concussion! You, you, help me!” Salih pointed at Felix and Porto. Salih said something else to the gathering crowd; he was telling people that he and his friends would take the men to a hospital.

They carried the nearly unconscious Germans and put them in the back of Felix’s Mercedes. The gypsy-cab driver and his passenger got back into the undamaged cab and moved it out of the way, into the street facing the halted German BMW and Costa’s Hyundai up ahead. The taxi driver, with help from other SEALs, pushed his ruined taxi to the corner of the intersection, blocking the crosswalk, but at least not blocking traffic, and left it there. He ran to the gypsy cab and crowded in.

Salih got into the damaged German Mercedes, pretending that the drive train had been bashed out of commission—so no one would suspect it was armored and thus get too nosy or have the car stick in their mind. Salih worked the steering wheel while Felix prepared to push from behind with the SEALs’ own armored Mercedes, damaged superficially but totally driveable.

Ahead of them, the BMW and Hyundai were both moving now, down the street. Felix used his knife to cut away his spent air bag, and tossed it onto the sleeping Germans’ legs. The SEAL in back arranged it like a blanket. Horns died down as traffic started crawling again. But Felix heard sirens in the distance, getting closer. Someone had phoned 155 or 112 or both, the Turkish equivalents of 911 for police or for an ambulance.

A hundred yards farther on, Salih and Felix came to an alley. They both knew it would be there. As Salih steered the Germans’ Mercedes, Felix used his car to shove the other into the alley, to get it out of the way and more or less out of sight. Salih joined him, again in the front passenger seat. Now Felix’s Mercedes was chock-full, with two unconscious Germans and a very pumped-up SEAL in back.

Felix took the first right turn he could. He knew the stolen gypsy cab, the rented Hyundai, and the commandeered German BMW would split up and take shortcuts to a nearby deserted industrial area. They’d avoid entanglement in a Turkish police investigation of the accident—they’d rendezvous again at a prechosen isolated point. Temporarily abandoned autos were a common sight in Istanbul after accidents, and drivers not lingering to be questioned by the cops was normal. What wasn’t normal was that the damaged taxi was stolen, and the damaged and dumped Mercedes had a license plate that might be traced to German consular ownership.