Hard Rain (29 page)

I was breathing again. I could feel the pulse in my neck.

‘Vin, Jesus, I –’

I put my finger against her lips. Somewhere close I could still hear the damn baby crying.

The train wasn’t going anywhere. The driver was probably in shock. The carriages that nearly killed us were now protecting us from further attack. For all anyone up on the platform knew, we were crushed, dead. I was happy not to spoil the assumption.

I saw a service duct a couple of yards ahead, in the shadows. ‘Go,’ I said quietly, pushing Masters forward towards it. Above us on the platform, an increasing number of people were running about shouting.

I joined Masters in the service duct. There was a door. It led to some stairs, which brought us to a maintenance elevator. My hand was shaking so violently I couldn’t get a finger onto any of the buttons.

B
ack in Istanbul the following day, we walked into the US Consulate-General like nothing had happened. The mission had mostly decamped to Ankara anyway, and only the local staff had clocked in. There was a message to contact Captain Cain. I put in a request for a video iChat.

‘That was quick,’ he said, his face suddenly appearing on my desktop. ‘How’d you make out?’

I filled him in, leaving out the attempt on our lives.

‘All tallies with the Request For Information I put in on the Kumayt project,’ he said, when I’d finished. ‘Got a reply this morning.’

‘Yeah? What’d it say?’

‘Almost nothing you haven’t just told me. Tawal sounds like a piece of work.’

‘What do you mean, “
almost
nothing”?’ I asked him.

‘Mightn’t be anything. The tender came up three-and-a-half years ago, took six months to be awarded. One of the reasons Tawal’s group seems to have won the project was that they promised to have it built inside three years. They’re late, by the way. It’s not operational yet. But something on the scale of that desal plant would normally take close to five years to build.’

‘So they’re in a hurry,’ I said.

‘I did say it mightn’t be anything . . . Oh, yeah. I read something online about two people jumping in front of a train at Châtelet last night. The driver swears he hit them, but they never found the bodies. You were near Châtelet last night, weren’t you?’

‘Paris is a big city,’ I said. While he talked, I Googled ‘Moses Abdul Tawal’. There were pages and pages on the guy. He was a playboy businessman who indulged himself in powerboat racing, Ferraris, and women that could get you into a lot of trouble. A potential role model for my next life.

‘Just wondered whether you’d got caught up in it, is all. The station was closed for an hour,’ Cain rambled.

‘Uh-huh. Anything been happening here?’ I asked, changing the subject.

‘As a matter of fact, yes. I ran that check on our friends Goddard and Mallet. They aren’t CID.’

‘I know. They’re CIA.’

‘Good guess.’

‘Not really. They pretty much told me.’

‘I called in a favour and had an army buddy stationed over in Kuwait walk in off the street into 3rd MP. They’ve got a Goddard and Mallet there, all right. Only, guess what? They’re both African–American and black as Alaskan winter sunshine.’

We batted around the small talk for a minute or two, then ended the call. I liked Cain. He was thorough, a good man to have on the team.

I leaned back in my seat and glanced at Masters across the room. She was tapping away on the keyboard. ‘You hear all that?’ I asked.

‘Yep. Not surprised.’

‘I’ll shoot you some stuff on this Tawal character.’

Masters sat back and exhaled.

‘C’mon,’ I said, after pressing the send key. ‘Get your coat.’

‘Where we going?’

‘To test this theory of mine.’

We rode the elevator. ‘So where are we going?’ she repeated as it bumped to a stop.

‘Portman’s residence, but first we have to call in at Doc Merkit’s place.’

‘Merkit? Why her?’

‘Because I don’t want to ask anyone here if I can borrow their Geiger counter.’

‘Whoa . . . wait a minute,’ Masters said, holding the doors open.

‘What’s up?’

‘Vin, perhaps you should fly solo on this one. I’ve got plenty to do around here – keeping Stringer off your back, for one thing. And for another, I also want to dig around in the Department of Energy, see if I can’t uncover a little more about those DU waste dumps.’

The elevator doors buzzed, annoyed at the long delay. We stepped out and the doors closed.

Masters had her reasons for avoiding the doc. I guessed they were ones that lived in the same apartment block as my desire to practise a left-right combo on Dick Wadding’s jaw. I wasn’t going to push her any further. ‘If you’re sure,’ I said.

‘I’m sure.’

‘Well, if you’re going to stay here, you might also have a look into the stuff Portman found in that water sample.’

‘Uranyl fluoride. Cain and I are already on to it. You going to come back here?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, but give me a couple of hours.’

‘Hours, eh? You seeing Merkit for, you know, other reasons?’

‘No.’

‘A bit quick off the mark there, Vin. If there are other reasons, that’s okay – really. But you’ll be upfront with me because, if you’re not, I’ll saw your testicles off with my nail file.’

‘Deal,’ I agreed, with a smile and a twinge in my groin area.

‘I called Emir earlier – he should be out front in the parking lot,’ said Masters.

‘Then I’ll sneak out the back.’

‘C’mon, he’s not that bad. And he’ll save you time calling a cab.’

Emir
was
that bad, but Masters had it right about the time – I didn’t have any to waste sitting around.

I walked out into the failing afternoon light, a chill gathering in the air and Emir leaning on the roof of his old Renault. The guy didn’t look pleased to see me. There was a distinct lack of waving. He flicked his Camel into the wall hard enough to make it bounce in a shower of orange sparks, and hopped in his vehicle.

I noticed he’d made some changes. The rear window was now framed by a line of small white pompoms and a few additional items hung from his rear-view mirror: a silver human skeleton, a pair of dice and a line of gaudy silver coins that jangled over the bumps like a jogger with a pocketful of dimes.

‘So, Mr Vin, I hear you having trouble on the road when you go to Ephesus.’ Before I could answer, he added. ‘You would not have had this trouble if Emir had been driving.’

‘No, probably not,’ I said. ‘I’m going to Beyoglu and then Bebek. And if there’s any trouble on the road, it’s all yours.’

Emir’s head gave a tilt. He was happy with that. ‘Yes, okay. I have an uncle in Beyoglu. If there is time, I will visit him.’

‘Sure. And Emir, keep a look out for tails, okay?’

‘What is tails?’

‘Anyone following.’

‘Yes, of course. I make sure no one is tails.’

I was dead tired. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about my throbbing knuckles, the aching rib or Masters’ nail file separating Little Coop from his wingmen.

Too soon, Emir’s voice penetrated my snooze. ‘No tails, Mr Vin.’

I opened my eyes. All too quickly, we were turning into Doc Merkit’s street. It was just after 4 pm and dark enough for the streetlights to have come on.

I gave my face a rub with my good hand. I didn’t have a lot of faith that Emir was equipped to spot a professional tail, but having him check the rear-view mirror every now and then had let me sleep easier. ‘Drive us around the block,’ I said. The business at Ephesus and Châtelet had made me jumpy.

Emir’s shoulders hunched in a shrug. I scoped the parked vehicles,
the usual line-up of Mercedes and a few Fiats, all of them empty as far as I could see. I’m not sure what I expected to find but we did the orbit anyway and I saw nothing out of the ordinary. ‘Pull over around the corner,’ I told him.

Emir drove past Doc Merkit’s pink shoebox. The lights were on. We rounded the bend and stopped another fifty yards further beyond it.

‘I’ll be an hour, max,’ I said, opening the door.

‘I will take tea with my uncle.’

‘I’ll see you back here.’

‘Back here,’ Emir repeated as he sparked up, sour tendrils of Turkish tobacco curling through the air.

I watched his tail lights disappear down the street. There was no other traffic, and suburbia swelled to fill the silence. Turkish folk music played in a house nearby. Three young boys laughed and squealed as they wrestled with each other in the gutter; a large grandma-type with legs thick enough to support coconuts and palm leaves sat in a nearby chair and kept watch. Lamb sizzled on a grill somewhere down the street, reminding me I was hungry.

Knuckle dusters wielded by a psycho super-bitch seemed a long way away from this scene. I hoped they stayed there.

‘Vin! It is you! I have been so worried. Come in, come in, please,’ the doc said, throwing the door wide. On her face, I could see consternation in one corner and relief in the other, both wrestling for control of her features.

I did my best to show her how remarkably fit and well I was, hopping up the stairs. The cracked rib did its best to spoil the show.

‘Your hand!’ She took the new cast carefully in her slender fingers. ‘I am just having a late lunch.’

‘It’s four o’clock.’

‘Well, then, perhaps it’s an early dinner. Have you eaten?’

‘No, but I’m not h–’

‘Vin, you must eat. And then you must tell me what happened.’

The latter was the reason I was here, so I quit with the protests. Over olives and cheese I filled her in on the past week or more: the meeting with Fedai, the information he’d recovered from Portman’s floor safe and his subsequent murder at Kusadasi, a little about Yafa and her merry band of monsters, the time spent in the cistern, what we knew about Thurlstane and the desalination plant in Kumayt, and finally the overnight trip to Paris and the meeting with Rivers.

The doc sat back and shook her head in amazement. ‘At least this confirms for us that these murders were not committed for psychotic reasons.’

‘You’re only saying that because you haven’t met the killers.’

The doc freshened up the hors d’oeuvres with cheese and bread.

‘Just to change the subject a little,’ I said, ‘you still not wearing a
türban
?’

‘No, I am not. I have thought about this. I have been dishonest with God, and my family. It will be difficult, but I will not wear it again . . . Now, if you will allow
me
to change the subject, did you and your Special Agent Masters make love when you were trapped?’

‘No,’ I replied, almost choking on an olive.

‘But you wanted to, yes?’

I thought about lying, but decided against it. I nodded.

‘Yes, I could feel this between you,’ she said, toying with her food.

‘So I guess there won’t be any more Turkish baths in my immediate future?’ I asked.

The doc locked those spectacular blue eyes of hers onto mine, and smiled. ‘When I saw you at the door, your last visit – our last love-making – it was all I could think about.’

It was all Little Coop could think about too, and now he was frustrated, unable to believe I was shooting in the foot his immediate chances of a rerun. ‘Sorry, doc.’

‘No, do not be sorry. I never expected you would be the one presenting my father with five camels and a goat.’ Aysun stood and went over to a large bouquet of pink lilies. ‘I received a call and some flowers from this man I met at your hotel . . .’ She picked up the card that was face
down on the bench beside the vase. ‘Colonel Richard Wadding. You know he asked me on a date?’

I snorted.

‘I don’t think he likes you,’ she said.

‘Really? There’s no doubt in my mind about him.’

‘I said no to the date. He told me you and Special Agent Masters were once lovers.’

‘Yeah, we were. But at the moment, we’re just working this case together. I think the colonel’s sore that Special Agent Masters finally saw him for what he really is.’

‘And what is he?’

‘Someone you shouldn’t get involved with.’

Doc Merkit examined the card, then dropped it in the trash. ‘Perhaps it is easier to remain celibate.’

‘Doc, I have a favour to ask.’

‘What is it?’

‘I need a Geiger counter. Do you know where I could get one?’

‘Would that not be something you could get through your embassy?’

I didn’t give her my theory about the mole, deciding to keep that one to myself. It was a complication the doc didn’t need to hear. ‘Asking for an instrument to measure radioactivity in these post-9/11 days?’ I said instead. ‘It’d send them into meltdown.’

‘Yes, I suppose. Hmm . . . a Geiger counter. I think it would be possible, but I will have to accompany you. First, I must make a call.’

The doc took her cell phone off the bench, scrolled through the memory. She leaned back against the cupboards, flicked her hair away from her face and brought the cell to her ear. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but the way the doc spoke Turkish was soft and gentle, like silk on silk blowing in the breeze. She ended the call. ‘Yes, I can get this for you, but it will take an hour.’

‘Okay. I’ll just –’

‘And now
I
have a favour to ask of
you
.’

‘Sure.’

‘Have you ever seen a Turkish woman dance?’

The show started with a kiss, a long, sensuous kiss, the kind of kiss that could earn a censor’s rating. A kiss that steamed your shirt to your back. ‘One hour,’ she then whispered in my ear, taking my hand and lifting it to cup her breast. Resistance was not exactly futile, it was non-existent.

So while we waited for the doc’s contact to call back about the Geiger counter, she danced for me, taking her time to strip down to her underwear. She danced without music, unplugged, the silence punctuated only by our breathing and the sound of her feet on the Turkish rug – the swell of her beckoning pubic bone moving back and forth like a hypnotist’s watch.

The dance concluded with Aysun nude and lying on the rug, sweat glowing on her skin, her chest rising and falling with expended effort, her damp hair sticking to her neck and shoulders, and her nipples hard. Little Coop knew just how they felt. ‘We have forty minutes left,’ she whispered. ‘How do you wish to spend them?’

Emir was talking to a well-dressed man in his fifties, who was sitting beside him in the passenger seat. I opened the rear door for the doctor and went round to the other side. Emir and his friend were already concluding the introductions in Turkish when I climbed in.

‘So, where we going?’ I asked.

‘The Grand Bazaar,’ said the doc. ‘Emir knows the place.’ A brief exchange between them in Turkish followed, establishing the minor details.

Emir pulled away from the kerb with a smile, his eyes darting to the rear-view mirror as usual, unsure what to make of the woman sitting beside me. His allegiances lay with Anna Masters, but part of him also wanted to be nice to the extraordinary piece of ass occupying the back seat.