A Colder War

39

Through the trees and across the water, west past Kadiköy and north along the Bosporus to Kabataş, a taxi was pulling into the ferry terminal where, only a few hours earlier, Thomas Kell and Javed Mohsin had waited for the ferry, drinking their glasses of tea.

Alexander Minasian, wearing shorts, a T-shirt and a white Adidas baseball cap, paid the driver, sprinted across the concourse, passed the terminal café, pressed a ticket into the entry barrier as a fog horn sounded on the water, then leapt on to the ferry only seconds before departure.

Delayed in traffic at the end of four hours of counter-surveillance, Minasian knew that if he had missed this boat, it would have been another three hours before he could dock in Büyükada, another two before it was safe to go to the Trotsky house, therefore making it necessary either to stay the night on the island or to hire a water taxi back to Istanbul in the dead of night, a journey he had endured once before, in mercilessly rough seas.

The ferry pulled away from the jetty. Minasian made grateful nodding eye contact with a member of the ship’s crew and headed for a row of moulded plastic seats on the port side. He kept an eye on the jetty, looking out for any last-minute passengers racing to catch the boat. Would a surveillance team risk exposure by one of their number chasing him on to a ferry? Perhaps not. If they were well organized, if they had people in Kadiköy or Kartal, an operative could be sent ahead to Büyükada, cutting him off at the town. It was even possible that an American or MIT team could be active on the ferry. But they were not organized. He knew that because KODAK had told him as much. In Istanbul, Alexander Minasian was always a ghost.

A second horn cried out over the water, the blast of the ship as she steered confidently towards the cut and thrust of shipping moving north and south along the Bosporus. Removing a paperback book from his jacket pocket, Minasian began to read, confident in the knowledge that his journey to clear the KODAK letterbox would, as ever, remain undetected.