Drone Threat

29

The Cool Breeze bar was packed with tourists and locals perched on high seats around club tables enjoying Manhattans and daiquiris and good Czech beer. The music from the small stage echoed on the ancient stone floors and arched brick ceiling. The place looked more like a medieval church basement than a jazz joint. The band was Indian. They played bass, sax, drums, and a sitar. Most of the patrons were talking among themselves, ignoring the skilled improvisations.

Mehmet Zorlu had never heard that kind of jazz before. He liked it. He sat at the end of the long mahogany bar with the locals. He was bald and clean-shaven, with a thick braid of gold chain looped beneath his double chins. In his sport coat, slacks, and loafers, he looked more like Alfred Hitchcock than a member of the Turkish mafia. One of his underlings nicknamed him “Tony Soprano” a few years back. He liked the American TV show, so he took no vengeance on the fool, a second cousin. He stabbed out his cigarette butt in a crowded ashtray and lit another one with a Zippo.

Zorlu knew the owners, Fipps and Robson, a couple of British expats. They were both behind the bar tonight, mixing drinks and laughing it up with the regulars. His sources inside the MIT, Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, had vetted the two men three years ago. If they were MI6 or CIA, they hid it well. High-dollar escorts were always in tow and dirty money swam in their cash registers. Some of that dirty money he’d placed there himself over the last year. He liked them, and their whores.

He checked his watch again. The courier was late. He wiped away a bead of sweat from his massive forehead. It was cold outside but hot enough inside to bake pide on the butt-strewn floor. He finished off the martini — his third — with a last gulp, then plopped the olive into his mouth. He caught the eye of Fipps, a blond with a brush cut and bulging biceps. Zorlu pointed at his empty martini glass. Fipps nodded and grabbed a clean glass and got to work.

Zorlu checked his watch again. The call he received came from the very top of his organization. A pickup, then a delivery. Very simple. Only not so simple. “Fail to receive the envelope and you die. Fail to deliver it, and you’ll be skinned alive. You and your wife, your mistress, and your sons.”

Where the hell was that drink?

He knew what lay ahead. He’d made the trip once before. A two-hour ride in the back of car if he was lucky, in the trunk if he wasn’t. Bag over his head, hands cuffed behind his back, straining his heavy shoulders. And then another trip by boat. There he would meet the man who would take him the rest of the way to Raqqa. A man he’d only met once face-to-face. A disturbing face. Cruel and certain, like all such fanatics. His contact in the ISIS oil-smuggling ring he ran between Syria and Turkey. They had a sort of trust, thin as a piece of old thread, but still intact. When Zorlu called him, he heard the suspicion in his voice. Suspicion that made him even more dangerous. Still, what choice did he have? He had his orders and his ISIS contact was his only hope.

The fat Turk stole a glance at the German woman seated next to him. Wide hips, big breasts. Very nice. He remembered his years in Düsseldorf fondly. Money, drugs, or force had spread many pairs of such legs in his youth.

Fipps approached with the new martini and set it down in front of him. He leaned in close. Nodded toward the staircase.

Zorlu turned around with difficulty. The courier, he guessed. A Turkish kid in his twenties. Leather jacket, long hair, dark. A British passport in his pocket, no doubt. One of the infamous Tottenham Turks, a violent gang his own organization used to distribute drugs in the U.K. in exchange for guns. His nervous young eyes scanned the room. No doubt he received the same grim threats.

Skinned alive wasn’t a metaphor.

For a moment he weighed the option of running. He carried a forged Panamanian passport and had enough cash stashed away in banks in Cyprus and Portugal to live modestly for a long while. He could start over. Even make a life for himself in the States. But he thought of his sons and their flayed corpses. He had seen such things. His stomach soured at the thought and he pushed it away.

Zorlu picked up the martini and drained it in one long gulp. He took one last puff on his cigarette, then crushed it in the overflowing ashtray. This message he was supposed to hand-deliver to the Caliph must be damned important.

Zorlu twisted around in his seat. The kid’s eyes finally landed on him. Zorlu acknowledged the courier with a nod, and with a sideways lean of the head, pointed the Tottenham boy toward a door leading to the back room.

Zorlu lifted his heavy girth off of the chair. Maybe it will all work out, he hoped as he made his way through the crowded, smoke-filled room. He better take a piss before the car ride, though. Otherwise it could be a long night in the trunk lying in his own cold stink.