The Red Room

9

You speak English, Besim?” Grace asks of her driver behind the wheel of a Mercedes. Her eyes never leave Melemet, his two bodyguards and the man following them. She has some Turkish, though her Arabic is stronger. She’d rather not show her cards to a driver; such men are known to talk.

One of the bodyguards takes the front seat of the Audi. A moment later he signals. Melemet is in, followed by the trailing guard. Traffic is intense. No one is going anywhere just yet.

The agent crosses to an island, waits and is met by a Land Rover. It stays at the curb, much to the disdain of a policeman who is waving it away.

“Some,” her driver responds. Balding, and with a short-cropped beard, he wears a black suit that brings out a caramel tone in his dark skin. She has yet to see his full face.

“Have you ever followed another vehicle?”

“Jealous wife. Jealous husband.” The beard puckers. He is smiling.

“I am — was — mistress to this man.” She points to the Audi. “We are going to follow him. He is not alone. He owes people money. Much money. You understand?” She points left to the Land Rover. “You see?”

“I understand.”

“I would rather not be noticed.”

“Not easy to follow during nighttime.”

She passes a good deal of cash into the front seat. He won’t want to touch her. She drops it.

“Let us make it as easy as possible,” she says, avoiding the use of confusing contractions. “Our problem is: the ones following are very good. They will be watching for people like us. They do not wish to share.”

“This, not easy, ma’am.”

No, she thinks.

“I tell you,” he says, pulling out now, five vehicles behind the Audi, already on the job, “I know this car company.” He motions with his head. “My brothel’s nephew”—she doesn’t correct his mistake—“the brothel to his wife’s sister, he is, how do you say, radio man, this company.”

“Dispatcher.” Grace appreciates his sense of extended family, the intermarrying of cousins, the generations of business relationships between families the size of clans. Tribes. Not so very different from her native China.

“Precisely. Drivers, we together.”

“I am sure.”

“I call my brothel?” he asks. “He call nephew?”

“How much?” She doesn’t mind paying but doesn’t want to come up short when the time comes.

“I am your driver throughout stay in Istanbul. No need for these monies, ma’am.”

She presses. “I may need an ATM.”

Another smile. More a lascivious grin.

“I make call,” he says.

Her driver makes three calls. She picks up more of the conversations than she thought she might. Pats herself on the back.

“Is okay,” he says, backing off the pedal a bit. “Destination, Florence Nightingale Hospital. Forty kilometers.”

Given Dulwich’s briefing about the sick mother, Grace has assumed the hospital would be an early stop. The location doesn’t help her. She works to keep the irritation from her voice. “After that? His final destination?”

He catches her eye in the rearview mirror, his mental gears clearly grinding. She’s following a man, her supposed former lover, who just landed and is heading straight to a hospital; her tone suggests she knows all this and yet somehow knows the hospital is not his final stop.

“His mother is ill, Besim,” Grace explains in a more intimate and caring tone, trying to stay a step ahead of her savvy driver. “Of course the hospital must come first. If I am to speak to him, it must follow.”

“I have address,” he says. “You desire I should drive you this place?”

“Yes. Please. Tell me, Besim, can we arrive at the hospital ahead of him?”

“It is doubtful — possible, but doubtful. Very fast driver, as you see.”

The Audi has sped out of sight since Besim’s initial backing off.

“I would like that,” she says. “No matter, I must arrive to his final destination ahead of him. I must be waiting.”

His dark eyes slide into the mirror and out again.

“He has wronged me,” she explains.

Besim keeps his thoughts to himself, but he’s an open book: she needs a good backhand to the face. A little tune-up. Eye-tunes.

“The money he gambled was mine. The money he lost. The money these other men want.” The invented story comes with surprising ease. She’s not a natural born storyteller; she’s a number cruncher.

The true story reads differently: she has left her first and one true love behind in China, both disallowed by their families from pursuing the relationship. She was eager to do so; he refused, held tightly by the family reins. Besim doesn’t need to hear this. For him she is translating the language of the heart to the language of money. Stories are so interchangeable, she thinks, wondering why lives are not.

“He has taken my heart,” she says honestly. “I want my money back.”

Besim’s chipped teeth sparkle white. He wants to say something about her being Chinese, to sting her for entering a relationship with an Arab. She knows that look and resents it. Objectified. Reduced to what’s between her shoulders and legs. So easy to choke or garrote a man from the backseat. Her emotions swing with every lane change of the car. Besim knows his stuff; they are stitching their way through the congested traffic.

She doesn’t want to follow, would rather leapfrog.

“His final destination, please. You will drop me there, then wait with my bags at my apartment. It is okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Her decision made, she sits back. Her thought process is linear, mathematical. If A equals B and B equals C, then… Were the agents waiting for Melemet, aka Mashe Okle, as they appear to have been? The “why” isn’t important to the equation, but the “how” definitely is. They must have been aware of his cover identity prior to his booking the ticket. If a known arms dealer, why not arrest him on the spot? Okle is in Istanbul to be at the bedside of his dying mother. Why put off his arrest? No matter how she manipulates the variables, the equation won’t yield a result. It’s an unsolvable proof. Unacceptable.

What is Dulwich not telling her, and why? This is the parenthetical product she’s lacking, the value that is throwing off the result.

When her phone vibrates and a sixty-four-character string of symbols and alphanumeric characters appears in the Messaging balloon, she knows it’s the password she’s been waiting for, the one she needs to raid Okle’s investment portfolio. She stares at the phone as if it belongs to someone else. The message doesn’t come from Rutherford’s Data Sciences division, but from Dulwich himself, the most digitally challenged man she knows. It’s a small inconsistency, but she’s trained to identify such variables.

She drums her fingers on her knee. What is Dulwich up to?

Outside the vehicle, the sparkle of the Istanbul lights emerges.

“You like?” Besim asks. He’s caught her look of awe in the mirror.

“It’s beautiful,” she says, admiring the twinkling hills, the dozens of mosque spires, and the sparkling vessels on the Bosphorus Strait. She doesn’t want to get her driver talking. She needs time to think.

The illuminated minarets of the mosques look like chalky fingers pointing to heaven.

Besim nods thoughtfully. “You will like this place.”

Grace is not so sure.