“Then can you at least get her out of here?”
“Come on, Connor. I’m not your babysitter. Just use your common sense.” Christina glances out the window. A flock of pigeons has landed on the hulking, graffitied fragment of the Berlin Wall set into the lawn. “By the way, you wearing eagle cuff links?”
“Yeah . . . ?” Connor sounds weirded out, which amuses her. It’s his first overseas assignment. With operations this explosive, Christina prefers to use disposables. Worse comes to worst, it costs less than half a million to train a new Connor.
“I could see your sleeve in the CNN shot. Be more careful.” She hangs up. Two seconds later, she’s pounding down the hall, in the direction of the parking lot.
Her executive assistant pounces, five-foot-nothing of twenty-seven-year-old enthusiasm with an unflattering ponytail, the ink still wet on her master’s degree. Bad luck for her, she can’t keep up with Christina in heels. “Um, Ms. Ekdahl, there’s a report from the Aleppo team about the hostage situation. They need to know if—”
“Not now, Taylor. I’ve got a breakfast meeting.”
“Sorry.” The girl jabs frantically at her tablet. “Um, I didn’t see—”
“Last-minute thing. Off-site. I’ll be back by eight thirty.”
“Definitely. Great. Um, the Aleppo team said they really needed your . . .” Taylor trails off. The elevator has already shut behind Christina’s back.
Anyone with as many medals as Christina has earned herself a decent parking spot. Within five minutes she’s past security, heading away from the Agency onto the highway.
Time for some strip-mall roulette.
For a once-in-a-career source like FOXFIRE, the read-in list is minuscule: the President, Secretary of Defense, CIA Director, and Christina herself. With the risk this high, even her own team can’t know.
Foxfire—the eerie, glowing bioluminescence of fungus in rotting logs. Light from stinking decay.
Christina digs the specially modified burner phone out of her purse and pulls in at a large pet store, the kind where morons with time for that kind of thing linger for half an hour, cooing at the kittens. She shrugs off the blazer, slides on drugstore glasses and a Pink Ribbon sweatband.
Two minutes later, Christina is standing by the gerbil cage, dialing the FOXFIRE protocol.
Christina has developed thousands of foreign agents: thugs and traitors, statesmen and strippers. But FOXFIRE is unique.
“Alhamdulillah, Christina!” a woman’s voice comes through the phone, her Turkish accent hardly even distinguishable. “I’ve been hoping for your call. This tragedy is unspeakable. A crime against humanity. My father has offered the United States his unreserved support—”
“It’s you I’m calling, Melek.”
Last year, even Christina was surprised when the President of Turkey’s daughter contacted the CIA, offering to sell secrets behind her father’s back if the Americans promised to help keep him in office. Melek has titanium nerves and a first-rate mind, badly underused. She’s valuable. That sure as shit doesn’t make her trustworthy.
“You know how much I value our partnership,” Melek says. “If there’s anything at all that I can do . . .”
“Are you aware of what just happened at the hospital?”
“With the flag girl? A hospitable gesture—”
“Your father just had his Prime Minister remove a U.S. citizen from our custody to your home, where we can’t protect her.”
“That jumped-up gym coach.” Melek sounds scornful. “Bolu used to be loyal. But now? Ever since my father made him prime minister, he only cares about his own image.”
“You’re saying kidnapping Penny Kessler was Bolu’s idea?”
“Inviting. Bolu’s putting on a family-man act for the media. Trying to steal attention. He’s selfish and he’s a fool. But he’s not dangerous.”
“Why Penny Kessler, Melek? Why only Penny Kessler?”
“It’s her picture on the front page, isn’t it? It’s not as if the girl is truly important.” The not-quite question hangs there.
“She’s a know-nothing intern, Melek, but she’s a U.S. citizen. I don’t care whether it was Bolu or your father behind this. And I don’t care what you have to do. But this is a PR disaster. I need Penny Kessler back to that hospital—untouched—before the nine a.m. news.”
“That isn’t possible!”
“Then I suggest you make it possible.”
6
* * *
WELCOME
ANKARA, TURKEY
15:35 LOCAL TIME
The ambulance pulls up to a monumental stone-and-iron gate emblazoned with President Palamut’s starry crimson seal. Four Anatolian Shepherd dogs sniff the vehicle, each one 150 pounds of muscle, straining against their thin black tethers. The gates slide open with a low electronic hum. As the ambulance passes through, blue LED lights flicker along the ground—motion sensors, to make sure only one vehicle can pass.
Thirty-foot pines flank the road. Just in front of the Presidential Palace, hundreds of red and white rosebushes have been planted to form the crescent and star of a giant Turkish flag. Two dozen gardeners ensure there will never be so much as a brown leaf. Until a few years ago, all this was public parkland. But where else in Ankara—a sprawling city of nearly 5 million souls—was there space for Palamut to build his 1,150-room new palace?
Penny feels the change in vibrations as the ambulance rolls onto smooth marble paving stones. The guards heave open the ambulance doors.
Penny catches her breath.
The Presidential Palace is an enormous white mansion, its neo-Ottoman façade striped in glass and pale Turkish marble. Blinding sunlight reflects off the marble drive, an endless shimmering field of white. Soldiers with rifles patrol every gate, and every door. This is more generalissimo chic than pleasure palace.
A clutch of construction workers in orange vests hammer away at a fountain on the wide third-floor front balcony. Workmen funnel chipped marble and fiberglass down an enormous yellow plastic tube, fat as a playground slide, into a dirty red dump truck below. Somebody plays a drum solo on the jackhammer, to the accompanying hum of industrial drills and the occasional tinkle of glass.
Penny’s head throbs. Construction workers? Isn’t the palace supposed to be finished?
The guards hoist Penny’s gurney and IV drip down from the ambulance and roll her toward the main entrance of the palace. Soldiers swing open the towering mahogany doors.
It’s happening. They’re really taking her inside.
She sits up to get a better look. She’d helped translate the flood of press coverage when President Palamut officially opened his new palace—it was one of her first assignments as an intern in POL. Palamut’s PR people put out a press release hyping the palace in Ottomanesque Turkish as “a magnificent monument to the strength of our glorious leader, President Palamut. Never has one mighty edifice so boldly, so proudly captured the national will of the mighty Turkish people!” The reaction of the political opposition was predictably outraged; Erol Albayrak, the weedy opposition leader, milked a dozen angry speeches out of it. The few besieged bastions of Turkey’s free (or at least not-yet-imprisoned) press bemoaned the palace. “Palamut’s six-hundred-million-dollar penis substitute,” one newsanchor dubbed it on CNN Türk. He’d used a slang word for penis that also meant “cucumber”; Penny had needed to double-check her online dictionary. An hour later, the CNN anchor was in jail on charges of “terrorist propaganda.” That hadn’t stopped #CucumberPalace from trending.
“You lie down,” says the leader of the guards, in his harshly accented English.
“I sit up,” she retorts. Adrenaline is making her rebellious.
She cranes her neck to take in the vastness of the room and feels a pang of disappointment. It’s not that she was expecting Versailles, but this is just . . . corporate. With its angular, shiny dark surfaces, carefully staged flowers, and bland executive furniture, the cavernous, three-story atrium re
sembles nothing so much as the lobby of an upscale Marriott hotel.
The only thing missing, thinks Penny, are free mints and a check-in desk. The thought emboldens her. She’s been rigid with apprehension all the way from the hospital, clenched from jaw to fists. But how scared can you be of a giant Marriott?
She swings her sore legs over the side of the gurney.
“What are you doing?” snaps the leader of the guards. He has the black curls and pale skin characteristic of the Black Sea coast—Argonaut country. Angry pink splotches stain his cheeks. “Get back up.”
“I’m going to walk,” says Penny. The glassy black marble floor is so cold, it stings her feet. But she’s damned if she’ll lie back down. They’ve got to know she’s got some strength left. She’s got to know it.
“Penny!”
From the door concealed behind a towering geometric tapestry emerges a plump Turkish man in a shiny pin-striped suit. He doesn’t appear to register that Penny is liberally speckled with dried blood and iodine, still hooked up to an IV drip, and wearing a knee-length hospital gown. From his manner, he might as well be greeting a trade delegation. To her surprise, he shakes her hand. Usually, Palamut’s inner circle are too religious for even fleeting physical contact with an unknown female, let alone a half-clothed foreigner. He must be part of the PR team. His hand feels as if he’s marinated it in moisturizer. From sheer force of habit, Penny matches his limp grasp. The American-style steam-pump handshake is considered rude in Turkey, especially from a young woman.
The shiny man fixes her in the eye. “I am President Palamut’s Chief of Staff. You may call me Ünal.” His English is almost flawless. His voice drops low as he adds, “I am so deeply sorry about the attack. My most profound condolences.”
Penny feels a lump rise in her throat. “It’s . . .” She swallows. “It’s . . .”
“I understand.” Ünal nods. There’s something almost comically supercilious about him, like the theater professor she saw play Poirot in the University of Michigan’s winter production of Murder on the Orient Express.
“President Palamut has sworn that he will hunt down the terrorists responsible,” Ünal is saying. “Already, MİT, our intelligence agency, has some excellent leads. You need not fear. We will find the terrorists. They will pay.”
Penny stares at him. If Palamut’s thugs can track down the terrorists, she’d forgive them an awful lot. What’s that saying—the enemy of my enemy?
She asks quickly, “Who do they think it was?”
Ünal holds her gaze with his watery basset-hound eyes. “You know how things are with Syria. Now the terrorists have infiltrated Turkey, too. They know if the deal goes through at the NATO Summit this weekend, we will finally be able to crush them. They are desperate. Especially these new maniacs, these”—he almost spits the name—“Hashashin terrorists. Again and again we have warned your government. Even Daesh—you know, ISIS? Even they fear the Hashashin. And now . . .”
“You think the Hashashin bombed the Embassy?”
He sighs theatrically. “We suspect the Hashashin and the Kurds have collaborated in this terrible attack.”
Palamut would blame the Kurds for snow in winter, but this seems far-fetched even for him. “The Kurds and the Hashashin?” Penny croaks. “But don’t the Hashashin keep bombing Kurdish villages?”
Ünal waves her words away. “A terrorist is a terrorist, and an enemy of the state is an enemy of the state. The bombing of your Embassy was an act of war, Penny.” Creases appear between his brows. “War.”
Penny’s knees feel as if they’re going to buckle.
The strain must show on her face because Ünal quickly adds, “But I am most inconsiderate! Look at you. You must rest. I will show you to your room.”
Flanked by the silent guards, Penny struggles to keep pace with Ünal down the dark gray marble hall, past shiny-looking new oil paintings of Ottoman sultans in various heroic poses. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the secular Republic of Turkey, whose blue-eyed, ferocious-eyebrowed image used to adorn every public office, store, and living room in the country, is conspicuously absent.
Penny works up her nerve. “It was extremely kind of the Prime Minister and President Palamut to . . . um . . . invite me here. But really, sir—”
“Please, call me Ünal.”
“Ünal Bey,” she says, using the honorific, “so many people are dead. So many people are hurt. Much worse than me. I don’t need special treatment. I don’t deserve it.” He doesn’t reply as they step into the gilded, mirrored elevator, which is so vast that six guards, the scowling nurse, the gurney, Penny, and Ünal all fit in with room to spare. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” Penny continues in a rush, “but—why me?”
“Because we cannot be equally kind to everyone, should we extend our humble hospitality to no one, Penny Hanım?” He returns the honorific playfully, smiling. “Do you give nothing to the beggar in the street because you do not have enough to give to everyone?”
“No, but . . .”
The elevator doors open on another long hallway. This one is wallpapered pearlescent white, hung with ancient-looking drawings of birds and flowers, made of contorted Arabic calligraphy. Penny had heard rumors that Palamut plundered the treasures of Topkapı Palace to furnish his own. She dismissed them as ridiculous exaggeration. It looks like she was wrong.
“You are very young, and alone, and far from home,” Ünal continues. “Melek Hanım has a kind heart. It is only natural that she wanted to help you.”
Penny is startled. “Melek Hanım? The President’s daughter?”
“But of course. These are her quarters. Who do you think invited you?”
“But how did she even know that I . . .” Penny trails off. “Of course. The photo.”
“She personally persuaded the President.” Ünal gestures to the guards to halt and leans forward, swiping the keycard on his lanyard against the flat black sensor set into the door. With a gentle beep of acquiescence, the lock releases.
It is a goddamn Marriott, thinks Penny.
Ünal pushes the door open. It takes Penny about three seconds to realize just how wrong she was.
She’s been in a few Turkish houses before—her landlady Fatma’s downstairs flat for glasses of scorching tea, the apartments of a couple of the Embassy’s local staff members for potluck suppers. They run, in her limited experience, to OCD cleanliness and austere IKEA furniture, with the odd bit of kitsch to liven up mostly bare walls. There’s usually nothing visibly Turkish or Middle Eastern about them. Certainly, there are few family heirlooms, little trace of a history before the foundation of the secular Turkish Republic in 1923.
Well, thinks Penny, Melek Palamut definitely didn’t get the “modern austerity” memo.
The huge room is awash in whites, yellows, and golds—a stage set of feminine opulence, straight from the oligarch’s handbook. Gauzy bronze drapes hang down around the head of the four-poster. The six gold velvet armchairs are overstuffed to the point of obesity, bulging as if they’ve never been sat on. Maybe they haven’t. A crystal chandelier, drooping from the ceiling like a stalactite, refracts light from the window in tiny starbursts across the thick Hereke carpet, its millions of silken threads knotted into a pastel tree-of-life motif. It’s too much—like a meal cooked entirely of butter and cream.
“Buyrun,” says Ünal, gesturing her forward. He smirks at her obvious shock. “After you.”
Penny steps through the door, and one of the guards rolls the little IV drip in after her. A moment of dizziness makes her wobble. Her foot catches on the corner of a carpet, and she hits the ground, sending the IV drip crashing down next to her. The scabs on her knees jar open. Oh, God, she can’t bleed on President Palamut’s carpet! Blushing, Penny scrambles to her feet—to find the two nearest guards have drawn their guns.
They’re both pointing straight at her head.
7
* * *
THE GOLDEN ROOM
Penny
stands there, her mouth stupidly open.
The moment seems to last a week. Details stab into her consciousness: the matte-black muzzles of the guns level with her eyes; the grim, set faces of the guards; Ünal’s narrowed eyes and merciless mouth; the bowl of shiny grapes on the rococo dresser—plastic, no flies.
For a second, she’s too shocked even to feel afraid. Then, just as the terror starts to hammer in her heart, it’s over.
Ünal is patting her shoulder. He is laughing. It doesn’t seem possible. “Penny! You gave us quite a scare. Here, have a seat.”
She lets him maneuver her into one of the golden armchairs as if she were a doll. Her head is pounding worse than ever. She finds her voice and hears herself croak, “I gave you a scare?”
“You’re our guest, Penny.” Ünal waggles a pudgy finger at her. “We can’t be too careful.”
“Careful?” The sheer illogic of it gives Penny a kind of mad, furious courage. “They were about to shoot me!”
“Shoot you?” Ünal is standing over her with an expression of quizzical concern. “What do you mean?”
His reaction scares Penny every bit as much as the guns. The words dry up in her throat. “I . . . don’t know.”
“Of course.” Ünal shakes his head with a smile. “I am forgetting—you’ve had a terrible injury to your head. Probably you are not thinking so clearly right now. Are you feeling dizzy?”
“A little.” Penny cradles her head in both her hands. She feels as if the whole room is spinning like a merry-go-round.
“Oh, Penny.” Ünal gives her an indulgent look. “We’re all here to protect you. Melek Hanım’s orders! Now, you just rest here a moment.”
“Miss Penny?” A stocky man with a salt-and-pepper beard blocks the doorway. He’s wearing a white lab coat.
“Good, good.” Ünal ushers him in. “Penny, this is the President’s own doctor. He’s going to take a quick look at you.”
Penny crosses her arms tightly across her chest. “With the guards here?”
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