Liar's Candle

by August Thomas

  Melek gives her an almost pitying look. “Everybody knows you came here in an ambulance. It would hardly be shocking if you leave in one.”

  Penny brazens it out. “That won’t look good for your father.”

  “My father isn’t the one who came to the hospital in front of all the TV cameras.”

  “So you’d throw Prime Minister Bolu under the bus?”

  Melek is unmoved. “That is not your concern.”

  “It’s still your father’s palace! Do you think he won’t be blamed if you murder me?”

  “Your brain damage was not fully assessed. Perhaps it’s worse than the doctors believed. It would be tragic. You have so much potential.”

  Penny can feel the blood throbbing in her neck. “As you say, I had a concussion,” she says, deliberately allowing her speech to slur a little. “I’m—really not thinking very clearly. I’m still dizzy. I don’t want to do anything stupid.”

  “No,” agrees Melek softly.

  “Maybe—maybe if I rest for a while, I’ll remember something. About Zach.”

  “A very good idea.” Penny could swear Melek looks almost amused. “Ünal Bey!”

  A beep, and the door swings open. Ünal makes a deferential bow of the head. “Efendim, Melek Hanım?”

  “Penny is going to rest a little while. I’ll come back in twenty minutes.” Melek gives Penny a sharp look. “I hope by then your memory will return. Meanwhile, Ünal Bey will keep you company.”

  Penny’s face falls. “Oh.”

  “And,” Melek continues sharply, “two guards will remain outside the door. In case you need any assistance.”

  “Thank you,” says Penny lamely.

  Melek smiles. “Have a good rest, my dear. Think things over.”

  The door closes behind her.

  Twenty minutes.

  Penny looks around the room. She has to escape. The window is her only chance. But how can she get rid of Ünal? There’s no way he’ll leave her alone. There’s really only one option.

  She’s going to have to knock him out.

  The thought is absolutely, comically absurd. She’s never even slapped somebody. She doesn’t even swat flies—she always tries to trap them and carry them to a window.

  Ünal has pulled a poufy armchair up to her bedside. “You’ve taken out your IV drip, Penny.”

  “It hurt.”

  “You’ll get dehydrated.” He waggles his finger. “We have to take good care of you.”

  “I am kind of thirsty.” An idea crosses Penny’s mind. It’ll never work. But what other chance does she have? She points to the heavy silver ewer. “Could I have a little water?”

  “Of course.” He gives a courtly nod, walks over to the little table, pours a tiny golden zemzem glass of water, and sets the pitcher back down.

  Damn.

  Ünal hands Penny the miniature glass and leans back in his armchair.

  Penny knocks the water back in two gulps. “It’s so nice and cool.” She tries to slur her words. “Can I please have some more?”

  Ünal looks mildly irritated, but he stands up. “Maybe you shouldn’t have taken out your IV drip.”

  Penny bows her head meekly.

  “Here.” Ünal slams the pitcher down on Penny’s bedside table. “Help yourself.”

  “Thank you, Ünal Bey.”

  Ünal just nods, lips thin. As he sits down, Penny notices the outline of a holster at his generously padded waist.

  Now or never. Penny reaches out and picks up the pitcher. Her stomach feels like it was tying itself into pretzel knots. “My grandma always said that when you’re dehydrated, the best thing is lemonade.” The handle of the pitcher is getting hot under her palm. She’s got to do it. She’s got to. But how can she? Ünal’s basset eyes are fixed straight on her face. His benign expression has grown taut; he must be getting suspicious. She licks her dry lips.

  “I’ll have the guards fetch the doctor. He’ll put your IV back in.”

  “Oh—good.” Penny swallows nervously. “Oops. Oh, I’m so sorry—”

  Ünal shakes his head, and his waxed mustache quivers. Clearly, he thinks she’s an idiot. “I’ll get it.” He stoops to pick up her zemzem glass, which has rolled under the bed.

  He’s down on his hands and knees.

  Do it! Penny tells herself furiously. Just—goddamn—DO it!

  “Got it,” announces Ünal, his head emerging from under the bed skirt. His hair is thinning just at the back, like a worn patch of carpet.

  “Great!” says Penny brightly. With both hands, wrists trembling at the weight, she brings the heavy silver ewer down on the back of his skull.

  There is a soft clonk, barely audible, like a teapot being set down on a thick tablecloth.

  Ünal doesn’t look surprised or pained. His jaw simply slacks open as he falls face-first into the Hereke carpet.

  9

  * * *

  INCHWORM

  For a moment, Penny just stares at him, too stunned to move.

  Did it actually work?

  It actually worked!

  “Yes!” She beams, then feels guilty. “Sorry.” She’s still holding the silver ewer, but her palms are getting sweaty. She leans over the side of the bed. Ünal is absolutely still.

  Oh, Jesus, has she killed him?

  No, the back of his suit is moving slightly up and down. He must be breathing. Good.

  She plonks the ewer on the bedside table and slides out the other side. She pads around the bed to the window, glancing nervously back at Ünal’s prone form. His suit jacket has hitched up, revealing an inch of pallid muffin-top. His holster is sandwiched between his thigh and the floor—no way to extract it. He hasn’t moved.

  Penny steps toward the window and feels for the catch in the side. She slides the window open. It’s a lot heavier than she expected.

  Two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve inches—wide enough for her to squeeze through.

  She takes a deep breath of the dusty outside air. It’s flatteningly hot even this late in the afternoon. She steps up to the wrought-iron railing. It’s a forty-foot drop straight down to the marble pavement. There isn’t even a convenient climbing vine, or a drainpipe.

  The room to her left has a balcony—a real one, nor just the ornamental railing. She’d have to leap about five feet. It’s a stretch, but it beats waiting for Melek to come back.

  She tightens the red bathrobe around her waist. Right. She can do this.

  A huge burst of sound sends her lurching back into the room.

  A man’s rich voice, soaring and swooping in the call to prayer, an everyday act of startling beauty, made tooth-achingly loud by the loudspeaker. Penny can feel the vibrations in her jaw. It’s the late afternoon ezan.

  “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar . . .”

  She looks fearfully over her shoulder. Ünal Bey is still out cold.

  The summons grows louder, and more yearning. Some muezzins sound about as musical as bawling fishwives; this one could sing Wagner at the Met. Of course President Palamut would have the best. Every word floats in the air, as pure and haunting as the church bells in Petoskey. Penny can remember the first time she heard the ezan reverberating through the concrete streets, badly distorted by a hundred speakers. Fatma, Penny’s square-jawed, proudly secular, never-married landlady, had been baffled why the American girl was getting misty-eyed over the call to prayer. “Just you wait till it comes on when you’re trying to watch the news,” she’d told Penny darkly. Sure enough, within a couple of weeks, the magic had worn off. But right now, in its transcendent, deafening music, the ezan feels like a gift.

  “Ash-hadu an la ilaha illallah . . .”

  Penny perches on the wrought-iron railing and slides first one leg, then the other, onto the outer side. The metal is sun hot on her bare feet. She’s still dizzy. But she can’t afford to miss.

  She takes a steadying breath of hot air. Nope nope nope. Don’t look down.

  With every scrap of strength,
she flings herself across the empty space, toward the balcony, eyes squeezed shut.

  A moment of fearful weightlessness, and the railing catches her like an iron punch to the gut. For a second, she hangs there, panting, clinging to the burning metal, the red bathrobe fluttering. She opens her eyes. She made it. Awkwardly, she pulls herself onto the balcony. The curtains to the room are closed, and the door is locked.

  What now? Her blood is throbbing. Is anyone chasing her? She looks back.

  No sign of anyone. Far below, the guards are facing outward; no one’s looking at the palace itself.

  She inches across the hot marble, toward the next balcony.

  It’s over twenty feet long, with a half-finished marble fountain rising amid dust and broken fiberglass. It looks—familiar? Yes! There’s that giant yellow tube leading down into the dump truck. This is the balcony she saw as she came in.

  The one with all the workmen.

  She ducks down and peers through the railing, breathing hard. What if someone saw her? There’s no sign of the neon-orange vests. None. Maybe the men have gone to pray?

  “Ash-hadu anna Muhammadan Rasul-Ullah . . .”

  Penny glances towards the gate. The soldiers are marching; no one looking her way. She stands up. The balcony with the fountain is only a four-foot leap. She needs to move fast. She hops on the railing and swings her legs to the other side. Her muscles are screaming at her. She pushes through the pain. Better than whatever Melek was going to do, she tells herself. She’s done the jump once—she can do it again. It’s almost fun.

  Eyes open this time, she leaps.

  She reaches out for the next railing. Her hands graze the marble, scraping uselessly against the stone as she starts to fall. She manages to grab one of the marble struts that holds up the balcony railing. Slippery. Her fingers lock around the marble. Her shoulders feel like they’re about to rip out of their sockets.

  Hold on. Just hold on.

  Except she can’t.

  The muscles in her shoulders start to burn, then quiver uncontrollably. Sweaty fingers are losing their grip.

  Physical terror, deep in her gut. She’ll fall. Crack her spine. Her skull if she’s lucky.

  “Haiya ‘alas-Salah . . .”

  The sun reflects off the marble paving far below, half blinding her.

  She feels a hot surge of defiance. She survived the bomb. She’s sure as hell not going to die as a splat on Palamut’s driveway. She swings her left leg back and forth, gaining momentum.

  “Haiya ‘alal-Falah . . .”

  “Ooph.” Penny snags her left foot up onto the outer edge of the marble balcony. She hugs herself closer to the railing, gasping. The fluffy red bathrobe feels as if it’s run through with heating coils. Suffocating. Penny drags herself between the marble struts and onto the main balcony. Her arms are burning, useless. The scabs are scraped clean off her bleeding knees. She can feel the wetness of fresh blood pumping in the wound on her head.

  But she’s up.

  Too weak to crawl, Penny rolls onto her back. She can feel her heart hammering against the dusty stone. Her lungs ache, and the dust isn’t helping. How the hell did she think she was going to get past the guards? Running is unthinkable. Walking is pretty much out of the question. She might as well just lie here. Nothing Melek can do to her is going to hurt more than this.

  “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

  Squinting into the sun, Penny’s eyes fix on the yellow garbage tube bolted to the side of the railing. It’s wide enough for a person to fit inside.

  A person.

  A faint hope flickers, insubstantial as an itch. But she shoves herself upright. Yes, the tube runs straight down into that red dump truck. Penny drags herself toward the tube, blood from her knees smearing across the dusty marble. She pulls herself to her feet, still panting as she leans on the marble railing for support. She peers down the darkening yellow tunnel and recoils.

  No. She can’t.

  The dark, narrow tube smells sick-sweetly of half-melted plastic and broken fiberglass. It funnels two stories down to a truck full of jagged stones.

  “I can’t,” whispers Penny.

  She looks down at the tube. Then over at the guards, marching in crisp formation by the gates.

  The last haunting notes of the ezan hang in the heavy air.

  “La ilaha illallah!”

  Penny sits on the edge of the balcony. She slides her feet gingerly into the tube, up to her knees, then her midthighs. It’s like climbing into an oven. She inches her behind to the edge of the tube and gulps. She can’t just slide. She’ll kill herself. She’s got to go slow. She presses her bare feet against the sides of the tube, ignoring her stinging cuts, and eases her body down into the weird yellow dimness, arms flat against her sides, palms tight to the tube wall. She lurches a few inches down, and a few inches more. One last deep breath of fresh air. Now her head is inside, too.

  It’s horrible, much worse than she’d imagined. The light glows highlighter-yellow through the thick plastic. The heat is already soaking her in stinging sweat. She can barely breathe. The fiberglass fragments are making her itch uncontrollably.

  What if she gets stuck in here? What if she dies in here?

  Shut up, she tells herself. You just have to inch down slowly. Inch by inch by inch. Another memory comes. Holding Grandma’s mitten in the sleety February wind on the way back from ice-skating, too big to be carried and too little to walk the whole half mile easily. Grandma urged her toward the warmth of the house with a chorus of “Inchworm, Inchworm.”

  Penny finds herself humming the words as she slides slowly, slowly down the construction tube. Foot over foot, hand over hand.

  “ ‘Seems to me you’d stop and see’—ouch”—she grits her teeth—“ ‘How—beautiful’—damn!—‘they—are.’ ”

  Almost there, almost there! She can feel fresh air on the soles of her feet. She slides her legs down and lets herself fall the last two feet onto the dusty truck bed, trying not to cut herself on the jagged pieces of stone and concrete. Soaked in sweat, the scrapes on her face feel like they’re on fire.

  Penny crawls out from beneath the chute and lies flat on her back, gulping in fresh, garbagey air.

  The balcony is high above her. There’s no sign of movement—they don’t even know she’s gone.

  She hears a young man’s voice call, “Kolay gelsin, kanka!”—Take it easy, bro!—and the truck door slams.

  Penny holds her breath, hardly daring to hope.

  An engine sputters to life, and the contents of the truck bed begin to shake. Then the dump truck, the magnificent, beautiful dump truck, begins to move.

  It rolls to a momentary stop at the gate, and the stones slide dangerously around Penny. She can hear the dogs barking. And then the truck pulls out, and into the piney air of the grounds.

  Bouncing down the road, Penny looks up at the overhanging branches of the evergreens. She’s smiling so wide it hurts. She’s out. She’s free!

  Now, she just has to find Zach.

  And Brenda.

  And the first goddamn plane back to Michigan.

  But first . . .

  She props her exhausted head on a cracked marble pilaster.

  Her eyelids feel like they’re made of marble, too. It won’t hurt if she closes her eyes for just a second. Okay, two seconds.

  The truck pulls onto the highway, toward the Çalışkan Yapı construction yard.

  10

  * * *

  KEEP YOUR SPIES CLOSE

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  10:12 LOCAL TIME

  In the STAB OPS Center break room, Christina presses the ice water tab on the cooler. On the bulletin board, photos from December’s gingerbread cookie contest are starting to curl. Omar from the Erbil desk won with a toppled statue of Saddam Hussein, with buttercream mustache. Taylor nabbed second place with an edible replica of the Kryptos sculpture—cracked, unlike the real one.

  “Ma’am?” Taylor herself h
urries through the door. “It’s Ankara Station. There’s an emergency signal from FOXFIRE? I can’t locate the record. . . .”

  Never, not once, has Melek used the emergency alert system. This can’t wait the twenty minutes it would take to get off-site. Christina locks her office door, cranks the AC up to its noisiest, and dials.

  “Melek. I got your signal—”

  “You told me she was a civilian with no specialized training.” Melek’s mellow voice is husky with anger. “I handled her accordingly. But it appears that you haven’t been honest with me.”

  “You interrogated her?” Christina stiffens in her ergonomic chair.

  “What do you expect, when you won’t tell me the simple truth?”

  Christina doesn’t let her anger show. “I take it you lied to me about Prime Minister Bolu?”

  “Bolu? The man would lose at chess to a stuffed pepper. If you don’t know that by now, I recommend you get better spies.”

  “Melek, allies have to trust each other.”

  There is hurt, as much as anger, in Melek’s voice. “Is that why you told me the girl was just some State Department intern?”

  “What makes you think she’s not? What exactly did she tell you?”

  “Tell me?” Melek gives a furious laugh. “Don’t her actions speak loud enough? She gives my father’s Chief of Staff a concussion, sneaks past hundreds of armed soldiers, rides straight out the through the gate . . .”

  Melek’s lies hardly rattled Christina. Even the kidnapping she could overlook—Melek hadn’t actually managed to acquire any compromising intel. But this is beyond the pale.

  Christina’s outrage breaks the surface. “You mean you let her escape?”

  “Who is she?” demands Melek. “She denies you sent her. Was that another lie?”

  Christina lowers her voice. “What have you done?”

  “What have I done? You didn’t even warn me about Zachary Robson and that Kurdish terrorist!”