Liar's Candle

by August Thomas

“I’m not saying you’re going to need it. But I need you prepared.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Connor races out along the second-floor corridor, swipes into his hotel room, and digs into his suitcase. In its plain dark gray bag, the ECRP looks like a boring men’s shaving kit—the kind that makes for a half-thoughtful birthday present. “Got it.”

  “Keep it on you at all times. Connor?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I know it’s your first time on the ground. But you got this.”

  It’s the kindest thing she’s ever said to him; Christina doesn’t do praise. Connor glows. “Thanks, ma’am.”

  “Move it. She’s ten minutes away, and you’ve got fifteen, max, before the Turkish police get there.”

  Connor’s already in the lobby. “Ma’am, can I ask who our source—”

  Plastic stillness on the line. She’s already gone.

  A tan, bored-looking man with a beer belly bulging under his blue suit is standing by the door, munching a chocolate bar. The sign he’s holding bears the logo of a cartoon eagle, with an incongruously toothy smile.

  * * *

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  10:28 LOCAL TIME

  Christina clicks the aerial stream from Ankara. The loading icon spins like a forlorn satellite; CIA’s office desktops are slow as they are crappy.

  Christina takes a deep breath.

  She looks at Elastigirl, clinging to the desk lamp. Isabel’s last gift.

  It’s twelve years since Isabel died in Helmand Province. Christina’s first mentor at the Agency. Her role model. Her best friend.

  Christina was Chief of Station in Karachi then. She got Langley to send her the report. The suicide bomber who attacked Isabel’s convoy had been scooped up for questioning two weeks before at another CIA station. He’d been released: insufficient evidence. The location was redacted.

  Christina was livid. She dialed Langley, demanding to know whose fuckup had cost Isabel her life. “Which station?” she’d screamed. “Who let him go?”

  “Nobody blames you,” her chief had begun. “You were just following protocol. . . .”

  There’s only so far you can stretch before you snap.

  Never again. No more squeamish qualms. All our enemies fight dirty. Why should we follow rules that make us weak? You crush the bastards hard, when you still can. Let others wring their hands about legality. Any methods, any cost, any sacrifice. As long as it worked.

  And it did work.

  Until Zach Robson threatened everything she’d built.

  Christina watches traffic crawl fifty-four hundred miles away. The white pulse of Connor’s tracker is easy to locate. He should be confirming pickup of Penny Kessler any minute now.

  One thing is certain: if Zach Robson had proof, he’d have made his move by now.

  Good luck to the girl with the flag.

  And then, Delivered.

  The Kurds brought the proof to the Embassy party. They delivered that proof.

  Zach doesn’t have it.

  Which means someone else does.

  Christina thought Penny Kessler could help lead her to Zach. But if what Melek says is true, Christina has only one option.

  She’ll do what she has to do.

  She always has.

  Good luck to the girl with the flag.

  A tense smile flickers on Christina’s face. Luck isn’t going to cut it.

  12

  * * *

  SAFETY

  ANKARA, TURKEY

  17:35 LOCAL TIME

  The dump truck slows to a crawl outside a convenience store in Ulus, near Ankara’s ancient citadel, a hodgepodge neighborhood of sloppy new construction and crumbling early-twentieth-century buildings too unpicturesque for tourists. Here and there rise the rusting steel and stained concrete of government buildings from the dawn of the Turkish Republic, manifestos made manifest in glass and steel, hopeful declarations of modernity and secularism eighty years out of date.

  A marble slab heaves against the inner wall of the truck bed, waking Penny with a jolt. For a moment, disoriented, she wonders why she’s lying on rocks. Memory kicks back in, and she sits up painfully. The red bathrobe is dusky with debris; by the strange, dry feel of it, her face is, too. Her legs itch with dried blood and crumbled fiberglass. At least her head isn’t throbbing quite so much.

  “Hey, Recep amca!” shouts the driver. “Toss me an Efes!”

  “Shouldn’t that be an ayran?” replies what sounds like an older man; you can tell he’s grinning.

  The driver groans theatrically. Penny hears him catch the beer bottle and pop it open on the edge of the window.

  The older man says, “Tough day at the palace?”

  “My brother-in-law cut us down to four tea breaks!”

  The older man tsks sympathetically.

  “And I had to drive halfway to Batıkent to get back —they’ve closed off every road into Çankaya!”

  “Still?” The old man sounds incredulous.

  “That bomb, I guess. I think it was those Syrians. ‘Refugees’—yeah, right.”

  The old man gives a knowing tut and says he’s sure it was the Israelis.

  “No way, amca,” protests the driver. “The Israelis love the Americans. I hear the U.S. president is secretly an Israeli.”

  That, says the old man confidently, just proves his point.

  Chat turns to the soccer match that night—both men are rooting for Galatasaray, but the driver thinks Arsenal’s new striker could be a threat.

  Penny shifts uncomfortably in the truck bed. Finally, the driver sighs, takes his leave, and the engine fires up again. A few minutes later, the truck pulls under a battered metal arch that bears the rusting legend Çalışkan Yapı. This must be the construction yard; he’s dropping off the truck for the night.

  A terrible thought occurs to Penny. What if he empties the truck? She holds her breath.

  The engine cuts. Thank God. Penny hears the driver slam out, humming the summer’s mega pop hit. They were blasting the buzzy synth on infinite repeat at that club Ayla dragged her to last week.

  “Bebby, bebby, ooh,” he hums, his voice getting farther away. “Oowah loveya, bebby . . .”

  “You’re late!” croaks a four-pack-a-day voice from across the yard.

  “Trafik,” the driver replies unrepentantly.

  “You’ve still got junk in the truck?” Four-Pack sounds ballistic. “How many times I got to tell you? Don’t leave trash in my trucks overnight!”

  “The D200 to Mamak is all blocked, abi. I’ll dump everything in the morning.”

  “Your head is all blocked,” mutters Four-Pack. “I told Ece we shouldn’t’ve given you a job. But no. Mehmetçik can do no wrong. You lazy son of a . . .”

  Lying as flat as she can in the truck bed, Penny can make out the metallic, angry-lawn-mower rattling of a motorcycle revving to life and then roaring away.

  For a full minute, Penny lies still and sore in the bright heat, just listening. She can hear the low thrumming melody of impatient horns and rush-hour city traffic, and a tinny, squawky soap-opera catfight. She pushes herself to her knees and peers cautiously over the edge of the dump truck, into the wide and badly paved lot. It’s empty. Through the grimy office window, she can see a bald guy—Four-Pack—with his feet propped on a table, apparently engrossed in the tiny television screen. Penny recognizes the theme music—her Turkish teacher in Ann Arbor used to make them watch this show for vocab practice.

  Slowly, agonizingly, Penny stands up and swings her sore legs over the back wall of the truck bed. She slides her feet down to the bumper and jumps to the ground, with a billow of the red bathrobe. Her legs almost give way beneath her. The pebbly, broken asphalt cuts into the soles of her feet. She crouches low to the ground, breathing raggedly.

  She can hardly believe how weak she feels. She won’t get far in Ankara, especially not in this getup. But she must find Connor—it’s her only hope of helping Zach. With luck, he might still be a
t the hospital. She glances in the direction of Four-Pack in the office. Should she knock on the window and throw herself on his mercy? What could she say? The truth is out of the question. She could pretend to be lost and ask him to take her to the hospital. And then what? How could she explain what she was doing in his construction yard, covered in blood and grime, in a bathrobe with the presidential seal emblazoned across the shoulders? At best, he’d think she was crazy. At worst, he might recognize her from the news. Either way, he’d be sure to call the police.

  Penny leans against the side of the dump truck. A plan. She needs a plan. Okay. She’ll get out of the construction yard, find a cab, and get to the hospital.

  Her face falls. She has no money, no cards. Well, somebody from the Embassy is bound to be at the hospital—they can lend her the fare when she arrives.

  Buoyed by a new sense of purpose, she edges along the truck to the cinder-block wall of the construction yard and heads for the gate, as quickly as her sore legs will allow.

  A cry of rage from the direction of the office. “You bitch!”

  Penny flinches. Every muscle tenses to bolt.

  “You cow!” cries the furious manager in Turkish. “You lying cow! You knew Betül was pregnant all along!”

  Penny is so relieved she almost laughs. She limps quickly toward the gate and out into the road, which an optimistic sign identifies as Beauty Street. It’s obviously a poor neighborhood, not like green, suburban Batıkent, where she’s been subletting a spare room in a row house near the metro stop, and her landlady, Fatma, even nurses a few willful rosebushes. The asphalt here is cracked and concave, like a dusty riverbed. This neighborhood must not have voted for Palamut’s party. Decrepit, pastel-plastered three-story apartment buildings line the road. No stores, just one basement bakkal—a dinky mom-and-pop store for buying bottled water, gum, bags of toasted chickpeas, and cheap ice pops.

  The low, brilliant sun flares in Penny’s eyes. Out of the shaded yard, the heat presses into her. Light and heat. The terrible dry boom of the blast in the Embassy garden. And just like that, the memories choke her. Vertigo. Nausea. Rising panic strangles her breath. She can’t fall apart now. She can’t. Can’t.

  Penny’s nails dig into her palms. Her eyes fix on a sign in the window of the bakkal, advertising those splintery sunflower seeds that Turkish farmers and their city cousins like to chew and spit, until the papery gnawed pods heap up around their ankles. Fatma hates them—calls them “peasant garbage,” which Penny had found kind of offensive. Now, she’d give anything for the ordinary, comfortable irritation of Fatma’s nagging offers of sage tea and unsolicited opinions on Penny’s love life, choice of shampoo, failure to starch her underclothes, and method of making coffee.

  The street is still—too still. No sign of a taxi. A stripy cat suns itself in the dust. A head-scarfed woman hanging undershirts off a balcony fixes Penny with a disapproving stare.

  Penny can feel her cheeks turn red. She feels terribly exposed, painfully conscious of how alone she is. The woman is watching her with alarming intensity.

  Oh, God, why aren’t there any taxis? There’s just one car on the street—a shiny charcoal-gray BMW parked near the bakkal. That’s much too expensive for this neighborhood, isn’t it? The windows are tinted; she can’t see in.

  Penny limps toward the corner. There’s got to be a taxi rank somewhere nearby.

  The gray BMW starts pulling out. It’s headed in her direction.

  Penny backs away, toward the stairs of a dilapidated pink apartment building.

  The door of the car opens, and a familiar blond crew cut appears.

  “Connor?” Penny gasps.

  He looks haggard and tense; deep worry lines across his forehead make him appear suddenly older, and a lot less flip. But it’s him, all right.

  “Oh, my God.” Tears sting suddenly in Penny’s eyes. For a moment, she’s too stunned even to smile. It’s a goddamn miracle. All he’s missing is a white steed and a suit of armor. “It is you,” she croaks. How could she ever have been cross with him? After so much fear, the relief makes her dizzy. “How did you find me?”

  “Are you alone?”

  Penny glances nervously over her shoulder. “I . . . think so.” She steps toward the car.

  “Don’t move.” Connor stares suspiciously at her robe. “What’s that?”

  Annoyance sidles like a crab through her wave of gratitude. Who the hell cares what she’s wearing? “A . . . bathrobe?” The woman on the balcony has pulled out a cell phone. Penny’s heart thumps. “Connor, can we talk about this in the car?”

  He pauses a beat too long before he says, “Get in.”

  “Nataşa!” spits the woman on the balcony.

  Penny slams the door and leans blissfully into the cool, plush upholstery as the BMW pulls away. The broken stones have left bruises all down her back. Now that she’s safe, exhaustion is already sweeping over her.

  Connor is frowning. “Why did she just call you Natasha?” He still sounds more like a cop-show interrogator than a friend.

  “It’s a slang word.”

  “For?”

  “Foreign prostitute.” She looks up at him. No reaction; he’s texting. He unzips his briefcase and tucks the phone into a specially shaped compartment. There’s something furious in his precision. And he still won’t look her in the face. “Merhaba,” she calls up to the driver. “Ben Penny.”

  The driver smiles warmly at her in the rearview mirror. “Faruk.”

  “Don’t talk to him,” orders Connor.

  Penny frowns. “Why not?”

  “Just don’t.”

  His pale eyes are hard, expression guarded; he’s sitting bolt upright.

  “Thank you for finding me.”

  “Just doing my job, Miss Kessler.”

  Penny draws back. Didn’t he call her Penny back at the hospital? Maybe formality is the way he handles fear. She just wishes he’d stop glaring at her. He obviously doesn’t want to talk, but she has to know. “How did you know where I was?”

  She hadn’t thought it possible for Connor to look less friendly, but he does. “That information is classified.”

  “Oh.” Penny swallows; her mouth is so dry. “Okay.” She glances up at the driver as they turn down off Beauty Street. “Are you taking me to Frank Lerman?”

  Connor shakes his head. “We’re going to a safe house.”

  “Oh.” In the stuffy stillness of the car, Penny’s headache is blazing back to life behind her eyes. “Do you have any more of that aspirin?”

  “Aspirin?” Whatever has been simmering beneath Connor’s forced calm explodes. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “No.” Penny gives him a puzzled look.

  Connor’s voice is low and tightly controlled. “I’m not in charge of interrogating you, Miss Kessler. We have specialists for that—”

  Penny blanches. “Interrogating me?”

  He steamrolls over her interruption. “—but there’s one thing I’d like to know. Just one thing. Professional interest, you might say.”

  Penny wishes he didn’t sound so angry. What does this starched twerp have to be angry about? Stupid, tired tears are prickling in her eyes. She tries to sound professional. “What’s that, Mr. . . .” She can’t remember his last name. Did he even tell her? “What?”

  “Just how, exactly, did you become immune to sedatives?”

  “Sedatives?”

  “Don’t play stupid.” His ears are bright red. “I saw you swallow them. I saw you. And next thing I hear, you’re punching out Turkish officials!”

  “It was one guy!” she protests. “And how did you even know I—” His words suddenly slide into place. The pills she threw up in the ambulance. “Did you—” Penny stares at him in horror. “Did you drug me?”

  “Fine.” Connor straightens his narrow charcoal tie, which doesn’t need straightening. “You can tell them at the safe house.”

  “You drugged me,” Penny repeats; she can hear
her voice getting thin with fury.

  Connor is watching her with an expression of consternation. He puts on a voice clearly intended to sound brusque. “I’m hardly the one at fault here, Miss Kessler.”

  Penny’s getting nauseous. “Why? Why would you do that?”

  “To be sure they couldn’t question you” is Connor’s pat reply.

  He doesn’t even bother to deny it.

  “It was for your own good as much as the Agency’s,” Connor adds defensively. “Standard procedure. They could’ve tortured you.”

  “So you thought I’d be safer unconscious?” Penny is so angry, she can barely speak. “With people you thought were probably going to torture me?”

  Something that could be guilt, or just embarrassment, flickers across Connor’s face. “Keep it down.”

  Penny’s breath is coming faster now. “How dare you?”

  “How dare I?” Connor’s cheeks are blotchy. “You play with terrorists, Miss Kessler, you get hurt. You’re lucky you’re not in cuffs on your way to prison. And if you’re what I think you are, you will be soon.”

  Penny stares at him.

  Now that Connor has started talking, he doesn’t seem to be able to stop the machine-gun rattle of his rage. “I don’t get it,” he splutters. “I just don’t. You don’t sound like a sociopath. You remind me of my kid sister. What happened to you? How do you work with people every day and then decide you’re going to blow them up?”

  Faruk turns around with a kindly, questioning look. “Okay?” he asks in heavily accented English.

  “Okay,” says Connor firmly. He draws a deep breath. “You know what, Miss Kessler? Never mind. I’m not even supposed to be talking to you. You just sit tight. You just sit tight till we’re at the safe house.”

  “You think I’m a terrorist.” An awful numbness makes Penny’s voice almost robotic. This can’t be real.

  “You sure aren’t behaving like some innocent little intern from Michigan.”

  Penny sucks in her breath. “Does trying not to get killed make me a criminal? I’m sorry, was I supposed to wait in the palace so you and Frank Lerman could ride in on your fire-breathing eagles or something?”