“That’s crazy.” Penny runs dry pine needles through her fingers. “Some weird business deal between Palamut and ISIS, okay, I can see—at least they’re both some kind of Sunni. But Palamut hates the Hashashin almost as much as he hates the Kurds, and he really, really hates the Kurds. I translated a speech last week where he called the Hashashin ‘Shia pigs,’ ‘Iranian dogs,’ and ‘traitorous rats.’ ”
“Not awesome at metaphors, our Palamut.”
“Not awesome at democracy.”
“But pragmatic,” says Connor. “Or he wouldn’t still be in power. Palamut kept going back and forth on the NATO deal before he agreed, trying to extort more money for his government. He can’t back out now. But if he wanted to scare the U.S. into defaulting on our side of the agreement, ‘accidentally’ letting the Hashashin blow up our Embassy wouldn’t be a bad strategy.”
“I’m telling you, it’s crazy.”
“But not impossible.”
“If Palamut is mixed up with the Hashashin . . .” Penny’s pulse quickens. “It could explain why a Kurd like Mehmetoğlu wanted to talk to Zach. Palamut’s bullied the Kurds for decades. If they could catch him involved in terrorism against the United States . . .”
“It would destroy Palamut.” Connor nods. “America forgives a lot, but we can’t be allies with a guy who just let terrorists blow up our Embassy. Palamut knows that. His enemies do, too.”
“If Zach thought he’d found something that big . . .”
“If Zach found something that big, he should have reported it!”
“What if he couldn’t?” says Penny slowly. Her heart pounds. “Was Zach’s Chief of Station Martin MacGowan?”
Connor’s face goes suddenly blank. “What makes you think that?”
“Zach said MacGowan was stalling the paperwork for his meeting with Mehmetoğlu. That’s why he needed my help to put him on the guest list. I thought it was some bureaucratic thing. But what if MacGowan is crooked? What if Zach found something MacGowan didn’t want him to find? What if MacGowan tried to get him fired, and it didn’t work, and Zach kept digging?”
“But then why meet with Mehmetoğlu at the party? Right in front of MacGowan?”
“The guy’s a Kurdish separatist. You said yourself, he’s on the terror watchlist. It’s not like he can just waltz around Ankara, meeting with American spies. At least if he meets with Zach at the U.S. Embassy, he knows Palamut’s secret police can’t just scoop him up.”
“But why meet in person at all? Zach had a burner phone—why not use that?”
“Delivered,” Penny whispers. “The text Mehmetoğlu received said, ‘Delivered.’ ” She looks up at Connor. “Maybe Mehmetoğlu and Zach weren’t just talking about Palamut and the Hashashin. Maybe Mehmetoğlu had proof.”
“If Melek knew that, and Palamut’s in bed with the Hashashin . . .”
Penny draws a sharp breath. “You think that’s why they kidnapped Zach?”
“Let’s go.” Connor stands up and dusts pine needles off his trousers. “We’ve got to get hold of my boss.”
16
* * *
THE ONLY THING BETTER
ANKARA, TURKEY
18:56 LOCAL TIME
The black SUV with diplomatic plates pulls up outside the Ulus State Hospital. Brenda and Frank hustle past the mic-thrusting journalists, up to the emergency room triage station. Eight armed Diplomatic Security agents hulk behind them; Brenda rounded up the toughest-looking ones she could find.
“Brenda Pelecchia. I’m looking for Penny Kessler?”
A fortysomething doctor steps briskly up behind her. Expensive glasses, careful makeup, an inch or two taller than Frank. Her badge identifies her as deputy director of the hospital. “You are from the American Embassy?”
“I’m Brenda Pelecchia. Acting Ambassador. I need to see Miss Kessler immediately.”
“We had to rush her into surgery. A catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage. It’s not uncommon in the aftermath of an explosion.” The doctor’s penciled-on eyebrows slope in sympathy. “I’m sorry.”
Brenda’s voice cracks. “Is she dead?”
“She received the best possible care.”
“Not good enough, clearly,” Brenda snaps. She clutches her head. “I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. But I’m going to need to see her.”
“I’m afraid that she, and the rest of the bombing victims, have already been transferred to the morgue.”
“Then take me to the morgue.”
The doctor’s face is set. “The city morgue couldn’t cope with the sudden influx. There’s a military hospital nearby—we’re using theirs. But I’m afraid it isn’t open to civilians.”
“That’s unacceptable. Why wasn’t the Embassy consulted?”
“Madam Ambassador, we’re in the middle of a heat wave. Hundreds of bodies in the hospital constitute a public health risk. We had to move them. When Penny’s family comes to collect her, the morgue will release the remains.”
“I am accountable for every single one of my staff. I leave for Istanbul in less than an hour. I need to see Penny Kessler’s body. Now.”
“Legally, I’m afraid that isn’t possible.”
“This is an emergency.”
“I’m sorry. It’s a military base—the headquarters of the Presidential Guard. There’s really nothing I can do. I understand she was important to you. . . .”
Brenda says in a hollow voice, “I was responsible for her.”
The doctor nods.
“Can I at least speak with the surgeons who attended her?”
“They’re still in the operating theater. We have over a hundred victims still in intensive care.”
“Brenda. Let’s huddle.” Frank smiles at the doctor. “Hang tight a sec, okay?”
Brenda and Frank walk fifteen feet down the hall. Diplomatic Security forms a wall around them.
“Just delegate someone to liaise with the morgue,” Frank hisses. “We have to get to Istanbul.”
“They can’t just seize the remains of U.S. citizens!”
“Brenda, the kid is dead. Secretary Winthrop is arriving in Istanbul tomorrow morning, and then we’ve got the fucking NATO conference. Is this the hill you’re going to die on?”
“You really don’t care, do you, Mr. Lerman?”
“I know my priorities. So should you.”
“Doesn’t this look wrong to you?”
“I get sent to all the crises, Brenda. And you know what? After an attack, a natural disaster, a coup—things are chaotic. Messy. You just get through it as best you can. You’re the acting Ambassador now. Your job is to hold things together. Not to go trawling for another crisis.”
“Even if you feel nothing for Penny and her family, how do you think the press is going to play this? She was your symbol of resilience!”
Frank shrugs. “The only thing better than a pretty girl with a flag is a pretty, dead girl with a flag.”
17
* * *
METU
ANKARA, TURKEY
19:08 LOCAL TIME
Twenty minutes later, Penny and Connor emerge from the woods onto the brown, baked-grass shoulder of a busy intersection. Across the highway rise the angular concrete buildings of METU, the Middle East Technical University, and the narrow minaret of a small mosque, whose shiny dome looks as if it were coated with aluminum foil. Cars shush past in the soft twilight, yellow headlights pointing homeward.
Penny and Connor are about to cross when a car honks. Then another. A truck driver hisses through his teeth.
“Hey, baby!” One guy leers out the window at Penny. “Take off the robe!”
Penny lurches back behind a tree, cheeks burning. “Assholes.” She pulls the red bathrobe tighter around her. “What are we going to do? We’ve got to be inconspicuous. We won’t make it ten feet!”
“Not with you in that getup.” Connor follows her back into the trees. “We need to get you some real clothes.” He squints. “If you wore my shi
rt like a dress . . .”
Penny shakes her head. “Nothing says inconspicuous like a bleeding foreign nataşa in a man’s shirt, woolly socks, and no shoes.”
Connor unbuttons his shirt anyway. “Put it on. Hide the bathrobe and the hospital gown.” He tucks in his undershirt and hands her his Swiss Army knife. “It has a small pair of scissors. Cut yourself some bangs—long enough to cover that cut on your eyebrow. I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
He sounds evasive. “Just wait here.”
* * *
Eight minutes later, just as Penny has finished cutting her hair, Connor returns.
He nods approvingly at her new bangs. “Good.”
“Crooked.”
“Trendy. And . . .” Connor reaches triumphantly into his jacket pocket and removes a small pair of knockoff Nike sneakers and an ugly yellow cotton shawl—the kind mosques keep by the door as spares.
A mosque.
“Oh, my God.” Penny stares at him. “You stole shoes from the mosque?”
“The lord helps those who help themselves.”
“Some poor guy is going to finish praying, go to put his shoes back on, and—”
“—find enough money to buy real Nikes. Hurry up and put them on. You can tie the shawl like a skirt.”
Penny knots the unyielding cotton around her waist and looks warily across the road. “What if someone recognizes me from the news?”
“No one’s going to recognize you because no one expects Flag Girl to be wandering the METU campus.” He adds sharply, “You stay where I can see you.”
“I didn’t run away before, did I?”
“Let’s just find the library.”
Penny gives a mock salute. “Aye, aye, Cap’n.”
Connor’s head snaps around. “How’d you know I was in the Navy?”
“Well, I guess you just told me. Come on. Damn the torpedoes.”
The METU campus isn’t as deserted as it looked from across the road. T-shirted summer school students lounge in the warm half-light, laughing over their phones and straggling to evening classes.
“Kütüphane.” Penny nods at a sign. “Here we go.”
As they head down the path toward the library, a faint chant becomes audible. Hundreds of candles flicker in the gathering dark, illuminating hand-daubed doves and peace symbols. Students bang pots and pans and hold up blotchily printed photos.
Connor is instantly on the alert. “A protest?”
Penny scans the signs and faces. “A vigil, I think.”
“What are they chanting?”
“Yurtta sulh, cihanda sulh.” Penny swallows. “It’s one of Atatürk’s most famous sayings: ‘Peace at home, peace in the world.’ ”
Connor is staring at the students, unnerved. “Penny, keep back.”
“But look. They’re holding American flags.”
“Exactly.” Connor’s voice is grim. “And a lot of candles to burn them with.”
“Oh, please.”
He squares his jaw. “I’ve seen the stats. America has a lower approval rating in Turkey than we do in Iraq.”
“On paper, maybe,” Penny retorts. “Everyone’s been very kind to me.”
“Oh, really?” Connor’s talking a little too loudly. “Everyone? Now who’s overgeneralizing? Who do you think blew up the Embassy?”
“Terrorists!”
“You think they were a bunch of Episcopalians from Vermont?”
“Who saved me at the hospital? Who do you think the first responders were? Do you know how many people in the Embassy are Muslim, Turkish local hires?”
“Who do you think set off a bomb in our car?”
“I don’t know, and neither do you. But I know who got murdered. Faruk!”
A bearded young guy in a dark hoodie grabs Connor’s shoulder. “You are American?”
Connor’s hand rests lightly where Penny knows his holster is. Without her realizing it, he has positioned himself protectively between her and Hoodie Guy.
“Yes.” Penny replies, stepping out from behind Connor. “We are.”
“Başınız sağolsun,” says Hoodie Guy, squeezing Connor’s shoulder. It is the ritual Turkish expression of well-wishing for the bereaved: may your head be healthy. “My brother and I drove back to school from Trabzon for this.” He gestures at the chanting students. “Attacks like this are a scar on the world. We all feel the pain with you.”
Penny finds her voice first. “Thank you.”
The guy in the hoodie nods to the hundreds of photos the students are holding up. Candlelight shines in the wetness of his eyes. “May they rest in the light.”
When the young man is gone, Penny and Connor stand silent for a moment.
“Connor.” Penny can barely speak. “Those photographs they’re holding . . . they’re the people who died.”
“Yeah.” His voice is husky. “Lerman said State was going to release official photos of all the deceased.”
“Connor,” says Penny, her heart shuddering, “Look at the one that guy is holding.” Penny’s mouth is dry. “And that guy. And those girls . . .”
Connor’s only reaction is one long, sharp breath. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
18
* * *
THE SECOND PHOTOGRAPH
“That’s my official State Department ID photo,” says Penny, trying to rub down the chills on her arms as they weave through the crowd. “It’s not online anywhere—nobody has that but the Embassy.”
“Just keep moving.”
They duck through the glass doors of the library.
“Connor, why would State release a photo of me with all the people who died?”
His face is unreadable. “Probably just a mistake.”
Penny feels nauseous. “You think?”
“Let’s just find a computer.”
They find an available computer by a window in the second-floor computer lab. Pale wood, white paint, stainless-steel shelves, the panicked typing of a few desperate deadline crunchers, the high-pitched nattering of a talk-show clip through somebody’s headphones—it could be any college library, all but empty on a summer evening.
“Hang on.” Penny strolls up to a cluster of girls. She lets anxiety spread across her face. That doesn’t take much pretending. “Excuse me—affedersiniz . . .”
A girl in a green head scarf smiles at her and says, in careful English, “What is up?”
“I’m so sorry to interrupt, but the registrar hasn’t processed my visiting student log-in yet, and I can’t print my essay, and it’s like thirty percent of my grade—”
“That freaking sucks,” says the girl in the green head scarf earnestly. Her intonation is pure late-nineties Cartoon Network.
“The registrar is the worst,” adds the girl’s round-faced friend. “Here, I’ll log you in. . . .”
Connor’s back goes rigid as the cluster of girls follow Penny back to the computer terminal.
“Haydi, bakalım. . . . There!”
“Sağol.” Penny smiles.
The girl in green notices the cuts through Penny’s eyebrow. “Geçmiş olsun! What went down?”
“Just . . .” Penny’s mouth goes dry. “Soccer practice.”
“Come to volleyball club tryouts.” The round-faced girl tucks a strand of hair back into her rainbow-striped head scarf. “Tomorrow at the gym at four. We’re not so violent.” She looks through her eyelashes at Connor and smiles. “There’s a men’s team, too.”
“Zach Robson trained you pretty well,” says Connor, as the girls wave aside Penny’s thanks and wander toward the vending machine.
“Zach didn’t train me at all,” Penny retorts. “I know how to lie. I just don’t like doing it.”
Connor rolls his office chair up beside hers at the computer station. “What are you doing? I need to contact my boss!”
“Just a minute.” Penny types ferociously. “All social media’s blocked. Every major site. Let me check the
newspapers.”
“What are you looking for?”
Penny types faster. “I want to know what my ID photo is doing on a list of dead people.”
Hürriyet Daily News, Turkey’s most reliable English-language daily, finally loads.
Penny swallows hard.
BREAKING: U.S. EMBASSY BOMBING ‘FLAG GIRL’ SUCCUMBS TO INJURIES
For almost 24 hours, U.S. Embassy intern Penny Kessler, 21, became a symbol of hope to millions in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in Turkey’s history, and America’s greatest loss of civilian life since the September 11 attacks. The Ulus State Hospital has confirmed that shortly before 6 p.m. tonight, Kessler died of complications of a catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage received in the bomb blast. This makes her the 287th victim of yesterday’s terrorist atrocity. The death toll continues to rise.
“Penny Kessler represents everything America is most proud of, and everything we’ll always fight for—our courage, our determination, and our patriotism,” said U.S. Under Secretary of State for Management Frank Lerman. Brenda Pelecchia, acting U.S. Ambassador in Turkey, added, “Penny was a credit to her family, her university, and the Foreign Service. We extend our deepest condolences to her loved ones at this tragic time.”
President Palamut, who returned this evening from a state visit to Moscow to handle the growing crisis, has also issued a statement: “I mourn Penny Kessler’s heartbreakingly early death. When I sent my Prime Minister to meet with her today, she begged him to ask me to find the terrorists who destroyed her beautiful young life. I have sworn we will not rest until we have avenged the honor of Turkey and destroyed these traitors and enemies of our nation.”
President Palamut’s office confirmed earlier today that both Turkey and the United States are now treating yesterday’s U.S. Embassy bombing as an act of international terrorism. The two countries will be collaborating in the investigation. No suspects have yet been named, and the widely suspected involvement of the extremist Hashashin group remains unconfirmed.
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