Byzantine Gold

by Chris Karlsen

“The French investigators thought it was a good idea. They’d considered suggesting additional security themselves and steered me to him. After all, he was a professional fighter.”

  “And no doubt told his boxer friends what a hot dog I am.”

  “Hot dog? You mean weenie.”

  “Same-same.”

  He cut another round off of the eggplant. The slice stuck to the blade. Atakan shook the knife hard, trying to shake it free, which he did, straight into the sink and down the disposal.

  “Kahretsin!”

  Charlotte had good conversational skills in Turkish. Her ability to write in the language remained a difficulty. Conjugation continued to stymie her. Kahretsin was Atakan’s “go to” curse word. She searched but never found the word or one similar in any English-Turkish dictionary. He said it had no literal translation. She guessed it was a combination of damn it and shit

  “Why don’t you let me finish chopping those? I’m almost done with the onions.”

  “No, I can do it.”

  “I’m sure you can, but I was hoping to eat sometime tonight.”

  “I may be slow, but I will finish.” He attacked the eggplant with renewed determination. “Ah-hah, you see?” he said minutes later, as a thick, but cleanly cut slice fell from the body.

  She gave up. Once Atakan dug his heels in on a point, it was almost impossible to move him.

  A year earlier Atakan had introduced her brother, to Canan, a pretty friend of his sister’s. They saw each other every day for two weeks before Nick had to return to Chicago. Charlotte knew the couple stayed in touch by email and spoke over the phone often.

  “Frankly, I think Nick’s offer has less to do with you than with finding an excuse to see Canan again,” she said, changing the subject as Atakan continued to whack at the poor eggplant like an apprentice Samurai. She’d never felt sympathy for a vegetable until now.

  “There...” He pointed to the slices and began to dice them. “I told you I didn’t need help,” he said, tossing the uneven pieces into a colander and sprinkling salt over the cubes.

  Never far from her thoughts, she rehashed the attack again and again, trying to make sense of what Tischenko intended, other than the obvious murder of Atakan.

  “Tischenko didn’t care we knew he was the shooter. He was already wanted for murder so what’s one more charge? I’m stuck on Paris. Why choose there to execute you?”

  “I’ve given a great deal of thought to the question too. I think it was his way of letting us, you specifically, know he is watching and has been for some time.”

  “Makes sense.” She grudgingly had to give him credit for the psychological game he played. He wanted to ramp up the fear factor and it worked. The implication of his watching terrified her. If true, they weren’t safe anywhere. “I wonder how he tracked us?”

  “I suspect he paid a techie to hack into one of our computers with the trip details.”

  “That’s creepy.”

  “He’s a creepy guy, as you well know. I suggested the possibility to the Director. He felt it had merit. I turned over our computers today. A forensic expert is conducting a deep diagnostic on them while I’m gone. The Ministry is loaning me a laptop to take on the project. We’ll buy you a new one.”

  “Mine was most vulnerable.”

  “Yes. The IT staff at the Ministry installs the same powerful firewall system in our personal computers used by all our government agencies.” Atakan began sautéing the eggplant and onions. “An unauthorized breech of my computer is difficult.”

  “Why not start the diagnostics immediately? Why the delay? Every day they wait, Tischenko knows our moves.”

  “There’s no point in hurrying now. If either computer is compromised, he already knows our plans. The project information was documented prior to the Paris trip.”

  A different assignment might keep Atakan safer. “I hate to say this, but since he knows about the Cyprus excavation, maybe you shouldn’t go.”

  “The Director and my unit discussed the pros and cons of the situation. Any field job I am sent on involves risk to civilians.”

  The civilian risk aspect had completely escaped her mind, she’d been so concerned over Atakan.

  “Although, he hasn’t made an attempt in Istanbul yet, assuming the worst case scenario, he has contacts here who can aid him in slipping through our border security. This presents the best opportunity for a second attempt.”

  “I knew you should’ve gone to your parent’s house.”

  He hadn’t because of her refusal to stay with his parents. That stupid reluctance on her part brought him right back to the worst place he could be. His mother’s words, ‘you are the root of the problem,’ and ‘bad for my son,’ surged to the forefront of Charlotte’s mind.

  “A moot point. To circumvent civilian risk, we reviewed maps of current project sites outside of Istanbul. Based on topography, those in Turkey offer better opportunity for Tischenko than Cyprus. We talked it over with MIAR’s administration. They are fine with my presence at the excavation.”

  “You’re certain he can’t pass from the south to the north through the island’s Green Line?”

  “The buffer zone is heavily guarded. Everyone is checked.”

  “Still leaves boat access in the north end.”

  “We’ll supply the latest information and photos of him to the local police and security personnel at the few resorts in the area.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much.”

  “No place is one-hundred percent secure.”

  “True.”

  American presidents had the best security available and there’d been successful assassinations and close call attempts on them. No point in bringing up the fact. It did nothing to help their situation. Until Tischenko was caught, she’d trust in Atakan and the Ministry’s handling of the problem. Although, talking things over with Nick didn’t hurt. Until Tischenko was caught. Why did it boil down to that conclusion she wondered with bitterness. Why didn’t people like him ever get hit by a bus and killed? Why didn’t they ever slip in the bathtub and split their heads open and bleed to death or get struck by lightning and fried?

  “You’re very quiet. Are you obsessing about Tischenko?” Atakan asked.

  “No, I’m thinking about onions.” Charlotte leaned over the skillet and inhaled slow and deep. “I love the smell of frying onions.”

  Someone knocked and she went to answer it. When she opened the door, a bouquet of pink tulips wrapped in cellophane lay at her feet. She picked up the flowers and stepped onto the landing to thank the delivery person. He was nowhere in sight. She peered over the railing to see if he was on the stairs but didn’t see or hear anyone.

  “Pretty flowers,” Charlotte said and lay them on the kitchen counter. For a brief moment, she flashed back to the awful afternoon she sat by the tulip bed in the hospital garden.

  She cut the wrap and the ribbon around the stems.

  “This is very sweet. Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me.”

  “Aren’t they from you?”

  “No,” Atakan said, shaking his head.

  “Then who sent them?”

  “My mother has a beautiful flower garden with pink tulips. Perhaps my parents sent them.”

  “Yeah right. Like your mother is going to send me flowers.”

  “Anything’s possible, although I admit highly improbable.” Chuckling, he searched the wrapping and greenery around the bouquet. “No florist’s label.”

  “Weird.”

  “Very.”

  A muffled version of Call Me, the old Blondie song came from inside Charlotte’s purse. She quickly dug through her handbag to retrieve her cell phone before the call went to voice-mail. She answered on the fourth ring. Caller I.D. showed “restricted.”

  “Hello.”

  “They are called, Angelique tulips. You admired them in the hospital garden in Paris.”

  Charlotte froze, holding her breath as she listened to the nightma
re voice, remembering how his Eastern European accent rounded certain sounds and how he stressed the last syllables in his words. Called became cawl-d.

  Tischenko.

  “Everything in time,” he said and hung up.

  Charlotte dropped the phone on the table. She turned to Atakan.

  The shock must’ve shown on her face. “What is wrong?”

  “That was Tischenko,” she said, finding her voice. “The flowers are from him. He was watching me in Paris when I was at the hospital. He—”

  Atakan didn’t wait for her to finish. He rushed into the living room, grabbed his gun from the bookshelf, and ran out of the apartment.

  Charlotte followed as he flew down the four flights of stairs to the street.

  “Stop.” Catching up to him on the sidewalk, she hooked his elbow with her hand. Fearful an armed Tischenko hid nearby, she positioned herself in front of Atakan, thinking to shield him. “We can’t stand here. He could be anywhere taking aim at you right now.”

  “Go back inside.”

  “Not without you.” She tugged on his shirt, pulling him toward their building. “Atakan please, let’s leave. Call the Director.”

  Atakan shoved her behind him. Silent, his eyes searched the dark doorways of neighboring apartment buildings and parked cars.

  “Atakan please.”

  “Get inside.”

  She stepped in front of him again. “We stay here together or we leave together.”

  An eternity of seconds passed. Neither moved or blinked.

  They both jumped and turned at the bellow from the horn of a passing truck. Thankfully, the driver was waving to another coming the opposite direction. He never saw the man in the sling pointing a gun at him.

  “Please,” she repeated.

  Atakan nodded. He stopped at the building’s entry door and took a last look, surveying the street. “He moves us around like pawns in a private game.”

  A thin haze of smoke hung in the hall of their floor, fed by more flowing out the door of their apartment.

  “Shit, our dinner.” Charlotte hurried inside.

  The acrid odor from the ruined dish filled the kitchen. She flapped her hand at the thick cloud of smoke and quickly removed the skillet from the stove.

  Behind her, Atakan had stopped to open the French doors to the patio and then opened the window in the kitchen wider.

  “I’ll take care of things in here. You call the Director,” she said, whipping the air with a dish towel.

  Between the open kitchen window and the French doors, most of the smoke dissipated rapidly. She gathered the bouquet. Atakan was right. They were forced players in Tischenko’s twisted game. She ripped the blooms from the stems and threw the flowers in the trash. She dumped the burned vegetables on top of them. Blackened butter fused vegetables and rice to the bottom of the pan. She scraped at the stuck pieces with a spatula but it was a lost cause. Once it cooled, she’d have to ditch the ruined skillet too.

  She brought out more onions and tomatoes and salvaged what she could from the remaining half of Atakan’s mangled eggplant. She listened to his end of the conversation as he paced between the kitchen and dining area. It did little good. After he informed the Director of the incident, his part of the call was limited to “yes” and “no.”

  “What’d he say?” she asked after Atakan disconnected.

  “He’ll request additional police units to patrol the area. My unit will meet with him tomorrow to discuss options.”

  “Maybe the police will get lucky and find him.”

  “They won’t. He’s lying low in a safe house somewhere in the city.”

  Atakan took a beer from the refrigerator and set it on the counter. He scooped out a handful of ice cubes from the small freezer and dropped them into a rock glass then poured her three fingers of scotch. Not a good sign. She liked scotch but didn’t often drink it. Import taxes made indulgence expensive. Obviously, whatever he had to tell her required stronger liquid courage than wine. With dread, she took the drink from him.

  “What’s on your mind?” she asked, taking a healthy swallow.

  “I stupidly reacted the way Tischenko expected, yet he didn’t shoot when he had the opportunity.”

  “Yes...so?”

  “He’s waiting.”

  “But, for what?”

  “That’s the question. What did he say to you on the phone?”

  “He said the name of the flowers, then added ‘everything in time,’ and hung up.”

  “I understand the message but not the bouquet.”

  “When you were surgery, I sat in the hospital’s garden. The flower beds were filled with those types of tulips. I stopped to admire one. The bastard was there, watching me.”

  “He watches us even now.”

  Chapter Eight

  Alexandria, Egypt-May

  Darav gazed out of the tram enjoying the scenery. His side offered the best view of the Mediterranean. Expensive hotels and sidewalk cafes with colorful umbrellas lined the eastern harbor.

  He’d seen the Mediterranean once before, in Marmaris, with Omar and Havva. They left him in a seaside café similar to the ones in Alexandria while they rigged three rubbish bins with percussion bombs. His table had a large blue umbrella advertising Dubonnet. Another, a red and black one, advertised Cinzano. It was the first time he’d seen umbrellas over tables. In his village, there was a small café attached to a fruit market. A rusted aluminum awning covered the few tables. He liked the bright umbrellas. They were cheerful.

  He could read and write; most in his tiny village couldn’t. He understood the letters in Dubonnet and Cinzano but didn’t know what they meant. He asked the waiter who took a superior tone with him for mispronouncing the words. The man referred to Dubonnet as an aperitif. Darav didn’t know what that was but refused to ask the arrogant waiter. He wished the waiter worked at a café near the bomb sites. The terror attack injured twenty-one people, half of them British tourists. The waiter should’ve been among the victims.

  The tram turned toward the western harbor. The next station was Ras el-Tin, his stop. Nassor Jafari, the Egyptian diver on MIAR’s project lived a few short blocks from the stop in the Al-Anfushi District. Of all the divers on the team, Jafari was the only one physically suitable for him to impersonate.

  Darav spoke broken Arabic. If stopped by any residents in Jafari’s neighborhood, they’d know he wasn’t Egyptian. Before the uprising and change of government leadership, he’d pass himself off as a wayward tourist. After the upheaval, he worried the lack of visitors to the country might affect his plans, make him more noticeable. He’d listened to BBC News on the radio and kept abreast of the news regarding Egypt. To his relief, the tourist trade had begun to slowly recover, Alexandria faster than Cairo.

  As he stepped off the tram, his anxiety faded. Clusters of tourists roamed the square, mostly European from what little he knew of the foreign languages spoken. They’d come to visit the famous Anfushi Tombs and the museum at Ras el-Tin Palace. He never heard of either or why they generated interest. Obviously important to tourists, both sites were circled on a pamphlet he’d taken from an airport kiosk. He’d mingle with the throng for awhile and then break away.

  Darav found the building Jafari lived in without difficulty. He opened a tourist map he bought from a vendor and walked to the immediate vicinity, occasionally checking it like he was lost. He used the presence of a parked delivery van to slip into the alley entrance of the building.

  Jafari’s apartment was on the third floor. The wood around the door’s frame and lock was chewed from previous burglaries. Darav removed a mini-crowbar he’d hidden in a pocket of his cargo pants. He used the site with previous scar marks to pry the lock. A cheap mechanism, it popped with ease. The crowbar was overkill. A credit card would’ve accomplished the job. Darav cleaned up the fresh splinters on the floor, entered the apartment and relocked the door.

  Darav took a plastic grocery bag from under the sink in the kitchen a
nd began sorting through Jafari’s desk. Any documents and photos pertaining to other dives he’d participated in, Darav put in the bag. In the bottom drawer was a locked fireproof metal box. Darav picked the lock and found Jafari’s passport, Egyptian birth certificate, and two envelopes containing Euros and Egyptian Pounds. Everything in the box, he put into different pockets. The paperwork from MIAR lay in a stack on the side of the desktop. Darav stuffed the communications in the bag. A silver framed picture of Jafari and an older couple sat on the corner of the desk. Darav studied it for a moment. He didn’t bear much resemblance to the younger version of Jafari. From the team photos posted in MIAR’s online newsletter, the now, more mature Jafari, looked the most like Darav.

  Once he gathered what he thought might be useful, Darav stored the bag and hid behind the door. He thought again about the waiter in Marmaris. When his people completed the raid in Cyprus and sold the artifacts, he’d use some of the cash and return to Marmaris. He’d hunt down the waiter and tape a grenade to his insolent mouth.

  Shuffling footsteps came from the wooden stairs that led from the last landing. Four apartments were on Jafari’s floor. Darav drew the Ka-Bar knife from his pants pocket, opened the blade and waited. The floorboards in the hallway creaked as the person came closer. The footsteps stopped outside Jafari’s door and Darav readied as the key slid into the lock.

  Jafari stepped inside, his back to Darav, and closed the door. Darav clamped his hand over Jafari’s mouth, yanking his head back simultaneously. He brought the blade down into the soft hollow of Jafari’s throat and twisted the knife, staying with him as Jafari flailed and dropped to the floor, choking on his own blood. When he felt the death shudder, Darav removed the knife.

  He took a towel from the bathroom and covered the front of his clothes and then returned to the living room. An excess of caution was needed, blood on his shirt or pants would attract attention. He knelt next to the body. In person, Jafari’s face was noticeably narrower than Darav’s and he was thinner-lipped. Darav would have to grow a beard to hide the differences, he thought as he checked for tattoos and any other identifying marks but found none.