Blown Circuit

by Lars Guignard

  That’s when I saw the old guy sneak out of the smaller hammam room. He had confused expression on his wet, wrinkled face. Jean-Marc must have followed my eyes. An essential rule of hand-to-hand combat is that you carefully control your eye contact. Just as an askance look can tell you what your opponent might do next, your eyes also telegraph your every move. But in this case, I didn’t mind Jean-Marc being distracted. I wanted him to be. I could use that to my advantage. Except for the fact that I hadn’t anticipated his response. Not entirely anyway.

  Jean-Marc scythed around with the blade and connected with the old guy’s throat, just below his right ear. He parried forward far enough to ensure solid contact and continued spinning in a viscous arc, slashing the old man’s throat from ear to ear. The poor guy fell to the floor, bleeding out like a geyser before he could even scream. Crimson blood sprayed the walls. And Jean-Marc’s momentum carried through to me, big drops of blood glistening off the yatagan’s blade.

  Now I was curious, but more than that, I was angry. Why had he gone after a civilian? Two possibilities: either the old guy wasn’t a civilian or, more likely, Jean-Marc didn’t want to leave any witnesses. And that’s why being mad was a problem. Because being mad could compromise my judgment. And in a life-and-death situation, compromised judgment kills as quickly as a bullet.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to share whatever it is you’ve got on your mind?” I said.

  “There is nothing to share, Michel.”

  Michel. The way he said Me shell, with a long e and soft c, it sounded like a girl’s name. It didn’t matter, I wasn’t taking the bait. Jean-Marc slashed down with the yatagan, the tip of his blade millimeters from my heart. I actually felt the hot humid air part as he scythed through the move.

  The way he slashed the sword told me something about him. It told me that Jean-Marc was a bit of a one-trick pony. Sure he was solidly built with a massive upper body. And he was pretty quick too. I knew that he’d crush me if he got me into a hold. But I hadn’t seen any real grace out of him since he’d flipped off his back to a standing position on the floor. Some guys are like that. They know a few good tricks, but not a whole lot more. That was my advantage. Now I needed to seize it.

  I took my final step backward as Jean-Marc parried forward again. Except it wasn’t a step. It was a leap. I leapt up onto the marble octagon directly behind me, my toes gripping the smooth wet marble as I landed in a crouch. The truth was, I almost slipped. Wet marble surfaces aren’t to be toyed with, but neither are knives, so I was two for two, and more important, I was still standing.

  The leap took Jean-Marc by surprise, I could tell because his balance was thrown off as he slashed downward missing me handily. He was leaning forward. Not far enough forward that he was in any danger of falling over, but far enough forward that he was off balance, if only slightly. The other thing working to my advantage was the blood. The hammam floor was now slick with the old guy’s blood and Jean-Marc had just stepped into a river of it.

  I was in an awkward position because of my improvised backward leap, but I wasn’t helpless. Far from it. Still, I was going to have to adjust. I’m already tall and having an extra twenty-four inches of height, while great for the view, wasn’t helping me at that moment. So I sunk low on my left leg and planted my foot firmly, letting go with my right leg in a massive front kick. The chest would have been the obvious target—easier to hit—but I didn’t want to go for the chest. I didn’t want this to keep going on and on. I wanted to end it. So I aimed for the bottom of Jean-Marc’s square jaw putting every ounce of my nearly two hundred pounds behind it.

  I regretted the move the instant I did it. I knew what the result was going to be, and I had jumped the gun. There was information I needed to get from Jean-Marc, but I didn’t think I was going to get it now. The kick was too focused. Too well planted. I felt the ball of my foot connect with the stubble of his chin, forcing his head back. But it didn’t stop there. The kick was too powerful and I followed through with it all the way.

  I felt resistance, and then a crack, like what you hear when someone cracks your back. Except it was the cracking of Jean-Marc’s neck. The human neck has a decent range of motion back and forth, but it’s not infinite. And it’s no match for a well-timed blow aiming to obliterate it. With that crack, I knew immediately that I had delivered a lethal blow. My foot had severed Jean-Marc’s head from his spinal cord as surely as if he had been hung. He stopped breathing before he hit the blood-soaked floor.

  The yatagan fell from Jean-Marc’s outstretched arm, landing with a metallic clank. I stepped off the marble slab carefully avoiding the old guy’s blood to check what I had done, but it was as I expected: Jean-Marc’s wide blue eyes had already started to glaze over. It was the same with the old man. He was still bleeding out, but more from gravity than anything else. I checked his pulse even though I could see that his heart had stopped beating.

  The whole thing made me angry. Angry at the waste. Angry with myself for jumping the gun. I checked the old man’s hammam towel to ensure he wasn’t hiding anything that might point to his presence there, but there was nothing. He seemed to be exactly what he appeared. A civilian. Then I checked Jean-Marc’s hammam towel. Nothing there either.

  So far I had avoided stepping in the slick of blood covering the floor, and I wanted to keep it that way. I didn’t need the local police following my bloody footprints around the block, but I wasn’t about to walk out unarmed either, so I grabbed the yatagan off the floor. Then I picked up my water bottle and the amulet and strode out the swinging door.

  Chapter 9

  BOTH THE ANTEROOM containing the shower and toilets and the lobby were empty. No sign of the heavyset guy. No sign of the guy folding towels either. I opened the changing room and quickly dressed. After that I picked up both backpacks, my plastic bag, and the yatagan, and a few seconds later I was on the street.

  The first thing I did was duck into a nearby doorway and pull out my Swiss Army knife. I had a decent vantage of the hammam and nobody was converging on it yet. I cut a one-inch slit into the bottom of the left strap of either pack. Then I pulled out the tracking beacons I found there and crushed them beneath the soul of my shoe. I knew that the packs were equipped with the long-range beacons so an agent could be located in an emergency, which, under the circumstances, was exactly what I didn’t want to have happen.

  I stuffed the smaller daypack into my larger pack. Then I cut a makeshift scabbard for the yatagan out of the towel. I wrapped the blade and slipped the yatagan deep into the long front pocket of my cargo shorts, pulling down my T-shirt to conceal the hilt. Moments later I was back on the street. The city had come to life since I’d entered the hammam, the scent of freshly grilled lamb and diesel hanging in the air. Men walked by with enormous loads on their backs while street sweepers pulled carts of trash, vendors selling everything from vegetables to tobacco to Turkish Delight in the narrow cobbled alleys.

  I was wound up like a clock. I had just killed a man, taken a life. It was something I’d been trained to do, yet something I’d never actually done. But I’d done it now, Jean-Marc’s lifeless body was testament to that. And though I wasn’t proud of what I’d done, I didn’t feel sorry for it either. Because the die had been cast. It had been him or me.

  What I needed to do was manage the aftermath. I needed to ensure that I wasn’t being followed and I needed to know why Jean-Marc had turned on me. His behavior had thrown my entire relationship with the CIA into question. I didn’t know whom I could trust.

  I replayed the events over in my mind from the beginning. Jean-Marc had sat down. He had said it was hot. He had told me that the authorities were looking for me. He had asked me what I had found.

  The Eye. I had shown him the Turkish Eye.

  I took the Eye out of the plastic bag. Looked at it. I still didn’t see what he had seen. But whatever it was, it had been important to him. It had been important enough to try to kill me. But what was it? There wa
s nothing about the thing that was remarkable. No code. No message. Just clay. Glazed, kiln-baked clay, shiny on one side, rough on the other. I thought about it. Then I bent low as I passed an iron hitching post and smashed the amulet down hard.

  It broke in two and I immediately saw that a thin transparent strip held the clay together. Gotcha. I turned in to a smaller alley and went to work separating the shiny transparent strip from the clay. The strip looked like it was made from some kind of heat-resistant material and I removed it easily from the clay. But what was interesting was what it said. Typed on the face of the strip was a message.

  The message read:

  TelD CaNtIVE OON SHEPs

  If the amulet was a message from my father, it seemed pretty obvious what he was trying to say. He was trying to disguise what he was writing behind poor typing, but with a few simple substitutions, a T for an H, an N for a P, an I for an E, I thought the meaning was pretty clear:

  HELD CAPTIVE ON SHIPS

  Why it was ships plural, and the word “ON” was misspelled, or how he had managed to bake a tiny transparent silicone strip into a piece of pottery while held captive on a ship, I had no idea. Still, taken as a whole, the message made sense. It did, however, beg a logical question. If the message was indeed from my father, had he received outside help? I flipped the strip over. On the other side it said, “Sipahi Caddesi.” I didn’t know who, if anyone, was helping my father. I couldn’t even be certain that the message was from my father, but I did recognize caddesi as the word for street. After quickly consulting my iPhone, I headed to the Grand Bazaar.

  MY CAP PULLED low over my eyes, it didn’t take me long to reach the bazaar’s pedestrian-choked Byzantine gates. The Grand Bazaar was, in essence, a huge collection of alleys in old Istanbul that had been covered with an arched roof hundreds of years previously. The walkways were lined with shops on either side, the tiled floor as uneven as the alleys that had predated it. Incense burned and touts cried out for business, scimitars and spices shared shelf space with the usual array of imported souvenirs.

  Shouts and screams echoed down the maze of corridors as I proceeded past the stalls of antiques and rugs and jewels until I eventually found my way to Sipahi Caddesi. Pushing through the crowds of backpackers and garden-variety tourists, it wasn’t long before I found a shop specializing in the product in question—Turkish Eyes.

  “Salaam.”

  The scratchy, low voice of the shopkeeper greeted me. He was old and wore a rough, checkered turban that looked right at home next to his leathery, heavily creased skin. Beckoning me near with a gnarled hand, he gestured to the thousands of amulets hanging from the ceiling of his shop. The amulets were everywhere, their black pupils staring back at me, the muffled roar of the bazaar gradually replaced by a chorus of their tinkling.

  I recognized a Kurdish flag at the back of his small shop. The flag had a blazing golden sun in the middle of it with a red stripe at the top and a green stripe at the bottom. The flag wasn’t big enough to draw undue attention, but it wasn’t hidden either. It simply hung on the far wall beside the amulets. I shouldn’t have needed the flag to identify the guy anyway, his turban gave him away as a Kurd.

  I knew from my background reading that the Kurds were among the world’s most dispossessed people. No nation-state to call their own, yet possessing a firm ethnic identity, they tended to be maligned by the majority wherever they lived. The Iraqis didn’t want them, the Syrians didn't want them, and the Turks sure didn’t want them, which meant, that like all dispossessed people everywhere, they did a good job sticking together.

  From what I knew of Turkish history, Turkish politicians had not been kind to their most sizable minority. I wouldn’t presume to speak for the Turkish people on the matter, but the current crop of officials was not about to give the Kurdish population what they truly desired—an autonomous homeland. And in their defense, why would they? Nobody likes to give up what’s already theirs. The fact that the man before me had hung the flag and wore the traditional turban told me that I was dealing with a proud man. Perhaps even an honorable one.

  “England, France, Germany?” the shopkeeper asked.

  I had no flag on my backpack, but I wasn’t sure that I could pull off a British accent. I decided I’d raise the least suspicion by staying as close as possible to the truth.

  “Canada,” I said.

  Everybody thought Canadians were harmless. There was no harm in impersonating one.

  “Yes, Canada. Beautiful place. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver?”

  “Montreal,” I said. I’d been there once. They spoke both French and English. It was a nice enough place if you could stand the cold.

  “My uncle, he too lives in Montreal. Saint-Laurent? Westmount?”

  The line of questioning was getting a little too specific for my liking.

  “A suburb outside the city,” I said.

  “Ahh, yes. Montreal. Good place. A fine, fine place. How may I help you today?”

  “Just looking at your Eyes.”

  “Yes. The nazur is a powerful talisman. It keeps evil at bay.”

  I stared at the hanging amulets.

  “Are they all the same?”

  “Some are the same. Some different.”

  “What about this one?” I said.

  I pulled out my broken amulet. There was no need to say anything else. The shopkeeper’s brow furrowed as he stared at the thin silicone strip still protruding from the baked clay. Then he took out a business card and scribbled an address on the back. After that, I recognized the Turkish word for good-bye.

  “Güle güle,” the shopkeeper said.

  Chapter 10

  I KNEW I’D taken a risk by putting my cards on the table with the shopkeeper. He could call ahead and warn the people I was going to see. But I needed a break. And even though there was a chance I’d be walking into a trap, at least I’d be walking forward. Sometimes you needed to sacrifice safety in favor of momentum. So I followed the Eye.

  The address on the card was on a nearby street of dirty cobblestones, sandwiched between a textile factory and an ironworks. The building was long and narrow with about twenty feet of street frontage. Inside the door was an old telephone sitting on a dusty wooden desk, behind which was a long table of artisans painting Turkish Eyes. I didn’t see the actual clay being worked, but there were kilns at the back of the space as well as a doorway leading to the adjacent ironworks.

  I walked in the front door and past the desk to the table where people were painting. A man of about fifty approached, sweat stains under the arms of his threadbare tailored shirt. He headed directly for me, the look in his hardened gray eyes deliberate, but not malicious. I was expecting to have to try out my guidebook Turkish. Instead, he simply pointed across the narrow room to the doorway of the ironworks. Clearly the old man from the Eye shop had called ahead.

  I continued around the long table and across the narrow room, cautiously crossing the threshold between the two shops. It looked like there was a washroom built out at the back of the ironworks, but other than that, there were no partition walls. Just the three walls of the building and a half-open metal roll-down door in the front. I glanced back at my host. He indicated I should keep walking to the rear of the washroom.

  Sparks flew, but the welders seemed more intent on their work than on me. Behind the washroom was an open wooden door with a high sill set in the stone wall. I continued through the door to find myself in a tight alley between buildings. It was no more than five feet wide and maybe sixty feet long. Thorns and grasses grew next to the rocks and discarded bricks in the long, skinny space. Looking north toward the street, the face of the alley had been blocked off to make it appear as though the buildings simply butted up against each other with nothing between them.

  On the south end of the alley was a decaying wooden fence and another building. It was impossible to say what was beyond it. But the factory owner had definitely pointed back here. He obviously expected me to know
what I was looking for, so much so that he seemed surprised that I didn’t immediately walk outside.

  It made sense. Whatever it was I was supposed to find, I had to assume that my father had already given me the information I needed. But he hadn’t given me much. Just a Turkish Eye which happened to come from the factory, the coordinates of the ship, and, of course, the message that he had left in the Eye like a half-baked fortune. I mulled over the message’s meaning again. I’d always had an eidetic memory, or one that at least approached photographic recall, so there was no need to fish out the broken amulet to read the silicone strip. I simply pictured it in my mind’s eye.

  TelD CaNtIVE OON SHEPs

  It read like a text from a bad typist. Or a tweet. Maybe he had limited characters. I already knew that my dad was held captive. What the message was saying was obvious. Could there be something else? I looked at the letters. Upper and lowercase. I had no cipher key, so I played with what I had, uppercase first.

  I got a few possibilities. The capital letters could be rearranged to spell out the words:

  NET

  or

  PITS

  or

  DEVICE

  But none of those words really told me anything. I looked at the lowercase combinations. Among others, I saw the words:

  seal

  or

  let

  or

  stela

  If I combined upper and lowercase, I could go on, but without a key it hardly seemed worthwhile. If I ignored the obvious meaning that he was held captive on a ship, there were just too many possibilities. Of course, the logistics of baking a message into a ceramic medallion while held captive were also an enigma. Did my dad have an ally on the outside? Did he know he would be held captive on that ship? Everywhere I looked there were more questions.