The Red Room

by Ridley Pearson

But over the next five minutes, the sky changes from gold to bronze, from bronze to copper. Strong wind whips rooftop Jordanian flags. Fine, powdery grit infiltrates the louvered window frame, enticing Knox to test the iron lever. Finding it not quite sealed, he lowers it fully into a locked position.

  The grit continues to invade.

  In the reflection off the glass, the door’s security peephole blinks, going dark. Someone is out there. Knox is already moving toward the door, thinking that without the sandstorm, without being drawn to the window, without the contrast between the dark sky and the well-lit space, he wouldn’t have seen the flicker suggesting someone is there, in the hallway. Knox doesn’t consider himself a fatalist, more an agnostic with inclinations that allow for a force or presence behind creation. Yet he acknowledges internally that he’s the beneficiary of a string of events—that he’s been offered an opportunity.

  He doesn’t question Dulwich’s ability to place a handgun in his hotel room safe. The man has his end of the bargain to uphold, whether it’s documents, background cover stories or small arms. Knox keys in the four-digit combination. Inside is a Jordanian-made 9mm Viper in a SERPA CQC holster. Along with a hundred rounds of ammo is a CRKT folding tactical knife and a pick gun capable of picking 98 percent of all locks, dead bolts and nondigital car locks. Two prescription bottles containing antibiotics and pain medicine. Nine hundred dinars in small bills left in a brown A4 envelope.

  Knox pockets the knife and cups the Viper, kneels as he trains the barrel into the wood of the door so he can shoot through it if required.

  The glass peephole is now unblocked, but Knox is not about to put an eye to it, not about to announce himself or take a round in the head. Knox cannot be made small, but he can be made less big and lower. The door’s interior lever automatically unlocks the dead bolt. Crouching now, he yanks open the door.

  The man on the other side is looking for someone at head height, lending Knox a split-second advantage. Knox comes to his feet spreading the man’s arms wide. He spins his visitor so the man’s throat slides into the crook of his own left elbow, grabs the right arm, wrenching it behind the man’s back with the barrel of the gun aimed into the base of the man’s skull. One twitch and they’ll be scraping gray matter off the ceiling.

  He drags the choked man into his room and kicks the door shut. Total time in the hallway: four seconds. His victim has yet to register what’s happened. The man tries to speak, but can’t in the chokehold.

  After thirty seconds without blood to his brain, the man slumps to the floor. Knox has already ID’ed him by holding him up to the room’s mirror: it’s the dishwasher from Saffron.

  He ties the man’s ankles together with a terry-cloth robe belt. Secures his wrists with the laces from the man’s running shoes. Gags him with a washcloth. Slips the Viper into the small of his back—no need to advertise. Unfolds the knife, using its tip to coax open the man’s thin wallet and clamshell cell phone. He memorizes the last four numbers called. He’ll need to write them down in the next few minutes; his memory isn’t what it once was.

  The dishwasher regains consciousness with a kind of terror in his eyes that serves a purpose for Knox: the man is not used to this kind of treatment. He’s new at this. An amateur.

  Things just keep getting better and better.

  Knox can taste the sandstorm; feel the grit between his teeth. A look out the window confirms a premature nightfall; the city’s in the heart of a violent dust cloud. The condition can last for days. It can ground aircraft, stop taxis and buses from running. Be a real pain in the ass.

  Knox speaks kindergartner Arabic, hoping his message gets through.

  “You were sent?” Knox says. He moves his own head first in a nod, then shaking to indicate “no.” He repeats his question.

  The man nods.

  Knox has found no weapons on the man.

  “To hurt me,” he states.

  The man panics.

  “To watch me.”

  Another violent shake of the head.

  “To warn me.”

  Again.

  “To tell me.”

  The man nods.

  Knox plucks the towel from the man’s mouth. The dishwasher speaks far too fast. Knox picks out: “Akram,” “speak,” but loses the rest. He allows the man time to calm down.

  “Again,” Knox says.

  This time he gets: “Akram speak you.”

  Knox toys with the man’s phone with the knife.

  “I call?”

  The dishwasher shakes his head.

  “Not here.”

  “Where?”

  “Machine café.” It takes Knox a moment to process “machine” as “computer.”

  He glances back at the window, moving like the skin of a timpani drum as it’s buffeted by the wind.

  “Shit,” Knox says.

  7

  Arriving at Atatürk International, Istanbul’s primary airport, Grace is both tired and hungry. She doesn’t want to do the math to determine how tired, but doesn’t require calculations to know how hungry. She has an hour and seven minutes before Mashe Okle, traveling as Mashe Melemet, is scheduled to land. She sits down with a salad at Greenfields, carrying a soy mocha from Starbucks. She calls her driver, tells him to wait. Kills forty-five minutes eating slowly while catching up on iPhone e-mails.

  Grace does not do well with free time. Her brain gets ahead of itself and starts tripping over discarded thoughts like a lost hiker stumbling over fallen limbs in the forest. Even at a meal, as tired as she is, she can’t help herself.

  She embedded code in the Emirates Airline’s server to alert her to any outside IP addresses searching the manifest for flight numbers 975 and 123. She built a trap to catch others like herself as a security measure, something Emirates should have done in the first place. Having received no such alerts, she has every reason to believe she’s alone in having identified the Melemet alias and flight schedule. But her mind won’t let it be.

  Ten minutes.

  Immigration desks are the fly strips of terrorism pest control. Face recognition software has improved exponentially in the past five years, to the point at which X-ray imaging in an airport’s full-body scanner can utilize an individual’s skull features to overcome attempts at disguise like glasses and wigs. If the man Grace is set to follow has tripped a list in Tehran or the UAE or is identified passing through Immigration here in Turkey, airport security will follow him. Turkish agents might arrest him. Where does that leave Dulwich’s plan? Why weren’t contingencies made?

  A Knox rule she’s absorbed: you can’t win the game if you don’t know all the players.

  Dulwich has either been told Okle is not in the international database of persons of interest, or Dulwich’s mystery client is none other than the Turkish government or one of its agencies—meaning the man can enter the country without being stopped. Atatürk Airport offers Grace an opportunity to identify such players if they exist. She notices a series of mirrored windows angled down toward the busy concourse from the mezzanine level. Despite her fatigue, she smiles at the advantage she has just discovered.

  She assumes Dulwich will follow Okle once he’s out of the terminal, but it’s nothing but an educated guess. She begins plotting.

  An agent or investigator wanting to follow Okle/Melemet out of the terminal would be far wiser to do so from a chair in a security office than with boots on the floor. Every square inch of the airport is monitored. Once the mark reaches Immigration Control and leaves, through a succession of cameras one would be able to follow him to a taxi, bus, passenger vehicle, rental or parked car.

  One agent in the security room, another in a car parked somewhere along the airport exit route. The mark has no way of identifying his surveillance team.

  But she does.

  She’s filled with a sudden burst of energy, defying h
er fatigue. Her mathematical mind is well suited to strategic planning; she’s capable of linear thinking, of laying down stepping-stones on the fly, rarely having to backtrack and correct a step.

  Abandoning the salad, she pulls her roll-aboard into the concourse and rides an escalator to the mezzanine and its pair of higher-end restaurants, administration offices and the secured entrance leading into the mirrored window area. She phones her car service, is patched through and informs the dispatcher she will be at the curb in twenty minutes—ten for the plane to land; ten, or more, for Okle to get through Customs and Immigration.

  She kneels by a trash can and makes a point of unzipping her bag and rearranging some clothing. She needs the cover.

  In the process, she places her iPhone slightly behind the trash can, lens pointing out, difficult if not impossible to see. The beauty of the device is that it allows still or video photography to be shot without having to unlock the phone. Its contents are Cloud-based; if the phone is confiscated, she will be able to access those via another identical phone in a matter of hours. Apple sells well in both Dubai and Istanbul. For now, it’s recording live video. She repacks, zips up the bag and leaves, returning to the concourse via the escalator.

  Six minutes.

  She repositions herself with a view of International Arrivals. A crowd of weary drivers and enthusiastic relatives has formed on her side of a restraining tape, a gauntlet past which she can’t see. Despite the heels, she’s forced to a stretch as she tries to balance against a spinning rack of tourist pamphlets. As arrivals reach the open end of the roped-off gauntlet, people rush to meet them, further obscuring her view.

  She overhears a woman ask an arriving passenger in English the flight’s origin. Delhi.

  One minute.

  The crowd ebbs and flows, sorting itself out. There’s a lull. She has a chance to secure a place at the tape, but decides against it. Mashe Okle must not see her; she is supporting Knox and may meet the man face-to-face. Her interest is less in Okle than in who’s watching him. That, along with his entourage, if any.

  She’s also monitoring the elevators and escalators for people like her—those who keep their distance and yet imply an interest in new arrivals.

  She sends Dulwich a secure text:

  mark on point

  He made it clear she won’t hear from him over the course of the op, but that only serves to excite her: he’s trusting her, solo. Until she and Knox confab, she’s independent.

  He expects her to fail at following Okle single-handed. Told her she can pick him up again at the hospital. But she has other ideas.

  Dulwich’s penchant for secretiveness has a chilling effect on Grace. His methods, his need-to-know exclusivity, protects the chain of knowledge, secures the intelligence. Her first field op for Dulwich, in Shanghai, she felt expendable. Recently, she’s been led to believe she’s not simply secure with her outsource work for Rutherford Risk, but is a highly valued asset/provider. Brian Primer has invested in her cyber intelligence training. He must see big things ahead for her.

  Knox knows Dulwich better than she, rarely believes everything Dulwich tells him. She often finds herself defending Dulwich only to wonder why later. She blames her ingrained sense of loyalty to her employer, her Chinese-ness, an inescapable connection to her heritage that she often wears like an albatross.

  Time is suddenly impossible to measure. The minute hand of her watch won’t advance. It isn’t the adrenaline-induced special effect of time slowing, a phenomenon that can be mesmerizing and addicting. Instead it’s her anticipation and expectation, which feed her impatience. She wants the curtain to rise.

  As so often happens in surveillance, when the logjam finally breaks with the arrival of Mashe past security and into the terminal, Grace finds herself in a perfect storm. She counts two other men traveling with him, possibly bodyguards; they aren’t making it obvious, but they aren’t hiding, either. They follow a step behind, emotionless and alert.

  She sees a Middle Eastern male, wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, walking down the moving escalator. The rubber rail guides his hand, his eyes on the arriving passengers. It’s his practiced scan of his surroundings that cues her: in a second or two he’s taken in the surroundings, including egress. He’s spotted a uniformed airport security team with a K9, as well as an undercover woman that Grace had missed.

  He’s wearing iPhone earbuds, the undercover equivalent of the flesh-colored curly “pigtails” bodyguards wear emerging from their shirt collars. His lips move. Could be a phone call, but Grace knows better—he’s with a team. Private security? Police? Domestic intelligence? Foreign? Friendlies?

  She calls Dulwich to pass along the intel of the extra set of eyes. He doesn’t answer the call, pissing her off. She assumes he must be nearby. Providing information like this should help solidify her stature as an effective field operative. There are a limited number of such opportunities on any op. The cream rises to the top because it separates; she must separate herself from the nose-to-the-ground types who can’t think for themselves.

  For now, she sends Dulwich a text, “company,” and leaves it at that. She avoids the man from the escalator. She’ll determine his role later. As he reaches the bottom floor, she locates and rides an elevator up one flight. She retrieves her phone, grateful it’s still there, and enters two passwords in order to unlock it and view the video. Back on the lower concourse, she replays the video a total of three times: she watches a man emerge from the secure area of the mirrored windows. He comes straight for the camera. Videoed from floor level, the perspective lends drama to his approach. When he’s three meters away, she pauses on a clean image of his face. It’s the same Middle Eastern man—the agent, the cop—who came down the escalator. A man who has been monitoring Melemet from inside airport security. Such access suggests Turkish law enforcement or an agent.

  Like her, this man—and his team? she wonders—are surveilling Melemet.

  Dulwich is going to love her.

  She calls her driver for a second time.

  “I’m coming out now,” she says. “Please be ready.”

  8

  Knox wears a damp strip of torn hotel towel over his nose and mouth, sunglasses, the spaces against his face stuffed with wet toilet paper. The dishwasher introduces himself as Shamir. He wears a sweat-stained kerchief around his neck. The sidewalks are cleared of all but the stupidest, a category into which Knox puts himself, given the conditions. He now knows what a pork cutlet or tilapia filet feels like when it’s dredged through a bag of cornmeal.

  Knox is sandblasted from all sides. Cars choke and die, windshield wipers swat at the dust like horsetails, car horns honk at double-parked vehicles blocking traffic. The leaves of the roadside plane trees rattle like the inside of a rainstick. Knox coughs. Shamir spits as he attempts in vain to screen his eyes.

  Hunched forward, they stumble up the sidewalk, battling a directionless wind, caught in vortexes that suck all the oxygen out of the air. Knox chops at a wall of swirling sand, hoping to part the curtain.

  Instead, it envelops him in an airless cocoon with a dust so fine it seeps through even the wet fabric to be ground between his teeth. It tickles his nostrils; stains his taste buds with a foul mixture of street grime, desert sand and the dung heap of humanity crushed into a fine powder and snorted. He tastes tobacco, rubber and motor oil, all behind a tinge of latex he doesn’t want to think about.

  Shamir points across the street. They cut through a line of motionless traffic. Nothing is moving but the air and the street signs, many of which are losing their coats of paint as if in slow-motion animation.

  They take shelter against a wall. The wind quiets. Coils of sand swirl at their feet. Plant life clings to crevices, whistling as if crying to hold on.

  The sudden peace is shocking. He and Shamir hesitate before charging back into the stinging roar. Knox clears his sunglasses,
pockets of trapped sand cascading down his cheeks.

  “Not good,” Shamir says.

  Knox understands him perfectly.

  “Bad,” Knox says.

  By now Knox is wondering about his choice. He might have fought harder to hold his ground at the hotel. The truth is: he loves this shit. The more difficult an op, the more he has to celebrate. But he worries he’s come off as soft to Shamir, that the man will report back to Akram how easily Knox was convinced to battle the elements for a meeting or a phone call. Due to the language barrier, Knox is still not convinced which it is to be.

  It isn’t weather for standing around, and the man’s movement catches Knox’s eyes. He’s off to Knox’s right somewhere, sometimes visible, sometimes not. Knox’s first glimpse of him was from across the street as he and Shamir left the hotel. At the time, he stood out as an anomaly. Who hangs around outside in such conditions? Survival dictates taking shelter.

  Initially, Knox assumed the man was awaiting a ride. But now, the same man is huddled against the sting of the sand, facing away from Knox and into the skin-shredding torrent. But Knox feels the eyes in the back of the man’s head. He considers the value of the Harmodius. Is there a group of art thieves after the treasure, too?

  Knox signals Shamir back into the sandblaster. They push ahead for a block, Knox not looking back.

  As they round a corner, Shamir again extends a finger, this time pointing to a swinging shingle sign at the bottom of which, below the Arabic, says in English: INTERNET! WI-FI!

  Knox waves the man on ahead. Shamir hesitates, encouraging Knox forward. Knox speaks some of the few Arabic words he can command: “Go! Wait.”

  Shamir doesn’t like it, but he trudges ahead anyway, entering the café.

  The man following Knox is made careless by the storm. He’s blind, head down and craned forward in a determined stride. A thick wave of airborne grit envelops the street. The man is a step off his game. Knox hits him from behind. He’s good: he manages to drag Knox down with him. It isn’t instinct. It’s training that allows a move like that. It’s like trying to fight on ice. Knox fails to land an effective blow; he is slow to dodge a fist that catches his shoulder. They wrestle and roll. Knox’s glasses are dislodged; he can’t see a thing. Feels like he took a spoonful of salt in both eyes.