The Red Room

by Ridley Pearson

  Knox flinches in agreement but doesn’t speak.

  “Perhaps Besim—”

  “He’s working for the Israelis.” He explains the end of his ride in terse, muttered sentences.

  “It’s not possible,” she says. “I booked Besim, not Dulwich. My arrangements, not his. Dulwich wanted it this way.”

  Knox grimaces and shrugs. Indifferent. “Fucking Sarge.”

  “My phone!” she says, still stuck on how an employee of the Israelis had ended up her driver. “The Red Room. When they switched the phone. My new model allowed full surveillance no matter the SIM chips I used. When I called to book my driver . . . they rerouted the call.”

  “Let’s save the CSI for later,” he says. Again, she misses the reference.

  “He got the business card?”

  Another smirk.

  “He didn’t get the business card.” A statement she mulls over. “But if Besim works with the Israelis, then why did he tip me off to the man watching my apartment? A man we assume also to be Israeli.”

  “We make too many assumptions.”

  “Your theory doesn’t explain anything,” she complains.

  “They wanted to sell you—us—on Besim’s loyalty.”

  It hits her in the center of her chest. She wants to contradict him. Prove she knew what she was doing as a solo field op. Can’t. “I believed.”

  “They underestimated you. If Besim hadn’t given you that guy, we’d never have picked up on the FedEx. It backfired on them because you’re way better at your job than they are at theirs.”

  He’s trying to console her. It works. She has a great deal to learn yet, she thinks.

  The waiter arrives. Grace orders coffee. Knox waves him away.

  “Thorium,” Knox says.

  “Need To Know,” says Grace. “The Iranians have always claimed peaceful use. Looks like they could claim that, however much they lied. A thorium reactor will not save the world, but it could nearly eliminate contamination. This would be a true game changer, John. Licensing such technology—the revenues would be staggering. Perhaps make up for shrinking oil reserves.” She lowers her voice additional decibels. “For the Israelis to bomb such research would be a public relations nightmare for decades to come.”

  “So some benevolent billionaire—the Israeli equivalent of Richard Branson—with ties to the government, or at least a faction of the government, hires Primer, or Dulwich—who knows?—to find a way to exclude the thorium reactor from any future attack.”

  “We didn’t need to know,” she says. “What did you mean by ‘faction’?”

  Knox ignores the question, instead informing her there’s been a shift change at the hotel. “When your luck turns, it’s hell turning it back. More like a supertanker.”

  “If I had any idea what you were talking about, it would help.” Between the medications and the beating he’s taken, it’s a miracle he’s conscious.

  He sips from her coffee. “Shift change. The bellmen, too, I imagine.” He drinks more and sets down the mug.

  There’s an American woman complaining to her husband at the salad bar. Looks like it might be her first time at one. The husband has little tolerance; he moves toward the cherry tomatoes, putting the cough screen between them.

  “Another inconvenience,” Knox says, then adds, “‘If it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have no luck at all.’ I prefer the Cream cover, in case you were wondering.”

  A waiter delivers a lamb shank. Knox has half of it gone before Grace can wave the waiter back and order the salad bar. His mouth full of food, Knox shakes his head vigorously at her choice. Orders fish for her. The man writes down the order as he walks away.

  Grace knows this particular John Knox personality. He has not shown it in a while, but he can be a confounding, frustrating and sarcastic man—and then there’s the John Knox that goes beyond even that.

  This is the man she now faces.

  “What I meant by faction was hawks and doves. Think about it: what are we doing here, Grace? You and me? Why us?”

  “You explained this yourself: if it carried any Israeli fingerprints, Mashe Okle would have run back to Iran.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “You are definitely high.”

  “Extremely.”

  “Okay. Wrong, how?”

  “All these guys we’ve been fighting, even the ones trying to kill us: they’re the same, but different. Two sides of the same coin. Hawks and doves. The hawks, the ones in charge, want every reactor, everything and anything to do with enrichment bombed back into the Stone Age. But there’s a catch—they would love to get their hands on any shopping list being couriered by top nuclear scientists in the hopes it gives them all the more evidence to start bombing tomorrow instead of being made to wait. That desire includes taking out possible couriers in hopes of recovering the list.

  “The doves,” he continues, “seek the higher ground, but lack the political capital to convince others, so they hire—my guess—David Dulwich, not Rutherford Risk, because they know him. Someone who knows of him, or knows him personally. Let’s call him the client.” Knox meets eyes with her. His are so glassy they look ready to run, so bloodshot it’s amazing he can keep them open. “The client finances the op. No connection back to the doves. Not ever. Two different sets of players on two opposite sides of the ball, and all on the same team. And us, you and me, in the middle.”

  He returns to eating ravenously.

  “Explain your reference to bad luck, please.” She has grown weary.

  “The Chinese put way too much faith in luck,” Knox notes through a mouthful of food. “You should learn to care less about luck.”

  She waits him out.

  “An errand,” he says. “We need to run an errand.”

  He wants to tease her into anger, or worse, begging. But he forgets how well she knows him.

  “Can I do it for you? I would be happy to.”

  He stops chewing. She wishes she had her phone’s camera at the ready.

  “We should do it together. I don’t want to get separated.”

  Grace relaxes. Hoping it doesn’t show. Knox has finished the lamb by the time her fish arrives. It’s the head and all—looks straight out of the Bosphorus. She doesn’t think she wants to deal with it until Knox fillets it for her. She tries a bite, and then consumes the remainder too quickly. Looks up to see him smiling. He has food in his teeth. He’s traded the coffee for a beer. This is the dangerous John Knox.

  “He should have told us,” Knox says.

  She’s the one with the mouthful. She tries to answer with her eyes.

  “The Need To Know makes sense.” He’s talking to himself. “Here’s what I think: I think our friends to the south of here were divided on this issue. I would bet their faction in Istanbul is completely off the books—resources back home, but not on the clock. I think some higher thinker saw a way to contract a third party—us—to do their bidding. No official involvement if it goes south, because official involvement could expose the bigger . . . fish.” He looks at her plate. “The fact that these bombs are indeed about to fall. The higher thinker doesn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater—the thorium project. This guy knows Dulwich somehow. Everyone knows Sarge. Appeals to his sense of patriotism, of higher good. Deep down, Sarge is a pussycat. Plus, he waves some serious change in his face. Sarge takes the bait. Uses the Red Room to sell it to both of us and to switch our phones. We buy into Rutherford’s involvement. And here we are.”

  “If we had done as he—”

  “Don’t go there.” He sips the beer. Then gulps. “We went where we went.”

  “It’s my fault.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I put us on that plaza.” She has to raise the question if he won’t. “Now that we know?”

  “Sarge ha
s his work cut out for him. First, he’ll have to explain why there’s no microdot on the hospital business card I gave him. Then he’ll have to talk them into letting us walk. We’ll likely be watched until whatever it is they have planned happens. After that, they can let us be.”

  “You talk as if we’ll be allowed to board a plane and leave.”

  “A train,” he says, correcting her. “But yeah, I get it. That’s where the errand comes in.” He signals for the check.

  His overconfidence makes her uneasy, despite that she finds his courage under fire seductive and alluring. Her defenses lowered, she feels prepared to cross an unthinkable line. If they get out of here, she’s going to ask Dulwich for reassignment.

  The bill paid, Knox moves surprisingly well on his injured legs as he leads her into the busy hotel lobby. “In case . . . in the event we’re separated,” he says, “Besim didn’t get the business card. As I was going down, I slipped it into the right coat pocket of a bellman named Furkan.”

  She lowers her voice to a whisper. “What might be Iran’s nuclear shopping list? In a bellman’s jacket pocket? What if he finds it? Discards it?”

  Knox shrugs. “I’m more concerned that he may have worn his jacket home. But I doubt it. It’ll be on a rack in the basement.”

  “The errand.”

  “Yes.”

  “Furkan.”

  “Pinned to the jacket. A name tag.”

  “Our free pass.”

  “Nothing is ever lost, only misplaced,” he says. “We’ll find—fuck, fuck. And double fuck.”

  She follows his line of sight.

  “The receptionist?”

  Knox has already swung his head in the direction of the street. A cab pulls to the curb. The driver climbs out at the same time as three others, all Caucasian—including the driver.

  “She may have made me. An American hotel! The nerve!”

  Grace pulls him away from the front doors. “Quickly!”

  He tugs back. “This way.”

  “We cannot stay.” They walk briskly, a pace just short of jogging.

  “We won’t get another shot at the card. Our only plan, Mashe’s only plan is for us to use that card, to play that card.” She wants to argue, but he calls her. “You got anything?”

  They’re engaged in a tug-of-war; she toward the hallway of boutique shops that likely leads to another outside exit; he to the right of the elevators and a green exit sign that depicts a little man running. It strikes her as absurdly symbolic. Stairs.

  Finally, she gives in, allows him to drag her along. Her capitulation is based on one thing: she has no plan whatsoever. His plan, regardless how reckless, is better than none. Ahead of her, Knox lumbers down the stairs, stiff-legged but surprisingly fast. She’s angry that she has to work to keep up with him, furious that she’s gone along at all.

  The bang of the door upstairs promises a fight. Knox is not going to turn himself in.

  “Two to one,” she says.

  “Yep.” As they exit the stairwell into a musty hallway that smells of cigarettes, Knox says, “Nothing permanent.”

  He’s studying a highway of wrapped pipes overhead. Ethernet, telephone, power and bell wire. Tube lighting. Green skin.

  “Twelve o’clock,” she says.

  Two men wait at the long end of the dim hallway. Knox and Grace move slowly toward them. The idea is for these two to block egress—shield the only apparent choice of exit besides the door she and Knox have just come through.

  That implies others coming from behind.

  Knox is in bobble head mode. She feeds off his intensity. He appears to be assaying the building’s structural components. “Ha!” he says, steering her through the first door to their left. It looks like a backstage dressing room in a seedy rock club.

  “Block it,” he says calmly.

  She drags a file cabinet across the cluttered floor, knocking a coffeemaker to the ground. Wedges a chair beneath the doorknob. All combined, it might buy them a few seconds.

  Behind her, Knox is rifling through a hanging rack of black sport jackets. She joins him, starting from the far end.

  “Name tag: Furkan,” he reminds her.

  “Right pocket,” she says, letting him know she pays attention to what he says.

  He bounces awkwardly to her side and slaps the far wall. He’s back in the line of jackets before she manages to speak. His slap has called the dumbwaiter.

  “A lift?”

  “For laundry carts. But it’ll do.”

  The first charge at the door rings out. She was wrong: ten seconds, at best.

  “You knew.” She fails to contain her astonishment. “About the lift . . .”

  “Old building. Low-gauge, high-voltage power line.” He points up to a thick black cable overhead. He followed it into this room.

  They are nearing each other at the center of the rack when Knox stops abruptly.

  “Go,” he says, eerily unemotional.

  She moves to the specialized lift. Hauls out the empty laundry cart; it pirouettes on its wheels.

  Knox searches the black jackets.

  The door blows open behind a determined kick. A man enters. Caucasian. Perhaps not ex-military, but conditioned. Trained. If there was a chance for talking this out, it has passed. The look in his eye is all attack.

  Knox spins and pulls down the manually operated door. Something flutters across her vision as Grace is trapped in darkness. A clunk; the groan of electricity. The lift ascends.

  It takes her a moment to register the image seared onto her blindness—the flashes of white lingering in her vision like the pop of a camera’s flash.

  A business card. The business card.

  56

  Knox unbraids the top of a metal hanger in three quick rotations. He straightens it with two sharp bends and is already swinging the wire whip as he steps around the rolling rack of employee uniforms. It extends three feet from his hands, catching the unsuspecting man across the face, first from Knox’s right and then again on the return blow from the left. It raises welts on the man’s right cheek, draws blood on the left. By the time his opponent reacts, all the man can do is offer up his hands for a lashing. The whip nearly takes his pinky off. Backs him up a staggering step.

  Forehand, backhand. Knox, the matador, marching forward relentlessly. The man cowering now, bent at the waist, bloodied hands clasped over his head, charges Knox like a bull. Hits Knox in the belly hard, reversing their fortunes. Knox drops the whip, gets his hands on the man’s shoulders, but it’s too late. Two hundred lean pounds drive Knox back and off his weak legs.

  The two men wrestle on the concrete floor. Roll into the clothes rack. Knox pulls it over onto them, drowning them in polyester. He breaks loose and crab-walks away, understanding he’s no match for this man’s coordinated power. A good pair of legs are vital for defending against a man of his opponent’s strength.

  By the time Knox scrambles out from beneath the pile of black jackets, he’s facing two men. One standing; he has a stitched-up ear. One kneeling and not looking good.

  All three are winded. Briefly, no one moves—Knox is still inverted on hands and feet like he’s in a camp contest. The message is simple: outnumbered, Knox has lost.

  Knox speaks first. “You speak English,” he tells them. “We’re all following orders. I don’t have what you want. I passed it off at the hospital. Check on that.”

  The one who’s standing produces a Taser from a side pocket.

  “Oh, come on,” Knox says.

  The man fires.

  As he regains consciousness, Knox registers that his hands have been plastic-tied behind his back. His legs are weak but moving, his head pounding, his heart racing.

  “Motherfucker,” Knox groans behind the electronic hangover.

  They’re in the hotel ba
sement corridor.

  “I like the jacket,” the man who didn’t suffer the face lashing says. “Could use one of those myself.” So they’ve searched him.

  “I passed it off,” Knox complains, repeating himself, directing attention back to the card.

  “You’ll be fine.”

  Knox doesn’t say, “Oh, sure.” He doesn’t say, “Tell that to my head.” He feels something foreign in that moment: hopelessness. Doesn’t know how people can live with such a feeling. His head swims but begins to level out, and he’s already looking for options, has already left the black hole of despair behind.

  The man Knox whipped grips Knox’s arm like a tourniquet. Knox won’t give him the pleasure of knowing how much it hurts.

  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” Knox says in a steady voice.

  “No one’s shooting anyone.”

  The wounded man trips Knox across the shins, hits hard against the bloodstains.

  Knox chokes out, “Your boss should make a call. I can give you a number.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself.” The wounded one swats the back of Knox’s head. It hurts worse than a cop’s nightstick. “Shut up, do not lie, and you are to be released. This is over.”

  Spooks—Israeli spooks?—get away with murder, Knox thinks, knowing he’ll never be released because the business card he handed Dulwich contains nothing more than hospital contact information.

  “We’re all on the same side here,” Knox says, not believing a word of it.

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Knox is searching for Grace as he’s led into the lobby. It’s a bad sign that these two don’t care about being seen by hotel employees.

  They reach the outside. It’s raining again. The Istanbul traffic is bumper to bumper. Pedestrians slosh along the sidewalk, colorful umbrellas held high overhead. It’s the parade of a dozen cultures. A place for lovers, enemies, allies. Spooks. He feels himself spiraling down the drain; blames the meds for his lack of inspiration. He’s out of ideas—a first. Hopes this isn’t his last glimpse of Istanbul. Wouldn’t mind staying a while longer.

  “Hatichat harah!” the talkative agent says, speaking Hebrew. He wins a flash of scorn from his nearest colleague.