Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  “I must see weapon licenses. The law.”

  More forged documents proffered, and accepted; more paperwork.

  “There now must be collateral for cars.”

  The team expected this. Salih handed Felix two wristwatches. Both were Harry Winston models, a very prestigious brand, for the extremely wealthy only. Felix gave them to the attendant. Each, in the U.S., would cost about a quarter of a million dollars new. They were sold worldwide, and Felix expected that the CIA had bought these in some neutral country, in an untraceable transaction.

  The appraiser came out again, inspected the watches, and nodded.

  The front-desk man took digital photos of both, printed the photos, recorded the Harry Winston serial numbers on their photos, filled out and signed a form, and gave Felix the receipt for the deposit. The watches went into the safe. They’d be returned when the cars were returned. He finished his cigarette, stubbed the butt in the ashtray, and lit a new one with a gold lighter. He exhaled another cloud of smoke.

  “One more thing. Need pictures, each of you. Here please.” One by one, Felix and his guys stood where the attendant showed them to, and he took photos. He checked that these came out okay on his computer screen, printed hard copies and added them to his paper files, saved the data to a backup disk, labeled it by hand, and put the disk into the safe.

  He called out into the rear office area, louder. Another Turk—rather unfriendly and with a knife scar on his cheek to rival Felix’s—appeared soon and took over at the counter. Like the appraiser, he had a big pistol bulging from under his suit jacket.

  The attendant made a downward scooping gesture with one hand, which signified that they follow him. He led Felix’s group through a door, down a dusty cinder-block corridor, then, after punching keys in an electronic lock, through another door.

  They came out into a large, enclosed space in the back-most part of the building. It smelled of fuel and exhaust fumes—both gasoline and diesel—and lubricants. The ceiling lights were harsh, bare, functional fluorescents. The floor, spotted with stains from oil and transmission fluid, was poured concrete. To one side, Felix saw a well-equipped maintenance area, with a hydraulic vehicle lift not now in use. A late-model Audi sat near there, with its front windshield and hood removed.

  Must’ve taken incoming fire, Felix thought. Wonder who the client was.

  And who shot at them.

  Farther on, half a dozen cars were parked as if at an indoor garage, except with more room between them.

  “I suggest this one for your guest.” The car was a 2012-model, sparkling-clean, black Mercedes-Benz sedan. He opened the driver’s door, and showed Felix the window. It was armored, and double glazed. “Other windows all like this.” Felix knew that the double glazing prevented eavesdropping by someone bouncing an infrared laser beam off the glass to catch vibrations from people talking inside the car. Good. “Between glass is vacuum, not air. Protect more for RPGs.” Rocket-propelled grenades. The vacuum would help break up a shaped charge’s supersonic jet of hot gas and molten metal. Very good. “Doors have armor panels, also front, back, top, two layers, stop RPGs. Special plate under chassis absorb even land mines. See? Look.”

  Felix peered under the Mercedes. He saw a plate protecting most of the underside of the vehicle. Ceramic composite. The plate was backed by a sheet of metal formed like bubble pack, designed to crumple and take the force of a blast.

  Felix stood. “No dark window tinting?” This was common on stretch limos used by celebrities, for privacy.

  “I can stick on sheets of tinting quick, but not recommend. Draws attention, and harder for you to see out at night.”

  “Agree, no tinting. . . . What’s this?” Felix pointed to small nozzles in the roof of the passenger compartment.

  “Fire-suppression system. Automatic. Engine space have same. New gas, like halon, but not toxic. . . . This one, good chase car.” The Turk pointed to a dirty, dented jalopy, a brown Hyundai four-door at least ten years old.

  “It looks like it’s been in an accident,” Felix said skeptically.

  The attendant smiled, for the first time. “You blend in. That just sheet metal. Chassis, suspension strengthened, engine new, two hundred fifty horsepower, whole drive train new. Passenger place, engine compartment, boot, all armored.” The “boot” meant the trunk.

  “Petrol tank?” Felix used the British word for gasoline.

  “Main and reserve, total one hundred fifty liters.” About forty gallons. A large supply, even for something so heavy because of all the hidden armoring. “Tanks hard steel with self-sealing rubber bladder inside. Mercedes same. Tires, both cars, bullet resistant.”

  Felix waited while his chief and enlisted man opened the hoods, checked in the trunks, sat in the driver seats. Both cars had manual transmissions, which the men expected and knew how to use. They took electronic instruments from their gym bags, and carefully did a visual inspection and swept for bugs or tracking devices.

  The attendant smiled again. “Professional. Trust no one.”

  Salih got in back in the Mercedes. Felix would drive. Costa was tasked to drive the chase car, with the enlisted man in the front passenger seat. The attendant punched a button and the garage doors at the back of the building opened onto a side street. Traffic was heavier now, because it was getting late in the day and the weekend was starting.

  With the driver’s door ajar, sitting, Felix reached out and offered to shake the attendant’s hand. He switched back to Turkish to close the deal politely.

  “Cok tessekur ederim. Allaha ismarladik.” Thanks very much. Good-bye.

  “Gule gule,” the attendant said. So long. “Hosca kalin.” Stay safe.

  Chapter 35

  Felix could feel his heart pumping almost as hard as it would in combat. In a way, he was in combat. He was trying to negotiate downtown Istanbul traffic in the middle of evening rush hour. The clock on the armored Mercedes’s dashboard, which he’d synchronized to his digital watch, said 5:57 P.M. They still had a lot to do before picking up Klaus Mohr at eight.

  An auto coming the other way, ignoring the lane-dividing line, almost sideswiped Felix as it used a momentary opening on his side of the street. Horns behind Felix blared—at him, for not driving aggressively enough. An accident would cause delays and draw unwanted attention, and make Felix and Salih very vulnerable. Felix wasn’t concerned so much about personal injury. With the vehicle’s hidden armor, on top of its regular air bags, he and Salih were protected. The danger was hurting someone else in a crash, or hitting a reckless pedestrian.

  “The ride’s surprisingly smooth,” Salih said.

  Felix glanced at him in the rearview mirror for an instant. “Good engine mount. You’d never know the power under the hood. And good shocks. Not too stiff, not too mushy.” Both men used English—but accented either Portuguese or Turkish—as the language they had in common according to their cover stories.

  They drove on, following a long-preplanned route. Felix tried to keep an eye on the banged-up Hyundai a few cars behind him, but it wasn’t easy. And Salih couldn’t keep looking out the rear windshield to give him status reports. Though the car was soundproof, a trained observer could still read their lips and watch their movements inside the car; Salih staring backward a lot would be a sure tip-off that he was doing spy tradecraft.

  The odds of a tail at this point were much higher. They’d had to sacrifice their anonymity when they rented the cars, and associated themselves with Awais Iqbal and thus with Klaus Mohr—this step was essential, so that they would appear genuine to German consular security and could pick up Mohr, and Salih could take him to the party that Iqbal had promised. If Mohr has been compromised, Felix thought, hostile action could break out at any moment.

  Besides the Germans and their Russian friends, there were also the Mossad, and Turkish counterespionage forces, to worry about. The chase car did its best to watch for a tail and protect the Mercedes’s rear. But the chase car itself might ha
ve a tail. A few sudden turns would help to check. Felix and his chief had talked this all through in rehearsals.

  At a street Felix was waiting for, he made a sharp right as the cars in front of him ran the red. He circled the block of stores and apartment buildings slowly. His eyes refocused constantly between the steel-and-flesh obstacle course ahead of the car and his mirrors that let him look behind. Sometimes he had to jam on the brakes, or floor the accelerator. He worked the gear shift constantly, mostly moving more slowly than a man could run; a heavy, armored auto had a lot of momentum needing precise control. He and Salih were thrown forward against their seat belts, or shoved back against their headrests, over and over. Felix made another right turn, this time driving with traffic that had the green.

  He slowed for a wayward pedestrian. Shit. In the rearview mirror, he saw that a delivery van behind him wasn’t stopping. That driver hit his brakes and skidded half sideways, blocking oncoming traffic, and more brakes squealed. Angry drivers everywhere made rude gestures at Felix.

  “You have to stop being so nice to people in the road,” Salih said. “No one expects it, least of all that person you were afraid of hitting.”

  “Yeah,” Felix said. “I need to drive more like the locals.”

  Salih threw his head back, raised his eyebrows, and made a loud tsking sound to show sharp disapproval and also remind Felix—by using proper Turkish body language—whom they were not supposed to be: new arrivals. Salih put a hand over his mouth and murmured, “You are a local. Been living in Istanbul a year, remember?”

  Felix caught himself almost nodding American style, but stopped the give-away gesture. He and Salih had to stay fully in character, living their parts every moment. Felix was supposed to be a war refugee, long acclimatized to the ways of Istanbul. My defensive driving habits might ruin everything. He made a sudden, unsignaled right as the light went red in his face. He gunned the engine, scattering natives in the crosswalk.

  “Better,” Salih said under his breath.

  Felix didn’t answer. He was too busy watching other cars. The Hyundai was up ahead. Felix had gone in a circle not just to watch for anyone following his vehicle, but to get behind the chase car for a while, and become the chase car himself.

  With his right hand he patted the MP-5 laid on the seat next to him, covered now by his windbreaker. The feel of its hard metal contours under the thin nylon cloth reassured him; he’d inserted a thirty-round magazine and now there was one in the chamber. The Mercedes, like the Hyundai, had firing ports concealed in the doors. They were covered by a synthetic-fiber cloth akin to Kevlar, which stopped bullets from one side but allowed a weapon muzzle to be shoved through from the other side—this feature of executive-security customized autos went back twenty years.

  They arrived at their next destination. Felix double-parked. He cracked the driver’s door and slid out before he could be sideswiped and squashed. He jogged into a tobacconist’s. Using some of his Turkish paper money, he bought a prepaid calling card, then jogged back to the Mercedes. Traffic now was such a mess that he had to squeeze in on the passenger side, then slide awkwardly over the MP-5 and the transmission hump and gearshift grip to get into his seat.

  This time, gamely, he returned the rude gestures of other drivers. Some shouted insults. Felix was glad he didn’t understand much Turkish. He saw Salih stifling a guffaw.

  “You don’t want to know what some of them called you.”

  Felix nodded his head down once, to agree.

  A couple of blocks later, Felix and the other driver ground to a halt: The chief in the Hyundai had stopped, also double-parked, and was buying himself a calling card at a newsstand kiosk on the sidewalk.

  Two lights farther on, the Hyundai made a hard left. Felix didn’t follow. Instead he watched for trouble, then continued straight ahead. He wanted to become the lead car again. He came to a traffic circle, as expected. He went around twice, again to check for a tail, and to let the Hyundai get in a good position a few cars behind him. A panel truck worked its way in between them. He and the chief lost sight of each other.

  Unless commandos burst out of the back of that truck and start firing antitank launchers at us, we’re fine. Again Felix patted the MP-5; Salih wore his under his jacket, also loaded now. But then Salih doesn’t have to drive. Felix switched on the air-conditioning. He was working up a sweat, just dressed in shirtsleeves.

  He came to another cross street he knew to expect. He turned and drove into a municipal parking garage, while the Hyundai circled the block. Salih stayed in the car with the doors locked, to make sure no one tampered with it.

  Felix, relying solely on the knife concealed on his right calf for self-defense, stretched his legs and walked as casually as he could out of the garage and into a crowded local Internet cafe. He knew the World Wide Web had been badly fragmented by the war. But Turkey was a forward-looking, technology-loving country, and everyone here was wired or wireless. Despite international firewalls and broken cross-border server connections, the Internet within Turkey was heavily used.

  Felix found an unoccupied pay terminal, and inserted his calling card. He went to an e-mail account whose ISP code, account name, and password he’d memorized. The account had been created by an in-country, CIA-connected agent whom Parker told Felix he had no need to know more about. He didn’t check for e-mails, but went directly to the drafts folder. It was empty. None of his two other teams, the men who’d hailed a taxi or the men who’d taken a bus, had checked in yet. Felix changed the account password to something only the SEAL team knew, to prevent unwanted intrusion if the in-country agent was compromised. Felix walked back to his car.

  Different people accessing the same e-mail account and leaving messages for each other as unsent drafts was the latest version of an age-old spycraft tool: the dead drop, a place no snooping third party would think to look. Because the drafts were never sent, they were never scrutinized by the government’s software that monitored e-mail content—and they couldn’t be intercepted in transit by covert adversaries either. The messages are never in transit.

  Near his Mercedes, Felix glanced around, pretending to check for possible muggers—like all big cities, Istanbul had its share of crime. He was really looking for security cameras, or any people in a direct line of sight. Satisfied, he got into the car, put the MP-5 strap over his left shoulder, and donned the windbreaker. Driving now was uncomfortable, but Felix had been through far worse discomfort in training and in battle.

  Felix and Salih left the garage, paying in cash for their short stay. Felix, saw the Hyundai as it circled the block. He wanted, and so allowed, Chief Costa to notice him. By maintaining a neutral expression, instead of giving some other prearranged sign, Felix informed the chief: no word from the other SEALs yet.

  Felix drove to a high-rise luxury hotel, and stopped the Mercedes at the underground valet parking. He told the attendant his passenger was just checking in for now, and they’d need the car again soon. Felix opened the door for Salih, then unlocked the trunk. He took out both gym bags.

  Inside the busy lobby, at ground level, they declined the offer from a bellhop to take their bags. They stood in line at the check-in desk and waited their turn. They again provided the clerk with the name Awais Iqbal, gave the reservation confirmation code that Iqbal had obtained more than a week earlier, and explained the last-minute substitution of Salih for Iqbal. They presented their documents, and the clerk did a quick verification of everything on his computer. Salih paid in advance for the room and for the party buffet with gold South African Krugerrand one-ounce coins. These were readily accepted—the price of gold had skyrocketed since the war, and the coins had long been sold worldwide to investors and collectors. The clerk gave Salih his change in cash, and handed him a plastic key card for the electronic lock to their room. They took the elevator to the twenty-second floor, the highest level. Their room was actually an elaborate corner suite at the end of the corridor, laid out for business entertaining. On
one side out in the hall were emergency stairs. The chief quickly checked them—no surprises.

  The suite immediately next door was already occupied. Through the walls, Felix and Salih could hear music playing, laughter, and loud conversation in Japanese. Felix put his ear to the wall.

  Only men. . . . Their call girls haven’t arrived yet.

  He glanced at his watch. After 7 P.M.

  Felix allowed himself a quick look at the magnificent view, and then pulled the curtains closed. He took a device from his gym bag and did a sweep of the suite for listening devices. Clean.

  The phone rang. Salih answered, then said something in Turkish and hung up. “On his way,” Salih told Felix. In a minute, the enlisted SEAL from the chase car came in, without his gym bag, but with his windbreaker on. Felix knew Chief Costa had dropped the man off nearby and that he’d walked to the hotel. Part of the plan was that he would now change cars to ride with Felix and Salih. All of them went downstairs and out of the hotel, onto the crowded and noisy street. They found another Internet pay terminal. Felix checked again for messages. This time both other teams said they were ready. No acknowledgment was needed; from now on everyone knew what to do. Felix deleted the drafts, then emptied the trash folder.

  They walked to the hotel’s parking garage, picked up the Mercedes, and drove back into Istanbul traffic. They saw the Hyundai with the chief at the place they’d agreed upon; he’d been maneuvering around the area, still watching for hostile agents watching him. Felix let the Hyundai get a few car lengths behind him. Then he set off for his next stop, the German consulate. It was close to Taksim Square, in the heart of the New City, very Westernized and with a very active nightlife.

  Klaus Mohr waited in the lobby of the consulate. After playing every trick card he could—reinforced by brown-nosing and pleading—he’d been given permission to go out with the Turk who was standing in for Awais Iqbal. He’d been ordered not to get the least bit drunk, to take the usual measures against sexual disease, and to save more than adequate energy for his work with the Kampfschwimmer later. He was told in no uncertain terms that he needed to leave the party at midnight, and would be picked up by a consulate car, with security—some of which he’d see, and some of which he wouldn’t. Before he left the consulate, the guard at the desk was to know the exact location of the party . . . and Mohr and this Turk would be tailed there as a further precaution.