Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  Mohr worked to behave naturally now. The lobby guards weren’t paying him any special attention. They had no reason to. On the contrary, they’d been warned to act naturally themselves, alert but nonchalant, despite unmistakable changes in the work rhythms and moods of the senior staff. Though they didn’t know the reason for their instructions on how to behave, Mohr did: No clues could be allowed to leak about Pandora and the stepped-up timing of the Afrika Korps offensive.

  If these guards only knew . . . But there are also surveillance cameras in the lobby, monitored by hard men who do know. Mohr forced himself to not keep looking at his watch or the clock on the wall, or right at a camera. The Turk who was supposed to meet him was late. He’d received no last-minute confirmation that the stag party, the whole extraction plan, was still on. He could think of a dozen things that might have gone wrong, things he wouldn’t have heard about or been told about.

  There was still the danger that his loyalty was suspect, and that he was being entrapped.

  The worst of it was that only Mohr himself understood what would really have to be done to halt Pandora. His rescuers, if they even arrived, had no idea of what was truly called for, and no conception of how narrow the margin of time had suddenly become.

  Mohr tried to redirect his concern and doubt into a difficult masquerade: He was supposed to be bound for a lecherous night on the town, to lustfully celebrate his legal separation from a now thoroughly estranged wife. He was supposed to also be on the verge of the final fruition of his astounding technical genius, putting into practical effect breakthroughs he’d spent his entire career on. Hurrah for the Fatherland! Long live the kaiser! Mohr felt bitter about how he’d been used for years by the coup conspirators, and about how he’d let himself be used.

  Someone came into the lobby from outside. Mohr looked up hopefully, his chest tight—but it was only a minor consulate employee.

  A few minutes later one of the guards at the outer gate came inside. Again Mohr held his breath. The man popped into the rest room near the lobby, then went back to his post.

  Mohr couldn’t help but glance at the clock. It was 8:25.

  The desk guard read his mind.

  “Probably just traffic.”

  Mohr nodded. He hoped so. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

  The gate guard came inside again. Mohr’s heart skipped a beat. But the guard murmured to the desk guard about something Mohr couldn’t hear. Neither of them even looked in his direction. They murmured together further. Mohr shifted his attention to the doors. He reminded himself that to act impatient at this point would be normal. Not being annoyed by the delay could give him away. He heard the desk guard typing on his computer.

  The gate guard went to the armored glass doors leading back outside. Mohr felt utterly crestfallen. He swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple hurt, making a noise he was sure both guards could hear. The gate guard stopped abruptly. He turned to Mohr, with the door propped half open against his back. Now Mohr could barely breathe.

  “Herr Mohr, your ride is here.”

  Mohr almost wobbled, weak kneed, as he got up. He realized with a mix of exhilaration and fear that the gate guard was standing there to politely hold the door for him.

  A Mercedes-Benz with a driver and another man in front idled by the curb, in the restricted parking zone outside the consulate compound’s security wall. A third man, with dark skin and a thick black mustache, was standing on the sidewalk. He was shorter than Mohr by at least twenty centimeters—about eight inches—and had a heavier, stockier build.

  He saw Mohr, smiled, approached, and greeted Mohr in fluent German. They got into the back of the Mercedes, and fastened their seat belts. The driver barged his way into traffic.

  “Herr Iqbal again sends his apologies. I think you’ll get everything you expected without him, though. I intend to take good care of you.”

  “You speak German very well.”

  The Turk sighed. “I used to live in Frankfurt. I was a building engineer.”

  Mohr wasn’t sure what to say next. Was this supposed to be some sort of code he hadn’t been told about? Who knew what messages hadn’t gotten through to him the past few days?

  “The consulate guards know where I’m going, but I don’t myself. Where are we going?”

  “Hotel Mercure.”

  Mohr was impressed—one of the finest in Istanbul.

  The driver narrowly beat a red light, and a pedestrian made a rude gesture. The driver mumbled something that sounded vaguely like Italian but wasn’t. The other person in front grunted in response.

  “These men work for you?”

  “Rent-a-guards, like the car. Refugees from Portugal.”

  “You speak Portuguese?”

  “I talk to them in English. They understand it enough.”

  Mohr nodded. The motion was jerky; his muscles were tight from nerves.

  The Turk took a calendar book out of a jacket pocket, and made some notes in the back with a felt-tip pen. He held the book open in his lap, well below the level of the car windows, and aimed it at Mohr. Darkness had fallen, and the New City streets near Taksim Square were well lit. Enough light came into the car for Mohr to see.

  Mohr saw, for some reason written in English, “Quiet until hotel.” Then he understood. The Turk had used English to make it look like an improvised phrase book meant for the bodyguards.

  Tradecraft every step of the way. God knows who’s following us besides my own security backup . . .

  No. They’re not my own anymore. From here on, other Germans are the enemy.

  Once back in the hotel suite, Felix turned on the stereo. He tuned the radio to a Turkish talk show, and turned the volume up until it was very loud. The enlisted SEAL did another sweep for bugs: clean. A buffet of food had been laid out at the bar area during their absence, along with a big urn of coffee.

  Klaus Mohr sat on a couch, next to Salih. No one spoke. Costa arrived; he’d left the Hyundai in a public garage nearby. He whispered gently in Felix’s ear, “Two cars were tailing you. Both had two occupants. Looked like German toughs. One car parked in the hotel garage; I expect that’s the one that’ll pick up Mohr later. The driver’s sitting, I guess to be on call in case this party ends early or Mohr doesn’t like it. The other car’s circling, as if to keep up roving surveillance around the hotel.” He quickly told Felix the make of the cars, their colors, and their license-plate numbers. Felix memorized the information and shot Costa a thumbs-up.

  Costa had a remarkable knack for vehicle surveillance and countersurveillance—one reason he was on the team. Costa had also had an unfair advantage over the Germans. Felix drove Mohr and Salih from the consulate to the hotel using a preplanned route with features that would force any tailing vehicles to exhibit tradecraft—which would show to someone with Costa’s trained eye. And since both SEAL cars knew the route to the hotel, they could sometimes split up and then get back together, giving Costa relative mobility even in traffic. But the Germans needed to stay glued to the auto with Klaus Mohr, if they were to provide Mohr with constant protection while in the streets.

  Soon Chief Porto and four more enlisted SEALs came in, singly or in pairs. The whole team was assembled.

  The house phone rang. Salih answered, spoke, hung up.

  He grinned.

  There was another knock. Salih went to the peephole, then opened the door to the suite. Three very attractive, well-dressed young women came in. Salih talked to them rapidly in Turkish, and offered each a large amount of cash. The women seemed surprised, but not for long. They took the money, giggled, piled plates with food from the buffet, and went into one of the bedrooms and closed the door. Soon Felix heard male voices and music coming from there, in between the Turkish men speaking on the radio, and the muffled noise of the Japanese next door—both sexes now, sounding very intoxicated.

  Our own call girls are watching a movie or TV show. One of Felix’s teams had been tasked to arrange for the high-class hookers,
by asking around among local taxi drivers for a recommendation, suitable for entertaining a diplomat, and then making a pay-phone call. Felix went into the other two bedrooms, and turned on music on the radios, different stations. He turned on more music in the kitchenette next to the bar and buffet.

  Porto took small tools from his bag, opened the hallway door halfway, and worked for a minute on the electronic lock. He let the door slam shut. An enlisted SEAL went through the door to the bedroom area and closed it behind him; Porto put his ear to that door. Satisfied, he stepped back, glanced at Felix, and nodded. The internal door was soundproof, as advertised.

  “It’s okay to talk now,” Felix said in English. “Don’t raise your voice above the radios. I made them loud in case we missed any bugs. Just let the Turkish chatter and the music flow, and talk under it.”

  “What did you do to the door?” Mohr asked.

  Felix hadn’t expected the question. Then he remembered that Mohr was supposed to be a techie. “The lock has an electromagnet, right? And all room locks are wired to a central processor, so hotel people can change key-card combinations from downstairs when someone checks out.”

  “Yes.”

  “The door acts like a sounding board. When vibrating, trace currents from that lock could be used to eavesdrop on this room.”

  Mohr smiled weakly, interested in the shoptalk but taken aback by the need for such heavy precautions. “I had not considered that.”

  “We did. Part of our job.”

  “And those women?”

  “Iqbal promised you an orgy. They’re the orgy. Just in case someone unfriendly is keeping tabs from in the lobby, or bribed one of the reception clerks. Everything has to look legit, so we don’t raise any alarms too soon.”

  “You seem to have thought of everything.”

  “Now is where we start to get more free form.”

  “What do you mean? Who are you?”

  Felix sensed that Mohr was becoming depressed. Here he is at last in American hands, and instead of bugle calls and parades it’s all so furtive and matter-of-fact. Parker and Salih told me to watch for this.

  Felix wasn’t sympathetic. He had to stay suspicious of the guy. This meet could still be a setup. Felix needed to act a part, and he psyched himself up. Parker had told him bluntly to use the drama of the moment—the initial contact—to establish rapport in case Mohr was genuine.

  “Allow me to introduce myself. Lieutenant Felix Estabo, U.S. Navy SEALs.” Felix shook hands with Mohr as warmly as he could, and gave him his most sincere, endearing smile. “You have no idea how much we and our government appreciate everything you’re doing, Klaus.” He used Mohr’s given name to speed their bonding. “Call me Felix, please.”

  “Yes, all right, Felix.”

  Felix introduced the members of his team, and Mohr shook hands all around.

  “Let’s dig in. We need the sustenance. Klaus, why don’t you go first.”

  Everyone loaded plates and grabbed hot coffee and started eating. The SEALs made sure to behave with quiet confidence; they’d been briefed to let Mohr feel he held center stage, while reassuring him that they’d come well prepared and could handle every aspect of the high-risk defector rescue. Mohr saw this, and after a few bites quickly perked up.

  “What time are your keepers supposed to collect you?” Felix asked.

  “Midnight. How did you know they’d do it that way?”

  “Professional surmise. That’s how we’d handle it if we were them. Then they take you to the safe house?”

  “Yes. More surmise?”

  “That, plus the info Iqbal could get to us.”

  Mohr thought for a moment. “Now I understand better. He asked me certain specifics, indirectly.”

  Felix nodded, then told him things that had stopped being secret anyway. Again, Mohr needed to know that the Americans were competent . . . plus, it wouldn’t hurt to pointedly remind him of who his friends were. “When your brothel acquaintance fled town after that attempted Mossad hit, it really put our side on the spot. Your last message to us got through, but the lady’s comm plan with you went out the window when she did. Let’s just say other assets were called into play, and it was rough when we found out the consulate had you under close confinement. We did what we could in a hurry. The main thing is, it worked.”

  Mohr nodded. Everyone finished eating and put the dirty dishes aside. They huddled around a glass coffee table. Costa took writing tablets and pens out of his gym bag. Porto produced a cigarette case and a lighter, lit several cigarettes, and let them smolder in a couple of handy ashtrays.

  “Use single sheets of paper,” Felix told Mohr, “placed directly on the glass, to leave no impressions on the underneath sheets of a pad. . . . This is flash paper. Touch it with a burning cigarette, it’s useless ash in a split second.”

  “I understand.”

  “Now, we have very little time for you to tell us everything you know about this safe house, the people who’ll be in it, and this unusual equipment of yours.”

  Chapter 36

  At first Felix had trouble believing the things Mohr said his equipment at the safe house could do. This set off red flags immediately. Felix’s orders were to insist on a summary of what Mohr offered the Allies. He was to judge how forthcoming Mohr behaved now that a gesture of good faith had been made to him—by the U.S. sending the SEALs—and abort the extraction at once if anything at all seemed fishy. Force protection came first. Felix and his team were not to unnecessarily endanger themselves, Salih or Parker, the captured German minisub, or USS Challenger without at least some up-front testing of Mohr’s credibility.

  But sitting on the couch in the suite, Mohr rattled off unclassified research going back decades. He referred repeatedly to Albert Einstein’s own expression from the 1930s, “spooky action at a distance.” To check this all out, Felix sent Porto to use an Internet pay terminal with its choice of search engines, to verify that these published theories and lab experiments were real. The suite itself had good computer equipment, but Felix had no intention of even touching it. Porto came back, and reported that everything Mohr had said was true.

  Meanwhile, Costa went downstairs, retrieved the Mercedes by using the claim check Felix had given him, made sure to elude any tail, and then drove to the quiet top level of a different garage. He exchanged the license plates on the Mercedes for a different set from his gear bag, then used special aerosol cans to put a lot of dust on the car, and road dirt around the fenders and wheel wells. This step was necessary since the Germans surely knew the Mercedes from when it had picked up Mohr; when Costa was finished it looked very different. He put on a disguise, drove the car into the underground garage at the Hotel Mercure, and went back upstairs.

  It was getting late, and the briefing had to end. In an unused bedroom with a private bath, Klaus Mohr stripped and took a shower. He dressed again, and combed his hair, but left his hair slightly damp on purpose. Back by the bar, he took a few puffs of a cigarette, then swirled some Turkish liqueur in his mouth and spat it out in the kitchenette sink.

  This is all what my bodyguards will expect.

  During the briefing, the SEAL leader Felix had sent men off to run errands now and then; some of them returned and some didn’t. The briefing involved a lot of sketching of the safe house, answering piercing questions from Felix’s chiefs about the Kampfschwimmer and their weapons, and thinking through each step of a hasty assault. Mohr gave a detailed description of what his field-equipment modules and special tool kit looked like. Salih discussed with him, at length, the personalities and attitudes of the individual Kampfschwimmer in the team they’d be going up against.

  Extensive map work followed, choosing routes of approach and escape, picking places to meet if the team got split up, and deciding where Mohr should wait—somewhere well outside the line of fire.

  Now, Felix looked Mohr up and down.

  “Remember, Klaus, you’re a warrior, and you aren’t alone. We’ll be ri
ght behind you. Just make sure you don’t lose that knockout pen, and for the love of God don’t use it on yourself by mistake.”

  “Yes.”

  The chief named Costa and one of his men departed, to get a head start. Then Felix put on a false beard and eyeglasses, so the guards wouldn’t recognize him from before, and told Mohr to give him five minutes. Felix and the other SEALs walked out.

  In the suite, the radios still played and the call girls still watched TV. It was just before midnight. Mohr left and took an elevator to the lobby. One of the bodyguards from the consulate came into the lobby by a different elevator from the underground parking garage. Without a word Mohr followed him, and got in the back of a dark blue BMW luxury sedan. As Felix had told him to, he sat behind the guard who was in the front passenger seat, and he didn’t buckle his seat belt.

  Felix drove the dirtied-up Mercedes while Porto used the front passenger seat and Salih sat in back. Costa and his enlisted man were in the Hyundai. Mohr had said the safe house was in a run-down neighborhood on the far side of the Old City. The Kampfschwimmer team and their gear were due to be back from their latest field test by eight P.M., to allow for possible delays in their getting there to meet Mohr. Felix was unhappy because this precluded his team from arriving at the safe house first, to ambush the Germans unawares while still outside, or to even just send a point-man observer to do a head count and size things up.

  Felix worried that the schedule had been set by the Germans for exactly this reason. Maybe they’d been tipped off to expect an attack tonight—perhaps tipped off by Klaus Mohr himself, or perhaps because Awais Iqbal was a double agent really owned by the Germans, not the CIA. Felix knew nothing of Iqbal but hearsay. Mohr’s unclassified technical references, since they were public information, by their nature didn’t conclusively prove yet that he deserved Felix’s trust; they just suggested that he might be of very high value if he was honest about his achievements and actually meant to defect.