“Easy,” said Anna. “It’s like a color scale. Except it’s mostly gray.”
“You got it. In practice, there’s no such thing as A-one. At least not in this world. Most of what we get is C-three. Possibly true information from a fairly reliable source. Middle gray, in other words.”
“My favorite color,” said Anna.
“So the question is: How do we rate your pal, Mr. Ascari?”
“Do you have a category called ‘total, complete asshole’?”
“Afraid not.”
“I’d have to call him an F-six. I don’t know if he’s reliable, and I don’t know if what he says is true.”
“I agree,” said Howard. “F-six he is.” He looked at the form. “Next item: When and where acquired. So I’ll write: London. What’s today’s date?”
“February 25,” said Anna.
Howard wrote the place and date acquired. “Now,” he said, “we need a byline.”
“A what?”
“A brief description of him for the report, right here where it says ‘source.’ ”
“I don’t know,” said Anna, thinking back to the grading exercise of a moment ago. “I guess we ought to call him ‘an Iranian source who claims links with Khomeini’s circle, whose reliability is unproven.’ ”
“Lovely,” said Howard, writing her description word for word. “Now, the juicy stuff.”
“There isn’t much. The source reported a plot by Iranians close to Khomeini to assassinate presidential candidates in the 1980 campaign, including the President and members of his staff, possibly during the presidential nominating campaigns. That’s it.”
“That’s enough, sweetie,” said Howard. “Believe me, that will wake them up back home.”
“What about the fact that he was born in the Soviet Union? Is that a problem?”
“Not with me. Azerbaijanis, Iranians. What’s the difference? But put it down. It will give the CI people something to do. If it bothers anybody, they’ll scream.”
Ascari had indeed pushed the right button. It was almost as if he knew how the American government worked; as if he knew that once an agency of the American government received a threat involving assassination of the President or presidential candidates, the information achieved a different status from ordinary intelligence, so that it was no longer subject to the same standards of evaluation. After Kennedy in 1963, the one thing that no agency of the government wanted to have in its files was an assassination threat it hadn’t acted upon because it seemed too implausible.
Headquarters came roaring back overnight. Immediate, London. Priority. Bells and whistles. They wanted more information as soon as possible from Ascari and authorized aggressive further development of him, including payment of a one-time cash reward of $1,000 for the information provided thus far. They gave him a cryptonym—SDROTTEN, picked at random from a dictionary back at headquarters. And they authorized immediate travel to Istanbul by the officer handling the case, Amy L. Gunderson, who should continue to describe herself as an intermediary to the embassy.
Anna suddenly found that she was a star. Twinkle-eyed Dennis gave her a big kiss when she walked in the next morning. Later in the day, a courier arrived with a “hero-gram” from C/NE, the chief of the Near East Division. “Wish congratulate Gunderson on professional handling of tricky case. Subject of high interest and very timely. Report used in DCI morning notes and in memorandum to director of NFAC.” Best of all, Anna received a personal message from Margaret Houghton, relayed via the London station. How she had learned of the case Anna couldn’t imagine. It said simply: “Well done!” All of which made it very difficult for Anna to do what she had planned—which was to dump Ascari.
The next day a package addressed to Anna Barnes arrived at Halcyon. It was delivered by a courier, but other than the address had no markings. Anna debated what it might contain. New paperwork to support her cover identity? Insurance claim forms from the personnel department? A new training manual? She opened the package eagerly. Inside, to her surprise, she found a dog-eared old book, whose bruises suggested that it had passed through many hands before reaching its current destination. She opened the cover. The book was in a Cyrillic Turkic language, but she wasn’t sure what it was until she saw the publication data on the title page. It read: “Baku, 1967.”
The book was titled Islam din galyglary—Survivals of Islam—written by someone called M. M. Sattarov. She leafed through the pages. It appeared to be a study of current Islamic worship in Azerbaijan, including detailed descriptions of holy shrines and Sufi cults in the Soviet republic. As Anna was turning the pages, a handwritten note fell from the book. She picked it up.
“This would make a handsome gift for your new friend,” read the note. “Good luck in Istanbul.” It was signed: “Stone.”
“Bring me back some Turkish taffy,” said Howard that night, when they met to plan the next phase of the case.
“They don’t have Turkish taffy in Istanbul,” answered Anna.
“Then bring me a Turkish towel.”
“They don’t have those either.”
“Then forget it,” said Howard.
He laid out the plan. “Travel arrangements are your responsibility. Have the administrative people at Halcyon make them. Economy class, please. Put together reasonable cover for the trip. Something economic. And then get your ass over there, pronto, before Ascari goes somewhere else.”
“What about money?”
“Pay him the thousand dollars in cash.”
“He may not think it’s enough. He may want more.”
“Stall him. Tell him you need to check with your friends at the embassy. And tell him that we’re going to want to polygraph him when he gets back to London, if he wants any more money. It’s time to begin reeling this guy in.”
“Can I tell him that I’m CIA?”
“No. You’re a NOC, for chrissake.”
“Please, Howard. I really think it would be better. He already knows it anyway.”
“He doesn’t know it,” said Howard. “He suspects it. Which is different. What does it matter anyway?”
“It matters to me,” said Anna, struggling for a way to explain the special problems she had with Ascari without sounding like a whiner. “Look, I’ll be honest,” she said. “If he knows I’m agency, then maybe he won’t try so hard to hustle me. He’ll treat me as an intelligence officer, rather than as a sex object.”
“Oh, that,” said Howard dubiously. “I can check with headquarters, but they seemed pretty adamant about maintaining the fig leaf. They’re not likely to change their minds. Unless there’s a real problem.” He said “real problem” as if it were a kind of disease.
“No,” sighed Anna. “I guess it’s okay.” She put her head in her hands.
“What’s the matter, honey?” asked Howard, trying to be supportive. “You got the jitters?”
“It’s not that,” said Anna. “I’m just not sure I should be handling this guy.”
“Why not? You’re doing great so far.”
“No, I’m not. I’m doing a lousy job. The chemistry is wrong. What did you call it the other day? Rapport. There isn’t any rapport.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I hate the guy. I think he’s an obnoxious prick, and I’d be happy never to see him again.”
“Look,” said Howard. “You’re not marrying him. You’re just developing him. And so far, you’re doing great! Cheer up. You’re a star.”
“He gives me the creeps.”
“Tell you what,” said Howard, putting his arm around Anna. “If you still feel the same way after the Istanbul meet, we’ll see about handing him off to someone in the embassy. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Anna. She took a deep breath. “One more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“What do I do if there’s an emergency?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. If there’s a problem in Istanbul. With Ascari. If I need to co
mmunicate with you or headquarters.”
“Call the base chief in Istanbul. His name is Taylor. We’ll send him a cable letting him know you’re in his neck of the woods. And we’ll work out some kind of recognition code before you leave. But don’t call him unless it’s an emergency. It’s insecure.”
“Okay,” said Anna.
“Don’t worry, for chrissake!” said Howard. “You’ll do fine. Just don’t fuck up.” He laughed heartily. Anna tried to join in, but she couldn’t muster even a chuckle.
15
Anna arrived in Istanbul late in the afternoon, landing in a bank of sooty gray smog that covered the airport and stretched across the Bosporus to Anatolia. The airport had the militarized look of the Third World: watchtowers and barbed wire lining the runways; poor enlisted men standing guard in the winter chill, freezing their asses off so that the generals could pretend they were in control of things. And everywhere, the dust and debris that settles in public places in the Third World, and the surging crowds that cannot be contained in orderly lines.
For a woman traveling alone, arriving in a Third World city is never easy. There are too many eyes watching, too many hands reaching out for your baggage, too many taxicab drivers barking for your fare. For Anna that day, these ordinary indignities were magnified. The tight little man at passport control spent too long examining her passport—studying the document, looking at her face, checking the passport again, consulting a watch list of passport numbers. Anna tried to remain impassive, to give nothing away—not even a nervous smile—but her knees felt weak. Finally he stamped the document and waved her through.
Anna collected her bag and headed for the green “nothing to declare” line. The customs man pulled her over. Was she so obvious? Had she inadvertently caught his eye, inviting examination with that guilty look that makes a customs officer’s job so easy? Or was it just that she was a woman traveling alone, and therefore suspect? He searched her suitcase, pawing through her clothes, and then sent her on. A scrofulous old porter lunged for her bag and carried it to the door of the terminal; she didn’t have any Turkish money, so she gave him a British pound note, and when he complained, she gave him another.
When she finally found a taxi and settled onto the fake leopard-skin seat, she wanted to scream. Her spirits lifted a bit on the way in from the airport. Through the smog she could recognize the outlines of the landscape: the rusty freighters riding at anchor in the Sea of Marmara; the jumble of cars and boats and people at the Galata Bridge.
Istanbul looked a mess. Anna was amazed at how much the city had deteriorated in the two years since she had been there. It had the weary look of a capital under siege: faded political posters covering every wall; the tinny sound of cheap loudspeakers broadcasting political propaganda in squares and intersections; security men who stared at you in lobbies and on elevators. Anna remembered the old saw. All Turkish men were the same: “Two eyes and a mustache.” That much hadn’t changed.
She checked into a hotel in Taksim—middle-range, not too fancy, not too seedy—and bought several Turkish newspapers on her way upstairs and read them in her room. The front page of each paper was dominated by stories about terrorism. Cumhuriyet decried the bombing of a leftist bookstore in Istanbul. Tercuman denounced a raid on a rightist coffeehouse in Malatya. It was as if the whole country had slipped a gear.
Anna decided against calling Ascari that first night. The timing had been left open in the operational plan, depending on how she felt. And she felt terrible. She didn’t want to talk to a soul, not even the Turkish chambermaid who tried to be nice when she saw that Anna was alone. She ordered dinner from room service, watched a game show on Turkish television, and then turned to the book she had brought along: a copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that her father had given her years before, when she entered graduate school. She made it as far as the seventh quatrain before dozing off.
Anna didn’t call Ascari the next morning either. She was still without her bearings. It wasn’t that she didn’t know the city. Anna had covered every inch of Istanbul two years before—when she spent the summer there doing thesis research in the archives—but that was in another lifetime, when she was still an innocent, if somewhat bored, graduate student and Istanbul was a playground.
Anna decided while eating her breakfast—still in her room—that she would visit one of her old haunts in the city. The Basbakanlik Archives, where she had done her research: perhaps the archival tea room, where she had picked up the Turkish professor. She might even do a little research on Ottoman relations with the princely families of old Baku. And then, with her feet firmly on the ground, she would call Ali Ascari.
“Topkapi Sarayi, Lutfen,” she told the taxi driver. After twenty minutes of cutting and weaving through traffic, they reached the walls of Topkapi Palace, and from there she walked the few dozen yards to the gray pile that housed the archival records of the Grand Viziers, the prime ministers of the Ottoman Empire. This gloomy building had been Anna’s favorite spot in Istanbul, for it contained the elements that made the city so mysterious, and so comical. Anna flashed her old reader’s pass at the main door and headed for the reading room.
The Basbakanlik reading room was a scene that might have been imagined by a Levantine Charles Dickens. It was run by an old woman, inevitably dubbed the “dragon lady” by visiting foreign scholars, whose greatest pleasure seemed to lie in denying researchers access to archival materials. Often, she didn’t have to bother, since the cataloguing was so haphazard and erratic that it was difficult to find things at all. The Germans had made a stab at cataloguing the archives during the several decades when they played Big Brother to the Turks, but even the Germans had given up. As a result, there were tens of thousands of documents, handwritten in Ottoman Turkish script, some of them dating back to the fourteenth century. But no one was ever sure exactly where they were. The only certainty was that anything politically sensitive—anything involving sticky moments with the Armenians or Bulgars or Greeks, for example—had been pulled from the shelves.
Not that a researcher could visit the shelves. That was against the rules. The dragon lady would send one of her minions to the storage depot where most of the records were kept to retrieve the requested volume, assuming it was permitted, assuming it could be found. Many other things were against the rules, too. Indeed, there was a formal list of twenty-one rules in legalistic Turkish posted on the wall of the Basbakanlik reading room. “It is forbidden to use pens in the reading room, only pencils; except for document-request forms, which must be signed in ink.” “It is forbidden for researchers to leave Turkey for more than a month without permission.” And so forth. But these weren’t all the rules; there were others, which weren’t posted. You had to guess at what they were.
Anna surveyed the reading room: It hadn’t changed in two years. The twenty-one rules were still posted on the wall; the dragon lady was still in her booth; the closed-circuit TV camera still panned the room, with its uncanny habit of focusing on women researchers every time they uncrossed their legs. And at the library tables, as ever, sat a half dozen glassy-eyed foreign researchers, staring at Ottoman texts.
Basbakanlik had its contingent of Turkish researchers, too, and of all the strange characters in the reading room, these were Anna’s favorites. They were mostly “professional” historians—old men who had mastered the nuances of reading Ottoman Turkish and hired themselves out to scholars. These Turkish researchers sometimes took years to complete their tasks. Part of the reason for the slow pace was that the old men spent much of the day sleeping. As Anna scanned the room, she could see four or five “professional” historians who had nodded off.
“Ufuk!” whispered Anna, spotting a familiar face walking toward her. It was Ufuk Celebi, one of the dragon lady’s assistants. During Anna’s three months at Basbakanlik, Ufuk had been Anna’s page turner. (Foreign researchers were not allowed to turn the pages of Ottoman documents; that was another of the rules.) When Anna had left Is
tanbul at the end of the summer, she had bought her page turner a box of Belgian chocolates. “Ufuk,” she said again. He turned toward her, still not recognizing her.
“Shhh,” he said. “What do you want, please?”
Anna debated whether to introduce herself and decided against it. “I’m looking for a manuscript,” she said.
Ufuk eyed her curiously. “Ask at desk,” he said, pointing to the twenty-one rules.
“They take so long at the desk. Maybe you can help me. I want to see the Azerbaijan papers. The correspondence between the Sublime Porte and Baku.”
“Sorry, closed. These papers are all closed.”
“But do you have them?”
“Ask at desk,” repeated Ufuk.
The hell with him, thought Anna. She decided that she would have tea in the Basbakanlik Tea Room. It was a jolly little room, with the ambience of a nineteenth-century Balkan railway station. Here, too, nothing had changed. It was the same collection of horny graduate students, balding professors, crackpot Armenians and sleepy Turks. Anna had a cup of tea and a sweet roll. There was no sign of the charming Turkish professor who had enlivened her summer two years ago. But a German man in his early thirties spied Anna across the room, sat down beside her, and tried to pick her up. The German was very earnest and boyish. Anna indulged him just enough to get a buzz, and then ignored him. He left looking stricken.
Anna returned to her hotel fortified to do what she had been dreading and call Ali Ascari at the Istanbul Hilton. She sat down on the edge of her bed, pen in hand, notepaper on the side table. The first time, Ascari’s line was busy. The second time, she reached him.
“Marhaba,” he answered in Arabic. He must have been expecting an Arab caller.
“Mr. Ascari,” said Anna. “This is Allison James.”
“Who?” Maybe that was a good sign. He didn’t remember her.
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