“Good morning,” he responded groggily, his eyes still closed.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” said a vaguely familiar voice on the other end. Suddenly, he popped up as if he had been prodded with a poker. He opened his eyes to see if he might still be dreaming. The voice sounded just like Patricia’s. Hope flooded his heart.
“Dad, are you there? Hello, can you hear me?”
“Gwyn, is that you?”
“Daddy, of course it’s me. Have you forgotten what my voice sounds like?”
“How could I, darling? It’s so much like your mother’s.”
“I hate to call so early, but I just got a text from Gilbert. He says he has a two-hour layover on Tuesday. Maybe you could steal away from the conference for a couple of hours, and we could meet him at the airport around three o’clock.”
“He could have given us a bit of forewarning, don’t you think?”
“Dad, come on, you know what his work schedule is like. It isn’t easy being at the beck and call of the board of directors. They’ve run him ragged the last two months. I’m sure he only just found out himself.”
“Just what an over-achiever like Gilbert needs, a slave driver for a CEO.”
Are they any different from the Caesars, Emperors, Kings and Sultans?
“Wait a minute, I thought you were flying to Dallas on Wednesday and driving out to see family for your vacation.”
“I am, but I changed my departure. I managed to get a seat on a Tuesday night flight as well, a couple of hours after Gilbert’s departure, so I can just come early and hang out in the airport with you after he leaves. It’ll give us a chance to catch up.”
“I hate to skip out on conference sessions, but it’s been a while since the three of us got together.”
“Come on, Dad. It’ll just be the afternoon.”
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
“The usual place?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll send Gilbert a text right now to confirm.”
“All right, darling. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”
“Bye, Daddy. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
He hung up the phone, turned around and looked down at Never Never land. The sheets were a tangled mess. It hardly looked like the place of his dreams, but he only dreamed of her here in this room. He would have gladly lain back down and tried his luck again. It never worked. He knew that he would have better odds with a lottery ticket. He glanced at the clock. It was almost six. It was a bit early, but he needed to shave and shower. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to be there early to see if everything was ready for the conference. Maybe he could catch Dr. Brown and ask him to take a look at his mysterious letter. He stood in the shower with his eyes closed just enjoying the jets of hot water pulsing against his face. He was replaying the dream over in his mind. Then, his face broke into a smile. He knew now where he had seen that dress she had been wearing. It had been her wedding dress.
Zeki had finished his prayers, taken his shower and reviewed his notes. The plenary address would be given at ten o’clock followed by a lecture on Byzantine graffiti, a sequel to the conference theme three years ago. Then, there would be a break for lunch, and he would be leading one of the break-out sessions in the afternoon. He had not even bothered to open the curtains, but the lack of light seeping in around the edges confirmed what the ache in his left shoulder had foretold the evening before. It was going to be another rainy day in London.
He placed his notes back in his briefcase, grabbed his navy blue overcoat and was about to head for the elevator when suddenly he stopped, took a piece of hotel stationary out of the complimentary folder on desk and tore off a piece no bigger than his thumbnail.
This is silly
.
There is no risk here.
He threw the tiny piece of paper in the bathroom trash and started to walk out the door, but when the paper hit the trash can, it exploded in his mind, sending him hurtling back to an episode that had happened on an August day over twenty years ago.
It was 1986 in Sanliurfa, his first field assignment in the Southeast. The escalating violence was straining the resources of the Turkish intelligence infrastructure and analysts like himself were hastily pressed into field ops out of necessity. He had been given a short six-week crash course in field operations and put on a bus with a new identity card. The proverb ‘haste is an invitation to the devil’ proved once again its sagacity.
Their mission was to pinpoint the routes used by the PKK to transport narcotics, the primary source of funding for the Kurdish separatist group. The safe house he was using was on the second floor of a four-storey building. The knowledge that any of the people he saw on the street or even the doorman might in fact be with the enemy was unnerving, and it had taken some time for him to get used to it.
He had completed his casual reconnaissance in an area on the Syrian border where his cover was acting as a wholesale buyer of livestock for an Istanbul slaughterhouse. He climbed the stairs and was pulling the key out of his pocket when he saw that the tiny piece of paper he had slid into the door jamb just below the hinge was lying on the floor. The memory was startling in its vividness. His stomach knotted, his mouth went dry and his heart began pounding from the tiny injection of adrenaline this observation had triggered. He had a visitor, somebody who probably wanted him dead.
His first thought had been to get out of the building as quickly as possible. Then he realized there might be someone outside watching the entrance. If he left, that would tip them off, so he walked down to the apartment of the building attendant on the ground floor, explained that he had lost his key and asked to use the restroom. All he had been doing was stalling, trying to collect his thoughts. When he came out of the restroom, he knew that the time for decorum was past. He would never see this building attendant again. He smiled at the man, asked for a drink of water, turned and walked into the family kitchen, opened the window and jumped through it into the alley. He could still remember the look of bewilderment and fear on the man’s face caused by the sudden realization that something was dreadfully wrong.
Zeki had gone to a pay phone and called in an anonymous tip to the security forces. According to protocol, he should have made a quick exit, immediately informed his superiors so that they could warn other operatives in the area, and made his way back to Ankara as best he could without doing further damage to his cover or contacting other field ops. Too new to understand the stakes, he failed to follow protocol. His desire to know what would happen, to know who was targeting him, to know that they were neutralized or brought to justice, blinded him. The rage that rose in his heart at the thought that somebody might actually be targeting him, and the fear he had felt standing in front of that door, prevented him from thinking clearly. If he had known then what he knew now, he would have realized that the price of knowledge can be a horrible price to pay.
Back then, there had been a rooftop teahouse at the end of the block on the opposite side of the street. He moved quickly, careful not to draw attention to himself. He had found a seat in the shade of the grape arbor near the edge of the flat roof and ordered tea. The entire city and the surrounding Anatolian plain lay before him, fuzzy because of the heat waves rising from the sunbaked buildings and farmland. It was a sweltering summer day. The heat-induced lethargy that seemed to hang over the city was a stark contrast to the apprehension and fear that gripped him. He reached for the glass of tea the waiter set on the table and realized his hands were shaking, so quickly set it back down in the saucer and turned to look down on the street.
Çevik Küvvet
, the Turkish SWAT team, had arrived within minutes and immediately secured the entire block. Snipers were placed on the roofs of the buildings in front of and behind his apartment and then Hakan, Mustafa, Cengiz and Gökhan entered the building. He did not, of course, know their names until afterwards when his Commander forced him to read the autopsy report in Ankara. Several shots were fired, he heard shouting and then there was a deafening explosion. Two more teams immediately entered the building, but it was over. Another Kurdish Marxist infidel had chosen death over torture and had taken the lives of seven others, two of them children in the apartment next door. The report indicated that Gökhan suffered for a week in the hospital, but that the others had died instantly.
Zeki never found out how he had been compromised. The reports seemed to suggest that another operative in Hakkari was the lead domino because one of his informants turned out to be a PKK double-agent. Somehow, his sloppiness was to blame. He had been found dead in his apartment the next morning. The time of death had been several hours before the explosion in Sanliurfa. One of their best men in Diyarbakir had also been shot on the street in broad daylight within an hour after the explosion, which had brought the death toll to nine—six officers and three civilians.
The whole thing had been a fiasco. Zeki received a minor reprimand from his boss that never even went into his record. The bureau chief was a man who recognized talent and knew it would ruin his career. Zeki understood, all too clearly, the mistakes he had made, and vowed never to repeat them. He could have just walked away from the safe-house, told his superiors he had been compromised and ask for a new assignment, depriving the nameless Kurdish terrorist of his moment of glory and leaving him to sit in that apartment until he ran out of food.
He could have let MIT deal with the problem in their own way though he wondered if they would have risked ‘outing’ an operative just to eliminate one Kurdish terrorist. He should have informed his superiors so that they could have dispersed their team, but the PKK moved immediately to eliminate his colleague, and both he and his superiors knew it might not have made a difference since the hits had obviously been planned as simultaneous actions. Still, it had been a breach of protocol and it ended his career as a field operative in the Southeast. He had been brought back to a desk job in Ankara for six months before getting his next field assignment in Cyprus.
Zeki stared blankly at the trash can. It slowly came back into focus as consciousness of his surroundings returned. He was in London now, far removed from the events that had taken place over two decades ago.
Was it fiasco or fate
, he wondered again for the umpteenth time.
Does my faith leave room for human error?
He stood there at the door in the hotel room twenty years later wondering if Omar Khayyam’s soul-searching analysis of theology might not have some validity.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
He liked Fitzgerald’s English rendition. The same stanza in Turkish was so very different, which was why he always had wanted to read it in Persian. In fact, one of his goals had been to learn the language just so that he could read the
Rubaiyat
in the original. After Diyarbakir, MIT never allowed him to work in their eastern theatre of operations again and so he never had the chance.
He glanced around to make sure there was no one in the hallway as he bent down and slipped the tiny piece of paper into the door jamb just under the hinge and slowly closed the door so that only about two millimeters were visible. Fate or no, he would stick with his training.
As he stood waiting for the elevator, he remembered the families of the four officers killed in the explosion. He had not been able to visit them officially, but he had learned the names and addresses of each one. Fortunately, only two of the officers had been married and only Gökhan had children, a four-year-old son named Orhan and a two-year-old daughter named Bengi. Zeki still carried their pictures in his wallet. He had been at Orhan’s high school graduation ceremony and still made a deposit in their mother’s bank account once every three months under a different name and from a different branch every time. The elevator door opened and he stepped back into the real world where stomachs growled at breakfast.