Deception (18 page)

Besides, the suite was comfortable: part of the Four Seasons of Istanbul, an Ottoman building located in the shadow of the Blue Mosque. The décor was vaguely Asian, with tasteful prints on the walls, fluted vases on nearly every open surface, and pristine light-gray carpeting. The suite felt clean, quiet, and, after her recent adventures, almost decadently luxurious.

Instead of leaving, Hannah moved to the minibar. She fixed herself a vodka tonic and carried it to one of the beds. She lay down, closing her eyes, enjoying the whisper of the air-conditioning and the smell of fresh-cut flowers. It beat prison, she thought.

Yet it was crazy.

The man was dangerous. And she would never be able to get away with … whatever it was she was getting away with. Playing the role the man had assigned to her, when she didn't even know what the role was.

In a moment, she would find her courage. Then she would stand up. She would take her chances. In a moment …

The door opened.

The man came into the room. He set down the packages in his arms, raised his eyebrows at her, and said nothing. He went to the bathroom, with the leather bag still looped around his shoulder—her purse, she figured, was in that bag—and shut the door.

A few seconds passed; she heard the shower beginning to run.

She looked at the packages. Then she looked at the door of the suite. This was her chance.

She looked back at the packages. Her mouth made the funny shape again, and she reached for them.

2.

“You do the honors,” she said.

Judging from the man's facility with the ordering, he had spent time in this part of the world before. He asked to see the fish before it was cooked, as if this was a natural request, and the waiter's reaction—despite the fact that the hotel's restaurant was decidedly upscale—was sanguine.

“In another week,” he told her, after the waiter had gone, “we'd be out of luck. It's illegal to catch fish during the spawning season. But if it's fresh, we're in for a treat.”

Besides making sure his turbot was fresh, the man seemed not to have a care in the world. When the waiter brought out the raw fish on a plate, he inspected the eyes and the gills and pronounced it acceptable. He ordered a bottle of wine and another vodka tonic for Hannah and then leaned back in his seat, sipping at complimentary tea. One hand rested protectively on his leather bag, sitting on the empty seat between them.

“The dress fits you well,” he remarked.

She dimpled charmingly, from habit, as her mother had taught her a lady should when she receives a compliment.

The man continued to make small talk. A gentleman spy, Hannah thought; she hadn't known that such a thing actually existed. He pointed out the bouquet of the wine, then the baklava on a passing dessert cart. The tactic, she thought, was designed to put her at ease. And it was working, up to a point.

This man, it seemed, had many talents. He could order fish in Istanbul and he could assault a helpless woman, with equal finesse. She had not forgotten the assault. She would never forget it. And when the time came …

But the time was not now.

She wondered what his name was.

She wondered what he would do if he caught her in a lie.

She wondered what she thought she was doing.

“Until you've had Turkish Delight in Turkey,” the man was saying, “you haven't had Turkish Delight. They call it
rahat lokum
—‘comfortable morsel.'”

He had experience in the Middle East, clearly. To Hannah's mind, that suggested CIA. Yet this assumption, like most of her assumptions about intelligence, was based on Hollywood and Tom Clancy novels. In this sphere, she could not trust what she thought she knew.

Hannah
, the voice said.
What are we hoping to accomplish here, exactly
?

Their food arrived; and as she dug into it, she turned the question over in her mind.

She was not hoping to get rich. Despite her first, greedy reaction to the figure the man had mentioned—
five million dollars
!—reality already was setting in. Even if she could come up with some convincing bluff about the chicken-scratch in the book, she would never be able to carry the pretense through to its conclusion.

Yet perhaps the man could help her anyway. If he could get her to America, allowing her to avoid an embassy or official channels, then she could still reach her father. She could still plea-bargain herself into a new life.

So she needed a good-enough bluff that she could stick with it for the foreseeable future. She wondered what the man thought she was. A spy, it seemed. Had the Epsteins been spies as well? It made sense, as much as any of this made sense. She had stumbled into something big—yet nobody seemed to have all the answers.

The man thought it was a bomb. She tried to think of
Scientific American
articles she had read,
60 Minutes
features she had seen, anything that might give her a platform for a convincing lie. There had been a spate of pieces on terrorism, of course. Dirty bombs, suitcase nukes, smallpox genetically engineered in high-school-level laboratories. But these technologies were disturbingly available to the masses already. They would not be worth such a large figure as the man had stated. It had to be something bigger, and something technical enough that the man would accept her lack of a detailed explanation.

She remembered paging through an article in a doctor's office she had been visiting with Frank. The subject of the article had been something called a Hypersonic Scramjet; much of the language was still in her mind. The Australians had recently tested this new type of engine, which used a rush of air to ignite hydrogen fuel. According to the article, the test had been only partially successful. Yet once this technology was perfected, the repercussions would be wide—for a working Hypersonic Scramjet engine would propel aircraft and rockets at Mach 8, eight times the speed of sound.

The article had gone on to provide background for the technology. An American program, NASA's Hyper-X Project, had been initiated by President Reagan less than a week after the
Challenger
disaster of '86. For almost twenty years, NASA had been striving to perfect the technology. The article had speculated that perhaps now the Australians had passed the Americans. It had theorized that similar work was being repeated in Russia, Japan, China, and India. For a working Hypersonic Scramjet would result not only in exceptionally fast manned flight; it would also produce hypersonic cruise missiles, and bombers too swift to be shot down.

This would be a fine secret, she thought. The Hypersonic Scramjet.

“By the way …” the man said.

Hannah looked up from her plate. He was holding a hand forward. “James,” he said.

She reached for the hand, and shook it. “Amy,” she said.

“Amy. A pleasure.”

“Mm.”

“Let me know when you feel ready to talk particulars …”

She dabbed at the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “I could use a good night's sleep first.”

“Understandable.”

She turned her attention back to her plate.

“I wasn't planning on leaving until morning anyway. Then I thought we'd catch a train at Haydarpasa. Make some distance to the east before we double back—in case Keyes has Atatürk under watch.”

She could feel the man's eyes on her, watching for a reaction to the name. She made a noncommittal sound.

“If you have reason to believe someone might be watching the trains, now might be a good time to mention it.”

She shook her head.

He watched for another second, his gray eyes flickering.

“In any case,” he said then, “there's an interesting story, behind Turkish Delight. In the late eighteenth century, they say, a man named Ali Muhiddin came to Istanbul from the mountain town of Kastamonu …”

3.

They pretended to sleep.

Hannah lay on one of the twin beds, trying not to look across the moonlit room at her roommate. She listened to the sound of his breathing, which seemed easy and unconcerned. But this, she thought, was an act. He was no more asleep than Hannah, and she knew it.

For a pillow, the man was using his leather bag; and inside the bag was the book.

She stared at the ceiling. There was a small network of cracks there, even in a hotel as fine as this. As she looked at the cracks, they blurred, forming Rorschach pictures. Her eyes were tired. All of her was tired. Yet she couldn't sleep.

She looked at the cracks, but what she saw was the Epstein couple, touching each other as blood spread slowly between them. She saw the man-child, climbing the ladder with his eyes burning cold in that macabre, unlined face.

Outside, the wind rustled. Distant music on an exotic scale swelled and dropped away. She heard a siren, so faint that it might have been only her imagination.

The cracks shifted, changing. Now they looked like bars. These would be the bars on her cell, she supposed. After she'd turned herself in. When it came time to face the music.

Why hadn't she done it yet?

She was biding her time, of course. Because in the morning, after she'd delivered her bluff, the man would contact his
interested parties.
Then they would arrange a meeting. With luck, it would be in America. So the man would bring her home; and then she would emancipate herself, get to Baltimore, and get to her father. He would work his magic. He was a fine criminal lawyer. She would turn on Frank; she would not go to prison at all. Perhaps she would even be rewarded.

It didn't hold together.

What if the meeting was not in America? Then she would be in trouble, even worse trouble than now. And what were the chances that her father could really make everything all better? It was the spoiled part of her that expected that—the little-girl part, the part that always believed Daddy could fix everything. The truth was, her situation now was out of her father's league.

She would be better off leaving the room at this very moment, as the man pretended to sleep, and heading straight for the embassy. Then, at least, she would have demonstrated good faith.

Yet she didn't move.

You want that book for yourself
, the niggling voice said.

He had not let go of the book from the moment he first had laid hands on it. He kept it in that damned leather bag, and the damned leather bag stayed in his lap, or around his shoulder, or by his hand, or—as at this moment—under his head.

Was that it? Possession of the book might help ease things when it came time to make the plea bargain, that was true. But then, it might not.

Perhaps, the voice suggested tentatively, she wanted the book for a different reason.

It was valuable. Valuable enough that everybody wanted it. Valuable enough that men would kill for it.

For that was what had happened, in the suburbs outside of Istanbul. There was no percentage in trying to avoid that fact any longer. “James” had executed the entire family—the two little girls wearing Hannah's own makeup at the moment of death. And he had put his hands on Hannah herself. Despite his gentle manner, despite his politeness and his suavity and his ability to order the right kind of wine, he was a violent man. And what would a man such as that do, if he had the secret inside the book? Nothing good.

America had enemies these days. They would be eager to get their hands on a secret that could sway the balance of power in the world. Would it be too much to suppose that this was why she hadn't yet left—she wanted the chance to do something good for her country? After all, her country had been good to her. And she had repaid it with spoiled, selfish behavior. Criminal behavior, not to put too fine a point on it.

Hannah Gray, patriot
, she thought, tasting the concept.

If she hadn't been feigning sleep, she would have chuckled aloud. It was, as her father would have said, patented grade-A bullshit. If she stayed around and tried to get a chance at grabbing the book, it would not be for any reason other than selfishness. A priceless military secret could make things easier when it came time to negotiate a plea bargain.

She rubbed unconsciously at the scars inside her wrist. Yes, that would be all. Selfishness. No point in pretending otherwise.
Patriotism
, as Samuel Johnson had said,
is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

For whatever reason—selfishness, patriotism, stupidity—she was still here, lying in this bed.

Could she get away with her bluff?

She stared at the spiderweb of cracks on the ceiling, and tried to formulate the words she would use in the morning.

The formula, she would say, described an airframe-integrated, scramjet-powered craft. Airflow through the engine would remain supersonic …

Meaning what
? the man might ask.

It was technical, of course, and neither of them was a scientist. But what it meant, in essence—she strove to picture the article she'd browsed through in the doctor's office; she could almost hear Frank rasping away at the receptionist—what it meant, in essence, was that a new breed of jet would capture oxygen from the atmosphere itself. The vehicle
was
the engine, with the forebody acting as intake for airflow and the aft section serving as a nozzle …

… ah, but it wouldn't do to go on too long. For if the man felt that he didn't need her anymore, God only knew what he would do.

And at some point, he might let his guard down—even if only for an instant—and she might have her chance at the book.

Hannah Gray, patriot
, she thought again, and the idea seemed infinitesimally less ludicrous.

What was in the book? She didn't know.

But whatever it was, she would have it for herself.

SEVENTEEN

1.

“Ow,” Henri Jansen said.

Madeleine snorted. “Don't be a baby,” she said, and dug her elbows deeper into his back.