It would’ve been real nice to trust her, though.
Traffic on the long stretch of four-lane highway between the airport in Yesilköy and the city proper was heavy. Elaine, though she did not waste any time, wasn’t pushing with the little car the way she had the first night on the Baltimore-Washington Turnpike.
“You haven’t asked me,” she said, “whether we’d gotten you the accommodations you’d asked for.”
Kelly laughed. “Demanded, you mean,” he said. At eye level out his side window were the rear axles of a fourteen-wheel semi, just like the ones immediately before and behind the Porsche. He had no doubt that the little car was as sturdy as anything its size could be, but the low seating position emphasized vulnerability to the trucks in a way that not even a motorcycle would have. “Look, I don’t say you couldn’t have failed, you know – maybe terrorists blew the place up this morning, that sorta thing. But you weren’t going to fail and not tell me about it right off.”
He turned to look at her profile, unexpectedly softer than any of the angles of the woman’s frame – pleasant in itself, and much more pleasant than the angle-iron bumper with a Bulgarian license plate ten feet beyond the hood. “At worst, I’m going to decide you’re a vicious bitch who’s dangling me for whoever, the Russians, to bite. You won’t ever convince me you’re stupid.”
It was the right thing to have said, because Elaine’s reaction was wrong – to the speculation, not the flattery. The face compressed itself momentarily into the neutral expression that gave nothing away save the fact that something was hidden. She smiled so quickly that Kelly could have thought he had mistaken the reaction . . . except that long, bloody years had taught him when his instincts must be trusted and no human being could be.
“This is the route from Europe,” she said, waving to the truck ahead of them, “traffic from as far as Sweden and England, on the way across the Hindu Kush, some of it.”
“Rather have your company than theirs,” the veteran replied, his hand paralleling hers in a gesture toward the red airport bus ahead in the other lane. “Though mind you, the next time you pick me up, a fifty-passenger Mercedes like that one’d be a little more in keeping with the rest of the traffic than a two-seater Porsche.”
Elaine laughed and made a pair of lane changes, cutting between bumpers more closely than she had previously that afternoon. The Porsche’s exhaust blatted at the downshift followed by swift acceleration. “That make you feel better?” she asked, nodding toward the little Anadol – a license-built version of an English Ford – now just ahead of them. “You see, your wish is my command.”
Istanbul was an exotic city with a history that went back long before the Roman conquest, much less that of the Ottoman Turks. Along the highway from Yesilköy, however, it resembled nothing so much as Cleveland, Ohio: another major industrial city decaying beside a major body of water.
It had ceased to be the capital in 1920, when the Allied powers had anchored warships in the Golden Horn – and had found that the only Turks they ruled were those literally within range of their guns. The Turks had been on the losing side during World War I, but their armies had defeated major attacks both at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia. There was no longer an Ottoman Empire, but there was a new nation called Turkey. Other failed empires in the region – the Persians and the Greeks both came readily to mind – had their pride. The Turks had in addition an army ready to kick whoever’s butt was closest. The planners in Washington who persisted in considering Turkey a client state of the US had no one but themselves to blame for the current anti-Americanism.
“What do you expect to do in Istanbul?” Elaine asked as they waited to cross the peripheral road surrounding the walls begun at least seven hundred years before Constantine renamed the city after himself.
“Talk to some people,” Kelly said, shrugging. “Ahmed Ayyubi for one, Mohammed’s brother. There had to be some reason Mohammed moved to Istanbul – or stayed here, if he was just ‘catching his breath with his brother after Birdlike came apart. . . . Look, I’m playin’ it by ear, that’s as much data as I’ve got.”