Elaine sent the car growling across the intersection and into the Old City proper. “We can help you locate people if you need that,” she said with a nod – approval, or more likely reassurance. “As we did with Ahmed Ayyubi.”
Kelly had asked her for a location on the dead Kurd’s brother even though he would much sooner that his present employers not know of his interest. What can’t be cured, though . . . Any damned fool would know that Kelly had to start with or near Ahmed Ayyubi; and though he could have gotten the man’s address without official help, he could not – in Istanbul – have been sure that his interest would not have leaked back anyway.
Better to be up front about what you couldn’t hide – it disarmed the brass hats who thought they owned your soul.
The Porsche turned left at Ataturk Boulevard, steeply uphill so that by twisting around Kelly got a good view of the Sea of Marmara. Though they had been driving parallel to the water for some time, the high corniche and the remains of ancient brick walls had hidden it from him.
Elaine, driving with the intention of making the best possible time, looked at her passenger in surprise. “Is somebody behind us?” she asked, and as she spoke her eyes flickered to the mirrors and the traffic around her.
I only get that paranoid in the boonies, thought Kelly, but that’s probably because she’s spent more time in cities than I’ve done. Aloud he said, “Oh, no problem. I just like to see something big and real now and again – to anchor me, you know?”
Elaine nodded acceptance rather than understanding and concentrated on her driving again. Though she hadn’t any right to be pissed, Kelly knew that nobody likes to be frightened needlessly, even in innocence. Well, she could have let him take the bus and a taxi instead of picking him up at the airport.
The Old City of Istanbul was on a finger of land projecting into the Sea of Marmara, separated from the equally-steep ridge of the Pera District by the deep gash of the Golden Horn. All of the bodies of water – the Horn, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus, which connected the latter to the Black Sea – were the results of separate fault lines as the continental plates that were Europe and Asia clashed. The earthquakes that were a certain concomitant of those faults meant that all but the most massive structures were brought down on a regular basis or were devoured by the fires that resulted.
It was a city of apartments of concrete and yellowish brick, built in the late nineteenth century or the twentieth – not unattractive, many of them picked out by balconies or iron grillwork, but all the colors muted by the soft coal that had been the city’s fuel for centuries. Only from above was there anything brighter, and that was the omnipresent red-orange of tiled roofs the shade of the rouge on a badly laid out corpse.
They crossed the Golden Horn on the Ataturk Bridge, early enough to miss the worst of the northbound traffic – tourists returning to the big luxury hotels in the Pera, and returning with them many of the personnel who had been catering to them among the ancient beauties of the Old City. Istanbul still had heavy industries, but there had been virtually no new development here since World War II. Only the tourists offered to preserve the city from sinking back into the state of somnolent ruin to which it had been reduced by the time the Ottoman Turks conquered it in 1453.
Elaine hadn’t used the long drive to pump him, which was just as well since the Porsche was too small a box for the hostility that would have resulted. Such of his plans as she didn’t know were things he hoped she wouldn’t learn, and the reality of what he was to do faded as the time for execution approached. It was hard to believe that he was really back in Turkey; and the notion that he was here to track down aliens with too many bones and far too many teeth in their circular mouths was as absurd as it would have been the day before he saw the dead thing.