Room 725 had a pleasant feeling for Kelly as he shot the deadbolt lock behind him; not home, but a bunker. Bunkers were a lot more useful than homes.
A glance out the window at the sun told him that he had time to put his gear in order and still catch Ahmed Ayyubi at work. Before starting to unpack, he sat his little Sony radio up on the window ledge and scanned the FM band until he found a station – probably Greek, but that didn’t matter one way or the other – playing music. There was a good deal of static, and the red diode that indicated tuning strength fluctuated feebly – which mattered even less to ears trained like Kelly’s in the hard school of communications intercept.
He had not brought a great deal of clothing, and his choices emphasized variety rather than several versions of the same garb. He stripped off the sportcoat, hung it up with the slacks he had taken from the suitcase, and tossed the long-sleeved polyester shirt he was wearing on the bed. In its place he donned a checked wool shirt and a nylon windbreaker, both of them well-worn and of Turkish manufacture, as was the short-brimmed cloth cap he put on. He’d look a little strange to the lobby personnel at the Sheraton, but that was a cheap trade-off for avoiding comment when he talked to Ayyubi. The money in the sportcoat could stay there for the time being.
The last thing Kelly did before leaving his room was to walk over to the Sony receiver and poke number seven of the ten station preset buttons. The apparent effect was the same as if he had pushed the Off button: the sound clicked off, the LED went dark, and the liquid crystal display of the tuning readout went completely blank as if the power were off also.
What actually happened to the receiver, which a stateside acquaintance of Kelly’s had hastily modified, was a good deal more complex. Preset seven tuned the unit to 88.35 megahertz, squarely in the midst of the upper sidelobe of Istanbul’s sixty-kilowatt commercial FM station. The hump which a spectrum analyzer would show there was exactly what was to be expected, and a separate transmitter would have to be very powerful indeed to affect the appearance of the band on the display.
The Sony’s output when operating on that preset was not to the speaker as an audible signal but rather through a shunt into the case intended for an external battery pack holding four C cells. It now contained a miniature tape recorder with a voice-activated switch. The false battery pack could be exposed by anyone who cared to open it; but Kelly had deliberately left an unmodified Sony and its accoutrements unattended at his apartment in Arlington during the week he was preparing for the mission, giving anyone who was curious ample opportunity to be reassured about its innocence.
It would be nice to learn that he didn’t have to spy on the folks with whom he was working just now. But given Pierrard, he was going to be very surprised if Elaine and her friends were playing straight.
The breeze from the Bosphorus was cool enough to be bracing now. A few hours after sundown it was going to be damned cold, but that itself would be a help in returning Kelly’s mind to operational status, like the process of scaling rust from armor plate. Working for Carlo Bianci, he had been able to stay warm enough all the time. That wasn’t something you counted on in the field.
The lead taxi in the rank was a Fiat, older than the driver, who cheerfully haggled in Turkish on a price to the Mosque of Sinan. It made a reasonable destination for Kelly, due east of the Sheraton and close to the Bosphorus — as well as being within two narrow, winding blocks of the agent’s real destination, a neighborhood mosque in an alley off Maskular Street.
The neighborhood mosque was named for Sidi Iskender – Saint Alexander – and Kelly wondered fleetingly whether Alexander the Great himself might not have been sanctified in the myths of Turkish tribesmen riding westward through the land which the Macedonian had conquered centuries before. The west side of the courtyard looked as if it had sustained battle damage, but that was the result of ongoing refurbishment: the wall had been knocked down and was in early stages of replacement by a portico of four column-supported barrel vaults.