“This I know, and all I know is this,” the stonecutter continued, prodding toward Kelly’s chest with a thumb-thick finger. “He met a blond whore, a dancer, and let her get him into this. As you got him into the other.”
“I didn’t get Mohammed into anything I didn’t get him out of,” Kelly said softly, with his eyes on the middle distance and his mind on memories that had nothing to do with the business at hand. His body shuddered, and his eyes focused on Ayyubi again. “Tell me about the dancer. Is she a Turk?”
“No, a foreigner,” the other man said. Something in Kelly’s expression a moment before caused Ayyubi to frown, not in fear but with a different awareness of the situation and the man who questioned him. “I know nothing about her, only the name – Gee-soo-lah. A belly dancer, very expensive. Dances at the best clubs and parties of the very rich because she’s blond, you see, and foreign.”
“Right …” Kelly said. “Know where she’s at just now?”
Ayyubi shook his head emphatically. “Sometimes here, sometimes she travels. Not with Mohammed, I think, but I know she was responsible.” He paused and added, “Mohammed showed me a billboard once, but that was months ago. I never saw her, and I never let him talk to me about freeing Kurdistan and the big money he was making.”
The stonecutter spat into the street. Some of the cars had their lights on by now. “Big money. It helped the family bury him.”
“I’ll let you know how things work out,” Kelly said, wondering if anybody was watching him just now. Pierrard’s people or others, not necessarily people. “Thank you, Ahmed.”
“Wait,” the Kurd said, touching Kelly’s arm as the agent started to turn away. When their eyes met again in the dusk, Ayyubi said, “I thought it was friends of yours who killed him. Americans. They came to talk with me the week before Mohammed was shot, and I didn’t know where he was to warn him. My brother.”
Kelly clasped the other man’s hand against him. “Ahmed,” he said, “nobody who kills one of my people is a friend of mine.” He squeezed the Kurd fiercely, then strode back toward the Mosque of Sinan and the hope of finding another taxi.
There was nothing particularly difficult about what came next, but the first three hours of it were simply preparation. He had to lose whoever might be tagging him on Pierrard’s behalf or Elaine’s – if there was a difference.
A properly trained team of at least a dozen agents could keep tabs on just about anybody in an urban environment, but that was a lot of personnel for anyone but the local security forces. Among US intelligence organizations in Istanbul, the Drug Enforcement Administration could probably put together such a team, and very possibly CIA could as well.
Pierrard, whoever he was and whatever funds he could disburse on special operations, had an insolubly different problem. You can’t bring a tracking unit into a city where the street patterns and the language are both unfamiliar, not and expect the team to function. Money alone won’t do it. And the most practical answer, to borrow trained personnel from friendly intelligence organizations, was also the least probable. There were no friendly intelligence services to people like Pierrard, least of all the other services employed by the US government.
Pierrard’s attitude, of course, was fully supported by that of his CIA and DEA colleagues, who would have been delighted to get their fingers into a rival’s turf.
For the moment, Kelly could be pretty sure that he could be being followed by only Doug and the three foreign nationals he had met at the Sheraton, perhaps with an equal number of Turkish drivers and the like. The Covered Bazaar – the Kapali Carsi in the center of the Old City – was the perfect place to dump any such tail.
There were eighteen entrances to the Bazaar and sixty-five separate streets within it, all covered by plastered brick arches with internal iron bracing. Kelly entered the three-acre maze of shops and pedestrians on Fuad Pasha Street across from the campus of the University of Istanbul. He ducked out again fifteen minutes later on Yeniceri Boulevard, spending no longer in the streetlights than he needed to hop into a brightly-painted Skoda taxi.