At Ankara Customs the neat, swarthy men in tan uniforms and peaked caps that seemed as wide as their shoulders glanced at Saxon’s and Hamilton’s passports and the holders open to show their DEA shields and murmured, “Please follow us.”
The Americans exchanged glances. Saxon shrugged. They followed. Saxon muttered, “We have nothing to worry about. It’s all in the bag; we’re DEA,” to his partner out of the side of his mouth. Hamilton hitched the shoulder strap of his overnight bag up higher on his shoulder and did not look convinced.
They were led to a small room. Though there were only two people in it, it seemed pretty well full already. The man in civilian clothes, fedora, and dark sunglasses didn’t take up much space, but the dude standing beside him – in baggy cloth-of-gold pants, blue-and-red vest over hairy bare chest, and an enormous turban on his head – definitely constituted a crowd of one. Especially since his hygiene seemed a little on the questionable side; it was close in here.
“Check out this geek with the sofa cushion on his head,” Saxon said from the corner of his mouth. He had made a little trip to the bathroom just before landing, and he was feeling fine. Hamilton shushed him frantically.
“I am Colonel Nalband,” the man in civilian clothes said. “This is Yaralanmaz, our Turkish national ace. His name means ‘invulnerable.’”
Yaralanmaz nodded his extensively turbaned head. “We’re honored,” Hamilton said.
“Yeah,” Saxon said, grinning hugely. “Honored.”
His grin shattered when the two uniforms started dipping gloved hands into the pockets of his off-white jacket. “Hey! What the fuck’s going on here? We’re DEA, damn it. This is bogus, man. Completely bogus.”
One of the two uniforms fished out the gold card case Saxon carried but never offered anybody cards from out of his inner pocket, cracked it, glanced inside, and passed it to Nalband. Nalband held up a tiny plastic vial with a bit of white powder drifted at the bottom.
“What might this be, Agent Saxon?”
“Hey, just a sample, you know?” Saxon said, suddenly all smiles again, holding out his palms and being an open, candid guy. “Sometimes we need to, you know, compare, so we can trace the routes the shit’s being carried along -”
“Indeed?” the other uniformed Customs officer said. “And is it necessary to carry so very much of it?” He pulled his hand out of Hamilton’s bag, which lay open on a table. He held a taped glassine packet crammed full of white powder. “There must be two hundred grams here, Agent Saxon.”
Hamilton turned dead white. “That’s not m-mine!” he exclaimed.
“It’s not mine either,” Saxon said, goggling. “Fuck me.”
Colonel Nalband shook his head. “We were warned you would be trying to smuggle cocaine into the Republic of Turkey. This is a very serious matter. Very serious indeed.”
“This is bullshit!” Saxon shrieked. “This isn’t our shit! We’ve been set up. And anyway, we’re the DEA! You got no fucking right -”
“We have every right to interdict criminal activity,” Nalband said solemnly. “And when you try to bring drugs into our country, you are nothing better than common criminals.”
“You towel-head sons of bitches!” snarled Saxon, and leaped at Nalband.
Yaralanmaz stuck out his hand and pushed against Saxon’s sternum. The American flew up into the air and crashed against the wall, his head almost to the dropped ceiling. He hung there for a moment like the Coyote flattened against a cliff by more Roadrunner perfidy, then slid down into a heap.
Nalband produced a compact square-snouted Glock pistol from inside his coat and pointed it at Hamilton. Hamilton held his hands up and said, “No problems.” The uniforms cuffed his hands behind his back, then hauled Saxon to his feet and cuffed him too. They had to hang on to him to keep him from sliding back down on his butt again.
“You have undoubtedly heard much of our Turkish prisons, gentlemen,” Colonel Nalband said. “Doubtless you will find your stay in them instructive.”
Yaralanmaz smiled. His teeth were stained the Turkish national brown from tea and cigarettes. He reached out and tweaked Hamilton’s cheek.
“You’re cute,” he said in a voice like a boulder rolling down a mountain. “You and me will be good friend.”
Mark accepted the invitation to stay in Whitelaw’s flat, which was filled with stacks and stacks of pamphlets and periodicals slowly melting together in the humidity. He still haunted the joker section of the old Chinese quarter Cholon – the joker ghetto, Whitelaw called it – searching for some way to make himself useful.
He was elated to discover there was a clinic in the area. He felt sure it must mirror the function of Tach’s Blythe van Rensselaer Clinic in Jokertown. He would certainly find a place there. He would have much to contribute, both his own biochemical expertise and practical advice from watching his friend the Doctor at work. This clinic was operated by the government, so it would undoubtedly be well funded, well run, and open to all.
What he found looked more like the flophouses he knew too well from his early days on the lam in New York than a hospital, and smelled that way too. And the clinic didn’t even have any jokers in it. It was mainly filled with babies with birth defects and women who had received hysterectomies and were undergoing chemotherapy for chorio-carcinoma. They all came from the southern provinces, which had been heavily dosed with Agent Orange defoliant by the Americans during the war. The intense and articulate doctor who took Mark on a tour bitterly drew the obvious connection.
Mark was saddened by the anencephalic babies and the young girls lying two to a bed or on blankets on the floor, most of them bald from the chemotherapy. But he was already familiar with the problem and the possible effects of Agent Orange.
“What about the jokers?” he asked. “There are already thousands of them in Cholon. They have special needs too.”
“It’s you Americans!” the doctor yelled at him, her glasses almost flying off her face. “You deny us aid! That’s why we don’t have the facilities to care for everybody!”
He beat a hasty retreat out onto the sidewalk and the rain.
The men in pith helmets were waiting for him.
Chapter Twenty
A fist slammed into the side of Mark’s face. He felt his cheek split. His head snapped sideways until the tendons of his neck stopped it. His brain just kept spinning.
Mark had seen lab rats, picked up inexpertly, frantically propeller their tails in circles. Unless they had their semi-prehensile tails curled around something, they felt unmoored, unsafe. Mark felt that way now inside his own head.
Gotta keep conscious, he thought, though he knew deep down that keeping or losing consciousness was a symptom, not something in his control. If you go all the way under after blows to the head, it’s a bad sign; it usually means there’s some crockery broken in there, the movies notwithstanding. Subdural hematoma: brain implosion time.
“You should truly thank us for our grandmotherly kindness,” an astringent voice said in precise Vietnamese-accented English, from beyond the blaze of lights that was going to be all Mark could see once he got his eyes open again. “Minh is really being quite gentle with you, comparatively speaking. We have among us as guests, citizens of the former People’s Republic of Germany who, betrayed by their countrymen, find themselves unable to return home. They are experienced in interrogation, and they have a good deal of frustration to work out.”
A pause for a movie-torturer drag on the cigarette Mark could smell. “You don’t want to meet them, let me assure you.”
Well, you’ve gone and done it this time, a disapproving voice said from the roaring ringing depths of his skull. I’ve always known it would happen.