13

ISTANBUL, DECEMBER 2007

The messages were waiting for her when she got back to the hotel. She called the instant she got to her room and was greeted with, "Where the hell have you been?"

"Touring the topless towers of Ilium for Smithsonian magazine," she said.

"What? Are you all right?" Hugh Rincon did not consider poetry necessary, and Elizabethan poetry even less so.

"Girl's gotta earn a living," Arlene Harte said.

"Whatever. Call me back from a pay phone?"

"All right."

She found a coffee shop whose owner was willing to accept an exorbitant amount of money for the privilege of loaning out his telephone, a massive black instrument that looked as if it had been used by George Raft to call in a hit on Humphrey Bogart. It even had a dial, and its cord was straight.

It was at least in the owner's office, and the owner's office had a door that closed. She negotiated her way through the intricacies of Turkish long-distance and a short time later had a surprisingly clear connection to London. "What's up?"

"I need you to go to the Renaissance Polat Hotel and find someone with a good memory who remembers an International Maritime Organization conference held there a couple of weeks ago."

The desk had a tattered phone book on it and she was already puzzling her way through the Turkish Yellow Pages. "Okay, got it. What do you need?"

"Someone masquerading as an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard attended the conference, I think to contact someone else who was attending legitimately."

" 'Someone'?"

"The someone is what I want you to find out. The guy masquerading as the Coastie was Isa."

She drew in a breath and blew it out again. She knew who Isa was. She'd been doing a story on Petra in Jordan when the Baghdad bomb had gone off. "Are we sure he's gone? I've always enjoyed being in one piece."

"Oh yeah, we're sure," Hugh said grimly, "because we're pretty sure he's in the U.S. "

Arlene felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. "Holy crap."

"Yeah. Anyway, I FedExed a package with photos to your hotel this morning."

"What exactly do you want to know?"

"If anyone remembers Isa, who was traveling under the name of Adam Bayzani. Commander Adam Bayzani. Find out if he was seen with anyone else. If he was, find out if anyone overheard any part of that conversation."

"You know you're dreaming, of course," she said. "This is Isa we're talking about, the practically invisible terrorist."

"I know," Hugh said gloomily. "Realistically, best-case scenario is you find his maid, who says he was such a nice young man, every morning he left a generous tip on his pillow. This guy won't even pick up a phone, he does everything anonymously via email with multiple addresses he never uses more than once. After we took out his boss, I'm guessing he won't even use satellite phones anymore. But he was at that conference, I'm sure of it. It lasted three days. Someone has to have seen him doing something." In spite of himself his voice rose. "Somewhere!"

She said nothing and Hugh got himself back under control. "Anything, Arlene, any scrap of information you can dig up is more than we've got now."

"Who am I working for, Hugh?" she said slowly. "This is starting to sound personal."

"It is personal," he said. "Sara was at the conference. He rode down in the elevator with her the first morning."

"Jesus Christ."

"She was in uniform, Arlene, and they introduced themselves. And as I'm sure you recall, Isa doesn't suffer a witness to live."

"I remember," Arlene said soberly.

"But for the record, you're working for us, or at least it'll be our name on the check."

"But?"

"But our friends across the pond are footing the bill."

"So, you're saying I can pile on the expenses."

"Anything, any scrap of information, Arlene," he said again, not responding to the joke. "Solid gold."

ARLENE HARTE, MIDFIFTIES, COMFORTABLY PLUMP, DETERMINEDLY blond, and relentlessly single though far from celibate, had reported from the various fronts of global wars for the Associated Press for long enough to earn a recognizable byline, a syndicated column, and an occasional spot on Washington Week in Review. Gunfire, however, had palled after thirty years, though travel had not, and there followed a comfortable retirement, the most part of which she spent freelancing articles for the Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, and Travel + Leisure.

The rest of her time was spent working freelance as a spy for her country, ferreting out information that opposition organizations and nations would much rather not be unearthed. Hugh Rincon had recruited her when he'd been on the Asian desk at the CIA. When he had resigned, she followed him to the Knightsbridge Institute, where the governmental oversight of company activities was significantly less, the pay was pleasurably more, and the job was, to say the least, eclectic. Arlene was invaluable to them. Her cover as a freelance writer, especially with her CV, got her in many a door that would be closed to anyone else, and her unthreatening appearance coupled with a ferocious intellect, an almost preternatural capacity for assimilating the details of global current affairs, and a gift for sniffing out people who liked to talk did the rest. It didn't hurt that she could write, her reports a model of clarity and a gold mine of intelligence. As soon as the intel in them cooled off they were commandeered by the instructors to show the new guys how to get the job done.

The Knightsbridge Institute, in fact, had just given her another raise, her sinful second in eighteen months, and when she finished the Troy story she had planned to head for Elizabeth Arden in New York.

Regretfully, she decided that Liz would have to wait a few days.

The Renaissance Polat was an abstract thrust of aggressively modern glass that looked more than usually phallic, as was the invariable manner of the glass-and-steel structures of nations clawing their way to first-world status. She went inside, consulted the directory, and saw an international nursing conference was currently being held in the public rooms. She found the bathroom, and from a capacious shoulder bag extracted a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, neatly folded and stowed in a gallon-size Ziploc freezer bag. She shook it out and pulled it on over her white T-shirt and chinos, and surveyed herself in the mirror. She fished around in the bag again and produced a pair of reading glasses with clear rainbow frames, which she perched on the end of her nose, over which her green eyes looked out inquiringly. She gave a satisfied nod, closed her bag, and walked out with a stride that somehow managed to hint at orthopedic oxfords worn on long nights on the kidney ward.

The conference was being held in half a dozen rooms with concurrently running programming. It was coming up on the hour. She selected a panel at random, "Shaping Healthy Behaviors," and went in. The speaker was a young woman with a bright red face and a stutter, and most of the audience looked as if it was just about to stop being polite and head for the door, but they weren't Arlene's concern.

At the back of the room stood a woman in the universal uniform of the hotel employee, a maroon vest over a white shirt with a black bowtie, black slacks, and comfortable black shoes. She stood next to a table holding a large stainless steel carafe, cups, pitchers of water, glasses, and trays of sugar cookies, most of which remained. It didn't speak well for the hotel baker.

Arlene busied herself pouring a cup of coffee, which to her surprise was the real thing, dark and aromatic. She sweetened it and poured in a healthy dollop of cream and by then the panel had wound down and the crowd, most of them women of varying ages, shapes, sizes, and nationalities but all of them looking relieved, streamed out of the room. She loitered until the last of them had departed, and smiled conspiratorially at the server.