The Counterfeit Agent (26 page)

A low stream of pop music provided the car’s only soundtrack. Kemal sipped from his bottle, nursing it until only drops remained. Just before midnight Wells felt his phone buzzing. Shafer.

“Ellis.”

“You in Constantinople?”

“Yes.”

“Close to our friend?”

“I think so, yes.”

“That threat, it’s confirmed. Before you ask, that’s all I know. Whatever game these people are playing, they are not messing around. Get that picture and get gone.”

Wells hung up.

A few minutes later, Kemal stirred. “How much longer tonight?”

“Let’s say until one. Come back tomorrow.”

“You pay five hundred extra.”

Wells was about to argue when the sniffer sounded again. The target was maybe fifty meters south. One of the buildings on the two-block street. Headlights lit the back window. Wells ducked low as a BMW sedan rolled past.

“Start the car and wait.” Wells jogged to the corner, peeked around. The sedan waited outside an apartment building at the south end of the street. Wells couldn’t get a clear look, much less a good photo, without exposing himself. A man in a pea jacket and jeans stepped out of the building, into the back of the BMW. At this distance, Wells couldn’t be sure it was Mason.

He ran for the cab, slid in back.

“Follow him. Not too close.”

Whatever his love for raki, Kemal piloted the Toyota smoothly. Wells lay on the backseat, head down, staring at his phone, mapping their route. They turned left, right, left again, northeast along the causeway on the shore of the Bosphorus. Wells guessed they were headed for the expressway that ran along the city’s northern edge and spanned the Bosphorus at the Sultan Mehmet Bridge. Maybe Mason was headed for a safe house on the Asian side. A few minutes later they accelerated up a ramp. But instead of going over the bridge, they turned west. Away. After another five minutes, they slowed, turned onto another ramp, accelerated again.

“South now,” Kemal said from the front seat. “Back to the city.”

The map showed Wells where they were, but he didn’t know Istanbul well enough to have any idea whether Mason’s route made sense. They’d traveled north on surface roads, west on the expressway, now south on another expressway. This ride stank of a countersurveillance trap.

They turned off the highway. “Beyoglu,” Kemal said. They were moving southeast, into the city center. After driving a half hour, they were only a couple kilometers from Mason’s apartment.

“Someone following us,” Kemal said. “Mercedes, black. We turn, he turn.”

Wells wondered if the Mercedes was after him. Or Mason.

The night brightened as they returned to Istanbul’s clotted heart. They turned left, stopped at a light, came up a hill. Then a right. Wells lifted his head to see if he could spot the Mercedes. But traffic here was heavy despite the hour, and he couldn’t.

“Near Taksim.” Another right. “Tarlabası. Big street. Big traffic.”

After another minute. “Okay. The BM pulling over. Two men getting out. Now the BM going again.”

“Pull over.” Wells looked through the rear right passenger window. The man in jeans and pea jacket was walking with a second man. He turned his head and Wells saw him in profile. His face was flatter and squarer—more Thai, somehow—than the presurgery pictures of Glenn Mason. And he was wearing a hood that shrouded his face. Yet Wells knew. This was Mason.

After three continents, four weeks of searching, Wells had found his man. He felt more relieved than elated. He hadn’t wasted his time. He wanted to jump Mason, drag him into Kemal’s car. But of course that was impossible. Anyway, as Shafer kept telling him, he didn’t need to arrest Mason, just get one good photo.

“The Mercedes,” Kemal said.

Too late for Wells to duck. He sat still as the black sedan drove by. It had tinted windows, and he had no hope of getting the plate. Wells had no way to tell whether it was tracking Mason or working with him, but the latter seemed more likely.

On the sidewalk ahead, the two men ducked onto a dark side street that disappeared down a steep hill.

“Very bad there,” Kemal said. “No police. Thieves. Drugs.”

“Go to Taksim, wait for me.” Wells opened the door.

“How long?”

“Two hours. You don’t see me, come back here in the morning. But be careful. Watch out for that Mercedes.”

“You pay now.”

Wells scribbled Shafer’s number on a page from his reporter’s notebook. “I don’t come back, call this man. In America. Tell him what happened. Where we went. He’ll pay you.”

Kemal shook his head but took the paper. “
Inshallah
, my friend.”

“Inshallah.”

Wells stepped out, oriented himself. Tarlabası was a wide two-way avenue. Wells stood on its western side, with traffic flowing south past him. The commuter hub of Taksim Square marked the avenue’s northern end, and million-dollar apartments were only a few hundred meters east.

Yet as Wells walked to the nameless street where Mason had turned, he realized the truth of Kemal’s warning. Down the hill he saw not a single streetlight. Not a storefront, open or closed. Fifty meters down, three men huddled around a burning garbage can, shifting against the cold. Tarlabası’s traffic obviously worked as a barrier between this blighted area and the wealth on higher ground to the east.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Wells saw Mason and his friend maybe a hundred meters ahead. Why had they come here at midnight? Why the long countersurveillance run? The moves stank of setup. Either they were trying to lose a tail, or trap one. But Wells had to take the bait. If Mason knew Wells was after him and Wells didn’t bite tonight, Mason would toss his phone and Wells would lose him again. On the other hand, if Mason was really meeting someone down here, Wells could fade into these black streets until he got the picture he needed.

So he told himself. But he knew that logic didn’t fully explain his insistence on chasing Mason into this maze without backup or even a pistol. He hadn’t come this far to back off now.
You want to play? Think you can take me? Good. Start the clock.

—

Wells reached the garbage can. Ahead, Mason stopped walking. Wells stepped close to the can. The sputtering flame inside was as hopeless as the men around it. They had the drawn faces and sallow skin of heroin addicts, dying from the inside out.

Wells counted seven, looked down the hill. Mason and the other man were turning left onto a side street. Wells followed. The smell of sewage grew more insistent. Rats jumped from a trash pile and slipped one by one into a hole in the sidewalk, like soldiers scrambling for cover. Farther down, Wells passed an empty husk of a building, its windows gone, its crumbling bricks covered with posters that warned against trespassing.

He reached the street where Mason had turned left. It ran north-south, parallel to Tarlabası. It was narrower than the street where Wells now walked, barely wide enough for a car to pass. Wells peeked around the corner. Mason stood near the end of the block, rapping on a door on the right side of the street, the west side. The door opened, and Mason and his buddy disappeared inside.

Tarlabası was maybe two hundred fifty meters away. Even with the hill, at a full run Wells would reach it in less than a minute. He had never felt so imprisoned by his own desire to hunt. He knew the odds he faced a trap were at least fifty-fifty. Yet he walked on.

Six front doors ran down the right side of the street, spaced about every twenty-five feet. But the buildings above them actually formed a single structure, five stories high. One building, split with separate entrances and street numbers, to give the illusion it was six. Mason had walked in the fifth door down.

Wells pulled his autopick and went for the first door. The lock gave so fast that Wells wondered if it had been set at all. The stairs were dark, but Wells chose speed over stealth, hurdling stairs two at a time. If this was a trap, Mason would want to draw Wells as far down the hill as possible before dropping the net. The pursuit would stay loose to keep from tipping Wells off. Still, a couple guys would be behind him. When they came around the corner and didn’t see him, they would know something was wrong. So Wells needed to move quickly now. He reached the top floor, kept climbing. Bad as the neighborhood was, basic fire codes still applied. The building had to have a fire door to the roof. Wells figured the door wouldn’t have an alarm. It didn’t.

The roof was slick with melted sleet. Wells found a chunk of paving stone, jammed open the door to be sure that it wouldn’t lock from the inside. He crunched a hypodermic needle under his boot as he stepped around a narrow mattress. He jumped over the half-wall that sectioned the building, landed clean, kept moving. When he reached the fifth section of the building, the section he’d seen Mason enter, he stopped.

On the street beneath him, footsteps. Wells crab-walked to the edge of the building, peeked over. Two men stood below, heads swiveling, pistols loose in their right hands. The front door beneath Wells opened and a third man came out.

So a trap. Mason had known he was coming. Maybe Singh had told him.
A man came here, he said he was Saudi, he knew all about you . . .
Mason, or whoever was in charge, had laid the crumbs just so. They’d given Wells a taste of Mason’s phone to draw him out. They’d run the countersurveillance to see whether Wells was part of a team or working alone. And Wells had taken the bait like the world’s dumbest fish.

At least he wasn’t surprised. Furious for his foolishness, but not surprised.

He heard footsteps coming up the stairs below. He scuttled back to the fire door. The high ground was a basic tactical advantage, and Mason’s men would want it. They ought to have had someone on the roof already, but they weren’t perfect.

The fire stairs were identical to those Wells had taken. They were covered by a half-pyramid that rose from the roof and ended in a door that swung open to the left. Wells crouched on the right side of the pyramid. He was betting the man inside was right-handed. He would push the bar with his left hand, lead with his right. His gun hand. He’d be close to the right edge of the door frame.

The man below ran along the fifth-floor hallway, turned, came up the stairs—

Wells drew his knife. Three seconds, two, one—

The door popped open. With his left hand, Wells grabbed the man’s outstretched right wrist. He jerked the man’s right arm up so the pistol pointed uselessly into the air. As he did, he spun around the door frame into the man. The guy couldn’t stop his momentum, couldn’t keep from impaling himself on the knife Wells held. He grunted, too surprised to scream, as Wells worked the blade deep into him. The pistol fell from his hand, and Wells left the knife inside him and shoved him back down the stairs and slammed the door shut as the man tumbled backward, thumping down the stairs, cursing. Wells didn’t particularly care whether the man lived or died. He’d needed a pistol and now he had one. He reached down now, grabbed it. A Sig Sauer, which didn’t necessarily mean anything either way.

More important was the fact that the guy hadn’t been wearing a tac radio. A Delta or SOG team would surely have been miked up. So would elite Israeli, Russian, or European units. Another sign that these guys were private, not government, unless they were so deep undercover that they felt they couldn’t carry the proper tactical gear.

A man yelled from deep inside the building, and Wells knew he had to move. The guy he’d stabbed was out of commission, but his friends would be up soon enough. Time to take his new pistol and run. Still, he had a chance. The men coming up the stairs would have to approach cautiously in case Wells was waiting to shoot down at them.

Wells retraced his steps, running north, vaulting the half-walls. As he reached the second section of the building, he heard shouting from the stairwell where he’d stabbed the operative. Then two quick shots, and two more. So Mason’s men had given up any hope of taking Wells silently. He was surprised they weren’t carrying suppressed pistols. Another tactical error. Maybe they’d figured they wouldn’t need them, that they would overpower him before he could respond.

Three more shots echoed from the stairwell as Wells leapt over the final half-wall. If he could get to the first staircase before his pursuers reached the roof, they would have no way of knowing where he’d gone. But he tripped on the edge of the mattress, landed hard on his right shoulder. His momentum carried him to the edge of the sleet-slicked roof. His heels slid over as he swiped at a vent pipe. For a moment his fingers failed to find purchase on the slick metal and he imagined himself tumbling sixty feet to the alley below, bouncing off brick as he fell. He dug in and finally stopped his slide. He picked himself up, ran for the fire door. As he stepped inside, he heard shouting. The stumble had ended his chance for a clean escape. They’d seen him. He shifted the pistol to his left hand and vaulted down the stairs.

Mason’s men didn’t have radios, but they had phones. Right now they would be calling one another, fixing his position. Five floors of stairs gave them too much time. They would set up outside the front door, gun him down as he tried to leave. But he couldn’t go back to the roof, either. They were up there now.

He needed another move.

Each of the six sections of the building was set up in classic tenement style, four apartments per floor, one on each corner. From the roof Wells had seen that the buildings one street west had lower rooflines, because they’d been built shorter and because they were farther down the hill. A narrow alley, no more than three feet, separated Wells’s building from the structures that backed it to the west.

On the third floor, Wells stopped. A dim light glowed under the door to the apartment in the building’s back right corner. Wells shoved his automatic pick into the lock.
“Asalaam aleikum,”
he said, loudly enough for anyone inside to hear. He opened the door, slowly. Inside, a naked lightbulb hung above a coffee table crammed with cheap children’s toys. A Turkish man in a dirty white T-shirt stood blocking an open hallway. He was small and wiry and held a cleaver high in his right hand.