The Istanbul Exchange Read online

  The Istanbul Exchange

  A Yael Azoulay Short Story

  Adam LeBor

  Contents

  The Istanbul Exchange

  Excerpt from The Geneva Option

  Prologue

  Goma and New York

  One

  Praise for The Geneva Option

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Adam LeBor

  About the Publisher

  The Istanbul Exchange

  by Adam LeBor

  The dead man floated face-down in the sea, his naked body cradled by the waves.

  Yael Azoulay waited on the Eminönü waterfront as the tide slowly carried him towards the shore. It was a perfect spring day in Istanbul. The morning sun was warm on her face, the Bosporus shimmered silver under an azure sky, the breeze was cool and pleasant, scented with coffee and cardamom. Two elderly fishermen stood nearby, resting their rods against the metal railing, watching their lines, smoking and chatting companionably. The barrier marked the edge of a continent—Eminönü was the last outpost of Europe; across the water lay the suburb of Üsküdar, Turkey's gateway to Asia.

  A white dinghy appeared, engines roaring as it bounced across the sea, its red and white Turkish flag flapping in the wind. The V-shaped hull cut through the water like a scythe at harvest time, pale spray fountaining in its wake. The engines slowed and the dinghy banked leftwards; for a second it seemed suspended in mid-air and about to tip over, but then righted itself. The dinghy stopped by the dead man, rocking gently in the current. A short, tubby policeman stood up at the back, shouting orders to two young subordinates. The policemen's voices carried clearly across the water.

  Yael held her smartphone out in front of her. The dinghy appeared on the small screen. She moved the zoom slider to its maximum distance and pressed a button on the right-hand edge to start recording. The camera had been specially modified: the zoom magnified by a factor of six, with diamond-sharp resolution, and its high-definition video camera shot 90 frames per second. Additional software and an encrypted Bluetooth connection allowed her to surreptitiously download content from other handsets up to ten meters away. Yael could read Deniz Polisi—Maritime Police—emblazoned on the side of the boat, the edge of the letters faded from the water. One of the young policemen, tall, ungainly, barely out of his teens, wielded a long pole with a loop on the end. He stood at the back of the dinghy, rocking back and forth, trying to catch the dead man's leg. His uniform trousers were too short and flapped above his shoes. Each time the loop neared the dead man's leg, the waves carried him away.

  A passenger ferry chugged across the bay to Üsküdar. The passengers were standing along the edge, pointing at the police's efforts and talking excitedly. The ferry's wake rocked against the hull of the police dinghy, tipping it dangerously from side to side. The short officer lurched sideways and almost fell overboard, but was grabbed just in time by his colleagues. Eventually, the young policeman succeeded in hooking the loop around the dead man's leg. He pulled the corpse towards the boat. The ferry passed within a few yards. The passengers fell silent as they realized the long, pale shape in the water was a dead body.

  Yael watched on her smartphone as the policemen pulled the dead man over the rounded edge of the dinghy into the small passenger space. The screen showed the three policemen grimacing at what they saw. She tapped to focus in on the dead man's back. It was a map of pain, crisscrossed by deep welts, their ruffled edges bleached white by the water. The dead man's arms and shoulders were dotted with semicircular rows of tiny puncture marks, each two or three inches long. The police commander shook his head in disgust. He covered the body with a grey blanket, gently smoothing the fabric over the corpse as though tucking a child into bed.

  The police dinghy turned towards the shore and slowly made its way towards land, granting the dead man at least a final, dignified, passage. Yael closed her phone. An ambulance arrived, its siren howling. The paramedics stepped out, wheeling a shiny aluminum stretcher forward, shouting and clearing a path through the crowd that had gathered to watch the commotion.

  Yael turned to see the American appear at her side.

  “We offered him a deal,” he said.

  “Which was?”

  “Better than that,” the American replied, gesturing at the police launch. The paramedics stepped through a gap in the railings and boarded the boat.

  “An orange jumpsuit?” asked Yael.

  The American laughed. “Any color he wanted.”

  The American's name, she had been told, was Cyrus Jones. But that didn't mean anything. Whoever this Cyrus Jones was, he stood completely at ease. His face was broad and pale, dotted with freckles, his hair and eyebrows dark blond, his lips thin. The lines around his eyes creased deep when he smiled, and she guessed he was in his late-thirties. A red and purple birthmark ran down the left side of his neck, from his ear to his collar. He wore pressed khaki chinos and a grey polo-shirt, and was clean-shaven apart from a soul patch of hair under his bottom lip—seemingly just another hip American tourist taking in the splendors of the historic Turkish city. A bottle of local mineral water was jammed in the webbing pocket of the day-pack on his back. Only the wraparound Oakley sunglasses perched on his head—the favored eyewear of the US military and their contractors—and his coiled, muscular build, suggested something more. Those, and the way his eyes, blue and alert, kept scanning his surrounds, continually processing the ebb and flow of the crowds.

  Jones, Yael sensed from his boxer’s posture, was capable of rapid and extreme violence. Where was his back-up? Jones's eyes rested for a fraction of a second on the terrace of a nearby café. A tall, heavy-set man in his mid-forties wearing a UCLA sweatshirt sat by the pavement, drinking a glass of tea, that day's International Herald Tribune in his hand. Jones touched his birthmark. The man in the sweatshirt turned the page of his newspaper.

  Yael watched the paramedics maneuver the dead man into the body bag, his arms and legs lolling from side to side. His eyes were wide open and the water dripped off his straggly beard.

  “Who was he?” she asked.

  “Nobody important,” said Jones.

  “Somebody thought he was, judging by his back.”

  “The important one is Abdullah Gul. Your friend.”

  Your friend. Was Gul her friend, she wondered. A female nomad with four passports, including a UN Laisser-Passer, who had grown up in Tel-Aviv, London and New York, served in the Israeli military, and was now supposedly working for the World Health Organization, seemed an unlikely friend for an Afghan warlord. But then Gul was an unusual warlord. A devout Sufi Muslim, he had a PhD from Harvard in artificial intelligence and a Twitter feed with 26,000 followers, loathed the Taliban as much as they hated him, and had been working with the United States Agency for International Development to develop a network of micro loan providers to help small farmers and women entrepreneurs. Gul's cyber-experts had built websites in Pashto and Dari—the local languages of Afghanistan—to counter the Taliban propaganda. He believed women should be educated, that Sufism, a tolerant, spiritual Islam, offered a better future than the ascetic fanaticism of Wahabism, the creed favored and funded by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The websites infuriated the Jihadists and Gul's militia had taken frequent casualties in their fire fights. Gul had been courted by the United States and its allies and the United Nations, touted as a future potential president. He was popular, subtle, and, incredibly for an Afghan politician, not for sale.

  In short, Gul was everything that the United States said Afghanistan needed: a pious but modern and progressive Muslim. Yael knew little about his private life but had enjoyed his company. Perhaps he was her friend. Lord knew, she didn't have many.

  “Tell me the dead man’s name,” she said, her voice insistent.

  “I don’t know it.”

  Yael knew he was lying. “You should. You killed him.” A paramedic was zipping up the body bag. A colleague helped him load it onto the stretcher.

  “I did not,” snapped Jones, his voice rising in anger.

  She turned to look at him. “But you were there…you watched. You supervised.”

  Jones blinked twice before he spoke. Yael read people: she knew the meaning of every eye movement, sideways look, curl of the mouth, touch of the tongue to the teeth, dilated vein under the skin, subtle intake of breath or exhalation, tiny flicker of emotion across a face—the signs that to everyone else were imperceptible. She knew when someone was dissembling, when they were telling the truth or even were perhaps subconsciously trying to tell the truth, albeit buried under a carapace of lies. She sensed his body tense, despite his determined effort to stay relaxed, to give nothing away, which was itself the biggest giveaway of all.

  “It was badly handled. He didn't know anything,” he replied, a hard edge to his California accent. The ambulance sped off, away from the dock, maneuvering a path into the slow moving traffic.

  Yael pushed further. “You watched him die. Who was he?”

  Jones looked away. She sensed anger, defensiveness, even a wisp of guilt. “His name was Ahmed Sharjazi. He was Gul's cousin. If you are so concerned about his fate, take it up with the MIT.” The Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı, the Turkish intelligence service, was one of the United States' most reliable allies in the region. Or had been until recently. The service, and its bosses in Ankara, the Turkish capital, were increasingly unhappy about the United States' support for the de-facto independent Kurdish statelet in northern Iraq. The K
urds were Turkey's largest minority, around twenty percent of the population. Most wanted some kind of autonomy, or at least the freedom to live openly as Kurds. The PKK, their armed wing, had been fighting a vicious war with the Turkish government for decades. A functioning Kurdish state in Iraq would give Turkey's Kurds some very dangerous ideas.

  “Try again, Mr. Jones,” said Yael, remembering the rows of puncture marks. Dogs were anathema to Muslims. “The MIT didn't do this. And I think they would much rather talk to you than me. Three drone strikes inside the Turkish border in a month. Twenty-seven civilians killed last week, including nineteen women and children who had gathered for a birthday party.”

  Jones was unmoved. “Very regrettable. Sure, the Turks shout a lot. They have to. But they understand. There is a war on. The border is porous. Jihadis are crossing back and forth from Syria. This whole region could go up in flames.”

  Jones was controlling this conversation, which meant he was controlling her. Yael allowed this for a short while. Control was very important for men like Jones, she knew, especially when dealing with a woman. But now, it was time for her to take over.

  “And who supplied the fuel and lit the fire?” asked Yael, not waiting for an answer. “You and your friends in D.C.”

  She pressed the touch screen of her smartphone and showed it to Jones. The handset lit up with an image of a military transport airplane on a runway, with large wooden crates being loaded up a ramp that reached down from its rear fuselage to the ground.

  Jones looked at the screen. “What is that?”

  “That is a US Air-Force C-130, unmarked, on the runway at Zagreb airport, three days ago at 2:17 P.M. The crates contain weapons left over from the Bosnian war: AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and light mortars, all supplied by the CIA. The plane landed in Esenboga airport, outside Ankara, four hours later. The Saudis and Qataris paid for the guns, and you handed them out to the Free Syrian Army, whose ranks, as you know, include a substantial number of Jihadis. The United States is arming Islamist fanatics.”

  She paused. “Bin Laden wasn’t enough?” she asked, genuinely curious.

  Jones turned away. “Above my pay-grade. Why are you showing me this?”

  Yael touched the screen in the top right corner and moved her thumb and forefinger across its surface. A tiny figure in the background of the photo, not far from the airplane, steadily expanded. The airplane and the wooden crates vanished, replaced by Jones's face. She held the phone out in front of her. “That’s why. The woman standing a few yards from you, watching the crates being loaded, is Joanna Schering, CIA head of station for Zagreb. Your boss. Would you like to see a photograph of her as well?”

  Jones twisted his soul patch, like a petulant child. “I don't work for her.”

  ”So what were you doing there?”

  “Just passing through,” said Jones, his voice dismissive.

  “Sure. Now tell me why I should bring Gul in. The truth please.”

  “He is the point-man between the poppy-growers and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. He runs the business side of things, takes care of the money and launders it. From Kandahar to Kabul, Kabul to Baku and then on to Zurich.”

  “Really?” asked Yael, her voice disbelieving. “Last time I met him, Gul was setting up a micro-loans bank, lending $50 to farmers and local women to rip up their poppy fields, plant food crops instead, and set up cooperatives. All in conjunction with USAID, which is a US government agency. So Gul is a colleague of yours.”

  “Gul conned us. It's a front. He controls the drug trade. Haven't you read the latest UN report? Opium cultivation is at an all-time high—thanks to Gul. He uses the micro-loans to move the money,” said Jones, his voice insistent.

  Yael watched his face. A small vein pulsed at the side of his neck. Jones was lying. There was something else going on here.

  Yael said, “Fifty bucks doesn't buy a lot of heroin, even in Afghanistan. And why do you need me? Why don't you just kidnap him, wrap him in a giant nappy and send him to Guantanamo?”

  “We don't do that anymore,” said Jones, regretfully.

  "Don’t you?” asked Yael, remembering a clutch of files that had just been leaked to the UN Human Rights Commission by a disgruntled former CIA agent.

  “Not for Gul. Capitol Hill and the White House are crawling all over us. Gul needs to come over of his own free will. Everything has to be squeaky clean. Which is where you come in.”

  Yael crossed her arms. “I don't work for the US government. I work for the United Nations.”

  “Which pays twenty-five percent of the UN's budget,” said Jones. “Anyway, that's what you do, isn't it? Cut deals, arrange things, make things happen. You made things happen in Goma and Geneva.” He looked at her appraisingly. “That was quite impressive. Where is Joe-Don, by the way?”

  Joe-Don Pabst, a US Special Forces veteran who served as Yael's bodyguard, was sitting three tables behind the man in the UCLA T-shirt, drinking fresh orange juice. But she was not about to tell Jones that.

  Yael shrugged. “I don't know. Around somewhere, I guess.”

  Jones moved closer. She could smell his soap and shampoo. Yael took a packet of chewing gum out of her pocket, unwrapped a piece and crunched into the sugary coating. The mint flavor flooded her mouth, but could not wash away the bad taste.

  “We are offering Gul a deal,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  Jones took out his smartphone from his pocket. Yael did the same, holding hers casually at her side so as not to attract Jones' attention, her fingers searching for the raised button on the underside of the case. Jones tapped on the screen until he found what he wanted and showed the handset to Yael. She pressed the button with her thumb twice and leaned over to watch. A young, pretty woman, with olive skin and dark eyes, was chatting on Skype at an internet café in Istanbul. She was dressed modestly in brown trousers and a long-sleeved beige top, her hair tucked away in a patterned hijab that reached down to her shoulders. She next appeared sitting in the back seat of a car, jammed between two men whose faces were hidden in shadows. A hand was clamped over her mouth, with a serpent tattooed on its wrist. She was wide-eyed with fear, a bright red mark down one side of her face, her head scarf askew. The third segment showed her lying on her back in a bare room with grey concrete walls and a bucket in the corner, wearing a shapeless grey shift. Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be unconscious. Her left foot twitched sporadically.

  Yael looked at Jones, anger and disgust surging inside her. “Who is she?” she asked calmly, keeping her emotions in check.

  “Gul's wife. Samira.”

  “And is she a player?”

  “She is now.”

  “Who do you work for, Mr. Jones?” Yael asked, not expecting a proper answer, but hoping at least for a hint of his government affiliation.

  “The D-o-D.”

  “Department of Defense?”

  He smiled. It was a genuine smile, one that reached his eyes, filled with the easy confidence of a man backed by the darkest recesses of the world's most powerful nation.

  “Of Deniable.” He laughed, pleased at his own joke. “And please call me Cyrus.”

  Jones was relaxed and sure of himself now, as though the mention of his shadowy masters had newly empowered him. Yael sensed that he was attracted to her. She had attacked and held her ground, but now it was time to retreat—to let him believe he was controlling the situation. She softened her voice and edged closer. Deniable. Cyrus could make people disappear. Yael was duly impressed and let it show. She flicked her bob of auburn hair behind her head, subtly arching her back to show her slim figure and the swell of her breasts. She turned to look at him. “OK, Cyrus. Like you said, it's a war. And in a war there are casualties—not always the right ones. But if we can cut off Gul's money, we can stop the financing to the terrorists, and the attacks on American troops, defeat the Taliban and bring democracy to Afghanistan,” she said, thoughtfully.

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “The money men are the key to everything,” said Yael.

  Jones nodded determinedly, pleased that she seemed to understand. “You said it.”

  He moved towards her, and she smiled, leaning back on the railing at the water's edge and raising her face to the sun. Her denim jacket fell open; she felt his eyes roaming up and down her body.