State Of Attack

This was an Alevi sector of the city. Filthy heretics, he believed, whose women wore Western clothes and prayed with their men. But within a few minutes the sedate Ankara scene would descend into a man-made hell.

He opened a copy of Zaman, the popular Turkish newspaper, and feigned reading the business page. There were four other people sitting in the café, a couple of old men, their faces streaked with deep lines like unironed T-shirts, a smart-suited professional woman, who smelt of lavender, and the pot-bellied owner. Ibrahim was six-foot two, so sitting made him less conspicuous. He knew that many Western intelligence agencies refused to employ a surveillance operative over five-eleven for just that reason.

He’d entered the country via Cologne under a forged passport, assuming the identity of a Muslim child who’d died at birth in that German city. Many Turks lived and worked there, and he’d been one of over a hundred who’d flown into Ankara’s Esenboğa Airport. Despite what he was about to do, he felt safe; untouchable, even.

He felt a tug on his suit sleeve, and peered down. A little girl was standing next to him, her wide, luminous eyes desperate to convey hope. But there was no hope there, he thought, just a form of dulled resignation. She was barefoot; her olive-green dress dirt-stained and frayed. He guessed her hair hadn’t seen shampoo for a month, and her fingernails looked like a coal miner’s. She was a gypsy girl, no more than seven years old, and he wanted her gone from the area. The truck bomb he was going to detonate would cause havoc. He didn’t kill little girls when he had a choice in the matter. Little Sunni Muslim girls, at least, as most Turkish gypsies were.

He checked his heavy wristwatch. He had time to spare.

She held out her hand, begging, but said nothing. Ensuring no one was paying attention he folded the paper and slapped her face with it, just hard enough to cause involuntary tears without leaving the skin marked. She turned and ran. He watched her until her fragile frame had reached the sidewalk proper and had crossed the narrow street at the square’s perimeter, her dark curly hair becoming lost among the crowds on the other side. When he was sure that she was out of harm’s way, he allowed himself a faint smile.

The bomb had been placed in a large wooden crate, which lay now on the bed of the stationary flat-back truck, covered with a heavy-duty tarp. There was no possibility of planting a bomb onto the chassis of the limo itself. Even if his associates could’ve arranged clandestine access, the chassis and wheel arches would have been checked regularly with mirrors, and an onboard bomb-detection system would have picked up anything that had been missed, as it scanned for magnets and noise signatures. A detached bomb had been the best option.

He would sit and wait, as if he was just another Turkish intellectual reading a newspaper and sipping the strong coffee; just another man shaded from the intense sunlight enjoying people-watching. But in reality he was about to become the most dangerous man alive, and one day, a day that was fast-approaching, after what he said was this somewhat irritating if necessary act, the world would know that, too.

Chapter 12 (#ulink_bd2581af-744b-5244-8d29-1eb7fbb489d9)

Tom had taken a lukewarm shower in his first-floor bathroom and had put on sweatpants and a T-shirt. He walked downstairs now and out of the kitchen door into the conservatory that ran almost the length of the back of the property and housed his sensitive bonsai trees. He had six inside, planted in ceramic pots, and a dozen outside, the hardy perennials.

There were weeping figs, Californian redwoods, junipers, Black Hills spruce, and bald cypress. He’d spent the last two years doing his best to re-create what he considered the greatest bonsai of them all, an imitation of the five-needle pine. The original, some five hundred years old, was one of the National Treasures of Japan and was documented as having been cared for by a Shogun.

Stepping forwards to a wooden table, he unfurled a cloth wrap-around and stared at his collection of bonsai tools. They were held in place neatly by their individual pockets, like an electrician’s kit: the leaf trimmer, the root hook, the branch bending jacks, and the concave cutter. The bon referred to the tray-like ceramic pot, with drainage holes, in which the miniature trees grew. The sai meant cultivation. The pot confinement kept the trees small, together with regular pruning of the roots and crown. The bending jacks were used to create the hanging branches effect.

His five-needle pine was on a bed of coarse sand and Akadama clay pellets, imported from Japan. He breathed in, began to prune the branches, taking particular care, as excessive pruning could kill the tree. Twenty seconds later, he wrapped some copper wire around the trunk and used a length to connect two branches. Then he watered it: a growing work of art.

That done, he walked back out of the kitchen to the living room and settled down on his ox-blood sofa, with a book of Picasso paintings in his hands. After flicking through a few pages, he focussed on Woman Ironing. Truth be told, he always focussed on this representation of the Spaniard’s masterpiece. He’d seen the original in the Venetian Hotel’s Guggenheim gallery in Vegas ten years back. It’d lingered in his mind like an exotic view experienced on a vacation, or the face of some former girlfriend.

The painting was superficially mundane, the colours of an overcast day, and had hung on the gallery’s steel outer wall via magnets. Painted in the master’s Blue Period, it was the study of a near-emaciated young woman hunched over a heavy iron, pressing a shirt. The woman appeared to be worn out. A sympathetic portrayal of the exploited poor, he’d read; a study in melancholy. Looking intently at it now, she reminded him of his mother.

He stood up and walked over to his drinks cabinet and fixed himself a Jack Daniel’s and Coke. No ice, about three fingers’ worth. Sipping his drink, he realized he had to focus on the living rather than the dead. After he’d gotten a little closer to his father, he’d questioned him about Dan Crane, the enigmatic CIA operative who’d watched his back as he’d tracked down the Secretary of State after she’d been kidnapped in Islamabad thirteen months ago.

His father had told him that he’d gone to Beirut to rescue Crane from Hezbollah in the eighties, and, unofficially, had paid for his release. Crane hadn’t given away the general’s identity to his kidnappers, so the general couldn’t give up on him, either. It was a code of honour between men and women who risked their freedom and lives on a regular basis, Tom knew.

Tom’s next assignment was a so-called mannyguarding, the close-protection of a foreign diplomat’s child, and he was getting sick of it. Crane had offered him a job in the clandestine services provided by the CIA after he’d been responsible for saving the secretary, and, taking a hearty slug of the Jack and Coke, he knew that that was getting more appealing by the day.

He looked over at the book once more, at the Woman Ironing. His mother was dead; it had been a shitty life in the years between his father leaving and her death. But bitching about it to the man who hadn’t even left him with his surname would mean he would become a sullen bore, and Tom had resolved to make things right between them.

Chapter 13 (#ulink_7e7be0ce-ddbb-593f-9d1f-cd1bca9f0648)

The general had reported to the Pentagon on the position regarding the likely protection of Ibrahim by the Turkish mafia and the Muslim terrorist groups via a secure satphone a couple of minutes ago. He’d left Habib’s office and had snuck into a nearby alcove, anxious neither to be seen nor heard. Now, after stepping out of an old-fashioned cage elevator, he walked across the dull grey flagstones to the revolving exit doors, nodding to the two plainclothes operatives sitting behind a desk to the right beneath a wide staircase.

Outside, the heat was still oppressive and the general was glad that his chauffeur had had the wits to park the black Mercedes limo beneath the splayed branches of a deciduous tree in the small courtyard. The chauffeur was standing with a couple of police outriders that MIT had seconded to protect the limo, but which the general felt were unnecessary.

But he was a three-star general now, the de facto head of operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he conceded the security went with the territory. Besides, Turkey wasn’t Switzerland, and suddenly he had a nagging feeling concerning what Habib had told him about Ibrahim, despite the bribe. In retrospect, he wondered if it had been given too eagerly, and he felt the ice on that metaphorical frozen lake shift a little beneath his feet. He felt played in a game within a game.

As he walked down the stone steps to the gravel at ground level, he focussed on the trio of men in front of him, seeing that they were smoking foul-smelling Turkish cigarettes in the shade beneath an overhang. But they stubbed them out quickly when he called out to them, and scampered over to where the limo and the motorcycles were parked like rebuked teenage kids. It was a scene he’d seen many times in foreign countries. Those at the top were treated with deference, irrespective of their vices, and outside of the States he always had the feeling of stepping back in time.

The chauffeur opened the back door, the general dipped in, leaving the seatbelt hanging, and he was driven out of the building’s courtyard. As the limo passed between the wrought-iron gates that abutted a tarmac slope leading to the street proper, he considered the possibility that MIT was protecting Ibrahim, too. There wasn’t a lot of logic to it other than some overarching but misguided geopolitical strategy regarding the Sunni-Shia conflict, and, for now at least, there was nothing to be done. He was doing his job and, after just four more appointments today, he would soon be home to spend some downtime with Tom.

He was looking forward to seeing his son. He knew he’d been through a helluva lot before he’d come of age, most of which, he, as his father, had been responsible for. He’d read a bit about how kids were affected by the break-up of their parents and how an absent father was about as healthy for a teenage boy as a diet of fries and pizzas, but he had vowed to change that a while back and they were now forming something that could be termed a wholesome relationship. And, less than two years off a retirement, which he intended to spend sailing in the Caribbean and playing golf in Palm Springs, he could involve his son in that, as and when time permitted.

As the outriders stopped oncoming traffic at intersections, the general glanced outside the limo’s smoked-glass window. Old men in flat hats were sitting under the awnings of hookah bars, puffing on the pipes and drinking the sticky coffee. Tired-looking women swept store fronts clean of dust and garbage, and young men sat astride mopeds, wearing shades and tight jeans, pretending, he guessed, that they were in a photo shoot.

But there was a distinct lack of females wearing the hijab, and he guessed that the metropolitan people of most countries tended to value personal freedom above tradition. It was different in the rural provinces, a fact that was being exacerbated by the rift between modernists and Islamists, something, he knew, that would dominate politics in the Greater Middle East for maybe the next twenty years. That and the other two main fault lines: the schism in the Muslim faith between Sunnis and Shias, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian issue.

After about ten minutes, the limo took a sharp right and, slowing down to take account of the motorcyclists’ sudden reduction in speed, seemed to crawl along at no more than fifteen miles per hour. The general thought the road looked like a back alley, bordered by the rear of rundown apartment blocks and derelict warehouses. But as he looked ahead and saw that it led to a well-populated square with squat palm trees, he figured it was a shortcut.

The chauffeur, who had several chins and a neatly trimmed moustache, and who the general had secretly nicknamed Oliver Hardy, turned his head forty-five degrees, and spoke pidgin English. “This Alevi part of city. Many problems. They like to fight police. No respect for government.”

The general kept silent. He’d read about the Alevi as part of his substantial briefing on the country before he’d left the States. It was a sect that had evolved from Shia Muslims in a Sunni dominated country. Some referred to them as Sufi-Shia, due to their unorthodox spiritual practices.

Even before the recent outbreaks of sectarian violence, they’d existed alongside the Sunnis in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and loathing. They’d always seen themselves as a pragmatic counterbalance to Sunni extremism. But they had strong ties with the Shia-based Alawites in Syria, even if many of them didn’t agree with Assad’s tactics, and this had literally enflamed the enmity with the Sunnis.

But something else was bothering him, too. He couldn’t pin it down, and wasn’t anything more than an ill-defined notion. Somehow the general felt that this Ibrahim would pose a whole new threat. Even if it was just a whim, he knew that in his business something akin to an animal sixth sense could save your life if you let it, and his was just about to spike.

As the car reached the edge of the square, and turned right along the one-way street that edged it, the general heard the motorcycle engines revving little more than a split second before the MIT outriders sped away.

“They crazy men,” the chauffeur said, raising a hand in the air.

Not crazy, the general thought, but in on it. He knew something bad was about to happen. He just didn’t know if it would be an assault by submachine gun-wielding assassins, an IED, or a kidnapping attempt.

“Stop the damn car and run,” he shouted as his left hand went for the door handle.

Chapter 14 (#ulink_1209379f-35fb-5735-bfe5-d0412e9c88eb)

Remaining seated at the café, Ibrahim knew that the vehicle the general was travelling in wasn’t an up-armoured limo; all part of the setup. As the motorcyclists reached a suitable distance, he used the newspaper to mask the removal of the cellphone from the pocket of his pants. He’d done the same as he’d received the text message from the MIT officer, Habib, who’d had the meeting with the general just minutes earlier. There was no coded text, and that meant that it was game on.

When the limo came parallel with the parked truck, he thumbed the cell, still hidden beneath the paper, in order to activate the bomb by remote control. It was a simple procedure, ringing the vibrate mode on another cell attached to the explosives by conducting wires. This cell had been modified, using an electric match – a small amount of primary charge fitted around the battery that ignited when the current passed through it – as a detonator.

Two seconds later, the truck rose a full three yards into the air, leaving a gaping crater instantly. Due to the force of the blast, the shockwave made the Merc somersault to the right before crashing into the crowds who were jamming the sidewalk. No one could survive that, he thought. It would take hours for fire crews to cut free their mangled bodies from the wreckage.

But the immediate aftermath was eerily calm, as if the explosion had rendered everyone deaf and dumb. Allah was Most Compassionate and Most Merciful, but He demanded the death of unbelievers. When the screaming and activated fire alarms cut through the silence, Ibrahim felt a calmness and contentment he had never known, a spiritual euphoria that he hoped would last for hours afterwards.

It was good practice for a terrorist to walk calmly away from an incident that they’d created. But, apart from the dead or injured, those in the square were either running for the exit routes, or were paralyzed with shock or fear. With the sound of the wailing of the injured in his ears, he began to sprint in the opposite direction to the bomb wreckage, feigning distress.

Ibrahim saw the white Ford Fiesta pull up at the designated place, a grocery store twenty yards down the adjacent street. As he got within a few feet of the car, the back door was swung open. The Turkish mafia had wanted to use an S series Mercedes, but he’d insisted upon a more popular and less conspicuous form of transport. He’d also ensured that no one exited the car and held open the door for him, something that could garner attention, even with the ensuing chaos around him. He got in and opened a translation App on his secure smartphone.

“No speeding,” he said in Turkish.

It was vital that he got to his destination undetected. The Amir was waiting for him and the Silent Jihad was about to begin. He was on a short timeframe, too, but speeding was a bad idea. The cops could be bribed and he had influential friends in the highest echelons of Turkey’s “Deep State”, but an enforced delay could be fatal. Some dumb cop could even attempt to make a connection. As a result, he might even be overlooked, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. He’d been reaching this point for years. Resting his head against the rear seat, he studied the folds of skin on the driver’s neck, reminding him of a slab of pork belly. He thumbed the APP.

“How long before we get there?” Ibrahim asked.

The black-suited man in the front passenger seat turned around. He had a thin, pitted face and a dropping moustache, a scar that ran from his left eye to his jaw line. “We drive you, we don’t like you. Keep you fucking mouth shut and we get there quicker,” he said in Turkish.

Ibrahim didn’t understand him, but the tone was obvious enough. He guessed the man had swapped a shoeshine kit for a switchblade years ago. He chose to ignore him. He nodded, appearing subservient.

The plan had been conceived following a report by a middle-ranking officer in Turkish military intelligence, who was in the mafia’s pocket and reported to them intermittently on any potential crackdowns on the smack trade. The officer had informed the mafia, who had in turn informed Ibrahim for the usual fee regarding relevant anti-jihadist intel, that he’d found out that the general had been working on the case for six months.