Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

“I want some action! I mean it!”

“I know, I know,” said Taylor, shaking his head. He was embarrassed by his incompetence as a procurer. He made a mental list of the possibilities, weighing each one against the risk that it would produce another disaster. “I’ve got it,” he said eventually. He mumbled a few words to the driver from the consulate motor pool and got in the car.

“What’s next?” asked George. “A sheep ranch?”

“A place called Omar’s,” said Taylor. “An old girlfriend of mine works there. Great gal. Her name is Sonia. She’ll like you.”

9

Omar’s had the ambience of a roadside coffeehouse in Tashkent or Tbilisi. It smelled of tobacco and Turkish coffee and the sweet licorice scent of anise; and, of course, for its worldly customers, Moslem or otherwise, of beer and whiskey. It was located near the university, just above Kumkapi, in a district frequented by immigrants—Tatars, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Azeris and a half dozen other Central Asian nationalities.

The bar was on the top floor of a cheap hotel that catered to Eastern travelers, and it featured a spectacular view of the harbor and its varied patterns of illumination: the bright lights of the Istanbul business district across the Golden Horn; the distant twinkling lights of the Asian shore across the Bosporus; the riding lights of the Russian freighters in the Sea of Marmara, waiting their turn to navigate the narrow strait to the Black Sea; and framing this scene, the moonlit spires of the five mosques that dominated the old city.

The owner, Omar Gaspraly, was a Tatar himself, from the Crimea, and he had made the place a gathering point for émigré intellectuals from the Caucasus and Central Asia. On a good night, you could hear people cursing in a half dozen different languages. They came to eat and drink, to read poetry in their native languages, to proclaim the inalienable rights of nations that no longer existed: most of all, they came to denounce the modern-day overlords of that part of the world—the Russians. In Istanbul, among intellectual Uzbeks and Azeris, the rule was: “Everybody meets at Omar’s.”

“Al-an,” boomed a loud and heavily accented voice when Taylor entered the place. Gaspraly embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks. He was a large man, with crinkly gray hair and perpetual laugh lines creased on his face. Taylor kissed him back. Behind the affable Tatar stood a slender Circassian woman in her early thirties in a low-cut, sequined dress. She had the sad look of a cabaret singer who has sung “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” too many times. Except in her case it was probably “I Left My Heart in Sevastopol.”

“Sonia,” said Omar, pulling her out of the shadows. “Look who is here!” Taylor kissed her on both cheeks. It was a former lover’s kiss, at once tender and distant.

“I want you to meet someone,” said Taylor, walking her toward George. “This is my friend. His name is Henry, and he doesn’t know anyone in Istanbul.”

“Hello, Henry,” said Sonia.

“Hi,” said George. He was wide-eyed, dumbfounded. Perhaps it was the contrast with the vulgar women they had encountered earlier in the evening, but George looked as if he had fallen instantly in love. “Come sit with us,” said George. It sounded almost like a marriage proposal.

“One more time I must sing,” she said. “Then I come sit.”

Omar led them to a quiet booth in the corner of the room, almost hidden from the other tables. The room was so smoky that you couldn’t see, at first, that it overlooked the magnificent panorama of Istanbul. The bar, enveloped in cigarette smoke and surrounded by the city lights, seemed to float over Istanbul like a cloud.

“Wod-ka?” said Omar, and wod-ka it was, a full bottle, and three glasses. “I come back,” he said.

“How do you know this guy so well?” asked George.

“He did some work for us after the war. We got a few of his buddies killed. Somehow, he still likes us.” Taylor emptied his glass of vodka and poured another for himself and for George.

“We fuck up a lot, don’t we?” said George.

“Of course we do,” said Taylor. “That is our mission. To provide a benchmark of incompetence against which other intelligence services can be measured.” They pondered that truth together in silence for a few moments, the cool, sharp taste of the vodka on their lips.

“We’re going to solve your problem for you, Al.”

“Which problem?”

“Leaving people hanging. Getting them killed.”

“Oh yeah? How?”

“With rats.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No,” said George, learning toward Taylor and talking in a whisper. “Back at TSD we have a new project to implant transmitters in the bodies of rats. Then we train the little critters to follow very precise routes, sometimes several miles long. If they make a wrong turn, we zap them by remote control, until they get it right.”

“So?”

“So when the rats get to where they’ve been trained to go, we send out a signal that kills them dead—poof!—and activates the microphone and transmitter. The dead rat becomes a listening post. The idea is to release these little guys at a precise point in the Moscow sewer system and have them make their way to the Kremlin, into the walls of the actual building where the actual fucking Politburo meets! And our dead rat will be just on the other side of the wall, broadcasting away. Incredible, no? Like having a miniature agent.”

“With fur and big teeth.”

“Seriously, Al, this is what you guys need. Nobody’s going to get bent out of shape about losing a few rats.”

“So how are the little fellows doing?”

“Still a few problems, actually. The rats tend to get lost, despite all the training. Stage fright maybe. And sometimes they don’t die when they’re supposed to. They hate carrying the hardware, so they try to get rid of it by scratching it, or gnawing at it, which can get kind of messy. But the idea