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

around Anna. “If you still feel the same way after the Istanbul meet, we’ll see about handing him off to someone in the embassy. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Anna. She took a deep breath. “One more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“What do I do if there’s an emergency?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. If there’s a problem in Istanbul. With Ascari. If I need to communicate with you or headquarters.”

“Call the base chief in Istanbul. His name is Taylor. We’ll send him a cable letting him know you’re in his neck of the woods. And we’ll work out some kind of recognition code before you leave. But don’t call him unless it’s an emergency. It’s insecure.”

“Okay,” said Anna.

“Don’t worry, for chrissake!” said Howard. “You’ll do fine. Just don’t fuck up.” He laughed heartily. Anna tried to join in, but she couldn’t muster even a chuckle.

15

Anna arrived in Istanbul late in the afternoon, landing in a bank of sooty gray smog that covered the airport and stretched across the Bosporus to Anatolia. The airport had the militarized look of the Third World: watchtowers and barbed wire lining the runways; poor enlisted men standing guard in the winter chill, freezing their asses off so that the generals could pretend they were in control of things. And everywhere, the dust and debris that settles in public places in the Third World, and the surging crowds that cannot be contained in orderly lines.

For a woman traveling alone, arriving in a Third World city is never easy. There are too many eyes watching, too many hands reaching out for your baggage, too many taxicab drivers barking for your fare. For Anna that day, these ordinary indignities were magnified. The tight little man at passport control spent too long examining her passport—studying the document, looking at her face, checking the passport again, consulting a watch list of passport numbers. Anna tried to remain impassive, to give nothing away—not even a nervous smile—but her knees felt weak. Finally he stamped the document and waved her through.

Anna collected her bag and headed for the green “nothing to declare” line. The customs man pulled her over. Was she so obvious? Had she inadvertently caught his eye, inviting examination with that guilty look that makes a customs officer’s job so easy? Or was it just that she was a woman traveling alone, and therefore suspect? He searched her suitcase, pawing through her clothes, and then sent her on. A scrofulous old porter lunged for her bag and carried it to the door of the terminal; she didn’t have any Turkish money, so she gave him a British pound note, and when he complained, she gave him another.

When she finally found a taxi and settled onto the fake leopard-skin seat, she wanted to scream. Her spirits lifted a bit on the way in from the airport. Through the smog she could recognize the outlines of the landscape: the rusty freighters riding at anchor in the Sea of Marmara; the jumble of cars and boats and people at the Galata Bridge.

Istanbul looked a mess. Anna was amazed at how much the city had deteriorated in the two years since she had been there. It had the weary look of a capital under siege: faded political posters covering every wall; the tinny sound of cheap loudspeakers broadcasting political propaganda in squares and intersections; security men who stared at you in lobbies and on elevators. Anna remembered the old saw. All Turkish men were the same: “Two eyes and a mustache.” That much hadn’t changed.

She checked into a hotel in Taksim—middle-range, not too fancy, not too seedy—and bought several Turkish newspapers on her way upstairs and read them in her room. The front page of each paper was dominated by stories about terrorism. Cumhuriyet decried the bombing of a leftist bookstore in Istanbul. Tercuman denounced a raid on a rightist coffeehouse in Malatya. It was as if the whole country had slipped a gear.

Anna decided against calling Ascari that first night. The timing had been left open in the operational plan, depending on how she felt. And she felt terrible. She didn’t want to talk to a soul, not even the Turkish chambermaid who tried to be nice when she saw that Anna was alone. She ordered dinner from room service, watched a game show on Turkish television, and then turned to the book she had brought along: a copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that her father had given her years before, when she entered graduate school. She made it as far as the seventh quatrain before dozing off.

Anna didn’t call Ascari the next morning either. She was still without her bearings. It wasn’t that she didn’t know the city. Anna had covered every inch of Istanbul two years before—when she spent the summer there doing thesis research in the archives—but that was in another lifetime, when she was still an innocent, if somewhat bored, graduate student and Istanbul was a playground.

Anna decided while eating her breakfast—still in her room—that she would visit one of her old haunts in the city. The Basbakanlik Archives, where she had done her research: perhaps the archival tea room, where she had picked up the Turkish professor. She might even do a little research on Ottoman relations with the princely families of old Baku. And then, with her feet firmly on the ground, she would call Ali Ascari.

“Topkapi Sarayi, Lutfen,” she told the taxi driver. After twenty minutes of cutting and weaving through traffic, they reached the walls of Topkapi Palace, and from there she walked the few dozen yards to the gray pile that housed the archival records of the Grand Viziers, the prime ministers of the Ottoman Empire. This gloomy building had been Anna’s favorite spot in Istanbul, for it contained the elements that made the city so mysterious, and so comical. Anna flashed her old reader’s pass at the main door and headed for the reading room.

The Basbakanlik reading room was