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

maybe also some guns. We’d like to tap into his network and use it.”

“For what?”

“For our operation.”

“Remind me what that is again. I don’t remember too much from last night.”

“I didn’t tell you much.”

“Well, tell me some more. Can I borrow your jelly, by the way?”

“Sure,” said Anna, handing him the jelly container.

“Go on, tell me. While you’re at it, let me borrow a piece of your toast.”

Anna laughed. Hoffman was impossible not to like, at least in the morning, when he hadn’t been drinking. “Stone starts from the same place you do, actually,” she said.

“Does he, now?”

“He thinks the agency is dead in the water.”

“He’s right.”

“He thinks the only thing we can do, for now, is try to scare the Russians and buy some time.”

“How?”

“By using people like the Iranian I was telling you about, to make the Soviets think that Central Asia and the Caucasus are coming apart.”

“And you’re looking for someone to run the Iranian and his smugglers.”

“Correct.”

“That’s wild. It doesn’t sound like Stone, though. It’s too crazy.”

“I don’t know. Maybe Stone has gone to seed, too.”

“What a happy thought.”

“So? What do you think?”

“It’s weird, and it’s dangerous. And I have a sneaking suspicion that it ain’t legal. But who cares. I like it.”

“What do you mean, that it isn’t legal?”

“Forget it. What do I know? I’m no lawyer. The point is, I like it. Count me in.”

“But I haven’t asked you yet.”

“I know, but you will. Face it. You need a cranky old woman-hating son of a bitch like me.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“What’s the Iranian’s name?”

“Ali Ascari.”

“Where does he live?”

“London and Tehran. But he travels a lot, on three passports. One of them is Greek, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, is it really, now? That little detail ought to come in handy.”

“As leverage?”

“Fuckin’-A right. When can you arrange a meet?”

“I still haven’t offered you the job.”

“Well, why don’t you think about it while I get rid of the breakfast dishes.”

Hoffman picked up the trays, knocking over a coffee cup, and walked to the door. He deposited them outside the room and returned. Anna didn’t have to think very long. She recognized that Hoffman’s raw energy—the crude, blunt, burnt-out rage of the man—fit the operating style of the odd little enterprise doing business as Karpetland. It functioned off the books, and so did Hoffman.

“So what’s the verdict?”

“So how would you like a job, Frank?”

“I think I’m in love,” said Hoffman.

27

Fortunately Hoffman had to leave that afternoon for a business engagement in Dubai, so he was gone before he could do anything that might have caused Anna to change her mind. This sudden conclusion of her business in Athens left Anna with a free day on the town before her flight back to Washington. Her first thought was to spend it sunning herself at the swimming pool maintained by the Athens Hilton. But after a stroll through the cabanas, which were filled with men in too small bathing suits and women falling out of their bikini tops, she decided that the Hilton pool was not her scene.

Anna’s scene was something closer to a library. So after studying a map, she set off walking from the hotel in the general direction of the National Library, a place she had wanted to visit on previous trips to Athens but had never quite gotten around to. She made her way past Syntagma Square and its touristic jumble of airline ticket offices and tacky cabarets, toward Omonia Square.

The library was an immense neoclassical pile, just past the university and the Hellenic Academy. A little man in a uniform at the front desk asked where she was going; Anna, without thinking about it very much, said she wanted to see the Ottoman history collection. The oppressive burden of graduate school was by now far enough in the past that she actually did want to see the Ottoman collection. Other people collected ancient coins or catalogued species of bugs. Anna’s area of useless specialization was late-nineteenth-century Turkish history. The guard at the front desk directed her to another guard, up a flight of stairs and down a very long hall, who in turn directed her to an owlish man who sat in the shadows of a large, cryptlike office. The man in question was the curator of the Ottoman history collection. His name was Jannos.

“What are you looking for?” he asked Anna dubiously. He spoke in a very precise, clipped English.

“Just browsing.”

“This is not an area for browsing, madame. You have to know very much even to know what to look for.”

Anna decided to lie. “I’m a doctoral candidate in Ottoman history at Harvard.” It wasn’t a big lie; more a change of tense.

“I see,” said the curator, still dubious. “What is the topic of your dissertation?”

“Administrative Practices in the Late Ottoman Empire, with special emphasis on the management of ethnic conflict.”

“I see,” said the curator. He finally seemed convinced that she was legitimate.

“How extensive is your collection?”

“Very extensive, madame.”

“Any new acquisitions?” she asked idly.

“No,” said the curator. “Only the Albanian material, which is temporarily on loan to us.”

Anna almost missed what he had said. “Excuse me,” she asked. “Did you say the Albanian material?”

“Yes, madame. From the Bibliothèque Nationale in Tirana.”

“You’re kidding!”

He was offended. “I assure you that I am not kidding. Why are you surprised? We have reciprocal exchanges with many national libraries. We may not be Harvard University. But we are quite modern here, you know.”

“I wasn’t being critical. I was just surprised. The Albanians have some documents I was looking for—am looking for, I mean—for my thesis.”

“And what documents might those be?”

“The Ibrahim Temo papers. He was one of the founders of the Union and Progress Committee.”

“Ah! I am sorry.”

“You don’t have them?”

“Not anymore, madame.”

“What do you mean?”

“We did have some of the Temo documents, but only very briefly. It was necessary to return them to Tirana, one month ago.”

“Oh no!” said Anna. “That’s awful.”

“You see, we are quite a modern library.”

“Now