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

for sure he was back in town. During the weeks of trolling and waiting, Taylor had asked the Turks to put a light surveillance on Silvana Kunayeva, the wife of the Soviet consul general. She didn’t lead them directly to Rawls; she was too careful for that. But she did pay a visit one morning to a businessman in Beyoglu, a certain Mr. Guztepe, who had a prosperous import-export business with the Eastern bloc. This worthy gentleman made a trip the next day to a real estate office near Taksim Square. And the proprietor of the real estate concern, after much bullying from one of Serif Osman’s Turkish agents, disclosed that one of his salesmen had just rented out an apartment in the district of Zeytinburnu, overlooking the Sea of Marmara. It was, if nothing else, a good place to hide. The city’s leather tanneries were located there, and the district was permeated with the smell of chemicals and animal carcasses.

Once Taylor had the address, it was relatively easy to maintain a fixed surveillance of the apartment. And eventually, one morning, the camera recorded a tall blond man putting his key in the lock and letting himself in the door. So they finally had a fix on Rawls. But Rawls, alas, still did not have a fix on them.

Taylor’s next move was to try to wire Rawls’s new safe house in Zeytinburnu. He first attempted to do it the easy way—by renting an adjacent apartment and running in a probe microphone. But that proved impossible. The apartments above, below and on either side were already rented, and trying to bribe the sitting tenants or have them evicted seemed too risky. Taylor did find an empty apartment across the street—with a direct, line-of-sight view of Rawls’s living-room window—and he had his deputy rent the place immediately, through a Turkish cutout.

Now Taylor needed a wireman. Stone had forbidden any use of regular agency personnel, but surely this was different—especially when Taylor had a friend who could solve technical problems and also keep his mouth shut. So he had his secretary call George Trumbo in Athens with the message that Sonia from Omar’s place wanted to see him urgently. George suspected that his leg was being pulled, but he agreed to come anyway. When he arrived the next day, Taylor took him the short distance from the airport to Zeytinburnu and showed him the layout of the two apartments.

“This place smells like dog shit” was George’s first comment.

“Forget how it smells,” said Taylor. “Just tell me how to bug it.”

“It’s easy, if you’ve got the hardware,” said the lumbering technician.

“Explain it for your dumb friend, please,” said Taylor.

“You just use this guy’s window as a microphone. Bounce an infrared laser off it from your apartment, pick it up with the right kind of optical gizmo, and feed the signals into an audio receiver. Bingo! You can read the vibrations of the windowpane as easy as if you had a needle in the groove of a phonograph record.”

“Great,” said Taylor. “So do it.”

“Are you kidding? I don’t have that kind of gear.”

“So go back to Athens and get it.”

“Al, you don’t understand. I don’t have it back in Athens either. They don’t give that stuff to field engineers. They keep it back at headquarters. It’s classified so secret you can’t even be in the same room with it alone. I couldn’t get hold of it without a lot of paperwork.”

“Haven’t you got friends back at the TSD front office who could help you get it without all the bullshit?”

“Maybe. But I’m not sure I want to ask for this stuff on the sly. Maybe you hadn’t realized, but I’m still in hot water for fucking around with you a couple of months ago.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that someone from the Inspector General’s office came by a couple of weeks ago asking questions about you, and what were you up to, and had I done any work for you recently, and how did I like having a regular paycheck?”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing, except for stuff he already knew.”

“Thanks. I owe you one.”

“Forget it. What are you up to anyway that makes the IG’s office so interested in you? Those guys are bad news.”

“You don’t want to know, Georgie. Believe me.”

“Why don’t you just go through channels and have someone from headquarters come out and install the hardware? They’ll have it done in a day. What’s the problem with that?”

“That’s what you don’t want to know.”

“Okay, Al. Sorry I asked. But a word to the wise: Watch your ass. Somebody back home is mighty curious about what you’re doing.”

Taylor thanked his friend for the warning. He wasn’t sure what was going on—what was prompting the IG’s office to ask questions—but fundamentally he didn’t care. The salient point, for the moment, was that wiring Rawls’s apartment wasn’t worth the hassle. Taylor would just have to wait a bit longer for the Russian from Vancouver to show his hand.

Munzer reported at his next meeting that Khojaev had finally introduced him to the mysterious Mr. Abdallah from Tashkent. Taylor had been hoping for several weeks that such a meeting would take place, but Abdallah wouldn’t be rushed. Evidently he had been admonished by someone or other to be very careful about talking to people. Munzer had a twinkle in his eye as he described the encounter.

“Abdallah ask me for literatures,” he said.

“So you gave it to him?”

“Yes, I give to him, like you tell me. I say to him: You are patriotic Uzbek man. You want to see what Munzer doing, so I show you. We all working together for same cause.”

“What did you give him, exactly?”

“I give him ‘Turkestan Under Soviet Yoke.’ I give him ‘Moslem Land of Happiness.’ I give him ‘Siberian Folk Chorus,’ which is really Naqshbandi sheikh. I give him special Pakistan Koran, small size, very nice.”

“What else? Did you show him the leaflet from Tashkent and tell him what happened