Chapter Thirty-Five
Istanbul, Turkey
Liesel Bergmann had spotted the man a few turns ago, about seven minutes after she’d split with Caspian.
The man was short and wore a pair of blue jeans, a dark jacket, and a beige ball cap.
Both times she’d glanced at him, his hands had been in his pockets and his head was just low enough that she hadn’t been able to see his face.
She updated Caspian, letting him know she might have picked up a tail. As expected, he offered to come to her assistance, but she refused. There was no point in him exposing himself further. And to be honest, she wasn’t sure she was being followed. Yet.
The man with the beige ball cap hadn’t been looking directly at her, but something had seemed familiar about him.
Had she first seen him while she was still with Caspian?
She didn’t know. Istanbul was full of men who looked like him.
But something inside her was triggered when she’d noticed the man again.
As a deep cover operative who had worked in the United States for years, Liesel had learned a long time ago that the moment you think someone might be following you, that’s the moment everyone suddenly starts to look suspicious.
Her BND instructors had warned her about this, and they’d taught her to keep her cool and to keep an unflustered, critical eye on the world around her.
Don’t get tunnel vision, Liesel, she reminded herself.
Still, right now, everyone did look suspicious. Fifty feet in front of her, a woman was talking on her phone, gazing Liesel’s way. Across the street, a city worker was sipping his coffee, and Liesel could feel his eyes on her.
Liesel tensed as her mind began working the situation. Had she been compromised? And what about Caspian? Had he picked up a tail too?
She forced herself to calm down and to concentrate on her breathing for a few seconds.
While she didn’t take the possibility of being tailed lightly, did it really make sense that someone would be following her?
Either the authorities had pegged them, or they hadn’t.
And if they had, why play cat and mouse?
Why not just pounce on her? Subtlety wasn’t part of the Istanbul Police tool kit, not when one of their own had been hurt.
She and Caspian had left a trail of unconscious bodies in their wake.
Three police officers and one security guard.
They hadn’t killed anyone, and they had used the least amount of violence possible to neutralize them, but she didn’t think their “restraint” would count for much in the eyes of the Turkish authorities.
She and Caspian had embarrassed them. Big time.
Liesel knew what the unwritten rules were .
. . they were the same across police departments all over the world.
Take one officer out, and the entire department will hunt you, looking to get their own kind of justice on the perpetrator.
She didn’t blame them. She’d do the same.
But that didn’t mean she was going to let them catch her and drag her into a van.
Liesel moved through the winding streets with calm, her eyes constantly moving.
She performed a quick series of turns and double-backs, but without making it obvious that she was running a quick surveillance detection route.
As tired as she was—though the few hours of sleep she’d managed to get the previous night had taken the edge off—all her senses were on alert.
Her SDR wasn’t perfect—it was way too short—but she hoped it would be enough to flush out a poorly trained plainclothes officer.
She’d joined the BND because she wanted to make a difference and do cool, dangerous stuff.
When she’d been accepted into the elite unit of the BND tasked with deep cover operations on foreign soil, she was sure she’d hit the jackpot.
But when her training ended and she learned that she was going to New York, she’d been less than thrilled.
She’d thought that speaking four languages, including Arabic, would have guaranteed her a position in the Middle East where she would have helped break up terror cells. It hadn’t.
Apparently, the BND had more than enough intelligence officers with the same language skills she had.
What had set Liesel apart was her accounting degree and her two years of experience in forensic accounting.
So instead of chasing terrorists, she’d become a corporate espionage specialist—a far cry from the glamorous spy stuff she’d envisioned she’d be doing.
Then Caspian Anderson had entered her life, and everything changed. Her life had become much more dangerous.
She knew something inside her had cracked when she’d been shot in France. And again, when Sofie had died in Port de Sóller. The adrenaline rushes she’d been craving earlier in her career didn’t feel like premium fuel anymore; they felt like fucking poison.
While she wasn’t certain, she had the impression that Caspian acted differently with her since she’d nearly died in Bordeaux.
He was more protective of her, too much sometimes.
She appreciated the love, but whatever additional attention he was giving her meant he wasn’t focusing on the task at hand.
At the airport the day before, she hadn’t lied to him. They really needed to talk.
She loved Caspian, but if the last year had taught her anything, it was that this life, as much as she had once wanted it, was no longer for her. She wanted to slow down, not live constantly on edge. She wanted kids. A garden. She wanted the life Caspian’s parents—Richard and Elizabeth—had.
But what about Caspian? He loved her, she knew that. But did he love her enough to step back from this crazy life? That was a question she didn’t have the answer to. And it scared her.
And even if he wanted out, would Ranger let him?
Liesel made a left onto a pedestrian street and immediately turned into a cluttered antiques shop.
She played tourist, browsing through the scarves, rugs, and brass bowls while keeping watch on the street.
After two minutes, when the man with the beige ball cap didn’t appear, she let herself relax, just a bit, and exited.
She was about to inform Caspian of her status when his voice came in through her earbud.
“Liesel, update,” he asked her.
“I think I’m good,” she replied. “I’m about to head north. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’ll let you know if anything changes.”
“Understood. Approaching the Hyatt now.”
Liesel stepped into Muammer Karaca Tiyatro, an alley carved between two aging buildings that led to Istiklal Caddesi, one of the most prolific pedestrian streets in Istanbul.
A black cast-iron gate stood under an archway, but it was open.
The alley, much narrower than she expected it to be, was lined with overflowing garbage bins and stank of urine.
Graffiti covered the outside walls of the buildings in layers of angry, spiked scripts.
Homeless men and women huddled in small groups, talking loudly in Turkish as she walked past them.
One man offered her a drink from his bottle.
She ignored him, but thanked him nonetheless.
Liesel quickened her pace. She was only twenty meters away from Istiklal Caddesi when she sensed movement to her left.
She turned, just in time to see a man lunge from the recessed doorway of a long-ago closed shop.
His face was covered with large reddish blotches, his eyes were bloodshot, and he was swinging a long, serrated knife at her heart.
She pivoted, deflecting the attack with her forearm, but the blade snagged her jacket, slicing through it, and the tip of the blade tugged against her belt.
Pain shot up her side.
Then an elbow slammed into her jaw, snapping her head sideways with such force that her earbud popped free. Before she could recover, thick arms wrapped around her from behind. A second man had locked his forearms around her torso, pinning her arms, his chest pressing against her back.
Her body, honed by countless hours of Krav Maga classes, reacted before her brain fully comprehended what was happening.
She thrust the heel of her left foot into the shin of the man behind her.
He barked in pain but held on, which turned out to be a good thing because it allowed Liesel to draw both knees up, feet off the ground, and kick forward.
She caught the charging knifeman in the gut as he was about to stab her in the abdomen.
But the hit wasn’t clean, and the man’s knife nicked her right leg, slicing through her skin from ankle to mid-shin.
She screamed as the energy of the impact sent her and the man holding her crashing into the wall.
The man lost his footing, and Liesel twisted out of his grasp as they fell, landing partly on top of him.
She drove her right thumb deep into his left eye, and the man yelled in pure agony.
She rolled away from him and scrambled to her feet, her injured leg buckling under her.
Her wound was already leaking through her pants, but she had no time to assess its severity, because the knifeman was closing in again.
But this time his approach was slower, more cautious.
He telegraphed his next strike, and when he lunged, she stepped forward and parried with her left forearm, knocking his knife hand aside.
She pivoted to her left and hammered the chop side of her right hand into the inside of the man’s forearm with as much power as she could muster.
The man’s fingers opened, and the knife dropped.
But Liesel wasn’t done.
She shifted her weight and drove her left fist into his throat.
His eyes opened wide in shock, and his hands shot up to his crushed windpipe.
It wasn’t a killing blow, but it was enough to drop him to his knees, choking.
She was confident the man would be forced to eat his meals through a straw for a week or two.
She turned to face the other man, and she saw him coming at her with a steel pipe.
The man was huge and very tall. He had the shape of a heavyweight boxer who had fought his last bout years ago, but who could still be dangerous.
His left eye was shut and bleeding, but the right one was rage filled.
He swung wide. She ducked, and the steel pipe flew over her head.
Pain flashed up her bad leg as she dipped low.
She came up off balance, half falling into the wall.
She had to end the fight. Now. She was losing blood faster than she thought.
She tried to kick low, go for the man’s knee, but her leg gave out and she dropped to one knee. Her eyes locked onto her assailant’s remaining eye. The man, who was now madly smiling, reset his swing.
Shit. I’m dead.
In desperation, she brought her forearms up, but the blow never came.
Instead, there was a crash of glass, and she heard the man grunt.
One of the homeless men, the one who had offered her a drink, was behind him, wild-eyed and completely drunk, clutching the jagged remains of a broken liquor bottle.
Liesel’s attacker turned, pipe raised, and began to swing it toward the other man’s head when the drunk charged him, plunging the broken liquor bottle into his ribs.
Liesel, wanting to take this new opportunity to get out of the alley, forced herself upright. Everything throbbed, and her leg was soaked in blood. Her coat too. She staggered forward, toward Istiklal Cuddesi.
She could see it. It was right there. Only a few more steps.
Behind her, she heard the steel pipe clang to the ground. She glanced over her shoulder. The homeless man had jumped onto the other man’s back and seemed to have his teeth buried deep in his neck.
The hell?
Liesel tried to pick up the pace, but she couldn’t. She didn’t have the energy. Her hand went to her side. It came back wet and sticky. She looked. Blood. A lot of it.
Had she been stabbed twice? She’d been so focused on fighting the two men, she couldn’t remember.
She pulled her phone. Her hands were shaking. Caspian’s number glowed on the screen. The call was still active, connected to her now-lost earbud. She moved to switch off Bluetooth, but her vision swam. Then the world tilted, and she slumped against the wall.
Fuck.
Her hand found her side again. The pain was sharp now, definite. Her knees folded, and Liesel felt herself slide down the dirty, graffiti-colored wall in slow motion. She could see the people on Istiklal walking by, but none of them looked her way.
And even if they had, they would have only seen another drunk. Another ghost.
And then her eyes closed.