Chapter Twenty-Seven
Istanbul Airport
Arnavutkoy District, Turkey
Caspian read the message again, then looked at Liesel. She had kept her composure, but he could see that she was deep in thought.
“It’s them. It must be. It’s the same people who killed Sofie,” she whispered.
Another encrypted message from Ranger came in, and Caspian’s phone hummed again in his hand. But this time, the elderly couple to his left had heard the faint buzz of his phone, and the older man’s eyes narrowed at the sight of the glowing screen half shielded beneath Caspian’s jacket.
“Work,” Caspian said in English, giving the couple a tired, apologetic smile. “I work at the Canadian embassy, and I’m supposed to be on vacation, but . . . you know how this goes, right?”
He offered an exaggerated shrug and tilted the phone so that the couple could see the blurred interface of what looked like a secure diplomatic app.
The woman gave a small shake of her head, but there was a sympathetic smirk tugging at her lips.
The man just shrugged and resumed his conversation with his wife.
Caspian read the message, then stared at his phone for a moment.
“What did it say?” Liesel asked.
“As far as Ranger can tell, the warrant didn’t originate from anywhere in Spain. The request came from inside the Istanbul police and is about to be pushed out to all the divisions.”
“That . . . that makes no sense,” Liesel said.
They had arrived in Turkey less than two hours ago, and they hadn’t even left the airport.
The implications of the content of Ranger’s message were enormous, because it meant that someone—someone who had somehow managed to track them to Istanbul—had access to Turkish law enforcement or judicial systems.
“You might be right,” he said finally. “Could be the same people.”
At the opposite side of the hangar, two members of a cleaning crew had just entered the hangar through a side access door, pushing a supply cart toward the rear corridor leading to the bathrooms. They wore matching blue coveralls and baseball caps and orange reflective vests.
As the outline of a plan began to form in his mind, Caspian watched two passengers return to their seats, escorted by a police officer.
Caspian had seen the pattern repeat itself over the past half hour, with one officer shepherding one or two passengers at a time. But never more than two.
“You saw the cleaners?” Liesel asked.
“Hard not to with their reflective vests,” he said. “You think they might be our way out of here?”
Liesel nodded slowly. “We need a pretext to get to them,” she said.
“If we do this, we’re committing ourselves,” he said. “There’ll be no going back.”
“I know, but if Ranger’s right, every officer here is minutes away from learning about our warrants. Heck, maybe they already know.”
“They’d be on us if they did,” Caspian said, his eyes moving to a cluster of officers hanging together close to a makeshift table on which were several opened laptops. “No one is looking specifically at us. So far.”
“I hope Ranger’s wrong, but we don’t have time to play wait and see, do we?” Liesel asked.
“I love you. You know that, right?” he said, surprising himself. Not that he hadn’t told her many times before, but he was confused as to why he had felt the urge to profess his love to her at this very moment. And, from the way Liesel was staring at him, she hadn’t expected it either.
“Yeah . . . I do,” she replied without the hint of a smile and somewhat cooler than he’d wished. “But we’ll need to figure a lot of stuff out, Casp. Once we’re out of this mess.”
Caspian swallowed hard. “Right. Follow me.”
He rose from his seat, and they made their way toward a patrolling officer. The man was stocky, with a thin mustache and a heavy brow.
“Excuse me,” Caspian said in Turkish. “My partner and I need to use the bathroom.”
The officer gave Caspian a surprised look, as if he hadn’t expected him to speak Turkish.
Caspian had once worked as a translator for the United Nations, a cover identity during his time as Elias.
Prior to joining the Department of Homeland Security, he had completed a bachelor’s degree in applied languages.
He was fluent in five languages and conversational in several more, including Turkish.
The officer gestured for them to follow him. “This way. And stay close.”
They trailed the officer as they walked the length of the hangar toward the bathrooms. As they neared the restrooms, Caspian caught a glimpse of the two-man cleaning crew.
To his dismay, the men had already changed out of their blue coveralls and into their regular clothes and were on their way to the side door from which Caspian had seen them enter the hangar.
Damn it. Thinking the janitors had been on their way to clean the restrooms, Caspian’s plan had been to subdue the officer and then do the same to the two janitors.
From there, he and Liesel would have “borrowed” the men’s uniforms and access passes.
With the janitors now out of reach, Caspian would have to rethink his escape plan.
Unless . . . the janitors . . . they had stripped out of their uniforms, hadn’t they? Maybe he wouldn’t have to reconsider his strategy too much after all.
With the bathrooms straight ahead, he could see three doors, one labeled Women, the other Men. The third was unmarked but appeared to be a supply locker. Where else could the cleaning crew have stashed their cart and uniforms? He glanced at Liesel, to make sure she was tracking his thoughts.
She gave him an almost imperceptible nod.
The police officer slowed as they neared the bathroom, and he stepped to the side, leaving plenty of space for Caspian and Liesel to walk past him.
Caspian quickly looked behind his shoulder and, after confirming they weren’t being followed by another group of passengers, he made his move.
As he walked past the policeman, he pivoted hard to his left and rammed his shoulder into the officer, slamming him against the wall.
Before the man could react, Caspian grabbed his wrist, bent it, and forced the officer to spin around.
Caspian hooked an arm around the man’s throat, dropped his weight, and yanked the cop back while tightening the choke, cutting off the blood to his brain.
Caspian applied as much pressure as he could to the carotid artery while shifting his hips to the right to break the officer’s balance.
The man struggled, elbows flailing, but Caspian kept his stance wide, absorbing the blows.
Two seconds later, the policeman went limp in his arms and Caspian began to drag him toward the supply closet.
Liesel was already there and opened the door for him.
Liesel figured out what Caspian wanted to do the moment he looked at her.
When she saw him spin the officer around, she rushed past him and pulled open the supply closet door.
She turned on the lights. The space was a small windowless room of roughly ten by twelve feet.
The interior was packed with mops, buckets, cleaning products, and a shelf stacked with paper towels and several boxes of rubber gloves.
There was also a supply cart, a partial roll of duct tape, and four spare janitor uniforms.
Behind her, Caspian was dragging the unconscious police officer toward the supply closet.
Liesel grabbed the duct tape, and as soon as Caspian pulled the officer into the room, she closed the door and covered the officer’s mouth with a large piece of tape, pressing it flush against his cheeks. She then taped his ankles and wrists.
“The cleaners must have taken their ID badges with them,” Caspian said, already pulling on one of the blue coveralls.
Liesel showed him the downed officer’s access badge. “This will have to do,” she said, pocketing it.
She pulled the officer’s pistol from its holster.
It was a Yavuz 16, a Turkish pistol developed from the Beretta 92FS.
She checked that there was a round in the chamber, then handed the gun to Caspian along with two spare magazines.
She then slipped into one of the coveralls, tucking her hair beneath a faded blue cap, and grabbed a clipboard from the cleaning cart.
Caspian wheeled the cart in front of them, and as they were about to leave the closet, the officer stirred.
The man blinked twice. Though the tape over his mouth muffled any sound, he groaned faintly and began to twitch.
Liesel leaned over him. “You want me to keep the light on?” she asked. “Is that what you’re saying? No problem.”
The officer blinked again, his face a mixture of confusion and helpless rage.
Liesel closed the door and, along with Caspian, stepped into the hallway.
They exited the hall a few seconds later and entered the open space of the hangar.
A uniformed officer who was standing with two passengers midway between Caspian and Liesel and the rows of plastic chairs looked up from a tablet and gave them a quick once-over.
Seeing only two cleaners with a cart, he turned his attention back to his device.
“Another minute or so and he’ll go investigate what’s taking us so long,” she said.
Liesel spotted the gray double door the janitors had used to access the hangar.
Reaching it, she saw a red light blinking on the keypad.
Next to it was an electronic scanner. If the officer they’d left behind in the supply closet was a backup from another division and not permanently assigned to the airport, his badge might not unlock the door, and it might be game over for her and Caspian.
She pulled the access badge from her pocket, then swiped it into the reader, aware that the officer holding the tablet was staring at them.
She held her breath.
The red light turned green. Liesel pushed the door and held it as Caspian maneuvered the cart inside.
The door led to a softly lit warehouse where the ceiling stretched three stories high.
From the look of it, the space was used to temporarily store cargo awaiting transit or inspection.
Half a dozen forklifts were parked next to stacks of wrapped pallets close to a shuttered loading dock.
A large corner office stood to the left, walled in by plexiglass panels that allowed whoever was inside to see what was happening on the floor.
There was nobody inside, and the warehouse looked to be deserted.
“Let’s leave the cart here,” Liesel said. “Keep watch while I go search for keys.”
Caspian replied by giving her a thumbs-up, but she was already jogging toward the corner office.
The office had several desks, all of them cluttered with staples, plastic binders, and maintenance checklists.
Liesel yanked open the top drawer of the desk closest to her only to find a bunch of loose pens, a few receipts, and a forgotten sandwich in a wax wrapper.
She didn’t fare any better with the second or third drawers.
Then her eyes caught something. She had missed it at first because of the poor lighting, but a key rack was bolted to the far wall next to an old ticking clock.
There were three sets of vehicle keys labeled in smudged black marker.
She snatched the three sets of keys and was about to head back to Caspian when the overhead lights of the warehouse powered on, flooding the entire space in white.
Then, in the open doorway of the office, a uniformed security guard had his eyes locked on her. And he had a radio in his hand, which was already halfway to his mouth.