Blown Circuit (30 page)

Tesla’s metallic sphere hung from the jib arm of the crane, a fat yellow power cord running out of the top of it and straight down to the courtyard below. Interestingly, the power cord bypassed the generators entirely. Instead, it ran right over the edge of the castle wall as though it was tied into the city supply. Maybe the generators were a backup, or supplemental. Not far from them, the triggers sat on the castle floor.

Three men I had never seen before huddled over the triggers. The men weren’t in uniform. They looked more like tech guys, Kurdish hackers. The men had daisy-chained the triggers together in a series with a network of wires coming out of one end. Those wires had then been piggybacked up the fat cable to the sphere. But what was more interesting was the input on the other end. They had what looked like a wireless router tied into the rear trigger. One of the men held a laptop computer. Kate bent closer to me.

“The first real computer wasn’t even built until after Tesla’s death,” Kate whispered. “What are they doing?”

I didn’t know for certain. But I had a theory.

“Tesla may not have designed the Device to be used with a computer, but it doesn’t mean the Soviets didn’t build it that way. It would be an add-on to the targeting system. Like a laser scope on an old revolver.”

“That was still the early fifties,” Kate said.

“These guys knew they’d be working with very old technology. Bayazidi might have even left them the schematics. They put together a team that’s figured out how to target this thing,” I replied.

I watched the cogs in the trigger turn. The triggers were connected to both a router and an external power source, but I could already see a number of issues. For one, the power source looked hacked—they had a common plug-in transformer, like the kind you would use to charge your phone, powering the electric motor in the trigger. For another, the titanium frames of the triggers were not meant to be self-supporting. They would be lying on their sides if not propped up by the crates. From what I knew of him, I was sure that Tesla would have devised a better design than that.
 

“Do you know the guy with the balding head?” Kate asked.

“Azad,” I replied. “He tried to slice my neck open with a bottle.”

“He’s PKK,” Kate said. “Top of the food chain. Rarely sighted, but when he is, something big happens. Always.”

Meryem and Azad were arguing. They had reverted to Turkish, presumably because they were angry, and it was loud. I kept picking out a Turkish word—
Akdeniz
—I had heard the gulet captain use it. It was the Turkish word for the Mediterranean Sea. I pulled off my backpack and took out my iPhone, which I was happy to have in my possession again. It was small enough that the bullets had left it unscathed. I could see their laptop computer operating right there on the wireless network in front of me. I launched a password cracking app, but I wasn’t confident that I could break their encryption locally, so I did what I had been wanting to do for a while. I messaged Langley directly. With any luck, they could tether in.

Then I saw Meryem glance up at the castle wall. It was just a quick glance, and her eyes fell quickly back to Azad. I briefly wondered whether their impending marriage was real. If every one of her moves all along had been calculated, tactical. I heard Azad say, “
Akdeniz,”
again, this time with finality, and Meryem hit a key on the laptop.

The screen on the laptop cycled to blue, but there was no sound, no countdown, no indication of anything. I glanced around the castle, dropping my phone into the front pocket of my T-shirt. The soldier on the courtyard floor a hundred feet to our right lit a cigarette, the orange ember glowing in the night. I saw nothing to my left but the steep stone staircase leading down from the rampart. All the action was down with Meryem and Azad at the triggers. Then everything changed.

It started with a great groaning sound, a sibilant yawn like everything was winding down. The floodlights at the base of the tower dimmed, the lights of the surrounding city dimmed, everything went black, and it stayed that way for three…four...five seconds, and then boom!

The sonic boom didn’t actually come first. First was the blinding light. The southern sky twenty miles beyond the castle lit up. I knew that there was a peninsula out there because we had sailed around it. What I wasn’t sure of was whether it was there anymore because the white light gave way to an orange fireball. Then, finally, an incredible percussive boom echoed over the sea. There was fire, but no waterspout, which suggested that the Tesla Device’s beam had hit land, not the sea. The tiny hairs on my arms stood up as a result of the static electricity in the dry air and I smelled the sharp odor of ozone, but other than that there was no information at all. Just the searing white light which then gave way to a yellow and orange conflagration on the land beyond.
 

After that I heard Meryem's voice, but not from a distance. It was right behind us.
 

“Raise your hands slowly,” she said.

Chapter 59

I
DID
AS
I was told, so did Kate, because Meryem hadn’t just snuck up behind us, she’d alerted the others, soldiers from the crane’s base now covering us with their machine guns. I raised my hands slowly, surreptitiously snagging my phone from the front pocket of my T-shirt as I did so.
 

“Drop your weapon,” Meryem said.

 
Kate dropped her Glock.
 

“Now kick it down.”
 

 
Kate kicked the gun aside. I heard a thump as it hit the courtyard floor below.

“Hands on your head,” Meryem said.

I put my hands on my head, Kate following my lead. A soldier patted us down from behind. He did a thorough job too. Patted my torso, my groin, my legs. However, he did miss the phone that I held carefully concealed under my palm on the top of my head. It wasn’t exactly a lethal weapon, of course, but it was what I had.

“Good to see you again, Meryem,” I said.

“You too, Michael. I see that you are well.”

“Yeah. Thanks for the dirt bath.”

“The dirt bath, as you call it, was not something I wished to do. I had no choice.”

“You always have a choice,” I said.

“Not always. Now, for instance, you have no choice. Now, please, walk.”

The soldiers below had us well covered. Meryem might have been right about me having no choice. At least not a desirable one.

“I said walk,” Meryem said.

I didn’t walk. Instead, I turned to look at Meryem. But not before I put my hands down, dropping the phone back into my front pocket.
Luckily it was dark, or I’m not sure I would have been able to get away with pocketing the phone. Meryem
held her SIG pistol aimed squarely at my head. She had learned her lesson. She was careful not to get so close as to be in danger of me disarming her, or too far away as to be in danger of missing. In short, she was the consummate pro, cool, calculated, deliberate.

“I am sorry that things between us ended as they did,” Meryem said.

“Really?” I said. “Why be sorry? You got what you wanted.”

“I’m sorry, because you have value, Michael Chase.”

“Is that your way of saying you like me?”

I smiled, but Meryem was in no mood for games.

“No, Michael. It is my way of saying that sometimes the wind changes direction. My superiors, once again, see your value.”
 

She was right about the wind. It was picking up. I tilted my head toward the conflagration burning on the horizon. I could smell smoke now. Smoke and ionized air. Like a woodstove burning after a thunderstorm.

“What do you want, Meryem?”

“The only thing that matters. Peace for my people. Between Faruk and me, we represent the security forces and the army. How long do you think your country will let the current Turkish government stand after forces within destroy their Sixth Fleet?”

“They’ll never believe it was the government,” I said.
 

“The entire Corlu Regiment is here in Bodrum. They will believe.”

“They’ll know it was a terrorist attack.”

Meryem smiled. A close, tight-lipped smile.

“You use that word terrorist. You use it like it is all that is evil. But what is evil, Michael? Is evil merely what the other side wants?”

“Evil is killing the innocent,” I said.

“You think men on a warship are innocent?”

“I think their families are,” I said. “And their children. And most of the rest of the Navy, a lot of whom just signed up to see the world, a lot of whom are a whole lot younger than I.”

 
“They are still soldiers,” Meryem said. “Call it a terrorist attack. Call it an act of war by the Turkish Army on the United States. Six thousand of your sailors will be dead. The United States of America will not allow our government to remain after this. The real terrorists, our esteemed prime minister and his cabinet will be gone and a better group will follow. But only if we make them. Only if we do the difficult things.”

“Doing this won’t help your people, Meryem. It will only hurt others.”

“I am a Kurd, Michael. My father was a Kurd, and his father before him. We will do as we have always done. That which is necessary to survive.”

“Killing six thousand people is equal to survival?”

“Killing six thousand people is equal to change.”

Finally, she had said it. She had reduced the issue to its simplest terms. And there was an appeal to her logic. An appeal that made me consider it. Was six thousand people a reasonable cost for change? Or sixty thousand? Or six hundred thousand? Because the cost would be less than the benefit. But only if you weren’t one of the six, or the sixty, or the six hundred. If you were, it wouldn’t be worth it. Because the problem with paying for a result, even a good result, with other peoples lives, was just that. The lives you were paying with weren’t your own. They weren’t even borrowed. They were stolen. And you can’t buy honesty with a lie. It just can’t be done. The legal profession calls it fruit of the poisonous tree. Everything that follows is tainted.
 

“You buried me once. What do you want with me now?” I said.

“A change of plan,” Meryem said. “We know about your work with technology,” Meryem said. “We require your expertise.”

I was staring down the barrel of her SIG. It was a 9mm. It was probably loaded with a soft-nose round with enough power to blow a cauliflower-sized hole in the back of my head. But I didn’t care. I just laughed.

“You’re not going to get it,” I said.

“No? What about now?”

Meryem pointed the barrel of the SIG down. Then she shot Kate clean through the foot. One casual pull of the trigger. Kate grimaced. She bit her lip. But she didn't scream. And I admired Kate at that moment. I admired her grit. Kate had a lot of questionable qualities, but being a whiner wasn’t one of them. No, she could take as good as she could put out. I saw that she was now favoring her good foot, blood staining the cream-colored fabric of her shoe.

“You think that’s going to convince me?” I said.

“Perhaps not,” Meryem said, “But I know what will.”

Meryem raised her arm and waved a soldier over to guard Kate. Then she pushed me forward with the barrel of the gun toward the parapet. I looked down on the town square from the castle wall. I saw military vehicles, big transport trucks and Jeeps, lots of them. I also saw people. Regular people, tourists, backpackers, all gathered in the square. I even saw the Irish family whose photo I had snapped. I recognized the freckled little kids from their lit-up shoes, dancing around their tall, backpack-wearing parents. The kids were still happy enough, but there was a growing sense of unease, a sense of panic in the crowd. Everybody had seen the light in the sky, but the square was very crowded and there were only two exit points. Those exit points had men in uniform stationed at either one of them.
 

Meryem spoke into a radio and Azad ambled up the stairs and over. He held a machine gun. Then, when he was five feet away from us, he turned and pointed the gun into the crowd. The gun was another of the HK33 assault rifles. It fired 5.56 mm NATO rounds. Almost thirteen of them per second. Azad smiled at me and placed his finger on the trigger. The square was his kill box. The setup was even better than a clock tower. He could run back and forth for maximum dispersal, and the best part was he didn’t even have to aim. Everybody, including the freckled children, would die.

“I’ll do what you want,” I said.

Meryem smiled and Azad eased up on the trigger.

“Good choice, Michael. Now we kill some sailors, instead, yes?”

I bit my tongue and followed Meryem down the steps, the guard with the machine gun on my heels.

Chapter 60

I
DIDN
’
T
WANT
to help. But I didn’t want Azad to open fire on a crowd of civilians either. And I still had my phone. So I made an imperfect decision. I bought time. Meryem held me at gunpoint in front of the trigger assembly while I made some quick observations. Up close, their silver cams rotating, tooled parts spinning like gyroscopes, the triggers were beautiful in their complexity. But I still thought it was a shame that they were haphazardly propped up on two crates. Then it struck me. Something so obvious that I was surprised that I hadn’t thought of it before.

“I’m going to need my backpack,” I said.

“You will fix the trigger with our equipment,” Meryem replied.

“I’m going to need my backpack, I’m going to need to move this whole assembly, and I’m going to need you to get the hell out of my way.”

“Why?” Meryem said. “The triggers are here. You are here. Fix them.”

I looked at her. I was treading a dangerous line, but it had to be done.

“They aren’t triggers,” I replied.

Meryem took a step back and conferred with the three tech guys. They didn’t look happy. There was some heated discussion in Turkish. She turned back to me.

“They are triggers. Our intel tells us they are triggers. The journal says they are triggers. Even you have said they are triggers,” she said.