The Counterfeit Agent Read Online Free PDF Page B

obvious reasons. Who sets a meet in the Grand Bazaar? Must be five thousand security cams in there. But you’ve got to go.” She didn’t wait for him to agree. “We’ve got a week. Let’s use it. Get a camera to put eyes on the door. He’s dressed wrong, looks like he’s hiding a vest, you abort. He wants to blow himself up, not your problem. Meanwhile, you want to stay in the safe house until this is done, I’m fine with that.”
    “I’ll stay put. Can’t give up that view.” No way would he let Hunt think he was scared.
    “You have a view? I hadn’t heard.” A joke. Taylor’s apartment was a minor legend.
    “Come on over sometime, see for yourself.” He snorted, so she’d know he was kidding. Though he wasn’t.
    “Tell you what. Get us inside the Iranian nuclear program and I will.” She smiled a smile he’d never seen before.
    He spent twelve hours wondering if she was flirting. Until he realized what she’d done. She’d given him a tiny ambiguous signal to chew over. To take his mind off the letter. Taylor had heard some men weren’t suckers for beautiful women. He’d never met one.
    —
    The week dragged. Taylor looked over his files from Ankara, but nobody jumped out as a possible double agent. The station’s tech-support team—two chubby guys named Dominick and Ronaldo—placed a thumbnail camera to watch the front door of the carpet store. The same night a cleaning crew threw it away. Hunt and Taylor decided not to risk placing another.
    Two days before the meeting, Taylor checked out the shop himself. It occupied expensive space a few feet from the domed square where the bazaar had begun five centuries before. Rather than traditional patterned carpets, it specialized in modern, brightly colored rugs. Under other circumstances, Taylor might have bought one. Instead, he wandered into a pipe store and watched Ethcon’s entrance as he pretended interest in an overpriced meerschaum.
    He’d come early. The bazaar was almost empty. After a few minutes, the Ethcon clerk poked his head out to talk to his counterpart across the corridor. Taylor recognized his accent as from southeastern Turkey, near Iran. Probably a coincidence. Hundreds of thousands of the region’s villagers had migrated to Istanbul. The letter writer had likely chosen Ethcon at random. The company didn’t show up on agency databases, and when Taylor had checked its Turkish records he’d found nothing suspicious. Taylor eavesdropped as the clerk talked about very little. Finally, he handed back the meerschaum and left, ignoring the curses the pipe store owner tossed at his back.
    He spent that night staring at the Bosphorus. He hated the way this meeting had come together. Simply by showing up, he was confirming his identity to whoever had sent the letter. Plenty of terrorists, from al-Qaeda to Greek anarchists, would gladly take a CIA scalp.
    —
    “Good night’s sleep,” Hunt said the next morning.
    “We don’t all have your cheekbones.”
    “Why don’t you take the day off, practice your shooting.”
    The agency had a deal with the Turkish army to let officers use a range at a base near Istanbul. As usual, she was ahead of him. Taylor hadn’t fired his pistol in a year. A day shooting would help him relax and might save his life. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    —
    The bazaar stretched across a dozen blocks in Sultanahmet, the heart of Istanbul’s Old City. On Friday afternoon, Taylor sat at a nearby McDonald’s, watching tourists and Turks slurp down Cokes against the late-summer heat. He wore a tiny receiver in his right ear for updates from the surveillance team, a baggy T-shirt to hide the pistol in his waistband. At 2:44, his receiver buzzed.
    “Pico One. Possible Gamma sighting. In the forest now.” Taylor could no longer bear the plastic friendliness of the McDonald’s. He shouldered his way to the bazaar’s southeast entrance. Two minutes later, his earpiece buzzed again. “Pico One. False alarm on