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ISTANBUL, TURKEY

Far off, the Sea of Marmara was a sheet of beaten brass, but closer to the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn was churning with packed ferries, net-laden fishing boats, pleasure craft of all sizes and shapes carrying wide-eyed tourists, looking wide-eyed, always looking. But upon closer examination, in among the sleek yachts one could make out smaller craft that were battered, torn by high seas and storms, crowded not with tourists at all, but Syrian refugees fleeing destruction, fire, and famine, yearning, clinging to whatever life awaited them, hoping to scratch out an existence in Istanbul’s alleys, byways, and criminal dens. Southwest of the Horn, in Muğra and Bodrum, the summer’s seemingly endless conflagrations had finally burned themselves out, leaving the kind of destruction all too familiar to those exhausted refugees.

Istanbul. One leg in Asia, the other in Europe. And yet Istanbul was neither Asian nor European in character, but something all its own. Overrun by the ancient Greeks, then the Roman legions, fierce, invincible, the leaders renaming it Byzantium until it was taken by force by the Ottomans, fiercer still, unafraid to die. In one way or another the city possessed attributes of all its conquerors. Even becoming part of the newly formed Turkish Republic in 1923 did nothing to rub the rough edges off the palimpsest of Istanbul’s disordered history.

All of this had rushed at Evan Ryder the moment she returned to the city she loved and hated in equal measure. Over the time she had been in harness to the world of espionage death had ridden her shoulders almost every day and night she spent in this splendid metropolis. Now, back again, she wended her way down a narrow side street near the Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque in Tophane. After passing a tinsmith’s shop and a storefront showcasing rugs for wholesale export, she pushed through a discreet door and entered a hammam. Fragrant wood, mineral stone, old, from the time of the Ottomans. Historic, but hidden away from the tourists, unknown to the guidebooks. For Turks only. Almost.

After being divested of her clothes, she was given a peshtemal—a thin cotton towel—by her natir—her female attendant—a short, powerful Turk of indeterminate age with dark skin and an unexpected softness. Evan was, after all, a ferengi. A foreigner. She was then taken to the temperate chamber, domed, skylit stars sprinkled around its crown, where she was dutifully washed, scrubbed, massaged. The chamber was lined with mosaics laid during the reign of Abdul Hamid II, the last Ottoman sultan, the tiles telling a kind of story in Arabic, if you knew the language and took the time to pick your way across the letters. After an hour she was shown the way to the heated baths.

There she found Lyudmila Shokova waiting for her, soaking in a far corner, away from three other women enjoying the heat with washcloths folded over their eyes and foreheads. Beautiful, striking Lyudmila, her long legs extended, crossed at her trim ankles. Blond, ice-blue-eyed, she would not have been out of place on the runways of Paris or Milan. Lyudmila, who had once risen through the ranks of the FSB until she was elevated to become the first female member of the Politburo. Lyudmila, who had cultivated her power within the elite governing body to the point where she became a perceived danger to the Sovereign himself. Fleeing Russia just ahead of the purge, seeding clues of her death behind her. Now she ran the largest and most sophisticated anti-Russian network in the world.

The two women kissed in the European fashion, briefly stared into each other’s eyes, touched foreheads in private celebration of their reunion.

“How is your first year with Marsden Tribe?” Lyudmila asked as Evan settled beside her.

“You know how it went.”

“Ah, yes. But underneath. Where even angels like me are blind.”

Evan waited a moment, the steam from the water a thin, twining mist between them. “He likes me.”

“Ah.”

“Nothing has happened.”

“Yet.” She swung her head, her damp hair slapping her shoulders, left, right. “Watch out for him.”

To this Evan said nothing. So. Time to move on.

“I’ve made a dangerous move,” Lyudmila said so softly Evan had to take a moment to process the sound into words. “Someone in a very secret section of the service—” She meant the Russian intelligence services, FSB or GRU, maybe. “—he did a very stupid thing. He called out his superior for a mistake—a serious mistake—that would set the program back at least a year. His opinion. Marius Ionescu.”

“A Romanian.”

“Extraction. Russian born and bred. But I believed him when he reached out to one of my contacts. I believe him even more now.”

“So now this Marius Ionescu is my problem?”

“No. Not at all. Oh, well, peripherally maybe. But, no, I’m taking care of Ionescu. But…”

“But what?”

Her hand covered Evan’s, squeezing it with some urgency. And Evan thought, She’s vulnerable. For the first time since she disappeared from Moscow she’s vulnerable. A quicksilver shiver of fear lanced through her.

“We’re friends,” Lyudmila whispered, leaning close. “More than friends.” Wreathed in mist and sweat. “Sisters. Under the skin.”

“Of course we are.” Evan would not refute her. Anyway, she was too busy wondering what this was all about.

Lyudmila relaxed visibly but her eyes turned inward. Always full of surprises. “In the days of Abdul Hamid he had of course a harem. The last sultan so the last harem in Istanbul, in all of the Empire. Before Turkey was Turkey. Not all the women in the harem saw Abdul Hamid let alone were led to his bedchamber at night. No. But these women longed to be gözde—in the eye—noticed by the sultan. Once to be desired. Now to be feared.”

Lyudmila turned a little, the heated water stirring, eddying languorously out from her.

“After being ‘dead’ for so long,” she continued, “I am now gözde. In the eye of the Sovereign.”

Evan was shaken. This was bad. Very bad. “But why would you take such a chance?”

“As I said, I took him,” Lyudmila said. “I have Ionescu. And I will keep him.”

Evan spread her hands, droplets of water running down her wrists. “That is the foolish thing. Offering him sanctuary.”

“In a way I had no choice.”

Copyright © 2023 by Eric Van Lustbader