Free A Deceit to Die For by Luke Montgomery Page A

explained that he had lost his key and asked to use the restroom. All he had been doing was stalling, trying to collect his thoughts. When he came out of the restroom, he knew that the time for decorum was past. He would never see this building attendant again. He smiled at the man, asked for a drink of water, turned and walked into the family kitchen, opened the window and jumped through it into the alley. He could still remember the look of bewilderment and fear on the man’s face caused by the sudden realization that something was dreadfully wrong.
    Zeki had gone to a pay phone and called in an anonymous tip to the security forces. According to protocol, he should have made a quick exit, immediately informed his superiors so that they could warn other operatives in the area, and made his way back to Ankara as best he could without doing further damage to his cover or contacting other field ops. Too new to understand the stakes, he failed to follow protocol. His desire to know what would happen, to know who was targeting him, to know that they were neutralized or brought to justice, blinded him. The rage that rose in his heart at the thought that somebody might actually be targeting him, and the fear he had felt standing in front of that door, prevented him from thinking clearly. If he had known then what he knew now, he would have realized that the price of knowledge can be a horrible price to pay.
    Back then, there had been a rooftop teahouse at the end of the block on the opposite side of the street. He moved quickly, careful not to draw attention to himself. He had found a seat in the shade of the grape arbor near the edge of the flat roof and ordered tea. The entire city and the surrounding Anatolian plain lay before him, fuzzy because of the heat waves rising from the sunbaked buildings and farmland. It was a sweltering summer day. The heat-induced lethargy that seemed to hang over the city was a stark contrast to the apprehension and fear that gripped him. He reached for the glass of tea the waiter set on the table and realized his hands were shaking, so quickly set it back down in the saucer and turned to look down on the street.
    Çevik Küvvet , the Turkish SWAT team, had arrived within minutes and immediately secured the entire block. Snipers were placed on the roofs of the buildings in front of and behind his apartment and then Hakan, Mustafa, Cengiz and Gökhan entered the building. He did not, of course, know their names until afterwards when his Commander forced him to read the autopsy report in Ankara. Several shots were fired, he heard shouting and then there was a deafening explosion. Two more teams immediately entered the building, but it was over. Another Kurdish Marxist infidel had chosen death over torture and had taken the lives of seven others, two of them children in the apartment next door. The report indicated that Gökhan suffered for a week in the hospital, but that the others had died instantly.
    Zeki never found out how he had been compromised. The reports seemed to suggest that another operative in Hakkari was the lead domino because one of his informants turned out to be a PKK double-agent. Somehow, his sloppiness was to blame. He had been found dead in his apartment the next morning. The time of death had been several hours before the explosion in Sanliurfa. One of their best men in Diyarbakir had also been shot on the street in broad daylight within an hour after the explosion, which had brought the death toll to nine—six officers and three civilians.
    The whole thing had been a fiasco. Zeki received a minor reprimand from his boss that never even went into his record. The bureau chief was a man who recognized talent and knew it would ruin his career. Zeki understood, all too clearly, the mistakes he had made, and vowed never to repeat them. He could have just walked away from the safe-house, told his superiors he had been compromised and ask for a new assignment, depriving the nameless