Free A Deceit to Die For by Luke Montgomery Page B

Kurdish terrorist of his moment of glory and leaving him to sit in that apartment until he ran out of food.
    He could have let MIT deal with the problem in their own way though he wondered if they would have risked ‘outing’ an operative just to eliminate one Kurdish terrorist. He should have informed his superiors so that they could have dispersed their team, but the PKK moved immediately to eliminate his colleague, and both he and his superiors knew it might not have made a difference since the hits had obviously been planned as simultaneous actions. Still, it had been a breach of protocol and it ended his career as a field operative in the Southeast. He had been brought back to a desk job in Ankara for six months before getting his next field assignment in Cyprus.
    Zeki stared blankly at the trash can. It slowly came back into focus as consciousness of his surroundings returned. He was in London now, far removed from the events that had taken place over two decades ago. Was it fiasco or fate , he wondered again for the umpteenth time. Does my faith leave room for human error?
    He stood there at the door in the hotel room twenty years later wondering if Omar Khayyam’s soul-searching analysis of theology might not have some validity.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
     
    He liked Fitzgerald’s English rendition. The same stanza in Turkish was so very different, which was why he always had wanted to read it in Persian. In fact, one of his goals had been to learn the language just so that he could read the Rubaiyat in the original. After Diyarbakir, MIT never allowed him to work in their eastern theatre of operations again and so he never had the chance.
    He glanced around to make sure there was no one in the hallway as he bent down and slipped the tiny piece of paper into the door jamb just under the hinge and slowly closed the door so that only about two millimeters were visible. Fate or no, he would stick with his training.
    As he stood waiting for the elevator, he remembered the families of the four officers killed in the explosion. He had not been able to visit them officially, but he had learned the names and addresses of each one. Fortunately, only two of the officers had been married and only Gökhan had children, a four-year-old son named Orhan and a two-year-old daughter named Bengi. Zeki still carried their pictures in his wallet. He had been at Orhan’s high school graduation ceremony and still made a deposit in their mother’s bank account once every three months under a different name and from a different branch every time. The elevator door opened and he stepped back into the real world where stomachs growled at breakfast.
    “Good morning, Mr. Öztürk. I had them put some white cheese, olives and tomatoes on the breakfast buffet this morning. I’m afraid the cheese and olives are Greek, but it was the best I could do in this neighborhood.”
    Advanced memory training for the Bedouin? he thought to himself. “That was very thoughtful of you.”
    “Don’t thank me yet. I still don’t have the tea you want. You will have to make do with English breakfast tea.”
    “I’m sure I could choke it down, but I think I’ll have your coffee instead.”
    Now Mustafa’s face lit up with a smile.
    “There is nothing like a cup of Arabian coffee,” Zeki said.
    The human mind has an amazingly selective semantic filter and a tremendous weakness for flattery, so it made no difference to Mustafa that this sentence would have been just as true if it had been said of Kenyan coffee or that it could be an insult just as easily as it was a compliment.
    After breakfast, Zeki sat out in the lobby waiting for his friend Haluk. They were supposed to meet at 8:30. Haluk was late again. He was the complete opposite of Zeki in every way, undisciplined, careless, not averse to partying, and a late