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protest. Stone could blow up half of Central Asia if he wanted, but snooping into Taylor’s love life was going too far. And it worried Taylor, too, in a vague sort of way, that Anna seemed to have moved in Stone’s mind from being part of “the team” to some other, indeterminate status. He wanted to say something, at least to register his concern. But just then Stone gave him another conspiratorial wink and handed him a snifter of fine old brandy.

Anna stayed up late that night waiting for Taylor. They hadn’t set a formal time to meet. Taylor had mumbled something about having a drink with a friend, and Anna had said she would see him when he got back. Reliability about such matters had never been a quality Anna valued much in men. It was such an ordinary, middle-class virtue. Solid, reliable, on time. It was one step away from boring. Dentists had to be reliable. Bankers had to be reliable. Lawyers had to be reliable. Reliability was a turnoff. The men Anna had fancied were the would-be poets and adventurers, the ones with frayed shirt collars and a hint of self-destructive recklessness in their souls. They didn’t have time to be on time.

But now that she had actually found such a man, Anna wondered if she shouldn’t revise her views. Excessive tidiness wasn’t sexy in a man, it was true; but neither was sloppiness. Punctuality wasn’t sexy, but neither was lateness. And there was nothing sexy at all about staying up till midnight in your motel room waiting for Romeo to come home.

Taylor finally returned at twelve-thirty, thoroughly looped, talking a blue streak about a scheme he’d hatched with Stone over late-night brandies to go boar hunting in eastern Anatolia. He gave Anna a wet kiss on the mouth and put his big hands on her breasts, and it appeared that somehow, despite all the booze, he intended to make love to her. But when they were nestled together in bed, and Anna was waiting for him to caress her, she realized that he had fallen sound asleep.

31

It was high summer when Alan Taylor returned to Istanbul. The city was painted in the bright haze of July; the Sea of Marmara shimmered beneath his approaching airplane like a still salt lake. Coming in from the airport, Taylor asked the embassy driver to let him out at the ferry terminal at Eminonu, on Seraglio Point just below Topkapi Palace. It was Taylor’s favorite spot in Istanbul—perhaps on the planet—capturing in a few hundred square yards the unruly human comedy: the barking chorus of vendors selling lottery tickets and bread; the arterial flow of travelers surging aboard the afternoon ferries to Uskudar and Besiktas; the churning black water beneath the ferries as they jostled offshore, belching smoke, waiting to dock; and just across the Golden Horn, the steep hill of old Pera, capped now with neon signs advertising Turkish banks and Japanese televisions. If there is a black hole on Earth, a place into which the matter of the universe is irresistibly drawn, thence to disappear into oblivion and eternity, it is surely the ferry dock at Eminonu.

Taylor moved through the crowd with the easy grace of a fish thrown back into his favorite pond. He crossed the Galata Bridge, passing the restaurants strung along the walkway below the main span, filling his nostrils with the smell of fresh fish cooking on the makeshift charcoal grills. The narrow walkway was filled with people pushing in both directions, and Taylor lost himself in the eastward flow, emerging a few minutes later on the Pera side. He began climbing the hill, still borne along by the human tide, joining with the Turks as they pressed their faces against the windows of small shops selling radios, batteries, plumbing fixtures, linoleum tiles, electrical switches, power drills, videocassette recorders—a veritable Noah’s Ark of commerce arrayed item by item, shop by shop. Thinner now, the crowd moved up the last steep incline, where the younger men quickened their pace and turned toward Giraffe Street and the red-light district. By the top of the hill, the human stream had dispersed. Taylor walked alone the rest of the way to the consulate, refreshed by his reimmersion in the Orient, savoring the sense of anonymity and surrender that is the true religion of the East.

Taylor’s colleagues were glad to see him back at the office, all except the deputy chief of base, who had a taste for bureaucracy and had actually enjoyed doing the paperwork while Taylor was away. He seemed worried that Taylor might remove these comfortable manacles of responsibility from him. Taylor summoned his deputy for a brief meeting in the bubble and reassured him that his own special assignment would be continuing for several more months, which meant that the D-COB could remain as A-COB. That pleased him immensely. He turned over to Taylor a neat stack of papers he had been saving, most of them not worth reading. On top of the stack was an invitation to Stanley Timmons’s farewell party, which would be held in several weeks at the Ankara Golf Club.

Munzer Ahmedov arrived the following day from New York and went directly to an apartment in Aksaray, whose address and key Taylor had provided. It was an out-of-the-way place, down a dusty side street off the Ataturk Boulevard. The CIA base in Istanbul had acquired it a decade ago as a safe house but had used it sparingly in recent years because of fears that the location had been blown. That didn’t matter so much in Munzer’s case; indeed, allowing interested parties to guess at his links to the agency was part of the game.

Taylor had drilled Munzer on arrangements before he left America. They would meet at the apartment in Aksaray at ten o’clock the morning after Munzer arrived and at regular intervals thereafter, at times and places Taylor would