Habib flipped open a silver casket and fingered a cigarette rolled with brown paper that he seemed desperate to smoke. He didn’t replace it. The general couldn’t figure out if he was trying to give up the habit or if he was just being polite. Maybe it was just a ritual, or another kind of habit. It didn’t matter. He’d had the same negative response concerning Ibrahim from every intelligence man he’d spoken with in Ankara. He brushed his slacks with his right hand before speaking.
“As I said, he’s come up on our radar, nothing more. Why are they protecting him?”
Habib shrugged. “Political and religious allegiances. And money. What else is there?”
“Can you give me something else?”
Habib closed his mouth, drew in his lips and shook his head.
Thinking the guy was overdoing the histrionics, the general said, “I could really make it worth your while.”
“A bribe, general?”
The general felt like saying: what the hell are you talking about? We both know I agreed to pay you a bribe already. But instead he decided to play along in the game a little. He sensed that Habib would enjoy it, that somehow he demanded it. But more importantly, the general believed that it would facilitate a positive outcome.
“Did I say that?” he said.
“It’s a fair question.”
“Let’s just call it a gift from one intelligence professional to another,” the general said, although in his mind he said, You want me to give you a goddamned contract signed in blood, or what?
“Then I accept this gift in friendship and cooperation, but only as such. A man told another man who told his brother who told me that a baba called Maroof, has, well, certain knowledge concerning this man. I dismiss it as mere speculation and womanlike gossip, of course,” Habib said, waving the unlit cigarette between his slender fingers in front of him sanctimoniously, yet with an effete air.
Interesting, the general thought. He eased himself back in the chair and crossed his legs. “Idle speculation, to be sure. But just between us, and to pass the time, if you will, who is this Maroof, the baba?”
“They say he is a degenerate who is addicted to heroin and Russian prostitutes, but powerful, nonetheless. Who knows?”
The general knew the Turkish mafia dominated the global smack trade. They processed the raw opiates from the Middle East in underground labs and trafficked the drug to the US and Western Europe. He knew too that the local mafia were more deadly than the Albanians and equalled the Mexican cartels in terms of savagery, favouring prolonged torture. The babas, or godfathers, were shadowy figures, who employed death squads such as the Grey Wolves. It was well-documented by the CIA that the so-called Turkish “Deep State”, an arrangement between the babas, politicians, intelligence services and high-ranking military officers, was impenetrable. The mafia ran protection rackets and in turn paid protection to those who could otherwise destroy them.
“Anything else?” the general said.
“That’s it.”
“You sure?”
Habib picked up the phone from its cradle and gestured towards the general with it. “Shall I call for your car now, general?”
The general decided not to push it. He had a lead and that was more than he’d expected before he’d entered the office. The game had come to an end. He stooped to the side and took a notepad and pen from his briefcase. He found that it elicited a more honest response than a recording device. It was a simple psychological tool whereby the interviewee perceived a lesser sense of replication, perhaps because it lacked the evidential value of a verbatim recording.
“Now, this damn conflict – what’s the army’s position?” the general asked, knowing that Turkey’s army was the second biggest in NATO.
His question was a genuine one. Part of his remit was to find out if there was any chance that the army would take a hard-line stance. Maybe even enact a coup, a temporary military government to ensure full-blown anarchy didn’t break out on the streets.
The “Deep State”, the state within the Turkish state, the general knew, had been born of the military’s paranoia since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey was constantly on the brink of some sort of collapse, they believed. It was ultra-nationalistic and, by its very nature, undemocratic and corrupt. But Turkey was a trusted ally, at least for now, and with the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East, the general had been briefed that the White House and the State Department were more than keen to keep it that way.
As Habib spouted the official party line of the increasingly Islamic party that held power, the general couldn’t stop his mind from wandering to Ibrahim. The man was becoming a menace, stirring up Sunni Muslim agitation and recruiting jihadists from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Initially, he’d come up on the Mossad’s radar, the Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations.
Things were sketchy, but the Mossad would get short shrift from the Sunni Turks, so this had been down to him. The Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, his employer, a relatively new federal agency under the control of the Defense Department that was part of the overarching foreign military espionage organization, wanted the guy found: dead or alive. Osama bin Laden style, although that was only known to a handful of people in the US.
“So, general, I’m sure you have other pressing business. But let me give you some friendly advice. Despite the heat, negotiating the political landscape in Turkey is like walking across a frozen lake, so you would do well to tread light from now on.” Habib smiled his closed-mouthed smile.
The general nodded. Habib was right, despite what appeared to be his change in attitude. Perhaps the bribe has mellowed him, the general thought. The Turk was richer by ten thousand US dollars, after all.
He reached down to his briefcase, replaced the pen and pad, got up and left without saying a word, feeling a little shabbier than when he’d first arrived, despite the intel. But then again, he always did after doing deals like this. When he’d worn a uniform life had seemed so much simpler, so much more black and white.
After a full ten seconds, Habib opened a desk drawer with his free hand and took out a silver Zippo. He lit up and took a long pull on the cigarette before taking a disposable cellphone from his inside jacket pocket.
He’d get paid by the Americans. He liked that, even though he had put his pension, if not his life, in jeopardy. But he consoled himself by thinking that if the worst happened, he and his young family could run, and there were a lot worse places than the US to run to. They would put him into some sort of witness protection programme. It would be fine.
He laughed out loud like a crazy man. Habib, the double agent. Yes, he liked that. And the best part was that he would get paid whether the general died or not, given what he knew was about to transpire.
He walked over to the window and looked out at the seemingly boundless cityscape, at the blocks of glass and steel and the powder-blue tiles of the ancient minarets. These were the two stories of Turkey, he thought, at once a modern free market economy and a Muslim state that still believed dogma was relevant. As a result, he foresaw a great calamity about to afflict his country, the strains of which were already apparent. The dichotomy between women who wore make-up and Gucci shades, and those who wanted to beat them for not wearing the hijab.
But most of all he feared the Sunni-Shia conflict