Morgan Stone - The Russian Factor

Anna looked past the heavy drapes demarcating business class. She scanned the jam-packed economy section for familiar faces. I hadn’t asked her to, and I didn’t think it was necessary, still, I had tears in my eyes. Maybe it was a reaction to the pain, but knowing Anna was cluing in to how this run for our lives had to work, and knowing I could lean on her, felt overwhelmingly good.

“Okay, it’s clear. Nobody on the plane that I know.” Anna took a seat beside me, placed her hand on mine and asked, “How is your headache?”

I smiled and closed my eyes.

It was dark when we landed in Dalaman. I didn’t know anything about the place, how big it was or even where it was. Someplace in southwestern Turkey, I figured. Did it have a train station, a seaport, hotels? Did anyone speak English? The terminal, like the one in Istanbul, was under some kind of major renovation. It was dark and desolate, with the exception of the red and white Boeing we’d arrived on. The structure itself reminded me of an American car dealership. Flimsy glass curtain-walls were topped by a thin slab roof and everything was open to the night. A gentle breeze smelling of flowers wafted through the place. Other than a couple of baggage handlers in yellow coveralls, our fellow passengers were the only signs of human life.

Some of the passengers gathered around a single baggage carousel. Others, including the pilots and flight attendants, vanished through open wall panels into the warm, black-velvet night. The eerie quiet was unnerving after the chaos and immensity of the Istanbul airport. Sounds were somehow muffled. My head throbbed, dulling my senses, yet I was acutely aware of the complete lack of bombastic Russian expletive filled insults among the background murmur of voices. I enjoyed hearing a language I didn’t understand and wasn’t obliged to eavesdrop on.

The baggage arrived and the passengers left. I’d held back, watching, regrouping, thinking. It looked like we were the only people left in the terminal. Beyond wide-open glass doors was a passenger pickup and drop-off area. It was badly lit and deserted. No shuttle buses, no taxis, no private cars, nobody at all. The few cars scattered throughout the lot looked like they hadn’t moved in years. I wandered back into the terminal. “Hello? Aloha, anybody here?”

I surveyed empty counters. Passing what might have been car rental booths once upon a time, I noticed an old-fashioned yellow phone missing the dial and numbers, the sort of phone you see near supermarket exits back home, labeled, TAXI. The phone I saw wasn’t labeled. It could have been for code-yellow aviation emergencies, for all I knew. I lifted the receiver and waited. Nothing, not even a dial tone. I waited a few more seconds. Then, about to drop the receiver into its chipped chrome cradle, I heard this tiny little voice rasping from the earpiece.

“Hello? English?” I asked.

“Yes please, speak English. You want taxi?”

“Please, and a driver who speaks English.”

A modern van, the color of the phone, but in much better condition, pulled up. A tall, dark older man, whose voice I recognized from the yellow taxi phone, got out and opened the side door for us. The question of “where to?” hadn’t come up until then. Apparently there was no point to staying in Dalaman. According to the cabbie, who had an astonishingly thick black mustache and platinum hair, it was a departure point for the various resort towns nearby. We could find a hotel in Dalaman, but that was about it.

I went over our options with Anna. “We can stay here for a few days, lay low and get some sleep, then go back, connect through Istanbul, maybe on to Cairo… Anywhere out of Turkey, I guess.”

“Nyet, I do not think going to Istanbul is a good idea. Mother is there!” Anna reverted to Russian. Good idea, I thought. Why share our problems with the driver? “My passport soon won’t work, so Cairo is not an option. We are here, we are safe and we should stick to this place. We do not have much choice. I don’t understand how could mother know we were in Istanbul? Do you think Timo could tell her?”

“Not a chance!” It had crossed my mind but I’d dismissed it. “She probably knew you were in Odessa from your constant phone calls. Got Vladimir’s henchmen to track us and pay off the VIP airline guy in Odessa, maybe. Then all she’d have to do was hop that flight from Moscow with the cousins and sit there waiting for us — slick as snot. Good thing it happened to get in late, spoiling her plans. Otherwise she and the cousins would have been our welcoming committee. My guess is she thinks we’re in Istanbul and she might have planted something in that duffel bag.”

“Like what? A bomb?” Anna jeered. “You are paranoid.”

“Not a bomb, but a GPS device like a phone. And, if you think I’m paranoid, why don’t you explain just how she ended up in Istanbul anyway?” I stopped myself. The last thing we needed was an argument about passports, customs, gangsters, spies and bombs in front of a Middle Eastern airport and a taxi driver who may as well speak Russian. The operative words are pretty much the same in any language. Taking a deep breath, I turned to the driver and asked in English for a recommendation of places we might spend a few days relaxing by the seaside.

“Ah, the Turkish Riviera, such beauty, such luxury, but not so close to here.” The driver pulled out a map and showed us the various places we could end up. We settled on the closest viable port, a place called Marmaris. According to the driver, it hosted cruise ships and ferries to Greece. It was also a long way from any airport, meaning our documented electronic trail would go cold in Dalaman.

We each took a bench in the taxi-van and bedded down for the drive to Marmaris. I awoke a few times and watched a dry tortured mountain landscape, lit by a sliver of moon and starlight, sliding by. I longed to see it during the day or even right then, but my exhaustion and headache had me down for the count. By the time the van’s pulling up and parking awakened me, the sky had started to lighten over scrub covered hills.

The driver arranged a place for us to stay, in an apartment-hotel near the old town. We checked in and I slipped into a virtual coma until early afternoon.

It was day one in Marmaris.

By the time I crawled out of bed and shuffled to the patio, the sun was at its highest and impossibly intense. I acknowledged it with a reflexive groan and made for the not-so-great indoors.

Anna came in from who-knows-where. Her tiny Nikon was swinging from her wrist and on her face was a smile that looked like it had always been there. “Finally you are up! This place is amazing, Jess. It is ancient. There are ruins.”

“Coffee… need coooffeee.” I zombie walked toward her, arms outstretched. Turns out it was coffee, Kiev style: instant in oily tap water.

I spent the afternoon inside. Using the Dell’s Wi-Fi, I grabbed hit-and-miss Internet access from any number of insecure and randomly appearing wireless networks. It wasn’t a network environment I was about to do anything in but web-surf.

A Web search confirmed what I pretty much knew about Marmaris; it provides a back door to Europe via the Greek island of Rhodes and numerous ferry crossings. That is, if one carries a Western or free world passport to get into Europe visa-free. Obviously, the Greeks on the other side were well aware of their backdoor status. They were ready and able to deal with the flood of refugees scheming up ways to get in. Getting through with Anna would be like breaking into Fort Knox. Even had her passport not been compromised, she would have had little or no chance of getting a visa without significant money and, more importantly, connections. Seeing as how the only Turkish land border with the European Union just happened to be in the neighborhood of where we had last seen The Skater, our options were truly limited.