Fault Line Read Online Free

Iranians and their VAVAK minders had gotten into one of the hotel limousines and returned after dark. Ben figured these trips were for meetings with Vasilyev and would have liked to follow them to learn more, but the likely costs outweighed the benefits. Alone in a car or on a motor scooter, he would be relatively easy to spot. Even if he weren't spotted, catching them in a venue that enabled him to do the job and depart without trouble would require an unrealistic amount of luck. He might have tried taking them as they arrived at or departed from the hotel, but the front and interior of the Four Seasons were quietly replete with cameras, doormen, and security personnel. It just wasn't a good place for a hit, which was part of the reason they had chosen it in the first place.
    It didn't matter, though. His gut told him something would open up. After all, the Iranians were in town for seven days, and what did that mean? Probably that they expected to be done with their work in four, or maybe five. Country and culture were irrelevant: when the government or the corporation or anyone else was footing the bill, bureaucrats and other worker bees could always be expected to overestimate the time they would need for meetings. Especially when the meetings required their presence in a city as enticing as Istanbul, and at a hotel as fine as the Four Seasons.
    In fact, the choice of hotel increased Ben's confidence about what was coming next. Because if the Iranians could persuade the bean counters to spring for the Four Seasons, cost was obviously not a consideration. If cost wasn't a consideration, they could have stayed at any hotel in the city-the Pera Palas, the Ritz-Carlton, even the second Four Seasons, recently opened on the Bosporus. Ben had checked with all of them, and they all had rooms available. They all offered more or less the same level of luxury and security. The question, then, was, why this hotel?
    The answer, Ben thought, was location. All the other luxury properties were in Beyoglu, the newer part of the city, north of the Golden Horn. Only the Sultanahmet Four Seasons was a five-minute walk from the city's most storied attractions: the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, the Grand Bazaar. And if Ben was right about location being the deciding factor, he was confident the Iranians would take at least a day, and probably more, to see those walking-distance sights. When they set out from the hotel on foot, Ben could get behind them. From there, an opportunity would present itself. All he had to do was wait.
    Which was fine. Waiting didn't bother him. He liked to wait, in fact, liked the simplicity of it. Waiting was the least complicated part of an uncomplicated job.
    Periodically, he received orders. The orders were always short and direct, and he had extremely wide latitude in determining how to carry them out. He could ask for whatever equipment he needed, and the equipment would promptly turn up in a dead drop as though by magic. There was no questioning, no red tape, no oversight.
    The only real constraint this time was that Vasilyev was off-limits. During the early years of the Cold War, trying to remove the other side's pieces from the board was considered just another part of the game. Eventually, like rival mafia families, everyone had figured out the bloodshed was more expensive than it was worth, and a kind of shadowy dEtente had settled in. Now, no one wanted to be responsible for breaking the truce, for a return to those bad old bloody days.
    He tried not to be irritated by the restrictions. After all, it wasn't like the Russians were matching Uncle Sam's restraint. They had killed that guy Victor Litvinenko in London with polonium. And there were all those dead journalists, too-Anna Politkovskaya, Paul Klebnikov, too many to keep up with. Ben thought he could make a pretty good argument that Ivan was getting more aggressive precisely because of Uncle Sam's overzealous devotion to the rules, but