Prepared For Rage

A pity they'd all been caught, but then there were always casualties in war, and they didn't know enough beyond their own operation to cause him any harm.

The next day he flew to Lanzarote. Adam Bayzani met him at the luggage carousel. He'd already rented a car, and a hotel room. Over cocktails, Akil played with the swizzle stick in his mai tai, loaded with chunks of pineapple, melon, and maraschino cherries, and met Bayzani's warm gaze only infrequently. Over di

When they got back to the room Akil insisted the lights be turned out before he allowed Bayzani to undress him. In bed he was timid, letting the other man take the lead, teach him how to kiss, how to touch. Bayzani was in no hurry, experienced enough to be patient, allowing the anticipation to build, certain the payoff would be all the sweeter for the wait.

He was right, it would have been, and he didn't know any better until Akil rolled over to pin him down, his hands caught beneath him, a hard knee pressing his legs apart. "Oh," he said, suddenly breathless, heart pounding. The pupil was changing places with the master. Bayzani was willing to have it so and then Akil, as a continuation of the same smooth motion, shoved the five-inch plastic swizzle stick he had palmed at the bar all the way into Bayzani's left ear. It required little force, ru

Bayzani's breath caught on a thin scream. Akil even had time to push the stick in and out a few times before Bayzani's body bucked once, twice, three times, legs thrashing, writhing, straining, shuddering in a cruel parody of sexual pleasure. He was young and fit and once he almost had Akil off, but by then it was too late.

He went limp. All the life sighed out of him in one long, ragged, rattling exhalation. He voided his bladder and bowels. Akil, lighting a lamp so he could see, watched Bayzani's pupils become fixed and dilated.

Adam Bayzani no longer lived there.

Akil was pleased. The swizzle stick had been an impulse, an improvisation. He was always looking for new, undetectable ways to kill with weapons that wouldn't set off a metal detector. He hadn't known the stick would work that well, guessing that at most it would reduce Bayzani to a drooling vegetable, which might have suited his purposes even better, so long as Bayzani lost the power of speech and cognitive thought. No, too chancy. Bayzani's death was preferable.

He looked down at the staring eyes almost with affection, pressed his cheek briefly against one growing rapidly colder, and unwrapped himself

from the body. He stood upright and pulled out the swizzle stick. It cleaned itself upon extraction. There was almost no blood or brains on it or on the pillow beneath Bayzani's head. He put it carefully in his shirt pocket, where he might have put it after using it to clean his teeth, and straightened the bedclothes. He pulled them to the corpse's chin, and stood in thought looking down at Bayzani with a meditative expression, as Bayzani's urine dried on his thighs.

Bayzani had rented the car and the hotel room. The restaurant where they'd had di

He showered and dressed. Bayzani's uniform fit him very well, a little tight around the waist, but that was all. He switched the tags on their two bags and pocketed Bayzani's passport, identification, and airline ticket. He waited quietly until four in the morning, not even turning on the television, before slipping from the room, placing the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob as he closed the door behind him.

There was no one in the hallway. He left by a back door. On the beach, he sat in the sand to watch the sun come up, a beautiful smear of red, orange, and gold across a tropical sky, eclipsing the moon. At eight he went in search of coffee, and at eleven he was back at the airport, boarding a flight for Dublin, and there, one for Heathrow, and finally, for Turkey.

IN ISTANBUL HE CHECKED INTO THE RENAISSANCE POLAT HOTEL AS ADAM Bayzani. It was a tall glass wedge of a building on the edge of the Sea of Marmara. The Strait of Bosphorus was just up the Sahil Caddesi, which naturally put him in mind of Byron, and indeed, Istanbul did walk in beauty like the night, especially at night. The conference didn't begin until Wednesday, so he had two days to explore the city, which he did as much as possible on foot. Anyone observing would have thought him just another tourist there to take in the sights, and for these two days he almost felt like one.

The souks were wonderful, a crowded concatenation of life, rude and smelly and noisy and dirty, merchants shouting out their wares, children scuffling in alleys, women walking about freely and scandalously without the hijab. He thought for a wistful moment of how much Adara would have enjoyed herself here. He could have bought her those gold-leaf earrings from the dark-ski

That evening he lay awake thinking about Turkey. They were trying so hard to push their way into the European Union. He wondered if they would succeed. He wondered if they had read through the EU constitution and knew that if they adhered to the letter of it, it would make them a target in the eyes of many Muslims. They already had enough trouble with the Iraqi Kurds on their border, and he wondered why they were courting more. He let his mind play with the idea of Istanbul as a possible future target. They could use a warning.

The next morning he rose early, showered and shaved, and dressed very carefully in the blue uniform that he had had cleaned and pressed on arrival. His registration packet, including the agenda, had been waiting for him when he checked in, and he looked over it as he rode the elevator down. On the seventh floor it stopped and a woman, a blond American in the same uniform, stepped inside. She was a commander.

This was a meeting of an international organization with member nations numbering in the hundreds and individual representatives in the thousands. It was a piece of extraordinary bad luck that the first person he would bump into would be one of Bayzani's fellow officers, and in such close quarters that contact would be unavoidable. From the wealth of information he had been able to elicit over the series of emails he had exchanged with Bayzani throughout their ripening courtship, he had learned that the U.S. Coast Guard was a relatively small government agency, with a quickly rotating duty roster. Sooner or later, everyone in the Coast Guard worked with everyone else. Would this officer have known Adam Bayzani? Served with him at a duty station or on a ship?