Chapter Eighteen · Adam's Robe Book 1

Baku, Azerbaijan — Present Day

Bhatti had specified the meeting place himself, in a message routed through three cutouts and delivered, in the end, as a single line to Katz's oldest working number: Icherisheher, the tea house nearest the Maiden Tower, sunset, and Ronen, I'd take it as a courtesy if you came without your American friend this time. Three is a negotiation. Four is a delegation, and I don't do business with delegations.

"He asked for you specifically," Katz said, reading it over Leah's shoulder in the hotel room they'd taken four hours earlier, "which either means he trusts you more than he trusts me, or means he's worked out that you're the one of us most likely to talk yourself into something against your better judgment. I would not put money on which."

"That's reassuring."

"It wasn't meant to be." He folded the phone away. "Cho stays on comms, not on the street. If he wanted you both dead he'd have said yes to four and done it somewhere considerably less public than a tea house forty meters from the most photographed building in the old city. That's not trust. It's arithmetic. Worth remembering the difference."

The walk through the Old City's narrow limestone lanes took eleven minutes, and Leah spent most of them doing the specific, useless work of trying to look like a tourist while cataloguing every face that crossed their path twice. A man in a flat cap who paused too long at a carpet stall. A pair of women, clearly local, who fell in twenty meters behind them for two full turns before peeling off toward a bakery that had, Leah realized a block later, been exactly where they were always going. She caught herself starting to build a case out of nothing and made herself stop, and then, thirty seconds later, caught herself doing it again.

"You're doing the thing," Katz said, not unkindly, without turning his head.

"What thing."

"Deciding everyone's a threat because you don't yet know what a threat actually looks like here. It's a normal reaction. It's also exhausting, and we have a long evening ahead of us." He nodded, minutely, at a boy selling roasted chestnuts from a cart bolted to the cobblestones. "That boy has sold chestnuts from that exact corner for at least the last two hours, because he was there when we did the pass-by an hour ago, and men watching a meeting don't stand still that long in one place. Learn the boring version of the street first. The interesting version takes care of itself."

Bhatti was already seated when they arrived, at a table angled to see both the tower and the lane, a pot of tea steaming between three glasses he'd apparently ordered on the assumption they'd both come regardless of what he'd asked for. He'd aged, in the months since Beirut, in the specific way of a man whose job had gotten harder rather than gentler — more gray at the temples, a new stillness around the eyes that hadn't been there before — but the smile he offered them was exactly as unhurried as Leah remembered.

"Dr. Sarkisian. You look considerably less like a woman being recruited against her will than you did the last time I watched the two of you from a respectful distance." He gestured at the empty chairs, the same gesture, she registered, as the café in Beirut — a small, deliberate rhyme he'd clearly chosen on purpose. "Sit. The tea is better here than it has any right to be, and I promise you both, on whatever currency either of you still believes I honor, that nobody is coming through that lane behind you tonight who isn't already known to me by name."

"That's not actually as comforting as you think it is," Katz said, sitting anyway.

"No," Bhatti agreed, pouring. "It generally isn't. I've never understood why people expect it to be."

He let them get halfway through the first glass before he said the thing Leah understood, watching his face, he had brought them here specifically to say.

"You have a crate somewhere on the Kazakh leg of a rail corridor that only runs a train every three or four days, moving toward a transfer yard at Dostyk or Khorgos, and no reliable way to learn which one it's actually on once it clears customs at Almaty." He said it the way he'd said everything in Beirut, as a fact rather than a guess, watching them for the reaction rather than waiting for confirmation he clearly didn't need. "I'm not going to insult either of you by pretending that took extraordinary tradecraft. Pakistan runs its own cargo through a parallel corridor for exactly the same reason your Colonel Nassiri does — the blockade makes overland the only reliable option left — and a man in my position who wasn't watching every forwarder registration along that route would not deserve his pension."

"You know who's handling it past Almaty," Leah said. It wasn't quite a question either, by the time it left her mouth.

"I know a name. I am not yet certain it's the right name, which is a distinction I'd encourage you to start caring about as much as I do, because in this particular business the difference between a name and the name has gotten several good people killed." Bhatti turned his glass a quarter turn on its saucer, unhurried. "I'll give it to you. Verified, cross-checked against two independent sources, the way I'd want it given to me. And in exchange, I want something that has nothing to do with your robe, your ledger, or your six weeks — I want everything Langley and Glilot between them currently hold on a network operating across the Zahedan corridor, financed in part through the same antiquities and black-market goods economy your Colonel Karimi quietly services. Weapons and men moving both directions across that border under half a dozen names depending which side you catch them on. It is a live problem for my country whether or not your war ever produces a winner, and it will remain one long after whatever happens to your robe has been forgotten by everyone except historians considerably more patient than either of you."

"That's not money," Katz said.

"I have never once asked either of you for money. I find it a genuinely uninteresting thing to want, compared to the alternative." Bhatti's smile didn't change, but something underneath it settled, the specific settling of a man who had just said the truest sentence he intended to say all evening. "I want something that makes my own service's next five years marginally less dangerous for people I actually have to answer to. You want a name on a rail manifest. Neither of us needs to pretend this is more complicated than it is."

Katz stepped away to the edge of the terrace to make the call, low-voiced, phone angled away from the tea house's other patrons, and came back eleven minutes later with the particular composure of a man who had just spent most of that time arguing and lost, or won, or possibly both.

"Cho says we can give him the network's financing architecture — routes, front companies, the pieces that would help him disrupt it operationally. Not sourcing. Not anything that identifies a specific asset inside it, ours or anyone else's." He said it to Bhatti directly, not to Leah, the way one professional states terms to another. "That's the offer. Take it or don't."

"I would have offered you the same restriction myself, Ronen, if you hadn't gotten there first." Bhatti extended a hand, and Katz, after a moment Leah understood cost him something, took it. "Frashogan Logistics. Registered in Almaty, three years old, clean paper, one director nobody's ever met in person. They've handled the last leg of exactly this kind of shipment for at least two other parties I'm aware of, both times for people who valued discretion considerably more than speed. If your crate is moving past the Kazakh transfer yard at all, it's moving under their manifest."

"And if it's not."

"Then I've cost you nothing but an evening and a pot of tea, and I'll owe you the next name for free, because I don't like being wrong in front of people I intend to do business with again." He sat back, and for the first time all evening something almost genuine crossed his face, gone again before Leah could be entirely sure she'd seen it. "One more thing, since I find I like you both more than my job strictly requires. There is talk in rooms I'm occasionally permitted into that Washington is revisiting the idea of a strike on that corridor — not the whole line, something surgical, the way they took the bridge near the Turkmen border in July. I'd encourage whoever authorizes that conversation to think very carefully about what a second strike on the same rail line does to a Chinese government that has already been asked, twice, to look the other way. Some doors, once you've knocked on them politely and been let through, don't open the same way a second time."

He stood, and left, unhurriedly, without paying, the way a man leaves a table he has already arranged to have someone else settle, and Leah sat for a long moment afterward watching the lane he'd disappeared down, aware that she had just watched something get traded that felt, despite every professional reassurance Katz had offered her walking here, considerably less like a transaction between equals than Bhatti had made it sound.

"Do you believe him," she said finally. "About the name. About all of it."

"I believe he believes it." Katz was already reaching for his phone, already composing, in his head, whatever he was about to say to Cho about Frashogan Logistics and a warning about Washington neither of them had asked for and both of them now had to carry. "Whether that's the same thing as it being true is a question I've been asking myself about that man for eleven years, Dr. Sarkisian, and I have never once been able to answer it with any confidence I'd stake anything real on."