Out Toward the Golden Horn

The drizzle has cooled the air, dragging a silk haze over the water. Tourists jam shoulder-to-shoulder along the balustrade, camera phones angling for a glint of ferry lights painting shimmer across the Golden Horn—a wide, grey boundary, as much mental as it is geographic.

Mitra’s warmth at my side is like a live wire, her breath measured but always close. Together, the four of us move as a single tense line toward the footbridge, our slack drawn tight with a new, unspoken urgency.

Somewhere behind, the tail—a man too ordinary to truly see, collar raised, gaze always a little too distracted—drifts closer through the crowd. It happens quietly: a tangle of bodies breaks our line, and in the window’s reflection I spot the tail hunched, pacing fast, intent sharpening.

Instinct fires.

Asdar, tall and copper-haired at my left, angles his umbrella to shear the tail’s line. A seamless pivot—Karim, two paces right, braces his stance and raises a hand, the gesture open enough to be nothing or everything.

It’s a dance.

Asdar’s chin drops imperceptibly. Karim matches, edging just so until Mitra and I are bracketed by muscle and intent—fluid, unspoken, clean. A tourist stumbles past; Karim’s fingers graze my elbow, feather-light, anchoring my breath. Asdar’s shadow merges with the tail’s trajectory, blanketing his approach, breaking the rhythm.

We never stop moving. My heart stutters in the gap—the moment stretched, warped by the crowd. The tail falters, catching the new choreography, eyes calculating before he drifts off, melting back into the churn.

In three heartbeats, Asdar and Karim have pressed, shielded, and steered us clear, and now we stand at the foot of the bridge: city opening up, the promise of Istanbul just beyond the water.

No words needed. Their protection is all ballet—no bravado, no shouting, only the artful certainty of bodies moving as one, a barrier conjured not by force, but by mastery.

I should never have said yes to Roger Boswell.

“Help Elena,” he said. “Only for a while,” he said.

Only-for-a-while, in Roger-speak, means: cancel your foreseeable future, pack for indefinite exile.

I’d told myself saying yes might get me a reprieve from my usual clientele; the wealthy, impatient, entitled, the ones who think deadlines and time zones are just suggestions, whose emergencies evaporate the second their tablecloth is the wrong shade of white.

Sometimes, when the money’s right, I dip a toe in the other current: favours that never get receipts, introductions that can’t be traced, solutions crafted in the humming silence only the street understands. Roger’s job was supposed to be just that—quick, clean, quiet. A break, I thought. Ha!.

Was I really happier among the pampered cruelty of the rich, or the sharp, honest tang of danger I understood too well? Tonight, it’s hard to say there’s a clear winner.

The Golden Horn is already behind us, Istanbul’s light breaking over the water like a smirk. Elena is at my elbow, close enough that I feel the  jitter beneath her calm facade. She kept glancing at Asdar and Karim, as if as if half-expecting them to vanish into thin air—and leave her alone with me to face whatever came next.

The antique warehouse wasn’t glamorous. My cousin’s place, though she was safely in London—far from the smell of dust and cold brass. The gate resisted; I turned the iron key in the lock, feeling its stubborn weight. Inside, the place breathed history: carpets curling in sleep, tarnished silver trays, nautical instruments pointing nowhere but the past.

Karim set his phone on the battered table, and instantly, the room felt like a campaign tent.

His voice was clipped, practical: a zigzag path along the Transasia Express—Ankara’s steel blur to Tatvan, then ferry across Lake Van, and on to Tehran with the border’s knife-edge.

Asdar countered: try driving—2,100 kilometers of road from Doğubayazıt to Maku, every toll booth a gauntlet, every official a latent threat.

Elena listened, one hand resting on an astrolabe, as if waiting for it to whisper a better route. I couldn’t tell if she was the reason for the danger, or simply someone swept up in its slipstream.

Me? I leaned back, wondering if I should have stayed in my own comfortable hell, placating billionaires and oil heirs. At least with them, the worst outcome was a tantrum over imported oysters. Here, the risks cut sharper. And next time Roger comes calling? I’ll double over, clutch my stomach, and swear I’ve been felled by an acute bout of diarrhoea.

Everyone respects diarrhoea.

I.Ph.