The Healer's Daughters by Jay Amberg

Author:Jay Amberg [Amberg, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781937484996
Publisher: Amika Press
Published: 2019-07-15T22:00:00+00:00

40

ANKARA

Tuğçe Iskan stands in front of the associate minister’s spacious mahogany desk. Nothing at all is on the desk except a telephone console and an iPad—no files, no pens, no notepads, no family photos, nothing for her to take notice of and store in her memory. Nothing on the walls either, except for enlarged framed photos of Ataturk and the current president. The minister sits behind the desk in a burgundy leather armchair. His hair, combed forward, hides much of his baldness. The hair on his temples has gone gray. His eyes—narrow, brown, and intense—scan her, taking in her height and hair, her bright eyes, pale skin, and large nose. His eyes pause for just a moment on her neck, which shows just a couple millimeters of her tattoo above the collar of her plain, white long-sleeved shirt. The eyes pause again, longer, on her chest.

The minister, Iskan notes, is cleanly shaved except for a tiny crescent of silver whiskers on his jaw beneath his left earlobe. A dark mole rises on his right cheek, and a small oval scar is at the base of his chin. His tie is maroon, his shirt a crisp white. His hands, folded on the desk, are hairy. His wristwatch features multiple dials.

“Sit, please,” he says, gesturing to one of the two leather-cushioned chairs set at angles in front of his desk.

She does as she has been told. She has never met one-on-one with anyone this high up in the Ministry, and she is unclear about what an associate minister does much less why she was summoned or how she should act. She was instructed to bring with her any files she retained on the Galen letter and on her earlier truncated investigation into the Hamit family finances. She has no paper or digital files on either, and the voluminous materials she has gathered on the Hamits in the last month are neatly filed—but only in her brain.

“How are you, Tuğçe Hanim?” he asks, his voice deep and his tone, she believes, unfriendly.

“I’m good. And you?”

He tilts his head and nods but does not smile. “You have taken leave?”

She smiles nervously. “Two weeks, long overdue… My department head has been…encouraging…me to.” Her left foot is dancing so she strokes her sweaty palms on the thighs of her black pants and roots the offending foot into the plush carpet.

“But you have not gone on holiday?”

Iskan is not sure it is a question so she merely shakes her head, glances over his shoulder at the portrait of Ataturk gazing into the future, and, trying to slow her mind down, forces a smile.

He looks her in the eyes for the first time. “And yet you have been to Bergama twice.”

When she told Nihat Monoğlu that she had been summoned to the Ministry, he suggested to her that she should not lie—but also not actually tell the associate minister anything he didn’t already know. “Yes,” she says, “under a directive from my department head.”

“Your new department head.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.