The Weapons Trail
The witness was a woman named Daria, Georgian by birth, stateless by circumstance, who had worked as a logistics coordinator for a shipping company in Batumi that existed primarily to move containers whose contents did not match their manifests. Khalil had been cultivating her for eight months before his death, feeding her information upward through a chain that Faris now understood had been compromised at some point between the source and the station. Daria knew the routes. She knew the shell companies. She knew the names of the brokers who converted weapons into paperwork and paperwork into deniability.
Faris found her in a basement apartment in Kadikoy, on the Asian side, where she was living under a name she had bought from a forger in Tbilisi. She opened the door with a kitchen knife in her hand and an expression that suggested she had been expecting someone less polite. He showed her the photograph of Khalil — the one from the bridge, which his contact had sent without being asked — and watched her face do the thing that faces do when grief and fear arrive simultaneously and compete for control. "He said you would come," she said. "He said if anything happened, the old man would come."
The weapons pipeline Daria described was elegant in its simplicity. Arms manufactured under license in Eastern Europe were sold through legitimate defence contracts to governments in