The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Prologue: The Runner

Father Wynne sweltered in Istanbul's summer heat. He sat on a blanket-draped wooden bench and looked down a colonnade of domes stretching along the alleyway, each held by pillars painted with brown and black geometric patterns. The view was mesmerizing, the receding corridor of identical domes and pillars shrinking in the distance like a mirror image caught in a mirror image caught in a mirror image.

Beyond the pillars and domes of this tranquil alley was the hustle and chaos of a city at work. Pedestrians, food carts, mules burdened with woven baskets, horse-drawn carriages, streetcars and automobiles all wove around each other, all competing for limited space and trying to find some break in the thick traffic. It felt to Father Wynne that time had converged here, that this city was some vortex of lifestyles stretching from the present all the way back to the middle ages. Old technology was not supplanted here like it was at home in the United States. Here the old continued to exist side by side with the new.

That strange clash of technology and aesthetic helped mask Father Wynne. His Western-style suit and Caucasian features were as common here as the fez hats and robes worn by Istanbul traditionalists. Father Wynne's Priestly collar was more unique, but the mostly Muslim city was no stranger to Christian tourists. Its recent revolution and subsequent secular government had begun to welcome pilgrims hoping to see its Christian holy treasures.

So although Father Wynne's appearance made him stand out, it did not draw unwelcome suspicion. Natives undoubtedly marked him for a Westerner but they probably just assumed he was an English or American Priest seeing the Christian sights. And in some ways they would have been correct in that assumption. Father Wynne was an American Priest, and he was also a teacher of Latin at an Episcopal Boy's School in New Hampshire. He'd come east during a leave of absence, and he did intend to see the sites and tell his students about them. But that wasn't his primary reason for being here. His primary reason was because in addition to being a Priest and an English teacher, Father Wynne was a spy.

He'd met his O.S.S. recruiter several years ago, while he was finishing his Seminary studies at Yale. At the time he'd had no idea the man was a government agent, he looked and acted more like an Ivy League professor. But that was before the war. And shortly after the war started, he'd been visited by that man again, and that man had extended an invitation to Father Wynne – an invitation to serve his country.

Father Wynne had considered doing his patriotic duty by joining the military as a Priest. But there was something about ministering to soldiers that made him uneasy. It was guilt, really, that was the source of the unease. If he was going to minister to soldiers, he wanted to share their danger. He knew he would feel guilty advising them spiritually and then not joining them in combat. Of course he couldn't in good conscious join them in combat, because one of the commandments was "Though shalt not kill". So as a compromise he had begun to consider joining the army as a combat medic, instead

The O.S.S. recruiter had convinced him otherwise. Father Wynne's particular talents would be wasted as a combat medic, the recruiter argued. Father Wynne was a member of a profession that offered special access to hearts and minds. He would do better for his country as a spy than as a medic. The recruiter urged Father Wynne to join the Office of Strategic Services, a brand new American central intelligence agency modelled after Britain's SIS. Father Wynne was intrigued by the idea, so intrigued that eventually he agreed. He took a sabbatical from his high school, was given rudimentary training, and then, by virtue of his fluency in Greek, he was sent to Eastern Europe. There he liaised with the Greek resistance, staying one step ahead of the German Army until he was ordered here, to neutral Turkey.

Although Father Wynne's new job was dangerous, he loved it. Travel stimulated his senses. Unfamiliar sights and sounds forced his brain to pay attention, to stop taking his surroundings for granted. The stench of donkey dung and body odor mingled with the scents of roasting coffee beans and sweetened tobacco sent his synapses firing. The gurgle of hubbly bubbly water pipes and the click of backgammon pieces and the lilting song of a language he didn't understand pushed his reasoning to a higher level. The taste of the strange coffee, black but almost creamy in its consistency, so different from the comparatively watery Maxwell House back home, forced his mind to reclassify and register it as an entirely new sensation. As a result, this young blonde man wearing a priest's collar with a cup of coffee in one hand and an English-language newspaper in the other, looking to all the world like an English or American tourist enjoying a relaxing afternoon, was in fact enjoying a state of high anxiety rivaling that of a mountain lion on the prowl or of a fox that knows it's being hunted.