by Will Adams
‘A success,’ nodded Bulent, but soberly.
Asena felt a twinge. Success was such a loaded term for operations like these. ‘How many?’ she asked.
‘Thirty-one so far,’ said Uğur. ‘Thirty-one and counting.’
‘Thirty-one?’ protested Hakan, appalled. ‘But you promised me we’d—’
‘That was a bomb we set off today,’ said Asena sharply, before he could finish. ‘Not a fucking hand-grenade.’
‘I know. But—’
‘One, two, ten, a hundred?’ snapped Asena. ‘What does it really matter? This is a war we’re fighting. A war for the soul of our nation. Or have you forgotten?’ She glared around at them all, daring one of them to challenge her authority. No one did. She stalked into the main cabin, poured two fingers of raki into a glass then splashed in water to turn it cloudy. Lion’s milk, they called it: aslan suku. She held it up as if in a toast then knocked it back and poured herself another. She could hear Hakan muttering with the others outside, but right now she didn’t care. Let them grumble if they must. As long as they obeyed.
The glass casings of the oil lamps, blackened with soot, threw eerie shadows on the wooden walls. These cabins were fitted with electric lights, but they only used their generator once a day, to recharge batteries and put a chill on the deep freeze. She rinsed her plate, poured herself a third glass of lion’s milk. The rain had stopped, but still drip-dripped rhythmically from the eaves. Wolves howled in the distance. They were in good voice tonight. Usually the sound cheered her with its hint of camara-derie, as if some higher power was letting her know the justice of her cause. But tonight it merely made her feel all the more alone.
The Lion and the Wolf.
The milk wasn’t going to be enough. She needed to talk to the man himself. She needed his assurance that those thirty-one lives and counting had been necessary. She went to her room, set up her satellite phone, pinged out an encrypted message. Ten minutes dragged by. Nothing happened. His job kept him absurdly busy and he had to be extravagantly careful about how and when he contacted her. She understood this intellectually yet she resented it all the same. The things she was doing for him, he should find the time. Today, of all days, he should find the—
Her screen blinked. A black box appeared. In the box, his face, grey-lit and jerky and craggy, yet so handsome withal that he still had the power to lift her heart. ‘My love,’ she said.
‘What is it?’ he asked, glancing at his watch.
His brusqueness hurt her. ‘I only wanted to know if today went as you’d hoped,’ she said. ‘And if there were any ramifications we needed to know about.’
‘Today went as hoped. There are no ramifications you need to know about. I’ll notify you through the usual channels if that should change.’
‘Only you never said this morning what it was we—’
‘It had to be done,’ he said. ‘That’s all you need to know.’
‘Thirty-one people,’ she said. ‘Thirty-one and counting.’
‘It was necessary.’
‘So you said. But why?’
‘I can’t tell you.’ He looked uncomfortable for the first time. ‘Please trust me.’
She shook her head, but only because she was unhappy. ‘I hate this,’ she said. ‘I want it to be over.’
‘It won’t be much longer,’ he said. ‘A few months at the very most and then we’ll be together forever, with everything we’ve worked for. Our nation will be free again. And your father too, don’t forget.’ He checked his watch again. ‘But right now I have to go.’ He softened the message with a smile. ‘You may have heard that a bomb went off today.’
‘Call me tomorrow,’ she said.
‘If I can.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Call me tomorrow.’
He nodded seriously. ‘As you wish.’
She reached out and touched his cheek upon her screen. ‘The Lion and the Wolf,’ she said.
He nodded and touched his own screen. ‘The Lion and the Wolf.’
II
Somehow, during the course of their meal, sharing a room with Karin had become an issue for Iain to manage. They fell into a slightly awkward silence on their way back to the hotel. Their footsteps synchronized on the pavement, that heel-and-toe cadence that sounds weirdly like heartbeats. The receptionist gave a curious frown as she wished them good night, and the lift seemed a bit more cramped than it had while coming down earlier.
He let Karin into the room ahead of him, the better to follow her cues. She invited him to use the bathroom first. He did so. When it came to her turn, he heard the toilet flushing, the running of a tap, the vigorous brushing of her teeth. She came out wearing his olive T-shirt, its hem hanging loose around her thighs like some skimpy miniskirt. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Never looks like that on me.’
‘The lights,’ she said.
He switched them off. She slipped beneath her duvet. The room was on the hotel’s top floor and had a sloped skylight in place of a window. The weak moonlight and the white net curtain that drooped across it meant that all he could see was various gradations of darkness. He turned onto his side to face her, propped himself up on an elbow. ‘So you were telling me about earthquakes,’ he said. ‘How they don’t cause fires like you’d expect.’
‘Wasn’t I boring you?’
‘Are you kidding? I’ll never get to sleep until I know.’
He heard her laughter, then rustling as she too turned onto her side. Strange to think that they were facing each other a few feet apart, yet blind. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘These places were mostly built of stone. Their citadels, at least. Even if an oil lamp tipped over, there was nothing to catch fire, certainly not enough to spread. Sometimes a conquering army would want to burn a city as punishment, or to send out a message, but actually it was a real production. They had to cut down nearby forests and drag the trees into the city then spread them around the houses before it would catch. A lot of work, especially when you consider a city was a valuable thing. Even if you didn’t want to live there yourself, you could squeeze the citizens for tribute. So why burn it? Yet we have numerous examples.’
‘A game of tit for tat?’ he suggested. ‘Only it got out of hand.’
‘That’s one theory,’ she agreed. ‘But these places are scattered all over the place, so it’s hard to fit them to a pattern. Usually, in history, you can build a narrative that makes some kind of sense. It may be wrong, but it helps you think about it until something better comes along. Not with this. And, even if it did, it still wouldn’t explain how brutal the Dark Ages were. Everything collapsed. Cities were abandoned, and not only the burned ones. There was a massive depopulation. In some places, the lack of archaeological remains suggest that populations fell by ninety per cent or more. Ninety per cent! And this lasted twenty generations, give or take. Think about that: How much do you know about your family twenty generations ago? Especially as this wasn’t normal, settled life, but nomadic scavenging and hard-scrabble farming under constant threat of raiders stealing your winter stores. Yet somehow, at the end of it, Homer managed to depict the Trojan War almost as though he’d been there.’
‘I thought you said the Trojan War may not even have happened.’
‘Yes. But the world in which it was set existed. He knows the names of Mycenaean kingdoms that no longer existed. He depicts their armour and weaponry, their ships, tactics, gods, rituals, terrain and burial customs. He’s not perfect, sure, and there’s plenty of later stuff mixed in, but he’s still far more accurate than he had any right to be. How?’
The room was as dark as before, yet suddenly he glimpsed something like movement in the darkness, almost as if Karin were reaching out her hand to him across the narrow aisle. He reached out, curious, to check; but it proved a mirage. Nothing but empty space. ‘And that’s the Homeric Question?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the Homeric Question.’
EIGHT
I
Iain slept p
oorly that night. It had been a while since he’d shared a bedroom, and he found himself vaguely unsettled by Karin’s proximity, her breathing, the occasional rustle of her bedclothes. But his restlessness had other causes too. Twinges in his ribs each time he shifted reminded him of the battering he’d taken from the rest-room door. Unhappy thoughts of Mustafa and the day’s other victims interwoven with older memories of similar scenes in different places. And, underlying it all, the fear of oversleeping, of being late for Layla. It was almost a relief, therefore, when it neared time for him to get up. He turned off his alarm-clock in anticipation so that Karin could sleep on. He rose, washed and dressed as quietly as he could, then wrote her a note to assure her she was welcome to stay on as long as it took to sort herself out.
The sky was milky with dawn, the roads so empty that he reached Hatay Airport in barely twenty minutes. The terminal seemed disconcertingly normal, as though yesterday’s carnage had never happened. Layla was on the first flight in. He met her by the gate. Her eyes were raw from weeping and she cried again when she saw him waiting. He put his arms around her and murmured what small comforts he could think of until she’d composed herself again.
They were silent on the drive in. Layla was lost in private thoughts and he couldn’t think of anything to say. The hospital was an ugly green block on Antioch’s western fringe. He parked in an adjacent street and led her inside. They asked directions to the morgue, an unmarked low grey building standing all by itself. Layla took his arm to stop him before they went in. ‘Was yesterday anything to do with you?’ she asked. ‘With your work, I mean?’
‘They’re saying it was Cypriots.’
‘I know what they’re saying. That’s not what I’m asking.’
Iain sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘Not for certain.’
‘It’s possible, then?’
‘Yes. It’s possible.’
‘Find out. I need to know.’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you.’ She opened the morgue door then stood there blocking him for a few moments, her head down, as if debating with herself whether to speak or not. ‘When we were on the phone yesterday,’ she said, at last, ‘suddenly you weren’t there any more.’
‘I lost coverage. The masts were overloaded.’
‘Yes. I thought that was it. But you didn’t call back. I waited and waited and you didn’t call back.’
‘I told you,’ said Iain. ‘I’d lost coverage.’
‘You called Maria,’ she said. ‘You asked her to get in touch with me. How did you manage that without coverage?’ She waited for him to answer, but he looked helplessly at her. ‘There’s no need to wait,’ she told him. ‘I can take a taxi back to the airport when I’m done.’
‘It’s no trouble,’ he said.
But Layla shook her head. ‘I’ll take a taxi,’ she said.
II
The reports on Global Analysis and Iain Black had arrived from London during the night. Michel Bejjani printed out copies for his father and brother to digest along with their breakfast. He handed Georges his with a certain satisfaction then scooped up a generous dollop of tahini with a strip of pita bread and gestured for some coffee.
Until recently, there’d been no question about his and Georges’ respective futures within the Bejjani Group. Michel didn’t just have seniority, a Cambridge degree and a Harvard MBA, he also had the look, temperament and connections of a top international financier. All Georges had, by contrast, was a certain innate shrewdness and a bullish forcefulness that together suited him perfectly for security and the like. It was humiliating, therefore, that there was any question about the succession, but his father had the old-fashioned attitude that a company leader should be able to handle all aspects of the business. That was why Michel had been on the lookout for a way to dent Georges’ reputation in such matters; and this man Black was his opportunity.
The report on Global Analysis was extensive. It included its latest balance sheet and accounts, its scope of operations, key clients and an executive summary that portrayed a company with a once-stellar reputation now hit by rumours of cash-flow problems, perhaps on account of an ill-fated joint venture between the founder-owner Quentin Oliver and a shady Uzbek oligarch.
The report on Iain Black was even more detailed. By happy chance, Black had sent his CV to all the leading business intelligence companies a couple of years before, including RGS, the agency the Bejjanis sometimes used. Black had ultimately opted to join Global Analysis, but in the meantime RGS had been interested enough to commission a head-hunter’s report, which they’d kept on file. It included eight photographs of him, both by himself and in company. They showed a tall, powerfully built man in his early thirties; and with a certain presence, to judge from the way other people arrayed themselves around him.
His British father and Jordanian mother had met while working on a pipeline project outside Amman. They’d later worked together on similar projects in Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and elsewhere, giving Black a suite of useful languages, a comfort with exotic places and – thanks to his mother’s genes – a valuable ability to pass for native in most Middle-Eastern countries. Back in England for his teens, joining the army out of school, serving with distinction in Afghanistan and Iraq. But then suddenly his file went dark. His records for his last seven years were classified, and the head-hunters had had to make do with unconfirmed reports of secondment to a shadowy military intelligence unit running special ops across the region, from Pakistan to Iran, Somalia and Libya.
Michel watched with satisfaction his father’s eyebrows rising as he read, and the finger Georges tugged inside his collar. He didn’t wait for them to finish, therefore, but said instead: ‘We need to call this morning off. It’s not fair to expect Georges to take on a man like this.’
‘What are you talking about?’ scowled Georges.
Michel turned to Butros. ‘I’m the first to acknowledge what a fine job Georges does running security, Father. But we need to be realistic. We’re bankers, not men of war.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Georges. ‘He’s one man. I’ll have Sami and Faisal and the whole crew with me. We can take him easily, I assure you.’
Their father held up a finger for silence. He thought for half a minute or so then turned to Georges. ‘Your brother is right,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a job for you.’
‘But, Father—’
‘This is a job for him.’
Michel’s smile grew a little strained. ‘With respect, Father, that wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was—’
‘I know what you meant. But you’ve been assuring me that Mexico was a one-off. It’s time for you to prove that.’
Silence fell. It was Georges’ turn to smile. Michel felt a sudden unwelcome squishing in his gut, but he knew better than to let it show. ‘And so I will, Father,’ he said. ‘And so I will.’
III
Zehra rose early to prepare a light breakfast for herself and Katerina. After last night’s harrowing drive, not all the demons in hell would ever get her back behind the wheel of her son’s car, so she had Katerina show her the way across the park to her school. She said goodbye to her at the gates and promised to meet her there again that afternoon.
It was a promise she had no intention of keeping.
A bus to the Old City, then on foot to a small enclave of handsome whitewashed homes just inside its walls. Two policemen were on duty outside the Professor’s house. She hesitated but then steeled herself. ‘I’m here to see Metin Volkan,’ she told them.
A scar from upper lip to left nostril made the nearer policeman seem to sneer. Or maybe he really was sneering. ‘And you are?’
‘Zehra Inzanoğlu.’
‘And what are you to him? His cleaner? His lover?’
She ignored their laughter. ‘We were children together.’
‘That was a while ago, I’m guessing.’ He took her bag, rummaged through it, holding individual items up for mockery before thrusting th
e whole thing back at her. ‘Go on in, then,’ said his companion, opening the door for her. ‘You’ll find your sweetheart in his study.’
Zehra didn’t know where that was, but she wasn’t about to ask. She opened doors at random, therefore, until she found him at a desk in a brightly lit, book-lined room, making notes in green biro upon a sheaf of stapled papers. Professor Metin Volkan, formerly a noted historian but now best-known as leader of One Cyprus, the political party he’d founded to press for reunification of the island. He looked up irritably from his work but sprang to his feet the moment he recognized her, hurried around to greet her. ‘My dear Zehra,’ he said. ‘How good to see you. But what are you doing here?’
‘My son came to visit me yesterday,’ she told him, launching into the speech she’d rehearsed on her way here. ‘Before they arrested him. He asked me to look after his daughter. But it’s impossible, I can’t, I’m too old. She needs to be here, near her school, near her friends.’ She thrust out her jaw. ‘You’ll have to look after her for me.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. You.’
He looked at her as though she were crazy. ‘What do I know about looking after a schoolgirl, Zehra? And did you really not notice those policemen at my door? I’m under effective house arrest. It’ll be a miracle if I’m not under full arrest in the next few days. The moment they find anything on me, anything at all … Anyway, she’s your granddaughter, not mine.’ He shook his head in bafflement. ‘What happened to you, Zehra? You used to be so kind.’
‘She’s one of them,’ spat Zehra.
‘One of them?’ frowned the Professor.
‘Yes,’ insisted Zehra. ‘One of them. A Greek. Like her mother. That whore you introduced to my son. So this is your fault. Your fault, your responsibility.’ She folded her arms emphatically, as if her position was unarguable.