by Will Adams
‘What should I have them watch for?’
‘Anything. Everything. What he does, where he goes, who he talks to. If we’re very lucky, he might even steer us to his source.’ He waited until Michel had closed the door behind him then turned to his younger son. ‘What is it with you?’ he asked. ‘Can you possibly be unaware of the opportunity I’m offering you right now? I thought that’s what you wanted: to lead the Group.’
‘I do, Father. But I don’t see—’
‘Because you don’t think. Or, at least, you think like a corporal rather than a general. You see the world as a series of skirmishes to be won. Forget skirmishes. Skirmishes don’t matter. What matters is the war.’
‘What do artefacts have to do with war?’
Butros sighed. ‘Do you know why history bores you, Georges?’ he asked. ‘It bores you because you think it is about the past.’
Georges laughed, thinking his father had made a joke. Then he realized he was serious. ‘I’m sorry, Father,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Clearly. Which is precisely why I can talk to your brother of these things, and not you.’
‘Give me a chance. I’ll try, I promise.’
‘Very well.’ He went to his wall-safe, punched in a code. He swung open the door and took out a blue box that he passed to his son. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look at this.’
George pulled back tissue paper to reveal a curved shard of charred pottery beneath, inscribed with faded ideograms. He shook his head in puzzlement. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Part of a storage jar or cooking pot.’
‘And it’s significant somehow?’
‘These characters are Phoenician,’ replied Butros, running the tip of his little finger across them. ‘Early Phoenician. As you can see, these characters are difficult to read, but this symbol here is a signifier of royalty; and these other characters appear to comprise the name Ishbaal, or something similar, meaning “child of Baal” or “servant of Baal” or the like.’
‘Ishbaal,’ frowned Georges. ‘Who was he?’
‘There are several plausible candidates. According to Jewish history, their first king, Saul, was succeeded briefly by his son before David seized the throne. This son was called Ishbaal, though later Bible editors refused to countenance a king of Baal as king of Israel, so they retrospectively changed his name to Ishbosheth – man of shame. But I think this piece is later than that. There was a very small quantity of organic residue on this shard that I had carbon-dated. Almost exactly twenty-eight hundred years old, they tell me. Think of that.’
‘I don’t …’
‘There was a king of Tyre called Eshbaal who died in around 860 BC. That’s a little early. His daughter was the notorious Jezebel, the one who married the Jewish King Ahab. Many think her name is a corruption of the feminized version of Ishbaal. And there’d have been no need for the Jews to change her name, after all, as it was precisely for worshipping her different god that they put her to death and fed her to the dogs.’
‘You think this piece once belonged to Jezebel?’
‘I think it’s possible. But the carbon residue was from later still. So it’s possible that the piece was passed on to one of her heirs. Her niece, say.’
‘Her niece?’
Butros looked up. ‘I meant what I said over lunch,’ he told him. ‘We have Phoenician blood, you and I. And not just any Phoenician blood, but the blood of Tyre. Our ancestors showed Solomon how to build his temple. They devised the alphabet and shared it with the world. They circumnavigated Africa and were first across the oceans. They led the Mediterranean out of its centuries of darkness, and founded many of its greatest cities. Yet does the world honour us for this? No. Egypt and Greece get all the credit instead. Do you know why?’
‘Why, Father?’
‘Because our past is invisible, that’s why. Because our ancient cities have become our modern cities. Tyre is Tyre. Sidon is Sidon. Beritus is Beirut. We’ve built over ourselves so often that we have nothing left to show for it. No Petra, no Giza, no Troy, no Ephesus. And what little we do have is Roman. Roman! Nor do we have any great icons to make up the loss. No Rosetta Stone. No Phaistos Disc. No Mask of Agamemnon. We’re a nation without a visual narrative, without an image of ourselves. That’s why we’re always divided, because in our heads we see our differences before we see our common heritage. We see Christian against Muslim, north against south, coast against mountain. This division makes us weak, and weakness makes us ripe for conquest. But if we could find our narrative again, if we could find our identity …’
Georges looked doubtfully down at the shard. ‘And you think this could do that?’
‘No,’ said his father, taking back the box. ‘This is nothing. Just a fragment from an old pot. But if it leads us where I think it could lead us, then yes, it could be everything.’
II
Iain returned to the hotel to find Karin still out. He bolted the door then checked his laptop. Recovery complete, it told him. He dismantled and packed away the peripherals then ran a search of video files. A list appeared on his new laptop’s screen. He ordered them by date, clicked on the most recent. The screen went black. He feared it had suffered an aneurysm of some kind. Then footage began to play. It was from the laptop’s integrated camera, so the resolution was relatively poor and the hotel entrance looked further distant than it had in truth been. It was also corrupted in patches, as was the audio of him chatting cheerfully away with Mustafa. Yet, all in all, it was better than he had any right to expect.
The hotel’s main car park had been to its rear, but several bays were marked out either side of the front steps, for taxis, delivery vans and the like. The blast crater suggested the bomb had been to the left of the steps as he looked at it, so that was what he watched. Time passed. Vehicles came and went. He fast-forwarded until he saw Karin approaching. She walked up the front steps then paused to let a helmeted, black-clad motorcycle courier in ahead of her. Several minutes went by. Karin came back out. Her day-pack was now bulky with its package. She stopped on the steps to check its label, while Iain and Mustafa bantered about her. Then she looked around and walked briskly out of shot.
On the recording, he offered Mustafa more tea. Glasses clinked as he picked them up. The café door opened and then banged closed again. On screen, meanwhile, the leather-clad and still helmeted motorcyclist came back out. To judge from their build and gait, it looked like a woman. She walked along the front of the hotel, looking up at balconies. She stopped beneath one, took two paces backwards, then turned and beckoned to someone out of shot. A plain white truck now drove past the camera then reversed up against the hotel. Iain sat forwards. This was surely it: the bomb being delivered. The low resolution and the glare from the windscreen obscured the driver’s face. The door opened and a man jumped down. His jacket was zipped to his chin, its collar was up, and he was wearing a plain black baseball cap and mirror sunglasses. He had leather driving gloves on, too, and was carrying a dark blue motorcycle helmet. He slammed the door behind him, walked briskly around the front of his truck and vanished from view. A bang as the café door shut again. The motorcycle nosed out onto the road. The leather-clad woman leaned forwards, looking both ways before pulling out. The man was riding pillion, his helmet now on, tapping at a phone in his left hand. They vanished out of shot.
Iain braced himself. The seconds ticked by. The truck seemed suddenly to bulge and lift. The screen went topsy-turvy and then black. The file ended. He replayed the last few minutes again, stopping and starting in hope of getting a better look at one or other of their faces. Without reward.
He opened the second file. This one had footage from a camera Mustafa had planted beneath an armchair inside the hotel’s lobby. It had been to plant it, and others on the floors above, that Mustafa had booked himself into the Daphne International, despite the slight risk that the Bejjanis, or whoever they were meeting, would take their security seriously enough to have the hotel’s gues
ts checked out. Which was also why Iain had opted to stay in Antioch instead of Daphne, for his presence would have been far more likely than Mustafa’s to set off alarms. Those other cameras had relayed their footage to a server in Mustafa’s room that had, of course, been obliterated in the blast; but they’d had this particular stream sent to his laptop as well, so that they’d have at least some advance warning when Bejjani came to leave.
The cameras had no microphones. They were too easy to check for, and might have given their surveillance away. The video was therefore synchronized with his laptop audio. Unfortunately, all he saw was Karin, the motorcyclist and various other staff and guests walking to and fro. The third camera had been set up on the main Antioch road, because that was the direction from which they’d expected the Bejjanis to arrive. But neither the motorcyclist nor the truck had come that way. Now for the fourth and final camera, attached to a telephone pole across the road from the hotel. The motorcyclist arrived, parked, went inside. Time passed. She came back out, walked along the front of the hotel, then turned and guided in the truck. The driver got out, shoulders hunched and head bowed. The woman straddled her bike and rocked it off its stand. The man had his back to the camera. He took off his cap and sunglasses and stuffed them in his pockets. Then he made to put on his helmet.
‘Look around, you bastard,’ muttered Iain, leaning closer. ‘Look around.’
The café door banged at that moment. The man couldn’t help himself, he glanced over his right shoulder. Iain stared at the screen almost in disbelief. ‘Got you,’ he said.
THIRTEEN
I
Iain froze the crucial frame then zoomed in on the man’s face. The resolution wasn’t great but it caught his short, dark hair, his high, wide forehead, his weak chin and the crescent scar by his left eyebrow. Not perfect, granted, but surely recognizable to a friend, colleague or relative.
What now?
He had to get this to the investigating team, of course, but that was easier said than done. They were bound to ask why he’d been filming the hotel; and while private surveillance wasn’t exactly illegal, you didn’t want to have to explain it to the police in the aftermath of an atrocity like this. They’d make his life miserable, force him to name his client, probably deport him from Turkey, maybe even ban him from ever returning. So he needed to remain anonymous.
The media had been pushing hotline numbers and other ways to get in touch with the investigating team. He quickly found an email address for them. The last section of footage from the fourth camera, from the arrival of the motorcyclist up to the moment of the blast, contained everything they’d need. If he sent it from a bogus Hotmail account set up via his new computer, ISP confidentiality would normally make it untraceable. But this was a terrorism case and so the rules were different. He couldn’t risk using the hotel wi-fi, and he was liable to be remembered if he used a local Internet café. And if he used Tor or one of the other programs people like him used to cover their digital tracks, it might prompt the police to look for someone with his particular skill-set and so steer them straight to him.
He needed another way.
The day he’d arrived, he’d wandered around the market, had taken coffee in a café with free wi-fi. He’d used his old laptop but he remembered the password. He checked his watch. The market shut down at night. The café was certain to have closed. But such places often left their routers running overnight. It had to be worth a shot. He zipped his laptop into its bag then hurried down and out.
II
Such food as her son had had in his apartment, they’d eaten the night before. Zehra therefore had Katerina show her to the nearest shop after collecting her from school. Plastic crates of tired produce looked as limp as she felt after her long day, but there was still enough for a meal or two. The first molohiya of the year was in. She added vine leaves, an onion, a pepper, a lemon, two small potatoes, a tomato, a garlic bulb, a few pinches of fresh herbs and a single chicken thigh, which was all her purse and arms would allow. The checkout woman eyed her sourly as she weighed each item in turn but Zehra paid her no mind, except to watch the scales to make sure she wasn’t cheated.
Back in the apartment, she gave Katerina the molohiya to prepare. Katerina looked dumbly at her, as though she’d never even seen it before. Zehra frowned. ‘It’s molohiya,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know how to prepare molohiya.’
Katerina shook her head. ‘No.’
Zehra sighed. She found a knife and showed Katerina how to hold it so as not to cut off her fingers, then chopped the dark green leaves into long thin strips. ‘Now your turn,’ she said.
Katerina bit her lower lip in concentration as she worked. Her fingers were tiny and boneless compared to Zehra’s own gnarled, arthritic stubs. But she kept at it until she was done, when she looked up with such shining eyes that it was a thump in Zehra’s chest. ‘Are we having this tonight?’ she asked.
‘No, child,’ said Zehra, more severely than was warranted. ‘It’s too bitter. It needs to soak.’ She filled a pan with water, tossed in the leaves. Then she took out the chicken thigh, two potatoes, the vine leaves, an onion, a lemon and a selection of herbs. ‘These are for tonight. Do you want to help?’
Katerina nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, please.’
‘Very well,’ said Zehra. ‘Then those potatoes aren’t going to peel themselves, are they?’
III
Incident Investigation HQ, Daphne
Inspector Ozgur Karacan leaned back wearily in his chair and covered his face with his hands. Another brutal day. It wasn’t just that the bomb had devastated his home town and killed two old school-friends working in the hotel, it was that the investigation into it was such a shambles. Part of that was excusable. A large team had had to be put together in a rush. It comprised local, regional, and national officers as well as specialist technical teams and gendarmerie under the broad authority of the Turkish National Police Counterterrorism Authority, all working hand-in-hand with the National Intelligence Organization. Each had overlapping areas of responsibility and conflicting reporting structures. Each had had to procure for itself suitable workspace and accommodation. To add even more confusion, a lieutenant colonel had arrived that afternoon from the Office of the General Staff. He’d claimed his brief was to observe and advise only, but no one believed that for a moment. With so many competing interests at work, it was no surprise that already people were manoeuvring crudely for what little credit was going, as well as to avoid blame. And so it had become painfully clear to him exactly how the terrorists had run their campaigns with such impunity, and why—
‘Inspector,’ said a woman.
He looked around. Melisa Avci, no doubt with yet another piece of nonsense from the incident hotline. ‘What now?’
‘Footage,’ she said. ‘It came in a minute ago. You can see a white truck backing up against the hotel. You can see the driver’s face.’
Karacan stood, electrified. So much police work was about luck; but this was extraordinary. He followed her to her desk. She played it for him. He watched the driver park his truck and get out. He watched him walk around the bonnet. Then he watched him glance around. Even as he exulted, he struggled to make sense of it. The camera must have been directly across the road from the hotel, yet that whole area had been wide open, to afford the hotel’s guests uninterrupted views. There’d been no CCTV cameras in the vicinity; it was about the first thing he’d checked. And what tourist would film the front of a hotel?
‘Fantastic work, Melisa,’ he told her. The hotline was soul-destroying work, what with all the whackos calling in their theories, so she deserved full credit if only for stamina. Within minutes, the room was filled with braided uniforms. A jihadi video, they all agreed. Perhaps sent in by a turncoat of some kind. But what to do with it? Some wanted to give it to the media in hopes of a quick identification and arrest. But others cautioned against alerting the bombers to the breakthrough and thus giving them time to cover their tra
cks. So up again it went, to the Minister himself. In the meantime, there was plenty to be done: licence plates to check out, emails and footage to examine, suspect photos to be searched for a match.
Ozgur Karacan’s jaw trembled as he fought a yawn. The notion of a jihadi video made little sense to him, but back-to-back twenty-hour days meant he was in no state to offer anything better. His first boss had once told him that the best next move in a hard case was often a good night’s sleep. Never had that advice sounded sweeter than right now.
FOURTEEN
I
The shower was on when Iain returned to his room. Karin was back. He stowed his laptop beneath the dressing table then turned on the TV both to catch the latest news and to alert her to his presence. Yet she still looked startled to see him when she came out a few minutes later, a white hotel towel wrapped around her chest.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘How dare you barge into your own room like that?’ She grabbed clean clothes and vanished again, re-emerging several minutes later. ‘God, I needed that,’ she said.
‘Tough day?’ he asked.
‘My Dutch consul guy is an angel,’ she said. ‘But the Americans are such pricks.’
Iain laughed. ‘Is that a general observation, or did something specific happen?’
She sighed. ‘I have this thing called an EB-1B visa. It’s a green card for researchers and academics and the like. But it was with my passport in my hotel safe. The thing is, Nathan arranged it for me before I could go to work for him. And now that he’s dead they’re saying they can’t issue me a new one, not unless I have another offer of work. I mean Jesus! You’d think they’d give me a little leeway. All my stuff’s over there. My apartment!’