by Will Adams
‘Consequences?’
Stalin smiled thinly. ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘our overriding concern is that word of this footage doesn’t get out prematurely. With that in mind, we have decided to offer you a choice. Your first option is to acknowledge your visa violation and agree to leave the country of your own volition. There is a flight from Hatay to Istanbul this afternoon, for example, from where you can easily catch a plane on to London. Do that, keep your mouth shut about the footage, and after an appropriate interval – six months, say – you will be welcome to return to Turkey.’
‘And option two?’
‘We hold you in one of our cells until we catch the bombers. Then we charge you with obstruction of justice, perhaps with conspiracy too. Even if you are acquitted, I will make sure you are deported and barred from ever returning, which I imagine might prove problematic for a man with Middle-East Director on his business card.’
Iain nodded. ‘I’m thinking option one.’
‘Good. Then let’s get you to the airport.’
III
Zehra was in a black mood. After walking Katerina to school earlier that morning, she’d gone straight back to Professor Volkan’s, ostensibly to get his positive identification of her photo, but in truth to prove she wasn’t useless. His shrug, however, had said it all. A photograph. So what? And so here she was again, back in Famagusta for a second day, tramping the streets in an effort to find him.
Old men in checked shirts and spacious trousers played dominoes and backgammon outside a café. She weaved between them, showed her picture to a woman sweeping out the inside. The woman held it at arm’s length, squinted and shook her head. ‘Who is he?’ she asked.
‘He owes me money,’ said Zehra.
‘Good luck then.’
A broken wind turbine span uselessly in an overgrown lot. Zehra knew how it felt. Yet the man had to live somewhere. Two rallies he’d been to, both in Famagusta.
A bench at a bus-stop, reprieve for throbbing feet. The loudspeakers of a twin-spired mosque began to blare. As a child, Zehra had been intensely devout, like religion was a competition; but she’d witnessed the suffering of too many good people since, and the triumph of too much evil, to waste time with it any more. Yet somehow this muezzin’s recorded wail seemed to call directly to her. She pushed herself wearily back to her feet and continued on her way.
IV
They buried Hakan out in the woods then divvied up the weapons and the explosives between the trucks and the horse-box. Asena would have liked to burn the whole Grey Wolf camp down, but it would only give it away, so she had the men set booby-traps instead, to delay evidence-gathering. Then they all hugged and wished each other luck and split into small teams and went their separate ways.
Asena was well on her way to Istanbul when the Lion pinged her with a request to call urgently. She had Bulent pull in at the next service station, then sent him and Uğur off to get something to eat while she found herself a discreet spot in which to set up the satellite phone.
‘About time,’ said the Lion.
‘We’ve had a busy night,’ she told him drily. ‘What’s the panic?’
‘I have news about that footage of your friend. Mixed news. On the plus side, we persuaded the rest of the team to keep the footage under wraps for the time being, while we search our files. That way, we won’t risk you finding out we’re on to you and so covering your tracks.’
‘So we’re okay?’
‘We can only stall publication for perhaps a week or two. Maybe not even that long. Which brings me to the person who sent the footage in. His name is Iain Black. He was in Daphne to film someone else, would you believe? We had to let him go, because detaining a foreign national during an inquiry would be sure to provoke exactly the kind of questions we can’t have asked. Nor did we want him hanging around in Antioch, where he might shoot his mouth off to some journalist. So we made a deal with him: leave the country, keep your mouth shut, and eventually you’ll be free to return.’
‘And you trust him?’
‘Of course not. Why do you think I had you call? We’re putting him on a plane from Hatay Airport up to Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen this afternoon. Then on to London.’
‘Which has what to do with me?’
‘He’s a single man travelling by himself. You’re a beautiful woman. Make friends with him. Get him talking. Ask him what he was doing in Turkey, how he enjoyed himself. If he is relaxed and glad to be going home and putting it all behind him, then let him be. But if he seems to you tense or angry or vengeful …’ He spread his hands as though her next step was obvious.
‘In the airport? Are you serious?’
‘Fly with him to England if you must. It would be more discreet to do it there anyway. And make it look like an accident.’
Asena scowled. ‘What if something goes wrong here? What if I’m needed?’
‘Something has gone wrong,’ he said. ‘You are needed. But, of course, if you feel you can trust a mission this important and delicate to one of your subordinates …’
She glowered at her screen. He knew too well how to use her vanity against her. And then she remembered Hakan lying on his side in his shallow grave and realized that she had her own score to settle with this man. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Send me the details. I’ll take care of it.’
He smiled and touched his screen. ‘The Lion and the Wolf,’ he said.
‘The Lion and the Wolf.’
EIGHTEEN
I
They gave Iain a two-man escort. Middle age had turned the first from barrel-chested to barrel-gutted; the second was young and self-consciously thin-limbed, constantly pushing his shirtsleeves up over his biceps as if to pretend the resultant bulges really were muscle. They drove Iain back to his hotel and glowered at him with the sullen faces of an unwelcome duty as he stuffed his belongings into his holdall.
At reception, he faced a problem. He hadn’t yet said a word about Karin to the police, anxious not to get her caught up in this mess, so he could hardly start now. But nor did he want to leave her with nowhere to stay if she didn’t get her passport and cards back. ‘I’ll pay for tonight too,’ he told the receptionist, in English. ‘It’s not your fault there’s a problem with my visa.’
‘That’s all right, sir,’ she assured him. ‘Our policy is only to charge for cancellations made after—’
‘I said I’ll pay for tonight.’
She nodded understanding. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to it myself.’ They drove out to Hatay Airport. He expected the policemen to see him on the plane and say goodbye, but they boarded with him, took the seats behind. No wonder they were in such foul moods.
Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen was a fifty-minute hop. They made their way to international departures. ‘Are you guys coming all the way to England with me?’ he asked. ‘It’s lovely this time of year.’ They didn’t answer. The Pegasus check-in desks were open for Munich, Paris and Tel Aviv, not yet for London. They waited on a bank of hard white seats. Their part of the lounge was quiet. Several business folk sat singly or in pairs around them. A trio of overexcited children tested their parents’ patience with a game of tag. An attractive, dark-haired woman with wide-screen sunglasses flipped bored through a fashion magazine. A flight-crew talked animatedly over each other as they headed for their gate. Iain felt restless. ‘Can I get myself a new phone?’ he asked, for his old one had been confiscated, along with his new and old laptops.
‘No.’
‘May I use a payphone, then?’
‘No.’
‘How about a newspaper? Or will that bring Turkey to its knees too?’ He bought a selection from a bookshop, settled down to read. Daphne was still top story, though it was having to share the front page with rumours of trouble on Friday’s protest rallies. Buried on an inside page, he found an interview with a Professor Metin Volkan, founder of One Cyprus, the party whose cause the Daphne bombers had claimed to support. If so, Volkan proved remarkably ungratefu
l. He furiously denied any link with them, denounced them as monsters and murderers, and pointed out that the bombs had undermined rather than bolstered support for his cause.
The papers also published the identities of several more victims. Nathan and Rick had been found, as had a retired French couple on a bicycling tour, an Israeli historian in Daphne to visit the Solomonic-era excavations at nearby Tell Tayinat and two Anatolian honeymooners on the last leg of their tour of Turkey. It was the final group, however, that truly caught his eye. Three of the victims had apparently belonged to an Istanbul-based squad of antiquities police. Antiquities police in the Daphne hotel on the very day that Nathan Coates and Butros Bejjani had been meeting a black market dealer. It couldn’t be coincidence. Either they’d been there on surveillance or they’d been trying to sell the pieces themselves, perhaps as part of a sting or simply because they were corrupt. In which case …
An overpowering sense, suddenly, of shadows that differed from the objects that ostensibly cast them. He glanced at the policemen either side of him. They said the Interior Minister was an ambitious and ruthless man. How ambitious? How ruthless? Two days before, a woman and a man had detonated a massive truck bomb outside a hotel in southern Turkey, murdering over thirty people, including his friend Mustafa. When he’d sent in his video-files of them doing this, the police had reacted by coming after him in absurd numbers, by quarantining the footage and putting him on the first plane out. Suddenly, what little faith he had left that the investigation would find the killers spilled away. More than ever, justice for Mustafa was up to him. But he was about to board a plane to London, where he’d be unable to do much of anything.
An idea came to him. He picked up the papers again, checked back through the newly released list of victims. Yes, it was as he’d thought. A screen nearby listed upcoming departures. He checked it then went to talk to a Pegasus Airlines supervisor. When she assured him it wouldn’t be a problem, he took out all the Turkish lira he had left in his wallet, folded them around his index finger for the policemen to see. Then he walked back over to them to open negotiations.
II
With her passport, green card and plastic safely recovered, Karin’s thoughts turned back to Iain. On the one hand, she was wary of getting caught up in his troubles, whatever they were. On the other, he’d been there for her after the bombing and ever since, and so she owed him. She returned to Antioch, therefore, went to the hotel. There was no sign of the police, but the receptionist waved her over. ‘Your friend left earlier,’ she murmured, visibly nervous of being overheard.
‘Left?’
‘They took him to the airport.’
‘Why?’
‘He said there was a problem with his visa.’ Her tone, however, suggested doubt. ‘But it’s okay about your room. He’s paid in full. For tonight too. He insisted.’
Karin took the lift up, let herself in. The cleaning staff had been, removing all trace of him. She sat on the bed, her bed, ran her hand over the duvet. The white cotton coverlet seemed almost to tingle, as though faintly charged with electricity. She remembered him climbing in beside her the night before, his arms around her, the tangle of their hands. She felt dismay, suddenly, that something so promising had slipped away. But there was no point brooding. She called the airline and then her Nicosia hotel, both to let them know about Nathan and Rick and also to confirm her own bookings for tomorrow. She’d need to talk to their Cypriot car-hire people too, as the booking would be in Rick’s name. She checked his travel documents to see which company he’d used, then she sat there in shock.
It had been a gorgeous spring night in Houston the year before, out on the terrace with Nathan and Rick. The garden in full bloom, the electric hum of nocturnal insects. Nathan had been in full courtship mode at the time, compensating for the age-gap with stories to demonstrate his status and virility, including an anecdote about a Bronze Age cauldron he’d tried to buy in Istanbul several years before. The trip had almost ended in disaster because the antiquities police had been tipped off to the obscene quantity of Turkish lira he’d had to raise at short notice. Raising cash fast was a nightmare, he’d confided, particularly with modern money-laundering regulations. But it was what dealers insisted on, so what could you do? He’d actually changed strategies as a result, keeping large stashes of dollars and euros in safety-deposit vaults in black market hotspots like Athens and Rome. But that had had its own drawbacks too. He’d grinned at Rick. ‘Tell her about last year.’
A bright false smile from Rick. ‘Are you sure that’s wise, sir?’
‘You’re such a pussy. Okay, I’ll tell her. Remember all that shit when the euro almost broke up? I thought for sure the fucking Greeks were about to slap on capital controls; maybe the Italians too. And me with over half a million euros in an Athens strongbox, as much again in Rome, all about to become worthless! So Rick here went to work. He flew over, drew it all out, took it up to Stuttgart instead. I mean, you can say what you like about the Germans, they weren’t going to default, were they?’
The thing was, Rick hadn’t flown in to Turkey with Nathan and Karin the week before. It had been his job, after all, to make sure Nathan was safe. He’d therefore flown in a week early to scope out their accommodations and the places they planned to visit, travelling their route in reverse from Cyprus up through Turkey to Istanbul, where he’d met them off their plane. Karin had assumed, therefore, that he’d flown directly from Houston to Larnaca.
But not according to his itinerary.
No. According to his itinerary, he’d flown via Stuttgart instead.
III
Asena identified Iain Black easily, thanks to his police escort. She bought a glossy magazine for cover then sat nearby and watched him. Buying herself a ticket at short notice had been no problem. She always travelled with a spare passport and a choice of plastic, and the London flight had been wide open. The trickier part would be to make friends with Black in such a way that he’d think it all his own doing.
He bought newspapers, read them for a while. He looked around thoughtfully. He got up, consulted a screen, went to talk to an airline supervisor. Then he came back to chat to his two policemen. They seemed to come to some kind of agreement. He picked up his holdall.
It was her cue.
She picked up her own bag and went to join the check-in queue ahead of him. When he arrived immediately behind her, she gave him a mildly flirtatious smile, as if she suspected he’d deliberately followed her, and was flattered. The queue was short, the service efficient. In no time she was being beckoned forwards. She dropped her purse, spilled a few coins. By the time she’d picked them up again, Black had been called to the desk alongside her. ‘London,’ she said to the check-in woman, handing across her passport. Then she smiled again at Iain and gave him an interrogative little arch of her eyebrow.
He smiled warmly back at her as he handed over his own passport. ‘Tel Aviv,’ he said.
NINETEEN
I
The policemen escorted Iain to his departure gate, where he joined the line for hand-luggage checks. He nodded farewell to them but they sat on a metal bench across the corridor, intent on seeing this all the way through. His bribe had bought him a change of destination. Charm evidently cost more.
He took off his belt to pass through the scanner, unzipped his holdall and parted his clothes for a woman security officer with a broken front tooth. A flash of manila at the bottom of his bag gave him a start, and he feared for a moment that his two policemen had set him up. Then he remembered Karin’s package, taking it from her after the blast and stashing it in there himself. He was waved through. He went to a far corner to open it. There was a toughened black plastic case inside, the size and weight of a hardback, with a handwritten note taped to it.
Dear Mike,
I think we’re finally homing in on our Virgil Solution!
Nathan
The case had twin clasps. He opened it up. There were eight sealed glass jars embedded in
protective grey foam inside, along with a memory stick. The jars were labelled A to H and each contained a small shard of pottery, a lump of corroded metal or fragments of charred wood.
Boarding was announced. He still hadn’t arranged to be met in Tel Aviv. He called Maria from a payphone for Uri’s contact details. He tried him on his mobile first, got straight through. ‘Hey, mate,’ he said. ‘It’s Iain. You up for a visit?’
‘To London? Always.’
‘No. Me to you. In fact, I’ll be landing at Ben Gurion in about two hours.’
Uri laughed. ‘Thanks for the notice, mate. What’s this in aid of?’
‘You heard about Daphne, right?’
‘Shit, yeah. Terrible thing. Mustafa was good people. But why would that bring you here?’
‘One of the victims was Israeli.’
‘So they’ve been saying. That history guy, yeah?’
‘That’s the one. Can you run a background on him? Doesn’t have to be too deep. Work history, where he lived, family, friends and colleagues. You know the score.’
‘I’ll get on it now. Anything else?’
‘I could use a spare phone or a laptop, if you’ve got one. I keep losing mine.’
‘I’ll see what I can find. What about actual help?’
‘This is an off-piste kind of thing,’ said Iain. ‘Quentin won’t be happy.’
‘Fuck Quentin,’ said Uri. ‘Mustafa was one of us.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Iain. ‘He was.’
II
Zehra’s feet were by now in an openly mutinous mood, rapidly gaining support from her thighs and back. Yet she pressed on all the same until she reached the edge of the Forbidden Zone itself – the lost city of Varosha.