by Will Adams
‘Our new account checks are usually completed overnight, unless there are any … issues. Which I am sure there won’t be in your case. If I take your details now, therefore, and you make a nominal deposit, I should be able to show you the vault first thing tomorrow morning. Then you can decide what kind of box you need, and for how long, and we will set it up for you. After that, you can bring in your grandmother’s belongings whenever you like. As long as we’re open, of course, and one of our cashiers is free.’
‘Perfect,’ smiled Karin, reaching for her passport. ‘Then let’s get started.’
II
Mike waited for a van to pass then turned into a street of large houses with imposing façades. He drove slowly, looking for a place to park. But everything was taken. He accelerated to the end of the road, turned left and left again. The buildings in this new street were less impressive, but at least there were spots free. Iain grabbed his holdall then got out, squinting against the sandstorm as he followed Mike around the corner and into the sanctuary of the Institute’s lobby, where they both brushed themselves down once more.
‘My office, first, I think,’ said Mike. ‘I can’t operate without coffee.’ He led the way along a corridor with labs on either side, a sprinkling of young men and women in white coats working diligently at gleaming machines.
‘You had a car crash to tell me about,’ prompted Iain.
‘Yes,’ agreed Mike, pushing between a pair of fire-doors. ‘You see, we kept turning up these odd anachronisms, particularly here in Egypt. There’s a notorious tomb complex in Tanis, for example, where a twenty-second dynasty Pharaoh built his tomb before a twenty-first dynasty one. Which is odd. And we found a cache of mummies in a sealed cave in Deir el-Bahari. If our chronology is right, then one of those mummies simply couldn’t have been among them. But it was. And then there are all those Apis bulls missing from Saqqara.’
‘If you say so.’
‘It’s not enough to overturn our model, of course, because history is messy, you expect anomalies like that.’ He opened a door and ushered Iain into his office, cramped with filing cabinets and work-tables strewn with papers and samples. ‘But it was certainly enough to make us look again at our assumptions. And, when we looked at Sothic dating again, it turned out to have a slight flaw.’
‘Which was?’
‘It was bunk, old chap. Complete and utter bunk.’ He allowed himself a nervous laugh as he poured a generous helping of ground coffee into a fresh filter. ‘At least, the theory is fair enough. But in practice it depends entirely upon the Egyptians never having adjusted their calendar. Not once. Not in thousands of years. Yet people were always adjusting their calendars. We know of several examples from the Ptolemaic and Roman eras alone. And before them came the Persians, the Nubians, the Libyans and a wretched intermediate period when Egypt disintegrated into rival chiefdoms vying for control. And we’re supposed to believe that the calendar was never adjusted in all that time?’ He glugged bottled water into the percolator then set it running. ‘Not once? Even though the most important Egyptian season was actually called inundation because – as you might expect – it marked the annual flooding of the Nile. Except, of course, that it wouldn’t. Yet no one noticed this, or did anything about it, for a thousand years? Perhaps it could have happened. Perhaps. But it’s fifty-to-one against. And to base our entire chronology upon such odds …’ He shook his head.
‘So out goes Sothic dating?’
‘Out goes Sothic dating. Unfortunately, our chronology was already set by then. Reworking it from scratch would have been a monumental task. Because, like I said, it wasn’t only Egypt now. It was the whole ancient world. And we’d all kind of internalized the chronology as undergraduates. It’s what our textbooks said and what our professors taught us. But then they would, wouldn’t they? They wrote the damned books.’
Iain frowned. ‘What about carbon dating and the other scientific techniques? Didn’t you say they supported the conventional chronology?’
‘I did, yes. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Take radiocarbon dating. The original and still the best. But what holds true for it also holds true for dendrochronology, thermoluminescence and the rest. Do you know how it works?’
‘Not a clue,’ said Iain.
‘There’s a variant of carbon called carbon-14 in our atmosphere. Radioactive but harmless. We breathe it in all the time, absorb it into our flesh and bone. We’re both taking it in now. All living things are. But when we die, we stop ingesting it, and so it begins a slow transition into a more common isotope of carbon, carbon-12. We know the half-life of this process, so by measuring the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in a sample, we can deduce how long it’s been dead. Simple, accurate, flawless. Or so people assume.’
Iain frowned at him. ‘Are you saying it doesn’t work?’
‘Oh no. I’d hardly have made a career out of it if I thought that.’ The percolator was choking on its last drops. He poured them each a cup, added two heaped spoonfuls of sugar to his own, then a dribble of milk. ‘What I am saying is that its reputation for precision is sometimes better than its capability. For one thing, we need organic materials to test. But organic materials decay unless they’re preserved in some way. One common method of preservation is charring, from being partially destroyed in a fire or being cooked. Yet exposure to heat can make wood seem older than it really is. Or take a wooden beam: date it and you can work out the age of a building, right? Except that beams last hundreds of years and were often reused, potentially throwing out calculations by centuries. Then there’s confirmation bias. It’s only human to accept data that fits your model while excluding that which doesn’t. Two samples from Tutankhamen’s tomb carbon-dated to nearly five hundred years after his death. Those results didn’t fit the accepted model and so were discarded. But if every such anomaly is discarded then the models gain false credibility. And even that isn’t the biggest problem. The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere varies significantly over time and place. We can’t, therefore, use raw results. We have to calibrate them. Let’s say our raw results indicate that a piece of wood is from a tree that died three thousand years before present. We check our charts for that time and place, calibrate the result, then declare that it’s actually two thousand eight hundred or three thousand two hundred years old, or whatever.’
‘Seems logical.’
‘Yes. But think about it: How do we calibrate our results? Well, we’re fortunate to have a vast bank of securely dated artefacts. How do we know they’re securely dated? Because they’re tied to particular Pharaohs whose dates we can be confident of, thanks to Sothic dating.’
‘But you just told me Sothic dating was bunk.’
‘I did, yes.’
Iain frowned at him. ‘So calibration assigns dates by referring to a discredited chronological model? But that’s ridiculous.’
Mike smiled broadly. ‘Now you’re getting it,’ he said.
III
Idleness didn’t come easily to Zehra. She’d spent her whole life working her house and land and so felt uneasy when not usefully occupied. She washed a basket of clothes then hung them up to dry on the clothes-lines on the small balcony. Then she set about cleaning the apartment. She left her son’s study until last. His desk had twin filing cabinet drawers. The top one was locked but the bottom one was open. It was packed with folders of columns, articles and speeches he’d written over the years, many of which were scribbled with annotations marking his dissatisfaction with them.
Curiosity tugged at her. She pulled one out to read. The light in his study wasn’t very good so she took it into the living room instead. She quickly found herself offended and exasperated by her son’s naïvety. She kept exclaiming in indignation and dismay. Yet, when she was finished, she went back for another and then a third.
One phrase in particular got beneath her skin. It came up in speech after speech, exhorting his audience to stand up and be counted. Fear was a border, he said. You could
cross it in your mind.
How easy for him to say! He’d never experienced a unified Cyprus himself, as she had. He’d never seen what neighbour would do to neighbour when given half a chance. Who was he to call her a coward? Who was he to disparage those who chose peace and separation over fear and conflict? She put the last of the pages away. The sun had shifted, leaving the apartment gloomy. She felt agitated. She felt the need for fresh air, for sunshine on her face. It was still an hour until Katerina finished school, but she set off anyway then waited in her usual spot, in the shade of a dappled almond blossom across the road.
When you feared for your life, you made bad bargains, because being safe trumped all. But those same bad bargains meant you’d never be safe. Nor your children. Nor your children’s children.
Something hardened inside her as she contemplated this. She wasn’t quite sure what.
Parents arrived in cars, blocking her view. Doors banged. A first few pupils ran out the gates. A bell rang and trickle turned to flood. Katerina appeared with two friends, all speaking excitedly over the others. Something twisted in Zehra’s heart, a mix of pain and pleasure that she hadn’t felt in years. She thought of her late husband. She thought of her imprisoned son.
‘Who were those two?’ she asked, when Katerina came over. ‘They looked nice.’
They were nice, enthused Katerina. They were working on a biology project together, growing beans in the school garden. She reached into her satchel and pulled out her digital camera to show Zehra various photographs she’d taken. Zehra found herself captivated, as much by the camera as by the pictures. The gadgets they had these days! She took it from her, turned it around in her hands.
Fear was a border. You could cross it in your mind.
An unexpected serenity settled upon Zehra as she crossed that border now. She would return to Famagusta in the morning. She would see inside the house of the man from the photograph, come what may. She passed Katerina back her camera. ‘Teach me,’ she said.
TWENTY-FIVE
I
Asena sat in the passenger seat of the silver Subaru and read yet once more the transcripts of last night’s telephone calls between Iain Black and Karin Visser. It didn’t get any better. The Lion was right: Black was close enough on their trail that he needed to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. The only question was how. She glanced across the street at the front door of the Cairo Institute of Archaeometry: no movement since Walker and Black had hurried inside half an hour or so before. She didn’t know what tests they’d be running in there, but presumably they’d take a while.
She had time.
Hits were nothing new to Asena. She’d killed her first man – a loathsome creep of an army officer called Durmuş Hassan – immediately before joining the Grey Wolves three years ago. She’d killed on multiple occasions since. It was shocking how easy it was, as long as you had patience, strong nerves and a robust plan. But abduction was far more challenging, as your target was unlikely to come willingly. That was why she’d brought Bulent and Uğur with her, and why their first order of business on arrival had been to visit the Lion’s contact for weapons and other equipment.
Mike Walker had his in-laws staying. Black would need a room. New Cairo was a city reclaimed from desert. There were no tourist attractions here, and therefore no hotels. All those were in Cairo proper. It was far too far to walk there, and public transport was uncomfortable, unreliable and slow, especially with the khamsin blowing. After he’d checked in for the night, he might go out again to eat or to sample the nightlife. But she couldn’t count on it. Ideally, therefore, they needed to take him between here and his hotel.
There were other problems too. They weren’t doing this snatch for fun. The point of it was to pump Black for everything he knew about the Grey Wolves and their plans, and what he’d told others. They needed, above all, to find out how much Visser knew, and whether she’d have to be taken care of too. Black was certain to resist their questioning, so they’d need to make him talk despite himself. That was likely to get loud, and so necessitated privacy. Finally, she had to make him vanish afterwards in such a way that no one would connect it back to Turkey.
A flurry of sand blasted her window. A youth leaned into the wind as he hurried by, a red-and-silver silk scarf over his mouth to help him breathe. They all did that here. She remembered reading of a man lost in a desert storm who’d collapsed from heat exhaustion then had suffocated from inhaled sand. The germ of an idea came to her. Maybe she wouldn’t need to make Black vanish after all. She checked the forecast on her smartphone. The khamsin was so named because it blew over a period of fifty days; and tomorrow was expected to be another. ‘Keep watching,’ she told Bulent. ‘Let me know if anyone comes out.’ She tilted her seat back, closed her eyes. Darkness helped her think. Her mind played with the variables like a child with a wooden puzzle. She tested ideas, refined them, tried to fit them together into workable combinations. It was fifteen minutes before she sat up again and turned around to Uğur, sprawled snoring across the back seats. ‘Wake up,’ she said, shaking him by his shoulder.
‘What is it?’ he yawned.
‘You’re coming with me,’ she told him. ‘We need to get a taxi.’
‘Sure. Where are we going?’
‘Nowhere,’ said Asena. ‘We just need to get a taxi.’
II
The third of the scandals was in some ways the least surprising. Yet, coming on top of the others as it did, it perhaps proved the most consequential.
For years, there’d been rumours that the Defence Minister had been taking massive kickbacks in return for the award of major arms contracts. He’d always denied these rumours furiously, stating flatly that, with all the audits and other checks, there was no technical possibility of profiteering from his office. But now an Istanbul newspaper published the confidential testimony of a US defence industry whistle-blower detailing several real-world examples of how such transactions worked, including a diagram showing how they’d funnelled money to the Swiss bank account of the Turkish Defence Minister himself.
Along with the news coverage, there was speculation too. Canny political journalists wondered aloud why three such juicy scandals should emerge on the same day. They pointed out that the Tourism, Justice and Defence Ministers were each members of different factions within the government. What seemed to be going on, therefore, was that either a tit-for-tat cabinet civil war had broken out or another faction altogether – perhaps the Interior Minister’s, for example – was sabotaging potential rivals before making a play for the top job.
On the street, however, the reaction was both simpler and blunter. Get rid of the whole rotten lot of them, was the verdict. Get rid of the whole lot of them and start again.
III
There was bad news for Iain when he handed Mike the samples case. ‘How long before you’ll have results for me?’ he asked.
‘It depends on the tests,’ Mike told him. ‘But I’d say allow at least a week.’
‘A week?’ frowned Iain. He’d assumed, from Nathan Coates’s compressed itinerary, that it could be turned around in a day or two at the most.
‘For the kind of analysis you want, yes,’ said Mike. ‘It’s one thing to tell whether a particular piece is authentically old or not, which is all Nathan wanted to know fast. It’s another to tell where clay came from, or where metals were originally mined, as you want. You’ve no idea how complex that level of analysis is.’
Iain grimaced. He was in no great hurry to return to London, but he could hardly hang around here for a week. ‘Can’t you give me anything?’ he asked.
Mike pursed his lips. ‘We’ll prepare the samples now and run our first tests overnight. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky. But don’t pin your hopes on it. Other than that, I can have my archaeobiologist check for pollen. But again I wouldn’t put too much weight on that. It’s far too easy for samples to get contaminated.’
‘Right now I’ll take anything.’
Mike briefed his team then set them to work. Iain watched them embed tiny fragments from the samples in plastic discs and feed them into their spectroscopes for analysis. But it was largely a waiting game now. He made himself more coffee, borrowed a phone to book himself into his usual hotel in Central Cairo, then spent the afternoon reading dense articles about dating and archaeology in academic journals.
The lab assistants – like Mike himself – were all attached to the nearby American University New Cairo campus, and so lived nearby. They drifted off, one by one, until only Mike and his pollen expert were left. At six-thirty, Mike came to fetch him, looking decidedly pleased with himself. ‘I have to lock up now,’ he told him. ‘More than my life’s worth, being late for the in-laws. But we’ve found something for you. Or Soraya has, at least. Come take a look.’ They went together to her lab, where a shy-looking woman in a hijab was standing by a high-powered microscope next to a computer monitor displaying an image of multiple spiked yellow balls. ‘Pollen grains,’ said Mike. ‘Soraya got them from one of your shards.’
‘And?’
Mike touched the screen with the tip of his index finger. ‘This one here is henna. Nothing surprising about that. It’s been grown all over the Eastern Mediterranean for millennia. But Cyprus was particularly well known for it. Homer even mentions it in the Iliad. Some people claim that’s how the island got its name, because henna was kuprus in Greek. But that’s not all.’ He nodded at Soraya. She changed the slide and a cluster of small purple pods appeared on the screen. ‘This is a variety of grass pollen,’ he said. ‘The thing is, Soraya recognized it. We found it on some samples last year from Salamis. These appear to be identical.’
‘Salamis?’
‘An old city on the east coast of Cyprus,’ said Mike.