by Will Adams
Iain nodded. ‘That’s where I should look?’
Mike shook his head emphatically. ‘Just because we found it there doesn’t mean it’s only there. Anyway, like I said earlier, you should never put too much weight on one pollen finding. But it’s interesting, certainly. A good start.’ He checked his watch meaningfully. ‘What say we reconvene in the morning, see what the night has brought us? You’ve got yourself a room, yes?’
Iain nodded. ‘Near the Corniche.’
‘I’d offer to drive you …’
‘Forget it. I’ll take a cab.’
‘I’ll run you up to the university. There are always a few cabs there.’
They locked up, headed out, hunched against the continuing khamsin. As luck would have it, a taxi pulled up just ahead and a woman got out to pay her fare, clutching her headscarf about her face. Iain waved to the driver. The driver nodded. Iain thanked Mike then hurried across to it. He tossed his holdall in the back then climbed in after. He checked his pockets for cash but pulled out instead Nathan’s cryptic note to Mike. For some reason, he got the joke instantly this time. What more fitting answer could there be to the Homeric Question, after all, than a Virgil Solution? And not only that, he also realized what that solution must be, and that Karin and Nathan and presumably even Mike himself were all in on it.
He reached for the door to call after Mike and ask him about it only to find the woman blocking his way. There was something odd about her posture, the way she had her hand beneath the flap of her bag, almost as if holding a weapon of some kind. He glanced up at her in surprise. Her scarf had slipped slightly. It was the woman from Sabiha Gökçen. He didn’t know precisely what was going on but he knew it was trouble. He threw himself at her but too late. Taser nodes thumped his chest and flung him twitching to the floor. He tried to cry out but his tongue was stuck in his throat. The driver reached around and plunged a syringe into his neck and he felt the blackness pulling up like a sleeping bag around him as the woman climbed in and the handbrake released and the taxi pulled serenely away.
TWENTY-SIX
I
Deniz Baştürk rubbed a hand wearily across his face. That Twitter and the other social media were ablaze with outrage at the day’s three scandals was hardly a surprise. Under other circumstances, it frankly wouldn’t have been much of a worry, either. Firestorms like this were common enough in Turkey, and they usually burned themselves out quickly enough. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s Day of Action offered the people the perfect opportunity to take their anger out onto the streets. And current intelligence suggested that they meant to seize it. No one was talking about tens of thousands any more. Nor even hundreds of thousands. No. According to this latest estimate, the best part of a million people were expected tomorrow.
And that was in Istanbul alone.
Deniz Baştürk tossed the report down onto his desk and looked up at Interior Minister Iskender Aslan. ‘And?’ he asked. ‘What exactly do you expect me to do?’
‘I don’t expect you to do anything, Prime Minister,’ said Aslan. ‘I’m merely keeping you informed.’
‘Of course. But you can handle it, yes?’
Aslan was too experienced a politician to answer a direct question with equal directness. ‘The organizers have been helpful,’ he said. ‘They seem sincere in their wish to keep things peaceful. But the usual trouble-makers are certain to try to cause mischief; and, as you know, these things can sometimes take on a life of their own. What we’d normally do, we’d bus thousands of reinforcements in from around the country, then flood the streets and squares with uniforms. But we can’t do that this time because these rallies are happening everywhere. I’ve done all I can. I’ve cancelled leave. I’ve authorized unlimited overtime. I’ve told our regional offices to defer the usual paperwork and put everyone on the streets. General Yilmaz has been helpful too. His troops will take over protection of transport hubs and national monuments, allowing us to put those extra officers on riot duty.’
‘So that’s a yes, then,’ said Baştürk. ‘You can handle it.’
Aslan grimaced. ‘You have to understand. Civil unrest is like a forest fire. You beat it in one place only to find it breaking out in a dozen others. Then suddenly it’s everywhere.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that tomorrow may be difficult. I’m saying that I may need to take strong action. I’m saying that that action may include the arrest of hundreds of people, perhaps even important people, if they start inciting trouble. But I can’t do that in the current climate unless I have your full and explicit backing.’
‘You have it, Iskender. I assure you.’
Aslan smiled graciously as he picked up the intelligence report. ‘Thank you, Prime Minister. Then I’ll leave you to your work.’
II
Asena and Uğur led in the taxi with Bulent following in the Subaru. They headed out of New Cairo on the Ain Sukhna road. The sandstorm was finally subsiding a little, revealing the terrain as flatter and bleaker than she’d expected. But it would do fine. They took a spur road then bumped down a desert track until they found a patch of suitably soft sand. Black was still out cold, and would be for another hour yet. She took out and searched his wallet, pocketed a slip of paper with various phone numbers on it, then dropped his hotel receipt from Antioch on the floor. Holding his hand by the wrist, she dabbed his fingerprints on the door-handle, the window and the seat. Then she had Bulent and Uğur carry him to the Subaru and toss him in the rear.
Black’s mouth was already covered with duct tape. Uğur used up the rest of a roll binding together his forearms and then his ankles. Bulent, meanwhile, drove the taxi out onto the soft sand and spun its wheels until it was stuck. He popped the bonnet, loosened a starter motor lead, closed it again. He locked the taxi then rejoined them, adding the taxi’s keyring to the Subaru’s as he came back across. They drove the Subaru deeper into the desert, bumping over the moonscape of pits and loose rocks for the best part of an hour. The wind died away. The ground grew soft. They reached a steep-sided dune valley turned almost to snowdrifts by luminous moonlight. ‘This will do,’ she said.
Bulent stopped, ratcheted the handbrake. He dragged Black out by his ankles while Uğur covered him with his silenced handgun. Asena crouched down beside him. His eyes were groggy slits as he lay on his back, just beginning to come round. She ripped the tape from his mouth and the sting of it brought him abruptly awake. She expected confusion and panic and pleading, but there was none of that. Instead, he looked around for a few moments then stared up at her with gathering focus and what might have been unnerving calm had she not held all the aces, and all the kings too. ‘Hello, again,’ she said. ‘Remember me?’
‘Refresh my memory,’ he said, his voice a little slurred from the anaesthetic. ‘I have a lot of stalkers.’
‘Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen. You were supposed to fly to London.’
‘I had a premonition. Seems like it was right.’
She waited for him to ask the obvious questions. He didn’t. She sighed and said: ‘I imagine you’ve guessed who we are and what we want with you. But in case there’s any doubt, we’re here for information. Specifically, I want you to tell me what you know about the Grey Wolves, and why you think they were involved in the Daphne bombing. I want you to tell me who you’ve talked to about it, and how much your girlfriend Karin Visser knows.’
His single blink at Visser’s name was the first hint of weakness he’d shown. ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ he said. ‘She knows nothing.’
‘Convince me,’ said Asena, ‘and maybe I’ll let her live.’
‘Fuck you,’ he said, with such disdain that she had a sudden fierce urge to hurt him. She took her hunting knife from its sheath and pressed it so hard against his larynx that it drew blood. He didn’t so much as flinch. Her cheeks grew hot, as though she’d lost in some small way. A tough one, this. He’d need softening before he talked. She stood and beckoned Bulent and Uğur out of his earshot. Then she
told them what she wanted.
III
Butros Bejjani was on the phone with a minor Saudi prince when his son Michel came into his cabin and signalled that he had news. He therefore hurried His Highness through his usual litany of excuses then made clear to him the consequences of default and put down the phone. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Our private investigator just called, Father,’ said Michel. ‘According to her contact in the police, Iain Black was arrested first thing this morning. He was interviewed in connection with the Daphne bombing, then deported.’
‘Deported? What for?’
‘She doesn’t know, not for sure. But apparently there’s a rumour that he was filming the Daphne hotel at the time of the blast. It would certainly make sense. If so, we have to assume that he told his interviewers about us. If they come to see us, explaining our purpose here could prove awkward.’
Butros nodded. Awkward was right. On the other hand, an awkward interview or two was a small price to pay for the prize he was after. ‘What about Black’s girlfriend Visser?’
‘Yes, Father,’ said Michel. ‘That’s another thing. She flew off to Turkish Cyprus this afternoon, as she was scheduled. So it looks as though we were wrong about her and Black working together.’ He dropped his eyes. ‘Father, it’s been two days and still no word from your contact. Surely he must have been killed in the blast. And surely he left no confederates to carry on his work. The police are likely to be here soon. Who knows what restrictions they’ll put on us. We have a reputation to preserve and a banking group to run. If we don’t set off while we still can, then—’
‘Yes, yes,’ cut in Butros. Michel had a habit of rattling on beyond what was necessary. ‘Very well. Give the order.’
‘Thank you, Father. I’ll do it now.’
The door closed. Butros scowled in frustration. To be so close. To be so close and yet still miss out. There had to be something he could do. He turned on his monitor, opened the video-file once more. He’d only had it two weeks or so, yet he’d already watched it at least twenty times. But he’d watched it, all those times, in anticipation rather than forensically.
He hadn’t studied it for clues.
It was twelve minutes fifty-seven seconds long. It had been filmed on a digital camera then crudely edited. The first few seconds were a confused blur as the man – you could tell it was a man from occasional glimpses of his free hand and tattooed forearm – came to grips with his equipment. A flash of night sky, then dusty tarmac painted with faint stripes, like a long-abandoned car park. A rope ladder was fed through a hole drilled in crudely-laid concrete. Then the descent began, the ladder twisting and yawing as the man filmed beneath him, offering a brief glimpse of the front grille and bonnet of a truck or bus that must somehow have fallen backwards through some crevice into the site. Bejjani froze the footage and zoomed in but the resolution wasn’t sharp enough for him to make much of it, largely buried beneath sand as it was.
He resumed playing the footage. The man stepped off the ladder onto a hillock of rubble presumably deposited there by the collapse of the car park above. He panned slowly around a huge ancient chamber, twin rows of rounded columns that faded into the distance, and beautifully smooth walls of ashlar masonry either side. He clambered down the hillock, his camera jumping and jolting as he went, catching incongruous flashes of modern litter as he went, sweet wrappers, a weathered plastic bag, an empty soda bottle. He ignored all those and reached down instead to tug free a crushed grey disk from the earth. When first he’d watched this footage, Butros had thought it a battered tyre-rim from the fallen vehicle. He’d been wrong. The man brushed it free of dust and sand then laid it flat on the ground to photograph. The photograph was one of several high-resolution stills that Butros had been sent along with the footage. He opened it now. Despite having been crushed flat, some relief-work was still visible, several men toasting each other at a feast. A silver mixing bowl, the kind for which the Phoenicians had been justly famous. Properly restored, it would make a prime exhibit for a middle-ranking or even national museum, and would be worth something upwards of half a million euros on the open market.
The man tossed it negligently aside.
The banqueting hall next, then the friezes. Nothing new in either. The footage now cut abruptly to a more cramped series of chambers. One had a carpet of broken pottery so thick that it crunched beneath the man’s feet, like he was munching crisps. He crouched down to pick up and inspect various shards. Most were plain but a good number were black-on-red. He zipped several away in his shoulder-bag. One of these was currently in Butros’s wall-safe, couriered to him two weeks earlier from an Antioch sorting office, along with the Ishbaal seal fragment, this footage, the still photographs and his invitation to Daphne.
Black-on-red ware was an enigma. It was found in moderate quantities in his home city of Tyre and elsewhere in Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Turkey, in contexts dating from the eleventh century BC onwards. Curiously, however, analysis of the shards suggested strongly that the vast majority of it had been made in Cyprus and then exported, even though black-on-red pottery hadn’t been found in Cypriot contexts before the mid ninth century BC, over two hundred years later.
Butros sat back in his chair. He’d assumed, because the package had been sent from Turkey, and because the meeting was in Turkey, that the site itself would be in Turkey too – for why risk smuggling artefacts across a border unless you had to? But what if it was really in Turkish Cyprus instead? The woman Visser had just flown to Turkish Cyprus, after all. Maybe that was coincidence, for she was merely following her original schedule. But her original schedule had been set by Nathan Coates, who’d surely been sent a package very similar to his own, including this same footage.
It was a hoary joke of archaeology that it was largely the study of broken pots. For while bowls and jars and the like broke easily, their shards were virtually immortal. And, because styles changed every generation or so, those shards could be dated with some confidence. What was true for ancient pottery was equally true of their modern equivalents. He skipped back through the footage. He’d ignored the modern litter on his first pass. Maybe he’d missed a trick. The old plastic bag had faint writing upon it. He zoomed in on it until it blurred. It was too worn to read, yet the characters looked distinctly Greek. The soda bottle was badly weathered but still recognizably Pepsi. He opened a web-browser and ran a search. What a marvel was the modern world. It took him only a few minutes to find the information he needed. Pepsi-Cola had been truncated to Pepsi in 1962, a sans-serif font introduced. In 1973, the font had switched colour. Allowing a year or two for …
A great shiver rippled him, as though he’d walked through a ghost. He leaned back in his chair and bit a knuckle. Where else could a truck fall through a hole in a car park and yet remain undiscovered, except to his mystery cameraman, for forty years? He thought to himself: My beloved Elissa; is that truly where you’ve been hiding all these years? In something of a daze, he turned off his monitor and made his way to the bridge. ‘A new plan,’ he announced. ‘We’re going to Cyprus.’
‘Cyprus?’ scowled Michel, visibly irritated to have his orders overruled so quickly and publicly. ‘Where, exactly?’
Butros smiled almost beatifically. ‘Famagusta,’ he told them. ‘The lost city of Varosha.’
IV
After the day’s hard winds, the night sky was luminously clear, constellations and galaxies with mythic names undimmed by passing headlights or the faintest urban glow. At another time, Iain would have found it beautiful. But right now all it meant to him was how completely he was on his own.
These three were involved in the Daphne bombing, he was sure of it. In fact, from the shape of her, he thought it probable that the woman was the leather-clad motorcyclist herself. He watched them talk. The breeze was against him so that he couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could see enough of the taxi-driver’s face to lip-read him a little. As best Iain could tell, he kept a
ddressing the woman as Asena, almost as though it were an honorific. And maybe it was. The name ‘Asena’ had great resonance in Turkish folklore, from a Romulus and Remus-style legend of a female grey wolf who’d nursed and raised the founders of the nation. So what more fitting title could there be for a woman leader of the Grey Wolves?
She glanced around at him again, then pointed across the flats to a tall dune, for all the world telling a pair of deliverymen how to get her new sofa up her stairs. That they intended to kill him out here seemed certain. Daphne had proved their ruthlessness, and they couldn’t risk him talking. He was therefore in a fight for his life here. And perhaps for Karin’s too.
His forearms were clamped together so tightly with duct tape that his hands had numbed and he could barely wriggle his fingers. His shins were bound too, though less so, as though they’d run out of tape. He worked his arms and legs in an effort to loosen them, but the conclave broke up before he’d made any progress and they came back over.
The taxi-driver aimed down a silenced handgun at Iain. The second man, a thuggish lump of muscle with a shaven scalp, fetched a coil of rope from the back of the Subaru. He looped a slipknot over the tow-bar then wound the other end multiple times around and between Iain’s ankles, securing it with another knot. Then he gave Asena the thumbs-up. She crouched beside him. ‘It doesn’t have to go like this,’ she said. ‘Just tell me everything you know about the Grey Wolves. You seem to believe that the bombing in Daphne is merely the prelude to something bigger. To what, exactly? Who have you told about your suspicions? How much does Visser know? And please don’t lie: I’ll know if you do.’
There was a bitter irony to the situation. Karin posed these people no threat. But if Iain told them that they wouldn’t believe him, because it was in the nature of torturers to believe only what they forced out of you with pain. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.