The Istanbul Puzzle

by Laurence OBryan

  He listened to the drone of the underground control room. Some days it reminded him of a symphony, all that humming and buzzing and heels clacking and coughs and clicks.

  ‘Are you all right, Henry?’ a woman’s voice whispered.

  He nodded, opened his eyes. Sergeant Finch was standing beside him. She always looked so good in her starched white shirt. He pointed at his screen.

  A message in a secure window read:

  DO NOT PROCEED WITH PTRE/67765/67LE.

  ‘What’s that about?’ said Finch.

  The matter of the checkpoints would have to wait. This was something Sergeant Finch could help him with.

  ‘I am not to place surveillance on Lord Bidoner, despite the fact that he’s met two other men we’ve been monitoring in the past week!’

  Finch looked surprised. A troubled look crossed her face.

  ‘That request was playing with fire, Henry. You do know who Bidoner is, don’t you?’

  Mowlam nodded, shrugged. He closed the message and went back to the video images he’d been assessing.

  Chapter 14

  ‘That was easy,’ I said.

  The Turkish immigration authorities had only taken our passports for ten seconds. The security check was quick as well. We just walked through a metal detector in a quiet corridor. The diplomatic briefcase embossed with the lion and unicorn crest of the British Foreign Office, which Isabel had carried with her from the helicopter, had probably helped. Now walking across the baking concrete apron towards a white, tube-like executive jet, I felt as if I’d been dropped into another world.

  I was looking forward to going back to London. That was where Isabel had said we were going when the passport official had asked her.

  The Greek Orthodox community in England was one of the largest outside Greece. I could well believe there was an expert there who could help us track down where the two pictures had been taken.

  The shrill sound of an aircraft readying for flight assaulted us as we made our way across the concrete. The smell of aviation fuel, heat and dust filled my nostrils as I climbed the rickety aluminium stairs and entered the small passenger cabin.

  What surprised me most was that once I was inside I couldn’t stand up fully. The cabin must have been only five foot something high. I had to bend in order to reach one of the royal-blue leather seats.

  They weren’t your usual commercial airline seats either. These were lower, wider, and far more comfortable. And there were only seven of them.

  Isabel sat opposite me. We were the only occupants of the cabin. A large blue cooler bag sat on the floor at the back. Isabel pulled it forwards, reached inside and passed me a bottle of orange juice.

  ‘You’re lucky. The last time I did this they forgot to put the refreshments onboard.’

  ‘That must have been a bad flight,’ I said. I took the bottle and drank from it. It tasted wonderful.

  ‘You two OK?’ a voice called out. The door to the pilot’s cabin was open. I could see an expanse of blinking lights and dials. The man who’d spoken was in the pilot’s seat, leaning towards us, his hand holding the door open.

  ‘A OK,’ replied Isabel.

  The pilot gave us a thumbs-up.

  A second, younger man, who would be sitting in the other cockpit seat, came into the cabin. He pulled the door to the outside closed. A light above it flashed red.

  The engines roared. My seat reverberated as we prepared to taxi.

  Then the roar diminished. I looked out of one of the tiny porthole windows. An all black Porsche jeep was speeding towards us. It had darkened windows. For a brief moment I thought it might be the Turkish authorities looking for me, that my inspector friend was wondering why I was leaving Istanbul so soon. Isabel leaned forward. Her knee touched mine. She reached over, grabbed her jacket, threw it on to the seat behind us.

  ‘We’ve got company,’ she said.

  The Porsche had pulled up by the plane. A man got out of the back, strode towards us. He was tall, dressed in a mustard coloured suit. He had that lightly tanned, angular sort of face that reminded me of pictures of celebrities trying hard to look good.

  The door opened with a whoosh. Wind and the smell of jet fuel filled the cabin.

  ‘Good to see you, Isabel,’ boomed a voice. ‘Looks like I got here just in time.’ The man in the mustard suit sat in the seat beside her. Both of them were facing me.

  ‘It’s a bit tight in here,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Isabel.’ He patted her knee. Then he turned to me.

  ‘This is the man, eh, Isabel?’

  ‘Sean,’ she said. ‘Meet Peter Fitzgerald. He works in the Consulate.’ As if that explained everything. Then I remembered. This was the guy who’d told me about Alek’s death.

  ‘Peter, this is Sean Ryan, from the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford. He co-founded it. He’s their Director of Projects.’

  Not for long, I thought, after the way this project in Istanbul had gone, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. In any case, the expression on Peter’s face was that of a wine waiter who’d just been asked for plum juice.

  ‘We spoke on the phone,’ he said. ‘So sorry about your colleague. What a dreadful death. It’s certainly stirred things up here.’ He put his hand out. I shook it.

  ‘Alek didn’t deserve that,’ I said.

  Isabel was staring at me.

  ‘I’m sure. What a terrible nightmare,’ said Peter. ‘And what about you, how are you? I heard you had a difficult night.’

  ‘I’m alright,’ I said. I didn’t need his sympathy.

  I heard scuffling, looked around.

  Two leather bags were being loaded into the passageway between the seats and the door to the pilot’s cabin. My own small bag, with everything from my hotel room packed into it, had been waiting at the private jet terminal when we’d arrived.

  I’d seen, straight away, that my stuff had been rifled through, that some items were missing, but compared to what had happened to Alek, and what could have happened to me last night I felt fortunate.

  ‘Tell me all about yourself,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I was a bit abrupt on the phone the other day. A lot on my plate right now.’ He tapped his nose.

  Peter seemed to be fascinated by everything I had to say. It was an hour, at least, and we were many miles from Istanbul before the flow of his questions slowed. By then he knew all about my origins, my father’s Purple Star background, our life in Norfolk, and in upstate New York, where I started college after my father left the military, and all about my very English mother, my one-year research extension in London, how I met Irene, my first job, how we founded the Institute. Surprisingly, there were things he didn’t ask about though. Like what had happened to my wife. Maybe he knew the answers to those questions already.

  ‘Tell him about the mosaic Alek took a picture of,’ said Isabel, when Peter seemed to have finished his questioning.

  I told him the little I knew. Isabel took the photo of the mosaic out of her bag and passed it to him as I was talking.

  ‘Very interesting,’ he said. When I finished, he looked around, as if he was afraid someone might be listening to us.

  ‘And you have no idea where this picture was taken?’ He waved the photo at me.

  I sat back. ‘I told Isabel already, and the answer is still no. Our project is about assessing how the mosaics in Hagia Sophia have changed over the years. It was never about identifying unknown mosaics.’

  ‘Your colleague was working only in Hagia Sophia, correct?’ He was staring at me.

  I nodded.

  ‘There’s a lot of interesting stuff besides mosaics in Hagia Sophia, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes. It goes back a long way. The building we see there now was put up in the 530s,’ I said.

  Peter’s eyebrows shot up. ‘It’s older than that, I think. Didn’t that old treasure hunter, Schneider, find out during the excavations he carried out in ’35 that the foundations were from an earlier church?’ He
knew his stuff.

  ‘The first Christian church on the site was probably built in 351.’

  Isabel looked amused.

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter, drily. ‘Hagia Sophia is one of the foundation churches of Christianity.’ His right hand slapped his armrest. ‘And it’s the best of them by far. Don’t some people say it’ll be returned to Christianity one day?’ He looked at me innocently.

  Was he trying to trap me? I didn’t reply.

  ‘So you don’t go along with all this Christian revival thing, do you, Sean?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you don’t know anything about the stories in the Turkish papers?’

  ‘No.’

  I felt myself getting irritated. Not only was he asking too many questions, I was also beginning to feel boxed in with his long legs blocking access to the corridor.

  ‘If any of those journalists poked into the dusty corners of your life, Sean, would they find anything . . . smelly?’

  Now he was really annoying me. I shook my head, fast. ‘Not a single thing. I have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing.’

  ‘Not that it would be just journalists doing the investigating,’ he said, gesturing towards Isabel and himself. His tone was haughty, detached, as if he knew things I didn’t.

  He looked me in the eye and smiled. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

  ‘There’s going to be a lot of interest in this story over the next few days, Sean. It’ll blow over, of course, but until then every blogger in Europe will be looking for an angle on Alek’s death. I do hope you’re not hiding any nasty little secrets.’

  ‘How many times do I have to repeat myself?’ I said. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’ I raised my hands, held them in the air, palms forward, as if I was going to push him and his accusations away.

  He rubbed at his trousers, fixed the crease.

  ‘I understand you’re upset, Sean, but this story has real legs. I don’t know if Isabel warned you, but all the security services, MI5, and 6, and all the rest, they do an under-every-stone trawl in cases like this. And if they do find anything funny, I must tell you, unofficially, they’re not beyond a little bit of mild torture, given what we’re up against now.’ He put his hands together, then braced them on his knees. ‘When it comes to defending our country we do get a bit of leeway these days, you know. But I’m sure you’ve nothing to hide.’

  Was he joking? I’d imagined the local police in Oxford going around to the Institute, asking a few questions. Not a platoon of security service types trawling through every chapter of my life.

  ‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I’ve nothing to hide.’

  The cabin was quiet except for the rumble of the plane’s engine.

  ‘So there’s nothing you want to tell us?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ I said, emphatically.

  ‘Very good,’ said Peter. The atmosphere changed from Artic cool to warmish again.

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘I do hope so.’ He leaned back, drummed his fingers on the arm rest.

  He clearly enjoyed playing games with people. I’d never liked people like that. Isabel seemed irritated too.

  I looked out the window. I could see snow capped mountains far below. The sun was high in the sky. There was a blue shimmer of sea far off to our right. I got a strange feeling. That was where the landmass of Europe should have been.

  What route were we taking?

  ‘Spectacular view, isn’t it?’ said Peter.

  ‘What mountains are they?’ I said.

  ‘Sorry, I’m no good at all that stuff. But they are beautiful, aren’t they?’

  ‘Now, about this mosaic,’ he said, in a softer tone. ‘I have to tell you there’s no record of such a mosaic anywhere in Istanbul or in all Turkey.’ He stretched his legs out into the passageway.

  ‘Which means it has to be from some undiscovered site. Mosaics were popular in the Roman Empire. They had to find a way to brighten their homes, I suppose.’ He sat up straighter.

  ‘I wonder what this old priest will tell us,’ said Peter.

  Isabel brushed hair from her face.

  ‘Peter’s been busy trying to find out who was shooting at us last night,’ she said. Her tone made it sound as if she was trying to sell Peter to me.

  ‘Great, any news?’

  ‘A little,’ said Peter. ‘Somebody’s been trying to track the Consulate’s Range Rovers. That was what you were driving last night, Isabel, wasn’t it?’

  Isabel nodded.

  ‘Well, someone went and hacked the systems at Istanbul’s Range Rover service centre early this morning. Whoever is after you is serious, Sean.’ He was looking out the window now.

  ‘What sort of people do this kind of thing?’ I said.

  ‘There are a number of small groups that might be involved. There are a lot of refugees in Istanbul. We’ve been keeping an eye on them, but it’s a big city and things are changing fast.’

  He reached over, took an orange juice from the cooler bag and drank from it.

  ‘The Turks are blaming the whole thing on foreigners, of course.’ He gestured expansively. ‘They’re probably right.’

  ‘I’ll check what the news sites are saying,’ said Isabel.

  She pulled a laptop from her briefcase, fired it up, hit a few keys, stared at the screen for a few minutes.

  ‘You don’t want to look at this.’

  ‘I want to.’

  She passed the laptop to me. The browser window was filled with the BBC News website. The lead story, accompanied by a gruesome, but blurry image, was about Alek. What had happened to him was hitting the big time. I stared at the picture. It felt weird, as if I was watching someone else. This was too crazy.

  Alek’s chin was down on his chest, his eyes hidden. He was strapped to a pillar. It was a still from that video I’d read about. I felt an urge to push the laptop away. I resisted. Then there was something catching in my throat. I put a hand to my mouth, kept it clamped shut as the sickening sensation passed. I wasn’t going to look away. That would be too easy.

  The story underneath the picture read:

  Beheading in Istanbul.

  No one, so far, has claimed responsibility for the beheading of a Mr Alek Zegliwski, whose body was found in Istanbul on August 4. Turkish security experts are pointing the finger at a radical Islamic sect intent on the re-establishment of the Islamic Caliphate, which until 1924 was based at Hagia Sophia, where Mr Zegliwski was working. Re-establishing the Caliphate is a key goal for many Islamic fundamentalists.

  The Arab script in the photo above Mr Zegliwski’s head, was, the article said, a threat to bring the war to London. Further on, the Turkish Prime Minister’s office had issued a statement saying arrests had been made that morning, and that the Turkish security services were following up a number of lines of enquiry.

  ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen,’ I said. I passed the laptop back to Isabel.

  Peter took it, put it on his knee, read for a few minutes.

  Then, he looked up from his screen and said, ‘The Turkish police raided known activists. They like to be seen to be taking action. I doubt they’ll find the people we’re looking for though.’ He nudged Isabel’s leg with the laptop. ‘Did you get a description of your friends from last night circulated?’

  ‘It was attached to my report,’ she said.

  ‘Was there anything about Alek’s behaviour in the past few weeks that seems odd now, Sean?’ Her tone was soft, coaxing.

  I thought about her question as the queasy sensation from seeing that image of Alek slowly faded. ‘There’s nothing I can put a finger on. He was unavailable a few times, but that happened now and again with him.’ It was weird talking about Alek in this way.

  Peter was drumming his fingers on his armrest.

  Isabel looked out the window.

  A flash of sunlight in the corner of my eye made me turn and stare out the window on the right. What I saw amazed me.

  The glimmer of sea
that I’d seen in the distance stretched to the horizon now, where the continent of Europe should have been, and in the sky, flying parallel with us, was a silver-grey jet fighter, no more than half a mile away. It had the distinctive dual tail-fins of the F-35 Lightning.

  We were being escorted by a state-of-the-art fighter jet. But why? And where the hell were we?

  Chapter 15

  On the rounded top of a salt hill, an outcrop of the Zagros Mountains, a black-cloaked shepherd sat. His flock, fourteen thin black sheep, was foraging among skeletal dwarf oak trees. In the distance a layer of dust and pollution marked the location of the city of Mosul.

  The Zagros mountain chain is a natural barrier between Iran and Iraq. It extends from north of the Straits of Hormuz all the way into Turkey. It’s a thousand miles long and its peaks are snow-capped. Its foothills resemble the hills of the US South West or the Highlands of Scotland. The city of Mosul, in the north of Iraq on the Tigris river, is near the ancient site of the city of Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire. Uncounted armies have battled in this area.

  The shepherd watched the white trail of a plane as it rose from Mosul airport. He thought about the warning he’d heard the night before. The evening star of Ishtar had risen late. The wizened crone who slept in a cave at the bottom of the hill had come into the village square to speak to them for the first time in ten years.

  ‘Not since Jonah warned the Ninevites has such a thing happened,’ she’d said in the pale evening light. Then she’d coughed for almost a minute.

  Finally she’d continued, ‘Remember Jonah’s warning.’ She’d looked at every face. ‘Another great city will be destroyed.’

  Chapter 16

  ‘That’s the easternmost corner of the Mediterranean,’ said Peter. ‘We’ll be heading inland soon, now that we’ve picked up our escort.’

  ‘What do we need an escort for?’ I was trying to sound as unfazed as I could. I turned, looked out the window again, just to check the F-35 was actually there.