City of the Lost

City of the Lost Will Adams A high-stakes thriller which weaves Turkey’s war-torn past with action, adventure and conspiracy.A TERRIFYING ATTACKSouthern Turkey. Business intelligence operative Iain Black, having survived the hotel bombing that killed his friend and partner, vows to find out who was responsible – then make them pay.A PAST THAT WON’T STAY BURIEDHistorian Karin Visser, who also lost friends in the blast, teams up with Iain to uncover secrets hidden deep within the region’s past, from the bloody division of Cyprus all the way back to the Trojan War.AN EXPLOSIVE SECRETPiecing the puzzle together, Iain and Karin discover the shocking conspiracy behind the blast. But now they’re running out of time to reveal it – before they’re silenced for good. CITY OF THE LOST WILL ADAMS To Hattie and Mark Table of Contents Cover (#u9d142bfd-dc82-5ae8-b34a-fe876eea0f2f) Title Page (#u16d13468-b528-5510-946a-d9d2c4b884ad) Dedication (#u8159607d-1600-5d4c-9bb0-a9b82822c16c) Prologue (#u8405a42b-3461-5849-892b-f3bfe7a690a7) Chapter One (#u5f3f3abc-3fd2-5f31-9773-486d76582372) Chapter Two (#u768195cc-7442-5310-a625-534391b448d0) Chapter Three (#u8da4c2a9-c4b9-5f64-ae8f-d44ece3551b5) Chapter Four (#u0eb2cb4b-4ddc-5f5b-bafb-973a5f839923) Chapter Five (#ud0d4c458-fb87-5778-a9f7-8697a595af6d) Chapter Six (#u8c506f29-c52e-5dc3-b0ef-fc6b4db39a14) Chapter Seven (#u180fd8cc-640e-5345-9750-cd56510b21ad) Chapter Eight (#u957eded3-de23-5418-8a22-8d14353efbf8) Chapter Nine (#u53aa7eca-2e52-5c6f-814e-cf28ae936012) Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Will Adams (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PROLOGUE (#ulink_1e31ab10-ce65-5acd-b7f6-52833c04b2c6) Alashiya, Eastern Cyprus, 805 BC She’d thought she’d have till dawn, but it wasn’t to be. They came at dusk instead. From the ramparts of her palace, she watched them landing on the beach. Between the breaking of the waves, she could hear the muffled roars of their triumph and the jubilant clashing of spears on shields as they saw they were unopposed and realized that her people had abandoned her. She didn’t blame them for that abandonment. She’d brought it upon herself through neglect of her queenly duties. What cut her, what truly cut her, was that the man she’d neglected them for had abandoned her too. She could see his fugitive sails still, the splash of frantic oars. She thought scornfully: Aeneas of the Teukrians indeed! No doubt he’d be telling himself comforting lies about how Sicherbas was her brother and could therefore be trusted to treat her honourably. She wanted, suddenly, for him to be confronted with the brutal truth of it. And, with him already so far distant, there was only one way to achieve that. It was time. Her palace was on three levels. The subterranean treasuries and storerooms, hewn out of raw bedrock. A ground floor of grand chambers with walls of ashlar masonry and roofs of cedar timbers shipped in from her childhood homeland. And, finally, the upper quarters of wood and thatch. The bottom level would never burn; the top would burn easily. It was the middle floor, therefore, that needed work. Her sister Anna was waiting below with two lit torches. She, at least, had no illusions about what their brother would do if they fell into his power. Nor did she have any stomach for letting him regain his claimed treasure. That was why, when word had first reached this new city of theirs that he was on his way with his full fleet, pledging terrible revenges upon them both, they’d sent every man they had to chop down the surrounding forests and fill these rooms with timber. She and Anna touched their torches to the largest stack now, then stood back to watch the contagion spread, flaming embers spitting and drifting to neighbouring chambers, where new fires quickly started. The smoke made her eyes water so that tears spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them angrily away lest Anna mistake them for self-pity. When the heat grew too much for them to bear, they retreated to the treasury steps, then hugged and wished each other well on their respective journeys. Once Anna was gone, she went alone down the steps into the vaults, fetched her sword from her armoury. His sword, more properly, for it was what they’d exchanged instead of vows. She used its blade and hilt to pry and hammer away the stone chocks, releasing cascades of sand from the walls, allowing the vast marble slab to sink slowly beneath its own unimaginable weight until it slotted neatly into place above her, sealing these steps off forever. One entrance closed. One more to go. Through dark and twisting corridors, she hurried to and down the long staircase. Usually, when she stepped out into the great cavern at the foot, it was already aglow with the myriad constellations of oil lamps in the walls. But her handmaidens had left with Anna and the others, to found their next new city on the Libyan coast, beyond even her brother’s vengeful reach. And so, for once, this place looked gloomy rather than magical. She closed and barred the heavy bronze doors behind her. Now for the second entrance: the twisting cave passage down which she and Aeneas had first discovered this place while seeking refuge from a storm. The mouth was high above the chamber floor, reached only by a staircase pegged to the left-hand wall, where the camber was easiest. She climbed it to the top, then crossed the short bridge to the narrow slit in the limestone. She ducked her head as she passed through it into the shaft beyond, then climbed the crude steps hacked in the rock up to and beyond the trap-doors. High above her, the night sky flickered orange. Her palace was ablaze. Her heart twisted with a kind of bitter triumph, knowing her lover couldn’t help but see this pyre as he fled his cowardly way. But she had no time to waste. She hacked at the two ropes until they both cleaved and slithered off upwards like startled snakes, then stood there for a moment, panting from the exertion. Rumblings began, as though Mother Earth herself were hungry. Her engineers had warned her to be swift. She climbed back below the trap-doors then closed them flat across the shaft and fixed them in place with their locking-bars. She was barely done when it began, a soft pattering that abruptly turned into a thunderous deluge before being so muffled by the sand already fallen that it grew silent again. Her tomb was sealed. As was her fate. Back across the bridge and down to the cavern floor. She held her torch to the staircase until it caught and began to burn with gratifying vigour, a spiral of fire spreading gloriously up and around the gallery. Wood and rope fizzed and crackled; steps and struts clattered blazing to the ground. With no more need for her torch, she tossed it into the general conflagration then went to their bed and set the pommel of his sword into a corner so that it couldn’t slip. Then she tore open her robes and pressed the tip of the blade sharp and cold against her stomach, pointing upwards beneath her breastbone towards her heart. A last hesitation as she looked down. How many times had they lain here together? How many times had he talked of sailing towards the setting sun, of founding a new city of his own somewhere across the great sea? He’d called it destiny. She’d called it avoiding marriage. Now he’d got his chance at last. And no doubt, if it went well for him, his entourage would tell stories to make heroes of themselves, as survivors always did. But he, at least, would know the truth of it. And, one day, maybe the world would too. ONE (#ulink_44f6707f-512a-5a8b-9a28-f629524876c6) I Daphne, Southern Turkey They said this was where the Trojan War had started. They said that it was here, among Daphne’s wooded hillsides, glades and waterfalls, that Paris had awarded his golden apple to Aphrodite, rather than to Athena or to Hera, thus winning himself Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, and precipitating the Greek armada and ten years of brutal, bloody war into the bargain. Iain Black smiled as he took another sip of his sweet strong tea. Men going crazy over a beautiful woman. How far the world had come. ‘Now her,’ he said, nodding along and across the road to the steps outside the black-glass fronted Daphne International Hotel. ‘She’s more like it.’ Mustafa glanced over his shoulder, snorted in amusement. ‘What is it with you and scrawny women?’ he asked. Then he flushed as he realized what he’d said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—’ ‘It’s okay,’ Iain assured him. ‘Anyway, she’s not scrawny. She’s elegant. There’s a difference.’ ‘Elegant!’ retorted Mustafa. ‘Can’t you see what she’s wearing?’ Iain laughed. He liked her clothes, the student chic of them, the way they showed off her figure without seeming to. A plain blue sweatshirt, baggy cream cheesecloth trousers, well-worn tan sneakers. Silver rings on her fingers and her left thumb, a back-to-front baseball cap through which poked unruly tufts of her straw-coloured hair, and a pair of John Lennon shades with shiny dark blue lenses. ‘Give her a break,’ he said. ‘She’s on holiday.’ ‘A woman should always make the most of herself,’ said Mustafa. ‘Especially a woman who can afford to stay in a place like that.’ ‘You’re a chauvinist and a snob, my friend,’ smiled Iain. ‘Yes,’ agreed Mustafa. The woman was carrying a tattered blue-vinyl day bag. She now half drew a bulky manila envelope from it so that she could check its address. She put it back, looked both ways, turned left and headed away from them, towards the main road. Iain watched her out of sight with a mild pang of regret, not for her in particular so much as for the companionship of an attractive woman. It had been too long; that was the fact of it. And he was ready again, he suddenly sensed it inside himself. Yet this was hardly the time or place. With Butros Bejjani and his entourage on their way, he needed his game-head on. He checked his laptop again, the feed coming in from the various cameras they’d set up to monitor the approach roads and the hotel lobby. No sign of them yet. ‘How are we for time?’ he asked. ‘Another half hour at least,’ said Mustafa. Iain nodded at their empty glasses. ‘More tea?’ ‘Need you ask?’ He picked up their glasses and took them inside, the door banging closed behind him. An elderly thin German woman with hennaed hair, silver jewellery and an embroidered crimson scarf was agonizing between juices. When finally she’d plumped for lemon, Iain gave his own order and asked for the drinks to be taken out. Then he headed for the rest-room. He was on his way in when it happened, a thunderous boom and the rest-room door slamming sideways into him like a small truck, throwing him down onto the white tiled floor. He rose with difficulty onto hands and knees. His ears were muffled yet he could still hear alarms outside, people screaming. The years of training and service kicked in, so that instead of panic he felt the familiar calm coldness spread through him, almost as though he was watching it happen to someone else. He tried to stand but his balance was off and he fell back down. He didn’t let this bother him but kept trying until he succeeded and made his way unsteadily out. There was glass, debris and dust everywhere. The waiter was down behind the counter, groaning softly. The German woman was on her side, her scarf splayed like blood around her throat and head. Her eyes were open but dazed and he couldn’t see any injuries, for she’d been protected from the worst of the blast by the solid side wall which— Mustafa. He hurried outside. A glimpse of hell, daytime turned to night by a canopy of noxious black smoke. A blue van with shattered windows was blazing furiously. Dust and fragments of stone whispered down around him like dry rain; and even as he watched, a misshapen and charred sheet of once-white metal crashed from a nearby roof onto the cobbles. His eyes watered with dust and toxic smoke. He had to squint to see. The caf?’s forecourt had been cleared as if by a giant arm. He went to the edge, looked down. The air was clearer here. Three cars had tumbled all the way down the steep slope to the tree-line of the valley beneath. Tables, chairs, sunshades and other debris were scattered everywhere. Great chunks of rubble, the tossed cabers of telephone poles, the black serpents of their wires. And there was Mustafa, two-thirds of the way down. The gradient was so steep and the ground so loose that he set off little avalanches with every step, earth cascading around his ankles. Mustafa was on his back, wheezing from the effort to breathe. His cheek was lacerated and bleeding and his left arm looked badly broken below the elbow. Iain knelt beside him. He’d dealt with trauma often enough in the army, but that didn’t make it easy. He unzipped Mustafa’s leather jacket. His white cotton shirt beneath was sodden with blood. A piece of shrapnel had torn into his friend’s gut and gone to grievous work inside, releasing that hateful sick sweet smell. He looked up the slope in hope of help, but there was no one, he was on his own. A shredded cotton tablecloth fluttered like defeat a little way off. He made a wad of it, pressed it over Mustafa’s wounds, bleakly and increasingly aware that it was futile, a gesture, that his friend was losing blood too fast for anything short of a miracle to save him. And he didn’t believe in miracles. Mustafa groaned and opened his eyes. He lay there for a moment, taking it in, assimilating what had happened to him, what was about to happen. He felt for and took Iain’s hand, looked him in the eyes. ‘My wife,’ he said softly. ‘My daughters.’ ‘You’re going to be fine,’ Iain told him. ‘Help’s on its way.’ He shook his head. ‘My wife,’ he said again, more urgently. ‘My daughters.’ Iain blinked back tears. ‘I’ll see they’re all right. I give you my word on it.’ Mustafa nodded faintly, satisfied by this pledge. ‘Who did this?’ he asked. ‘Was this us?’ Iain grimaced. For eighteen months now, Turkey had been caught up in a spiral of violence that approached a state of war. Not just the overspill from Syria, a few miles south of here, but also from Kurdish separatists, Islamicists, Armenians and even Cypriots who’d taken advantage of the growing chaos to press their own particular causes. Yet that this should happen outside this hotel today of all days was too big a coincidence to ignore. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Find out,’ said Mustafa. ‘I promise.’ ‘Find out and make them …’ He grimaced in pain or shock. He gave a little cry and clenched Iain’s hand tight. His left leg twitched briefly, as though trying to kick off a slipper. Then he stiffened and his body arched for a moment or two before something seemed to puncture inside him and he relaxed again and was still. II Georges Bejjani was tapping a cigarette from its soft pack when the bomb exploded a short distance ahead. He didn’t see the blast itself, for it took place on a side road and thus was obscured by the black glass exterior of the Daphne International Hotel. And, because it was a fraction of a second before the first sound reached them, he thought momentarily that he was suffering some kind of weird hallucination, perhaps an optical illusion caused by sunlight and the midday haze. But then a silver 4?4 came back-flipping out onto the road and he heard the sudden thunder of it, and alarms began tripping all around them as a canopy of thick black smoke spread low across the sky. Faisal slammed on the brakes, began instantly to turn. He was trained, after all, for such emergencies. But the traffic had been squeezed into a single lane by an unloading lorry and an oncoming van screeched to a halt right beside them, pinning them in. A fist of stone punched the passenger-side window, buckling the frame and turning the glass seawater green for a fraction of a second before it shattered and fell away. Debris pattered and then pounded upon their roof like a sudden squall of hail. Even while it was still coming down, Georges whipped out his mobile to call his elder brother. ‘Bomb,’ he said, the moment Michel answered. ‘Get Father back to the boat.’ ‘Are you okay?’ asked Michel. ‘We’re fine. Just get him safe.’ ‘On our way now,’ Michel assured him. ‘Was it for us?’ ‘I don’t know. It went off ten seconds ago. But it was right outside the hotel.’ ‘Then it was for us,’ said Michel. ‘I’ll check into it.’ ‘Be careful.’ Georges snorted. ‘Count on it,’ he said. He turned to Faisal and his bodyguard Sami. ‘Let’s take a look,’ he said. ‘But we’re out of here before the police show. Okay?’ They ran forward in a crouch, wary of a second device or of gunmen waiting to ambush the first responders. Childhood in Lebanon was a harsh teacher. Dazed people appeared like a zombie army from the smoke, clothes torn and ashen, faces bloody and smeared. The smoke grew black as night, choking and eye-burning. They passed cars on their roofs and sides, reached the front of the stricken hotel. Only the right-hand side of the road here had been developed, affording hotel guests uninterrupted views of Daphne’s gorgeous valley from the balconies. But the bomb had chomped a vast bite from this road, tarmac and hardcore tumbling in a great rubble avalanche down the hillside. The resultant crater had also been partially filled with shattered black glass, broken masonry and other debris from the hotel itself. A forearm protruded from beneath a chunk of grey concrete at such a grotesque angle that Georges couldn’t be sure it was even still attached. The block was too heavy for him alone, but Faisal and Sami helped him lift it high enough to reveal the man beneath. They looked away, sickened, let the masonry fall back down. In the distance, sirens. Police, medics, maybe even the army. They were near to a war zone here, and this whole region was prone to earthquakes. They’d have experts and heavy lifting machinery. Staying here wouldn’t help anyone, would only invite the kinds of questions he wished to avoid. He needed to find answers before returning to the boat, but this wasn’t the place. Sami looked meaningfully at him. He gave the nod and they ran together back to the car, then pulled a sharp turn in the road and drove away even as the first emergency vehicles raced past them to the site. III The shameful truth was that fine music bored Deniz Ba?t?rk. Two years in the steelworks had done damage to his ears and left him with coarse tastes: music to dance to, to drink to, lyrics made for bellowing. When his son Orhan had told him that he wanted to transfer to the Ankara State Conservatory to study it, therefore, he’d thought – or perhaps more accurately hoped – it was a joke. But such were the perils of falling in love with an artistic woman. On the concert platform, his son packed his oboe away into its case, took a zurna from his music-bag instead. He’d been granted the rare honour of choosing a piece to perform, to showcase his own talent. But what it was, Ba?t?rk didn’t know. He frowned inquisitively at his wife Sophia; she gave him in return only an enigmatic smile. The lights dimmed a little. The players took up their instruments. His son put the zurna’s reed to his lips, readied his fingers for the first note. Ba?t?rk found himself tensing, hope fighting fear. If this was what his son wanted, it was what he wanted too. But he’d learned the hard way, these past six months, that aspiration wasn’t the same thing as ability. The first notes, so soft he could barely hear them. Ba?t?rk made sure to keep his hands and expression relaxed, but his feet were clenched like fists beneath his seat until with a shock he not only recognized the piece but then quickly realized that Orhan had mastered it completely, that he was good; and now the other instruments joined in and the music began to soar raucously and joyously and he knew it was going to be okay, his son would have the life he coveted, and he sagged a little with the relief of it, and he took and squeezed his wife’s hand, and he felt quite ridiculously proud. Now that he could relax, the music went to work on him. It was a personal favourite of his, conjuring childhood memories of his own father, of being carried on his shoulders at protest marches, of watching him holding union crowds enthralled with his fierce rhetoric. Then the music hit its first melancholic passage, and it took him with it. For it had been a mixed blessing to have such a man for a father, dooming him to a life of falling short. And he had fallen short, he knew. He’d let his father down. He’d let his wife and son down. He’d let his country down. He felt, again, the almost crippling sense of inadequacy that had blighted him so often since he’d started his new job. A door banged behind him. He looked irritably around at this disruption of his son’s performance. Shadows conferred in those urgent low voices that were somehow doubly intrusive for being hushed. On stage, the players hesitated, uncertain whether to treat this as a rehearsal or a full performance, before staggering to an ugly, ragged stop. Ba?t?rk slapped his knee in anger then got to his feet. ‘I thought I said no interruptions.’ ‘Forgive me, Prime Minister,’ said Gonka, his senior aide, hurrying down the aisle to him. ‘But there’s been an incident. A bomb.’ ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Not another.’ ‘I’m afraid so,’ she nodded. ‘In Daphne. And I wouldn’t have disturbed you even so, but the press have found out you’re here. And they’re already gathering outside.’ TWO (#ulink_f3a0deee-424f-5a24-be5f-f853b2216efc) I There was nothing more Iain could do for Mustafa, and others might need his help. He made his way down the slope to the cars that had rolled to its foot. The first two were empty, but a middle-aged woman was strapped unconscious behind the wheel of the third, a green Peugeot settled on its roof. He couldn’t see any flames but its interior was clouding with smoke. The doors were all jammed shut, but its passenger-side window had partially buckled so he smashed it with a stone until it caved. He took a deep breath then wriggled inside. He released her seatbelt, took her under her arms, hauled her out and laid her on her back. Her pulse was weak but she was alive and breathing unaided. He clambered back up the hillside. It was steep enough to make his calves and hams ache. Shrieks of pain and wails of grief greeted him. The smoke had cleared to reveal the blast’s full devastation. A great bite had been taken out of the road in front of the Daphne International Hotel and its black-glass frontage had shattered and fallen away, exposing a honeycomb interior of ruined rooms, of broken baths and toilets dangling grotesquely from twisted pipes. The scale of damage, and the lack of any residual smell of cheap explosive, suggested to him military-grade ordnance. And not some stray shell from the Syrian war: it would take a large missile or a truckload of Semtex to wreak this much— A cracking, splintering noise ripped the air, sending the fire-crews and search-and-rescue teams scurrying for safety. Then, a second or two later, the hotel’s left-hand wall simply sheared away and toppled forwards into the general rubble, bringing the rear wall down too, throwing up more clouds of noxious dust and reducing still further any hope of finding survivors. Ambulances were now arriving in large numbers. He led a pair of paramedics down the hill. While one of them treated the Peugeot driver, he and the other strapped Mustafa onto a stretcher and carried him back up to the top, loaded him onto an ambulance. He asked to go along with him, but the paramedic gave an expressive little shrug. It wasn’t an ambulance right now, but a body-cart; and they needed all of it. ‘Did he live around here?’ the man asked. ‘Istanbul,’ answered Iain. He nodded at the wrecked hotel. ‘He was staying there.’ ‘Wife? Family?’ ‘I’ll call them myself,’ said Iain. ‘We still need to know who they are.’ He summoned up Layla’s number on his smartphone, wrote it along with Mustafa’s name on the back of one of his own business cards, then added the name of his Antioch hotel should they need to contact him. The paramedic thanked him and moved off in search of further grim duties. Remarkably, it was only now that he remembered what he and Mustafa had been here to do. Or, more precisely, remembered the footage that would have been streaming into his laptop right up to the moment of detonation. If his hard-drive had somehow survived, and the footage could be recovered, it could prove vital to the investigation. On the other hand, if the police discovered it for themselves it would be a nightmare to explain away. He went back down the slope to where he’d found Mustafa then searched in an ever-widening spiral until he spotted an edge of the toughened black casing protruding from loose earth. He pulled it free. Its screen was shattered, its hinges broken and its casing pocked by shrapnel, but it could have been far worse. He carried it obliquely back up the slope to his hire-car, locked it away in his boot. His next job promised to be harder. He took out his phone again. No signal. The masts had to be overwhelmed. He walked away in search of coverage. Still nothing. A wicked little voice whispered that the paramedics or the hospital would take care of it for him, maybe even handle it better than he could. They’d be calm, clinical, practised. In Istanbul, last year, Layla had cooked a feast in his honour, to thank him for bringing good employment to her husband. Their two daughters had sat either side of him upon their divan while he’d read them stories from the lusciously illustrated copy of the Thousand and One Nights he’d brought as a gift. A signal at last. Tenuous but undeniable. He felt light-headed as he dialled Mustafa’s home number, like the first hint of flu. The phone had barely rung before Layla snatched it up. She began talking Turkish so fast that it was a struggle for Iain to follow. He tried to slow her. When she recognized his voice, she burst into sobs of relief. ‘You’re safe,’ she said, switching to English. ‘Thank God you’re safe. I’ve been watching on the news. I’ve been so worried. Where’s Mustafa? Is he with you? I’ve been trying his phone.’ ‘Layla,’ said Iain. There was silence. It stretched painful as the rack. ‘He’s hurt,’ she said. ‘He’s hurt badly, isn’t he?’ ‘Layla,’ he said again. She began to wail. It was a desperate, inhuman sound, like an animal being tortured. He didn’t know what she needed from him, whether to respect her grief with silence or to tell her what he knew. He decided to talk. It would be easy enough for her to shut him up if she wanted. He described their morning in the caf?, how he’d gone for more tea immediately before the blast. He told her how he’d knelt beside her husband in his last moments. She wept so loudly that it was hard to believe she could hear him, but he kept talking anyway, about how Mustafa had seized his hand and asked him to look out for her and their daughters. He told her of his promise, reiterated it now. Her sobs abruptly stopped. ‘Layla?’ he said. He’d lost signal. He felt sick and bruised and drained and guilty all at once as he walked around trying to reacquire it. When finally he succeeded, to his shame he couldn’t bring himself to call Layla again. He called the London office instead, asked for Maria. Maria had known Mustafa a little, had a wonderful gift of empathy. He braced her for bad news, told her what had happened. He asked her to get in touch with Layla, arrange for her and her daughters to fly down to Antioch if she so wished, plus whatever else she needed; and also to start the paperwork on Mustafa’s life insurance. ‘Are you okay?’ Maria asked. ‘You yourself, I mean?’ ‘I’m fine,’ he assured her. ‘You don’t sound fine.’ ‘I just watched Mustafa die,’ he told her. ‘I thought I was past all this shit.’ ‘I’ll talk to Layla,’ she promised. ‘Thank you,’ said Iain. ‘And put me through to Quentin.’ ‘Now?’ ‘Now.’ He went on hold. His boss picked up a few moments later. ‘Maria told me,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it. Are you okay?’ ‘I’m fine.’ ‘What are you going to do? Are you coming home?’ ‘No. I need to be here for Layla.’ ‘Layla?’ Iain clenched a fist. ‘Mustafa’s widow.’ ‘Ah. Yes. Of course. Layla.’ ‘Listen, Quentin,’ said Iain. ‘Before Mustafa died, he asked me if we had anything to do with the blast. I promised him I’d find out.’ ‘How could you even think such a thing?’ ‘Because I don’t know who our client is,’ said Iain. ‘Or what they wanted from this job.’ ‘You do know our client. Hunter & Blackwells.’ ‘They’re lawyers, Quentin,’ said Iain. ‘Who do they represent?’ ‘They had nothing to do with this. Take my word for it.’ ‘No,’ said Iain. ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘I said no, I won’t take your word for it. Not on this. I need to know who they are and why they’re so interested in the Bejjanis.’ Silence. ‘Very well,’ said Quentin, finally. ‘I gave them a pledge of confidentiality, but under these circumstances, I think I can ask permission to share. Though I make no promises.’ ‘I do,’ said Iain angrily. ‘Either you tell me or I’ll make it my business to find out. And they really don’t want me going after them, not in the mood I’m in.’ He ended the call, rubbed the back of his neck. His first few months at Global Analysis had been such a relief after the army: stimulating, demanding and rewarding, yet no one getting killed or even hurt. This past year or so, however, it had turned increasingly sour. The secrecy. The offshore accounts. The relentless push for profits. The downright nastiness of some of their clients. That was why, for several months now, he’d been making vague plans to set up on his own, maybe invite Mustafa and a few of the others to go with him. Yet he’d done nothing concrete about it. And now this. II Turkish Nicosia, Cyprus Taner Inzano?lu made a point of walking his daughter Katerina to and from school every day he possibly could. He did it partly because his car was old and unreliable, and partly because petrol was so expensive. But mostly he did it because it was such a relief to get away from his writing and other work for a while; a relief to spend time with Katerina and not feel guilty. The afternoon was sunny and warm, yet pleasantly fresh. The perfect spring day. He bought them each a raspberry-flavoured ice-lolly. They licked them as they walked through the park, tongues sticking to the frosting and turning ever redder. She told him about her day, her friends, the lessons she had taken, the inexplicable splinters of knowledge that had somehow lodged in her mind. They finished their lollies. He took her wrapper and stick from her, put them in a bin. Then he broke into a run. ‘Race you,’ he shouted over his shoulder. The course was well known to them both. Through the trees, around the swings and the exercise machines, back to the path. ‘I can’t believe you beat me,’ he protested, as he collapsed panting onto the grass. ‘What kind of daughter would beat her own father!’ The way her eyes crinkled when she laughed reminded him so vividly of her mother that his heart ached almost as though it had just happened. With the pain came the usual premonition: that something calamitous would overtake her too, that he’d be equally powerless to stop it. He reached up and hugged her and pulled her down onto the grass beside him. ‘What is it, Father?’ she asked. ‘Nothing,’ he said. His anxiety wouldn’t go away, however. If anything, it grew worse. They’d barely left the park before his mobile rang. He checked the number, was relieved to see that it was only Martino. ‘Hey, my friend,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re cancelling tonight?’ ‘Aren’t you watching?’ asked Martino. His heart stopped. ‘Watching what?’ ‘The bomb. In Daphne.’ Taner turned his back on Katerina so that she couldn’t see his face. ‘How bad?’ he asked. ‘Bad. Really bad.’ He paused a moment, then added what Taner had most feared. ‘And they’re saying that a warning was called in. They’re saying it was us.’ III The police had already started taking statements from possible eye-witnesses. Iain gave his name, details and a bowdlerized version of his day to a slab-faced officer with an implausible belly. A few paces away, the woman he’d earlier joked about with Mustafa was struggling to make herself understood by an officer with limited English. When he was finished, therefore, he went across and offered to translate. Her name was Karin Visser. She was twenty-seven years old. She was Dutch but had been studying and working in America for the past four years, which explained both her accent and her impeccable English. She’d been travelling around Turkey with her boss Nathan Coates, a retired oil executive, and his head of security Rick Leland. The two of them had been in Nathan’s room all morning, in some kind of meeting. No, she didn’t know who with. No, they hadn’t been in Daphne long. They’d only arrived from Ephesus late the night before, had been due to fly on to Cyprus the day after tomorrow, then back to the States at the end of the week. No, she hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary. She’d gone for a long walk that morning, had returned to the hotel thinking the meeting would have finished. But it had still been going on. She opened up her day-pack to show the manila package inside, and explained how her boss had given it to her to have couriered, insisting that she see to it herself rather than merely trusting it to reception. She’d been on her way when she’d heard the blast and run back. That was when … She waved an expressive hand to indicate the destruction. The policeman thanked her wearily and asked her to let him or his colleagues know before she left the area, then went off to conduct his next interview. ‘Are you okay?’ Iain asked her. ‘I’m fine,’ said Karin. But her hand was trembling slightly and her eyes glittered. ‘It’s just, they were my friends, you know. And I’ve never been through anything like this before.’ She shook her head. ‘I feel so useless. I feel like there are things I should be doing.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘I don’t know. To do with Nathan and Rick, I guess. I mean did you see the hotel? Nathan’s room was right above that crater. I mean right above it.’ Her tears finally started flowing. She brushed them away with the heel of her left hand. ‘They have to be buried under God only knows how much rubble. There’s no way can they still be alive. So what do I do? Do I call their families? Or do I wait until it’s confirmed? And is it up to me to arrange for them to be …’ She closed her eyes, unable to complete the thought. ‘And then there’s stupid stuff. I left my passport in my room safe, for example. My cards, my driver’s licence, nearly all my cash. I assumed they’d be okay there.’ ‘Someone from your consulate will be here soon,’ Iain assured her. ‘By tomorrow at the latest. They’ll deal with the police and the authorities for you. They’ll arrange to have your boss and your colleague flown back home. They’ll issue you with a new passport. They’ll make sure you have money and a flight.’ ‘But what about until then? God, I know this is trivial, but where do I go? What do I eat? Where do I sleep? How do I get around? I don’t know a soul in this place and I don’t speak a word of the language and my friends are dead and I don’t have anywhere to stay or enough money to pay for a room and I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you a room at my hotel.’ ‘I told you. I don’t have any money.’ He touched her arm gently. ‘I’ll put you on my tab,’ he said. ‘You can pay me back when you sort things out.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Of course I’m sure.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘Thank you so much.’ ‘It’s fine.’ There was nothing more to keep them here, so he led her to his car. It was barely five miles to Antioch, but the roads were so chaotic that it took them an hour. He parked up the cobbled street from his hotel, led her inside. The receptionist stared at them in astonishment. ‘You were there?’ she asked. Iain touched Karin on the elbow. ‘My friend here was staying at the Daphne International. She needs a room. Oh, and she’s lost her passport and her cards, so can you please put her on my account for the moment.’ ‘I’m so sorry,’ said the receptionist, ‘but we don’t have any rooms left. The phone’s been going crazy. Journalists and TV people and police. Everyone’s on their way. And the other hotels are the same. We’ve all been referring inquiries to each other. I honestly don’t know of any rooms left in the city.’ Iain glanced at Karin. Sharing a room with a stranger breached all kinds of company protocols, but she was visibly at the end of her tether. ‘We can go hunting, if you like,’ he said. ‘Or there’s a spare bed in my room.’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t possibly.’ ‘Just for tonight. We’ll sort something better out tomorrow.’ The receptionist smiled at this happy solution, tapped Karin’s details into her terminal, gave her a spare card-key. They took the lift up. He fixed them a drink each, spilled a pack of chocolate-covered nuts into a saucer. Karin sat heavily on a bed and checked her mobile, but the masts were evidently overwhelmed here too. He nodded at the bedside phone. ‘Use that,’ he said. ‘It’s to Holland. To let my parents know I’m safe. Then to America.’ ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘Owe me.’ He half held up his hand to apologize for his irritability, but Karin didn’t even seem to notice. He went into the bathroom, put his hands upon the sink, rested weight upon them. It was a risk of being single too long that you lost your soft edges. He checked himself in the mirror: a mess of sweat and dust and blood. He fetched clean clothes from his wardrobe, stripped and took a shower, vigorously soaping off the dirt and blood and sweat, watching the grey-brown mess of it circle the plug and then vanish. He dialled the heat up as high as he could take it then turned his face to the spray almost as if to purge himself of something, or perhaps in penance for the fact that, yet once more in his life, an operation he was running had turned so utterly to shit. THREE (#ulink_f589ac45-0f21-5351-ade2-e340a0cb400c) I They found a storage room crammed with pianos and other instruments in which to brief Deniz Ba?t?rk on the bomb before he went out to face the press. Discordant notes thrummed and pinged each time someone changed position or rested a hand on a keyboard, making it even harder for him to absorb what he was being told, fretting at the ordeal ahead as he already was. Hard to believe that he’d actually once enjoyed dealing with the media. As an economics professor of reasonable repute, brought into the Ministry of Finance in the wake of the global financial crisis, his first interviews had almost exclusively been policy-dense one-on-ones with sober-minded financial journalists. He’d enjoyed the intellectual challenge of making his case persuasively, and he hadn’t needed to worry much about ambush, partly because he was essentially an honest man, but mostly because access was too valuable a commodity to the press to be wasted on a hit against someone as obscure and technocratic as himself. But then had come his unexpected elevation to the top job, and everything had changed. Enough. His aides knew nothing more and if he didn’t go out soon the murmuring would start, that he was hiding. He led the way himself, marching through the lobby and striding boldly out the automated glass front doors, because you had to look in command even if you didn’t feel it. It had turned darkly overcast outside, exaggerating the eruption of flashbulbs from the several dozen reporters and photographers crowded in the small courtyard and on the steps up to the street, almost like he was in an auditorium of his own. He felt exposed without a podium to stand behind; his usual one not only had a concealed step to make him appear taller, but its considerable girth also helped disguise his own. There was nothing for it, however. He took a moment to compose himself and to adopt a suitably sombre expression then spoke the usual platitudes about the nation’s thoughts being with the victims and their families, giving them his word the perpetrators would be caught. ‘You’ve been giving your word for six months,’ said Birol Khan of Channel 5. ‘Yet still they bomb. Each worse than the last. The Syrians, the Kurds and now it seems the Cypriots. It’s like they’re competing with each other.’ ‘That’s an unnecessarily alarmist way of—’ ‘Alarmist? These monsters murdered thirty people. And you call me alarmist?’ He held up a hand. ‘That’s not what I meant. These … perpetrators are criminals. This is a security problem, not a war.’ ‘It feels like a war. It feels like we’re under attack all the time.’ There were murmurs of approval at this. These weren’t merely journalists. They were civilians too, people with their own fears, with loved ones of their own. Until recently, the troubles had been sporadic and largely confined to the Kurdish south-east, but now attacks were taking place with increasing frequency and violence all across the country. No town or village felt safe any more. No public space or office. And it was impossible to protect everywhere. He cast a guilty glance over his shoulder. Since his son had started here, the Academy had added layers of security, courtesy of the state. He himself was escorted by at least six secret service bodyguards wherever he went. His cars were armoured, his office and both homes protected by rings of steel. How would he feel if it was his own family in jeopardy and no progress was being made? He suffered another flutter of inadequacy. The country needed a proper leader, not some floundering economist. ‘The police are doing the best they can,’ he said weakly. ‘That’s the precise problem,’ shouted out Yasemin Omari, a gadfly TV reporter who mistook rudeness for speaking truth to power. ‘They’ve made a great many arrests.’ ‘Yes. Of people the Interior Minister doesn’t like.’ ‘That’s a ridiculous allegation.’ ‘Some say he can’t catch the bombers because he’s fired his best officers and replaced them with incompetent loyalists. Others say he’s deliberately slow-pedalling the investigations to make you look bad. Which do you think it is?’ ‘I think he’s a dedicated public servant doing an excellent job under extremely difficult circumstances.’ ‘Your current Chief of the General Staff helped take down the Kurdish separatists last time it got like this. Why not put him in charge?’ ‘Because counterterrorism is a civilian task. Besides, the Minister and the General are already in close contact. We operate a joined-up government.’ Laughter made him flush. ‘I assure you,’ he said. ‘You assure us?’ taunted Omari. ‘Everyone knows those two hate each other. When was the last time they even spoke?’ ‘We have just suffered the most terrible atrocity,’ he said sharply. ‘Do you seriously expect me to reveal details of our investigation on national television?’ He shook his head as if in dismay then pushed his way through the pack and up the steps to the waiting cars. A heartfelt sigh the moment they were safely inside. ‘Get the Interior Minister and the Chief of the General Staff for me,’ he told Gonka, as they pulled away. ‘I want them in my office.’ ‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ she said. ‘When?’ He turned so that she could see his face. ‘When do you think?’ he asked. II Karin was on the phone when Iain finished his shower, being talked at by an American man with an abrasively loud and patrician voice. ‘… need to let me know the moment my father’s death is confirmed,’ he was saying. ‘Of course,’ said Karin. She glanced up at Iain. ‘But I have to go now,’ she said. ‘Again, I’m really sorry for your loss.’ ‘I’ll bet you are,’ said the man, sounding remarkably chipper for someone who’d had such grievous news. ‘Waking up like this to find nothing on the night-stand.’ The phone clicked; there was dial-tone. Karin grimaced as she replaced it in its cradle. ‘Nathan’s eldest,’ she said. ‘He seemed to take it well.’ ‘They aren’t the closest of families.’ Iain nodded. If she wanted to talk about it, she’d bring it up herself. ‘You look exhausted,’ he said. ‘Enough with the phone calls. Have a bath. A nice cup of tea.’ He fetched an olive T-shirt from the wardrobe, tossed it to her, then fished some Turkish lira banknotes from his wallet. ‘For clothes and food and shit. Whatever you need.’ ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘And if there’s anything else …’ She took a deep breath. ‘Does that extend to advice?’ ‘Sure. About what?’ Karin had brought her day-pack up to the room. Now she took the bulky manila envelope out from it. ‘You remember what I told that policeman? How I went out walking all morning. Then I went back to Nathan’s room only to find him still in his meeting, and how he gave me this to post.’ Iain frowned. ‘You want me to run it down to reception?’ ‘No. It’s nothing like that. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about something. About why we were even here.’ She bit her lower lip briefly, as though torn between discretion and the urge to share. ‘If I tell you something in confidence, will you keep it to yourself?’ ‘Of course,’ said Iain. ‘What?’ She showed him the package’s address label. It was made out in neat turquoise handwriting to a Professor Michael Walker at the Egyptian Institute of Archaeometry in New Cairo, Egypt. ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I know Mike. My boss Nathan used to sponsor his institute, you see, so I’ve dealt with him a fair bit over the phone. He’s an archaeologist, essentially, but he specializes in scientific techniques like carbon-dating, thermoluminescence testing, spectrum analysis, that kind of thing. How old is this parchment? Where was this amphora fired? What’s the mix of metals in this ingot?’ ‘Okay,’ said Iain. ‘Nathan was fascinated by the ancient Greeks,’ said Karin. ‘Particularly the Mycenaeans. The ones Homer wrote about. We were in Troy a couple of days ago, for example. Then we came here. You won’t know this, but some people believe the Trojan War started in Daphne.’ ‘Sure,’ nodded Iain. ‘Paris awarding Aphrodite the golden apple.’ ‘Yes. Exactly.’ She looked so impressed, he decided not to confess that Mustafa had told him this that same morning. ‘But you saw the place. It’s not exactly Ephesus, is it? Though, to be fair, Nathan also co-sponsors excavations at an old Hittite city called Tell Tayinat, which is only a few miles from here, by the Syrian border. But that’s off-season right now. There’s no one there.’ ‘Am I supposed to be following this?’ ‘Sorry. I’m thinking out loud. You see, when I was arranging our itinerary, this was the only leg of the trip that Nathan insisted on, even though there was nothing for us to do here. We had to arrive last night, we had to stay at the Daphne International Hotel, and we couldn’t leave for Cyprus until the day after tomorrow.’ ‘Ah,’ said Iain. ‘And Nathan only decided to make this trip two weeks ago. You don’t know him, but that’s completely out of character. He likes to have everything just so.’ She gave a little grimace. ‘He liked to, I should say. Spontaneity was never his thing. Yet suddenly he decides to come here. And you should have seen how excited he’s been these past few days. And that hotel! It was nice enough, yes, but Nathan was rich. I mean really, really rich. I could easily have found us something far nicer, like the place we had in Istanbul, you should have seen it. But no, he insisted on that specific hotel. And then this morning he tells me that he and Rick have a meeting, and that I should go out and not come back for at least two hours.’ Iain nodded. ‘So you think your whole trip here was in fact cover for this meeting?’ ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ ‘Do you know who it was with?’ ‘No.’ ‘But you suspect someone was offering him artefacts for sale, right? And that this package for your friend Mike in New Cairo contains samples he wanted tested? To authenticate the pieces before he handed over any cash?’ Karin grimaced. ‘Nathan never cared too much about provenance,’ she said. ‘At least, that’s not fair, he did care, he cared a lot. But he thought it worth pushing the boundaries a little if it meant getting important pieces back into the public domain. He donated all those sorts of acquisitions to museums, you see. The black market’s still illegal, though, however honourable your intentions. And he told me once that he almost got caught here in Turkey several years ago. So what do I do? I can’t see how telling the police would help the investigation, but what if it could? Yet if I tell them about it, and they use it to trash his reputation, I’d hate myself. Or what if they accuse me of being his accomplice? I wasn’t, I swear I wasn’t. It never even occurred to me until a moment ago. But how could I possibly prove that?’ ‘So post it to this Walker guy,’ suggested Iain. ‘You’d have done it anyway.’ ‘But they’re bound to be keeping an eye on those sorts of places, aren’t they? What with the bomb, I mean. Or what if Mike notifies them himself after he receives it? It’ll look like I was trying to hide it. And I showed it to that policeman, remember? What if he asks for it?’ ‘Why would he?’ ‘I don’t know.’ She sounded a little close to the edge suddenly; shock often got to people in unexpected ways. ‘Maybe to find out who Nathan was meeting. To identify his body or something. What would I do then?’ He took the package from her, packed it away in his holdall at the foot of his wardrobe. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You were badly shaken by the explosion. I took it from you to carry. What with everything else, you never even gave it another thought.’ ‘But I—’ ‘You never even gave it another thought. If anyone asks for it, which they won’t, frown and say you think maybe I have it. If they ask me, I’ll give it to them and your boss’ reputation will have to take a hit. That’s all. But it won’t happen, I promise you. Nor will anyone come after you. They’ve got far more important things to worry about.’ She let out a deep breath. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘And not only for this. For everything. I honestly don’t know what I’d have done without you.’ ‘Just glad I could help,’ he said. III A smallholding near Gornec The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus Zehra Inzano?lu was breaking up soil in her top field when she heard the engine. It sounded strained and urgent, with a different pitch to any of her neighbours’ vehicles. Nor did it sound much like the hire-car of one of the hapless tourists who sometimes got themselves lost up here while trying to find some imaginary shortcut across the mountains to the north coast. She rested her mattock against her thigh, brushed dry earth from her hands. The car crested the low rise and came into view. It was old, pale blue and patched in places with grey filler and black tape, and her heart gave a little skip of recognition as it pulled to a stop on the hardened mud track near the steps to her cottage. Then the driver door opened and her son Taner stepped out. He was taller than she remembered. He’d filled out in the chest and shoulders too. When she’d last seen him, it had been possible to think of him as a boy, her boy, though he’d been twenty-four, married and about to become a parent himself. But he was a man now, beyond question. She walked down the path towards him, but stopped several paces short and held her mattock out like a pikestaff. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. He tried a smile. ‘I need help, Mother,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘I need your help.’ She shook her head slowly. He was flesh and blood so saying no to him could never come easily. But the choice had been his. She and her husband had made the consequences of his betrayal perfectly clear. ‘You should have thought of that before.’ ‘I’m not asking for myself,’ he said. He turned and beckoned to the car. The passenger door opened and a girl of perhaps ten years old climbed out. She was wearing a school uniform of royal blue with yellow bands, and her hair was of a lustrous black that tumbled in glossy curls down to and beyond her shoulders. Her mouth was mutinous and her eyes were bloodshot from rubbing or weeping. Even so, she looked so strikingly like how Zehra’s younger sister had looked at that age that it was a punch in her chest. ‘This is your granddaughter Katerina, Mother,’ said Taner. ‘Katerina, this is your grandmother Zehra.’ They stared at each other for several moments, uncertain what to say or do, so that in the end it was Taner himself who had to break the silence. ‘I need you to look after her for a few days, Mother,’ he said. ‘Why?’ ‘Because I’m about to be arrested.’ That caught her attention. She tore her eyes from her granddaughter. ‘Arrested?’ ‘The bomb.’ ‘What bomb?’ ‘On the mainland. Haven’t you heard?’ ‘I don’t listen to news.’ ‘It killed many people. And they’re blaming me and my friends.’ ‘With reason?’ He flinched as though she’d slapped him. ‘Of course not, Mother,’ he said. ‘I detest violence. But plenty of people don’t like what we stand for and this is their chance to shut us up.’ Zehra nodded at Katerina. ‘Why can’t her mother look after her?’ ‘Athena’s dead, Mother. She died last year.’ ‘Oh.’ Despite herself, despite her promises, she felt an unexpected pang of pity for her son, for there was no doubting that he’d loved his wife, and she knew what it was to lose someone you loved. ‘Don’t you have friends?’ ‘They’re going to arrest them too. They’ll arrest all of us. They made that absolutely clear after the last time. So it’s either you or sending her to stay with her mother’s family in Paphos.’ He gave her a shrewd look. ‘And if I send her there, how can I be sure they’ll ever let her come back?’ Zehra sniffed. She knew he was trying to manipulate her, but it was the truth too. Greek Cypriots couldn’t be trusted, which was precisely why she’d warned him against marrying one in the first place. She was about to point this out when she heard other engines approaching. ‘I told them I was coming here,’ explained her son. ‘I didn’t want them to think I was trying to run.’ He went to Katerina, crouched down before her so that she could see the seriousness on his face. He murmured something. She shook her head. He murmured it again, more forcefully. She took a couple of half-hearted steps towards Zehra then stopped and looked around. ‘Please, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘For Daddy.’ She nodded and went unhappily over to Zehra. ‘Be kind to each other,’ he said. Then he turned and raised his arms above his head and walked up the short hill to meet the two black SUVs now cresting it. They pulled to a stop either side of him. Doors opened. Six uniformed and plain-clothes policemen got out. They cuffed him roughly and bundled him into one of the SUVs, climbed in either side. The drivers executed a neat ballet to turn in the constricted space, then headed off. Taner looked back through the rear window, his palms pressed against the glass, but then they were gone, leaving only the fading noise of their engines and thin clouds of settling dust. Zehra turned and looked bleakly at her granddaughter. Her granddaughter looked bleakly back. What now? It was Katerina who made the first move. She clenched her eyes, opened her mouth, and began – at a quite appalling volume – to howl. FOUR (#ulink_d89e6148-56d0-52b6-989a-2341cb7e132d) I Iain turned on the TV while Karin was in the bathroom. He only meant to watch for a minute or two, to get the latest on the bombing, but it proved strangely compelling. The picture, unsurprisingly, was still blurred, but between the various channels it was beginning to come in to some sort of focus. An unidentified white van or truck had been seen parked outside the hotel, though he couldn’t recall it himself. A phone call claiming credit had been made to a local newspaper within a minute or two of the explosion. Thirty people were confirmed dead, with at least as many more unaccounted for. He was still watching when Karin came out of the bathroom, tucking his olive T-shirt into the waistband of her trousers. ‘What are they saying?’ she asked. ‘They’re saying it was Cypriots.’ ‘Cypriots?’ She frowned in puzzlement. ‘Why?’ ‘Apparently they rang in a warning.’ ‘No. I mean why would Cypriots want to bomb here?’ Iain muted the TV. Cyprus was one of the world’s more intractable problems; explaining it was hard. ‘You know it’s partitioned, right?’ ‘Turks on the top,’ she nodded. ‘Greeks on the bottom.’ ‘Right. Except that the Greek bit is actually independent.’ The island had been a tug-of-war between Turkey and Greece for three thousand years. Then the British had taken over for a while, until forced out by insurgency in 1960. An uneasy independence had lasted until 1974, when a botched coup backed by Athens had provoked the Turks into invasion, seizing the northern third of the island before stopping. As Greek Cypriots in the north had fled south, so Turkish Cypriots in the south had fled north, creating a de facto partition. At first glance, the Turks got the better of the deal; their nationals accounted for one in five of the population, but they now controlled a third of the island, including the main resorts, the ports, the water resources and the fertile central plain. But sanctions had since devastated tourism and trade, forcing Ankara to pump in billions of lira every year to keep the place running. Worse, Cyprus had blighted Turkey’s international reputation and hobbled its application for EU membership. ‘The UN’s been trying to negotiate a settlement from the start,’ he told Karin. ‘But without much success. You can understand it: well over a thousand people vanished without trace during the fighting, and have never been found. Tens of thousands of others lost their homes and businesses and belongings, so there’s still a lot of bad blood. But then this new guy Deniz Ba?t?rk became Turkish Prime Minister. He made it clear that Cyprus would be his number one foreign policy priority. There’s this place called Varosha. It’s a district of Famagusta, a city on the east coast of Cyprus. It used to be one of the top resorts in the whole Med until the Turks seized it, but it’s been completely abandoned ever since and now they call it the Lost City. Anyway, it’s been one of the major sticking points, because the Greek Cypriots have always insisted it be handed back before negotiations can begin in earnest, which the Turks have refused to do, because giving Greeks something for free is unthinkable. But then Ba?t?rk came in and made noises about handing it over, which caused such an uproar among Turkish nationalists that Ba?t?rk had to back down. That, in turn, provoked hard-line Cypriot reunificationists into setting off bombs, in the hope of persuading Turks to change their mind and let Varosha go.’ ‘And so they murdered thirty people?’ asked Karin. ‘But that’s crazy.’ ‘Since when has crazy ever stopped bombers?’ He touched his left ear. ‘Suds,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’ She checked a mirror, wiped them away, then ran fingers through her hair, spiking it a little, but with evident dissatisfaction. ‘You don’t have a comb, do you?’ Iain ran a hand over his buzz-cut. ‘Do I need one?’ ‘I guess not.’ She held up the banknotes he’d given her. ‘Then maybe I should go do some shopping,’ she said. II ‘Hush, girl,’ said Zehra Inzano?lu, as her granddaughter stood on the road and continued to bawl. ‘Enough.’ But Katerina didn’t stop, except to take in more breath so that she could howl all the louder. Indignation roiled Zehra’s heart. How could her son do this to her? She was too old. Her parenting was done. Yet what could she do? She looked around. She couldn’t see any of her neighbours watching but she knew they would be, if only because she’d be watching them were their situations reversed. And still Katerina howled. Village life was a delicate affair. Everyone knew each other’s business, yet they also soon learned where they could and couldn’t tread. But then something new came along and suddenly all those tacit boundaries broke down, and people would ask their intrusive questions again. They’d make judgements. Zehra couldn’t face that again. She just couldn’t. Besides, a girl of Katerina’s age should be at school. Yes. The thought was clarifying to her. She needed to return her to her home, find someone there to look after her. The Professor, perhaps. They wouldn’t have arrested him. And it would serve him right for introducing her son to that Greek whore in the first place. Her chin jutted with the rightness of it. The bus wouldn’t run again that day, she couldn’t afford a taxi and asking a neighbour for a lift would mean having to explain and thus justify herself. She’d rather die. She went instead to her son’s car. His keys were still in the ignition; his wallet and mobile phone were on the dash. The car was a manual, however, and Zehra had only ever driven automatics. On the other hand, she knew the basic principle: you started them in second gear and then drove them as though they were very, very bad automatics. She went inside to pack a bag, in case the Professor wasn’t home. When she came back out, Katerina was still bawling. Her persistence was astonishing. ‘Hush,’ she said crossly, belting her in to the passenger seat. ‘I’m taking you home. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ But Katerina just carried on. Bitter thoughts filled her mind as she climbed behind the wheel, turned on the ignition and tried various combinations of pedals while heaving at the gear-stick, until finally it slotted into place. Then she took her foot off the brake and began bunny-hopping on her way. III A police horse whinnied in the street outside the Prime Ministerial offices, then did a little leftwards dance before lifting its tail and venting its bowels in a massive, noisy movement exactly as Deniz Ba?t?rk was getting out of his car, providing the pack of press photographers across the street with the perfect visual metaphor for his premiership. And no one to blame but himself, for the horses were his idea, a way to increase security without making it look like they were turning into a police state. A car pulled up behind. Iskender Aslan, his Minister of the Interior. ‘Prime Minister,’ he called out, hurrying to catch up. ‘May I ask what this—’ ‘Inside, Iskender.’ ‘But I—’ ‘Inside,’ said Ba?t?rk. They found the Chief of the General Staff waiting in the antechamber. General Kemal Yilmaz typically wore suits in Ankara, as befitted a civilian city, but he’d been supervising exercises when the call had come, and so was in uniform today. ‘All those ribbons,’ mocked Aslan. ‘You must be very brave.’ ‘They award most of them to anyone who serves,’ replied Yilmaz. ‘I’m sure you have plenty of your own.’ ‘Gentlemen, please,’ said the Prime Minister. He motioned them through into his private office, made their aides wait outside. This wasn’t the kind of talk that wanted witnesses. ‘Nine mass-casualty bombings in three months,’ he began, walking to his desk. ‘Twenty in the past year.’ ‘The terrorists are to blame for that, Prime Minister,’ said Aslan. ‘Not my ministry or the police. We’re doing all we can. And we’re making real progress. We have already made a number of highly significant arrests in Cyprus this afternoon.’ ‘Ah, yes, all these highly significant arrests of yours. You tell me about them after every bomb. Then you quietly release them a week later for lack of evidence. So what good are these arrests when the bombings don’t merely continue, but get worse? They’re saying thirty people. Thirty people!’ He sat down, as much to calm himself as anything, then looked back and forth between them. ‘You may have seen me on television earlier. I assured the nation that we operate a joined-up government, that you two were already working together on this. Is that even faintly true? Are you working together?’ The two men glanced coolly at each other. Their mutual loathing was an open secret. ‘I saw your briefing, Prime Minister,’ said General Yilmaz. ‘As you made clear, counterterrorism is rightly a job for the police, not the army.’ ‘And we don’t need the army’s help,’ added Aslan. ‘All things considered, we’re making commendable progress in—’ Ba?t?rk slapped the table. ‘Commendable progress!’ he mocked. He let silence fall again, then said: ‘I don’t care what history you two have. I don’t care about turf wars or saving face. This is a crisis.’ He dropped his eyes a little, for all three of them knew that this was merely his own exercise in arse-covering, so that his earlier statement wouldn’t be proven a lie. ‘General Yilmaz helped defeat the terrorists last time it got this bad. He knows the Syrians and he fought in the Cyprus campaign. So I want you to take advantage of his experience, Iskender. Is that clear?’ ‘But we—’ ‘Is that clear?’ ‘Yes, Prime Minister.’ ‘Several of my old team are still in the service,’ Yilmaz told Aslan. ‘Perhaps I could have them seconded to you? To observe and advise only. That way we wouldn’t overstep any constitutional boundaries. And, who knows, your team may even find their new perspective helpful.’ ‘Minister?’ Iskender Aslan flushed. If he said yes and things improved, people would credit the army. If things continued or got worse, it would be because he hadn’t accepted enough help. But he had no choice. ‘Of course, Prime Minister.’ ‘Excellent,’ said Ba?t?rk, hurrying to his feet and walking Aslan to the door before he could think up some objection. ‘Thank you so much for coming by. Now I need a quick word with General Yilmaz on that other matter.’ ‘That other matter?’ frowned the Minister. ‘But I thought we’d agreed to leave it until—’ ‘Did you?’ asked Ba?t?rk politely. He closed the door on him then turned back to the General. ‘Now, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk riots.’ FIVE (#ulink_e0a97448-b719-5587-a9cc-fe3aab2503ff) I Iain walked Karin down to the hotel lobby and pointed her to a nearby shopping street, then asked at reception about overnighting a package to the UK. He’d missed his window, however, so he asked instead for directions to a computer repair store, got sent across the river along the hospital road. A grizzled shopkeeper was hauling down rusted shutters with a hooked stick, a cigarette almost sideways in his mouth, as though he’d walked into a wall. He eyed Iain gloomily, but invited him inside. The place was dimly lit, as seemed appropriate for the computer morgue it resembled, shelves crowded with innards and peripherals. It would be easiest to have the man try to recover the footage for him, but it was too risky, so he bought himself a new laptop instead, plus a screwdriver and various other tools, then returned to the hotel. Karin was still out shopping. He cleared space on the dressing table, opened up both laptops and transferred his old hard drive into the new machine. It wouldn’t boot. That, sadly, was the extent of his computer skills, so he called the office, got put through to Robyn. ‘I just heard,’ she said. ‘Poor Mustafa. I can’t believe it. He was so nice.’ ‘I didn’t know you knew him,’ said Iain. ‘I put him on our system.’ ‘Of course.’ Iain rubbed his neck wearily. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘My laptop got pretty badly banged up. I’m sure you can imagine. But there’s stuff on it I need.’ ‘What kind of stuff?’ ‘Footage.’ A moment’s silence. ‘My God. You think you got it?’ ‘It’s possible. I’d like to find out.’ ‘Overnight it to me. I’ll start on it first thing.’ ‘I missed last post,’ he told her. ‘And this needs doing fast. Can’t you talk me through it?’ ‘You’d need a new laptop.’ ‘Already got one. And I’ve tried switching drives.’ ‘No luck?’ ‘No luck.’ ‘Then you’re going to need some more equipment. And it won’t be quick. Recovery could take a day, maybe longer.’ ‘I’m only after a few video-files.’ ‘It doesn’t work like that. What we’ll have to do is we’ll have to send in a special program to copy every bit of salvageable information on your old hard drive over to your new one. Think of it as like a photographer at a crime scene. You don’t know where the vital clue might be, right, so you photograph everything. But you won’t have to stand over it or anything. The program will run by itself.’ ‘Okay. What will I need?’ ‘Get Skype if you don’t already have it. And an external web-cam too, so that I can see what you’re up to. Plus a CD-writer and some blank CDs and a—’ ‘Whoa!’ he said. ‘I need to write this down.’ He fetched a pad and pen. ‘Okay. Shoot.’ ‘An external web-cam. A CD-writer. Some blank CDs. An external hard-disk drive with as much capacity as you can get, because you’re going to be sending everything to it. Oh, and does your room have a fan?’ ‘No. Air conditioning. Why?’ ‘You’ll need to keep the disks cool. They’ll seize up otherwise. Buy two computer fans to lay on top of them. And a couple of mouse-mats, to stop them vibrating.’ ‘What about software?’ ‘I’ll email it to you. Burn it onto a CD then boot up your new laptop with it. Call me back once you’re ready.’ ‘It won’t be until morning. The shop’s closed.’ ‘Try me on my mobile if I’m not in. And don’t go yet. Maria wants a word.’ ‘Fine.’ He sagged and fought a yawn, the day’s adrenalin finally ebbing away. ‘What about?’ ‘I think there’s some issue with Mustafa’s insurance.’ ‘Oh, hell,’ he said, sitting up straight again. ‘Put her on.’ II ‘Riots, Prime Minister?’ asked General Yilmaz. ‘You know, I imagine, that the public service unions have called for a Day of Action this Friday to protest against the new wage and pension cuts.’ It was why he’d gone to the Academy that afternoon: his son’s concert was on Friday night, and so there was a chance that duty would keep Ba?t?rk from it. ‘Most of the other major unions have declared their support. And now various opposition parties have endorsed it too. There will be large marches and rallies here in Ankara and in Istanbul, and smaller ones all across the country. And they keep revising the estimates of attendees up. Because it’s not only about pensions and the economy any more. It’s about the bombs as well. People see us as ineffective. They see us as weak. So there’ll be plenty of trouble-makers out to take advantage: anarchists, Marxists, criminal gangs, everyone with a grudge or a fondness for mayhem.’ ‘Then cancel the rallies.’ ‘On what grounds? We’re supposed to be the party of the people, and the people are suffering. Deny them this opportunity to vent and it will only make things worse. Anyway, that’s not the issue right now. The issue is that, what with everything else they’re dealing with, the police are likely to be under extreme strain that day. Our friend the Minister insists that this proves how under-resourced he is, how he needs more officers. But it’s only one day, and we’re all having to make do with less.’ Yilmaz looked unhappy as he saw where this was heading. ‘My men are soldiers,’ he said. ‘They aren’t trained to police marches. You know that.’ ‘Yes. But they are trained to protect strategic sites, correct? And to provide personal protection to important figures? A great many police officers are currently employed on such duties. The Minister assures me that, if your troops were to take over various such tasks for the day, he could put enough additional officers on the streets to make the difference.’ Yilmaz frowned. ‘Are you telling me you want this done, Prime Minister? Or are you telling me that you want me to draw up contingency plans in case it needs doing?’ ‘The latter. I don’t like this any more than you do. But we need to be ready, in case.’ ‘As you wish, Prime Minister. I’ll see to it myself.’ ‘Thank you, General.’ Ba?t?rk allowed himself a wry smile. ‘If only my cabinet colleagues were as helpful as you are.’ ‘Are they not?’ ‘They want my job.’ He let out a heavy sigh. His ministers were all potential rivals, so he couldn’t talk of this to them; and he hated to worry his wife or his old friends with his woes, so he rarely got the opportunity to unburden himself. ‘Let’s face it, I only got this job because the last guy went so fast that none of the others were ready or quite strong enough to seize it for themselves. So they compromised on me as a kind of caretaker, because they knew I’d be easiest to get out later on.’ ‘I’m sure that’s not true, Prime Minister.’ ‘We’ll get on better, General, if you don’t humour or flatter me.’ Then he smiled. ‘Or not to excess, at least.’ ‘Forgive me, Prime Minister,’ said Yilmaz. ‘I find it hard with politicians to know what constitutes excess.’ Ba?t?rk laughed a little too loudly. The Chief of the General Staff made for refreshingly candid company, but he was also in mild awe of him, of his uniform and his war service, and he very much wanted him to like him. But he quickly turned serious again. ‘I’m not under any illusions, you know. I can’t fire any of my main rivals without sparking a civil war in the party. My government wouldn’t last a week. I wouldn’t last a week. I don’t have the support. Nor can I go to the people. They think I’m competent and likeable enough, but they don’t respect me, they don’t love me, they wouldn’t miss me.’ He looked up for Yilmaz’s opinion of his analysis. The General nodded fractionally. He felt himself droop a little, for it was only human to want such a bleak assessment rejected. ‘I have a few months at the most to get done the things I want done. Maybe not even that. Sometimes I think I can hear the footsteps behind me. So if you should happen to hear anything …’ ‘If I hear anything, I will of course report it to the proper authorities.’ Ba?t?rk gave a strained smile. ‘The proper authorities are the ones that scare me.’ He glanced meaningfully at the door. ‘Our recent friend is a very ambitious man. In my more suspicious moments, I can’t help but wonder if he’s not tolerating or even encouraging a certain level of disorder simply to undermine me.’ Yilmaz frowned. ‘Surely he’d only be undermining himself.’ ‘Except that in every interview he gives he insists that his problem is lack of powers and men. Yet every time we give him more of either, he uses them to bed himself further in, win himself more allies. When I think of all the information he now has access to … On each one of us.’ Yilmaz pursed his lips. Then he said: ‘You are not the only person seeking to do the best they can for the institution they are privileged to lead, Prime Minister. I don’t have to remind you of the modern history of the army in Turkey. Four coups in fifty years. Five, by some measures. Over three hundred officers and their associates recently convicted of attempting another. Those incidents have tarnished our reputation badly. Some would say disgraced it. As you know, the reason I was offered my current position – and the reason I accepted – was to make sure that nothing of that nature could ever happen again. That has to be my overriding purpose. If it should be suspected for one moment that the army was once again involved in deciding who should and shouldn’t lead Turkey, that we were taking sides …’ Ba?t?rk sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right. Of course you’re right.’ ‘But if I can find a way to help without overstepping …’ added Yilmaz. ‘Thank you.’ He shook his head despondently. ‘You don’t know what this job is like. No one does. Not until you sit at this desk for yourself.’ ‘Look on the bright side. You may not have it for much longer.’ Ba?t?rk laughed a second time, albeit more ruefully this time. ‘Thank you, General. I needed that.’ III Iain was on hold for the best part of a minute before Maria came on. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Hey yourself. What’s up?’ ‘I’ve been on with Layla. Her sister can look after her daughters, but only for one day. So I’ve booked her a return flight tomorrow. She’ll be arriving really early, but I said you’d meet her at the airport. I hope that’s okay?’ ‘Of course. What time?’ She read out flight details. He jotted them down. ‘There’s something else,’ she added, lowering her voice. ‘I didn’t tell Layla, but there seems to be an issue with Mustafa’s insurance.’ ‘So Robyn said. What?’ ‘You know how all you guys need special coverage for whenever you go on missions? Well, we changed policies for our overseas associates at the start of the year, and I’m not sure—’ ‘We did what?’ ‘We changed policies. And the new one is basically workplace only. I don’t think Mustafa’s covered.’ Iain didn’t speak for a moment. He didn’t trust himself. The work they did was nothing like as dangerous as serving in a war zone, but it was dangerous enough. Their regional client-list read like a Who’s Who of oil-and-gas oligarchs and other power-brokers, all engaged in fierce competition with each other, seeking information that they could use as leverage or even as weaponry to destroy; and although incidents of lethal violence were rare, they were far from unprecedented. ‘Was this Quentin?’ he asked finally. ‘I don’t know for sure,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But I think it must have been.’ ‘Put me through to him.’ ‘He’s left for the day.’ ‘Then put me through to his mobile.’ ‘Iain, I’m not sure that’s so wise right now, not until I’ve made sure—’ ‘I said put me fucking through.’ She gave a sigh, put him on hold. Quentin came on a few moments later, sounding as cheerful as ever, over Mustafa already. ‘This’ll have to be quick, old chap. I’m on my way to a meeting.’ ‘Is it true about the insurance?’ ‘Is what true?’ ‘That you downgraded our overseas offices all to workplace only?’ ‘Downgraded is a very loaded word,’ said Quentin. Iain could hear someone angrily tooting a horn in the background. ‘All I did was update our policies to something more appropriate to our new structure.’ ‘More appropriate,’ said Iain. ‘Cheaper, you mean.’ ‘This is a business I’m running, not a charity. Income is down. We’re only profitable at all because I clamped down on unnecessary overheads.’ ‘Unnecessary?’ exploded Iain. ‘Since when has insurance been unnecessary?’ ‘You’ve no idea how expensive those policies were.’ ‘Yes. Because this is a dangerous fucking business we’re in, particularly out in the field.’ ‘Uh, oh,’ said Quentin. ‘Tunnel.’ The phone went dead in Iain’s hand. He glared at it for a moment then made to hurl it against the wall, controlling himself only just in time. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ He looked around in surprise to see Karin in the doorway. In his distraction, he hadn’t heard the door. ‘My colleague,’ he said. ‘The one who was killed this morning. There’s a problem with his insurance.’ ‘Oh, hell. Does he have family?’ ‘A wife. Two daughters.’ ‘Oh, hell,’ she said again, coming over to touch him on his arm. ‘What will you do?’ He shook his head. He couldn’t face thinking about it tonight, not after everything else. ‘I’ll sort something out, I guess. But not right now. Right now I need something to eat. Fancy joining me?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do.’ IV It was dark by the time Georges Bejjani returned to the small fishing port of Kapisuyu. Lights on the boats and around the harbour walls reflected charmingly upon the ruffled water, while the light breeze made steel cables tinkle like wind-chimes against the masts of the pleasure boats. He walked briskly to the Dido’s berth, found his elder brother Michel waiting impatiently on deck. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded. ‘Hospital.’ ‘Hospital?’ Michel frowned over Georges’ shoulder to look for Faisal and Sami. ‘Is one of the guys hurt?’ ‘No. They’re fine. They’re parking the car.’ ‘Then why hospital?’ All his life, Georges had looked up to Michel. He was his elder brother, after all, and heir apparent to the Bejjani Group. But then Michel had let himself get played by a third-rate Mexican conman on a fictional property deal in Acapulco, losing the bank several hundred thousand dollars and making an international laughing stock of them all for a few months. The succession had thus been put in doubt, and suddenly Georges had discovered in himself an unexpected ambition. ‘Perhaps I should explain to you and Father together. No point going through it twice.’ ‘Father’s on with the executive committee. He won’t want to be disturbed unless it’s—’ ‘He’ll want to be disturbed for this. Where is he? His cabin?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but made his way along the starboard deck to his father’s suite. As Michel had indicated, he was on a conference call. He held up a finger to beg their silence for a moment then told his management team he had to go and that they’d pick it up again tomorrow. Then he rang off. ‘About time,’ he told Georges. ‘Where have you been? Why didn’t you call in?’ ‘The coverage in Antioch is terrible,’ said Georges. Which was true enough, but he’d also turned off his mobile for tactical reasons, so that he’d have the chance to present his ideas and discoveries in person. ‘Well? What have you learned?’ Georges sat in an armchair and stretched his legs out in front of him. In this world, the trick was always to look in command. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard how they’re saying the bomb was Cypriots. In which case, we don’t need to worry about it. We can leave it to the police.’ Michel sighed theatrically. ‘It’s really taken you all afternoon to work that out?’ ‘We only need to worry if it wasn’t Cypriots,’ continued Georges imperturbably. ‘We only need to worry if the bombers really were after Father. Imagine for a moment that that’s the case. We all know how hard it is to kill a well-protected target with a car bomb, even one that big.’ Every Lebanese citizen was painfully familiar with assassination techniques. ‘You can’t simply set a timer and then leave. The kill zone is small and you have to make sure your target is in it when you detonate. That means having line of sight not just on the bomb itself but on all the possible approaches too. And the only way to guarantee that is by being on the spot. Which makes it a dangerous business, because you’ll be in the danger zone yourself should it trigger early for any reason. And, if this one was meant for Father, then by definition it triggered early.’ Butros nodded thoughtfully. ‘You think the bomber was caught in his own blast?’ ‘I thought it worth exploring,’ agreed Georges. ‘So we tailed an ambulance to Antioch hospital, where they’ve taken all the victims. Then it was a matter of finding a friendly nurse willing to sell us a casualty list.’ ‘And?’ ‘One of the dead men was called Mustafa Habib,’ said Georges. ‘Executive manager of the Istanbul branch of a British company called Global Analysis. According to their website, they provide business intelligence services to multinational corporations.’ ‘Company spies,’ muttered Butros. He glanced at his elder son. ‘Are they the ones your London friends warned you about?’ ‘They only told me they’d been approached themselves,’ answered Michel. ‘They didn’t know who if anyone had been hired.’ ‘Anything else?’ Butros asked Georges. ‘Mustafa Habib wasn’t alone. He had a companion with him. This companion gave his card to a paramedic in case they should need to contact him. His name is Iain Black. He is director of Global Analysis’s Middle-Eastern operations. Which makes it all but certain they were in Daphne on a job.’ ‘A job!’ scoffed Michel. ‘They were there for us. They set that fucking bomb.’ Butros shook his head. ‘What kind of assassin takes business cards on a hit with him? What kind of assassin would then give one to a paramedic?’ ‘You’re not suggesting it was coincidence, are you?’ protested Michel. ‘I don’t believe it.’ ‘Nor me.’ He brooded a few moments before he came to his decision. ‘Michel,’ he said. ‘Get in touch with your London friends. Have them find out what they can about this man Black and his company Global Analysis. Their clients, their reputation, their range of services. But discreetly, discreetly. I don’t want them knowing we’re onto them.’ He turned back to Georges. ‘I want to talk with this man Black myself. I want to look him in the eye when I ask him what he was doing at the hotel. I want to look him in the eye when I ask him if he tried to kill me.’ ‘You’re not leaving the boat, Father,’ said Georges. ‘Not until we know what’s going on.’ ‘Then perhaps we should invite him here for lunch tomorrow.’ ‘As you wish, Father,’ said Georges. ‘But what if he says no?’ Butros smiled thinly. ‘I really wasn’t thinking of that kind of invitation,’ he said. V Iain and Karin chose a restaurant close to the hotel, too weary to explore further. They sat upstairs on an open roof terrace of polished terracotta tiles hedged by potted cypresses. Few tables were taken; the atmosphere was subdued. Every so often voices would be raised in anger, not only against the bombers, but also against the perceived feebleness of the government’s response. Everyone seemed agreed that someone new was needed to take up the fight; someone with the stomach to do whatever was necessary to restore order. And everyone seemed keen to take part in Friday’s Day of Action. They ordered beers that arrived already poured into miniature brass tankards, to protect the sensibilities of their more devout customers. They clinked them together in a dull toast then tried some small talk, but it proved hard work and Karin soon fell into an introspective silence. ‘Tell me about him,’ prompted Iain. ‘About who?’ ‘Your boss. His assistant. Whichever one it is you’re thinking of.’ Karin shook her head. ‘I really didn’t know Rick all that well.’ ‘Nathan, then. What was he like?’ ‘He was fine. He was nice. He was rich.’ She gave a sad smile. ‘I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s simply that some people have so much money it becomes part of who they are. You can’t describe them without it.’ ‘How do you mean?’ ‘I don’t know. I guess I used to think of money as something you bought stuff with. That the more money you had, the more stuff you could buy. But it’s not like that, not when you’re born into an oil dynasty, as Nathan was. At that level, it’s more like a force. Like gravity. It shapes the world and everyone bends to it, whether they want to or not.’ Iain looked curiously at her. ‘Including you?’ he asked. ‘You know us Dutch?’ she said. ‘How tolerant we are. Live and let live, all that shit? Well, my family isn’t like that. Not one bit. My parents are very Calvinist. They raised us to think a certain way: that money was slightly disgusting, that hard work should be its own reward. And so I worked hard. I studied history at Leiden. I got a good degree, good enough that I was offered the chance to go study at the University of Texas in Austin. They had an excellent programme there, right in my area. I was offered a partial scholarship too, so that at least my tuition was paid for. But it’s still an expensive business, being a student in America. I had to take on a crazy amount of debt, which my parents were not happy about, let me tell you. Anyway, I got to know Nathan while I was there, because he was the one sponsoring the programme. It was on the Homeric Question, you see, which was his thing too. And he saw how stretched I was with my studying and my bar-jobs, so he hired me as a sort of PA to help him manage his collection and deal with museums on his behalf, that kind of thing. But the work was pretty light and really it was another way for him to support my research, you know?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘So eventually I got my doctorate and then Leiden offered me a job. It wasn’t exactly what I’d wanted but it was a start, a foot in the door. For some reason, however, Nathan decided he wanted me to stay and work for him full-time. He offered me twice what Leiden were. I said no. So he offered me quadruple.’ ‘He must have thought highly of you.’ ‘Yes. But I think also he wanted to demonstrate something. I’d been so pleased at the Leiden job, you see. And my attitude towards money always amused him. The rectitude of it. All that hard work bravely done shit. This will sound awful, but I think he wanted to corrupt me a little. And he had so much money that my salary was effectively meaningless to him. Like filling a thimble from his lake. So he kept offering me more and more until finally I said yes. It was all that student debt; suddenly I could pay it off.’ She sat back in her chair as their main course arrived: succulent charred lamb kebabs garnished with yoghurt, onions, tomatoes and eye-watering peppers. ‘But the thing about a big salary is that you start taking it for granted. You think it’s what you’re worth. So instead of paying down your debt, you rent yourself a nice apartment, you lease a car, you fly home four times a year. Which was stupid, because no one else would ever have paid me half what Nathan did. I was his friend as much as his employee. I was his escort for openings and family events. It got so that people began to talk. I tried to ignore all that. I mean, Christ, he was as old as my grandmother. Literally.’ She took a deep breath, looked defiantly at Iain. ‘Last Christmas, he asked me to marry him.’ Iain nodded. He’d guessed something of the sort. ‘What did you say?’ ‘I said no. I told him I was fond of him, but not like that. He kept at it. It seemed almost like a game to him. He kept making exploratory little advances. Like he’d buy me gifts small enough that I’d have been churlish to refuse them. But then the next gift would be a little bigger, so how could I fuss about that after accepting the one before. Or he’d touch my elbow in public. Then my shoulder and my back. Or he’d tease me and call me pet names. That kind of thing. And whenever I tried to draw a line for him, he’d joke about my salary, only not altogether a joke, you know. Once you’ve grown used to a good income, the prospect of losing it is a bit like vertigo.’ ‘I can imagine.’ ‘Anyway, it got so that everyone took it for granted that we were secretly engaged. You should have seen the looks his children used to dart at me. Like they hated me.’ ‘Ah,’ said Iain. ‘That dickhead on the phone earlier.’ ‘Julian. Nathan’s eldest son. It’s hard to blame him too much. Even by his own telling, Nathan must have been a truly shitty father. He whored around until his wife finally had had enough and walked out on him, taking the kids with her. They grew up angry with him, as you can imagine; justice matters so much when you’re young. But then they grew older and realized where the money was.’ ‘So they came crawling back?’ ‘And he despised them for it, I think. Even though he’d inherited the company himself. And, God, he could be cruel. He’d get them to tell stories against themselves and against their mother, that kind of thing. Muse aloud about leaving everything to some absurd charity or other, or marrying again and starting a new family.’ ‘But now they’ll get to inherit after all,’ observed Iain. ‘No wonder Julian sounded like he was off to pop some corks. After all that worry.’ ‘Yes.’ Iain allowed himself the faintest of smiles. ‘You don’t suppose he could have been worried enough to have had his father killed, do you?’ SIX (#ulink_12140991-650c-52ea-9be9-8df5ba7a3e48) I Karin looked at Iain in consternation. ‘Have his father killed? What are you talking about?’ ‘Someone set off a bomb today,’ said Iain. ‘You said yourself the crater was directly beneath his room. Maybe it really was Cypriot reunificationists out to inflict carnage for the cause. But isn’t it possible that it was a murder made to look like terrorism? That your boss was the real target?’ ‘No.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘His children aren’t angels, but they’re not like that. They couldn’t be. Anyway, Nathan only decided to come here two weeks ago. And he didn’t tell his family until a couple of days before we left. You’d need far more time than that to set up something like this halfway across the world.’ ‘What if they had more time? What if they had weeks? Even months?’ ‘Aren’t you listening? He only decided to come two weeks ago.’ Iain reached across the table to touch the back of her hand. ‘Don’t get mad at me. I’m only speculating. I don’t know Julian and these others. I owe them nothing. But I do owe Mustafa the truth. So put yourself in the shoes of one of Nathan’s sons. He hates his father for all the shit he’s made him eat. He sees him falling for you and now he’s panicked too. Maybe he’s a gambler. Maybe he has a high-maintenance mistress. He needs his inheritance. He needs it now. So he decides to act. But getting at his father isn’t easy. Rick was his head of security, correct? Not just a bodyguard. So he obviously took his personal protection pretty damned seriously, right? Getting to him in America was sure to have been hard. And he’d likely have been near the top of the suspects list. But what if he could lure Nathan somewhere he’d be vulnerable? He’s a collector. Dangle the right piece in front of him and he’d be on the first plane. And if he was killed by some random atrocity while he was here, no one would look at it twice.’ She shook her head. ‘And all those other people? Collateral damage?’ ‘He wouldn’t necessarily have planned it that way. He could have hired a hitman and left the method up to him. It wouldn’t be the first time. Some of the gangs here are notoriously ruthless. There’s this group of ultra-nationalists called the Grey Wolves who …’ He frowned, sat back in his chair, scratched his neck thoughtfully. ‘What is it?’ she asked. Iain didn’t answer at once. There was something darkly familiar about all this, he suddenly realized: about the worsening terrorism, the hapless government response, the growing public clamour for decisive action. But surely all that belonged to Turkey’s buried past. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘A weird d?j? vu, that’s all.’ ‘What about?’ ‘I can’t really talk about it.’ She tipped her head quizzically to one side. ‘You have a past,’ she said. ‘Who doesn’t?’ ‘Tell me.’ ‘I’d rather not.’ ‘I told you mine.’ He sighed and splayed fingers on the starched white tablecloth. ‘I was in the army kind of thing for a few years.’ That made her smile. ‘The army kind of thing?’ ‘Afghan, Iraq, a bunch of other places. I saw the usual horrible things. I did the usual horrible things. It got to me. I left. Now I’m a business consultant. Nice, safe and boring, you know. All that shit well behind me. Until today. Until Mustafa.’ He shook his head. ‘Let’s not talk about it, eh? Not tonight. There must be happier topics.’ ‘Fine,’ smiled Karin. ‘You lay off Nathan’s kids, I’ll forget the army kind of thing. Deal?’ ‘Deal.’ ‘Then what do we talk about?’ ‘How about this Homeric Question of yours,’ said Iain. ‘Surely it can’t get any safer than that.’ II The drive to Nicosia was gruelling. Zehra Inzano?lu kept so far to the left-hand lane that her passenger-side wheels sporadically left the tarmac altogether and she’d bump her way over mud and loose chippings for a second or two before correcting herself, sometimes too sharply. Cars, minivans and lorries sped past in a blur of headlights, tooting resentfully at her slow crawl. She tried once to change up to third gear, but metallic harpies screeched at her from beneath the bonnet and she veered dangerously from her lane and almost side-swiped an overtaking bus whose indignant blare unnerved her all the more and turned Katerina stiff as a shop mannequin in the seat beside her. Zehra had intended to drive straight to the Professor’s house and thrash it out with him that night, but she was simply too shattered by the time they reached Nicosia’s outskirts. She therefore followed signs to her son’s neighbourhood instead then had Katerina direct her in. His apartment block was run-down and ugly, its car park a patch of deeply rutted earth. The lift wouldn’t answer repeated summons so they trudged wearily upwards with their bags instead. Zehra’s spirits sank as they climbed. How could anyone choose to live in a city? Lift doors opened and closed continuously above her. She could hear men whispering. Something wasn’t right. She called out. Footsteps came scampering down towards them; two youths in leather jackets with collars up, cans of spray-paint in their hands, their laughter now echoing up from beneath. A red plastic chair was lodged between the lift doors on her son’s floor, stopping them from closing. The landing lights were poor, the red spray-paint moist and dripping. Instantly, Zehra was swept back forty years. Then, the slurs had been aimed at her father, not her son; and in Greek, not Turkish. Yet the message was the same. And an immense gloom settled upon her, a sense of troubles not her own, yet which threatened to snare her even so. III ‘The Homeric Question,’ said Karin doubtfully. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘At least tell me what it is. Maybe I’ll be able to answer it for you. Or is that what you’re scared of? That I’ll put you out of a job.’ ‘I’m out of a job already.’ ‘Shit. Sorry. Yeah.’ He raised his empty tankard at a passing waiter to request refills. ‘But tell me anyway.’ ‘It’s not that simple,’ said Karin. ‘For a start, it’s really a series of questions rather than a single one. Who was Homer? Where was he born? When? Where did he live? How old was he when he composed his various works? Which of the places he wrote about had he visited? Who and what were his sources? Was he a woman?’ Iain laughed. ‘Really?’ ‘Really. And was there only one of her, or was it a family enterprise, passed down from parent to child?’ She sat forward in her chair as she got into her subject, her cadence quickening and her eyes brightening; and Iain could soon see exactly why Nathan had bid so fiercely for her services. Enthusiasm became harder to generate yourself as you grew older, but you could still warm yourself on the radiated enthusiasm of others. ‘Or maybe Homer was simply an honorific title, like “bard”,’ she said. ‘There are some reasons to think that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by different people, for example.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘Style. Vocabulary. Attitudes towards races. Homer praises the Phoenicians in the Iliad, for example, but then derides them in the Odyssey. And the Odyssey also pokes fun at the Iliad, which is odd if he wrote them both.’ ‘Maybe he didn’t take himself too seriously,’ said Iain. ‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘There are all kinds of explanations. That’s why people like me argue about it. But there are other questions too. More to do with the general history of the era. The ones I studied for my thesis, and which Nathan was particularly interested in.’ ‘And what are those?’ ‘How his books were even possible. You see, the Trojan War, if it really happened, which is a big debate all in itself, took place towards the end of the Late Bronze Age. Somewhere around 1200 BC, give or take. Yet the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t composed until the Early Iron Age: 800 BC at the earliest, more likely nearer to 700 BC or even later.’ It wasn’t merely enthusiasm either; it was command, authority. Iain had always had a weakness for smart women confident in their expertise. Watching Karin now, he had a sudden, vivid flashback, waking up weak and dazed to find a tall woman of angular beauty standing beside his bed in a loose white medic’s coat, frowning down at him as she jotted notes upon a clipboard. ‘So we’ve got this gap of around four hundred years to explain,’ Karin was saying. ‘And not any old years. There was a terrible dark age between the Late Bronze and the Early Iron. Do you know about this?’ He’d collapsed, apparently. On a flight back from Pakistan. And, because he’d been delirious with some strange fever, and thus liable to say something indiscreet about his mission, they’d summoned a specialist in exotic diseases with an appropriate level of clearance. ‘Assume I know nothing,’ he told Karin. ‘You can’t go far wrong that way.’ ‘Okay. Then this is one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. During the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, the eastern Mediterranean was reasonably stable. Roughly speaking, Greece and the Aegean were ruled by a loose confederation of Mycenaean kings; the Hittites ran Turkey; the New Kingdom Pharaohs had Egypt and Israel; and the Assyrians ran Syria, Iraq and Iran. Then something terrible happened. The trouble is, we don’t know what. Archaeologists call it the Catastrophe, but mainly that’s because it sounds cool and what else can you call it? But, whatever it was, it scared the shit out of people.’ Her name had been Tisha Morgan. A professor of microbiology brought in from her London research institute to diagnose his condition, then cure him of it. Scrawny, Mustafa had called her. And maybe so. But what Iain had mostly noticed about her at the time was how fully she’d committed herself to his cause. It was why she’d gone into research, she’d later confided to him; because she’d been prone to get too attached to her wards, and therefore took it too hard when she lost them. ‘How can you tell?’ ‘By excavating old cities like Tiryns and Mycenae,’ explained Karin. ‘They massively strengthened their fortifications. They built huge storerooms and dug deep wells or secret underground passages to nearby springs. All classic signs that they feared something bad. But it did them no good. They pretty much all got sacked and burned. And this wasn’t only in Greece. Same thing across the whole eastern Med, from the Hittites here in Turkey all the way down to Egypt. And no one knows what or who or why.’ With Tisha’s help, he’d soon overcome his fever. Getting over her, however, had proved somewhat harder. After his discharge from hospital, he’d fought the urge to go see her, telling himself he was being stupid, that there was no way they could fit into each other’s lives, that there were plenty of other women out there. But he couldn’t shake the feeling and finally he’d succumbed. He’d visited her at her institute. They’d taken coffee together in a nearby caf?. The next day too. On both occasions, she’d mentioned her surgeon boyfriend about once every minute, in that half-conscious way people touch a lucky charm in times of stress. But it had done her little good. ‘You must have some idea,’ he said. ‘I mean, didn’t the Greeks invent history? Surely they had something to say about it?’ ‘Not as much as you’d think,’ said Karin. ‘They kind of glossed over it, skipping straight from the age of heroes to the archaic age, despite the centuries in between. But then they weren’t very good with chronology. There are hints of a mysterious tribe called the Dorians invading from the north of Greece, setting off a cascade of displaced people in which each went pillaging the next. A lot of people think that the Trojan War was part of it. And maybe the Odyssey too. There’s a bit in there that seems to describe a famous battle fought by the Egyptians against invaders known as the Sea Peoples. Trouble is, there’s no real evidence of these Dorians, or of any new arrivals. The opposite, if anything.’ Their marriage had lasted three wonderful years. He’d become a father, which had changed him in ways he’d never have imagined possible. He’d been inside Iran when this idyll had abruptly ended, courtesy of an overworked truck driver on a damp and foggy night. The importance of his mission and the difficulty of exfiltration had persuaded his handler neither to inform him nor to pull him out early. It had been the correct tactical decision, the decision he’d probably have made himself had the roles been switched, yet it had been a betrayal all the same. And though he’d returned to active service afterwards, in an effort to slough off his encasing grief, his heart had never again been in it. He’d begun to cast a jaundiced eye not merely at the fine expressions of intent behind his missions, but at the consequences of them too. And he’d grown to hate the things he’d seen. His own bereavement, to put it crudely, had sapped his will to maim and kill. And so he’d quit. ‘You see, what’s so remarkable is how little changed. Three to four hundred years of absolute turmoil, yet the Greek world emerged from it still recognizably Greek. The Hittites were succeeded by neo-Hittites, the Phoenicians by more Phoenicians, the New Kingdom Pharaohs by Late Period Pharaohs, the Assyrians by neo-Assyrians. All still in the same places, worshipping the same gods, speaking much the same languages, crafting the same kinds of goods with the same materials and techniques. So maybe a terrible region-wide famine caused a bunch of local resource wars; except we can find precious little evidence for that either. Earthquakes, then, except that earthquakes simply don’t happen on that scale. They may take out an island or a province, but not the whole Mediterranean.’ Life after the army had proved hard for Iain. Without Tisha and Robbie to give him purpose, a dreadful lassitude had set in. He’d lain on his sofa, drinking beer, watching daytime TV, loathing himself for not having been there when his family had most needed him, sinking into the downward spiral that had claimed so many of his former comrades, half of whom now seemed to be Born Again, while the other half were drunks. A long, hard look in the mirror one hung-over morning had finally jolted him into action. He’d cut out the booze, got himself fit, sent his CV to anyone in the market for his particular skills, eventually joining Global Analysis. And time had done its usual healing. These past few months, in fact, he’d finally begun to feel better about the world. Like glimpses of blue sky on a dull day, an unfamiliar sensation would sometimes spread right through him, and he’d realize to his mild surprise that it was happiness. Yet, in one way, he hadn’t moved on at all. Despite the efforts of well-meaning friends to fix him up, the few dates he’d been on since Tisha had had all the spark of a wet match struck against a wet box; so that tonight was the first time in years that he’d felt even the possibility of flame. ‘How about a tsunami?’ he suggested. ‘Maybe,’ nodded Karin. ‘Except much of the destruction happened inland; and, afterwards, people settled on the coast, which you’d hardly do if you were scared of tidal waves. Besides, these cities were burned. I know you might expect earthquakes to knock over candles and oil lamps and so start fires, but actually it doesn’t work that way because—’ She broke off, however, looked around. They’d been talking so long that the restaurant was empty, except for staff leaning wearily against the walls, waiting to close up for the night. ‘We should go,’ she said. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘We should.’ SEVEN (#ulink_e9d8c947-c9f4-5359-9293-569a0ee5e99a) I It made for a long day, wondering whether you’d killed one person, five people, fifty. But, once Asena and Hakan had found themselves caught between police roadblocks, they’d had no alternative but to hole up in a tumbledown farmer’s hut and wait them out. The roadblock had lasted only a couple of hours beyond nightfall. No stamina, these rural police. They’d got back on her Kawasaki and headed on their way. A first drizzle at the forest fringes quickly turned into a downpour that made the track treacherous with mud and puddles and sodden leaf litter. With Asena’s rear tyre a little bald, and Hakan riding pillion, it kept sliding out of her control, so that they both kept having to thrust out their feet to stay upright. But they arrived at last at the lair of the Grey Wolves, eight large wooden huts hidden from spy planes and satellites by thick camouflage nets. She drove past the armoury, gave the engine a final roar as she pulled up between the horse-box and the other trucks, enough to bring Bulent, U?ur, ??kr?, Oguzhan and various others out of their cabins, most holding waterproofs above their heads. ‘Well?’ she asked, embracing them briskly in turn. ‘What news?’ ‘A success,’ nodded Bulent, but soberly. Asena felt a twinge. Success was such a loaded term for operations like these. ‘How many?’ she asked. ‘Thirty-one so far,’ said U?ur. ‘Thirty-one and counting.’ ‘Thirty-one?’ protested Hakan, appalled. ‘But you promised me we’d—’ ‘That was a bomb we set off today,’ said Asena sharply, before he could finish. ‘Not a fucking hand-grenade.’ ‘I know. But—’ ‘One, two, ten, a hundred?’ snapped Asena. ‘What does it really matter? This is a war we’re fighting. A war for the soul of our nation. Or have you forgotten?’ She glared around at them all, daring one of them to challenge her authority. No one did. She stalked into the main cabin, poured two fingers of raki into a glass then splashed in water to turn it cloudy. Lion’s milk, they called it: aslan suku. She held it up as if in a toast then knocked it back and poured herself another. She could hear Hakan muttering with the others outside, but right now she didn’t care. Let them grumble if they must. As long as they obeyed. The glass casings of the oil lamps, blackened with soot, threw eerie shadows on the wooden walls. These cabins were fitted with electric lights, but they only used their generator once a day, to recharge batteries and put a chill on the deep freeze. She rinsed her plate, poured herself a third glass of lion’s milk. The rain had stopped, but still drip-dripped rhythmically from the eaves. Wolves howled in the distance. They were in good voice tonight. Usually the sound cheered her with its hint of camara-derie, as if some higher power was letting her know the justice of her cause. But tonight it merely made her feel all the more alone. The Lion and the Wolf. The milk wasn’t going to be enough. She needed to talk to the man himself. She needed his assurance that those thirty-one lives and counting had been necessary. She went to her room, set up her satellite phone, pinged out an encrypted message. Ten minutes dragged by. Nothing happened. His job kept him absurdly busy and he had to be extravagantly careful about how and when he contacted her. She understood this intellectually yet she resented it all the same. The things she was doing for him, he should find the time. Today, of all days, he should find the— Her screen blinked. A black box appeared. In the box, his face, grey-lit and jerky and craggy, yet so handsome withal that he still had the power to lift her heart. ‘My love,’ she said. ‘What is it?’ he asked, glancing at his watch. His brusqueness hurt her. ‘I only wanted to know if today went as you’d hoped,’ she said. ‘And if there were any ramifications we needed to know about.’ ‘Today went as hoped. There are no ramifications you need to know about. I’ll notify you through the usual channels if that should change.’ ‘Only you never said this morning what it was we—’ ‘It had to be done,’ he said. ‘That’s all you need to know.’ ‘Thirty-one people,’ she said. ‘Thirty-one and counting.’ ‘It was necessary.’ ‘So you said. But why?’ ‘I can’t tell you.’ He looked uncomfortable for the first time. ‘Please trust me.’ She shook her head, but only because she was unhappy. ‘I hate this,’ she said. ‘I want it to be over.’ ‘It won’t be much longer,’ he said. ‘A few months at the very most and then we’ll be together forever, with everything we’ve worked for. Our nation will be free again. And your father too, don’t forget.’ He checked his watch again. ‘But right now I have to go.’ He softened the message with a smile. ‘You may have heard that a bomb went off today.’ ‘Call me tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If I can.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Call me tomorrow.’ He nodded seriously. ‘As you wish.’ She reached out and touched his cheek upon her screen. ‘The Lion and the Wolf,’ she said. He nodded and touched his own screen. ‘The Lion and the Wolf.’ II Somehow, during the course of their meal, sharing a room with Karin had become an issue for Iain to manage. They fell into a slightly awkward silence on their way back to the hotel. Their footsteps synchronized on the pavement, that heel-and-toe cadence that sounds weirdly like heartbeats. The receptionist gave a curious frown as she wished them good night, and the lift seemed a bit more cramped than it had while coming down earlier. He let Karin into the room ahead of him, the better to follow her cues. She invited him to use the bathroom first. He did so. When it came to her turn, he heard the toilet flushing, the running of a tap, the vigorous brushing of her teeth. She came out wearing his olive T-shirt, its hem hanging loose around her thighs like some skimpy miniskirt. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Never looks like that on me.’ ‘The lights,’ she said. He switched them off. She slipped beneath her duvet. The room was on the hotel’s top floor and had a sloped skylight in place of a window. The weak moonlight and the white net curtain that drooped across it meant that all he could see was various gradations of darkness. He turned onto his side to face her, propped himself up on an elbow. ‘So you were telling me about earthquakes,’ he said. ‘How they don’t cause fires like you’d expect.’ ‘Wasn’t I boring you?’ ‘Are you kidding? I’ll never get to sleep until I know.’ He heard her laughter, then rustling as she too turned onto her side. Strange to think that they were facing each other a few feet apart, yet blind. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘These places were mostly built of stone. Their citadels, at least. Even if an oil lamp tipped over, there was nothing to catch fire, certainly not enough to spread. Sometimes a conquering army would want to burn a city as punishment, or to send out a message, but actually it was a real production. They had to cut down nearby forests and drag the trees into the city then spread them around the houses before it would catch. A lot of work, especially when you consider a city was a valuable thing. Even if you didn’t want to live there yourself, you could squeeze the citizens for tribute. So why burn it? Yet we have numerous examples.’ ‘A game of tit for tat?’ he suggested. ‘Only it got out of hand.’ ‘That’s one theory,’ she agreed. ‘But these places are scattered all over the place, so it’s hard to fit them to a pattern. Usually, in history, you can build a narrative that makes some kind of sense. It may be wrong, but it helps you think about it until something better comes along. Not with this. And, even if it did, it still wouldn’t explain how brutal the Dark Ages were. Everything collapsed. Cities were abandoned, and not only the burned ones. There was a massive depopulation. In some places, the lack of archaeological remains suggest that populations fell by ninety per cent or more. Ninety per cent! And this lasted twenty generations, give or take. Think about that: How much do you know about your family twenty generations ago? Especially as this wasn’t normal, settled life, but nomadic scavenging and hard-scrabble farming under constant threat of raiders stealing your winter stores. Yet somehow, at the end of it, Homer managed to depict the Trojan War almost as though he’d been there.’ ‘I thought you said the Trojan War may not even have happened.’ ‘Yes. But the world in which it was set existed. He knows the names of Mycenaean kingdoms that no longer existed. He depicts their armour and weaponry, their ships, tactics, gods, rituals, terrain and burial customs. He’s not perfect, sure, and there’s plenty of later stuff mixed in, but he’s still far more accurate than he had any right to be. How?’ The room was as dark as before, yet suddenly he glimpsed something like movement in the darkness, almost as if Karin were reaching out her hand to him across the narrow aisle. He reached out, curious, to check; but it proved a mirage. Nothing but empty space. ‘And that’s the Homeric Question?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s the Homeric Question.’ EIGHT (#ulink_14b4ed35-6d54-5f31-9127-6b6912d5469d) I Iain slept poorly that night. It had been a while since he’d shared a bedroom, and he found himself vaguely unsettled by Karin’s proximity, her breathing, the occasional rustle of her bedclothes. But his restlessness had other causes too. Twinges in his ribs each time he shifted reminded him of the battering he’d taken from the rest-room door. Unhappy thoughts of Mustafa and the day’s other victims interwoven with older memories of similar scenes in different places. And, underlying it all, the fear of oversleeping, of being late for Layla. It was almost a relief, therefore, when it neared time for him to get up. He turned off his alarm-clock in anticipation so that Karin could sleep on. He rose, washed and dressed as quietly as he could, then wrote her a note to assure her she was welcome to stay on as long as it took to sort herself out. The sky was milky with dawn, the roads so empty that he reached Hatay Airport in barely twenty minutes. The terminal seemed disconcertingly normal, as though yesterday’s carnage had never happened. Layla was on the first flight in. He met her by the gate. Her eyes were raw from weeping and she cried again when she saw him waiting. He put his arms around her and murmured what small comforts he could think of until she’d composed herself again. They were silent on the drive in. Layla was lost in private thoughts and he couldn’t think of anything to say. The hospital was an ugly green block on Antioch’s western fringe. He parked in an adjacent street and led her inside. They asked directions to the morgue, an unmarked low grey building standing all by itself. Layla took his arm to stop him before they went in. ‘Was yesterday anything to do with you?’ she asked. ‘With your work, I mean?’ ‘They’re saying it was Cypriots.’ ‘I know what they’re saying. That’s not what I’m asking.’ Iain sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘Not for certain.’ ‘It’s possible, then?’ ‘Yes. It’s possible.’ ‘Find out. I need to know.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Thank you.’ She opened the morgue door then stood there blocking him for a few moments, her head down, as if debating with herself whether to speak or not. ‘When we were on the phone yesterday,’ she said, at last, ‘suddenly you weren’t there any more.’ ‘I lost coverage. The masts were overloaded.’ ‘Yes. I thought that was it. But you didn’t call back. I waited and waited and you didn’t call back.’ ‘I told you,’ said Iain. ‘I’d lost coverage.’ ‘You called Maria,’ she said. ‘You asked her to get in touch with me. How did you manage that without coverage?’ She waited for him to answer, but he looked helplessly at her. ‘There’s no need to wait,’ she told him. ‘I can take a taxi back to the airport when I’m done.’ ‘It’s no trouble,’ he said. But Layla shook her head. ‘I’ll take a taxi,’ she said. II The reports on Global Analysis and Iain Black had arrived from London during the night. Michel Bejjani printed out copies for his father and brother to digest along with their breakfast. He handed Georges his with a certain satisfaction then scooped up a generous dollop of tahini with a strip of pita bread and gestured for some coffee. Until recently, there’d been no question about his and Georges’ respective futures within the Bejjani Group. Michel didn’t just have seniority, a Cambridge degree and a Harvard MBA, he also had the look, temperament and connections of a top international financier. All Georges had, by contrast, was a certain innate shrewdness and a bullish forcefulness that together suited him perfectly for security and the like. It was humiliating, therefore, that there was any question about the succession, but his father had the old-fashioned attitude that a company leader should be able to handle all aspects of the business. That was why Michel had been on the lookout for a way to dent Georges’ reputation in such matters; and this man Black was his opportunity. The report on Global Analysis was extensive. It included its latest balance sheet and accounts, its scope of operations, key clients and an executive summary that portrayed a company with a once-stellar reputation now hit by rumours of cash-flow problems, perhaps on account of an ill-fated joint venture between the founder-owner Quentin Oliver and a shady Uzbek oligarch. The report on Iain Black was even more detailed. By happy chance, Black had sent his CV to all the leading business intelligence companies a couple of years before, including RGS, the agency the Bejjanis sometimes used. Black had ultimately opted to join Global Analysis, but in the meantime RGS had been interested enough to commission a head-hunter’s report, which they’d kept on file. It included eight photographs of him, both by himself and in company. They showed a tall, powerfully built man in his early thirties; and with a certain presence, to judge from the way other people arrayed themselves around him. His British father and Jordanian mother had met while working on a pipeline project outside Amman. They’d later worked together on similar projects in Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and elsewhere, giving Black a suite of useful languages, a comfort with exotic places and – thanks to his mother’s genes – a valuable ability to pass for native in most Middle-Eastern countries. Back in England for his teens, joining the army out of school, serving with distinction in Afghanistan and Iraq. But then suddenly his file went dark. His records for his last seven years were classified, and the head-hunters had had to make do with unconfirmed reports of secondment to a shadowy military intelligence unit running special ops across the region, from Pakistan to Iran, Somalia and Libya. Michel watched with satisfaction his father’s eyebrows rising as he read, and the finger Georges tugged inside his collar. He didn’t wait for them to finish, therefore, but said instead: ‘We need to call this morning off. It’s not fair to expect Georges to take on a man like this.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ scowled Georges. Michel turned to Butros. ‘I’m the first to acknowledge what a fine job Georges does running security, Father. But we need to be realistic. We’re bankers, not men of war.’ ‘This is ridiculous,’ said Georges. ‘He’s one man. I’ll have Sami and Faisal and the whole crew with me. We can take him easily, I assure you.’ Their father held up a finger for silence. He thought for half a minute or so then turned to Georges. ‘Your brother is right,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a job for you.’ ‘But, Father—’ ‘This is a job for him.’ Michel’s smile grew a little strained. ‘With respect, Father, that wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was—’ ‘I know what you meant. But you’ve been assuring me that Mexico was a one-off. It’s time for you to prove that.’ Silence fell. It was Georges’ turn to smile. Michel felt a sudden unwelcome squishing in his gut, but he knew better than to let it show. ‘And so I will, Father,’ he said. ‘And so I will.’ III Zehra rose early to prepare a light breakfast for herself and Katerina. After last night’s harrowing drive, not all the demons in hell would ever get her back behind the wheel of her son’s car, so she had Katerina show her the way across the park to her school. She said goodbye to her at the gates and promised to meet her there again that afternoon. It was a promise she had no intention of keeping. A bus to the Old City, then on foot to a small enclave of handsome whitewashed homes just inside its walls. Two policemen were on duty outside the Professor’s house. She hesitated but then steeled herself. ‘I’m here to see Metin Volkan,’ she told them. A scar from upper lip to left nostril made the nearer policeman seem to sneer. Or maybe he really was sneering. ‘And you are?’ ‘Zehra Inzano?lu.’ ‘And what are you to him? His cleaner? His lover?’ She ignored their laughter. ‘We were children together.’ ‘That was a while ago, I’m guessing.’ He took her bag, rummaged through it, holding individual items up for mockery before thrusting the whole thing back at her. ‘Go on in, then,’ said his companion, opening the door for her. ‘You’ll find your sweetheart in his study.’ Zehra didn’t know where that was, but she wasn’t about to ask. She opened doors at random, therefore, until she found him at a desk in a brightly lit, book-lined room, making notes in green biro upon a sheaf of stapled papers. Professor Metin Volkan, formerly a noted historian but now best-known as leader of One Cyprus, the political party he’d founded to press for reunification of the island. He looked up irritably from his work but sprang to his feet the moment he recognized her, hurried around to greet her. ‘My dear Zehra,’ he said. ‘How good to see you. But what are you doing here?’ ‘My son came to visit me yesterday,’ she told him, launching into the speech she’d rehearsed on her way here. ‘Before they arrested him. He asked me to look after his daughter. But it’s impossible, I can’t, I’m too old. She needs to be here, near her school, near her friends.’ She thrust out her jaw. ‘You’ll have to look after her for me.’ ‘Me?’ ‘Yes. You.’ He looked at her as though she were crazy. ‘What do I know about looking after a schoolgirl, Zehra? And did you really not notice those policemen at my door? I’m under effective house arrest. It’ll be a miracle if I’m not under full arrest in the next few days. The moment they find anything on me, anything at all … Anyway, she’s your granddaughter, not mine.’ He shook his head in bafflement. ‘What happened to you, Zehra? You used to be so kind.’ ‘She’s one of them,’ spat Zehra. ‘One of them?’ frowned the Professor. ‘Yes,’ insisted Zehra. ‘One of them. A Greek. Like her mother. That whore you introduced to my son. So this is your fault. Your fault, your responsibility.’ She folded her arms emphatically, as if her position was unarguable. Volkan nodded. ‘I’m sorry about what happened between you and your son. I truly am. But it wasn’t my fault. Nor was it even your son’s. All he ever did was fall in love.’ ‘Then whose fault was it?’ demanded Zehra. ‘Yours.’ She looked incredulously at him. ‘Mine?’ ‘Yours and your husband’s.’ ‘Those monsters raped and murdered my sister,’ she said furiously. ‘They broke my father’s legs and they stole our home and land and everything we’d ever owned. We had to run for our lives. We had to take refuge in a concentration camp. You had to take refuge there too, in case you’ve forgotten. And now you’re telling me that it was my fault?’ ‘Athena did all those terrible things to you? Remarkable, considering she hadn’t even been born at the time.’ ‘Not her. Her kind.’ ‘Her kind!’ he retorted. ‘So all Greek Cypriots are accountable for the sins of those few, are they? Even the ones who weren’t yet born back then? Does that work both ways, I wonder? Did you know that Athena’s family came originally from Kyrenia? That they were refugees themselves, only in the opposite direction, fleeing from us? Do you have any idea how many hundreds of them vanished during that time? And did you know her own uncle was one of them? That he was photographed surrendering to Turkish troops yet he was never seen again?’ ‘Good,’ snapped Zehra. ‘I’m glad.’ Volkan didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t need to. Her cheeks grew hot all by themselves. ‘They started it,’ she said weakly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They did. But before they started it, we started it. And before we started it that time, they’d started it once before. Go back to the beginning of time and you’ll never run out of other people starting it. So the question isn’t who started it. The question is who can finish it.’ ‘You?’ scoffed Zehra. ‘No,’ said Volkan. ‘Not me. Your son, perhaps. More likely your granddaughter.’ ‘Don’t call her that.’ ‘Your flesh, Zehra. Your blood.’ ‘I’m too old,’ she said. ‘I don’t live here. I made a vow to my husband …’ She faltered at the feebleness of her own protests. ‘What am I to do?’ she asked plaintively. But it was an admission of defeat. He put a hand upon her arm. ‘It may not be for long. With luck they’ll release your son soon enough.’ ‘With luck?’ ‘We have good lawyers,’ he said. ‘They’re working hard on his case. On everyone’s cases. But you have to understand what’s going on here. These arrests have nothing to do with investigating the bomb or capturing the real culprits. They’re all about reassuring the Turkish people that the police are active, that they’re making progress, and most importantly that they’re making life miserable for people like us. To release your son and the others now would be to admit that they have nothing, and they can’t do that, not without risking an outcry.’ She gave a long sigh. She knew the truth of this. It was how life was. ‘And you swear that neither you nor my son had anything to do with the bombings?’ Volkan shook his head. ‘How could you even ask such a thing? We make a lot of noise, your son and I, because we want desperately for Cyprus to be one island again, independent of Turkey, Greece and Britain, and ruled by its own citizenry under its own constitution. But we reject utterly the use of violence.’ ‘I still want your word,’ she insisted. ‘I want your word that you know nothing about it.’ ‘I give you my word,’ said Volkan. But there was just a hint of something else in his voice: of hesitation, of doubt. And they both heard it. And, to judge from his expression, it seemed he was every bit as taken aback as she was. NINE (#ulink_de306b2d-194d-5e55-b147-c8f31270b3c9) I Antioch was slowly rousing itself from its slumbers as Iain headed back in from the hospital. Perhaps that was why the countless minarets looked, from this vantage point, so like the nails in a fakir’s bed. For all the city’s rich pre-Islamic history, few traces of it were left. An early Christian church on its northern fringe; and, a little further out, a single pillar of giant stones and crumbling mortar rose from the foot of a precipitous gorge to hint at the one-time vastness of its ancient walls. But now, like so many modern Turkish cities, it was all office blocks and apartment buildings painted in sickly sweet pastels, like some Soviet suburb with a Miami makeover. Last night’s computer shop wasn’t yet open. He parked and wandered for a while. It was between seasons right now. The chilly wind that swept down from the snowcapped mountains to the city’s north-west was countered by the warmth of the morning sun. Men in sweaters and thick jackets polished shoes beneath colourful sunshades. Hawkers flogging winter snacks set up next to others selling iced drinks. Men in mirror shades, stubble and fat-collared shirts stood in small clusters on street corners. He walked an accidental gauntlet of shopkeepers sluicing down their pavements, passed through an alley of shabby workshops where two mechanics fought like emergency-room doctors to bring an ancient jalopy back to life. Children waged hose-pipe wars beneath cat’s cradles of electric and telephone wires, while laundry flapped like indulgent parents on the overlooking balconies. The shutters were finally up when Iain returned to the computer shop. The owner was in boisterous spirits this morning, greeting him like a long-lost friend and insisting he share his pot of spiced tea. They chatted of football as they drank, then Iain passed him Robyn’s list and he put together a box for him. Karin was up and gone by the time he returned to the hotel. She’d left her things in his room, he saw, along with a note to tell him she was off to Daphne in search of her consul but hoped to see him later. He hung out his ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, bolted the door, cleared the dressing table and laid out his new gear. He downloaded Robyn’s software, cut it onto a CD, rebooted his laptop, then called her on her mobile. ‘I’m ready,’ he told her. ‘Now what?’ She talked him through the set up, had him start recovery. ‘Let it do its thing,’ she told him. ‘Check it from time to time. If it freezes, give me a call.’ He thanked her and rang off. He watched it for a while, but he soon tired of that. He felt restless and a little hungry. The hotel would have stopped serving breakfast by now, but he was in the mood to stretch his legs anyway. A caf? at the top of town, a selection of newspapers for the latest on the blast. He wrote admonitions in English and Turkish to leave the computer equipment alone, and placed them so they couldn’t be missed. Then he made up both beds, left the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the doorknob and headed on his way. II Michel Bejjani and his team had been in position for a couple of hours before Iain Black finally re-emerged from his hotel. Michel, sitting in the caf? across the street, looked away at once lest he be spotted himself, then gave a surreptitious nod to Faisal across the backgammon board, and to Sami and Ali who were sharing a water-pipe at a nearby table. He cupped a hand over his earpiece to cut down on the caf?’s ambient noise then murmured into his microphone hidden beneath his collar: ‘That’s him now.’ ‘Got him,’ said Yacoub, who was with Josef in the first SUV, parked a short distance up the road. ‘Me too,’ confirmed Kahlil, with Sayed, in the second. Black paused on the front steps. He took out his phone, chose a number, made a call. He began chatting cheerfully away then crossed the road and walked obliviously straight past them. The moment he was out of sight, Michel checked to make sure his taser and GPS transmitter were both on, then got to his feet and gestured for the others to follow him. Acapulco had been an aberration, an uncharacteristic lapse of concentration. He was every bit as capable of running this kind of operation as Georges, should the need arise. It was time to prove that to his father. III ‘We had nothing to do with yesterday’s bomb,’ Professor Metin Volkan assured Zehra. ‘With any of the bombs. I swear this to you on everything I hold dear. I started One Cyprus because I believe passionately that reunification offers the best future for the people of this island. But it only works if there is peace and trust. And you can’t achieve peace and trust with bombs, no matter who you target.’ ‘But …?’ asked Zehra. A grimace, a little flicker of the eyes. ‘When you asked your question a moment ago, it reminded me of something, that’s all. Of someone. A man. He came to one of our rallies. To two of them, actually, though we only spoke once.’ ‘Where?’ ‘In Famagusta. Both times in Famagusta. You know the Eastern Mediterranean University? In a lecture hall there. That was one reason he stood out. He was much older than the other students. Not that there were so many of them, mind you. What with the bombs starting to go off, and people thinking we had something to do with them.’ ‘This man,’ prompted Zehra. ‘Yes. He stood to one side and watched. Very still, very quiet, very intense. He spooked me a little, if I’m honest.’ He nodded towards his front door to indicate the two policemen outside, the power structure they represented. ‘I assumed he was one of them, there to take names, scare people off, find things to use against us. But nothing came of it so I forgot about him. Until he showed up at our next Famagusta rally too. This was maybe three or four weeks ago. There’d been another bomb by then, the worst until yesterday’s, so that even fewer people were there, for all that we denounced the bombings furiously at every opportunity we got. Anyway, he came to talk to me afterwards.’ ‘And?’ ‘He asked me the same question you did. And he asked me to give him my word too. That’s what made me think of him. I told him what I told you: that we were men of peace who deplored the use of violence; and, moreover, that our involvement in a bombing campaign wouldn’t merely be vile, it would be stupid too, because he could see for himself how people were turning against our cause. He didn’t seem surprised. It was more like it was confirmation of bad news, like a second opinion of cancer. I asked him what was going on. I told him that if he knew anything he had to go to the police. He said he knew nothing, he simply wanted to make sure he could trust us before contributing. He asked me what we needed. I didn’t want him around the campaign, if I’m honest, so I told him we needed money. He promised to see what he could do. That’s all, I swear. I haven’t seen or heard from him since.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/will-adams/city-of-the-lost/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.