The Istanbul Puzzle
Laurence O’Bryan
Sean Chancellor is shocked to learn that his colleague and friend Alex Zegliwski has been savagely beheaded. His body found in an underground archaeological dig, hidden beneath the holy temple of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.When Sean arrives in the ancient city to identify the body, he is handed an envelope of photographs belonging to Alek and soon finds himself in grave danger. Someone wants him dead but why?Aided by British diplomat Isabel Sharp, Sean begins to unravel the mystery of the mosaics in the photographs and inch closer to snaring Alek’s assassin. Evil is at work and when a lethal virus is unleashed on the city, panic spreads fast. Time is running out for Sean and Isabel. They must catch the killer before it’s too late.
The Istanbul Puzzle
Laurence O’Bryan
Copyright
Avon
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011
Copyright © Laurence O’Bryan 2011
Laurence O’Bryan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9781847562883
Ebook Edition © August 2013 ISBN: 9780007453269
Version: 2018-07-23
Dedication (#ulink_a8acd932-16d1-5b7b-9656-547c7642201b)
‘We may our ends, by our beginnings know.’
JOHN DENHAM, 1615–69
Contents
Title Page (#u1fb69d7a-02a2-5eba-9d76-a0833cb2ccf5)
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Epilogue
A day in old Istanbul
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b63dec64-cda6-5a6a-8ae4-eb918a3ae7f4)
Icy sweat streamed from Alek’s pores. He’d been optimistic. Way too optimistic. Kidnapping in the Islamic world was almost always a form of extortion – so he’d been told. But the appearance of the knife, big enough to gut a bear, had changed everything.
He shook his head in disbelief. Only an hour ago he’d been happy in his hotel room, a place that was now as unreachable as a childhood dream.
His heart banged against his ribs as if it wanted out. He looked around. Was there someone else in the pillared hall he could appeal to?
The bead like eye of the video camera blinked on. Alek’s arms and legs jerked, straining at the orange nylon rope binding him to the smooth pillar. Musty air filled his nostrils. He was trembling, as if he had a fever.
When the two men had entered his room, he’d gone with them quietly. How stupid he’d been. Why hadn’t he shouted, roared, jumped for the window? He’d seen the look in this bastard’s eyes, as hard as stone. Now it was too late.
‘Let me go,’ he screamed.
His voice echoed. A hand held his shoulder. He threw his head from side to side, straining his neck. The rope around his ankles, knees and chest held him tight. His pulse thumped against it.
The knife glistened in the air like falling water. Only the prayer his mother had taught him could help him now.
Agios o Theos, agios ischyros, agios athanatos, eleison imas!
Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Immortal, have mercy on us!
He closed his eyes. Iciness hit his neck. Then a hot torrent fell on his chest. Warmth gushed down his legs, soaking him. A foul smell rose around him.
An eerie calm descended.
He looked around the ancient hall, taking in its forest like rows of pillars. The entrance he’d found must have been sealed up over five hundred years ago, before the ancient city of Constantinople above him fell to a Muslim army and its name was changed to Istanbul. There were treasures down here any museum director in the world would beg for. But he wished he’d never found the place.
He stared at the aluminium tables nearby. What he’d seen on those tables had terrified him.
A black mist rushed towards him. Would Sean find out what had happened?
Agios o Theos, agios …
A minute later the two fountains of blood, two foot high at their peak, from the left and right arteries emerging from Alek’s chest, bubbled like cooling coffee percolators. The flesh around them shone with a silky gleam. But Alek’s eyes were closed and his face was peaceful.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_1d4d0eab-1201-5c39-ac60-336bda4495d4)
Glass fell into the street. The four-storey frontage of the new American electronics store was collapsing. An animal rumble passed under me. Alarms sprang to life in a chorus.
I’d been on my way home. It was a Friday night in August. London was hot, sticky. I’d been crossing Oxford Street when I stopped, mid step.
Coming towards me, that glass behind them, was a mass of fists, hooded faces, rage. Every muscle tightened inside me. Was the city going up in flames again?
I saw an entrance to a brick-lined alley, broke into a jog. A girl with a pink afro, white stilettos and a lime green tube top was standing in the middle of the street, her mouth open, her arms at her side. I veered towards her.
‘Come on,’ I shouted.
She looked at me as if I was a ghost, but came with me. I didn’t have to turn my head to know the mob was almost on us. We barely made it. We turned together and watched them pass. For one frozen moment I thought they might turn on us, that I’d have to defend my new friend. But they moved on, chanting a drum-beat rhythm of slogans I could barely understand. That’s a sound I’ll never forget. Because this lot weren’t just looting. These bastards had found a cause.
Some of them glared at us as they passed, but luckily we weren’t their target. They were after symbols of their oppression. And they were out of their heads on it. After they were all gone, my pink-haired friend shuddered, then ran off.
Screaming alarm bells and broken windows were the most obvious signs of the mob’s passing, along with a whiff of danger. Was a police raid on a mosque worth all this?
I caught sight of a woman in a tiny leather jacket on the other side of the street. Her face was turned away from me. She was running. My vision tunnelled.
‘Irene!’ I said, softly. My legs started towards her. I stopped them.
Irene was gone.
But even though I knew that was true, my heart still wanted for the woman to turn, to smile, for my heart to pound like a rocket ship going into orbit again. No one had ever affected me like Irene. Before I met her I’d never believed that a woman could make your heart thump, just by walking into a room.
And a big part of me still didn’t want to get over what had happened to her, didn’t want to move on, not now, not ever, no matter what anyone said or did.
The woman was almost gone now, her black hair flying behind her as she disappeared into a glow of flickering lights. If I went after her, all it would mean was that I was crazier than I thought.
I let out my breath, slowly. I’d had what my grief counsellor had called a legal hallucination. People don’t come back from the dead. No matter how much you want them to. No matter how unfair their death was.
When my mom and dad had died back in the States, within eighteen months of each other, I hadn’t felt this way. They’d both had a good innings, but Irene had barely got to bat.
A helicopter flew low, its searchlight wandering. It was time to get away from this madness, to get back to normality, to my own frustrations. Alek hadn’t responded to my last text message. He was due back on Monday when the image enhancement program I’d spent the last week fixing would finally get properly tested.
If we messed up this project, I wouldn’t be able to hide from the rumour mill.
I could imagine what they’d say. How can you expect a project director not to make mistakes after what happened to him? Wasn’t it obvious he wasn’t over his wife’s death, wasn’t up to the job any more? Wasn’t this why he’d been demoted?
I started walking, checked my phone again. Nothing. Why was someone with every communication option the world had devised been uncontactable for six freaking hours?
Photographing mosaics of angels, emperors and saints shouldn’t have been this difficult. Even if he was doing it in what had once been the Islamic world’s St Peter’s. We’d worked in the Vatican for God’s sake. And in the British Museum.
Then it was raining and I was running. It was lashing in Piccadilly Circus by the time I got to the entrance of the Underground. I was totally soaked. My shoes were squelching. I knew I’d be looking like a half-drowned marsh creature, tails of brown hair straggling across my way-too-pale forehead, my four AM shadow even more pronounced than usual.
The train was packed. It was not a good time to be wet. But we all stood shoulder to shoulder, trapped, swaying, dampness and tension filling the air.
I read the headlines on a girl’s iPad. ‘New London Riots’ was the big story. Her finger hovered over it, pushed it away. ‘England Awakens’ read the next headline. Our train lurched, then stopped. The lights flickered. Someone groaned. It was ten minutes before the train started again.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_31f6209c-abc3-592e-a604-0a2ba5640fe1)
In the basement of a villa belonging to the British Consulate, in the affluent Levent suburb of Istanbul, two men were staring at a laptop screen.
Loud moaning noises filled the room. On the screen, a big-breasted blonde was bouncing up and down on top of a scrawny dark-skinned older man. The bed they were on, in a hotel near Taksim Square, where the Iranian biological scientist had been staying, squeaked like a busted door on a moving train.
Surely a man that age should have stopped to consider why a woman so young and beautiful might be interested in him.
As the man let out a gasp the blonde pulled back. The view of his face was quite a sight. The man sitting in front of the laptop clicked his mouse. A still image appeared for a moment, then flew to the bottom corner of the screen. Peter Fitzgerald tapped his colleague’s shoulder.
‘That should be enough for you to open him up,’ he said. ‘His superiors in Iran won’t be inclined to forgive him for this.’
Peter frowned as he went over to the printer. It hummed to life. This was going to be easier than he’d thought. But had they moved quickly enough? The Iranian had been in Istanbul for two weeks already.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_2a1b5aee-13ab-53f2-b9cf-a1bbdeecd17a)
The following night, Saturday night, I went to a barbecue near my house in West London. The Institute had an apartment in Oxford, but I rarely used it any more. My attic office was more than good enough for the days I didn’t feel like battling up the M40.
It had been over thirty hours since I’d heard from Alek. If he didn’t make contact until he came back on Monday I’d give him a chance to explain himself, then I’d tell him what I thought of his bullshit.
The barbecue was one of those gatherings where everyone dressed in similar, expensively-distressed clothes to demonstrate their individuality. I left before midnight. The host had been trying to hook me up with one of her friends, and while she was certainly attractive, my heart wasn’t it. All everyone wanted to do was talk about the riots starting up again.
And all I wanted to do was get away from thinking about them. I walked home, crossed New King’s Road, passed a bar with thumping music, people laughing outside. Everything looked normal. Maybe the riots weren’t kicking off again. Good. I needed to get some sleep if I was going to go for a run in the morning.
My plan was to do the Kauai Marathon in September, which was only six weeks away. Ten days in Hawaii was a break I needed. I’d been looking forward to it for months. It would be the holiday that would mark a proper break with my past. That was what Alek had said, and I was hoping he was right.
I kicked off my shoes in the hall downstairs as soon as I got home. They skidded across the black and white tiles. Then I hung my jacket on the pile over the bottom of the banisters. I really needed to sort them all out. But where would I find the time? God only knew how Irene had kept the place tidy. The cleaner who came in now had enough work keeping the kitchen from turning into a health and safety disaster.
I checked my iPhone to see if I’d missed anything. There was still nothing from Alek. No texts. No emails. No missed calls. No tweets. Nothing! What was he playing at?
Was this all some stupid game? Was he trying to make a point about how important he was? I wouldn’t put it past him.
A creak sounded from above my head. The pipes in the building had a habit of doing that. I reckon they were installed when Victoria was a princess.
The house had four floors and was at the end of one of those white stuccoed terraces West London is famous for. We’d grown used to its moods. Living there was our greatest luxury, Irene had said. Working seventy-hour weeks and being one of the founding directors of the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford had to have some advantages, I used to reply.
But I knew I’d been fortunate to end up owning the house. I’d been lucky to get a place on an exchange programme with University College London. And I’d been lucky to meet Irene while I was there. The work I did that year led to an article on patterns in human behaviour, which was published in the New York Times magazine to some acclaim. The success of that article helped us start the Institute.
I’d worked in a software company in Berkshire for three years after we got married. Then a few of us from college decided to set up the Institute. It had taken off way quicker than we’d expected, with serious projects in each of our specialisations.
We’d been lucky in many ways, but I’d give up every dime of our success, if that meant Irene could still be alive. We’d had plans and a house that was just waiting to be filled up with the sound of children’s laughter.
And sometimes in my dreams I could still hear the echoes of what might have been.
I headed upstairs. I always kept a light on on the floor above, so it didn’t feel like the house was brooding. That was the theory, anyway. Though it didn’t seem to have the desired effect.
As I was undressing, the landline rang. It had that insistent tone only a telephone ringing late at night has.
Was it Alek? It had to be.
I found the phone on a foot-high stack of documents by the bed.
‘Mr Ryan?’
The voice wasn’t Alek’s. It sounded like one of those city types who wear their sock suspenders to bed.
‘Yes?’ A needle-sharp sense of foreboding is difficult to ignore.
The sound of a car horn came over the phone line. A tinny noise, a radio station playing what sounded like Middle Eastern hip hop, echoed over the line.
‘The name’s Fitzgerald, sir. Peter Fitzgerald. I’m sorry to disturb you.’ He spoke slowly, emphasizing each syllable, his manner exceedingly polite. ‘I’m with the British Consulate, here in Istanbul.’
A shiver ran through me, as if I’d brushed against a wall of ice.
‘Yes?’ I didn’t want to talk to him.
‘I’m sorry, sir. It’s bad news, I’m afraid.’
My mouth was as dry as sandpaper. Then my stomach did a backflip.
‘It’s about Mr Alek Zegliwski, sir. I’ve been told you’re his manager on a project out here. Am I speaking with the right Sean Ryan?’ The tinny Middle Eastern music played on in the background. What time was it there? 3:00 AM? Had he tried calling earlier, when I was out?
‘Yes.’ My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.
Alek was more than a colleague. He’d been one of Irene’s closest college friends. Then a drinking buddy of mine. We free-dived together. He was coming with me to Kauai.
Laughter echoed from the street below, from another world.
‘Please sit down, Mr Ryan.’ The voice seemed distant.
All the kinds of trouble Alek might have gotten himself into flickered through my mind, in a bizarre slide show. I stayed standing.
‘I’m afraid it’s my unfortunate duty to have to tell you that the authorities here have informed us that your colleague Mr Zegliwski is … ’ He hesitated.
‘… dead.’
A void opened beneath me. That was the one word he wasn’t supposed to say.
‘I am very sorry, sir. I’m sure it’s an awful shock.’
I opened my mouth. No sound came out.
‘We do need someone to identify his body fairly quickly. It’s the Turkish authorities you see. They do things differently out here.’
Alek was coming back on Monday. We were meeting up in the evening. He was coming to my house. We were going for a run.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Please, let it be a mistake.
‘I am sorry. They found his wallet, his ID. It’s a bad time to ask, I know, but do you have contact details for Mr Zegliwski’s relatives?’
I slumped onto the edge of the bed. Its scarlet Persian cover, half off already, slipped to the floor.
‘I don’t, I’m sorry. They’re in Poland. I think.’
‘He’s not married?’
‘No.’
‘What about a girlfriend?’
‘Not for a few months. And that was only for a week or two. He rarely talks about his family.’ I wanted to be more helpful, but Alek was about as single and as independent as you could get. The only time he’d been asked about his next-of-kin in my presence, he’d pointed at me. That was his idea of a joke. He never went back to Poland either – not that I knew of anyway.
‘No relatives in the United Kingdom at all? Are you sure?’ He sounded sceptical.
‘Not that I know about, no.’
Alek couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be. More than anyone else I knew, he was able to look after himself. He was six foot tall, full of life, in his twenties for God’s sake.
Something around me seemed to be changing, as if a hidden door had opened somewhere and a breeze had begun blowing.
‘In that case, Mr Ryan, we’ll have to ask you to come to Istanbul to identify Mr Zegliwski’s body. I believe the authorities here have some questions about the project he was working on too.’
I didn’t reply.
‘Are you there, Mr Ryan?’
‘Yes.’
‘When can you come out? The earlier the better, really.’ His tone wasn’t soft any more.
The line between us hummed. I took my mobile out of my pocket, scrolled to Alek’s number, tapped it. I had a phone to each ear now. Maybe, just maybe, this was all some stupid mistake. A joke even.
‘This is too crazy,’ I said, buying time. ‘Do you know what happened to him?’
My mobile beeped. I looked at the screen. Alek’s number was unavailable.
‘We’re not sure. The Turkish authorities are investigating. That’s all I can say for now.’ The line fizzed. ‘Oh, and I spoke to your colleague, Dr Beresford-Ellis.’
The conversation had turned a surreal corner.
‘I know you’re aware of the current sensitivities with our Turkish friends. So you’ll understand why we want to get all this done as quickly as possible.’
‘I’ll be on the first flight I can get a seat on.’ My voice was firm. The truth was, he couldn’t have stopped me going to Istanbul.
He coughed. ‘Very good. Now finally, and I am sorry, but I must ask you this: Was Mr Zegliwski involved in anything political or religious, or anything like that?’
‘No, not really. Nothing you wouldn’t hear in any pub in England.’
I could hear the line between London and Istanbul hiss again as Fitzgerald waited for me to add to my answer. But I didn’t want to say any more. I had nothing to hide. Alek had nothing to hide as far as I knew. But would there be consequences if I repeated every crazy opinion he’d ever expressed?
‘What work does the Institute do, sir? I haven’t heard about you.’
I could imagine my interrogator’s eyebrows shooting up as he asked me that question.
‘We apply advanced research to practical problems. Imaging technology is one area we’ve been working on, technology to find criminals in crowds for instance.’ It was the standard description I’d been using for years whenever anyone asked me what the Institute did.
‘Very good, sir.’ He didn’t sound interested. ‘I’ll tell our people you’re on your way. You’ll be met at Istanbul airport by someone from the Consulate. We’ll know which flight you’re on. The Turks will do the identification formalities on Monday, most likely. And please, do ring the Foreign Office emergency helpline to verify this conversation. The UK number is on our website. Goodbye, Mr Ryan. I’m very sorry for your loss.’
The line went dead.
I held the handset tight. My knuckles were porcelain white. A picture of Alek grinning outside Hagia Sophia, which he’d emailed me only the day before, came to me. He’d looked so happy. What the hell had happened? My hand trembled as I called his landline in Oxford. I was still hoping that somehow it was all a mistake.
His answering machine took the call. I hung up.
This couldn’t have anything to do with our work at the Institute, could it? Alek had helped us win the project he was working on in Istanbul. It was a real opportunity to establish our credentials in that part of the world. But I’d allowed him to go out there on his own. My stomach turned.
‘How complicated do you think taking photos is?’ he’d argued at the time.
I stabbed my fist into the mattress.
What was going to happen?
Beresford-Ellis would lap all this up. His appointment as Director of the Institute last year had been a not-too-subtle attempt to sideline me totally. It wasn’t enough that I was demoted for the stunt I’d pulled in Afghanistan. The other founders of the Institute had demanded I relinquish, temporarily, many of my responsibilities, for my own good.
And I’d agreed, reluctantly. So the last thing I needed now was for one of my new projects to end in disaster.
I shook my head. What happened to me didn’t matter. All that mattered was what had happened to Alek.
He’d been the one I’d talked to when things had gotten too much, when the emptiness had won, when I’d decided I couldn’t go on. I would have never survived without him.
I checked the Foreign Office website, rang their emergency number. As I waited for an answer I thought about how people would react to the news.
Beresford-Ellis had been disdainful about the project in Istanbul from the beginning. When I’d told him we’d won it, he’d said, with his trademark pessimism, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Ryan. Isn’t any project like this in a Muslim country a bit too controversial these days? We don’t want a bloody fatwa on our heads.’
‘It’s a small project,’ I’d said. ‘Who gives a damn about someone taking pictures in a museum?’
‘Hagia Sophia may be a museum, Ryan,’ he’d replied. ‘But it was once the supreme mosque ruling the Sunni Islam world, and the seat of the Islamic Caliphate. And before that it was the Orthodox Vatican. There are a lot of toes to be stepped on out there.’
Having made his point, he left our office, sniffing as he passed Alek’s empty desk.
But he was right. Hagia Sophia was important. It had been built when the Byzantine Empire was at its peak in the 7th century and had been dedicated to Holy Wisdom, Sophia, a concept that spanned both the Christian and pre-Christian worlds.
The Orthodox Greeks had lost their Vatican when the all-conquering Ottoman Turks had captured Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul in 1453. In doing so, they’d snuffed out the Byzantine Empire, the direct descendants of ancient Rome.
Sure, fundamentalists were angered when Atatürk had turned Hagia Sophia into a museum in 1934, but their argument was with the Turkish state, not us.
In any case, our project – comparing digital images of mosaics to prints and sketches produced by artists over the centuries – was just about the least invasive thing you could do in a world heritage site. And it was also exactly the type of project our Institute had been set up to do.
A friendly Indian lady finally came on the line. After receiving permission from her superior, she told me about a note on her system from the Istanbul consulate detailing how someone called Alek Zegliwski had indeed been involved in a serious incident in Istanbul. Their contact in relation to the matter was a Mr Fitzgerald. She didn’t have any more information to give me. She couldn’t even tell me Mr Fitzgerald’s first name.
I fell asleep as the first rays of dawn were softening London’s skyline. I’d spent all night thinking about what had happened. One memory had replayed itself over and over in my mind.
The day before he’d flown to Istanbul – only a week earlier – Alek had leaned towards me and whispered,
‘You do know the Devil’s caged under Hagia Sophia, boss? Let’s hope I don’t disturb him, eh?’
I’d laughed. Such superstitions had seemed ridiculous in our shiny glass-walled offices in Oxford.
When I woke, the first thing I did was look for Beresford-Ellis’ number. It was 8:00 AM, but I didn’t care.
Beresford-Ellis was the kind of guy who kept pictures of himself with prominent people on his wall. He had one with David Cameron, another with the chancellor of the university he’d worked in before he came to us, another with Nelson Mandela, and another with the head of the US Geological Service. He was so good at social climbing he could have run PhD-level courses on it. The cherry on top of all that was that he was about as trustworthy as an Afghan warlord with an empty war chest.
When the other founders had decided to take on a qualified manager to lead the Institute, because each of us was immersed in our own projects, I’d said nothing. Irene had died only a month before. Getting Beresford-Ellis in had seemed like a good idea.
I soon found out that his appetite for corporate-speak was prodigious. We didn’t have projects any more, we had ‘collaboration initiatives’ or ‘research value actualisations’. And he’d been subtly critical of every ‘initiative’ I’d worked on since he’d joined. The work we’d done in Bavaria identifying Bronze Age settlements from satellite images hadn’t identified settlements from the target period, he’d said. And our trial security initiative in New York, for a big American bank, hadn’t turned into anything lucrative. All he wanted, it seemed, were projects that got us major contracts quickly.
He was right in his own way, if you disregarded the fact that it took months for the impact of many of our projects to come to light.
These faults weren’t compensated by his demeanour either. He seemed to be uninterested in everyone around him, not just me. Most of the time, it was almost as if his colleagues were invisible to him. What he preferred to do was talk about his own achievements.
‘Bad publicity is the last thing we need right now,’ he said, after I got through to him and told him I was planning to fly out to Istanbul that afternoon. He was good, as always, at finding the down side.
‘If there’s anything in the press about the Institute being involved in something it shouldn’t have been, it’ll be a disaster for our fundraising this year, Ryan. I know this is a bad time to say it, but there are some board members who think we’ve given you too much rope already.’ He waited for a moment for his words to detonate.
What a bastard! Not a single word about Alek’s death. He’d be happy with our scalps on his wall next to those photos.
‘I won’t dodge my responsibilities,’ I said. ‘But I think you should reserve judgement until we know the facts.’ I cut the line.
A few hours later I headed for Heathrow feeling sick, totally unprepared, and unplugged from reality.
It knew it could easily have been me who’d been murdered out there. I could have gone to Istanbul instead of Alek, if I’d insisted on it. And there was more too. If what had happened to Alek had been because of our work in Hagia Sophia, how careful would I need to be?
What was going to happen in Istanbul?
Chapter 5 (#ulink_5142a678-90c1-54e5-9bf6-c77993086beb)
Malach walked slowly. He turned his head often. The yellow bulbs were barely bright enough to light the sloping brick tunnel in front of him. The polished sheen of his bare head, almost touching the roof, was elongated as if he had been bound at birth.
From his huge hands dangled two canvas bags, the type you see in army surplus stores. Both were empty. When he reached his destination, he put them down beside the tables. He had work to do. The project had delivered what was needed. It was time to tidy up. What had happened in the last few days had pushed the cleanup operation forward, but not by much. Soon, if anyone found this place, they wouldn’t have any idea what had been going on.
As he filled the canvas bags he thought about their unexpected visitor. The man had soiled himself in his last few minutes. Westerners were so weak. Their soft comforts made them that way. They knew nothing about how to face their end.
He took the hunting knife from its scabbard under his armpit, felt the tip. It was still sharp. Good. He would need it again, soon if he was lucky. He loved the feeling of power that ran through him when he used it. It was exhilarating. He held the knife in the air, admiring it. Then he put it away. He had a lot to do.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_fd8aa0bc-8d44-54ad-a2bc-2052a43463f4)
Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5, the largest free-standing building in the UK, looked as busy the following morning as it had during the nightmare snow storm the previous winter.
There were queues at the check-in machines, lines at the information desks, people sleeping, huddled together on its gleaming floor. The continued closure of French air space, due to an extended nationwide strike, was taking its toll. Flights that weren’t cancelled were being rerouted. The knock-on effect delayed my departure by an hour. And I was among the lucky ones.
To distract myself I read anything I could find.
The English Sunday newspapers were feasting on the riots in London. They hadn’t spread, but some journalists were saying that police leave had already been cancelled. It was astonishing, one article suggested, that a raid on a mosque had produced such a reaction. Another paper, which devoted two pages to what had happened, linked the rioting to other incidents around Europe in the past few weeks. The article claimed that there was a fear in intelligence circles that such riots were being coordinated.
Another paper had a map of St Paul’s and the City of London showing how far a crowd of half a million would reach, if that many did turn up the following Friday for the mass demonstration planned by a different Islamic group. The police presence at such events was likely to be much heavier now, even if the event had already been approved, said the article.
My eye fell on a side piece about a video being posted on the Internet showing a Westerner being beheaded. It made me uncomfortable. Could that Westerner be Alek? No. There was no need for total paranoia.
But what had happened to him? Was his death the result of a random incident? A robbery? A car accident? That was certainly the most likely explanation. Our Institute was a world leader in applying technology to intractable problems, but I couldn’t imagine anything we’d been working on out there being a reason to murder him.
We did uncontroversial things, like identifying lost settlements under forests with L-band digital imaging, or devising high-speed spectrometry techniques to date carbon-based compounds without destroying the sample. I was proud of our work.
And everyone I knew thought we were doing something good. Even my dad, who had seen us open the Institute, had been proud. And that was something, coming from a US Air Force pilot who had flown 212 combat missions, had bailed out over Bosnia in 1995 and had then evaded Serb paramilitary units for three days.
It was time to board.
I was glad I’d picked a window seat. The thought of identifying Alek’s body had put me off idle chitchat. And the idea that it might have been me lying cold in some morgue, and Alek flying out to identify my body, didn’t help.
I’d had more than enough of the sympathetic noises people make when they find out something bad has happened to you.
It’s not that I don’t like to talk about Irene or to think about her. I probably think about her too much still. But I hate to talk about it to strangers. The words have got stuck in my throat once too often.
It had taken ten days, after they’d come to our house to tell me she was dead, before the tears came. Something inside me didn’t want to face how much I was hurting, how much I needed her, loved her. That’s what the grief counsellor had said. I stopped going to see her. I wasn’t ready for all the stuff she wanted me to do. I don’t know if I ever will be.
Irene had been the best part of my life for twelve years. My friends at MIT had thought me crazy for staying in England: I’d earn a lot more in the States, they’d said, but I couldn’t have been happier. I’d grown to love London.
Slate-grey clouds were rolling below the plane now and the guy in the seat beside me was reading a book called Turkey – The New Power.
I picked up my iPad. I’d downloaded a guide to Istanbul on it. I read a few pages, then the meal came. I only ate half of it.
My unease about the prospect of viewing Alek’s body only grew as we descended over the inky Sea of Marmara, towards a long curving shore marked by the glow of early evening street lights. Istanbul, a grey tapestry of roads and buildings, was coming into view.
An hour later, the marble floor of the arrivals hall echoed as I walked through it.
I’d felt the familiar breath-catching August Mediterranean heat as soon as the plane doors had opened, but in that metallic cavern of a hall everything was cool, slick, antiseptic.
I caught my reflection in a mirrored wall as I walked by. I looked like a typical tourist in my short-sleeved navy linen shirt and loose cream chinos. The leather haversack on my trolley looked about as travel-scarred and worn-out as I felt.
Already, I’d been detained at passport control for minutes while the immigration officer had checked his computer. I’d bought a tourist visa at the nearby counter, and others were going through quickly, so there was no reason for him to hold me.
Unless the authorities here were expecting me.
‘Enjoy your visit to Turkey,’ he finally mumbled, as he handed me back my passport.
I was relieved.
The frosted glass doors that led out of the arrivals hall opened with a sigh as I approached them. The shiny public area beyond had a long curve of people waiting for arriving passengers. The hall hummed with a click-clack of activity. Acres of glass gave the place an airy feeling.
And directly ahead, advancing toward me out of the crowd, was a tall pencil-thin man with an almond-brown face, black hair and a thin nose. His hair was slicked back. He looked like someone who wouldn’t put up with too much crap. And he was looking straight at me.
Following the man, about a pace behind, were two other men dressed in pale-blue short-sleeved shirts and navy trousers flapping at the ankles.
The charcoal suit, which the leading man wore, looked expensive. He held out his hand as he closed the gap between us.
‘Merhaba, Mr Ryan. I am Inspector Erdinc.’ He shook my hand. His grip was tight, designed no doubt to make criminals uneasy. There was a smell of tobacco on his breath.
He stared into my eyes, as if I was his quarry.
‘I was expecting someone from the British Consulate,’ I said, looking around.
There were a few people nearby holding up pieces of cardboard with names on them. Unfortunately, none of them was mine.
‘I am with the International Crime Section at the Ministry of the Interior, Mr Ryan.’ He looked over my shoulder, as if checking to see if anyone was with me.
‘I am here to meet you.’ He raised his hands in an open gesture, and gave me a brief smile. ‘You work for the Institute of Applied Research and are here to identify your colleague’s body, yes?’
I nodded. One of his eyebrows shot up. I got the feeling he was assessing me. It wasn’t going to be easy to get away from this guy.
‘You will come with me,’ he said, assuredly. Then, with his head down, like a boxer on his way to a match, he walked away motioning for me to follow him, as if he needed someone to carry his sweat towel. His heels clicked on the marble as he walked.
I looked around. His two assistants were nodding, indicating I should go after the inspector. I sighed, and followed him, with them bringing up the rear. It must have looked, to anyone watching, as if I’d been arrested.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_60af890b-68e1-5e5f-90cd-279fad5eba08)
The black S1100R BMW superbike came to a halt at the back entrance of the steel and glass apartment block, its tyres scattering gravel. Its rider, Malach, was, within seconds, heading up in the service elevator to the penthouse apartment with the breathtaking views over the Golden Horn. Its wrap-around balcony had once been used to host a party for a visiting Hollywood star. That evening the balcony was empty.
Arap Anach was in the main marble-floored bedroom. A cocoa-skinned girl was lying on a white rug in front of him, face down.
‘You are a devil,’ he whispered. She moved her hips invitingly, then groaned.
She’d been well trained, and understood English. He made a mental note to use the same contact in the red light district of Mumbai again. This girl was, without doubt, a 10,000 rupee girl, exactly as he’d been promised. He would send the man a bonus. From what he knew had happened to the man’s family, he’d appreciate it.
He fingered one of the gauze-thin veils the girl had discarded. Then he examined her body. A creak sounded from outside the door. He didn’t react. He’d seen what he was looking for.
‘You think threads on your wrist will ward away evil spirits?’ he said.
She moaned. She hadn’t understood the turn this encounter was taking.
He looked at the scar on the back of his hand. Then, reflexively, he glanced around, even though he knew the room was secure, that no camera could be watching them, no microphone listening. He’d done the bug sweep himself.
It was time.
He placed the palm of his hand a hair’s breadth from her back, and traced the contours of her body without touching her.
‘I will be your last,’ he whispered. Would she react? Anticipation and adrenaline coursed through him.
Somewhere inside her there was a shard of anxiety, there had to be, but it was well hidden. She assumed, most probably, that because she’d survived thus far in her career, and had met many men, that the future would be the same as the past.
A tentative knock sounded from the door.
‘Do not move,’ he said firmly. He padded across the room, cracked the door open.
‘There is an envelope. It was sent to the Greek at his hotel,’ a voice whispered. ‘What should we do?’
‘Get it, fool.’ He clicked the door shut, walked back to the rug. As he passed the small table he passed his hand slowly through the flame of the candle burning on it, until he felt its sting.
‘Are you ready?’ he whispered. He kneeled down beside her, put one hand on her back.
She wriggled in anticipation. He reached to his left, slid a steel syringe from under the mattress of the emperor-sized bed. He held the tip near her back, dragging out the moment. Soon she would feel something. Very soon.
Then it would begin.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_c8042c20-0fce-5749-b18b-f3cf094b6fae)
The heat was like an open-air oven, even though night had fallen. I could hear a plane’s engine revving. The odour of jet fuel filled the air. The inspector was striding towards a gleaming black Renault Espace with darkened windows, which stood beside a ‘No Parking’ sign.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked loudly.
‘You will see,’ was his nonchalant reply. He held the Espace’s door open for me. His colleagues were a few paces behind me. Did they think I was going to run? Did they think I’d done something?
Or had Alek done something outrageously stupid? Was I going to be implicated in something illegal that I knew nothing about?
‘This is quite a welcoming committee,’ I said.
‘Hagia Sophia is one of our national treasures,’ said the inspector, as he put his seat belt on.
‘Anything to do with it involves our national security, especially these days. I’m sure you understand. All deaths there must be fully explained and accounted for.’ He sounded firm, and suspicious. About what I had no idea, but he was not in the least bit ashamed of it.
I belted myself in.
‘How is London?’ he said. ‘I saw you had another riot.’
‘It was good when I left.’
‘I like London. I have a cousin there. Such a great city.’ He tapped the driver on his shoulder. The car moved off with a squeal.
‘I thought you were going to be British, Mr Ryan,’ said the inspector. ‘But your accent is American, I think.’ He looked puzzled.
‘My father was American. My mother was English. We stayed in England until I was ten, then we lived in upstate New York. I’m back in England twelve years now.’
‘An English mother and an American father.’ He repeated what I’d said, as if he found it amusing. If he was trying to annoy me he was doing a good job.
‘That’s what I said. I like Macy’s and Harrods. And I’m proud of it.’ I’d used that line before. And I didn’t mind giving him more from where that came from.
He looked me up and down, then changed the subject. ‘Were you close to your colleague, Mr Ryan?’
‘We were friends.’ I stared back at him. I had nothing to hide.
He stared out the window. Letting me stew, most likely.
The motorway we joined a few minutes later had five lanes. The headlights streaming towards us were like strings of pearls.
The reservations I’d had about coming to Istanbul seemed justified now. What the hell had happened to the contact from the Consulate who was supposed to meet me? And where were we going?
‘You were Mr Zegliwski’s manager, weren’t you?’ asked the inspector a minute later. The question had an aggressive undertone to it, as if he was trying to find someone to take responsibility for something.
‘Yes, I am. That’s why I’m here, to find out what happened to him.’ I’d worked hard on this project. I’d spent months on research. Alek had too. There was no way I was going to allow this guy to dump anything on me, or on the Institute.
‘And you haven’t been told what happened Alek?’ His eyes gleamed in the semi-darkness.
‘Just that he’s dead. That I’m supposed to identify his body.’ There was still a slim chance that it wasn’t Alek they’d found, that he was in a coma in some hospital. I clung to it.
The inspector opened his window. Warm soggy air poured in. It was well after 9:00 PM, but still as hot as midday on the hottest summer day in London.
‘It’s a little hot,’ I said.
‘Not too much,’ he replied. ‘This is cool by Istanbul standards.’
‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’ I asked, louder than I expected to. I wiped off a rivulet of sweat running down my cheek.
I could smell musky aftershave.
‘Your colleague’s been murdered, effendi,’ he whispered. Occasional beeps and the drone of cars speeding around us almost drowned his voice out.
I stared back at him. I felt empty, numb. I’d assumed Alek had died in an unfortunate accident.
‘I’m sorry for the bad news.’
I looked at his face, waited for his nose to grow.
‘Why are you treating me like a criminal, when my friend’s been murdered?’
He didn’t answer. He just kept staring at me. His eyes were bloodshot. He had a thin white scar on the side of his forehead.
‘Did your colleague have enemies?’
I shook my head. ‘Are you going to tell me how it happened?’ I said.
For a split second, I saw disdain in his expression, then it became impassive again.
The traffic reverberations around us were like a muzzled growl. Warm air sliced menacingly through the car. Anger rose up inside me. I had to close my eyes to calm myself, start breathing deeply. I had to be careful. Letting off steam into this guy’s face would probably only see me end up in a prison cell.
Memories of Alek flashed through my head. Why the hell had he been murdered?
‘Is it a secret?’ I said.
‘Later, effendi, later.’ His tone softened.
We passed a conga line of minibuses. There must have been fifty of them. Each had a blue circular logo on its side, the outline of the minarets and unmistakable dome of Hagia Sophia.
I’d been to Istanbul twice before. Alek had been even more times. The grey crust of buildings that flows to each horizon gives the city an anthill intensity. It’s what you get, I suppose, for having a population of almost fourteen million. No city in Europe has ever been bigger.
I stared out the window, trying to take in what had happened. It was all so unreal. Anger rose up inside me again. I put my fist against the glass.
‘We will find out who did this, Mr Ryan. And when we do…’ I turned to look at him. He put his hands together, motioned as if he was crushing something.
The motorway we were on soared over a valley encrusted with buildings. The scene was lit by a spider web of yellow and white street lights. Then the motorway turned to the right and a whole vista of curved steel-and-glass office blocks appeared in front of us, all lit up. TV screens flickered in one of the blocks.
Electronic billboards flashed by. Yacht-sized, red Turkish flags were draped down the sides of some of the larger buildings. The skyscrapers we passed would not have been out of place in Manhattan or Shanghai.
Mixed with all this modernity, on every ridge, were spot-lit minarets and the illuminated domes of mosques, each a mini Hagia Sophia. Every district seemed to have one. Some were half dark and had fewer minarets; others were lit up like football stadiums. But none of them came anywhere near Hagia Sophia’s beauty.
‘Alek loved this city,’ I said.
‘He was right to. This is the city of the future,’ the inspector replied. ‘We are growing fast. And we’re managing it well.’ His finger jabbed the air.
‘Our birth rates aren’t low, like the rest of Europe.’ He raised an eyebrow, gave me a toothy grin.
‘People are still moving here?’
‘More than ever. From Turkey and this whole region. Everyone deserves a future.’
Who could argue with that? I went back to staring at the cars streaming past. People were changing lanes as if they were on a racetrack.
‘And you’re not sweeping aside the past,’ I said.
‘No, not at all. You Westerners think you are the best at conserving things, but you forget we saved Hagia Sophia, the greatest building in the world. Tell me, which 1300-year-old building is still in use in England?’ He looked smug.
‘I think the Greeks were already a beaten empire by the time they lost this city,’ I said.
‘It is true, Mr Ryan. And it was foretold. That was the Greeks’ fate. And they were fortunate too. Mehmed’s tolerance, the freedom he allowed different races and religions, was something your European kings and inquisitors could have learned from.’
He pointed at a skyscraper the size of the Empire State Building. It was lit up in electric blue and had a giant Islamic crescent on top.
‘Look, this is the future. Islam and capitalism married at last. Faith and money intertwined. What our people can do will surprise you all.’
‘I just want to find out what happened to my colleague.’
The motorway became elevated again. We were bowling along high up over a muddle of buildings. Then the road swung to the left. The lights of the city were spread out in front of us, as if a sack of diamonds had spilled over dark velvet.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as we powered through the traffic, sounding our horn at anyone who strayed into our path.
‘The morgue at the New International Hospital,’ was the inspector’s reply.
I thought about telling him to postpone the identification, that I was too tired. I’d have preferred to speak to Fitzgerald before I did it, find out what the process was in Turkey, if there was anything I had to make sure to do. But maybe it was better to get it over with.
We turned off the motorway onto a dual carriageway running between pencil-thin office buildings, fifteen, maybe twenty storeys high. There wasn’t as much traffic now. Soon I lost all sense of direction. We were driving through a warren of narrow streets with old buildings crowding in on each side.
‘The Galata area,’ said the inspector, motioning at the hodgepodge of old and new around us.
I’d seen pictures of the Galata Tower poking its head up above the tiled roofs of old Istanbul. Venetian traders had built the stone tower on the top of a hill to the north of the Golden Horn, Istanbul’s natural horn-shaped harbour.
We pulled up with a squeal in front of what looked like an office block. I saw a green cross sign. I wasn’t looking forward to what was going to happen next. But I held on to a paper-thin hope that the body wouldn’t be Alek’s.
I followed the inspector through an oddly empty reception area into a marble-floored lift. We’d left his colleagues in the car. They’d smiled at me like factory workers who’d been given a day off.
The hospital looked new. There wasn’t a scuff mark on a wall or a scratch on any of the shiny floors.
For a second I wondered if we were too late to visit the morgue. Then I remembered who I was with.
A moon-faced attendant in a loose virgin-blue uniform was waiting for us, clutching a clipboard, when the doors to the basement slid open. He mumbled something in Turkish. We followed him. Our shoes squeaked on the floor. He led us to a low room encased in white tiles. The smell of powerful disinfectant filled the air. He pulled a shiny metal morgue tray from a wall. Every noise was amplified. All eyes were on me. Things were moving too fast.
There was a covered body on a tray in front of me. I’d expected a long wait, documents to be signed.
‘Mr Ryan, are you ready?’ The inspector sounded uninterested, as if he’d done this many times before.
I desperately wanted to leave. There was something pressing into my chest.
I nodded.
He said something to the attendant in Turkish, who motioned for me to adjust the white cotton face mask he’d given me, hold it tight to my mouth, as he was doing.
I’d been talking to Alek only a few days ago. How could the white-swathed figure on this tray be him? No, it was impossible. This shape didn’t even look like him.
The attendant pulled back the stiff white sheet just far enough to expose the face. Bile rose inside me.
The face I was looking at was pale, plastic, like a mannequin’s, a waxy effigy of Alek. A bloody bruise disfigured his forehead. His lips were dry, closed tight, as if they’d been glued together.
I stared, unblinking. I was watching what was happening, but from far away.
I’d learned in the past few years to disdain pity, to look ahead, to act strong, to not think too much. I needed every one of those lessons now.
Alek’s skin had a blue tinge. There were wisps of vapour emanating from under the sheet.
And his body seemed strangely disconnected from his head, as if his neck had been elongated. A shudder ran through me. He looked different, so still. He’d always been so full of life.
I took a step forward, put my hand out. I wanted to touch him, to say goodbye.
The attendant waved me back briskly.
‘Mr Ryan, can you confirm that this is your colleague, Mr Alek Zegliwski?’ said the inspector.
‘Yes.’ I looked away. This was not how I wanted to remember him.
‘As your colleague was Greek, Mr Ryan, our investigation of his death must follow certain procedures.’ He paused.
‘He was Polish,’ I said, cutting in fast.
‘His mother was Greek, Mr Ryan. He had emphasised that fact himself to a number of people here in Istanbul.’ He spat out the word Greek.
I took a deep breath. All Alek had ever told me about his mother was that she was dead. Had she been Greek?
The attendant pulled the sheet over Alek’s head. Then, with a resounding clunk, he slid the tray back into its drawer. Neighbouring trays rattled. Something caught my eye high up; a tiny security camera staring down at us.
‘Come, we will talk,’ said the inspector.
He led me to a smaller room up the hall. The type of room where grieving relatives could be comforted. I sat on a hard plastic chair. There was a line of five of them down the wall opposite the door. Everything was white. The inspector stood facing me. He was hunched over, as if he was thinking hard, and his arms were folded. Tiredness pulled at me. My body had finally decided to react to everything I’d been through.
‘Aren’t Turkey and Greece friends these days?’ I said.
‘Of course we are, but you must understand there are a lot of crazy Greeks who claim Hagia Sophia, and this whole city, for themselves. They say it all belongs to them.’ He sounded affronted at the idea.
‘What does any of that have to do with what happened to Alek?’ I said.
In answer I got silence. All I could hear were the rumblings from the air conditioning. I waited, imagining Alek lying cold in that drawer. The inspector stared at me, as if he was expecting me to answer my own question.
‘I came here to find out what happened to my friend. And I still don’t know,’ I said, as calmly as I could. ‘And I’ve no idea why you think being Greek would have any impact on Alek’s murder.’
The inspector held up his hands.
‘I will explain why. The last Greek emperor of this city, Constantine the 11th, disappeared in Hagia Sophia the day the city was captured.’ He paused. His tone was firm as he continued.
‘Some Greeks say the last emperor made a pact with the devil that afternoon. That his body was taken below Hagia Sophia and that he will come back, and retake this city when the time is right. So you must understand, Mr Ryan, a Greek being murdered in Hagia Sophia is a big deal.’
‘I don’t believe in legends and I don’t think Alek did either.’ I gave him the kind of smile I reserved for younger children. ‘Our Institute was commissioned by UNESCO to do a simple task here; to verify how the mosaics in Hagia Sophia are being preserved and altered over the years. That’s what Alek was working on. It’s not a big project.’ The air in the room was getting stuffy, thick.
‘There isn’t even a UNESCO representative overseeing us. We’re just recording things, monitoring changes. None of this stuff could have anything to do with what happened to Alek.’
The smell of hospital disinfectant was getting stronger too.
‘UNESCO is monitoring Hagia Sophia?’ he said.
‘We’re taking pictures, inspector.’ Frustrated, I held up my hands. ‘Thousands of tourists do it every day.’ I had to move the conversation on. ‘Can you at least tell me where Alek was found?’
He looked at me as if he was debating whether to say anything more or not. Then he continued. ‘Your colleague was found outside Hagia Sophia early yesterday morning.’ He studied my face. ‘His head was near his body. For that we can be grateful.’
‘He was beheaded?’ I said it slowly.
‘Yes.’ He said, matter-of-factly.
My stomach flipped. I thought about what Alek must have gone through. I held my hand to my chest. The pressure had got stronger.
And the room seemed suddenly smaller, as if its walls had moved in.
He said something I didn’t understand. The words were in English, but I couldn’t make them out.
The fact that Alek had died was bad enough. That he’d been butchered like an animal was too much. This was why they hadn’t pulled the sheet down. I’d been right about his body looking odd. This was sick.
I walked towards the wall, leaned my forehead against it. A wave of revulsion rolled through me. The white tiles were shiny, slick.
How could any human do such a thing?
‘I don’t believe this,’ I whispered. Then I remembered something.
There’d been a story in one of the Sunday newspapers about a decapitation. No details. Just a one paragraph story. Had it been about Alek?
It had all seemed so distant when I’d been reading it. I must have read lots of stories like it. Of atrocities, horrible deaths. There were so many that few registered any more. I swallowed hard.
‘Did what happened to Alek get into the newspapers?’ I turned to face the inspector. He was standing by the table.
‘The media here hunts for such stories these days.’ His tone was hard. ‘There may have been a small item in a Turkish newspaper yesterday. I promise you, we did not give out his name.’
I closed my eyes. Would the media in England find out what had happened to Alek? Would people be tweeting about it soon, speculating about the details? I could only guess what theories would come up, how it would all spin out.
‘Does this sort of thing happen often in Turkey?’
‘This is the first case of beheading in three years. We are not Iraq.’
‘So why did this happen to Alek?’
He shrugged, looked me up and down. ‘Are you planning to speak to the press?’ he said.
‘No.’
His face was a hard mask. ‘Good. We’ll be finished with your colleague’s body in a week or so. There’ll be an autopsy, of course.’ I closed my eyes. ‘You can make arrangements for his body after the results are in. We will hand over all his personal belongings then. ’ His tone softened. He was playing the understanding official again.
Where will you be staying, Mr Ryan?’
‘The Conrad-Ritz. Where Alek is… I mean was staying.’ Alek had told me about the place. I’d called it from Heathrow.
‘My driver will take you there.’
I nodded.
‘Make no mistake,’ he said. ‘We value human life in Turkey, Mr Ryan, unlike in some places. We take a crime like this seriously. As you will see.’
He took a shiny black leather notebook out of his pocket and began writing in it. I wanted to leave, to be on my own, to think.
‘Are we finished?’ I said.
‘Just a few more questions.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Can you tell me exactly what Mr Zegliwski was monitoring in Hagia Sophia, Mr Ryan?’
I wanted to snap at him. I was too tired for this.
‘The tesserae, inspector. The tiny cubes that make up the mosaics. In Hagia Sophia a lot of them were preserved by the plaster Ottoman workmen covered them with, to conform to Islamic prescriptions against figurative art.’ I spoke slowly. ‘Gradually those mosaics have been exposed. Now we have a chance to record them digitally using the latest techniques, in case they’re damaged in the future. It will help us understand how they’ve changed over time by comparing the images with drawings made over the centuries, which we are also digitizing.’
He made a note in his book.
‘Do you think any of this could be a reason for someone to kill your colleague?’ He stared at me, his hand poised to write.
‘Inspector, the layers of gold that form the sandwich that make up many of the tesserae in Hagia Sophia are thicker and more valuable than those anywhere else in the world. Perhaps he disturbed someone robbing some gold tesserae.’ It was a theory I’d come up with on the plane. Alek had joked about how valuable the larger mosaics were, even broken up.
He took another note. Then he said, ‘Did Mr Zegliwski send anything to you or to your Institute after coming here?’
What was he implying? That we’d been stealing, illegally exporting artefacts, not just photographing them?
‘No, he sent us nothing but digital images. There’s no law against that.’
He closed his notebook. Then, as an afterthought, he said, ‘Do you know about the Orthodox Christian archives, the ones that are missing, Mr Ryan?’
I wiped my forehead. A slick of cold sweat covered it. Alek lay dead a few feet away, beheaded for God’s sake, and this man wanted to know about archives!
‘I don’t,’ I replied. ‘Are we finished?’
‘You didn’t know they were lost when Hagia Sophia was taken over?’
I shook my head. ‘We’re here to record mosaics inspector, nothing else.’
‘Indeed, but any item discovered in the archives would have immense value. They included a letter from Mohammad, peace be upon him, so it is claimed. You can imagine the interest there would be in that. They say it was addressed to Emperor Heraclius, the Byzantine Emperor at the time. He visited Jerusalem when the Prophet was in Arabia awaiting his return to Mecca. Such a letter would have a major impact if it was found. It might even be considered important in England, no?’
‘Our project has nothing to do with lost archives or lost letters.’
Why was he quizzing me about this stuff? Did the Turkish authorities really think our project was more than it seemed?
On the way up in the lift, the inspector smiled at me. It was the smile of a reptile as it sunned itself, while waiting for its prey to come within reach. He patted my shoulder as I climbed into the police car.
‘Take care. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you in our beautiful city.’
I doubted very much that he gave a damn about what happened to me.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_d7d25edf-9782-575a-9244-0d67aa2598c6)
In Whitehall, in central London, not far from Downing Street, Sergeant Henry P Mowlam was looking out the window. The office he was in had a spectacular view over the London Eye. It was rotating, imperceptibly, against a backdrop of blue sky and the puffiest clouds he’d seen all year. His own office didn’t have a view like this.
‘Sergeant Mowlam,’ said a voice.
He turned. The meeting had been organised by the Ministry of Defence. The conference room, with its dark panelled walls, held over twenty people. Just his luck to get called the second he’d got a proper look out the window.
‘Yes, sir.’
The brigadier general who was leading the meeting from the top of the shiny oak conference table looked around the room, as if wondering who had replied.
Sergeant Mowlam coughed. ‘How can I help?’ he said.
‘I was saying, Sergeant Mowlam, that we have some new chatter that’s just come in. Can you give us the latest on it?’
‘We’ve been picking up email and Twitter feeds this morning, sir. We discount most of this sort of stuff, but these messages are between the organisers of the demonstration planned for Friday. They are about supplies. Shall I read them out?’
The general nodded.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_56ef013b-5610-51e8-9022-b564c4d8835f)
The driver sped through the still-busy streets. I was in the back again. Inspector Erdinc had stayed in the hospital. His other colleague had disappeared. My forehead was pounding as if I had a migraine.
A lot of things had been stirred up in me in the last few hours. There were so many links to the past in this city. So much was different here.
My fists were clenched as we sped onto a wide, low bridge. It had black chest-high iron railings on each side. Below, eel-black water slid past. On the far side of the bridge the shadow of a hill loomed, crowned with the spot-lit outlines of Topkapi Palace, the palace of the Ottoman Sultans, and the dome of Hagia Sophia. The dome was glowing with yellow light, and with its four minarets it looked like an oil painting come to life. Above, stars shone weakly through a haze. We were crossing the Golden Horn.
I asked the driver how soon we would get to the hotel. He didn’t answer. I had only one word of Turkish – Merhaba, hello – so I decided to shut up.
He stared at me in his rear-view mirror. Then he touched one of those blue and white circular evil-eye charms they hang everywhere in Turkey. When we stopped at the traffic lights on the far side of the bridge he spoke.
‘Your friend, he played a dangerous game, no?’
His eyes were fixed on the rear-view mirror.
I looked over my shoulder. There was a car with blacked-out windows behind us.
‘It shouldn’t have been dangerous,’ I said.
He tutted, as if he didn’t believe me. The lights changed. We sped on, cutting across two lanes in a way that would have spelled disaster in London.
He turned the radio on. A wild song filled the car, part Arab lament, part Latin dance beat. Then he turned the radio down, as if he’d remembered he shouldn’t be playing music while on official business.
Then we were rumbling up a cobbled street and after another tight turn, with the minarets and dome of Hagia Sophia looming over us, we stopped in front of a parchment- yellow building. It was an Ottoman era, five-tier, wedding-cake of an edifice. It dominated one whole side of a narrow and steep side street.
Alek had picked the hotel, he’d said, because it was in the oldest part of Istanbul, near the summit of the hill Hagia Sophia was on. That was where the original Greek colony had been founded by someone called Byzas hundreds of years before Alexander the Great’s family even owned a single olive tree.
The site had been chosen for reasons any child would understand. It was easily defendable. It had water on three sides; the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn.
Not far from the hotel were the remnants of the old Roman Hippodrome, a stadium Ben Hur might have raced in.
The Roman imperial legacy here was only part of the history of the place though. Within strolling distance of the hotel was the palace and harem of the Ottoman sultans, rulers of an empire which at one time stretched from Egypt almost to Vienna.
I stepped out of the car. Old stone walls and sun-bleached Ottoman-era buildings lined the street. The hotel brooded above me. It felt strange, unsettling, to be following in Alek’s footsteps, seeing things he’d seen only a few days before.
I stood for a moment watching the police car pull away. I could smell jasmine on the warm air, hear laughter, voices. I touched the yellow plaster of the hotel wall as I climbed the stairs from the street.
As soon as I entered the building I was hit by a blast of air conditioning. The smiling lady behind the glass-topped ultra-modern reception desk had the blondest hair I’d seen in a long time. She was friendly, and very sympathetic, after I gave her my name and told her I was a colleague of Alek’s.
‘We are all so sorry about what happened. We heard from the police that Mr Zegliwski had an accident. It’s terrible. He was so nice. What happened to him? Do you know?’
‘Yes.’ I didn’t feel like telling her though, so I added. ‘And thanks. I appreciate your concern.’
She smiled, then held a finger in the air, as if she was trying to remember something. After a moment, she said, ‘There’s something here for Mr Zegliwski.’
She turned, scanned the pigeon holes that filled the wall behind her until she found what she was looking for – a large brown envelope. She held it out in front of her triumphantly, to show me what was written on it. Mr Zegliwski.
I took the envelope. As I walked to the lift I squeezed it gently. It felt like there were a few sheets of paper in it, and something else at the bottom.
A man in a puffy black jacket stared at me from an oversized leather sofa at the far end of the reception area. He gave me the creeps. I imagined his corpulent boss entertaining some underage hooker or three upstairs.
As I waited for the lift to reach the fifth floor, I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope and looked inside. A silver key-ring, with one of those USB memory sticks attached, lay in the bottom of the envelope. I pulled it out, looked at it, then put it in my pocket. The only other thing in the envelope were some photos.
I almost dropped them on the white marble floor of the hallway as I juggled my room card and bag. It wasn’t until I was inside that I got a chance to look at the photos properly.
One of them was of a woman with long black hair and a winning smile. Alek had clearly been busy. Something tightened in my chest. Did she know what had happened to him? My shoulders hunched, as the weight of his death bore down on me. There was one thing I was going to promise myself, and Alek. Whatever happened, I would find out who had done this.
I steadied myself, looked at the photos again.
Two didn’t fit with the rest. One was of a crumbling floor mosaic. Debris lay scattered around it. The other was of the inside of a brick-lined tunnel. It had an arched ceiling, sloping downwards. A yellow marble plaque hung on the wall near the top of the tunnel. I could just about make out what was carved on it; scales with a sword lying across its pans.
I put the photos on the round table near the window. I couldn’t make sense of them now. And I didn’t want to think about them. I looked around. The room was a pastiche of late Ottoman style, decorated in reds and golds. Every piece of furniture was covered in a thick layer of varnish.
After a quick shower I turned off the bedside light and lay staring at the shadows, my mind drifting. A faint aroma came to me. The smell of roses. It reminded me of Irene. It would have been good to be able to call her now, to talk all this through with her.
When I met Irene she’d been studying medicine. She hadn’t been interested in me initially, but I found out she used to drink in the university bar before getting her train home. A week later we had our first date. A walk in Hyde Park. She was a great listener.
We got married three months after I graduated. One of her friends used to tease us about how perfect our lives were, how lucky we’d both been to be doing so well so soon after graduating.
And then she’d volunteered to go to Afghanistan with the Territorial Army. They needed doctors. Three of them had volunteered from her hospital. That had been reassuring. I’d imagined stupidly, so stupidly, that that meant there would be safety in numbers. That the odds were against all three of them being killed. Their tour started two years and three months ago.
And she was the one who didn’t make it back. A roadside bomb, an IED – an Improvised Explosive Device – killed her two weeks into the mission.
And for a long time I felt powerless and angry, all at the same time. Irene had been about all that was good about England. All she’d ever wanted to do was help people. It wasn’t right that she’d died. Not for one second.
For months after it happened I fantasised about her walking through our front door. And I used to hope, despite everything logical, that I’d wake up one day to find her beside me again.
Tragedy warps everything.
I was slipping away, on the edge of consciousness, back in London, walking towards Buckingham Palace. A man in a long white shirt carrying a pitcher of water was coming towards me. I turned my head. Somebody was behind me, way in the distance. I knew who it was. But she was so far away. I turned, ran, stumbled.
I woke up, sickly unease rising through me. The floor-to-ceiling curtains were shadows in the darkness. I could make out the vague outlines of the gilt-edged prints of Ottoman Istanbul that hung in a row on the wall, like Janissaries, the Sultan’s guards, standing to attention.
Then I felt something move. There was something in the bed with me.
Bloody hell! I swung my fist, slammed it into the mattress, bounced up out of the bed, scrambled for the light switch by the bathroom door.
The room flooded with jaundiced light.
There was nothing. Nothing in the bed. Nothing under it. Was I going mad?
Relief soaked through me. Had it been an animal, a spider, something like that? My skin crawled. I should never have left the window open.
The phone rang.
‘Mr Ryan?’ A woman’s voice, anxious. It was the receptionist who’d given me that envelope. I sat on the bed, cradling the telephone against my bare shoulder. The gossamer breeze from the window felt like water running over my skin.
‘Yes?’
‘Two men are on the way up to see you, Mr Ryan.’
‘What?’
The line went dead. I could hear a truck grinding its gears outside.
For a second I didn’t understand why she’d called. Then it came to me. She was warning me.
A sharp knock – rat tat tat – sounded from the door. The do-not-disturb sign hanging on the doorknob vibrated.
That was quick. Then the knock came again. It was even more insistent this time.
I walked over to the door, put my eye to the viewer. Nothing. Just blackness. Was it broken?
‘Come on, Mr Ryan,’ an officious female voice called out. Someone English.
‘Hold on,’ I replied. I grabbed a fresh T-shirt from my bag and pulled it over my head. An even sharper knock sounded.
Rat-tat-tat-tat.
‘Coming.’ What the hell was the hurry? I pulled on my chinos, pushed my feet into suede moccasins.
Another knock.
RAT TAT-TAT TAT-TAT.
‘Come on!’ She sounded petulant, as if she hadn’t heard my replies, or had heard, but didn’t think I was moving fast enough.
I jerked the door open but held my foot against it, just in case I needed to close it in a hurry.
An attractive-looking woman was standing outside. She was in her late twenties, I guessed, and was wearing a tight high-necked black T-shirt. Her face was symmetrical, her eyes dark green, serious, her black hair pulled back tight. She had a thin gold chain around her neck. Despite her slim frame, she was clearly someone who could look after herself.
And she was holding an identity card in my face. I saw a severe-looking face and an official stamp, a triangle with a crown and the letters EIIR above it, and the words ‘British Consulate’ below. Then the card vanished before I had a chance to read any more. I stood up a little straighter. And then it came to me. This was the woman from one of Alek’s photos.
‘Come with me, Mr Ryan. Now.’ She glanced towards the lifts.
‘There are some people on the way up that you don’t want to meet. They were demanding to know your room number down at reception. You have to come with me. I mean it.’ She looked up and down the corridor, as if expecting to be interrupted at any moment. I heard a metallic thrum as the lift rose towards us. Then there was a creaking noise. It had stopped at a lower floor, maybe the one below us.
I could smell her perfume. It was faint, sweet.
‘Did you know Alek?’
A flicker of hesitation crossed her face.
‘My name’s Isabel Sharp. I was Alek’s liaison officer at the Consulate. Come on, Mr Ryan. If you don’t want to end up like him.’
I felt my back pocket. My wallet was there. I could get another room pass. I was dressed. I had my shoes on.
‘OK.’
She moved quickly. My room door closed behind me with a clunk. She was already halfway to a door down the corridor with an ‘Exit’ sign above it.
She held the door open for me, closed it after I’d passed through.
‘I thought I was gonna be met at the airport?’ I said, still unsure why I was following her.
‘That was a little misunderstanding,’ she said. ‘But I’m here now.’ She started down the carpeted stairs. I followed.
I was going to ask her why she was moving so fast, when I heard a juddering bang above us, as if someone had slammed a door open.
‘They’re coming,’ she said. I barely heard her. A muffled clatter of footsteps echoed from above.
She took the next set of stairs in two jumps.
Someone shouted. Then a crisp popping sound filled the stairwell. It was accompanied by a shrill pinging near me. A rain of concrete chips and dust fell around my head. Something had hit the wall above me!
‘Bastards,’ she said, in a low voice, as if she was talking to herself. I was barely keeping up with her.
My heart was pounding.
Something struck the metal handrail behind me. It squealed. I jerked my hand away from it.
Adrenaline pumped through me, tingling every muscle. The hair on my body stood up straight. My scalp felt tight.
I was taking three steps at a time, sometimes four. I could feel the rough concrete under the thin carpet as I landed on each step. Then Isabel almost fell. I put a hand under her arm, held her up. She regained her footing. We kept going.
The sound of running feet, voices, wasn’t far above us now. They were catching up. I looked behind. All I could see was a shadowy blur coming down.
Isabel’s face was pale.
The backs of my legs were straining. Who the hell were they?
At the bottom of the stairwell I overtook Isabel, barged through the fire exit door, held it open for her. The deafening noise of an alarm rang out above our heads.
Then she was sprinting like an Olympic runner down the deserted concrete laneway in front of us. I went after her, my lungs dragging in air. She was heading for a black Range Rover, a giant cockroach resting on oversized tyres.
The Range Rover’s lights flickered as we came up to it. For a moment I thought there might be someone in it.
‘Get in,’ she roared, jerking open the driver’s door.
As I slammed the passenger door closed, a sense of security enveloped me. Then I heard muffled shouts. I turned, looked through the back window. Two huge guys, one of them bald, had emerged from the fire exit door. The bald guy lifted his arm, pointed a gun at us.
There was a noise like fire crackers snapping.
‘Go!’ I shouted.
The engine of the Range Rover growled. I heard a whoosh, fans starting.
We jumped forward. There was a loud ding. I looked around.
The back window had taken a hit. The glass had a star in it now. Then another. But it didn’t shatter. We had bulletproof glass.
‘Put on your seat belt,’ she shouted.
A brick wall loomed. She swerved.
‘They’ll need a missile to stop us.’ She sounded triumphant.
We slid sideways, tyres squealing, onto an empty street. Exhilaration filled me. I was glad to be alive.
‘These diplomatic cars are worth every penny,’ she said. She was holding the steering wheel so tightly I could see her knuckles protruding through her pale skin.
‘Who they hell were they?’ I shouted.
‘I think a better question is, what the hell have you been up to that they want you so bad?’
‘I have no idea,’ I shouted. I took a deep breath, released my grip on the armrest, peeled my hand slowly from the plastic. I’d been holding it way too tight. I stared out the back window. There was no one coming after us. Isabel squealed around another turn. My shoulder banged against the window.
‘You better thank your guardian angel I didn’t get a taxi tonight,’ she continued.
I settled back in my seat, rubbed my elbow. It throbbed lightly. The inside of the Range Rover was a cocoon of black leather and brushed aluminium. A shiny logo sat at the centre of the polished walnut steering wheel. The vehicle was cavernous and it smelled of leather.
We turned the next corner a lot slower. Then, after examining the rear view mirror, Isabel sat back in her seat.
‘Do you have any idea what a bitch this car is to park?’ she said.
I was still thinking about how close the bastards had come. I looked at Isabel. She had tiny gold studs in her earlobes. They shone as we passed a street light.
She looked as if she’d done this sort of thing before. Only a few hairs had escaped from her ponytail. And they were flying gently in the breeze from the air conditioning.
The Range Rover growled as she changed gears. The steep side street we were on was empty. Pools of darkness crowded around lonely street lights. We bounced through a pothole.
‘You’re in good shape,’ she said, glancing in my direction. ‘You live in your gym, right?’
‘No. I free dive, run most days, but not usually for my life. Does this sort of stuff happen a lot to you?’
She shook her head.
‘No. Mostly I help businessmen and holidaymakers. And I rescue the unlucky from police custody.’
‘What do you think that lot were after?’
Her expression hardened, as if I’d insulted her. ‘Mr Ryan. This has to do with you and your colleague, Alek.’
‘Well, I’ve no idea why anyone would come after me like that. Has Istanbul gone mad?’
‘Not at all.’
I felt an ache in my arm. I rubbed it, moved it in its socket. Nothing seemed to be broken, but it was stiff and painful.
We stopped at a traffic light.
‘You obviously can’t go back to the hotel. I’ll take you somewhere else.’ It sounded as if she was going to find a kennel for a sick dog.
‘I can look after myself.’
‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Mr Ryan. Didn’t they teach you that at MIT?’ She looked at me, then at the traffic lights.
‘No, I was taught to look for explanations. And I still don’t have one for what just happened.’
‘Mr Ryan, when people get shot at here, it’s usually for a good reason, because of drugs or something worse.’
‘I’m not into drugs or something worse.’
She didn’t speak for a few seconds. ‘What about this project you and Alek were working on? Could it be something to do with that?’
‘I don’t think so. The project’s no big deal. There’s nothing controversial about it at all. We’re doing photographic work in Hagia Sophia for God’s sake. That’s it. What kind of joker is going to start killing because of that?’
‘Well, you’ve trodden on someone’s toes. Those thugs were prepared to kill you. And me, by the way, which I don’t appreciate one bit.’
As we drove on, she checked the mirror at regular intervals. My breathing had just about returned to normal, but my leg muscles were tight, as if I’d run a marathon, and my stomach felt weird, all hollow, as if I’d retched, even though I hadn’t.
‘Are you into antiquities, Mr Ryan? This place is awash with them. Maybe you have something those guys want, something of value.’ There was a suspicious edge to her voice.
‘You’re on the wrong track.’ Her insistence that all this was something to do with me was pissing me off.
‘We don’t deal in or smuggle antiquities at the Institute. I have nothing those guys could want.’ I made a show of patting my body.
My fingers touched the USB storage device in my trouser pocket. For a moment I considered not mentioning it, but I decided to take it out, to show her how little I’d picked up in the few hours I’d been here.
I pulled out the storage device, waved it dismissively in the air.
‘This is the only thing I’ve been given since I came here. It was in an envelope with some photos for Alek at the hotel. I don’t think they’d try to kill us for this.’
She reached for the USB key. ‘We’ll be the judge of that.’
I swung it away. ‘This is the property of my Institute.’ I hadn’t even looked at what was on it.
‘Give it to me, Mr Ryan.’ We were travelling through an obviously poorer district now. The houses crowded in on each side.
‘Or perhaps I should drop you here, if you’re going to be so uncooperative.’ She stopped at a corner, as if she meant to let me out.
‘I could outrun them better, without you holding me back,’ I said.
‘But their aim might improve.’
‘Tell me a good reason I should give it to you.’
She let out an exasperated sigh. ‘Look, beheadings are long out of fashion in Turkey. If they’ve started up again, there has to be something serious going down. We need to follow up anything that could help us find out why Alek was murdered, and who did it. That requires you to give me your full cooperation. Now please, can I have it?’ She held out her hand.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘But I want a copy of whatever’s on it. Agreed?’
She hesitated, then nodded.
I handed over the device.
Chapter 11 (#ulink_26cb4ea0-f385-519c-9a5e-2266c968a6ba)
Arap Anach stood on the balcony of his suite. In front of him the lights of the buildings crowding around the Golden Horn were cobwebs of diamonds.
The hem of his midnight-blue silk robe wafted in the breeze. There was an angry shout. He looked down beyond the black ironwork balcony. Istanbul in early August was a hot and airless city at ground level. Only those with expensive apartments or hotel suites high up felt the cooling breezes that glided over the rooftops.
Far below, in the thin light of a street lamp, a beggar jerked in the dust. People were gathering. Someone shouted. Malach watched, as if observing the death of an ant.
The sliding door behind him opened with a swish. He turned. Malach came through, bowed and spoke in a quiet voice.
‘They failed,’ he said. ‘The car he escaped in had CD plates. It’s registered to the British Consulate. We got photos from his room, and an iPad too.’ He handed the photos to Arap.
‘Don’t turn the iPad on,’ said Arap. He held the photos up. ‘You didn’t get his phone?’
‘No. But we know his name. He came from England yesterday.’
‘Look for him, but discreetly. And finish the clean up. I want no traces for anyone to find.’
Malach nodded, turned, went back out through the door, closed it with a click behind him.
Arap ran his hands along the balcony, caressing it. Then he gripped it, hard.
Copies of the pictures that Greek boy had taken could be in the hands of the British already. It wouldn’t be easy for them to work out where they had been taken, but it wouldn’t be impossible either.
But would they understand the significance of what they’d found, bother to follow it up? Maybe. They weren’t stupid. All these loose ends would have to be sorted out quickly.
Five years of planning could not be wasted. It had taken too long to get to this point. Everything was almost ready.
He remembered the day he’d started down this road. The day he’d discovered his father’s dismembered corpse in the master bedroom of that gaudy villa in Austria.
His father had deserved what he got. Anyone who spent their time on the Cote d’Azur in a drugged haze, squandering their inheritance, deserved a painful end. The only useful thing he’d taught him was a lesson very few fathers thought it necessary to teach their children.
Arap’s own tastes had been corrupted a long time ago. He’d known that since he’d raped a girl near his school in England. The local paper had been full of it. Why they’d cared so much about a nobody, an insignificant larva, he still had no idea. The English were far too squeamish.
That slippery wisp of a girl hadn’t been his first taste of forbidden pleasure either. He’d lost his virginity when he was ten. His father’s friends had laughed as they’d pretended to strangle him on a yacht in the Aegean, as they took pleasure from his body. That had been an experience he would never forget.
What his father told him afterwards had stuck in his mind; when you’ve done things that can never be forgiven, you become free, because you can never go back, never undo them.
And he’d been right. He was free, and about to make his mark in a way his father had never contemplated. He was going to do something such as his ancestors had done centuries ago. His inherited estates and titles going back a thousand years made it all possible. There were few others who had the ambition, money and connections to make this thing happen. His time was coming.
His phone beeped. He picked it up from the marble table. A scrambled message icon was flashing. He pressed at it. Letters scrolled in front of him.
The siren of an ambulance sounded below. He put the phone down, peered over the railing. Shadows were milling around the ambulance. All the powerless larvae.
Everything they’d known was about to change. There were just a few things to fix now, and Malach could take care of those, easily. He’d proved long ago that he enjoyed such tasks.
Chapter 12 (#ulink_dbb52d6e-a319-5c51-a92f-845905d9031b)
We arrived at one of the British Consulate’s guest apartments after midnight, and it was past 1:00 AM before I closed my eyes in one of the spartan, marble-floored bedrooms.
I didn’t sleep well. A few hours after drifting off I sat up and looked around, memories of being shot at playing through my mind. I felt angry as the early morning sunlight filtered through the blinds. The air in the room was humid and already heavy. I’d turned off the air conditioning unit by the window before going to sleep.
One question had lodged in my mind. Were those bastards still looking for me?
The apartment had a balcony with a stunning view. Not surprising, I suppose, seeing as how it was on the tenth floor and overlooking where the glittering Sea of Marmara met the choppy Bosphorus channel.
I had a shower in the small bathroom attached to my room. I stayed longer than usual, as the tension of the last twelve hours dissipated into the water. When I was dry and dressed I went out onto the balcony.
The far shore of the Bosphorus, the Asian side of Istanbul, literally another continent, swam far off, in the early morning heat haze. Directly in front of me a variety of ships, freighters and tankers were making their way in two distinct lines, like foam-flecked water insects, travelling into and out of the sun-dappled channel of the Bosphorus.
Isabel had told me the night before that the apartment block overlooked the old Byzantine port of Bucoleon, the sea port that had served the Roman Emperor Justinian’s imperial palace. The shimmering sea and infinite azure sky must have been as alluring back then as they were now.
As I was admiring the view, Isabel joined me. She was carrying a tray with croissants, butter, jam, coffee, warm milk and pale brown sugar.
Her black hair was undone, flowing over her shoulders, but she still looked businesslike. And her expression was serious.
‘Did you sleep?’ she said.
‘Sure, every time I get shot at, almost kidnapped, I sleep like a baby.’
‘It’ll make a good story for your grandchildren.’
‘If I ever have any.’ I poured coffee for the both of us, then tasted mine. It was strong, black, just what I needed. I ate a croissant.
‘What about the police? Are you going to call them?’ I asked, as I poured myself some more coffee. I’d been wondering whether we should have reported what had happened already.
‘We’ll tell them at the appropriate time. What we’re concerned about first is your security.’
‘Why didn’t you shoot back at those bastards last night?’
She was gazing out to sea.
‘I don’t carry a gun, Sean. I’m not James bloody Bond. This is not a movie.’
I could smell salty sea air as a welcome breeze wafted up to us.
‘Having pitched battles in the street isn’t the way we operate here.’
‘Have you any new ideas about who those guys were?’
‘No, and we don’t jump to conclusions. Everyone with a grudge is taking their chances these days. Perhaps you have some new idea?’
‘You gotta be joking,’ I said. ‘That was like Grand Theft: Istanbul last night.’
She stared at a giant red oil tanker that had left a flotilla of ships moored out in the Sea of Marmara. The tanker was proceeding slowly towards the channel of the Bosphorus. Isabel sat down on one of the cushioned wicker chairs facing out to sea and pulled her long legs up under her, as if she was about to do yoga. Her black sweatpants and skintight black T-shirt made her look like a gym instructor. I stayed standing, taking in the view.
‘Some tankers wait a week to get through these straits,’ she said.
We sat in silence for a minute.
‘I didn’t expect that last night,’ I said.
‘The Turks are among the kindest people in the world, Sean. They’re welcoming, warm and giving, almost to a fault.’ She stretched her arms above her head. ‘What happened to you I have never seen happen to any visitor here.’ She sipped at her coffee.
‘We’re very concerned, Sean.’ She put her coffee cup down. ‘Alek’s death has been linked to a threat against the United Kingdom.’
‘What?’ I recoiled.
She stared out to sea. The heat was growing stronger by the minute, as the sun climbed in the sky. Home felt a long way away.
‘There’s a video clip on the Internet already. It shows Alek’s beheading.’ She was talking fast now. ‘It also contains a threat to bring Armageddon to London.’ She paused, as if to give time for what she’d said to sink in.
‘We’ve had a lot of this stuff in the past year, what with everything that’s going on. The nuts like to come out together. So we won’t be panicking, but we have to follow up every threat. So I need to know if there’s anything else you can tell me, which might help us to find the people who murdered Alek.’ She turned to look at me.
I stared back at her. Was this for real? Had Alek gotten himself caught up in something totally stupid?
‘If I knew anything that might help, I’d tell you. I would.’
‘I hope so.’
She stood up, went inside. In less than half a minute she was back, holding some photographs.
She placed the prints on the glass-topped dining table.
‘These images were on that storage device,’ she said.
I bent over, looked at them. There was a page of thumbnails and two images printed out full size. The thumbnails were images of mosaics in Hagia Sophia. I scanned them quickly. The only ones not clearly from Hagia Sophia were the two that had been blown up and the photo of Alek with Isabel.
The two photos she had printed out full size were the ones I’d left in the hotel room, which had been in the envelope. They must have meant something for Alek to have had them printed out. But what?
‘Can you tell me anything about these photos?’ Isabel pointed at the two prints.
I looked at them closely. ‘They’re not part of our project. That’s all I can say.’
She pulled one of the chairs forward and sat down.
‘OK, let’s go back to the beginning,’ she said. ‘Did your project include work in any excavations or tunnels under Hagia Sophia?’
‘No, not all.’ I was sitting opposite her, facing the sun.
‘Then why does this picture look like it was taken under- ground?’
‘I have no idea. Our project is about the mosaics that are on public view. And anyway, we did a lot of research on Hagia Sophia and there are no crypts under it, nothing like this.’ I pointed at the pictures. ‘There’s just a few drainage tunnels. No one has ever found mosaics under Hagia Sophia.’
‘So where were these photos taken?’
I didn’t have an answer.
She stretched her arms up high, as if she was warming up for a yoga session.
‘I think Alek must have gone off and done some exploring, Sean.’
‘He couldn’t have done it in Hagia Sophia. The place is guarded day and night. It’s a museum housing priceless treasures. Their security is tight.’
I took a sip of my coffee, placed the cup on the table and picked up one of the pictures. It was of a floor mosaic, a representation of a Madonna with child in dull blues and pale greens. The faded IH letters near the baby represented the word Jesus. It was a classic and beautiful image, an archetype of Christian art. There was a giant Virgin and Child wall painting in Hagia Sophia, which was like it.
‘Did Alek tell you anything about what he was up to? You were friends weren’t you?’
‘Yeah, we were, but he never said anything about this.’ I motioned at the pictures again. ‘What about you, did he tell you anything? This is a picture of you, isn’t it?’ I pointed at the thumbnail.
‘We went for lunch, Sean. The Consulate likes to keep itself informed about what’s happening in this city. He was a nice guy, but he hardly spoke about his work. And he never said anything about taking pictures anywhere else, before you ask.’
Why hadn’t Alek told me he’d met her, and about these odd photos? Was he planning to when he got back? Or was I being naïve?
‘I’m sure you have experts who’ve examined this already,’ I said, pointing at the picture in my hand. ‘What do they make of it?’
‘It’s an almost classic representation of the Virgin, so I’m told.’
‘What do you mean, almost?’
She moved towards me. I caught a faint lemony perfume smell.
‘Look at the Virgin’s dress. It should have gold stars. And the colours are wrong too. It needs expert examination.’
‘Your people know their stuff.’
‘But not enough,’ she said. ‘We don’t know where the photo was taken.’
She was holding something back though. I could feel it.
‘In a few weeks I might have an answer,’ I said. ‘My Institute has access to a lot of people. Maybe we can figure this one out.’
‘You don’t have to go to all that trouble,’ she said. ‘The greatest living expert on early Christian mosaics of the Virgin is an Orthodox priest. We’re going to contact him, find out what kind of mosaic this is, where it might be found.’
‘We’ll do our own investigation too.’
She looked at me coolly. ‘You’ll get a copy of these images, I promise, Sean, but not yet. They’re part of our evidence chain. Alek’s death was a serious criminal act. We think these pictures have something to do with it.’
I knew where this was going. I’d be lucky if they gave me a copy of these in six months. My best friend had been murdered, I’d been shot at, and I was about to be cut out of what was going to happen next. I felt anger bubbling up inside me.
‘Do your superiors know that Alek and you were close?’ It was a long shot, but it was worth a try.
‘You’ve got to be joking, right?’ Her smile was gone. Her expression was glacier-like now.
I’d met some officials in the last two years who’d tried to protect me, tell me as little as possible, whenever I’d asked about Irene’s death. I wasn’t going to accept all that this time.
‘I bet the British tabloids would love to find out that one of Her Majesty’s Consular officials had been involved with a guy who was beheaded. Wasn’t there a campaign to discredit the Foreign Office a while back for bungling? I’m sure there’s plenty of journalists who’d run with this story.’
She looked calm, unmoved by my anger.
‘Alek was a good friend, not just a colleague. I will find out what happened to him. I’m not going to walk away from this. Neither is my Institute. Not now. Not ever.’
She shook her head slowly, indicating I was heading the wrong way. I didn’t care.
‘We consulted with the Greek Orthodox community when we planned this project. So it won’t be hard to find this expert of yours and a few of our own.’ I reached for the photo of the mosaic and picked it up.
‘And I’m sure the Turkish media would love to know about our research material being confiscated, an important UNESCO project being interfered with by the British government.’
Now she pointed a finger at me.
‘I don’t like being threatened, Sean. But I’ll put it down to what happened last night, for your sake.’
‘You can put it down to whatever you like, after I tell the media about this.’ I waved the photo in front of her face.
We looked at each other. Her expression was a mask of grim determination.
‘Your Institute is involved in something it shouldn’t have been,’ she said.
‘You’re talking crap. And you know it. But I don’t care what lies you make up about us. This is too personal.’ An annoying jingle from what sounded like an early morning TV show came up from the apartment below.
I felt a slight breeze on my skin. It barely alleviated the rising heat.
‘You’re upset,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what I can do. But I’m not making any promises.’ She stood up and went inside.
I waited. It was getting hotter by the minute and it was still only 8:30.
I shifted my chair around. A thick pad of lined green paper lay discarded under the table. I imagined Isabel or her colleagues sitting here taking notes.
She had a frown on her face when she came back half an hour later. ‘You can come with me, if you want. Someone thinks it might be a good idea to have you along.’
She sat down opposite me.
‘When are you going?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘I love being kept in the dark.’
She spoke slowly. ‘I can show you this.’ She placed a netbook on the table in front of me. The sound of a car beeping angrily echoed from the street below.
She pointed at the screen.
On it was an English language version of a Turkish newspaper’s website. The top of the screen read ‘Zamiyete – Breaking News’ in big letters.
Below the banner there was a picture of the iconic dome of Hagia Sophia. The headline underneath read:
‘Greek Plot to Steal Hagia Sophia’s Treasures.’ I pulled the screen towards me. The article was about Alek.
It claimed that a shadowy group of Greek businessmen had been trying for years to penetrate the tight security at Hagia Sophia, and that the man whose decapitated body had been found in its grounds was connected to them. It claimed that man had been murdered by fundamentalists who wanted Hagia Sophia to become a mosque again, against Atatürk’s explicit wishes.
The man who’d died, the article went on to say, had used the cover of working on an official UNESCO project to conduct unauthorised electronic tests at Hagia Sophia.
The article also claimed that there’d been speculation in the Greek media that the Labarum of Constantine, a banner used to rally the first Roman Christian legions, was one of the artefacts being sought by the Greek businessmen.
‘I thought you said your little project wasn’t controversial?’ She sounded tired.
What concerned me though was what they were saying about Alek.
‘I don’t know anything about Greek businessmen. And we weren’t doing any unauthorised electronic tests. How can they make this stuff up and get it published?’
A horrible sense of déjà vu came over me. There’d been speculation in the press in London too, after Irene had died. Some stories had claimed that she’d been killed by friendly fire. It had been totally unsettling. It was one of the reasons I’d gone out there.
‘You think they made it all up?’ Her tone was sceptical. ‘You know nothing about this Labarum thing?’
Her arms were folded.
‘I didn’t say that.’ There was no point in denying it. ‘Alek told me all about Constantine military standard, the Labarum thing, as you call it. He claimed …’ I hesitated. The craziness of what Alek had said when he was alive seemed spookier now that he was dead.
‘He claimed …’ Was this how he’d be remembered?
‘Do go on,’ said Isabel.
I sighed. ‘Alek said the Labarum of Constantine would reappear at a time of great change.’
That was enough for her. She raised her hands in the air as if she didn’t want to hear any more.
I shrugged. I’d always been a cynic when it came to Alek’s crazy theories. This one was only a bit stupider than the rest.
‘If he’d found even a part of this banner of Constantine, it’d be worth a mint, right?’ she said.
‘Yeah, but he wasn’t looking for it.’
‘Why do you think they’re talking about it?’ she said.
‘It’s one of the legends of Hagia Sophia. That’s enough reason for them to write this stuff. Some people like stirring things up. It sells newspapers. But whatever they say, there’s no way the Institute was part of a search for the Labarum. And whatever you say about him, I honestly don’t think Alek was either. He would have told me. We should sue that newspaper.’
She shook her head. ‘Not a good idea, unless you like spending a lot of time in hot court rooms.’
‘Well, their story is full of crap.’
‘So where did Alek take this photograph?’ She tapped her finger against the print lying on the table.
‘Like I said, I’ve no idea.’
I shaded my eyes. The sun was way too hot already. My skin was burning.
Despite my insistence that Alek was innocent, I knew I had to consider that there was a chance, if even an outside one, that he might have become involved in something he hadn’t told me about. Sure, he valued his job, but what about all the weird stuff he used to go on about?
Had he spread his crazy ideas about Constantine’s Labarum? Had someone persuaded him to look for it?
Isabel gazed out at sea. Then she turned to me.
‘Why did you go to Afghanistan after your wife died?’
Someone had been digging about me. But it was a question I’d answered many times before. I put my hands on the table, palms downward.
‘I went to Afghanistan because the Institute I work for got permission from the Ministry of Education there to do an aerial survey.’
‘You’re telling me it was a coincidence? Your wife had died out there six months before; then you get to go out there. Come on Sean, I’m not stupid.’
I pressed my palms down on the table. I’d heard this response before too. ‘What would you do if your husband was murdered, and no one was ever caught for it, never mind punished, and the whole incident ended up almost forgotten?’ I was getting louder, but I couldn’t help it, ‘If the whole thing is brushed away as if it never happened?
Her voice was softer when she responded. ‘I heard you almost got yourself killed. That you were lucky to be deported.’
I stared out to sea. We sat in silence.
‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ I said.
What she’d said was all true. I’d managed to visit the nearest village to where Irene had been murdered by a roadside bomb. I’d ended up in a room with ten armed men and a nervous translator. I’d been hoping to find out which group had killed her. To get closure. Put a name to the bastards.
An American patrol was called in by a local guy. I was taken into custody, handcuffed, put on a plane out within seventy-two hours. They’d threatened to charge me too, but my visa to get into Afghanistan had been legitimate. I must have had ten people shouting in my face before the plane doors closed. I’d put lives at risk. I had to accept I shouldn’t have done it.
I’d also put my own life at risk. But I didn’t care about that. My parents were dead. My beautiful wife was dead. We had no children. Who the hell would care if I was history?
I was a hollow human robot with a ghost haunting it. All I did most days were tasks I cared nothing about.
And going out to Afghanistan hadn’t cured me. It had just created more problems.
The fact that the Institute was banned from Afghanistan for ten years was one of the reasons I’d had to accept that my role at the Institute was going to change. I had to get approval from Beresford-Ellis before I went off on any project now, no matter what I thought of him. It irritated me – I’d co-founded the place – but I couldn’t argue with the logic of it.
‘You’ve definitely stepped on someone’s toes this time too,’ she said, softly, after a minute had passed. ‘Hagia Sophia is a big deal here. The oldest copy of the Koran in the world is in Istanbul, a few minutes’ walk from it.’ She went to the balcony.
‘Are you ready?’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘We’re going.’ She shaded her eyes. She was looking along the coastline. A low-flying white helicopter was coming towards us. I watched it approach.
‘I’ve just realised,’ she said, turning towards me. ‘That’s an upside down V.’ She pointed at the top corner of the mosaic in Alek’s photo. ‘That could be the Greek letter lambda, our letter L.’
‘L, what does that stand for?’
‘It could stand for Luna, the goddess of the moon. Maybe this isn’t Christian after all.’ She laughed, grabbed the photos off the table. She had a high-pitched laugh.
Her laughter was drowned out by the roar of the helicopter. It was almost level with us now.
‘It’s a bit noisy, isn’t it?’ she shouted in my ear.
The helicopter descended towards a patch of grass in front of the building, between the sea and the road.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘To meet that expert I told you about.’
‘Is this the way you always travel?’ I shouted.
‘No, only when people’s lives are in danger.’
Chapter 13 (#ulink_3c423744-b075-5739-a32a-67f3aa69a758)
In Whitehall Sergeant Henry P Mowlam was looking at his screen. His hands were curled into fists.
He closed his eyes. Would they listen to him? The raid on the London mosque had led to two riots already. As far as he was concerned, traffic checkpoints in the city should have been in place for at least another two weeks. The unrest in other European cities had continued during the last twenty four hours. All across Europe similar raids on mosques had been conducted in search of terror suspects who’d gone on the run after the escalation in the Middle East. Acting on rumours, looking for scapegoats, was how it had been described by some in the media. The civil rights mob had been having a canary, live on television.
He listened to the drone of the underground control room. Some days it reminded him of a symphony, all that humming and buzzing and heels clacking and coughs and clicks.
‘Are you all right, Henry?’ a woman’s voice whispered.
He nodded, opened his eyes. Sergeant Finch was standing beside him. She always looked so good in her starched white shirt. He pointed at his screen.
A message in a secure window read:
DO NOT PROCEED WITH PTRE/67765/67LE.
‘What’s that about?’ said Finch.
The matter of the checkpoints would have to wait. This was something Sergeant Finch could help him with.
‘I am not to place surveillance on Lord Bidoner, despite the fact that he’s met two other men we’ve been monitoring in the past week!’
Finch looked surprised. A troubled look crossed her face.
‘That request was playing with fire, Henry. You do know who Bidoner is, don’t you?’
Mowlam nodded, shrugged. He closed the message and went back to the video images he’d been assessing.
Chapter 14 (#ulink_4977bd84-8fc0-5721-a250-c549c14d8719)
‘That was easy,’ I said.
The Turkish immigration authorities had only taken our passports for ten seconds. The security check was quick as well. We just walked through a metal detector in a quiet corridor. The diplomatic briefcase embossed with the lion and unicorn crest of the British Foreign Office, which Isabel had carried with her from the helicopter, had probably helped. Now walking across the baking concrete apron towards a white, tube-like executive jet, I felt as if I’d been dropped into another world.
I was looking forward to going back to London. That was where Isabel had said we were going when the passport official had asked her.
The Greek Orthodox community in England was one of the largest outside Greece. I could well believe there was an expert there who could help us track down where the two pictures had been taken.
The shrill sound of an aircraft readying for flight assaulted us as we made our way across the concrete. The smell of aviation fuel, heat and dust filled my nostrils as I climbed the rickety aluminium stairs and entered the small passenger cabin.
What surprised me most was that once I was inside I couldn’t stand up fully. The cabin must have been only five foot something high. I had to bend in order to reach one of the royal-blue leather seats.
They weren’t your usual commercial airline seats either. These were lower, wider, and far more comfortable. And there were only seven of them.
Isabel sat opposite me. We were the only occupants of the cabin. A large blue cooler bag sat on the floor at the back. Isabel pulled it forwards, reached inside and passed me a bottle of orange juice.
‘You’re lucky. The last time I did this they forgot to put the refreshments onboard.’
‘That must have been a bad flight,’ I said. I took the bottle and drank from it. It tasted wonderful.
‘You two OK?’ a voice called out. The door to the pilot’s cabin was open. I could see an expanse of blinking lights and dials. The man who’d spoken was in the pilot’s seat, leaning towards us, his hand holding the door open.
‘A OK,’ replied Isabel.
The pilot gave us a thumbs-up.
A second, younger man, who would be sitting in the other cockpit seat, came into the cabin. He pulled the door to the outside closed. A light above it flashed red.
The engines roared. My seat reverberated as we prepared to taxi.
Then the roar diminished. I looked out of one of the tiny porthole windows. An all black Porsche jeep was speeding towards us. It had darkened windows. For a brief moment I thought it might be the Turkish authorities looking for me, that my inspector friend was wondering why I was leaving Istanbul so soon. Isabel leaned forward. Her knee touched mine. She reached over, grabbed her jacket, threw it on to the seat behind us.
‘We’ve got company,’ she said.
The Porsche had pulled up by the plane. A man got out of the back, strode towards us. He was tall, dressed in a mustard coloured suit. He had that lightly tanned, angular sort of face that reminded me of pictures of celebrities trying hard to look good.
The door opened with a whoosh. Wind and the smell of jet fuel filled the cabin.
‘Good to see you, Isabel,’ boomed a voice. ‘Looks like I got here just in time.’ The man in the mustard suit sat in the seat beside her. Both of them were facing me.
‘It’s a bit tight in here,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Isabel.’ He patted her knee. Then he turned to me.
‘This is the man, eh, Isabel?’
‘Sean,’ she said. ‘Meet Peter Fitzgerald. He works in the Consulate.’ As if that explained everything. Then I remembered. This was the guy who’d told me about Alek’s death.
‘Peter, this is Sean Ryan, from the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford. He co-founded it. He’s their Director of Projects.’
Not for long, I thought, after the way this project in Istanbul had gone, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. In any case, the expression on Peter’s face was that of a wine waiter who’d just been asked for plum juice.
‘We spoke on the phone,’ he said. ‘So sorry about your colleague. What a dreadful death. It’s certainly stirred things up here.’ He put his hand out. I shook it.
‘Alek didn’t deserve that,’ I said.
Isabel was staring at me.
‘I’m sure. What a terrible nightmare,’ said Peter. ‘And what about you, how are you? I heard you had a difficult night.’
‘I’m alright,’ I said. I didn’t need his sympathy.
I heard scuffling, looked around.
Two leather bags were being loaded into the passageway between the seats and the door to the pilot’s cabin. My own small bag, with everything from my hotel room packed into it, had been waiting at the private jet terminal when we’d arrived.
I’d seen, straight away, that my stuff had been rifled through, that some items were missing, but compared to what had happened to Alek, and what could have happened to me last night I felt fortunate.
‘Tell me all about yourself,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I was a bit abrupt on the phone the other day. A lot on my plate right now.’ He tapped his nose.
Peter seemed to be fascinated by everything I had to say. It was an hour, at least, and we were many miles from Istanbul before the flow of his questions slowed. By then he knew all about my origins, my father’s Purple Star background, our life in Norfolk, and in upstate New York, where I started college after my father left the military, and all about my very English mother, my one-year research extension in London, how I met Irene, my first job, how we founded the Institute. Surprisingly, there were things he didn’t ask about though. Like what had happened to my wife. Maybe he knew the answers to those questions already.
‘Tell him about the mosaic Alek took a picture of,’ said Isabel, when Peter seemed to have finished his questioning.
I told him the little I knew. Isabel took the photo of the mosaic out of her bag and passed it to him as I was talking.
‘Very interesting,’ he said. When I finished, he looked around, as if he was afraid someone might be listening to us.
‘And you have no idea where this picture was taken?’ He waved the photo at me.
I sat back. ‘I told Isabel already, and the answer is still no. Our project is about assessing how the mosaics in Hagia Sophia have changed over the years. It was never about identifying unknown mosaics.’
‘Your colleague was working only in Hagia Sophia, correct?’ He was staring at me.
I nodded.
‘There’s a lot of interesting stuff besides mosaics in Hagia Sophia, isn’t there?’
‘Yes. It goes back a long way. The building we see there now was put up in the 530s,’ I said.
Peter’s eyebrows shot up. ‘It’s older than that, I think. Didn’t that old treasure hunter, Schneider, find out during the excavations he carried out in ’35 that the foundations were from an earlier church?’ He knew his stuff.
‘The first Christian church on the site was probably built in 351.’
Isabel looked amused.
‘Yes,’ said Peter, drily. ‘Hagia Sophia is one of the foundation churches of Christianity.’ His right hand slapped his armrest. ‘And it’s the best of them by far. Don’t some people say it’ll be returned to Christianity one day?’ He looked at me innocently.
Was he trying to trap me? I didn’t reply.
‘So you don’t go along with all this Christian revival thing, do you, Sean?’
‘No.’
‘And you don’t know anything about the stories in the Turkish papers?’
‘No.’
I felt myself getting irritated. Not only was he asking too many questions, I was also beginning to feel boxed in with his long legs blocking access to the corridor.
‘If any of those journalists poked into the dusty corners of your life, Sean, would they find anything … smelly?’
Now he was really annoying me. I shook my head, fast. ‘Not a single thing. I have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing.’
‘Not that it would be just journalists doing the investigating,’ he said, gesturing towards Isabel and himself. His tone was haughty, detached, as if he knew things I didn’t.
He looked me in the eye and smiled. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
‘There’s going to be a lot of interest in this story over the next few days, Sean. It’ll blow over, of course, but until then every blogger in Europe will be looking for an angle on Alek’s death. I do hope you’re not hiding any nasty little secrets.’
‘How many times do I have to repeat myself?’ I said. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’ I raised my hands, held them in the air, palms forward, as if I was going to push him and his accusations away.
He rubbed at his trousers, fixed the crease.
‘I understand you’re upset, Sean, but this story has real legs. I don’t know if Isabel warned you, but all the security services, MI5, and 6, and all the rest, they do an under-every-stone trawl in cases like this. And if they do find anything funny, I must tell you, unofficially, they’re not beyond a little bit of mild torture, given what we’re up against now.’ He put his hands together, then braced them on his knees. ‘When it comes to defending our country we do get a bit of leeway these days, you know. But I’m sure you’ve nothing to hide.’
Was he joking? I’d imagined the local police in Oxford going around to the Institute, asking a few questions. Not a platoon of security service types trawling through every chapter of my life.
‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I’ve nothing to hide.’
The cabin was quiet except for the rumble of the plane’s engine.
‘So there’s nothing you want to tell us?’
‘Not a thing,’ I said, emphatically.
‘Very good,’ said Peter. The atmosphere changed from Artic cool to warmish again.
‘It’s the truth.’
‘I do hope so.’ He leaned back, drummed his fingers on the arm rest.
He clearly enjoyed playing games with people. I’d never liked people like that. Isabel seemed irritated too.
I looked out the window. I could see snow capped mountains far below. The sun was high in the sky. There was a blue shimmer of sea far off to our right. I got a strange feeling. That was where the landmass of Europe should have been.
What route were we taking?
‘Spectacular view, isn’t it?’ said Peter.
‘What mountains are they?’ I said.
‘Sorry, I’m no good at all that stuff. But they are beautiful, aren’t they?’
‘Now, about this mosaic,’ he said, in a softer tone. ‘I have to tell you there’s no record of such a mosaic anywhere in Istanbul or in all Turkey.’ He stretched his legs out into the passageway.
‘Which means it has to be from some undiscovered site. Mosaics were popular in the Roman Empire. They had to find a way to brighten their homes, I suppose.’ He sat up straighter.
‘I wonder what this old priest will tell us,’ said Peter.
Isabel brushed hair from her face.
‘Peter’s been busy trying to find out who was shooting at us last night,’ she said. Her tone made it sound as if she was trying to sell Peter to me.
‘Great, any news?’
‘A little,’ said Peter. ‘Somebody’s been trying to track the Consulate’s Range Rovers. That was what you were driving last night, Isabel, wasn’t it?’
Isabel nodded.
‘Well, someone went and hacked the systems at Istanbul’s Range Rover service centre early this morning. Whoever is after you is serious, Sean.’ He was looking out the window now.
‘What sort of people do this kind of thing?’ I said.
‘There are a number of small groups that might be involved. There are a lot of refugees in Istanbul. We’ve been keeping an eye on them, but it’s a big city and things are changing fast.’
He reached over, took an orange juice from the cooler bag and drank from it.
‘The Turks are blaming the whole thing on foreigners, of course.’ He gestured expansively. ‘They’re probably right.’
‘I’ll check what the news sites are saying,’ said Isabel.
She pulled a laptop from her briefcase, fired it up, hit a few keys, stared at the screen for a few minutes.
‘You don’t want to look at this.’
‘I want to.’
She passed the laptop to me. The browser window was filled with the BBC News website. The lead story, accompanied by a gruesome, but blurry image, was about Alek. What had happened to him was hitting the big time. I stared at the picture. It felt weird, as if I was watching someone else. This was too crazy.
Alek’s chin was down on his chest, his eyes hidden. He was strapped to a pillar. It was a still from that video I’d read about. I felt an urge to push the laptop away. I resisted. Then there was something catching in my throat. I put a hand to my mouth, kept it clamped shut as the sickening sensation passed. I wasn’t going to look away. That would be too easy.
The story underneath the picture read:
Beheading in Istanbul.
No one, so far, has claimed responsibility for the beheading of a Mr Alek Zegliwski, whose body was found in Istanbul on August 4. Turkish security experts are pointing the finger at a radical Islamic sect intent on the re-establishment of the Islamic Caliphate, which until 1924 was based at Hagia Sophia, where Mr Zegliwski was working. Re-establishing the Caliphate is a key goal for many Islamic fundamentalists.
The Arab script in the photo above Mr Zegliwski’s head, was, the article said, a threat to bring the war to London. Further on, the Turkish Prime Minister’s office had issued a statement saying arrests had been made that morning, and that the Turkish security services were following up a number of lines of enquiry.
‘This wasn’t supposed to happen,’ I said. I passed the laptop back to Isabel.
Peter took it, put it on his knee, read for a few minutes.
Then, he looked up from his screen and said, ‘The Turkish police raided known activists. They like to be seen to be taking action. I doubt they’ll find the people we’re looking for though.’ He nudged Isabel’s leg with the laptop. ‘Did you get a description of your friends from last night circulated?’
‘It was attached to my report,’ she said.
‘Was there anything about Alek’s behaviour in the past few weeks that seems odd now, Sean?’ Her tone was soft, coaxing.
I thought about her question as the queasy sensation from seeing that image of Alek slowly faded. ‘There’s nothing I can put a finger on. He was unavailable a few times, but that happened now and again with him.’ It was weird talking about Alek in this way.
Peter was drumming his fingers on his armrest.
Isabel looked out the window.
A flash of sunlight in the corner of my eye made me turn and stare out the window on the right. What I saw amazed me.
The glimmer of sea that I’d seen in the distance stretched to the horizon now, where the continent of Europe should have been, and in the sky, flying parallel with us, was a silver-grey jet fighter, no more than half a mile away. It had the distinctive dual tail-fins of the F-35 Lightning.
We were being escorted by a state-of-the-art fighter jet. But why? And where the hell were we?
Chapter 15 (#ulink_2965bc6f-9f70-5ee9-9ecb-3a608212f6bd)
On the rounded top of a salt hill, an outcrop of the Zagros Mountains, a black-cloaked shepherd sat. His flock, fourteen thin black sheep, was foraging among skeletal dwarf oak trees. In the distance a layer of dust and pollution marked the location of the city of Mosul.
The Zagros mountain chain is a natural barrier between Iran and Iraq. It extends from north of the Straits of Hormuz all the way into Turkey. It’s a thousand miles long and its peaks are snow-capped. Its foothills resemble the hills of the US South West or the Highlands of Scotland. The city of Mosul, in the north of Iraq on the Tigris river, is near the ancient site of the city of Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire. Uncounted armies have battled in this area.
The shepherd watched the white trail of a plane as it rose from Mosul airport. He thought about the warning he’d heard the night before. The evening star of Ishtar had risen late. The wizened crone who slept in a cave at the bottom of the hill had come into the village square to speak to them for the first time in ten years.
‘Not since Jonah warned the Ninevites has such a thing happened,’ she’d said in the pale evening light. Then she’d coughed for almost a minute.
Finally she’d continued, ‘Remember Jonah’s warning.’ She’d looked at every face. ‘Another great city will be destroyed.’
Chapter 16 (#ulink_652b7a8f-fb2f-5b66-9c04-05757a53b0bc)
‘That’s the easternmost corner of the Mediterranean,’ said Peter. ‘We’ll be heading inland soon, now that we’ve picked up our escort.’
‘What do we need an escort for?’ I was trying to sound as unfazed as I could. I turned, looked out the window again, just to check the F-35 was actually there.
‘We’ll be flying near the Syrian border soon, and with everything that’s been going on, we don’t want to take any chances. Thankfully, air cover is one of the few things we can still rely on here.’ He leaned back in his seat.
‘I should have told you we were making a stop before taking you to London,’ said Isabel, looking at me. ‘But I was asked not to.’ Her gaze flickered towards Peter.
A list of questions came into my mind. ‘Where are we going?’ was the one that came out.
‘Mosul,’ said Isabel.
‘Northern Iraq?’
She nodded. ‘The expert I told you about – Father Gregory – has been working on an archaeological dig not far from the city. We don’t have much choice, Sean, unless you want to wait a month until he finishes up there.’ Isabel sounded genuinely sorry she hadn’t told me what was going on.
If I remembered right, Mosul had been the scene of a number of bloody battles after Saddam’s fall.
‘Isn’t Mosul still a bit hot for archaeological work?’
Peter closed his eyes. ‘Mosul has been hot for a long time. The whole of Iraq is an archaeological minefield. Everyone has a different view about which layer of history is the most important and which you can trample on.’ He waved at Isabel. ‘Why don’t you tell him what we dug up?’
Isabel sat forward. ‘Mosul was the earliest Christian city outside what is now Israel,’ she said. ‘The reason Father Gregory is there is because the Greek Orthodox Church wants him to look at some very old Christian sites, before someone bans them from digging in the country. It’s not an ideal time to dig, but when is it around there?
‘Mosul has nearly as much history as Istanbul,’ said Peter. ‘It’s not far from the tar pits, which were the original source of Byzantium’s secret weapon, Greek fire, which saved their asses from the Muslim hordes. All of us might be worshipping Allah now, if the Greeks hadn’t won in 678 with the help of Greek fire.’
Suddenly, we dropped altitude. A gaping hole opened in my stomach. I looked out the window. I could see a range of grey mountains. One, far off, still had snow on its peak. To our right there were bare rolling hills stretching away into a yellowy horizon. Our altitude stabilised after about thirty seconds. Then our escort was alongside us again.
‘An evasive manoeuvre most likely,’ said Peter. ‘Some unknown radar signal must have lit us up.’
I continued staring out the window. Was this for real?
‘Can anyone just walk into Iraq these days?’ I said.
‘You can, if you have the right visa,’ said Peter. ‘The Iraqi Department of Border Security has a temporary visa programme for just this sort of occasion. And we have friends at Mosul airport. I don’t expect there’ll be a problem.’
He was right.
‘Welcome to the land of Gilgamesh,’ was how the green suited senior guard at the airport greeted us. His soft, educated accent seemed out of place after the guttural tones of the Iraqi guards who’d escorted us in a hot, white minibus from our plane to Mosul’s concrete airport terminal.
‘I lived in London for five years,’ he said, before he handed us back our passports.
‘Have a nice day!’ were the words that echoed after us as we crossed the passport hall.
And it was hot, brutally hot. The air was as thick as oil. There were air conditioning units on the walls of the terminal at various points, but for some reason they were turned off.
I felt a crawling sensation under my skin. There were guards standing around, but few travellers. And the guards were standing well back from us, as if they were waiting for someone to blow themselves up. They were all wearing ill-fitting green camouflage uniforms, with black patches on their arms with yellow lion head insignias on them, and soft peaked caps.
Within a minute of leaving the airport building my shirt clung to my skin as if I’d showered in cola.
We were being escorted towards a camouflaged Hummer by two young guards barely out of their teens, with tufts of wispy hair on their chins. The Hummer was parked beyond concrete barriers about two hundred yards from the terminal building. Peter was the only one of us who was carrying anything. He had a black Lowepro knapsack over one shoulder. Everything else was back on the plane.
The Hummer’s door opened as we came up to it. A man in a crumpled cream suit stepped halfway out, waved at us. Then he got back in.
When the Hummer’s doors closed behind us I understood why. The air inside was as cool as a refrigerator’s. It was like being in heaven, compared to the heat outside. I undid some shirt buttons, let the cool air slip over my skin.
‘Got any water?’ I said.
The man in the left-hand driving seat who’d waved at us, the only occupant of the vehicle, opened a black refrigerator box that sat in the front passenger footwell. He passed me a bottle of the coolest water I’d ever tasted.
As I took my first sip, I noticed he had put his hand on Isabel’s arm. She had climbed into the front seat next to him. She slapped his hand away.
‘Nice to see you too, my dear,’ said the man. The Hummer started with a roar.
‘Sean meet Mark Headsell, one of our…’ she hesitated, as if she was debating with herself how to say what he did, ‘representatives in Mosul.’ She spat out the word representative. ‘He’s an old friend.’
‘Good to meet you, Sean. Don’t mind Isabel. Welcome to the front line’
‘I thought the front line was in Afghanistan,’ I said.
‘We’re still busy here, I can tell you,’ said Mark.
Isabel was looking out the side window. Peter was outside on his phone. He was standing with his back to us.
He finished his call, jerked the door of the Hummer open. ‘How is your personal hellhole these days, Mark?’ he said, loudly. Then he slapped Mark’s shoulder.
‘Wonderful, if you don’t mind sewage pipes that back up, gun-toting locals with grudges, and fleas as big as rats.’
‘That sounds like progress,’ said Peter.
‘You’re heading for Magloub, right?’ said Mark. ‘Where that crazy Greek priest is digging?’
‘How long will it take to get there?’ said Peter.
‘Well, if we don’t get blown up or have to take a lot of stupid detours, we should be there in less than two hours. It’s only fifty miles or so.’
At the exit from the airport there was a checkpoint. It was manned by bearded security guards wearing the same yellow lion insignias. They also had black bulletproof vests on. Mark told us they were from a new Golden Lions security force that had taken over after the last US Marines had left. A sign nearby in English and Arabic read Deadly Force Area. After an exchange of words between Mark and one of the guards, we were waved on.
We travelled for a while in silence. I was soaking up the sights outside the tinted windows. The road from the airport was wide and dusty. There were one or two wrecks of houses, but most of the buildings looked untouched by the years of war. There was even some building work going on.
There were small craters on the road occasionally, probably where IEDs had gone off. We passed a big petrol station a few minutes after leaving the airport. It was surrounded by cement walls, except for a small entrance manned by security guards. There was a queue to get into it.
Then we passed a cluster of low houses at a crossroads. Some of them had sandbags piled haphazardly near their doors. One had a cement wall in front of it. They looked deserted.
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