City of the Lost

I

Michel Bejjani and his men tailed Iain Black into Antioch’s main market, a tangle of cobbled alleys and roads thronged with shops and stalls and shoppers. It was so labyrinthine that the only way to keep your bearings, when the sun went in, was the way the city everywhere sloped down to the Orontes river.

It said in the head-hunter’s report that Black had made multiple solo trips inside Iran, seeking information on the regime and its nuclear programme from dissidents, while also advising insurgents on their tactics.

Michel watched him banter with a silversmith about a brooch and a pair of earrings, then buy a punnet of strawberries from a barrow piled so high that the fruit was squishing beneath its own weight, little pools of sticky red juice gathering on the cobbles below. A call came in on his phone. He spoke briefly, checked his screen, put it away again, meandered onwards.

It said in the head-hunter’s report that Black had been in Libya all through the Qaddafi uprising, making sure Western weaponry got to the right people, and teaching them how to use it too.

He came to a busy road, waited for a break in traffic. The two SUVs approached from his right, tracking his GPS transmitter on their SatNavs. Josef raised an eyebrow at Michel as he drove by, but it was far too busy for a snatch. Lights turned red ahead. Traffic congealed. Black weaved between cars to the far pavement then hurried up a steep flight of narrow stone steps into the city’s old quarter. Michel clenched a fist with quiet satisfaction. This part of Antioch was crowded with colourful yet dilapidated slum housing, walls slanted at impossible angles, roofs repaired with sheets of corrugated iron, balconies made from wooden planks strapped to scaffolding poles. The kind of place where people knew to mind their own business. The kind of place almost designed for ambush.

The steps kept corkscrewing wildly, stealing Black from view. He walked so briskly that it was an effort to keep up. They had to step aside as a group of rowdy schoolboys charged gleefully past, satchels bouncing on their shoulders. Another turn of the steps and then the staircase forked, with no sign of Black on either prong. Michel gestured Sami and Ali left while he and Faisal went right. Barely twenty paces along, however, they came to a dead end. A strangled cry in his earpiece was followed by a thud and then by silence. He felt a sudden dread as he ran back around. A booted foot protruded from a recessed doorway. He drew his taser, advanced cautiously, heart pounding in his ears. Sami was lying unconscious on his side, dribbling saliva from his mouth, while Ali lay face down beside him.

A short buzz of electricity behind. Faisal yelped and then went down. Michel raised his taser as he whirled around. Too late. His wrist was seized and twisted so hard that he cried out and let it go. His hair was grabbed; nodes were pressed against his throat. Their coldness and menace made him whimper. He had to fight to hold his bladder.

‘So who the fuck are you idiots?’ asked Black, in an offensively measured voice. ‘And why have you been following me?’

II

Famagusta was an hour by bus from Nicosia. Zehra got off by the main gates of the Eastern Mediterranean University. A campus map steered her to the registrar’s office, but she found several people already waiting there, and they looked so ridiculously young and exotic that Zehra instantly lost her nerve and fled, wondering what on earth she was doing there. But she knew what she was doing there. Volkan had got beneath her skin. She meant to prove something to him, and she could scarcely back down already.

There was an Internet café across the street. Zehra had never used the Internet herself, had only gleaned the vaguest idea from television of how it worked. But it seemed a place to start. A large, gloomy room with cubicles against the walls in which teenage boys in headphones yelled curses at the cartoon violence on their screens. Thankfully none of them paid her the slightest attention. An overweight young man had his feet up on the reception desk. ‘Yes?’ he asked, without looking up from his comic.

‘I’d like to see the university’s website please,’ Zehra told him, putting a half-lira coin down on the counter, as though to buy a ticket for the movies.

The young man snorted in amusement, but took pity. He put away his comic, slapped his mouse, brought his monitor into life. ‘What bit of it?’ he asked.

She gave a helpless shrug. ‘The news. From a month ago.’

He brought up a new page on his screen, turned it for her to see. ‘What story?’

‘There was a rally here.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Professor Metin Volkan.’

He raised an eyebrow, clicked a link. A new page loaded. A clip of Volkan mouthing silently began to play. Four paragraphs of text ran down its side and there were thumbnail photographs of four other speakers beneath. Her heart gave a little skip when she saw the third of them. ‘My son,’ she murmured, touching the screen.

The young man nodded. ‘That’s what you’re looking for? Your son?’

‘No. What I’m looking for isn’t there.’

‘Whoever took this is bound to have filmed more than they posted,’ he said. ‘If they’ve kept it, and you ask them nicely…’

‘And how do I do that?’

He scrolled back up for the reporter’s name, gave her a big grin. ‘How about that?’ he said. ‘Andreas Burak.’

‘You know him?’

‘Know him? I follow him. Everyone does.’

‘Follow him?’

He held up his phone. ‘On Twitter.’ She shook her head in bewilderment. He might as well have been speaking Chinese. ‘Never mind,’ he said. He ran a search of the university’s directory, dialled a number. ‘Here.’ He handed her his phone. ‘You speak to him.’

III

Iain had known he was under surveillance from the moment he’d left the hotel. In his line of work, it was second nature to notice people looking hurriedly away. He’d seen, too, the man’s loaded glance at the second table, the way he’d cupped his hand over his ear and murmured into his collar. A posse, then, and an incompetent one at that.

The prudent move would have been to retreat inside the hotel. But Mustafa was dead and so fuck prudence. Besides, he was pretty sure he recognized Michel Bejjani. The Bejjanis were bankers, not gangsters. If he couldn’t handle this lot, it was time to get a new job.

His meander through the market had revealed their numbers and disposition; it had also given Maria time to send file photos of the Bejjanis to his phone, to confirm their identities. He’d told Maria what to do should he disappear then had led them into his ambush. He yanked Michel’s head fiercely back by a hank of hair. ‘I won’t ask again,’ he warned him. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

Bejjani wailed pitifully and held up his hands. ‘Michel Bejjani. I’m Michel Bejjani.’

‘And why were you following me?’

‘You were in Daphne yesterday,’ he said. ‘My father wanted to know why.’

‘You think I set off that fucking bomb?’ said Iain furiously. ‘It killed my friend.’

‘We know. We know. My father himself asked what kind of assassin would give his business card to a paramedic. But still: you were there because of us. My father wanted to know why, and who for.’

‘Then why not ask?’

‘Would you have told us?’

Iain nodded. It was as he’d figured. ‘Call him,’ he said.

‘Call who?’

‘Your father.’

‘But I—’

Another yank of his hair. ‘Now.’

Michel fished his phone from his pocket, dialled the number. Iain took it from him. ‘This is Iain Black,’ he said. ‘I’m with your son Michel. He says you wanted to talk to me.’

A moment or two of silence. Butros Bejjani was reputed to be as sharp as knives. ‘Yes, Mr Black,’ he said. ‘I was hoping you’d join us for lunch.’

‘To eat it or to be it?’

Bejjani laughed. ‘You’d be my guest, Mr Black. My honoured guest. If you know anything about me, which I think we both know that you do, you’ll be aware that I take the obligations of hospitality most seriously. Besides, if you weren’t as eager to discuss yesterday’s horrors with me as I am with you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?’

‘Okay,’ said Iain. ‘Lunch it is.’