City of the Lost

I

Iain froze the crucial frame then zoomed in on the man’s face. The resolution wasn’t great but it caught his short, dark hair, his high, wide forehead, his weak chin and the crescent scar by his left eyebrow. Not perfect, granted, but surely recognizable to a friend, colleague or relative.

What now?

He had to get this to the investigating team, of course, but that was easier said than done. They were bound to ask why he’d been filming the hotel; and while private surveillance wasn’t exactly illegal, you didn’t want to have to explain it to the police in the aftermath of an atrocity like this. They’d make his life miserable, force him to name his client, probably deport him from Turkey, maybe even ban him from ever returning. So he needed to remain anonymous.

The media had been pushing hotline numbers and other ways to get in touch with the investigating team. He quickly found an email address for them. The last section of footage from the fourth camera, from the arrival of the motorcyclist up to the moment of the blast, contained everything they’d need. If he sent it from a bogus Hotmail account set up via his new computer, ISP confidentiality would normally make it untraceable. But this was a terrorism case and so the rules were different. He couldn’t risk using the hotel wi-fi, and he was liable to be remembered if he used a local Internet café. And if he used Tor or one of the other programs people like him used to cover their digital tracks, it might prompt the police to look for someone with his particular skill-set and so steer them straight to him.

He needed another way.

The day he’d arrived, he’d wandered around the market, had taken coffee in a café with free wi-fi. He’d used his old laptop but he remembered the password. He checked his watch. The market shut down at night. The café was certain to have closed. But such places often left their routers running overnight. It had to be worth a shot. He zipped his laptop into its bag then hurried down and out.

II

Such food as her son had had in his apartment, they’d eaten the night before. Zehra therefore had Katerina show her to the nearest shop after collecting her from school. Plastic crates of tired produce looked as limp as she felt after her long day, but there was still enough for a meal or two. The first molohiya of the year was in. She added vine leaves, an onion, a pepper, a lemon, two small potatoes, a tomato, a garlic bulb, a few pinches of fresh herbs and a single chicken thigh, which was all her purse and arms would allow. The checkout woman eyed her sourly as she weighed each item in turn but Zehra paid her no mind, except to watch the scales to make sure she wasn’t cheated.

Back in the apartment, she gave Katerina the molohiya to prepare. Katerina looked dumbly at her, as though she’d never even seen it before. Zehra frowned. ‘It’s molohiya,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know how to prepare molohiya.’

Katerina shook her head. ‘No.’

Zehra sighed. She found a knife and showed Katerina how to hold it so as not to cut off her fingers, then chopped the dark green leaves into long thin strips. ‘Now your turn,’ she said.

Katerina bit her lower lip in concentration as she worked. Her fingers were tiny and boneless compared to Zehra’s own gnarled, arthritic stubs. But she kept at it until she was done, when she looked up with such shining eyes that it was a thump in Zehra’s chest. ‘Are we having this tonight?’ she asked.

‘No, child,’ said Zehra, more severely than was warranted. ‘It’s too bitter. It needs to soak.’ She filled a pan with water, tossed in the leaves. Then she took out the chicken thigh, two potatoes, the vine leaves, an onion, a lemon and a selection of herbs. ‘These are for tonight. Do you want to help?’

Katerina nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, please.’

‘Very well,’ said Zehra. ‘Then those potatoes aren’t going to peel themselves, are they?’

III

Inspector Ozgur Karacan leaned back wearily in his chair and covered his face with his hands. Another brutal day. It wasn’t just that the bomb had devastated his home town and killed two old school-friends working in the hotel, it was that the investigation into it was such a shambles. Part of that was excusable. A large team had had to be put together in a rush. It comprised local, regional, and national officers as well as specialist technical teams and gendarmerie under the broad authority of the Turkish National Police Counterterrorism Authority, all working hand-in-hand with the National Intelligence Organization. Each had overlapping areas of responsibility and conflicting reporting structures. Each had had to procure for itself suitable workspace and accommodation. To add even more confusion, a lieutenant colonel had arrived that afternoon from the Office of the General Staff. He’d claimed his brief was to observe and advise only, but no one believed that for a moment. With so many competing interests at work, it was no surprise that already people were manoeuvring crudely for what little credit was going, as well as to avoid blame. And so it had become painfully clear to him exactly how the terrorists had run their campaigns with such impunity, and why—

‘Inspector,’ said a woman.

He looked around. Melisa Avci, no doubt with yet another piece of nonsense from the incident hotline. ‘What now?’

‘Footage,’ she said. ‘It came in a minute ago. You can see a white truck backing up against the hotel. You can see the driver’s face.’

Karacan stood, electrified. So much police work was about luck; but this was extraordinary. He followed her to her desk. She played it for him. He watched the driver park his truck and get out. He watched him walk around the bonnet. Then he watched him glance around. Even as he exulted, he struggled to make sense of it. The camera must have been directly across the road from the hotel, yet that whole area had been wide open, to afford the hotel’s guests uninterrupted views. There’d been no CCTV cameras in the vicinity; it was about the first thing he’d checked. And what tourist would film the front of a hotel?

‘Fantastic work, Melisa,’ he told her. The hotline was soul-destroying work, what with all the whackos calling in their theories, so she deserved full credit if only for stamina. Within minutes, the room was filled with braided uniforms. A jihadi video, they all agreed. Perhaps sent in by a turncoat of some kind. But what to do with it? Some wanted to give it to the media in hopes of a quick identification and arrest. But others cautioned against alerting the bombers to the breakthrough and thus giving them time to cover their tracks. So up again it went, to the Minister himself. In the meantime, there was plenty to be done: licence plates to check out, emails and footage to examine, suspect photos to be searched for a match.

Ozgur Karacan’s jaw trembled as he fought a yawn. The notion of a jihadi video made little sense to him, but back-to-back twenty-hour days meant he was in no state to offer anything better. His first boss had once told him that the best next move in a hard case was often a good night’s sleep. Never had that advice sounded sweeter than right now.