City of the Lost

I

Karin was still at the lobby computer when the police arrived in numbers at the hotel. While most hurried upstairs, two stayed by the front doors and tried with bright false smiles to intimate that all was normal, when clearly it wasn’t. Even so, it came as a profound shock to see their colleagues come back down again, a scrum of them surrounding a handcuffed Iain. He looked quite incredibly composed, all things considered, just as he had in the aftermath of the Daphne bomb. He looked around the lobby as he passed through it. His eyes glanced her way but didn’t settle on her even for a moment, as if trying to convey the message that this was his crisis and that she should stay clear. She stood to watch through the window as they bundled him into a squad car. Sirens turned on; a three-car convoy sped away.

Several police officers remained behind in the reception area, joking and laughing with the release of tension that accompanies the successful conclusion of a hazardous mission. She could only imagine that they suspected him of having some connection to the bombing. It seemed absurd to her, but what did she really know of him? Her searches on Google had turned up little, for there were no photographs of him and Iain Black was too common a name for her to be sure of anything.

She had visions, suddenly, of being pointed out to the police, of being arrested as a suspected accomplice, of interrogation and incarceration and tangled explanations falling on deaf ears. She logged out of the computer and hurried from the hotel while she still could, more in need of her passport and her own money than ever. She glanced behind as she climbed the short hill to the bus-stop, but no one was following. She caught a minibus out to Daphne and made her way to the warehouse the forensic team had sequestered to process debris from the hotel. Fatma saw her by the doors and came across. She was her liaison officer, thanks to her good English. From a distance she looked deathly pale, but it turned out to be plaster dust. She had bad news: the bodies of Nathan Coates and Rick Leland had been recovered overnight. Karin nodded. She’d already accepted the certainty of their deaths. Fatma waited a moment or two out of respect then added that they’d also recovered a number of safes, including hers. They’d open it for her just as soon as their locksmith arrived.

Karin bought water and fruit from a nearby shop then breakfasted on a bench beneath blossom trees. She felt like she should be grieving for Nathan and Rick, but she had too many problems of her own. The warehouse door opened. Fatma called her over. They walked together down a long corridor to a large storeroom where a man in grimy blue overalls stood by a sturdy work-table. ‘What room number?’ asked Fatma.

‘One one five,’ she told her.

The safes had their numbers written in black marker pen on their rears. The locksmith found 115, unscrewed a front panel and tried to pick it open. The mechanism was fried, however. He fetched an electric drill. The screech was hideous. Karin covered her ears and looked away. It saddened her to see the stack of battered safes and know their contents would likely never be reclaimed. The door popped open. She stooped to look inside. Her belongings were all there, dusty but unharmed. Relief flooded through her.

Fatma checked her against her passport photo, then wrote up and printed out a receipt. ‘Thank you so much,’ said Karin, signing it. ‘Is that everything?’

‘Your friend Nathan Coates,’ said Fatma. ‘We need someone to sign for his belongings too.’

‘Oh,’ said Karin. ‘Of course.’

The locksmith began to drill. Karin felt a sudden twinge of alarm. What if Nathan had already bought an artefact from his mysterious dealer? What if he’d stowed it in his safe? How would she explain that? The door opened. She craned to look. It was empty. Her heart-rate settled back down. ‘Oh, well,’ she said.

‘Now for Mr Leland’s,’ said Fatma. Karin braced herself again. She hadn’t much liked Rick, to be honest. He’d mocked her accent, had had her make him drinks and the like. Then Nathan had fallen for her, and he’d become resentful of her, even jealous. But there was no disputing how heavily Nathan had relied upon him, especially when anything murky needed doing, say like holding black market artefacts on his behalf. Her mouth was dry as the door opened, but again her fears proved unfounded. A bunch of keys, a black-jacketed notebook and a sheaf of travel documents. Her involuntary loud sigh of relief prompted Fatma to glance quizzically at her. ‘My friends,’ explained Karin.

‘Of course,’ said Fatma. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’

II

The police took Iain down to a windowless basement room with a broken air-con unit, damp white walls scratched with defiant graffiti, and a pair of dark blue moulded-plastic chairs set to face each other. They uncuffed him and sat him on one of them then left him alone again.

Arrest was an unavoidable risk in his line of work. He’d previously enjoyed the hospitality of Afghan, Libyan and Sudanese police forces, compared to whom the Turks were champions of the rule of law. He had powerful friends and extensive contacts to call on, should the need arise. But, when all was said and done, this was still an investigation into a terrorist atrocity in which dozens had been killed or badly injured, so he had to assume the normal rules suspended.

The door opened. His interrogation team filed in. Apparently he warranted four. The first, who sat down in the chair opposite, was the only one in uniform. Iain recognized him as the inspector who’d taken his statement after the bomb. The second was a low-ranking bruiser who stood behind Iain in an obvious effort to intimidate him, while the remaining two stood against the walls either side. Both wore expensive dark suits that implied senior rank, but otherwise looked very different. The one to Iain’s left was badly out of shape. He had grizzled gelled-back hair and a bushy Stalin moustache that he kept stroking, as though to imply that he’d gladly consign Iain to the Gulags should the opportunity arise. The man to Iain’s right, by contrast, had the shaven scalp and lean and hungry look of a career soldier: military intelligence, if Iain had to guess.

‘So then,’ said the inspector. ‘Tell us about the footage.’

The trick in situations like this was to stick as close to the truth as you could. The more lies you told, the greater the chance of one of them being discovered. So Iain explained what he did for a living, and for whom. He told them about Mustafa and how he’d recruited him from the National Intelligence Organization. He told them how they’d been hired to find out who Butros Bejjani was meeting in Daphne, which was why they’d been filming the hotel. He told them how his laptop had been badly damaged by the blast, but that he’d recovered the video-files yesterday afternoon and had immediately sent the crucial clip in from an anonymous account, lest he get into trouble for conducting the surveillance in the first place.

‘Why were you watching this man Bejjani?’ asked Stalin.

‘I told you. It was a job.’

‘For whom?’

‘They’re called Hunter & Blackwells,’ said Iain. ‘They didn’t tell me what their interest was, but I’m sure they’d tell you if you explain the circumstances.’ He was sure of the absolute opposite, if he was honest, but there was no harm bluffing.

‘Did you send them the footage you recovered?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? They were paying you, weren’t they?’

‘Not for that.’

‘So who else has seen it?’

‘No one.’

‘Are there copies?’

‘On my laptop and my old hard-drive. Both of which you now have.’

‘What about in the sent folder of the email account you used?’

‘I deleted it. Hotmail accounts aren’t exactly secure.’

The inspector rose from his chair. He left the room and returned with Iain’s laptop. ‘Show me,’ he said. The station had its own wi-fi. Iain logged on to it then complied, showed them the empty sent folder. ‘Now let’s see your proper email account,’ said the inspector.

‘It’s private,’ said Iain. ‘But I assure you—’

‘Monday’s bomb killed over thirty people,’ said the inspector. ‘Including two friends of mine. It will be easy to get a warrant if you insist. But then I will make you pay for it. How does a week in one of our cells sound?’

Iain shrugged. The laptop was new and it was basic trade-craft not to keep anything sensitive or incriminating in one’s email. He logged in to his company account then turned the laptop around to let the men browse. ‘Satisfied?’ he asked.

Stalin nodded at the door. The four men all left, taking his laptop with them. It was another half hour before the door opened again and Stalin came back in alone. He sat in the facing chair. ‘The two bombers you filmed are foot soldiers,’ he told Iain. ‘We want to catch them. Of course we do. But our priority is to catch the people behind them. The ringleaders, if you will.’ There was an evasive look in his eyes as he talked, giving Iain the strong impression that he wasn’t sharing the full story. ‘Should news of this footage leak out, it will give those ringleaders time to cover their tracks. Should they successfully evade us, they’ll recruit new foot soldiers to bomb more hotels and murder more of our citizens. I will not let that happen. So I ask again: are there any other copies of this footage?’

‘No.’

Stalin glared at him for maybe ten seconds. But then he relaxed. ‘I spoke to a friend at the National Intelligence Organization. She vouched for your colleague Mustafa Habib. Your office and your client both broadly confirm your account of your mission. We therefore accept that you were here on surveillance and that you filmed the bombing by chance. We also accept that, under the circumstances, you have been tolerably helpful. However, running surveillance is a clear violation of your tourist-visa status, and there have to be consequences for that.’

‘Consequences?’

Stalin smiled thinly. ‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘our overriding concern is that word of this footage doesn’t get out prematurely. With that in mind, we have decided to offer you a choice. Your first option is to acknowledge your visa violation and agree to leave the country of your own volition. There is a flight from Hatay to Istanbul this afternoon, for example, from where you can easily catch a plane on to London. Do that, keep your mouth shut about the footage, and after an appropriate interval — six months, say — you will be welcome to return to Turkey.’

‘And option two?’

‘We hold you in one of our cells until we catch the bombers. Then we charge you with obstruction of justice, perhaps with conspiracy too. Even if you are acquitted, I will make sure you are deported and barred from ever returning, which I imagine might prove problematic for a man with Middle-East Director on his business card.’

Iain nodded. ‘I’m thinking option one.’

‘Good. Then let’s get you to the airport.’

III

Zehra was in a black mood. After walking Katerina to school earlier that morning, she’d gone straight back to Professor Volkan’s, ostensibly to get his positive identification of her photo, but in truth to prove she wasn’t useless. His shrug, however, had said it all. A photograph. So what? And so here she was again, back in Famagusta for a second day, tramping the streets in an effort to find him.

Old men in checked shirts and spacious trousers played dominoes and backgammon outside a café. She weaved between them, showed her picture to a woman sweeping out the inside. The woman held it at arm’s length, squinted and shook her head. ‘Who is he?’ she asked.

‘He owes me money,’ said Zehra.

‘Good luck then.’

A broken wind turbine span uselessly in an overgrown lot. Zehra knew how it felt. Yet the man had to live somewhere. Two rallies he’d been to, both in Famagusta.

A bench at a bus-stop, reprieve for throbbing feet. The loudspeakers of a twin-spired mosque began to blare. As a child, Zehra had been intensely devout, like religion was a competition; but she’d witnessed the suffering of too many good people since, and the triumph of too much evil, to waste time with it any more. Yet somehow this muezzin’s recorded wail seemed to call directly to her. She pushed herself wearily back to her feet and continued on her way.

IV

They buried Hakan out in the woods then divvied up the weapons and the explosives between the trucks and the horse-box. Asena would have liked to burn the whole Grey Wolf camp down, but it would only give it away, so she had the men set booby-traps instead, to delay evidence-gathering. Then they all hugged and wished each other luck and split into small teams and went their separate ways.

Asena was well on her way to Istanbul when the Lion pinged her with a request to call urgently. She had Bulent pull in at the next service station, then sent him and Uğur off to get something to eat while she found herself a discreet spot in which to set up the satellite phone.

‘About time,’ said the Lion.

‘We’ve had a busy night,’ she told him drily. ‘What’s the panic?’

‘I have news about that footage of your friend. Mixed news. On the plus side, we persuaded the rest of the team to keep the footage under wraps for the time being, while we search our files. That way, we won’t risk you finding out we’re on to you and so covering your tracks.’

‘So we’re okay?’

‘We can only stall publication for perhaps a week or two. Maybe not even that long. Which brings me to the person who sent the footage in. His name is Iain Black. He was in Daphne to film someone else, would you believe? We had to let him go, because detaining a foreign national during an inquiry would be sure to provoke exactly the kind of questions we can’t have asked. Nor did we want him hanging around in Antioch, where he might shoot his mouth off to some journalist. So we made a deal with him: leave the country, keep your mouth shut, and eventually you’ll be free to return.’

‘And you trust him?’

‘Of course not. Why do you think I had you call? We’re putting him on a plane from Hatay Airport up to Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen this afternoon. Then on to London.’

‘Which has what to do with me?’

‘He’s a single man travelling by himself. You’re a beautiful woman. Make friends with him. Get him talking. Ask him what he was doing in Turkey, how he enjoyed himself. If he is relaxed and glad to be going home and putting it all behind him, then let him be. But if he seems to you tense or angry or vengeful…’ He spread his hands as though her next step was obvious.

‘In the airport? Are you serious?’

‘Fly with him to England if you must. It would be more discreet to do it there anyway. And make it look like an accident.’

Asena scowled. ‘What if something goes wrong here? What if I’m needed?’

‘Something has gone wrong,’ he said. ‘You are needed. But, of course, if you feel you can trust a mission this important and delicate to one of your subordinates…’

She glowered at her screen. He knew too well how to use her vanity against her. And then she remembered Hakan lying on his side in his shallow grave and realized that she had her own score to settle with this man. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Send me the details. I’ll take care of it.’

He smiled and touched his screen. ‘The Lion and the Wolf,’ he said.

‘The Lion and the Wolf.’