City of the Lost

I

The first story was published in plenty of time to be picked up by the main breakfast shows. But because it appeared on the blog of an opposition muckraker, or ‘citizen journalist’ as she styled herself, with a history of bombshell announcements that went phutt, it received a cautious and sceptical response. But then she published the supporting documentation and suddenly it had legs.

The claim was simple: Turkey’s Ministry of Tourism had spent vast sums improving the roads and other infrastructure of certain Mediterranean resorts, and also offering generous tax incentives to encourage privately funded projects. One such project had been granted a stretch of prime national parkland south of Bodrum to develop into an eco-resort. Instead, however, a small number of opulent villas had appeared; and now it transpired that the Minister of Tourism owned one of these himself via an offshore holding company, though he had no family wealth to speak of, and its market value was far beyond his salary. To make matters worse, the Minister had been making his name by denouncing corruption and calling for shared sacrifice. His own sacrifice, it seemed, had involved taking bribes of luxury villas in exchange for prime public land, huge tax subsidies and the licence to profiteer.

TV reporters went out onto the street to solicit reaction. They’re all the same, people fumed. They’re all in it for themselves. One rule for them, another for us. No wonder we’re all getting poorer. And they were agreed, too, on whether the Minister would ever stand trial for it: not a chance.

II

The annual khamsin had started blowing in Egypt. Iain landed at Cairo International Airport in a see-saw of such brutal crosswinds that for once he was tempted to join in the general cabin applause for their safe arrival. He cashed some Egyptian pounds near passport control then found Mike Walker waiting in arrivals, holding up a sheet of foolscap with his name scrawled in purple marker pen upon it. He was tall, thin, angular and younger than Iain had judged from his voice, mid to late thirties. ‘Thanks so much for coming to meet me, Professor,’ said Iain.

‘Mike, please. And it’s my pleasure. Nothing else on today. To be honest, I’d pretty much cleared the whole week for these pieces of yours.’

‘Interesting, are they?’

‘Not the foggiest.’ He turned and led the way through the crowded and chaotic arrivals hall with characteristic British diffidence, murmuring soft warnings and wincing apologies to everyone he bumped. They made it to the doors then outside into the hot, dry wind, a yellowish smog of dust and sand gusting violently enough to make Mike hold his glasses in place and raise his voice. ‘But when your main sponsor asks you to run some tests, you don’t tell him about the slot you’ve got available the week after next.’

‘Big supporter, was he?’

‘Our biggest, by a mile. Frankly, I don’t know how we’re going to manage without him.’

‘Maybe he’ll have left you something in his will.’

‘Yes. And maybe we’ll have three Christmases this year.’ They reached his car, climbed in, brushed themselves down with smiles of relief. Mike flipped his wipers to clear his windscreen then leaned forward to squint through the gloom as he pulled away. ‘But we’ll figure something out. This is Egypt, after all. If it’s coming easily, then you’re clearly doing it wrong.’

Iain laughed. ‘That’s always been my experience.’

They passed out of the airport. Conditions improved, but only marginally. Out on the open road, Mike proved a bolder driver than Iain would have anticipated, keeping up a decent pace and not being shy with his horn when anyone tried to cut in. But then an accident ahead brought traffic on the el-Nasr road to a complete standstill, and he sighed and ratcheted his handbrake and turned off his engine and raised his eyebrows at Iain as if to warn him that they were likely to be there awhile.

‘So did you know Nathan well?’ Iain asked him.

‘Not particularly. We only met a few times. But we spoke on the phone a fair bit. I had to report in at least once a month, though much more often if something juicy was going on.’

‘Juicy meaning to do with the Homeric Question, right?’

‘Or the oil thing.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Iain. ‘What oil thing?’

‘Oh. I assumed you knew. His family money came from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels fuck up the planet.’ He nodded at the lorry in front of them, spewing exhaust fumes even though it was stuck in the jam with the rest of them. ‘Most people in that business either shrug it off or reject the science. But Nathan had studied geology at Yale. He liked data. He understood models. He knew the climate really was changing. So he set about it in a different way. Specifically, he argued that the planet was naturally susceptible to large swings in temperature, so that the current rise was only a to-be-expected part of an overarching pattern. But if such climate fluctuations are standard, we should find evidence for them in the archaeological record. And we do. The medieval warm period. Various minor ice ages. And then there’s the big one: the Catastrophe itself. The Mediterranean was plunged into hundreds of years of misery, ergo the cause of it must have been extraordinary. A lot of people — including Nathan — believe it involved climate change of some kind, most likely a prolonged heatwave causing droughts and widespread famine. But there was no proof of this, so he set out to find it. That was where we came in, of course. We were right here on the spot and already studying this exact period. So he gave us lots and lots of money for shiny new machines. But it’s a rabbit warren, this kind of thing. You set off down one hole only to pop up another. And pretty soon Nathan got hooked on the Dark Ages themselves. And I do mean hooked. He spent well over a million dollars on it through us alone. Not to mention all the artefacts he bought.’

‘Looking for his Virgil Solution?’

Mike threw him an uneasy glance. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘He wrote you a note to go with his samples. Something about you guys getting closer to your Virgil Solution. Which is what, exactly?’

‘No idea, old chap. No idea at all.’

Iain looked curiously at him. He didn’t look the type to lie. Yet he just had. But he let it go for the moment. ‘So these Dark Ages,’ he asked. ‘What exactly got Nathan so hooked?’

‘Are you being polite? Or are you genuinely interested?’

‘Let’s call it fifty-fifty.’ He nodded at the gridlock ahead. ‘It’s not as if we’re going anywhere for a while.’

‘Fair enough,’ smiled Mike. ‘Okay. Let me start with this: Alexander the Great died on the afternoon of the eleventh of June, 323 BC. That is to say, we know the hour of the day of the year. You may think that’s trivial. But Alexander died while campaigning in a far-distant country. They didn’t have fixed calendars back then. It was all “in the fourth moon of the fifth year of such and such a king…” Every time a new dynasty took over, the whole system was liable to be replaced. Rulers fiddled the records shamelessly, both to glorify themselves and to diminish rivals. Record-keeping was atrocious, and archives and libraries were constantly being destroyed. And the whole region was in constant turmoil. There were endless wars, famines, revolutions, earthquakes, eruptions and the like. Then, to cap it all, came the collapse of the Roman Empire, which precipitated a dark age of its own. Piecing the timeline of that back together is incredibly hard. So surely it’s possible that we’ve missed a day here or there, maybe even a year or two. Some people argue we’ve lost decades. Yet I can assure you with total confidence that we know exactly when Alexander died. How is that possible?’

Iain smiled. ‘I trust that’s a rhetorical question.’

Mike jabbed a finger upwards. ‘The stars, my friend. The stars. Alexander died in Babylon and the Babylonians kept incredibly detailed astronomical records. With modern computers and algorithms, it’s easy to retrocalculate what was happening in the skies there two and a bit thousand years ago, then to test that against their records. And they match perfectly. So we know beyond reasonable doubt when Alexander died. And the Babylonians weren’t the only astronomers. The Greeks and Romans and Egyptians all were too. Their records all confirm our chronology. What’s more, they help us push our knowledge further and further back. There was a battle near the River Halys in eastern Turkey, for example. The two sides called it quits after a solar eclipse made them all think they’d made their gods angry. Retrocalculate solar eclipses for that part of Turkey and you get the twenty-eighth of May, 585 BC. That, unfortunately, is about the earliest specific date everyone agrees on. We can do months and years before then, but not days. When we get back to the Early Iron Age, even years become fuzzy so we move increasingly to ranges: the third quarter of the ninth century, that kind of thing. But once we hit the Dark Ages proper, everything falls apart. We can’t date specific events in the Late Bronze Age with anything like certainty, not even to the nearest hundred years.’

‘Karin told me the other night that the Trojan War took place in 1200 BC,’ said Iain mildly. ‘Are you saying she was wrong?’

‘No, no. Not at all. At least, that’s a very unhelpful way of thinking about it. To give you the short explanation, Karin was using something called the conventional chronology. We all use it, even though we don’t necessarily agree with it, because it makes communication so much easier. Think of it as our collective best guess, if you like. But many of my colleagues think it’s too low, which is to say they think we should push the Late Bronze Age fifty or a hundred years further backwards in time, so that the Trojan War would have taken place in around 1275 BC, say. But others think that it’s too high, and that the Bronze Age should be brought forwards by fifty years or so, placing the Trojan War around 1150.’

‘And that was the short explanation, was it?’ said Iain. ‘It wasn’t so bad. What’s the long one like?’

III

Karin spent the morning on the hotel computer running searches for safety-deposit vaults in the Antioch area. When she came up dry, she turned to variations of SGAMA, the cryptic initials on the tag of Rick’s key, and other such long-shots. Again without success. Her departure time approached. She considered, briefly, switching to a later flight; but in truth she’d run out of ideas. And she was eager to leave too. Antioch had bad associations for her.

A taxi to Hatay Airport. A half-empty plane out across the Anatolian coast and over dazzling deep blue sea, then flying in over the accusatory finger of the Karpas peninsula. From Erkan Airport, she took a taxi south across the border into the Republic of Cyprus. Her passport was checked; she was asked intrusive questions. It made her wonder how Rick had brought across his Stuttgart cash. A significant risk, surely, especially with Nathan not even certain to buy.

Her hotel was on Archbishop Makarios Avenue, at the heart of Nicosia’s modern city. She took the lift up to the top floor. Her room was vast and plush with a whole wall of smoked glass. She slid between doors out onto a spacious balcony with white metal furniture heavy enough to resist strong winds. She enjoyed heights. They made her toes tingle. She leaned over the balcony and looked down at the busy street below, the awnings and polished windows of chic boutiques and jewellers, a florist’s shop and a pair of expensive-looking cafés with glassed-off areas of pavement. But it was none of those that really caught her eye. What really caught her eye was the branch of the Société Genève bank nestled in between them.

The Société Genève, Archbishop Makarios Avenue.

SGAMA.