City of the Lost

I

Asena sat in the passenger seat of the silver Subaru and read yet once more the transcripts of last night’s telephone calls between Iain Black and Karin Visser. It didn’t get any better. The Lion was right: Black was close enough on their trail that he needed to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. The only question was how. She glanced across the street at the front door of the Cairo Institute of Archaeometry: no movement since Walker and Black had hurried inside half an hour or so before. She didn’t know what tests they’d be running in there, but presumably they’d take a while.

She had time.

Hits were nothing new to Asena. She’d killed her first man — a loathsome creep of an army officer called Durmuş Hassan — immediately before joining the Grey Wolves three years ago. She’d killed on multiple occasions since. It was shocking how easy it was, as long as you had patience, strong nerves and a robust plan. But abduction was far more challenging, as your target was unlikely to come willingly. That was why she’d brought Bulent and Uğur with her, and why their first order of business on arrival had been to visit the Lion’s contact for weapons and other equipment.

Mike Walker had his in-laws staying. Black would need a room. New Cairo was a city reclaimed from desert. There were no tourist attractions here, and therefore no hotels. All those were in Cairo proper. It was far too far to walk there, and public transport was uncomfortable, unreliable and slow, especially with the khamsin blowing. After he’d checked in for the night, he might go out again to eat or to sample the nightlife. But she couldn’t count on it. Ideally, therefore, they needed to take him between here and his hotel.

There were other problems too. They weren’t doing this snatch for fun. The point of it was to pump Black for everything he knew about the Grey Wolves and their plans, and what he’d told others. They needed, above all, to find out how much Visser knew, and whether she’d have to be taken care of too. Black was certain to resist their questioning, so they’d need to make him talk despite himself. That was likely to get loud, and so necessitated privacy. Finally, she had to make him vanish afterwards in such a way that no one would connect it back to Turkey.

A flurry of sand blasted her window. A youth leaned into the wind as he hurried by, a red-and-silver silk scarf over his mouth to help him breathe. They all did that here. She remembered reading of a man lost in a desert storm who’d collapsed from heat exhaustion then had suffocated from inhaled sand. The germ of an idea came to her. Maybe she wouldn’t need to make Black vanish after all. She checked the forecast on her smartphone. The khamsin was so named because it blew over a period of fifty days; and tomorrow was expected to be another. ‘Keep watching,’ she told Bulent. ‘Let me know if anyone comes out.’ She tilted her seat back, closed her eyes. Darkness helped her think. Her mind played with the variables like a child with a wooden puzzle. She tested ideas, refined them, tried to fit them together into workable combinations. It was fifteen minutes before she sat up again and turned around to Uğur, sprawled snoring across the back seats. ‘Wake up,’ she said, shaking him by his shoulder.

‘What is it?’ he yawned.

‘You’re coming with me,’ she told him. ‘We need to get a taxi.’

‘Sure. Where are we going?’

‘Nowhere,’ said Asena. ‘We just need to get a taxi.’

II

The third of the scandals was in some ways the least surprising. Yet, coming on top of the others as it did, it perhaps proved the most consequential.

For years, there’d been rumours that the Defence Minister had been taking massive kickbacks in return for the award of major arms contracts. He’d always denied these rumours furiously, stating flatly that, with all the audits and other checks, there was no technical possibility of profiteering from his office. But now an Istanbul newspaper published the confidential testimony of a US defence industry whistle-blower detailing several real-world examples of how such transactions worked, including a diagram showing how they’d funnelled money to the Swiss bank account of the Turkish Defence Minister himself.

Along with the news coverage, there was speculation too. Canny political journalists wondered aloud why three such juicy scandals should emerge on the same day. They pointed out that the Tourism, Justice and Defence Ministers were each members of different factions within the government. What seemed to be going on, therefore, was that either a tit-for-tat cabinet civil war had broken out or another faction altogether — perhaps the Interior Minister’s, for example — was sabotaging potential rivals before making a play for the top job.

On the street, however, the reaction was both simpler and blunter. Get rid of the whole rotten lot of them, was the verdict. Get rid of the whole lot of them and start again.

III

There was bad news for Iain when he handed Mike the samples case. ‘How long before you’ll have results for me?’ he asked.

‘It depends on the tests,’ Mike told him. ‘But I’d say allow at least a week.’

‘A week?’ frowned Iain. He’d assumed, from Nathan Coates’s compressed itinerary, that it could be turned around in a day or two at the most.

‘For the kind of analysis you want, yes,’ said Mike. ‘It’s one thing to tell whether a particular piece is authentically old or not, which is all Nathan wanted to know fast. It’s another to tell where clay came from, or where metals were originally mined, as you want. You’ve no idea how complex that level of analysis is.’

Iain grimaced. He was in no great hurry to return to London, but he could hardly hang around here for a week. ‘Can’t you give me anything?’ he asked.

Mike pursed his lips. ‘We’ll prepare the samples now and run our first tests overnight. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky. But don’t pin your hopes on it. Other than that, I can have my archaeobiologist check for pollen. But again I wouldn’t put too much weight on that. It’s far too easy for samples to get contaminated.’

‘Right now I’ll take anything.’

Mike briefed his team then set them to work. Iain watched them embed tiny fragments from the samples in plastic discs and feed them into their spectroscopes for analysis. But it was largely a waiting game now. He made himself more coffee, borrowed a phone to book himself into his usual hotel in Central Cairo, then spent the afternoon reading dense articles about dating and archaeology in academic journals.

The lab assistants — like Mike himself — were all attached to the nearby American University New Cairo campus, and so lived nearby. They drifted off, one by one, until only Mike and his pollen expert were left. At six-thirty, Mike came to fetch him, looking decidedly pleased with himself. ‘I have to lock up now,’ he told him. ‘More than my life’s worth, being late for the in-laws. But we’ve found something for you. Or Soraya has, at least. Come take a look.’ They went together to her lab, where a shy-looking woman in a hijab was standing by a high-powered microscope next to a computer monitor displaying an image of multiple spiked yellow balls. ‘Pollen grains,’ said Mike. ‘Soraya got them from one of your shards.’

‘And?’

Mike touched the screen with the tip of his index finger. ‘This one here is henna. Nothing surprising about that. It’s been grown all over the Eastern Mediterranean for millennia. But Cyprus was particularly well known for it. Homer even mentions it in the Iliad. Some people claim that’s how the island got its name, because henna was kuprus in Greek. But that’s not all.’ He nodded at Soraya. She changed the slide and a cluster of small purple pods appeared on the screen. ‘This is a variety of grass pollen,’ he said. ‘The thing is, Soraya recognized it. We found it on some samples last year from Salamis. These appear to be identical.’

‘Salamis?’

‘An old city on the east coast of Cyprus,’ said Mike.

Iain nodded. ‘That’s where I should look?’

Mike shook his head emphatically. ‘Just because we found it there doesn’t mean it’s only there. Anyway, like I said earlier, you should never put too much weight on one pollen finding. But it’s interesting, certainly. A good start.’ He checked his watch meaningfully. ‘What say we reconvene in the morning, see what the night has brought us? You’ve got yourself a room, yes?’

Iain nodded. ‘Near the Corniche.’

‘I’d offer to drive you…’

‘Forget it. I’ll take a cab.’

‘I’ll run you up to the university. There are always a few cabs there.’

They locked up, headed out, hunched against the continuing khamsin. As luck would have it, a taxi pulled up just ahead and a woman got out to pay her fare, clutching her headscarf about her face. Iain waved to the driver. The driver nodded. Iain thanked Mike then hurried across to it. He tossed his holdall in the back then climbed in after. He checked his pockets for cash but pulled out instead Nathan’s cryptic note to Mike. For some reason, he got the joke instantly this time. What more fitting answer could there be to the Homeric Question, after all, than a Virgil Solution? And not only that, he also realized what that solution must be, and that Karin and Nathan and presumably even Mike himself were all in on it.

He reached for the door to call after Mike and ask him about it only to find the woman blocking his way. There was something odd about her posture, the way she had her hand beneath the flap of her bag, almost as if holding a weapon of some kind. He glanced up at her in surprise. Her scarf had slipped slightly. It was the woman from Sabiha Gökçen. He didn’t know precisely what was going on but he knew it was trouble. He threw himself at her but too late. Taser nodes thumped his chest and flung him twitching to the floor. He tried to cry out but his tongue was stuck in his throat. The driver reached around and plunged a syringe into his neck and he felt the blackness pulling up like a sleeping bag around him as the woman climbed in and the handbrake released and the taxi pulled serenely away.