City of the Lost

I

The raucous atmosphere in the safe house quickly grated on Asena. The mayhem in Turkey might be a cause for quiet satisfaction, but not for celebration. They were supposed to be patriots, not vandals. Besides, there was a long way yet to go and it felt like they were tempting fate.

She was jittery for another reason, too. Not fear of failure but rather of success. If all went well, the Lion would soon be Turkey’s new leader. Perhaps even by tomorrow. But what about her? Under her old name, she was wanted for questioning about the murder of Durmuş Hassan. A new identity was easily attained, a new face from a Swiss clinic, but explaining their relationship was certain to be problematic. It could be accomplished if the Lion wanted it badly enough. But would he? As head of state, he could have his pick of women.

And she wasn’t as young as she’d once been.

She pushed herself up out of her chair, went next door. A dining room turned to storage, the walnut table and six chairs shoved against the walls to make space for the team’s luggage and supplies, weaponry and surveillance equipment, plus several cardboard boxes stacked with papers and electronics.

Four days before, the Lion had called her in an uncharacteristic state of agitation. A meeting had been due to take place shortly in the Daphne International Hotel, he’d told her, and it had the potential to cause perhaps fatal damage to their enterprise. She was to send a team, without delay, to take out the entire hotel, then blame it on Cypriots. At the same time, he’d also asked her to assign another team to watch a particular small farm-house on the outskirts of Famagusta to get early warning of anyone sniffing around. And to send the team in, if they thought it safe, to strip the house of its documents and computer equipment.

She hefted a box onto the table. It was filled with those hanging folders designed for filing cabinets, now sagging shapelessly. The first was fat with academic papers; the second with photographs of Phoenician and Mycenaean artefacts. There were bills and bank statements, catalogues of farm equipment, letters from a veterans’ organization. The second box was filled with hardware: an old laptop, a mobile phone with a broken fascia and a missing battery, an antique television remote control, a GPS handset, various CDs scrawled with black marker pen. She turned the laptop on, ran a search of recent documents. No activity at all for a week, and little of interest before that. She tried the CDs. They contained his accounts. To judge from them, he’d barely scraped a living.

The safe house had no broadband, but then she didn’t need it to check his browser history. The last site he’d visited was departure information for passenger ferries from northern Cyprus to the Turkish mainland. Before that, the home page of the Daphne International Hotel. Further back still, multiple searches of men she’d never heard of, and of one that she had: Nathan Coates, victim of the Daphne blast. And now combinations of words such as “donor”, “collector”, “Dido”, “Troy”, “Phoenician”, “millionaire”, “black market” and the like. Plus other searches of “Varosha” in combination with “hotel” and “car park” and “church”.

Her chair creaked a little as she sat back. She closed her eyes and let her mind go to work, trying to put herself in Baykam’s shoes so that she could imagine what he’d been after and how he might have gone about it. It was ten minutes before she abruptly opened her eyes and muttered a curse at her own obtuseness. She took the GPS handset from the box to check if it kept records of recent activity. A small thrill ran through her when she saw it did. She watched raptly as it drew a beeline for her right into the dark heart of Varosha. Then it simply vanished.

She held the handset against her lips. When first they’d started out on this endeavour, she and the Lion had pledged each other total trust and loyalty, for that was their only hope of success. Yet, when he’d called her to ask her to bomb the Daphne hotel, he’d refused to tell her why, he’d begged her not to press him. Because she loved him, she’d made that promise. But, because she loved him, now she needed to know.

II

Michel Bejjani was on the bridge when Sami called in to let him know that Visser, Black and some unknown friend were on the move. He called again to tell him that they’d driven to a local mega-market to do some shopping, then a third time that they were heading further south towards Varosha. On each occasion, Michel immediately contacted Georges.

‘Anything else happening?’ asked Georges, his voice breaking up a little thanks to the relay of cell radios.

‘No,’ said Michel. ‘Nothing else is happening.’

The Dido could comfortably accommodate twenty-four passengers. On a windy day, under race conditions, it took a dozen trained crew to get the most out of her. Yet, on a calm night like this, sails furled and away from shipping lanes, her state of the art communications, navigation and propulsion systems made helming her from the bridge easy, even for one person on their own.

If you choose to stay here, I assure you I will go with Georges.

Michel leaned back in the captain’s leather chair and resumed the game of solitaire he was playing on his iPad. There was no one to watch him, yet it was a matter of pride to look completely relaxed. He was a banker, after all. Masking one’s true feelings needed to be second nature. But, in truth, anger had been pulsing in rhythmic waves inside him ever since his father had delivered his verdict, soft explosions of oddly comforting warmth.

He moved a black jack onto a red queen.

It would serve his father and brother right if they were caught on this crazy mission of theirs, especially with Black and Visser clearly on their way into the Forbidden Zone themselves. Boldness was all very well, but in their line of work prudence always won out over the longer term. Prudence and the ability to turn challenging situations to advantage.

He’d programmed the radio to skip from channel to channel every few seconds, going through a rota of local police, army and emergency services channels. Half an hour before, activity had suddenly picked up with the Famagusta traffic police issuing a series of alerts about various unscheduled army convoys due to pass through the city. As best he could tell, they were headed to the army base at the northern tip of Varosha, just a few hundred metres from where his father and brother now were. Chances were it was coincidence, nothing to do with them. They already had enough on their minds. It was best not to worry them unnecessarily.

He turned over another three cards. Then he sat there, chin resting on his fist, and pondered his next move.

III

The patrols were too frequent and the road too exposed for them to risk hopping the wall here. Andreas therefore drove them back north to where Varosha began its seaward turn, then parked in the forecourt of a shabby apartment block. The modern city and the Forbidden Zone were pressed right up against each other here, making it easier to cross the wall unseen. It would mean a longer walk on the other side than they would have liked, but there was no help for that.

Iain made them go through their packs and pockets a final time, ensuring they had everything they might need, but no more. They locked up the Citroën and walked alongside the perimeter wall as if returning from a night out in the Old City. Headlights swept over them. Karin raised her forearm to shield her eyes. They waited until the vehicle had passed then slipped down an alley into a derelict industrial estate. They talked among themselves as they went, so that they might plausibly claim that they were merely lost should they encounter a guard-post or patrol. But there was no one there. The light was poor, just stars and a low sliver of crescent moon. A pair of warehouse doors hung loose. A rusted car with an open bonnet and no wheels sat on crumbling breeze-blocks. A cat screeched at them then jumped down from a green container. And a stack of broken pallets were heaped against an old wall topped with razor-wire. Iain climbed up this accidental ladder, peered over the top. ‘All clear,’ he murmured.

Andreas nodded unhappily at the pallets. ‘Is this the only way?’

‘It’s your city,’ said Iain.

‘Okay,’ said Andreas. The pallets proved more solid than they looked. They gathered at the top then straddled the rusted razor-wire and dropped themselves down the other side.

They were in.

The moonlight was weak; Karin had to put her other senses to work. The soft scurry of night-time creatures; the pungent yet not unpleasant smell of rot. They made their way along a broken road, old tarmac ripped by wild bamboo and cacti. But the pavement was little easier to negotiate, flagstones that see-sawed violently beneath their tread, the treacherous tripwires of creepers. They reached a junction. The signpost had fallen onto its side, but Iain knelt beside it and used his weakest torch to check the street names and consult their map. He pointed to his right. ‘That way.’

A bird whirred up in front of Karin, sending her heart into overdrive. They turned into what once must have been a chic boulevard of pavement cafés and expensive boutiques, but which now resembled the set of a post-apocalyptic film. The road was so thick with dust that they couldn’t help but leave a trail of footprints in it. An Italian restaurant with a tattered red-and-white awning had tables set for meals never taken. Once-fashionable clothes had fallen to rags on shop dummies that lay like corpses in their windows. The cars and vans parked along one side had been stripped by time and now squatted like stalking cats on flattened tyres. Fallen telephone wires slithered across the road like giant snakes.

Their first hotel proved a bust. A swing was creaking on rusted chains in a children’s playground outside, and a few spaces were marked out for parking; but there was no church in sight, no buses or industrial estate. They were making their way to the next hotel when Iain held up his hand and they all stopped dead. Karin strained to hear whatever it was he’d heard, but there was nothing, and finally he beckoned them on again.

The next hotel didn’t fit Baykam’s criteria either. Not from the front, at least. A side road opened out behind into a misshapen square largely used for parking, to judge from the faint traces of white lines just visible beneath the dust. But what really caught her eye were the two abandoned buses and the high wall with badly weathered double gates that suggested some kind of industrial site beyond. And there was an alarming dip in the car-parking area, she noticed, where it had evidently suffered from subsidence. Perhaps that was why it had never been developed.

At the foot of this dip, two large sheets of corrugated iron had been pinned in place by chunks of masonry and an old cement mixer. The iron screeched like fingernails on a blackboard as they dragged them aside, revealing a great mess of roughly set concrete below, like so much scar-tissue in the original tarmac. The concrete was clearly of poor quality, for it was riven through with cavities. Someone had recently attacked one of these cavities with a drill, widening it to the size of a manhole cover. They’d also hammered a steel spike into the tarmac nearby, and tethered one end of a rope ladder to it. The rest of the ladder had been fed through the hole and vanished into darkness.

They’d found it.

Iain knelt beside it, reached his torch down inside, turned it on. The stratification of the modern city: a top layer of concrete held up by what appeared to be planks of wood laid across wire-mesh. Beneath this, more concrete, then hardcore, then compacted sandy earth, then dark and cavernous space.

Iain’s teeth flashed palely as he grinned. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Who wants to go first?’

Behind them, a man cleared his throat to alert them to his presence then stepped calmly out of the night. ‘I think that would be me,’ he said.