City of the Lost

I

They were saying on the radio that the Prime Minister was still locked in his crisis cabinet, but his aides had promised he would come out soon to address the nation on the day’s tumultuous events. Haroon passed on this news in the rear of the horse-box. He felt a strange mix of fear, elation and resolution as their moment drew closer. Most of all, however, he felt righteous.

Haroon and his three companions had little in common with their supposed allies in the Grey Wolves. They’d each been recruited specifically for this one job; and their primary qualification for it was their willingness to die. For his own part, Haroon wasn’t even Turkish. He was Syrian. And a doctor. He’d finished his studies just a matter of months before the onset of the Arab Spring, then had won a coveted position at an Aleppo hospital. When his childhood sweetheart Mina had agreed to marry him, his life had looked set. A promising career, a beautiful wife, a nice apartment and the hope of better things in Syria and across the Arab world. But then that spring of hope had disintegrated into a summer of violence and the Syrian civil war.

As a doctor, he’d done what he could to tread the fine line between factions. He’d treated everyone brought to him in the same way, had left the questions to others. His caseload had grown heavier and more severe. Every day had brought new trauma victims, and, as the embargoes had begun to bite, their stocks of essential drugs and equipment had dwindled and then given out altogether. His life had become an exhausted blur of eighteen-hour shifts. He’d come to hate those, on both sides, who’d kept the carnage going. Only in his brief respites with Mina had he felt remotely human.

He’d come across the trolley in a downstairs corridor, a white sheet draped over it. He’d passed so many of them, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought, except that the left shoe had been partially visible, a woman’s shoe, dark blue with a gold buckle, a worn sole and a poorly mended heel. He’d gone numb as he’d noticed the third trimester bulge. In disbelief, he’d pulled back the sheet covering her face.

They’d showed him the proof of it. A Turkish rocket fired from a Turkish launcher by insurgents trained in Turkey for the proxy war being waged from Ankara to buy regional advantage with the lives of women and their unborn children. Even thinking about it made the hatred well afresh in his heart, and overflow.

Fine lines were for other people now. Haroon wanted blood.

II

The man was silver-haired, slightly built and wearing tightly fitting black clothes, while a pair of night-vision goggles hung loose around his neck like some grotesque medallion. ‘Who the hell are you?’ demanded Karin.

‘My name is Butros Bejjani, Miss Visser,’ he told her, his voice low and level and with an unexpected hint of amusement in it.

‘The Dido man?’

‘That’s not how I would choose to describe myself. But if you like.’

She could see shadows in the darkness all around them. ‘What are you going to do with us?’ she asked.

Bejjani gave a little laugh. ‘Nothing, I assure you. We are not those sort of men. Ask your friend.’

Iain nodded. ‘They try to be sometimes. They’re just not very good at it.’

‘We were good enough to follow you tonight,’ said one of the shadows, stepping forwards into view.

Karin recognized him instantly. One of the two men who’d taken the table behind her in that Antioch café. ‘Oh, hell,’ she said, realizing too late why her bag had seemed to shift position, and how they’d managed to track them so easily.

‘What are you here for?’ Iain asked Bejjani.

‘The same thing you are,’ said Bejjani. ‘Though we, at least, have a legitimate claim.’

‘Sure!’ scoffed Iain.

‘I assure you,’ he said. ‘What lies beneath us came originally from my city of Tyre. It was stolen from us three thousand years ago. We are here to take it home again.’

‘If it’s been here three thousand years,’ said Andreas, ‘I’d say it already is home.’

Karin nodded. ‘And whatever’s down there, it’s too important to be locked away in the vault of some private collector.’

‘It won’t be. I give you my word. I intend to donate everything I take to my national museum. Can you say as much?’

‘We’re not here for loot,’ said Iain.

Bejjani frowned. ‘Then what are you here for?’

Iain turned his torch on for just a blink, to illuminate the gash in the ground. ‘Why don’t we go down there, and maybe I can show you.’

III

Asena pocketed the GPS handset, a torch and the keys to the SUV, then told the others she was heading out for a while. Traffic was tailed back all the way along the Salamis Road so she cut through the Old City instead, then drove south along the Varosha perimeter.

There were alarming numbers of army vehicles on patrol. She wondered whether it was the Lion’s doing. It didn’t deter her so much as whet her curiosity all the more. She checked the GPS handset and parked near the same entry point Baykam had used. She loitered patiently in the shadows as one army patrol after another crawled by, until at last there was a long enough gap between them for her to hurry across the road, vault the crumbling wall and drop down on the other side.

It quickly grew dark away from the headlights of the road. She had to concentrate so hard on her footing and the GPS that she would have blundered into the clustered group had she not heard them talking just in time. She stopped instantly, crouched low. A pair of rusting yellow buses were parked near a high wall. She looped around them to give herself cover as she went in for a closer look. One of the group briefly turned on a torch to illuminate a fat black gash in the ground, and the reflected light was enough for her to recognize Black and Visser in discussion with several men she didn’t know.

Whatever the Lion was so frightened of, it surely lay down that shaft in the earth beneath them. And it seemed equally certain that these people were here to find it so that they could somehow wield it against them, hoping to derail their coup even at this late stage. She had to stop them. But she couldn’t do it alone and unarmed. She retreated quietly out of earshot. Then she began to run.