The Babylon Idol

Chapter 31

They were soon back on the motorway, speeding along in the second dodgy old car Ben had been forced to buy since landing in Greece only yesterday. He wasn’t sorry to be leaving the country. Just over four hours later, they arrived at Athens airport. By late afternoon, they were in the air, heading for Turkey.

But the long, frustrating journey wasn’t over yet. The only plane they’d been able to board at such short notice was terminating at Istanbul, making it necessary to jump on a domestic flight to take them the extra five hundred kilometres south-east to Ankara. That ate up a lot more time, and until the last minute it was uncertain whether the internal flight would even depart, with adverse weather conditions and threats of severe snow in the capital.

Finally, late that evening, they touched down in a sub-zero, white-frosted Esenboga International Airport outside Ankara, where crews were working hard to clear ice off the runways. The airport was teeming with a heavy paramilitary police presence in the wake of terror bombings by Kurdish separatists, to add to the failed attempt by rogue elements in the Turkish Army to overthrow the government a few months earlier. Ben and Anna filtered slowly through the scrutiny of customs, who paid close attention to the contents of Ben’s battered green canvas haversack.

‘Is this a bullet hole?’ asked one of the officials, poking his finger through it.

‘Cigarette burn,’ Ben told him. Which, of course, wasn’t the case. The official, a dumpy little guy in what looked like a military uniform, did a lot of frowning before he finally let them through. The bag would have excited him a good deal more if Ben hadn’t dumped the MPX machine pistol and ammunition on a quiet mountainous stretch of their drive through Greece.

Esenboga Airport abounded with gift boutiques, cafés and restaurants, and even featured its own dozen mosques for travellers to catch up on their prayers, but to Anna’s bitter disappointment she couldn’t find anywhere to buy clothes and had to endure the humiliation of wearing the same travel-stained rags as before. Ben was more concerned about getting her some appropriate winter wear. She was shivering with cold as they left the airport and searched for a taxi rank, but it took more than freezing temperatures to diminish her fascination for history.

‘Did you know that right here, on this very spot, more than six hundred years ago, a huge battle was fought?’ she said. ‘It was a bloody conflict between the Mongolian warlord Timur the Lame and the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid the First, and it achieved very little. The Ottomans were defeated but would return to take back Ankara just the following year. It’s claimed there were more than a million soldiers on the battlefield, exactly where we’re standing now.’ She shook her head. ‘A million men, full of hate and trying to hack each other to pieces, and all for nothing. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like. It’s so senseless. What makes people want to wage war and slaughter one another like that?’

Ben ignited a Gauloise and clanged his lighter shut. ‘You mean, aside from money, power, territory and the fact that most of them were probably just doing what they were ordered? You’re the history expert. What would I know?’

‘But you were a soldier. You must surely know.’

‘War is what human beings do best,’ Ben said. ‘Always has been. It’s what sets our species apart from all the others and until we wipe ourselves out, that’s how it will always be.’

‘When you fought in wars, did you believe you were doing a good thing?’

He looked at her. ‘Sometimes. Mostly not. That’s why I left.’

‘Why did you join?’

‘You know, I really don’t remember.’

‘The more I study history, the more I realise what very strange creatures men are.’

‘You don’t need a doctorate to work that one out,’ Ben said.

Soon afterwards, they found a solitary taxi waiting at a rank nearby. The engine was running to keep the heater going, melting the snow into a pool below its steaming exhaust. Anna had Ercan Kavur’s address on a slip of paper, and passed it to the driver through the window. The driver nodded. They got in. The inside of the car was stifling. ‘Hey, no smoking,’ the driver complained as Ben climbed in with his Gauloise. Ben replied in Turkish, ‘Who are you kidding? This shitbox smells like an ashtray. Let’s go. And you can start the meter. I know all the tricks.’

Cheated out of the opportunity to stiff a couple of tourists by quoting a fixed rate fare, the driver sullenly set off. Ben kept glaring at him in the mirror. Roguish cabbies weren’t his favourite people right now.

‘I didn’t know you could speak Turkish,’ Anna said.

‘Just phrasebook stuff. Let’s hope this guy Kavur is at home tonight.’

‘Ercan doesn’t get out much,’ she replied. ‘He used to be married, until he became too eccentric to keep his job at the University, and his wife left him. Nowadays, if he’s not on a dig somewhere, which he wouldn’t be at this time of the year, he spends nearly all his time in his study, translating ancient languages and deciphering old manuscripts and tablets. He’ll be there, I’m sure of it.’

The white-dusted motorway flashed by for half an hour as the taxi’s wipers slapped away drifting snowflakes and the spangling expanse of city lights gradually swelled on the horizon. Coming into Ankara, the taxi cut eastwards towards the centre, through streets piled at the edges with dirty brown slush. They passed the Grand National Assembly building, Turkey’s parliament, which had been badly hit by F16 strikes during the military coup attempt and was now half-hidden behind scaffolding as it was slowly pieced back together. It hadn’t been very long since tanks and troop convoys had been rolling through these same streets as the government and rebel factions struggled for power. ‘There’s the Kocatepe Mosque,’ Anna said, pointing out another of Ankara’s landmarks with its lit-up dome and four tall towers piercing the night sky like spikes.

Ercan Kavur lived right across town on the south-eastern edge of Ankara, within an area called Dog˘ukent Caddessi, where crumbly traditional red-roofed houses intermingled with suburban high-rise developments that looked unfinished and neglected. Arriving in a narrow street with houses spaced far apart and back from the road, Anna told the driver to pull up. The night air seemed to have dropped another degree as they stepped out of the car. Their breath fogged in the chill. Snowflakes spiralled gently down to add themselves to the whiteness of the empty street.

‘That’s his house there,’ Anna said, pointing, as the taxi disappeared into the night. ‘I think I see the study light on. What did I tell you?’

Ben glanced at the house, a squat single-storey building that looked from a distance like a concrete bunker. A small area of garden in front was lined with bushes that were caked in snow. A winding path led through a gate to the front door. All the windows were dark except one, from which a chink of light was shining through a narrow gap in the drawn curtains.

‘I take it you’ve been here before,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘After finishing with the excavations in Iraq, Ercan and I brought the pieces of the damaged Muranu tablet back here together. I stayed with him for three days, during which time he showed me some of his work. He’s a fascinating man. Dry as a rock and a little strange, but fascinating nonetheless. You’ll like him.’

‘A little strange how exactly?’

‘You’ll soon see for yourself. Let’s just say that his world view goes a little bit beyond not using telephones and email.’

It was after midnight. Anna led the way towards Ercan’s gate. The slab pavement was slick with frozen snow, and Ben held her arm to catch her if she slipped. Italian designer shoes weren’t made for this.

‘Walk on the crunchy bits,’ he said.

‘I go down, we both go down,’ she replied, flashing a nervous smile at him.

Ben was about to reply when he looked down, his eyes narrowed to slits and he stopped. His grip tightened on her arm.

‘You say Ercan lives here all alone? Doesn’t get out and has no friends?’

‘Pretty much.’

Ben pointed at the path leading to the house. Anna looked down where he was pointing, and her smile dropped. At least four sets of footprints led from the front gate and up the path towards the front door.

‘Then his social life must have improved since you last saw him.’

Ben bent down to examine the tracks. The prints were mostly overlapped and the individual sole treads hard to make out, but judging by the clearer imprints he reckoned the tracks had been made by at least four different people, rather than by just one person going back and forth. The crushed snow was powdery, the impressions of the sole treads not yet frozen hard by the cold night. Enough to discern that Ercan’s visitors had been wearing boots with chunkier treads than regular shoes. Which wasn’t too much of a tell, in itself, on a cold and snowy night. Then again, as Ben knew well, a good solid pair of boots were good for other things than walking. That was why soldiers wore them, and assault teams who might have to kick down doors and get a little rough.

One of the sets of prints was unlike the others. Shoes, not boots. Making sloppy drag marks, like the footsteps of someone too drunk to walk steadily and needing to be supported. The tyre tracks that curved away from the kerb and merged with the fresh ones just made by the taxicab explained where Ercan’s visitors had gone.

Anna was reaching the same disturbing conclusion Ben was. ‘Someone’s been here before us,’ she said, looking at him anxiously.

‘And not long ago, or they’d be covered by fresh snowfall.’

‘Ben, you don’t think—?’

Ben walked up to the front entrance. The door was reinforced, set into a steel frame that made it as strong as concrete. To the right of the door was a panel with keypad and an intercom speaker behind a grille. A wall-mounted camera stood guard over the doorway, its red power light blinking at them.

‘I thought you said he hated technology,’ Ben said as Anna caught up with him.

‘Only when it’s for communication,’ she replied. ‘Not when it’s for security. I told you, he’s a very cautious man.’

But not cautious enough to keep his front door shut. It was hanging ajar by half an inch. Ben gave it a shove and it swung a quarter open on its reinforced hinges. It was a beefed-up security door, welded steel like the entrance to a bank vault. It would have needed some kind of serious dedicated door-breaching munitions to take out the lock, but there wasn’t a scratch to suggest forced entry. Whoever they were, the four booted visitors who’d called earlier that night hadn’t had a hard time getting inside.

No sound, no movement from within. The house felt empty. But there was only one way to find out for sure.

Ben put his finger to his lips, telling Anna, ‘Quiet’, then held the finger up to signal, ‘Wait here.’

Ben eased the heavy door open the rest of the way and stepped inside the dark silence of Ercan Kavur’s house.