Authors: Will Adams
‘Good,’ snapped Zehra. ‘I’m glad.’ Volkan didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t need to. Her cheeks grew hot all by themselves. ‘They started it,’ she said weakly.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They did. But before they started it, we started it. And before we started it that time, they’d started it once before. Go back to the beginning of time and you’ll never run out of other people starting it. So the question isn’t who started it. The question is who can finish it.’
‘You?’ scoffed Zehra.
‘No,’ said Volkan. ‘Not me. Your son, perhaps. More likely your granddaughter.’
‘Don’t call her that.’
‘Your flesh, Zehra. Your blood.’
‘I’m too old,’ she said. ‘I don’t live here. I made a vow to my husband …’ She faltered at the feebleness of her own protests. ‘What am I to do?’ she asked plaintively. But it was an admission of defeat.
He put a hand upon her arm. ‘It may not be for long. With luck they’ll release your son soon enough.’
‘With luck?’
‘We have good lawyers,’ he said. ‘They’re working hard on his case. On everyone’s cases. But you have to understand what’s going on here. These arrests have nothing to do with investigating the bomb or capturing the real culprits. They’re all about reassuring the Turkish people that the police are active, that they’re making progress, and most importantly that they’re making life miserable for people like us. To release your son and the others now would be to admit that they have nothing, and they can’t do that, not without risking an outcry.’
She gave a long sigh. She knew the truth of this. It was how life was. ‘And you swear that neither you nor my son had anything to do with the bombings?’
Volkan shook his head. ‘How could you even ask such a thing? We make a lot of noise, your son and I, because we want desperately for Cyprus to be one island again, independent of Turkey, Greece and Britain, and ruled by its own citizenry under its own constitution. But we reject utterly the use of violence.’
‘I still want your word,’ she insisted. ‘I want your word that you know nothing about it.’
‘I give you my word,’ said Volkan. But there was just a hint of something else in his voice: of hesitation, of doubt. And they both heard it. And, to judge from his expression, it seemed he was every bit as taken aback as she was.
Antioch was slowly rousing itself from its slumbers as Iain headed back in from the hospital. Perhaps that was why the countless minarets looked, from this vantage point, so like the nails in a fakir’s bed. For all the city’s rich pre-Islamic history, few traces of it were left. An early Christian church on its northern fringe; and, a little further out, a single pillar of giant stones and crumbling mortar rose from the foot of a precipitous gorge to hint at the one-time vastness of its ancient walls. But now, like so many modern Turkish cities, it was all office blocks and apartment buildings painted in sickly sweet pastels, like some Soviet suburb with a Miami makeover.
Last night’s computer shop wasn’t yet open. He parked and wandered for a while. It was between seasons right now. The chilly wind that swept down from the snowcapped mountains to the city’s north-west was countered by the warmth of the morning sun. Men in sweaters and thick jackets polished shoes beneath colourful sunshades. Hawkers flogging winter snacks set up next to others selling iced drinks. Men in mirror shades, stubble and fat-collared shirts stood in small clusters on street corners. He walked an accidental gauntlet of shopkeepers sluicing down their pavements, passed through an alley of shabby workshops where two mechanics fought like emergency-room doctors to bring an ancient jalopy back to life. Children waged hose-pipe wars beneath cat’s cradles of electric and telephone wires, while laundry flapped like indulgent parents on the overlooking balconies.
The shutters were finally up when Iain returned to the computer shop. The owner was in boisterous spirits this morning, greeting him like a long-lost friend and insisting he share his pot of spiced tea. They chatted of football as they drank, then Iain passed him Robyn’s list and he put together a box for him. Karin was up and gone by the time he returned to the hotel. She’d left her things in his room, he saw, along with a note to tell him she was off to Daphne in search of her consul but hoped to see him later. He hung out his ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, bolted the door, cleared the dressing table and laid out his new gear. He downloaded Robyn’s software, cut it onto a CD, rebooted his laptop, then called her on her mobile. ‘I’m ready,’ he told her. ‘Now what?’
She talked him through the set up, had him start recovery. ‘Let it do its thing,’ she told him. ‘Check it from time to time. If it freezes, give me a call.’
He thanked her and rang off. He watched it for a while, but he soon tired of that. He felt restless and a little hungry. The hotel would have stopped serving breakfast by now, but he was in the mood to stretch his legs anyway. A café at the top of town, a selection of newspapers for the latest on the blast. He wrote admonitions in English and Turkish to leave the computer equipment alone, and placed them so they couldn’t be missed. Then he made up both beds, left the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the doorknob and headed on his way.
Michel Bejjani and his team had been in position for a couple of hours before Iain Black finally re-emerged from his hotel. Michel, sitting in the café across the street, looked away at once lest he be spotted himself, then gave a surreptitious nod to Faisal across the backgammon board, and to Sami and Ali who were sharing a water-pipe at a nearby table. He cupped a hand over his earpiece to cut down on the café’s ambient noise then murmured into his microphone hidden beneath his collar: ‘That’s him now.’
‘Got him,’ said Yacoub, who was with Josef in the first SUV, parked a short distance up the road.
‘Me too,’ confirmed Kahlil, with Sayed, in the second.
Black paused on the front steps. He took out his phone, chose a number, made a call. He began chatting cheerfully away then crossed the road and walked obliviously straight past them. The moment he was out of sight, Michel checked to make sure his taser and GPS transmitter were both on, then got to his feet and gestured for the others to follow him.
Acapulco had been an aberration, an uncharacteristic lapse of concentration. He was every bit as capable of running this kind of operation as Georges, should the need arise.
It was time to prove that to his father.
‘We had nothing to do with yesterday’s bomb,’ Professor Metin Volkan assured Zehra. ‘With any of the bombs. I swear this to you on everything I hold dear. I started One Cyprus because I believe passionately that reunification offers the best future for the people of this island. But it only works if there is peace and trust. And you can’t achieve peace and trust with bombs, no matter who you target.’
‘But …?’ asked Zehra.
A grimace, a little flicker of the eyes. ‘When you asked your question a moment ago, it reminded me of something, that’s all. Of someone. A man. He came to one of our rallies. To two of them, actually, though we only spoke once.’
‘Where?’
‘In Famagusta. Both times in Famagusta. You know the Eastern Mediterranean University? In a lecture hall there. That was one reason he stood out. He was much older than the other students. Not that there were so many of them, mind you. What with the bombs starting to go off, and people thinking we had something to do with them.’
‘This man,’ prompted Zehra.
‘Yes. He stood to one side and watched. Very still, very quiet, very intense. He spooked me a little, if I’m honest.’ He nodded towards his front door to indicate the two policemen outside, the power structure they represented. ‘I assumed he was one of them, there to take names, scare people off, find things to use against us. But nothing came of it so I forgot about him. Until he showed up at our next Famagusta rally too. This was maybe three or four weeks ago. There’d been another bomb by then, the worst until yesterday’s, so that even fewer people were there, for all that we denounced the bombings furiously at every opportunity we got. Anyway, he came to talk to me afterwards.’
‘And?’
‘He asked me the same question you did. And he asked me to give him my word too. That’s what made me think of him. I told him what I told you: that we were men of peace who deplored the use of violence; and, moreover, that our involvement in a bombing campaign wouldn’t merely be vile, it would be stupid too, because he could see for himself how people were turning against our cause. He didn’t seem surprised. It was more like it was confirmation of bad news, like a second opinion of cancer. I asked him what was going on. I told him that if he knew anything he had to go to the police. He said he knew nothing, he simply wanted to make sure he could trust us before contributing. He asked me what we needed. I didn’t want him around the campaign, if I’m honest, so I told him we needed money. He promised to see what he could do. That’s all, I swear. I haven’t seen or heard from him since.’
‘Then why do you think he had something to do with Antioch?’
‘I don’t. If he’d been a bomber, why would he ask me for my assurances?’ He must have realized how weak this sounded, for he added: ‘But there was something about him. Like he was dead inside. If ever I’ve met a man capable of that kind of horror, it was him.’
‘Cypriot?’
Volkan shook his head. ‘A mainlander. But here a long time, to judge from his accent. An old soldier, if I had to guess. He had that look.’
Zehra nodded. After the Turkish army had successfully annexed Northern Cyprus, they’d awarded many of the homes, farms and businesses abandoned by Greek Cypriots to veterans of the campaign, in part to thank them for their service but mostly to tie the island ever more closely to the mainland. ‘Do you have photographs?’
‘Nothing official. People were already edgy enough about being seen with us. But I think someone filmed it for the university’s website.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you find out?’
Volkan scowled angrily. ‘Do you really not understand what’s going on here, Zehra?’ he asked. ‘I’m considered an enemy of the state. I’m being watched
all the time
. As are my friends and associates. As you may be too, simply for coming here this morning, unless they consider you too obviously harmless. They monitor my Internet and email; they listen to my phone calls. Anyone I touch I taint. They’re waiting for an excuse to take me in.
Any
excuse. And what if I’m right about this man, that he is involved in some way? They’ll use him to incriminate us all.’
‘So you’ll do nothing? Is that what you’re saying?’
An insult too far. He snorted almost contemptuously. ‘If you want something done, Zehra, maybe you should do it yourself for once.’
Zehra lifted her chin. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Maybe I will.’
Michel Bejjani and his men tailed Iain Black into Antioch’s main market, a tangle of cobbled alleys and roads thronged with shops and stalls and shoppers. It was so labyrinthine that the only way to keep your bearings, when the sun went in, was the way the city everywhere sloped down to the Orontes river.
It said in the head-hunter’s report that Black had made multiple solo trips inside Iran, seeking information on the regime and its nuclear programme from dissidents, while also advising insurgents on their tactics.
Michel watched him banter with a silversmith about a brooch and a pair of earrings, then buy a punnet of strawberries from a barrow piled so high that the fruit was squishing beneath its own weight, little pools of sticky red juice gathering on the cobbles below. A call came in on his phone. He spoke briefly, checked his screen, put it away again, meandered onwards.
It said in the head-hunter’s report that Black had been in Libya all through the Qaddafi uprising, making sure Western weaponry got to the right people, and teaching them how to use it too.
He came to a busy road, waited for a break in traffic. The two SUVs approached from his right, tracking his GPS transmitter on their SatNavs. Josef raised an eyebrow at Michel as he drove by, but it was far too busy for a snatch. Lights turned red ahead. Traffic congealed. Black weaved between cars to the far pavement then hurried up a steep flight of narrow stone steps into the city’s old quarter. Michel clenched a fist with quiet satisfaction. This part of Antioch was crowded with colourful yet dilapidated slum housing, walls slanted at impossible angles, roofs repaired with sheets of corrugated iron, balconies made from wooden planks strapped to scaffolding poles. The kind of place where people knew to mind their own business. The kind of place almost designed for ambush.
The steps kept corkscrewing wildly, stealing Black from view. He walked so briskly that it was an effort to keep up. They had to step aside as a group of rowdy schoolboys charged gleefully past, satchels bouncing on their shoulders. Another turn of the steps and then the staircase forked, with no sign of Black on either prong. Michel gestured Sami and Ali left while he and Faisal went right. Barely twenty paces along, however, they came to a dead end. A strangled cry in his earpiece was followed by a thud and then by silence. He felt a sudden dread as he ran back around. A booted foot protruded from a recessed doorway. He drew his taser, advanced cautiously, heart pounding in his ears. Sami was lying unconscious on his side, dribbling saliva from his mouth, while Ali lay face down beside him.
A short buzz of electricity behind. Faisal yelped and then went down. Michel raised his taser as he whirled around. Too late. His wrist was seized and twisted so hard that he cried out and let it go. His hair was grabbed; nodes were pressed against his throat. Their coldness and menace made him whimper. He had to fight to hold his bladder.
‘So who the fuck are you idiots?’ asked Black, in an offensively measured voice. ‘And why have you been following me?’
Famagusta was an hour by bus from Nicosia. Zehra got off by the main gates of the Eastern Mediterranean University. A campus map steered her to the registrar’s office, but she found several people already waiting there, and they looked so ridiculously young and exotic that Zehra instantly lost her nerve and fled, wondering what on earth she was doing there. But she knew what she was doing there. Volkan had got beneath her skin. She meant to prove something to him, and she could scarcely back down already.