Authors: Will Adams
Butros Bejjani was on the phone with a minor Saudi prince when his son Michel came into his cabin and signalled that he had news. He therefore hurried His Highness through his usual litany of excuses then made clear to him the consequences of default and put down the phone. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Our private investigator just called, Father,’ said Michel. ‘According to her contact in the police, Iain Black was arrested first thing this morning. He was interviewed in connection with the Daphne bombing, then deported.’
‘Deported? What for?’
‘She doesn’t know, not for sure. But apparently there’s a rumour that he was filming the Daphne hotel at the time of the blast. It would certainly make sense. If so, we have to assume that he told his interviewers about us. If they come to see us, explaining our purpose here could prove awkward.’
Butros nodded. Awkward was right. On the other hand, an awkward interview or two was a small price to pay for the prize he was after. ‘What about Black’s girlfriend Visser?’
‘Yes, Father,’ said Michel. ‘That’s another thing. She flew off to Turkish Cyprus this afternoon, as she was scheduled. So it looks as though we were wrong about her and Black working together.’ He dropped his eyes. ‘Father, it’s been two days and still no word from your contact. Surely he must have been killed in the blast. And surely he left no confederates to carry on his work. The police are likely to be here soon. Who knows what restrictions they’ll put on us. We have a reputation to preserve and a banking group to run. If we don’t set off while we still can, then—’
‘Yes, yes,’ cut in Butros. Michel had a habit of rattling on beyond what was necessary. ‘Very well. Give the order.’
‘Thank you, Father. I’ll do it now.’
The door closed. Butros scowled in frustration.
To be so close. To be so close and yet still miss out.
There had to be something he could do. He turned on his monitor, opened the video-file once more. He’d only had it two weeks or so, yet he’d already watched it at least twenty times. But he’d watched it, all those times, in anticipation rather than forensically.
He hadn’t studied it for
clues
.
It was twelve minutes fifty-seven seconds long. It had been filmed on a digital camera then crudely edited. The first few seconds were a confused blur as the man – you could tell it was a man from occasional glimpses of his free hand and tattooed forearm – came to grips with his equipment. A flash of night sky, then dusty tarmac painted with faint stripes, like a long-abandoned car park. A rope ladder was fed through a hole drilled in crudely-laid concrete. Then the descent began, the ladder twisting and yawing as the man filmed beneath him, offering a brief glimpse of the front grille and bonnet of a truck or bus that must somehow have fallen backwards through some crevice into the site. Bejjani froze the footage and zoomed in but the resolution wasn’t sharp enough for him to make much of it, largely buried beneath sand as it was.
He resumed playing the footage. The man stepped off the ladder onto a hillock of rubble presumably deposited there by the collapse of the car park above. He panned slowly around a huge ancient chamber, twin rows of rounded columns that faded into the distance, and beautifully smooth walls of ashlar masonry either side. He clambered down the hillock, his camera jumping and jolting as he went, catching incongruous flashes of modern litter as he went, sweet wrappers, a weathered plastic bag, an empty soda bottle. He ignored all those and reached down instead to tug free a crushed grey disk from the earth. When first he’d watched this footage, Butros had thought it a battered tyre-rim from the fallen vehicle. He’d been wrong. The man brushed it free of dust and sand then laid it flat on the ground to photograph. The photograph was one of several high-resolution stills that Butros had been sent along with the footage. He opened it now. Despite having been crushed flat, some relief-work was still visible, several men toasting each other at a feast. A silver mixing bowl, the kind for which the Phoenicians had been justly famous. Properly restored, it would make a prime exhibit for a middle-ranking or even national museum, and would be worth something upwards of half a million euros on the open market.
The man tossed it negligently aside.
The banqueting hall next, then the friezes. Nothing new in either. The footage now cut abruptly to a more cramped series of chambers. One had a carpet of broken pottery so thick that it crunched beneath the man’s feet, like he was munching crisps. He crouched down to pick up and inspect various shards. Most were plain but a good number were black-on-red. He zipped several away in his shoulder-bag. One of these was currently in Butros’s wall-safe, couriered to him two weeks earlier from an Antioch sorting office, along with the Ishbaal seal fragment, this footage, the still photographs and his invitation to Daphne.
Black-on-red ware was an enigma. It was found in moderate quantities in his home city of Tyre and elsewhere in Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Turkey, in contexts dating from the eleventh century
BC
onwards. Curiously, however, analysis of the shards suggested strongly that the vast majority of it had been made in Cyprus and then exported, even though black-on-red pottery hadn’t been found in Cypriot contexts before the mid ninth century
BC
, over two hundred years later.
Butros sat back in his chair. He’d assumed, because the package had been sent from Turkey, and because the meeting was in Turkey, that the site itself would be in Turkey too – for why risk smuggling artefacts across a border unless you had to? But what if it was really in Turkish Cyprus instead? The woman Visser had just flown to Turkish Cyprus, after all. Maybe that was coincidence, for she was merely following her original schedule. But her original schedule had been set by Nathan Coates, who’d surely been sent a package very similar to his own, including this same footage.
It was a hoary joke of archaeology that it was largely the study of broken pots. For while bowls and jars and the like broke easily, their shards were virtually immortal. And, because styles changed every generation or so, those shards could be dated with some confidence. What was true for ancient pottery was equally true of their modern equivalents. He skipped back through the footage. He’d ignored the modern litter on his first pass. Maybe he’d missed a trick. The old plastic bag had faint writing upon it. He zoomed in on it until it blurred. It was too worn to read, yet the characters looked distinctly Greek. The soda bottle was badly weathered but still recognizably Pepsi. He opened a web-browser and ran a search. What a marvel was the modern world. It took him only a few minutes to find the information he needed. Pepsi-Cola had been truncated to Pepsi in 1962, a sans-serif font introduced. In 1973, the font had switched colour. Allowing a year or two for …
A great shiver rippled him, as though he’d walked through a ghost. He leaned back in his chair and bit a knuckle. Where else could a truck fall through a hole in a car park and yet remain undiscovered, except to his mystery cameraman, for forty years? He thought to himself:
My beloved Elissa; is that truly where you’ve been hiding all these years?
In something of a daze, he turned off his monitor and made his way to the bridge. ‘A new plan,’ he announced. ‘We’re going to Cyprus.’
‘Cyprus?’ scowled Michel, visibly irritated to have his orders overruled so quickly and publicly. ‘Where, exactly?’
Butros smiled almost beatifically. ‘Famagusta,’ he told them. ‘The lost city of Varosha.’
After the day’s hard winds, the night sky was luminously clear, constellations and galaxies with mythic names undimmed by passing headlights or the faintest urban glow. At another time, Iain would have found it beautiful. But right now all it meant to him was how completely he was on his own.
These three were involved in the Daphne bombing, he was sure of it. In fact, from the shape of her, he thought it probable that the woman was the leather-clad motorcyclist herself. He watched them talk. The breeze was against him so that he couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could see enough of the taxi-driver’s face to lip-read him a little. As best Iain could tell, he kept addressing the woman as Asena, almost as though it were an honorific. And maybe it was. The name ‘Asena’ had great resonance in Turkish folklore, from a Romulus and Remus-style legend of a female grey wolf who’d nursed and raised the founders of the nation. So what more fitting title could there be for a woman leader of the Grey Wolves?
She glanced around at him again, then pointed across the flats to a tall dune, for all the world telling a pair of deliverymen how to get her new sofa up her stairs. That they intended to kill him out here seemed certain. Daphne had proved their ruthlessness, and they couldn’t risk him talking. He was therefore in a fight for his life here. And perhaps for Karin’s too.
His forearms were clamped together so tightly with duct tape that his hands had numbed and he could barely wriggle his fingers. His shins were bound too, though less so, as though they’d run out of tape. He worked his arms and legs in an effort to loosen them, but the conclave broke up before he’d made any progress and they came back over.
The taxi-driver aimed down a silenced handgun at Iain. The second man, a thuggish lump of muscle with a shaven scalp, fetched a coil of rope from the back of the Subaru. He looped a slipknot over the tow-bar then wound the other end multiple times around and between Iain’s ankles, securing it with another knot. Then he gave Asena the thumbs-up. She crouched beside him. ‘It doesn’t have to go like this,’ she said. ‘Just tell me everything you know about the Grey Wolves. You seem to believe that the bombing in Daphne is merely the prelude to something bigger. To what, exactly? Who have you told about your suspicions? How much does Visser know? And please don’t lie: I’ll know if you do.’
There was a bitter irony to the situation. Karin posed these people no threat. But if Iain told them that they wouldn’t believe him, because it was in the nature of torturers to believe only what they forced out of you with pain. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.
She stood and nodded to the shaven-headed man. He got into the Subaru, started it up. The engine roared even as the brake lights flared red, so that his tyres spun wildly, spraying sand. Asena drew back her foot then kicked Iain in the pit of his stomach with savage force, winding him so badly that he gasped in air thick with sand, rasping down his throat and into his lungs. The brakes were released; the Subaru sprang away. The rope snapped taut, jolting through Iain’s ankles, knees and hips, winding him for a second time. Then he was off, flailing after the Subaru like some hapless water-skier, stones stabbing and scoring his skin as he sucked in ever more of the sandy air while still choking on that already in his system, coughing and gasping and suffocating.
He couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t breathe
. Yet on and on it went, beyond what was endurable so that he thought he was going to pass out, until finally the Subaru began to slow and stop, allowing him to turn onto his side and retch and cough and spit out the worst of it while at the same time trying to suck air down his raw throat back into his starved lungs.
It was perhaps half a minute before he’d recovered sufficiently to even think about anything else, before he could look around. They’d completed a circuit of some kind, were back to where they’d started. The taxi-driver was again on his right, aiming down his handgun. Asena was to his left, drinking in his pain, fists upon her hips. ‘We can do this all night,’ she said.
‘You bitch,’ said Iain.
Her mouth hardened. She nodded at the driver. The engine revved. As he began to pull away, she drew back her foot and kicked Iain again in his stomach. She kicked him as hard as before, but he was prepared this time, it winded him less badly. He turned onto his side and put his bound forearms up in front of his face to filter out what sand he could. They rode up a dune, ploughing furrows as they went, then returned to the crusted sand of the desert floor, where the battering was harder but the breathing was easier. He worked his arms back and forth against each other but the duct tape was still tight. He reached down for his belt instead, undid its buckle then gripped it between his fingers and rolled over to pull it free from its loops. Then he fed it back through its own buckle to fashion a slipknot of his own.
He was barely done when they began slowing for the end of the second circuit. He lay on his front and coughed and hacked and gasped exhaustedly, as if beyond the limits of his endurance. They came to a stop. He could see shoes either side. Asena crouched beside him. ‘The truth,’ she said implacably. ‘Your last chance.’
‘You sick ugly bitch,’ he whispered.
She scowled and stood back up, gestured at the driver for another lap. The engine revved, the tyres turned, they began to pull away. Then she drew back her foot to kick him for a third time.
Now
.
Iain spun onto his side to release his belt, fashioned into a makeshift lasso that he snared around Asena’s ankle even as she kicked him. She looked surprised rather than alarmed as he yanked the slipknot tight. The Subaru was already accelerating away. She hopped several times before she fell. The taxi-driver ran after them, yelling and pointing his gun but too worried about hitting Asena to shoot. Asena, herself, was kicking out and twisting furiously, doing everything she could to force him to let her go, putting extraordinary strain on his fingers, dragging his arms back over his head. But when you had just one chance to survive, your body would find a way.
Asena took out her hunting knife. She hauled herself up by her own trousers into a sitting position then slashed at Iain’s hands. She couldn’t quite reach him, however, began hacking at the belt instead. And her blade was so sharp that the leather immediately started to fray.
Behind them, the gunman gave up his futile chase. He unscrewed his silencer and fired twice into the air. Brake lights flared. The Subaru slowed and stopped. Iain hauled Asena towards him by the belt. She stabbed at his face. He swayed aside then clubbed her so hard with the hammer of his bound hands that she slumped to the sand and dropped her knife. He picked it up between his clumsy paws and began to saw at the rope around his ankles.