The Istanbul Puzzle. Laurence O’Bryan
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been killed by friendly fire. It had been totally unsettling. It was one of the reasons I’d gone out there.
‘You think they made it all up?’ Her tone was sceptical. ‘You know nothing about this Labarum thing?’
Her arms were folded.
‘I didn’t say that.’ There was no point in denying it. ‘Alek told me all about Constantine military standard, the Labarum thing, as you call it. He claimed …’ I hesitated. The craziness of what Alek had said when he was alive seemed spookier now that he was dead.
‘He claimed …’ Was this how he’d be remembered?
‘Do go on,’ said Isabel.
I sighed. ‘Alek said the Labarum of Constantine would reappear at a time of great change.’
That was enough for her. She raised her hands in the air as if she didn’t want to hear any more.
I shrugged. I’d always been a cynic when it came to Alek’s crazy theories. This one was only a bit stupider than the rest.
‘If he’d found even a part of this banner of Constantine, it’d be worth a mint, right?’ she said.
‘Yeah, but he wasn’t looking for it.’
‘Why do you think they’re talking about it?’ she said.
‘It’s one of the legends of Hagia Sophia. That’s enough reason for them to write this stuff. Some people like stirring things up. It sells newspapers. But whatever they say, there’s no way the Institute was part of a search for the Labarum. And whatever you say about him, I honestly don’t think Alek was either. He would have told me. We should sue that newspaper.’
She shook her head. ‘Not a good idea, unless you like spending a lot of time in hot court rooms.’
‘Well, their story is full of crap.’
‘So where did Alek take this photograph?’ She tapped her finger against the print lying on the table.
‘Like I said, I’ve no idea.’
I shaded my eyes. The sun was way too hot already. My skin was burning.
Despite my insistence that Alek was innocent, I knew I had to consider that there was a chance, if even an outside one, that he might have become involved in something he hadn’t told me about. Sure, he valued his job, but what about all the weird stuff he used to go on about?
Had he spread his crazy ideas about Constantine’s Labarum? Had someone persuaded him to look for it?
Isabel gazed out at sea. Then she turned to me.
‘Why did you go to Afghanistan after your wife died?’
Someone had been digging about me. But it was a question I’d answered many times before. I put my hands on the table, palms downward.
‘I went to Afghanistan because the Institute I work for got permission from the Ministry of Education there to do an aerial survey.’
‘You’re telling me it was a coincidence? Your wife had died out there six months before; then you get to go out there. Come on Sean, I’m not stupid.’
I pressed my palms down on the table. I’d heard this response before too. ‘What would you do if your husband was murdered, and no one was ever caught for it, never mind punished, and the whole incident ended up almost forgotten?’ I was getting louder, but I couldn’t help it, ‘If the whole thing is brushed away as if it never happened?
Her voice was softer when she responded. ‘I heard you almost got yourself killed. That you were lucky to be deported.’
I stared out to sea. We sat in silence.
‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ I said.
What she’d said was all true. I’d managed to visit the nearest village to where Irene had been murdered by a roadside bomb. I’d ended up in a room with ten armed men and a nervous translator. I’d been hoping to find out which group had killed her. To get closure. Put a name to the bastards.
An American patrol was called in by a local guy. I was taken into custody, handcuffed, put on a plane out within seventy-two hours. They’d threatened to charge me too, but my visa to get into Afghanistan had been legitimate. I must have had ten people shouting in my face before the plane doors closed. I’d put lives at risk. I had to accept I shouldn’t have done it.
I’d also put my own life at risk. But I didn’t care about that. My parents were dead. My beautiful wife was dead. We had no children. Who the hell would care if I was history?
I was a hollow human robot with a ghost haunting it. All I did most days were tasks I cared nothing about.
And going out to Afghanistan hadn’t cured me. It had just created more problems.
The fact that the Institute was banned from Afghanistan for ten years was one of the reasons I’d had to accept that my role at the Institute was going to change. I had to get approval from Beresford-Ellis before I went off on any project now, no matter what I thought of him. It irritated me – I’d co-founded the place – but I couldn’t argue with the logic of it.
‘You’ve definitely stepped on someone’s toes this time too,’ she said, softly, after a minute had passed. ‘Hagia Sophia is a big deal here. The oldest copy of the Koran in the world is in Istanbul, a few minutes’ walk from it.’ She went to the balcony.
‘Are you ready?’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘We’re going.’ She shaded her eyes. She was looking along the coastline. A low-flying white helicopter was coming towards us. I watched it approach.
‘I’ve just realised,’ she said, turning towards me. ‘That’s an upside down V.’ She pointed at the top corner of the mosaic in Alek’s photo. ‘That could be the Greek letter lambda, our letter L.’
‘L, what does that stand for?’
‘It could stand for Luna, the goddess of the moon. Maybe this isn’t Christian after all.’ She laughed, grabbed the photos off the table. She had a high-pitched laugh.
Her laughter was drowned out by the roar of the helicopter. It was almost level with us now.
‘It’s a bit noisy, isn’t it?’ she shouted in my ear.
The helicopter descended towards a patch of grass in front of the building, between the sea and the road.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘To meet that expert I told you about.’
‘Is this the way you always travel?’ I shouted.
‘No, only when people’s lives are in danger.’
In Whitehall Sergeant Henry P Mowlam was looking at his screen. His hands were curled into fists.
He closed his eyes. Would they listen to him? The raid on the London mosque had led to two riots already. As far as he was concerned, traffic checkpoints in the city should have been in place for at least another two weeks. The unrest in other European cities had continued during the last twenty four hours. All across Europe similar raids on mosques had been conducted in search of terror suspects who’d gone on the run after the escalation in the Middle East. Acting on rumours, looking for scapegoats, was how it had been described by some in the media. The civil rights mob had been having a canary, live on television.
He listened to the drone of the underground control room. Some days it reminded him of a symphony, all that humming and buzzing and heels clacking and coughs and clicks.
‘Are you all right, Henry?’ a woman’s voice whispered.
He nodded, opened his