City of the Lost. Will Adams
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my father’s legs and they stole our home and land and everything we’d ever owned. We had to run for our lives. We had to take refuge in a concentration camp. You had to take refuge there too, in case you’ve forgotten. And now you’re telling me that it was my fault?’
‘Athena did all those terrible things to you? Remarkable, considering she hadn’t even been born at the time.’
‘Not her. Her kind.’
‘Her kind!’ he retorted. ‘So all Greek Cypriots are accountable for the sins of those few, are they? Even the ones who weren’t yet born back then? Does that work both ways, I wonder? Did you know that Athena’s family came originally from Kyrenia? That they were refugees themselves, only in the opposite direction, fleeing from us? Do you have any idea how many hundreds of them vanished during that time? And did you know her own uncle was one of them? That he was photographed surrendering to Turkish troops yet he was never seen again?’
‘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.
I
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.
II
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.
III
‘We had nothing to do with yesterday’s bomb,’ Professor Metin Volkan assured Zehra. ‘With any