City of the Lost (17 page)

It had been a gorgeous spring night in Houston the year before, out on the terrace with Nathan and Rick. The garden in full bloom, the electric hum of nocturnal insects. Nathan had been in full courtship mode at the time, compensating for the age-gap with stories to demonstrate his status and virility, including an anecdote about a Bronze Age cauldron he’d tried to buy in Istanbul several years before. The trip had almost ended in disaster because the antiquities police had been tipped off to the obscene quantity of Turkish lira he’d had to raise at short notice. Raising cash fast was a nightmare, he’d confided, particularly with modern money-laundering regulations. But it was what dealers insisted on, so what could you do? He’d actually changed strategies as a result, keeping large stashes of dollars and euros in safety-deposit vaults in black market hotspots like Athens and Rome. But that had had its own drawbacks too. He’d grinned at Rick. ‘Tell her about last year.’

A bright false smile from Rick. ‘Are you sure that’s wise, sir?’

‘You’re such a pussy. Okay, I’ll tell her. Remember all that shit when the euro almost broke up? I thought for sure the fucking Greeks were about to slap on capital controls; maybe the Italians too. And me with over half a million euros in an Athens strongbox, as much again in Rome, all about to become worthless! So Rick here went to work. He flew over, drew it all out, took it up to Stuttgart instead. I mean, you can say what you like about the Germans, they weren’t going to default, were they?’

The thing was, Rick hadn’t flown in to Turkey with Nathan and Karin the week before. It had been his job, after all, to make sure Nathan was safe. He’d therefore flown in a week early to scope out their accommodations and the places they planned to visit, travelling their route in reverse from Cyprus up through Turkey to Istanbul, where he’d met them off their plane. Karin had assumed, therefore, that he’d flown directly from Houston to Larnaca.

But not according to his itinerary.

No. According to his itinerary, he’d flown via Stuttgart instead.

Asena identified Iain Black easily, thanks to his police escort. She bought a glossy magazine for cover then sat nearby and watched him. Buying herself a ticket at short notice had been no problem. She always travelled with a spare passport and a choice of plastic, and the London flight had been wide open. The trickier part would be to make friends with Black in such a way that he’d think it all his own doing.

He bought newspapers, read them for a while. He looked around thoughtfully. He got up, consulted a screen, went to talk to an airline supervisor. Then he came back to chat to his two policemen. They seemed to come to some kind of agreement. He picked up his holdall.

It was her cue.

She picked up her own bag and went to join the check-in queue ahead of him. When he arrived immediately behind her, she gave him a mildly flirtatious smile, as if she suspected he’d deliberately followed her, and was flattered. The queue was short, the service efficient. In no time she was being beckoned forwards. She dropped her purse, spilled a few coins. By the time she’d picked them up again, Black had been called to the desk alongside her. ‘London,’ she said to the check-in woman, handing across her passport. Then she smiled again at Iain and gave him an interrogative little arch of her eyebrow.

He smiled warmly back at her as he handed over his own passport. ‘Tel Aviv,’ he said.

The policemen escorted Iain to his departure gate, where he joined the line for hand-luggage checks. He nodded farewell to them but they sat on a metal bench across the corridor, intent on seeing this all the way through. His bribe had bought him a change of destination. Charm evidently cost more.

He took off his belt to pass through the scanner, unzipped his holdall and parted his clothes for a woman security officer with a broken front tooth. A flash of manila at the bottom of his bag gave him a start, and he feared for a moment that his two policemen had set him up. Then he remembered Karin’s package, taking it from her after the blast and stashing it in there himself. He was waved through. He went to a far corner to open it. There was a toughened black plastic case inside, the size and weight of a hardback, with a handwritten note taped to it.

Dear Mike,

I think we’re finally homing in on our Virgil Solution!

Nathan

The case had twin clasps. He opened it up. There were eight sealed glass jars embedded in protective grey foam inside, along with a memory stick. The jars were labelled A to H and each contained a small shard of pottery, a lump of corroded metal or fragments of charred wood.

Boarding was announced. He still hadn’t arranged to be met in Tel Aviv. He called Maria from a payphone for Uri’s contact details. He tried him on his mobile first, got straight through. ‘Hey, mate,’ he said. ‘It’s Iain. You up for a visit?’

‘To London? Always.’

‘No. Me to you. In fact, I’ll be landing at Ben Gurion in about two hours.’

Uri laughed. ‘Thanks for the notice, mate. What’s this in aid of?’

‘You heard about Daphne, right?’

‘Shit, yeah. Terrible thing. Mustafa was good people. But why would that bring you here?’

‘One of the victims was Israeli.’

‘So they’ve been saying. That history guy, yeah?’

‘That’s the one. Can you run a background on him? Doesn’t have to be too deep. Work history, where he lived, family, friends and colleagues. You know the score.’

‘I’ll get on it now. Anything else?’

‘I could use a spare phone or a laptop, if you’ve got one. I keep losing mine.’

‘I’ll see what I can find. What about actual help?’

‘This is an off-piste kind of thing,’ said Iain. ‘Quentin won’t be happy.’

‘Fuck Quentin,’ said Uri. ‘Mustafa was one of us.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Iain. ‘He was.’

Zehra’s feet were by now in an openly mutinous mood, rapidly gaining support from her thighs and back. Yet she pressed on all the same until she reached the edge of the Forbidden Zone itself – the lost city of Varosha.

It had to be at least forty years since she’d been here last. Her uncle had worked in the kitchens of an expensive restaurant on the seafront, and they’d sometimes come to visit him on holidays. Varosha had been so glamorous back then, dazzling with film stars and European royalty, with millionaires and sporting legends. On one visit, she’d even seen Elizabeth Taylor coming out of the Argo hotel in a gorgeous blue dress and a wide-brimmed white hat.

It wasn’t like that any more.

Tall apartment blocks lay derelict, their windows broken, their façades riven by gigantic cracks. A cross had collapsed onto its side atop an Orthodox church, and its terracotta dome was sieved with holes where tiles had fallen in. Houses were overrun by vegetation, while cacti pressed up against the perimeter fencing in the forlorn manner of prisoners in a concentration camp. She remembered what Professor Volkan said about all those people who’d gone missing during the war, whose bodies had never been found, and suddenly this place appeared to her their symbol: not a lost city so much as a city of the lost. It gave her the chills, and she was glad to turn away from it again.

She came across a general store. The owner grunted when she showed him her photograph. ‘What do you want with
him
?’ he asked.

She looked up in surprise. After so many failures, you stopped expecting success. ‘Do you know him? Does he live here?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘He owes me money.’

‘Sure,’ scoffed the shopkeeper. ‘To you and those men in the cars, I’ll bet.’

‘What cars?’

‘The ones watching his house. Three days now. What’s going on? What’s he done?’

‘Nothing. He owes me money.’

The man shrugged it off, gave her directions. She reached a patchwork of fields, orchards and allotments. The houses were in small clusters here, but there was one all by itself that matched the shopkeeper’s description: compact and shabby white, with a wooden lean-to against its side. It was set in a little citrus grove with a pair of tattered polythene greenhouses nearby, vegetation sprouting like straw from old mattresses. A rutted track connected it to the road, and a black SUV with tinted windows was parked near the junction.

She shuffled past the SUV, muttering to herself like a crazy woman. Two men were in the front, both wearing dark glasses and looking monumentally bored. Neither paid her any attention whatsoever. But the man in the back gave her a long, hard, piercing stare. Then he laughed scornfully and looked away again. She reached the next junction, turned right. The moment she was out of view, she bent double and fought for breath. It had been years since she’d suffered a panic attack. She’d thought herself over them.

As a young woman, the local PASOK thugs had eyed her in a different way, yet with that same fusion of entitlement and contempt. One day, four of them had pounded on their front door and demanded she come out. Her father had gone out instead to remonstrate. They’d beaten him into unconsciousness then forced their way inside. She’d hidden in the narrow space behind her wardrobe. For the next twenty minutes she’d had to listen as they found her mother and younger sister instead. Their cries haunted her still, as did the knowledge of such men. And the truth was that she’d been in hiding from their kind ever since.

Zehra didn’t know why such men would bother to watch the small white farm-house in the shadow of the lost city. Nor did she much care.

She was out.

Israeli immigration was usually a bugger for Iain, his passport being so clotted with visas and entry stamps of hostile neighbours that his arrival was treated almost like a taunt. But this time they waved him through. Uri was waiting the other side, a year older, a year balder, a year fatter. ‘A word with a mate,’ he grinned, as they hugged.

‘I knew there had to be a reason I recruited you.’

He was parked short-term, a powder-blue Mercedes soft-top. He popped his jeans button and lowered his zip to give his gut room to breathe. ‘My trousers keep shrinking in the wash,’ he said.

‘Sure. That’s the only possible explanation.’

Uri tossed him a smartphone. ‘Yours for the trip, but I’ll need it back. And those pages on the dash are all I could find on your man Jakob. Seems clean enough. Born in the States but moved here young. Taught archaeology up in Haifa. Wife died a few years back, no kids. Lives up near the Lebanese border. I’m assuming you could use a driver, right?’

‘You’re a prince among men, Uri.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’ He glanced over his shoulder, screeched backwards from his spot. ‘Your turn,’ he said. ‘The fuck’s going on? What’s this guy got to do with Mustafa?’

‘I’d tell you if I knew. I’m chasing shadows here.’

‘Then tell me about the shadows.’

‘Give me a moment. There’s something I need to do first.’ He hauled the samples case from his holdall, plugged the memory stick into Uri’s smartphone. It contained a number of image files that he began copying across. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Ever heard of the Bejjani family?’

‘The bankers?’ frowned Uri. ‘Sure. How do they fit in?’

‘About a month back, we got hired to find some dirt on Butros. He’s a bugger to get close to in Tyre, as you can imagine, but one of Mustafa’s old colleagues tipped us off to a meeting in Daphne the day before yesterday. Butros Bejjani doesn’t go to meet people. They go to him. So this had to be a
major
swinging dick, right? We reported back to our clients, who turn out to be British intelligence, though I didn’t know that at the time. They asked us to find out more.’ The image files had all loaded, so he began looking through them. The small screen made it hard to see clearly, but the first two showed a pair of wheeled suitcases lying open on a floor, each containing what he could only presume to be artefacts, wrapped for safekeeping in clothes and tissue paper and bubble-wrap. ‘So I flew in, hooked up with Mustafa, set up some cameras outside the hotel and settled down to watch.’

‘Which was when the bomb went off?’

Iain nodded. ‘The thing is, we got Bejjani’s meeting wrong. He wasn’t there for a client. He was there sniffing after some black market artefacts. He’s a sucker for Dido, apparently; for anything Phoenician.’ He continued going through the image files as he talked, which showed the various artefacts unwrapped and held in a patch of sunlight for the photographer to shoot. They were mostly shards of pottery and the like that meant little to Iain. But, every so often, there’d be a glimpse of something different: the floor or the bed or the hands of the men holding the pieces up. There were at least two of them. Both were elderly and deeply tanned, but they were wearing different coloured shirts. One wore a gold wedding ring, the other had a faded forearm tattoo half-hidden beneath his cuff. ‘The thing is, Bejjani wasn’t the only bidder. An American oil gazillionaire called Nathan Coates and his head of security were with the dealer when the bomb went off. They were both killed in the blast, and presumably the dealer too. So maybe the bomb was planted by Cypriots, like the police are saying. They’ve bombed before and apparently they sent in a codeword. But the Cypriots are denying it furiously and – let’s face it – codewords aren’t exactly top secret. And the more I look into it, the more it’s looking like a hit.’

‘On who?’

‘That’s the question. My first thought was this guy Coates. He’s rich, his kids hate him, the bomb was parked directly beneath his room. But that didn’t pan out. So then I thought Bejjani. Maybe even our clients. That didn’t work either. Then this morning I learned that three antiquities police officers were killed in the blast too, which can’t be coincidence. They
had
to be there for Coates or Bejjani, either to investigate them or to sell them the pieces. So now I’m thinking that maybe
they
were the target. That someone got wind of their investigation and freaked out and used the Cypriots as a scapegoat.’

‘Murdering over thirty people while they were at it? Isn’t that a bit extreme?’