City of the Lost (31 page)

‘And that region was where?’

Karin tapped Andreas on his shoulder. ‘Have you ever heard of a region of ancient Cyprus called Alashiya?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ he frowned.

‘Where is it?’

He waved his hand at the night-time lights of the city of Famagusta that lay scattered like embers before them. ‘Here,’ he said.

Fifty years before, Famagusta had been one of the busiest port cities in the eastern Mediterranean. But the Turkish invasion and occupation had led to such severe trade embargoes that it was now a faint shadow of its former self.

The
Dido
was moored between pleasure boats in its old harbour, cables clinking in the light breeze. There were lights on in the Port Authority building, and two old men were playing backgammon in the harbour café, while the occasional pop of a flashbulb revealed some tourist taking night-time photos from the city’s ancient walls. But that was about it. Butros Bejjani stared south towards the dark shadow of the Forbidden Zone. ‘You’re certain about this?’ he asked. ‘There’s no mistake?’

‘There’s no mistake, Father,’ Michel assured him. ‘The woman Visser is not only back in Turkish Cyprus, she’s on her way here right now. And Black is with her. He borrowed her phone earlier to make a phone call.’

Butros sighed. He’d hoped they’d have time to explore Varosha at their leisure. But it wasn’t to be. Visser and Black had clearly made the same deductions he had, which meant he now needed to adapt his plans accordingly. This was no discussion for an open deck, however, so he led his sons to his cabin and closed the door behind them. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Any ideas?’

‘I say we let them make their move,’ said Michel. ‘Maybe they already know where it is, in which case we can track them on Visser’s phone.’

Butros shook his head. ‘If they were foolish enough to take a phone into Varosha, which they’re not, its signal would give them away instantly. The army would be onto them in no time. Anything else?’

‘Maybe we should turn them in,’ said Georges. ‘Get them out of our way.’

‘No,’ said Butros. He’d liked Black, and didn’t wish him or Visser harm. He merely intended to beat them to the site. ‘What if they talk? We’d lose our chance.’

‘Then let’s make a deal with them. Pool our resources.’

‘And what if
they
turn
us
in?’ scoffed Michel. ‘Anyway, we have all the resources we need. What can they offer?’

It was a valid point. One of the benefits of uncommon wealth was the ability it gave you to acquire expensive and sophisticated equipment at short notice. Butros had had a truckload of it delivered that same afternoon: cell radio sets, night-vision goggles, inflatables and much else. He gave himself a moment to think. His original plan had had two phases: reconnaissance and recovery. In phase one, Georges was to have led a small team over Varosha’s perimeter wall to search the derelict city, night after night, until finally they found the site. In phase two, they’d go back in on the inflatables, taking video-cameras and a satellite modem with them, so that Butros would be able to watch it all live from the
Dido
’s bridge, and decide which pieces they should take and which they should leave. Then they would carry their booty out to the inflatables and away.

Yet this plan, while prudent enough, had always been unsatisfying to Butros. To assess an artefact properly, you needed to touch it, hold it, weigh it, smell it, taste it. You had to feel what it did to your gut. Besides, if he was right about all this, it was Dido’s palace they were talking about.
Dido’s palace
. A discovery that would go down in history. More than anything else in the world, he wanted to play his full part in it.

His heart began beating a little faster when he realized what he was going to do. It was in the nature of banking that you came to assess everything in terms of risk. But where was the fun in that? He smiled as he turned to Georges. ‘We’re going in on the inflatables tonight,’ he said. ‘And I’m coming with you.’

The lift was out of order, no matter how many times Andreas pressed the button. ‘Is that how it works?’ asked Karin sweetly. ‘You just hit it hard enough?’

Andreas grunted. ‘That’s my understanding.’

The stairwell was gloomy with fire-escape lighting. They passed another couple coming down, exchanged wry greetings. Andreas was wheezing hard by the time they reached his floor. He put his hands on his knees and gave himself half a minute to recover. ‘What kind of a fool buys a top-floor flat?’ he sighed, fishing out his keys and letting them in.

His floor was strewn with papers. They set straight to work. It was Andreas who found the paper-clipped pages of an old street-map printed out from the Internet. ‘Varosha,’ he said. ‘But from before the Turkish invasion.’ He fitted the eight pages together into a strip two wide by four tall, the seafront to the east, the modern city to the west and north. The scale was large enough to name consulates, shops, hotels and other buildings of interest, and there were pencil jottings in the margins.

Rear of hotel

Car park

Perimeter wall, industrial estate?

Two yellow buses

View of Church roof

At least one street in from the sea

These notes were reflected on the map itself. The churches had rings around them, as if someone had placed a glass over them, then drawn around it. And the hotels one street or more in from the sea were highlighted in pink marker pen, while the top four of them had been crudely scratched through.

‘Imagine you were one of the first soldiers into Varosha during the invasion,’ said Iain, ‘but you haven’t been back in since. There’s a place you want to find, but your memory of it is hazy. It was a little way inland, there was a hotel nearby, a pair of buses in a car park. And you could see a church roof. The place is now under military occupation so that you can only visit it at night and at considerable risk, so that you have to minimize torchlight and blundering about. What do you do?’

‘You find yourself a map,’ said Karin. ‘You make a shortlist of places to check.’

Iain nodded. ‘Then you cross them off as you go along. That’s why the rings around the churches and the highlights are neatly done, but the crossings out are so rough. Because Baykam did them on the hoof.’

Karin put her finger on the next hotel down. ‘Until he found what he was looking for, at least. Then there’d have been no further need to scratch anything off, would there?’

A frisson ran through Iain as he looked down. The Daphne International Hotel hadn’t been bombed merely to kill Yasin Baykam, say in punishment for some breach of Grey Wolf security or protocol. No, it had surely been bombed to stop Baykam from revealing the location of this Varosha site. Which meant that there was something in there worth the murder of Mustafa and all those others.

Andreas was still staring down at the map. ‘Do you know how Famagusta got its name?’ he asked.

‘How?’ asked Karin.

‘It’s from the Greek word
ammochostos
. It means “buried beneath the sand”.’

Iain nodded. ‘Then let’s go dig it up.’

Frustration had piled on top of frustration for Asena these past twenty hours. The fiasco in the desert, Visser’s escape from Emre, her Grey Wolf team arrested in Famagusta, an afternoon wasted searching Nicosia for Black. Now, to cap it all, the turmoil in Turkey had persuaded the government to close its airspace until security could be restored; and while that was testimony to the success of their enterprise, it meant that her flight back home had been cancelled, stranding her here in Cyprus.

She sat with folded arms in the cramped rear of the SUV as they headed east to their safe house. The radio was on, provoking cheers every time some new outbreak of trouble was announced. Tiredness got to her. She’d have fallen asleep except that her head kept knocking against the window, jarring her back awake. A haze of memories enveloped her instead. Twenty-one again, and in a different car, heading with her father to some swanky soiree for the Fourth Army’s top brass, her mother having backed out at the last moment with the usual profession of nerves.

Asena had been studying modern history at Bosporus University at the time, and while not quite mutinous enough with liberal ideas to refuse to escort her father, she’d been quite liberal enough to punish him with a sulk. Her ill grace had lasted until he’d introduced her to the Lion. Tall, golden-haired, unbelievably beautiful in his uniform. Late forties, but didn’t look it. Their first conversation had lasted perhaps a minute and to this day she only had the vaguest idea of what they’d said. Yet, by the end of it, by the end of those sixty seconds, her heart had set itself on him.

They reached a roundabout, turned left, headed north out of Famagusta.

He’d fallen for her too. She’d known that instinctively. The difference was, he’d tried to fight it. His wife had been sick with a degenerative disease, and he’d been too loyal to leave her or even betray her. He’d therefore avoided Asena, had refused to take her calls. So she’d concocted an essay on the Cypriot campaign as an excuse to interview him, and had asked her father to set it up. Her father had outranked the Lion back then; he’d been unable to say no. She’d sat beside him at his desk as he’d gruffly pointed out landmarks on a flapped-out map. She’d edged ever closer to him. Their thighs had touched. She’d placed her hand on his leg to support herself while leaning over to look at how he’d outflanked the northern mountains. Then her hand had slipped. Thus had begun a period of squalid joy. He’d been too well known in Turkey for the usual business of country hotels; nor could he visit her at her digs. One of his friends on secondment overseas had lent them his apartment. How well she’d come to know it, and the others that had followed. He was marked out for great things. Promotion had followed promotion. She’d built her life around him, taking jobs wherever he was posted, even dating a series of plausible young men both to give them cover and to get her parents off her back. One of these, a shudderingly narcissistic young officer called Durmu
ş
Hassan, had asked her to marry him, but his proposal had so transparently been intended to gain favour with her father that she’d laughed in his face.

The Lion’s wife had fallen sicker. The term had been uncertain, the final outcome not. They’d pledged their futures to each other the moment he was free. But then they’d been blind-sided by the notorious Sledgehammer investigations, in which hundreds of senior Turkish officers had been arrested and charged with plotting a coup on evidence so flimsy that it would have been tossed out of any self-respecting court; except that it was never about justice or a coup, it was all about the government grabbing the army by its balls, and then slicing.

Her own father, absurdly, had been among the accused; and the key witness against him had been her old suitor Durmu
ş
, taking vengeance for her rejection of him by concocting malicious lies about covert planning meetings. She’d testified in her father’s defence, but no one had believed her. She’d gone to the Lion instead, but he’d been as helpless as she, for any officer who tried to defend his comrades was instantly added to the charge sheet. He’d begged her to be patient, had confided her that the fightback was already underway, that he was leading it himself. But it would take time. There was a vast quantity of work to be done, not least in finding someone to rebuild and then lead their shadow army of Grey Wolves, for their ability to create covert mayhem was a necessary precondition of success.

Still furious about her father, Asena had volunteered herself for the job. He’d refused even to countenance it. The chances of discovery were too high. It would involve unspeakable acts, not suitable for his future wife. And she was too precious for him to risk. Instead of arguing further, she’d bought herself a handgun and had gone to wait outside Durmu
ş
’s Istanbul apartment one frosty morning. She’d called out his name as he’d emerged, so that he’d know by whose hand nemesis was come, then she’d put twelve hollow-point rounds into his chest and face, one for each year of her father’s sentence. Thus had begun her new life as Asena, leader of the Grey Wolves, the Lion’s liaison and right-hand.

They turned right off the main road. An estate of holiday homes, quiet with the off-season. They pulled up behind a white Renault saloon. Doors opened. She shook herself from her reverie then followed the others through the cactus garden and inside.

The suspension of the horse-box had been stiffened to suppress excessive movement. The undercarriage had been lubricated to minimize creaking. An observant passer-by might still, however, have noticed its fractional rocking or heard the faint squeak of metal on metal as a series of bolts were drawn beneath the floor, then a metal panel was lifted up and slid to one side.

But there were no passers-by.

The horse-box settled again. There was silence for perhaps half a minute. Then a man sat up slowly and broke a glow-stick, enough to see by but not enough to be seen from outside. It gave a greenish tint to his hand and wrist as he set it down, as though in sympathy with how he felt inside, for it was no joke lying for two hours in a fume-filled, poorly ventilated and overheated space some thirty centimetres high – a space, what was more, that he’d had to share with three other men.

Haroon moved away from the floor panel, stretched his cramped legs. Erol now emerged. Samir and Mehmet. When all four of them were safely out, Haroon and Erol went to the wall that separated the main body of the horse-box from the back of the driver’s cab. They pushed hard against it and the internal locking mechanisms released. Two large, flat panels now swung outwards, revealing shallow cavities filled with grey packing foam that had been precision cut to accommodate weapons, munitions, clothing and other equipment.

In silence, they removed and distributed this equipment. They closed the panels again then stripped to their underwear and began to dress. The body-armour and the bomb vests first. Then the uniforms, jackets, boots and caps of Special Protection Squad officers. Assault rifles and spare clips. Handguns, grenades and enough military-grade explosives to blast their way through bulletproof glass and reinforced doors.