City of the Lost (33 page)

She held the handset against her lips. When first they’d started out on this endeavour, she and the Lion had pledged each other total trust and loyalty, for that was their only hope of success. Yet, when he’d called her to ask her to bomb the Daphne hotel, he’d refused to tell her why, he’d begged her not to press him. Because she loved him, she’d made that promise. But, because she loved him, now she needed to know.

Michel Bejjani was on the bridge when Sami called in to let him know that Visser, Black and some unknown friend were on the move. He called again to tell him that they’d driven to a local mega-market to do some shopping, then a third time that they were heading further south towards Varosha. On each occasion, Michel immediately contacted Georges.

‘Anything else happening?’ asked Georges, his voice breaking up a little thanks to the relay of cell radios.

‘No,’ said Michel. ‘Nothing else is happening.’

The
Dido
could comfortably accommodate twenty-four passengers. On a windy day, under race conditions, it took a dozen trained crew to get the most out of her. Yet, on a calm night like this, sails furled and away from shipping lanes, her state of the art communications, navigation and propulsion systems made helming her from the bridge easy, even for one person on their own.

If you choose to stay here, I assure you I will go with Georges.

Michel leaned back in the captain’s leather chair and resumed the game of solitaire he was playing on his iPad. There was no one to watch him, yet it was a matter of pride to look completely relaxed. He was a banker, after all. Masking one’s true feelings needed to be second nature. But, in truth, anger had been pulsing in rhythmic waves inside him ever since his father had delivered his verdict, soft explosions of oddly comforting warmth.

He moved a black jack onto a red queen.

It would serve his father and brother right if they were caught on this crazy mission of theirs, especially with Black and Visser clearly on their way into the Forbidden Zone themselves. Boldness was all very well, but in their line of work prudence always won out over the longer term. Prudence and the ability to turn challenging situations to advantage.

He’d programmed the radio to skip from channel to channel every few seconds, going through a rota of local police, army and emergency services channels. Half an hour before, activity had suddenly picked up with the Famagusta traffic police issuing a series of alerts about various unscheduled army convoys due to pass through the city. As best he could tell, they were headed to the army base at the northern tip of Varosha, just a few hundred metres from where his father and brother now were. Chances were it was coincidence, nothing to do with them. They already had enough on their minds. It was best not to worry them unnecessarily.

He turned over another three cards. Then he sat there, chin resting on his fist, and pondered his next move.

The patrols were too frequent and the road too exposed for them to risk hopping the wall here. Andreas therefore drove them back north to where Varosha began its seaward turn, then parked in the forecourt of a shabby apartment block. The modern city and the Forbidden Zone were pressed right up against each other here, making it easier to cross the wall unseen. It would mean a longer walk on the other side than they would have liked, but there was no help for that.

Iain made them go through their packs and pockets a final time, ensuring they had everything they might need, but no more. They locked up the Citroën and walked alongside the perimeter wall as if returning from a night out in the Old City. Headlights swept over them. Karin raised her forearm to shield her eyes. They waited until the vehicle had passed then slipped down an alley into a derelict industrial estate. They talked among themselves as they went, so that they might plausibly claim that they were merely lost should they encounter a guard-post or patrol. But there was no one there. The light was poor, just stars and a low sliver of crescent moon. A pair of warehouse doors hung loose. A rusted car with an open bonnet and no wheels sat on crumbling breeze-blocks. A cat screeched at them then jumped down from a green container. And a stack of broken pallets were heaped against an old wall topped with razor-wire. Iain climbed up this accidental ladder, peered over the top. ‘All clear,’ he murmured.

Andreas nodded unhappily at the pallets. ‘Is this the only way?’

‘It’s your city,’ said Iain.

‘Okay,’ said Andreas. The pallets proved more solid than they looked. They gathered at the top then straddled the rusted razor-wire and dropped themselves down the other side.

They were in.

The moonlight was weak; Karin had to put her other senses to work. The soft scurry of night-time creatures; the pungent yet not unpleasant smell of rot. They made their way along a broken road, old tarmac ripped by wild bamboo and cacti. But the pavement was little easier to negotiate, flagstones that see-sawed violently beneath their tread, the treacherous tripwires of creepers. They reached a junction. The signpost had fallen onto its side, but Iain knelt beside it and used his weakest torch to check the street names and consult their map. He pointed to his right. ‘That way.’

A bird whirred up in front of Karin, sending her heart into overdrive. They turned into what once must have been a chic boulevard of pavement cafés and expensive boutiques, but which now resembled the set of a post-apocalyptic film. The road was so thick with dust that they couldn’t help but leave a trail of footprints in it. An Italian restaurant with a tattered red-and-white awning had tables set for meals never taken. Once-fashionable clothes had fallen to rags on shop dummies that lay like corpses in their windows. The cars and vans parked along one side had been stripped by time and now squatted like stalking cats on flattened tyres. Fallen telephone wires slithered across the road like giant snakes.

Their first hotel proved a bust. A swing was creaking on rusted chains in a children’s playground outside, and a few spaces were marked out for parking; but there was no church in sight, no buses or industrial estate. They were making their way to the next hotel when Iain held up his hand and they all stopped dead. Karin strained to hear whatever it was he’d heard, but there was nothing, and finally he beckoned them on again.

The next hotel didn’t fit Baykam’s criteria either. Not from the front, at least. A side road opened out behind into a misshapen square largely used for parking, to judge from the faint traces of white lines just visible beneath the dust. But what really caught her eye were the two abandoned buses and the high wall with badly weathered double gates that suggested some kind of industrial site beyond. And there was an alarming dip in the car-parking area, she noticed, where it had evidently suffered from subsidence. Perhaps that was why it had never been developed.

At the foot of this dip, two large sheets of corrugated iron had been pinned in place by chunks of masonry and an old cement mixer. The iron screeched like fingernails on a blackboard as they dragged them aside, revealing a great mess of roughly set concrete below, like so much scar-tissue in the original tarmac. The concrete was clearly of poor quality, for it was riven through with cavities. Someone had recently attacked one of these cavities with a drill, widening it to the size of a manhole cover. They’d also hammered a steel spike into the tarmac nearby, and tethered one end of a rope ladder to it. The rest of the ladder had been fed through the hole and vanished into darkness.

They’d found it.

Iain knelt beside it, reached his torch down inside, turned it on. The stratification of the modern city: a top layer of concrete held up by what appeared to be planks of wood laid across wire-mesh. Beneath this, more concrete, then hardcore, then compacted sandy earth, then dark and cavernous space.

Iain’s teeth flashed palely as he grinned. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Who wants to go first?’

Behind them, a man cleared his throat to alert them to his presence then stepped calmly out of the night. ‘I think that would be me,’ he said.

They were saying on the radio that the Prime Minister was still locked in his crisis cabinet, but his aides had promised he would come out soon to address the nation on the day’s tumultuous events. Haroon passed on this news in the rear of the horse-box. He felt a strange mix of fear, elation and resolution as their moment drew closer. Most of all, however, he felt righteous.

Haroon and his three companions had little in common with their supposed allies in the Grey Wolves. They’d each been recruited specifically for this one job; and their primary qualification for it was their willingness to die. For his own part, Haroon wasn’t even Turkish. He was Syrian. And a doctor. He’d finished his studies just a matter of months before the onset of the Arab Spring, then had won a coveted position at an Aleppo hospital. When his childhood sweetheart Mina had agreed to marry him, his life had looked set. A promising career, a beautiful wife, a nice apartment and the hope of better things in Syria and across the Arab world. But then that spring of hope had disintegrated into a summer of violence and the Syrian civil war.

As a doctor, he’d done what he could to tread the fine line between factions. He’d treated everyone brought to him in the same way, had left the questions to others. His caseload had grown heavier and more severe. Every day had brought new trauma victims, and, as the embargoes had begun to bite, their stocks of essential drugs and equipment had dwindled and then given out altogether. His life had become an exhausted blur of eighteen-hour shifts. He’d come to hate those, on both sides, who’d kept the carnage going. Only in his brief respites with Mina had he felt remotely human.

He’d come across the trolley in a downstairs corridor, a white sheet draped over it. He’d passed so many of them, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought, except that the left shoe had been partially visible, a woman’s shoe, dark blue with a gold buckle, a worn sole and a poorly mended heel. He’d gone numb as he’d noticed the third trimester bulge. In disbelief, he’d pulled back the sheet covering her face.

They’d showed him the proof of it. A Turkish rocket fired from a Turkish launcher by insurgents trained in Turkey for the proxy war being waged from Ankara to buy regional advantage with the lives of women and their unborn children. Even thinking about it made the hatred well afresh in his heart, and overflow.

Fine lines were for other people now. Haroon wanted blood.

The man was silver-haired, slightly built and wearing tightly fitting black clothes, while a pair of night-vision goggles hung loose around his neck like some grotesque medallion. ‘Who the hell are you?’ demanded Karin.

‘My name is Butros Bejjani, Miss Visser,’ he told her, his voice low and level and with an unexpected hint of amusement in it.

‘The
Dido
man?’

‘That’s not how I would choose to describe myself. But if you like.’

She could see shadows in the darkness all around them. ‘What are you going to do with us?’ she asked.

Bejjani gave a little laugh. ‘Nothing, I assure you. We are not those sort of men. Ask your friend.’

Iain nodded. ‘They try to be sometimes. They’re just not very good at it.’

‘We were good enough to follow you tonight,’ said one of the shadows, stepping forwards into view.

Karin recognized him instantly. One of the two men who’d taken the table behind her in that Antioch café. ‘Oh, hell,’ she said, realizing too late why her bag had seemed to shift position, and how they’d managed to track them so easily.

‘What are you here for?’ Iain asked Bejjani.

‘The same thing you are,’ said Bejjani. ‘Though we, at least, have a legitimate claim.’

‘Sure!’ scoffed Iain.

‘I assure you,’ he said. ‘What lies beneath us came originally from my city of Tyre. It was stolen from us three thousand years ago. We are here to take it home again.’

‘If it’s been here three thousand years,’ said Andreas, ‘I’d say it already is home.’

Karin nodded. ‘And whatever’s down there, it’s too important to be locked away in the vault of some private collector.’

‘It won’t be. I give you my word. I intend to donate everything I take to my national museum. Can you say as much?’

‘We’re not here for loot,’ said Iain.

Bejjani frowned. ‘Then what are you here for?’

Iain turned his torch on for just a blink, to illuminate the gash in the ground. ‘Why don’t we go down there, and maybe I can show you.’

Asena pocketed the GPS handset, a torch and the keys to the SUV, then told the others she was heading out for a while. Traffic was tailed back all the way along the Salamis Road so she cut through the Old City instead, then drove south along the Varosha perimeter.

There were alarming numbers of army vehicles on patrol. She wondered whether it was the Lion’s doing. It didn’t deter her so much as whet her curiosity all the more. She checked the GPS handset and parked near the same entry point Baykam had used. She loitered patiently in the shadows as one army patrol after another crawled by, until at last there was a long enough gap between them for her to hurry across the road, vault the crumbling wall and drop down on the other side.

It quickly grew dark away from the headlights of the road. She had to concentrate so hard on her footing and the GPS that she would have blundered into the clustered group had she not heard them talking just in time. She stopped instantly, crouched low. A pair of rusting yellow buses were parked near a high wall. She looped around them to give herself cover as she went in for a closer look. One of the group briefly turned on a torch to illuminate a fat black gash in the ground, and the reflected light was enough for her to recognize Black and Visser in discussion with several men she didn’t know.

Whatever the Lion was so frightened of, it surely lay down that shaft in the earth beneath them. And it seemed equally certain that these people were here to find it so that they could somehow wield it against them, hoping to derail their coup even at this late stage. She had to stop them. But she couldn’t do it alone and unarmed. She retreated quietly out of earshot. Then she began to run.