The Istanbul Puzzle Page 2

  ‘In that case, Mr Ryan, we’ll have to ask you to come to Istanbul to identify Mr Zegliwski’s body. I believe the authorities here have some questions about the project he was working on too.’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Are you there, Mr Ryan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When can you come out? The earlier the better, really.’ His tone wasn’t soft any more.

  The line between us hummed. I took my mobile out of my pocket, scrolled to Alek’s number, tapped it. I had a phone to each ear now. Maybe, just maybe, this was all some stupid mistake. A joke even.

  ‘This is too crazy,’ I said, buying time. ‘Do you know what happened to him?’

  My mobile beeped. I looked at the screen. Alek’s number was unavailable.

  ‘We’re not sure. The Turkish authorities are investigating. That’s all I can say for now.’ The line fizzed. ‘Oh, and I spoke to your colleague, Dr Beresford-Ellis.’

  The conversation had turned a surreal corner.

  ‘I know you’re aware of the current sensitivities with our Turkish friends. So you’ll understand why we want to get all this done as quickly as possible.’

  ‘I’ll be on the first flight I can get a seat on.’ My voice was firm. The truth was, he couldn’t have stopped me going to Istanbul.

  He coughed. ‘Very good. Now finally, and I am sorry, but I must ask you this: Was Mr Zegliwski involved in anything political or religious, or anything like that?’

  ‘No, not really. Nothing you wouldn’t hear in any pub in England.’

  I could hear the line between London and Istanbul hiss again as Fitzgerald waited for me to add to my answer. But I didn’t want to say any more. I had nothing to hide. Alek had nothing to hide as far as I knew. But would there be consequences if I repeated every crazy opinion he’d ever expressed?

  ‘What work does the Institute do, sir? I haven’t heard about you.’

  I could imagine my interrogator’s eyebrows shooting up as he asked me that question.

  ‘We apply advanced research to practical problems. Imaging technology is one area we’ve been working on, technology to find criminals in crowds for instance.’ It was the standard description I’d been using for years whenever anyone asked me what the Institute did.

  ‘Very good, sir.’ He didn’t sound interested. ‘I’ll tell our people you’re on your way. You’ll be met at Istanbul airport by someone from the Consulate. We’ll know which flight you’re on. The Turks will do the identification formalities on Monday, most likely. And please, do ring the Foreign Office emergency helpline to verify this conversation. The UK number is on our website. Goodbye, Mr Ryan. I’m very sorry for your loss.’

  The line went dead.

  I held the handset tight. My knuckles were porcelain white. A picture of Alek grinning outside Hagia Sophia, which he’d emailed me only the day before, came to me. He’d looked so happy. What the hell had happened? My hand trembled as I called his landline in Oxford. I was still hoping that somehow it was all a mistake.

  His answering machine took the call. I hung up.

  This couldn’t have anything to do with our work at the Institute, could it? Alek had helped us win the project he was working on in Istanbul. It was a real opportunity to establish our credentials in that part of the world. But I’d allowed him to go out there on his own. My stomach turned.

  ‘How complicated do you think taking photos is?’ he’d argued at the time.

  I stabbed my fist into the mattress.

  What was going to happen?

  Beresford-Ellis would lap all this up. His appointment as Director of the Institute last year had been a not-too-subtle attempt to sideline me totally. It wasn’t enough that I was demoted for the stunt I’d pulled in Afghanistan. The other founders of the Institute had demanded I relinquish, temporarily, many of my responsibilities, for my own good.

  And I’d agreed, reluctantly. So the last thing I needed now was for one of my new projects to end in disaster.

  I shook my head. What happened to me didn’t matter. All that mattered was what had happened to Alek.

  He’d been the one I’d talked to when things had gotten too much, when the emptiness had won, when I’d decided I couldn’t go on. I would have never survived without him.

  I checked the Foreign Office website, rang their emergency number. As I waited for an answer I thought about how people would react to the news.

  Beresford-Ellis had been disdainful about the project in Istanbul from the beginning. When I’d told him we’d won it, he’d said, with his trademark pessimism, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Ryan. Isn’t any project like this in a Muslim country a bit too controversial these days? We don’t want a bloody fatwa on our heads.’

  ‘It’s a small project,’ I’d said. ‘Who gives a damn about someone taking pictures in a museum?’

  ‘Hagia Sophia may be a museum, Ryan,’ he’d replied. ‘But it was once the supreme mosque ruling the Sunni Islam world, and the seat of the Islamic Caliphate. And before that it was the Orthodox Vatican. There are a lot of toes to be stepped on out there.’

  Having made his point, he left our office, sniffing as he passed Alek’s empty desk.

  But he was right. Hagia Sophia was important. It had been built when the Byzantine Empire was at its peak in the 7th century and had been dedicated to Holy Wisdom, Sophia, a concept that spanned both the Christian and pre-Christian worlds.

  The Orthodox Greeks had lost their Vatican when the all-conquering Ottoman Turks had captured Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul in 1453. In doing so, they’d snuffed out the Byzantine Empire, the direct descendants of ancient Rome.

  Sure, fundamentalists were angered when Atatürk had turned Hagia Sophia into a museum in 1934, but their argument was with the Turkish state, not us.

  In any case, our project – comparing digital images of mosaics to prints and sketches produced by artists over the centuries – was just about the least invasive thing you could do in a world heritage site. And it was also exactly the type of project our Institute had been set up to do.

  A friendly Indian lady finally came on the line. After receiving permission from her superior, she told me about a note on her system from the Istanbul consulate detailing how someone called Alek Zegliwski had indeed been involved in a serious incident in Istanbul. Their contact in relation to the matter was a Mr Fitzgerald. She didn’t have any more information to give me. She couldn’t even tell me Mr Fitzgerald’s first name.

  I fell asleep as the first rays of dawn were softening London’s skyline. I’d spent all night thinking about what had happened. One memory had replayed itself over and over in my mind.

  The day before he’d flown to Istanbul – only a week earlier – Alek had leaned towards me and whispered,

  ‘You do know the Devil’s caged under Hagia Sophia, boss? Let’s hope I don’t disturb him, eh?’

  I’d laughed. Such superstitions had seemed ridiculous in our shiny glass-walled offices in Oxford.

  When I woke, the first thing I did was look for Beresford-Ellis’ number. It was 8:00 AM, but I didn’t care.

  Beresford-Ellis was the kind of guy who kept pictures of himself with prominent people on his wall. He had one with David Cameron, another with the chancellor of the university he’d worked in before he came to us, another with Nelson Mandela, and another with the head of the US Geological Service. He was so good at social climbing he could have run PhD-level courses on it. The cherry on top of all that was that he was about as trustworthy as an Afghan warlord with an empty war chest.

  When the other founders had decided to take on a qualified manager to lead the Institute, because each of us was immersed in our own projects, I’d said nothing. Irene had died only a month before. Getting Beresford-Ellis in had seemed like a good idea.

  I soon found out that his appetite for corporate-speak was prodigious. We didn’t have projects any more, we had ‘collaboration initiatives’ or ‘research value actualis
ations’. And he’d been subtly critical of every ‘initiative’ I’d worked on since he’d joined. The work we’d done in Bavaria identifying Bronze Age settlements from satellite images hadn’t identified settlements from the target period, he’d said. And our trial security initiative in New York, for a big American bank, hadn’t turned into anything lucrative. All he wanted, it seemed, were projects that got us major contracts quickly.

  He was right in his own way, if you disregarded the fact that it took months for the impact of many of our projects to come to light.

  These faults weren’t compensated by his demeanour either. He seemed to be uninterested in everyone around him, not just me. Most of the time, it was almost as if his colleagues were invisible to him. What he preferred to do was talk about his own achievements.

  ‘Bad publicity is the last thing we need right now,’ he said, after I got through to him and told him I was planning to fly out to Istanbul that afternoon. He was good, as always, at finding the down side.

  ‘If there’s anything in the press about the Institute being involved in something it shouldn’t have been, it’ll be a disaster for our fundraising this year, Ryan. I know this is a bad time to say it, but there are some board members who think we’ve given you too much rope already.’ He waited for a moment for his words to detonate.

  What a bastard! Not a single word about Alek’s death. He’d be happy with our scalps on his wall next to those photos.

  ‘I won’t dodge my responsibilities,’ I said. ‘But I think you should reserve judgement until we know the facts.’ I cut the line.

  A few hours later I headed for Heathrow feeling sick, totally unprepared, and unplugged from reality.

  It knew it could easily have been me who’d been murdered out there. I could have gone to Istanbul instead of Alek, if I’d insisted on it. And there was more too. If what had happened to Alek had been because of our work in Hagia Sophia, how careful would I need to be?

  What was going to happen in Istanbul?

  Chapter 5

  Malach walked slowly. He turned his head often. The yellow bulbs were barely bright enough to light the sloping brick tunnel in front of him. The polished sheen of his bare head, almost touching the roof, was elongated as if he had been bound at birth.

  From his huge hands dangled two canvas bags, the type you see in army surplus stores. Both were empty. When he reached his destination, he put them down beside the tables. He had work to do. The project had delivered what was needed. It was time to tidy up. What had happened in the last few days had pushed the cleanup operation forward, but not by much. Soon, if anyone found this place, they wouldn’t have any idea what had been going on.

  As he filled the canvas bags he thought about their unexpected visitor. The man had soiled himself in his last few minutes. Westerners were so weak. Their soft comforts made them that way. They knew nothing about how to face their end.

  He took the hunting knife from its scabbard under his armpit, felt the tip. It was still sharp. Good. He would need it again, soon if he was lucky. He loved the feeling of power that ran through him when he used it. It was exhilarating. He held the knife in the air, admiring it. Then he put it away. He had a lot to do.

  Chapter 6

  Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5, the largest free-standing building in the UK, looked as busy the following morning as it had during the nightmare snow storm the previous winter.

  There were queues at the check-in machines, lines at the information desks, people sleeping, huddled together on its gleaming floor. The continued closure of French air space, due to an extended nationwide strike, was taking its toll. Flights that weren’t cancelled were being rerouted. The knock-on effect delayed my departure by an hour. And I was among the lucky ones.

  To distract myself I read anything I could find.

  The English Sunday newspapers were feasting on the riots in London. They hadn’t spread, but some journalists were saying that police leave had already been cancelled. It was astonishing, one article suggested, that a raid on a mosque had produced such a reaction. Another paper, which devoted two pages to what had happened, linked the rioting to other incidents around Europe in the past few weeks. The article claimed that there was a fear in intelligence circles that such riots were being coordinated.

  Another paper had a map of St Paul’s and the City of London showing how far a crowd of half a million would reach, if that many did turn up the following Friday for the mass demonstration planned by a different Islamic group. The police presence at such events was likely to be much heavier now, even if the event had already been approved, said the article.

  My eye fell on a side piece about a video being posted on the Internet showing a Westerner being beheaded. It made me uncomfortable. Could that Westerner be Alek? No. There was no need for total paranoia.

  But what had happened to him? Was his death the result of a random incident? A robbery? A car accident? That was certainly the most likely explanation. Our Institute was a world leader in applying technology to intractable problems, but I couldn’t imagine anything we’d been working on out there being a reason to murder him.

  We did uncontroversial things, like identifying lost settlements under forests with L-band digital imaging, or devising high-speed spectrometry techniques to date carbon-based compounds without destroying the sample. I was proud of our work.

  And everyone I knew thought we were doing something good. Even my dad, who had seen us open the Institute, had been proud. And that was something, coming from a US Air Force pilot who had flown 212 combat missions, had bailed out over Bosnia in 1995 and had then evaded Serb paramilitary units for three days.

  It was time to board.

  I was glad I’d picked a window seat. The thought of identifying Alek’s body had put me off idle chitchat. And the idea that it might have been me lying cold in some morgue, and Alek flying out to identify my body, didn’t help.

  I’d had more than enough of the sympathetic noises people make when they find out something bad has happened to you.

  It’s not that I don’t like to talk about Irene or to think about her. I probably think about her too much still. But I hate to talk about it to strangers. The words have got stuck in my throat once too often.

  It had taken ten days, after they’d come to our house to tell me she was dead, before the tears came. Something inside me didn’t want to face how much I was hurting, how much I needed her, loved her. That’s what the grief counsellor had said. I stopped going to see her. I wasn’t ready for all the stuff she wanted me to do. I don’t know if I ever will be.

  Irene had been the best part of my life for twelve years. My friends at MIT had thought me crazy for staying in England: I’d earn a lot more in the States, they’d said, but I couldn’t have been happier. I’d grown to love London.

  Slate-grey clouds were rolling below the plane now and the guy in the seat beside me was reading a book called Turkey – The New Power.

  I picked up my iPad. I’d downloaded a guide to Istanbul on it. I read a few pages, then the meal came. I only ate half of it.

  My unease about the prospect of viewing Alek’s body only grew as we descended over the inky Sea of Marmara, towards a long curving shore marked by the glow of early evening street lights. Istanbul, a grey tapestry of roads and buildings, was coming into view.

  An hour later, the marble floor of the arrivals hall echoed as I walked through it.

  I’d felt the familiar breath-catching August Mediterranean heat as soon as the plane doors had opened, but in that metallic cavern of a hall everything was cool, slick, antiseptic.

  I caught my reflection in a mirrored wall as I walked by. I looked like a typical tourist in my short-sleeved navy linen shirt and loose cream chinos. The leather haversack on my trolley looked about as travel-scarred and worn-out as I felt.

  Already, I’d been detained at passport control for minutes while the immigration officer had checked his computer. I’d bought a tourist visa at the nearby co
unter, and others were going through quickly, so there was no reason for him to hold me.

  Unless the authorities here were expecting me.

  ‘Enjoy your visit to Turkey,’ he finally mumbled, as he handed me back my passport.

  I was relieved.

  The frosted glass doors that led out of the arrivals hall opened with a sigh as I approached them. The shiny public area beyond had a long curve of people waiting for arriving passengers. The hall hummed with a click-clack of activity. Acres of glass gave the place an airy feeling.

  And directly ahead, advancing toward me out of the crowd, was a tall pencil-thin man with an almond-brown face, black hair and a thin nose. His hair was slicked back. He looked like someone who wouldn’t put up with too much crap. And he was looking straight at me.

  Following the man, about a pace behind, were two other men dressed in pale-blue short-sleeved shirts and navy trousers flapping at the ankles.

  The charcoal suit, which the leading man wore, looked expensive. He held out his hand as he closed the gap between us.

  ‘Merhaba, Mr Ryan. I am Inspector Erdinc.’ He shook my hand. His grip was tight, designed no doubt to make criminals uneasy. There was a smell of tobacco on his breath.

  He stared into my eyes, as if I was his quarry.

  ‘I was expecting someone from the British Consulate,’ I said, looking around.

  There were a few people nearby holding up pieces of cardboard with names on them. Unfortunately, none of them was mine.

  ‘I am with the International Crime Section at the Ministry of the Interior, Mr Ryan.’ He looked over my shoulder, as if checking to see if anyone was with me.

  ‘I am here to meet you.’ He raised his hands in an open gesture, and gave me a brief smile. ‘You work for the Institute of Applied Research and are here to identify your colleague’s body, yes?’

  I nodded. One of his eyebrows shot up. I got the feeling he was assessing me. It wasn’t going to be easy to get away from this guy.