The Mephisto Threat

6

THE cell in which Tallis surfaced was no improvement on the original. Concussed by the second serious blow to his head in less than twenty-four hours, he still, mercifully, retained a sense of direction. If the previous guest suite was located on the third floor down, he guessed his current quarters were four floors. It stank of human excrement and despair. The single light hanging from the ceiling only further illuminated the hopelessness of his situation. Same old squat hole. Same lack of water. Thin layer of cardboard replaced by a stone plinth for reasons that soon became obvious—his cellmates were a small family of rats. The way his stomach was growling from lack of food, the best thing he could do was kill and eat them. Welcome to the Turkish Hilton, Tallis thought, taking immediate advantage of his new bed.

Resting back, hands tucked behind his head, he replayed Koroglu’s last words. Shut the fuck up! Pure Brooklyn. CIA or FBI, Tallis wondered, or some other covert organisation that the world knew nothing about? He didn’t like to consider the political implications, but he had to. Surely the Americans weren’t conducting their war on terror from the bowels of a Turkish detention centre? He couldn’t envisage the Turkish government allowing it. Yet stranger things had happened. Governments the world over passed off dodgy or ambiguous dealing with regimes not to their taste with phrases like in the national interest, real politic, or the more recently popular in the interests of national security.

Any of the above usually involved obscene heaps of money, sometimes armaments, often the granting of power and influence. Poor old Turkey had been stonewalled by the Europeans for so long, why be surprised if they looked to America to win them some grace and favour? That the Americans used their considerable funds to oil the wheels of various intelligence services throughout the world, Pakistan being one of them, was common knowledge. Like Pakistan, Turkey was also open season to religious fundamentalism. Lately, the political situation had grown considerably worse.

He let out a knackered sigh. And where did all this leave him, apart from being stuck in this rodent-infested gulag? They, whoever they were, obviously thought he was someone he wasn’t, which was true, but not the someone they thought he was. He very much doubted his cover was shot. If so, they’d have come out and said so. What worried him far more was their mistaken intelligence about his connection to the dead Moroccan. They clearly didn’t think he’d killed him. If the bloke had been that serious a threat, and they suspected him of being involved in his death, why not treat him like an ordinary criminal, or even someone who’d done them a favour? No, they had him down for an associate.

He rolled over, tried to get comfortable, finding it virtually impossible. The skin on his back felt sandpapered from being dragged unceremoniously along the concrete floor. Escape seemed less possible now. His only hope was that when they took him away to do God knew what, he’d be presented with another opportunity. He wasn’t overly optimistic. In the absence of having any better ideas, he decided to try and sleep.

Napier, Morello, Ertas, Koroglu, all puppets and players in his dreams, clamoured for his attention, each morphing into another in such a cacophony of sound and vision he wasn’t sure whether his waking thoughts were part of his subconscious or the here and now. Gingerly opening one eye, he swore the walls were shaking. A deep rumbling sound appeared to be coming from the centre of the earth. He sat bolt upright. The light above his head flashed, jittered and cut out. Then followed a thunderous noise, which shook the entire cell, followed by popping, not like gunfire, but as if the planet was splitting. Tallis threw himself under the bed. The rats had the same idea. The walls were really shaking now, the earth shuddering. Lights flashed back on, as if a generator was kicking in. Before his eyes he could see the floor near the makeshift latrine begin to lift and tear, then open.

The cell resembled a house of moving floors like he’d seen at a fairground when he’d been a kid.

No doubt about it, this was an earthquake. Gripping the side of the stone plinth, he hung on, determined not to be lost to Mother Earth, his greatest fear being buried alive. Nothing felt fixed and what little there was in the cell was moving. Everything that had seemed quiet was dancing with noise. Shouts and screams rent the air. Tallis rolled himself into a ball, mute, every sinew in his body tensed for action. When the wall nearest the door started to yaw, crumble and disintegrate, he seized the opportunity and lunged through the gap.

Out into the corridor, Tallis saw a vision of chaos. Two officers were lying on the ground, their heads mashed in by fallen masonry. Tallis checked their pulses. Both dead. Either a bomb had gone off or, as he’d originally suspected, there’d been an earthquake. If the latter, it seemed to have lessened in potency. Aftershocks, however, could prove as powerful and devastating to already weakened structures. He needed to get out. Now. Problem was he knew he wouldn’t escape without a credible disguise.

He turned to the largest of the two dead men, stripped off the man’s uniform, put it on then dragged off socks and boots from the feet of the other dead officer, who looked to be nearer his size, and put those on too. A quick search yielded a cap. Tallis dusted it down on his sleeve and slapped it on his head, pulling it down hard over his eyes, then headed for the remains of the staircase. Badly damaged, there was a yawning gap, revealing a vault three feet wide.

He suddenly realised the significance of the sound of running water. He must be near the Basilica Cistern, a popular and most unusual tourist spot. A vast underground water cistern dating back to 532, the roof held up by three hundred and thirty-six columns, each over eight metres high, only two-thirds of the original structure was visible, the rest bricked up in the nineteenth century, but had it remained so? What if it had been redeveloped? Where better to hide something as sinister as this place than right under the noses of the general public?

Tallis backtracked six steps, took the staircase at a run, leapt high and sure, adrenalin aiding his flight. His next obstacle was the automatic security door, which was shut. Not knowing the code, he banged on it, praying he’d be heard and hoping that in the mayhem protocol would be relaxed. Sure enough, the door drew open, a guard appearing. He was young, probably no more than twenty. He had frightened eyes.

‘Thanks, mate,’ Tallis said in Turkish, touching the young man’s arm in gratitude.

‘No problem. You all right?’

‘Sure, but don’t go back that way,’ Tallis said, gesturing vaguely behind him. ‘It’s completely annihilated. Was it a bomb, or what?’

‘Earthquake,’ the guard confirmed, eyes wet with terror. ‘Rezul came this way. Did you see him?’

‘Cok uzgunum.’ Sorry.

‘You mean?’ The guard’s eyes widened.

‘There’s nothing you can do for him now.’

The young man looked stunned. He looked as if he might breach the gap, investigate for himself. Tallis had to stop him at all costs. ‘What’s it like up there?’ he said, inclining his head, drawing the man’s attention away.

‘It’s bad. Many have been killed. Some of the prisoners have already escaped.’

Good, Tallis thought. ‘Come, we must get out.’

‘But Rezul,’ the guard said plaintively, trying to look past Tallis. ‘My brother.’

Tallis clamped a hand on his shoulder. ‘He has already gone to Allah.’

Tallis quickly discovered that his rescuer’s name was Hikmet. Above was exactly as Hikmet described: death and destruction. As always, the Grim Reaper had made no distinction. Bodies of prisoners and officers alike lay where they’d been crushed. The wounded, most of them beyond help, moaned where they fell. Tallis blocked out the sound of screams and the cries of those alive beneath the rubble.

He fell into step beside Hikmet, two buddies together, as far as anyone who counted was concerned. The guts of the building had been devastated. Structures twisted. Columns shattered. Water poured in. Electrics flashing. Still some tilt and sway with aftershocks. Both of them headed for the remains of a metal staircase, the only way, Hikmet assured him, of reaching safety. But they were not the only ones intent on saving their skins. Prisoners desperate for freedom, some of them armed, were massing in large numbers. As Tallis surged forwards, a fight broke out behind him. He quickened his pace, keen not to get caught up in the brawl, and saw Koroglu up ahead. Barking orders, he was trying to stem the tide of rising panic in the small number of officers at his side. Christ, is that how many survived? Tallis silently asked himself until it dawned on him that, rather than signifying the strength of the quake, the actual number of guards was probably very small, a classic schematic in detention centres. The fewer the people who knew what was going on, the less chance of word getting out.

Thick and dusty air coated his mouth. Shouts and yells bounced off and reverberated around the walls. Tallis could feel the tide of humanity threatening to crush and overwhelm him. It felt as if he was in the middle of a football crowd on the rampage. People were jostling on all sides, desperate to get onto the rickety staircase, which he feared would collapse underneath the volume of men. He and Hikmet leapt on together, steaming up the stairs, brutally punching away those who tried to obstruct them, glad to get to the next level.

They were in a vault. Light was limited, the air filled with ancient dirt. Tallis covered his mouth, trying not to breathe in the choking atmosphere, but what he could see through narrowed eyes was quite beautiful in its design. Gazing at the most exquisitely engraved columns of stone, he remembered that for a century, after the Ottoman conquest, the victors had known nothing of the original cistern’s existence. Perhaps this was a part of the old structure. Sound for thousands of years, would it hold up in the wake of an onslaught by Mother Nature? As if she’d heard and wished to remind them of her power, another tremor shook the ground. Tallis and the others stood stock-still, breath held, listening in terror as the walls around them crunched and crackled. Without warning, there was a terrible noise of tearing metal followed by the far worse sound of men screaming and falling to their deaths. As Tallis glanced behind him, he saw that the stairs, the only route to freedom, were gone.

They were moving urgently forwards again. Ahead, an archway and the entrance to a stone staircase like those seen in ancient castles. It led up. Koroglu had stepped aside as if counting his men in. Tallis fell in behind Hikmet, adjusted the cap he’d stolen so that it fell down a little more over his face and shuffled forwards. In line with Koroglu, near enough to smell his breath, the earth shook once more. Hikmet and the others threw themselves forwards, surging ahead, bounding up the stone steps as if it were their last snatch at freedom. Tallis followed. He didn’t look back to see whether Koroglu had joined the flight. Up and up, they went, until at last, dizzy and disorientated, they were disgorged into a stinking alleyway.

Tallis took a deep breath of dusty air, thinking it had never felt so good. Looking up to a sulphurous-looking sun, he estimated it was roughly around five-thirty in the morning, maybe earlier. He’d never seen the city look so busy at that time before. Everywhere were people out of their homes and shops, staring nervously at the sky, as if it, too, were about to fall in on them. He guessed men had been doing the same since time began. You didn’t have to be religious to require an explanation for a sudden act of God. Bang on cue, he heard the haunting call of the clerics to the faithful, encouraging the devout to attend the first of the prayer times as laid out in the Koran. Not all Turkish Muslims were quite so dutiful, but Tallis reckoned today the mosques would be full.

He turned at the sudden sight of a man wandering past, the shirt torn from off his back exposing burns to his skin. Tallis didn’t know if he was a local resident or one of the prisoners. Glancing furtively around him, he saw Koroglu striding away. Probably heading for the American embassy, or a safe house. Tallis didn’t care. He had no intention of following him. Hikmet turned and thanked him.

‘For what?’ Tallis said, perplexed.

‘For witnessing my brother’s passing.’

Tallis hung his head, feeling terribly ashamed. Didn’t Hikmet realise that he was wearing the clothes of the dead? ‘I’m truly sorry,’ was all he could manage.

‘I must go and find my family,’ Hikmet said simply.

Both men hugged each other as strangers did when thrown together in extraordinary times. Tallis wished him well.

While others also went in search of loved ones, Tallis set about finding his way onto a street he could recognise. Quick examination of his pockets yielded Rezul’s wallet. Tallis opened it. Inside he found an ID card, a photograph of Rezul’s girl and money. He was tempted to run after Hikmet, but it would be too dangerous to explain. Besides, he needed the loot.

At last, he found himself walking down a main thoroughfare, heading towards Sirkeci station. Most buildings there looked unaffected. Those that had collapsed had been of inferior build and situated in narrow alleys. As usual the poor and less well off copped for it. Many were standing around, some blank-faced. Others, more sanguine, sat outside in the open, drinking coffee. Word on the street was that an even bigger quake was on its way. A police car crawled slowly past, an officer hanging out of the passenger side with a loudhailer to his mouth, instructing people in both Turkish and English to head for an open area. Many were heading for Gulhane Park. Tallis didn’t join them. He’d learnt his lesson. Never revisit the scene of a crime. In fact, he knew exactly where he was destined. And it wasn’t the station. He only hoped that Kerim would be there.

7

THERE were no more tremors. By six-thirty, Tallis had bathed, bought shorts and shirt, dumped the guard’s uniform and purchased a rucksack. Two days of not shaving ensured a growth of stubble. The swelling around his mouth had gone down a little. Any visible wounds he could blame on the quake. At least it made him look less recognisable.

He’d already been to the ferry terminal at Eminonu. Kerim’s boat was there but of Kerim there was no sign. Tallis was not unduly worried. Yet. His flight from the airport didn’t leave until 2.35 p.m. By then, he hoped that air travel would be operating normally, though he realised there might be congestion and long delays because of the ground conditions. He was also acutely aware that once Koroglu had recovered his equilibrium, he’d be issuing strict orders for his arrest. Tallis smiled. Koroglu would be looking for David Miller. He’d also be searching the flight manifests for passengers heading for Britain, not Spain.

Tallis took advantage of the Turk’s natural inclination to make the most of every commercial opportunity. Enterprising young men selling cans of Coke and bottled water, stuffed vegetables, mezes and Turkish bread were milling about, doing their bit to feed the city in its hour of need. Tallis paid top dollar. Worth every luscious mouthful, he thought. It had been over twenty-four hours since he’d last eaten.

An hour later, he’d bought enough convincing clutter to stuff in his rucksack to trick the most astute customs officer. Half an hour after that, Tallis’s patience was rewarded. Kerim, his podgy frame distinct amongst the crowds, went over to his boat and jumped aboard. Tallis jumped in after him. At first Kerim’s face expressed alarm, but as his mind made the connections he broke into a beaming smile. ‘Friend,’ he said, clapping Tallis on the back. ‘You come. You are safe. Praise Allah!’

Good, Tallis thought, Kerim wants his money. ‘And you,’ Tallis said, reciprocating with a hearty slap that made Kerim cough, ‘your family is also safe, all those children?’

‘Indeed. All is good. Very good,’ Kerim said expectantly, drawing the small parcel from the pocket of his trousers. ‘I brought as you said. I bring every day in case you come.’

‘Good man,’ Tallis said, taking the package and opening it. Inside was the Turkish equivalent of five hundred pounds in sterling. He gave two hundred to Kerim, keeping the rest for extra expenditure. Of more interest was the passport he’d secreted inside. It belonged to none other than Paul Tallis.

Using up the bulk of Rezul’s money, he took an expensive cab ride to Ataturk Airport. Spacious and modern, the arrivals hall was crawling with people. There he made his way straight to the international terminal. He went to the desk for reserved tickets, showed his passport. After brief enquiry, he discovered that his KLM flight was delayed, predicted to leave at 4.30 p.m. Tallis tried not to look too disconsolate. With a stopover, he wouldn’t arrive until 2.30 a.m. Pocketing his economy-class airline ticket, he glanced at the clock in the airport lounge. He had almost four hours to kill.

He spent the intervening time trying to stay out of trouble. He bought a stash of magazines and newspapers, including the Turkish News, and topped up his calories. Whenever he saw a police officer, he resisted the temptation to either turn away or run. Instead, he tuned out, acted the part of tourist, just another traveller bumming his way round the Med.

At the earliest opportunity, he went to the check-in counter, joining the queue displaying the hand luggage sign. It was extremely busy. When it came to Tallis’s turn, the looks were stony, but he was cleared and given the appropriate accreditation.

Approaching 3.30 p.m., Tallis found himself anxiously watching the terminal’s clock. Still his flight had not been called. A curdled feeling slopped about in the pit of his stomach. What if Koroglu turned up? What if he arrived with a bevy of armed police? What if CIA operatives stalking the airport already had him staked out and in their cross-hairs? What if…?

There was some disturbance down the far end of the lounge. Several armed police officers were on the move. They were making for the departure lounge for British Airways flights. Oh, Jesus, Tallis thought. Koroglu was striding along behind them. Then came an announcement:

‘KLM, flight number 082, originally due to depart at 14.35 hours and departing now at 16.30 hours, will be leaving from terminal…’

Tallis was on his feet, jaw grinding, walking with as controlled a step as he could. He handed his passport and ticket over to a young Dutch woman with milk-white skin and almond-green eyes. He met her steady gaze with a relaxed smile and watched her cheeks flush pale pink. She handed back his belongings. ‘Have a safe journey, Mr Tallis.’ She smiled back.