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I’d also put my own life at risk. But I didn’t care about that. My parents were dead. My beautiful wife was dead. We had no children. Who the hell would care if I was history?
I was a hollow human robot with a ghost haunting it. All I did most days were tasks I cared nothing about.
And going out to Afghanistan hadn’t cured me. It had just created more problems.
The fact that the Institute was banned from Afghanistan for ten years was one of the reasons I’d had to accept that my role at the Institute was going to change. I had to get approval from Beresford-Ellis before I went off on any project now, no matter what I thought of him. It irritated me – I’d co-founded the place – but I couldn’t argue with the logic of it.
‘You’ve definitely stepped on someone’s toes this time too,’ she said, softly, after a minute had passed. ‘Hagia Sophia is a big deal here. The oldest copy of the Koran in the world is in Istanbul, a few minutes’ walk from it.’ She went to the balcony.
‘Are you ready?’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘We’re going.’ She shaded her eyes. She was looking along the coastline. A low-flying white helicopter was coming towards us. I watched it approach.
‘I’ve just realised,’ she said, turning towards me. ‘That’s an upside down V.’ She pointed at the top corner of the mosaic in Alek’s photo. ‘That could be the Greek letter lambda, our letter L.’
‘L, what does that stand for?’
‘It could stand for Luna, the goddess of the moon. Maybe this isn’t Christian after all.’ She laughed, grabbed the photos off the table. She had a high-pitched laugh.
Her laughter was drowned out by the roar of the helicopter. It was almost level with us now.
‘It’s a bit noisy, isn’t it?’ she shouted in my ear.
The helicopter descended towards a patch of grass in front of the building, between the sea and the road.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
‘To meet that expert I told you about.’
‘Is this the way you always travel?’ I shouted.
‘No, only when people’s lives are in danger.’
Chapter 13 (#ulink_3c423744-b075-5739-a32a-67f3aa69a758)
In Whitehall Sergeant Henry P Mowlam was looking at his screen. His hands were curled into fists.
He closed his eyes. Would they listen to him? The raid on the London mosque had led to two riots already. As far as he was concerned, traffic checkpoints in the city should have been in place for at least another two weeks. The unrest in other European cities had continued during the last twenty four hours. All across Europe similar raids on mosques had been conducted in search of terror suspects who’d gone on the run after the escalation in the Middle East. Acting on rumours, looking for scapegoats, was how it had been described by some in the media. The civil rights mob had been having a canary, live on television.
He listened to the drone of the underground control room. Some days it reminded him of a symphony, all that humming and buzzing and heels clacking and coughs and clicks.
‘Are you all right, Henry?’ a woman’s voice whispered.
He nodded, opened his eyes. Sergeant Finch was standing beside him. She always looked so good in her starched white shirt. He pointed at his screen.
A message in a secure window read:
DO NOT PROCEED WITH PTRE/67765/67LE.
‘What’s that about?’ said Finch.
The matter of the checkpoints would have to wait. This was something Sergeant Finch could help him with.
‘I am not to place surveillance on Lord Bidoner, despite the fact that he’s met two other men we’ve been monitoring in the past week!’
Finch looked surprised. A troubled look crossed her face.
‘That request was playing with fire, Henry. You do know who Bidoner is, don’t you?’
Mowlam nodded, shrugged. He closed the message and went back to the video images he’d been assessing.
Chapter 14 (#ulink_4977bd84-8fc0-5721-a250-c549c14d8719)
‘That was easy,’ I said.
The Turkish immigration authorities had only taken our passports for ten seconds. The security check was quick as well. We just walked through a metal detector in a quiet corridor. The diplomatic briefcase embossed with the lion and unicorn crest of the British Foreign Office, which Isabel had carried with her from the helicopter, had probably helped. Now walking across the baking concrete apron towards a white, tube-like executive jet, I felt as if I’d been dropped into another world.
I was looking forward to going back to London. That was where Isabel had said we were going when the passport official had asked her.
The Greek Orthodox community in England was one of the largest outside Greece. I could well believe there was an expert there who could help us track down where the two pictures had been taken.
The shrill sound of an aircraft readying for flight assaulted us as we made our way across the concrete. The smell of aviation fuel, heat and dust filled my nostrils as I climbed the rickety aluminium stairs and entered the small passenger cabin.
What surprised me most was that once I was inside I couldn’t stand up fully. The cabin must have been only five foot something high. I had to bend in order to reach one of the royal-blue leather seats.
They weren’t your usual commercial airline seats either. These were lower, wider, and far more comfortable. And there were only seven of them.
Isabel sat opposite me. We were the only occupants of the cabin. A large blue cooler bag sat on the floor at the back. Isabel pulled it forwards, reached inside and passed me a bottle of orange juice.
‘You’re lucky. The last time I did this they forgot to put the refreshments onboard.’
‘That must have been a bad flight,’ I said. I took the bottle and drank from it. It tasted wonderful.
‘You two OK?’ a voice called out. The door to the pilot’s cabin was open. I could see an expanse of blinking lights and dials. The man who’d spoken was in the pilot’s seat, leaning towards us, his hand holding the door open.
‘A OK,’ replied Isabel.
The pilot gave us a thumbs-up.
A second, younger man, who would be sitting in the other cockpit seat, came into the cabin. He pulled the door to the outside closed. A light above it flashed red.
The engines roared. My seat reverberated as we prepared to taxi.
Then the roar diminished. I looked out of one of the tiny porthole windows. An all black Porsche jeep was speeding towards us. It had darkened windows. For a brief moment I thought it might be the Turkish authorities looking for me, that my inspector friend was wondering why I was leaving Istanbul so soon. Isabel leaned forward. Her knee touched mine. She reached over, grabbed her jacket, threw it on to the seat behind us.
‘We’ve got company,’ she said.
The Porsche had pulled up by the plane. A man got out of the back, strode towards us. He was tall, dressed in a mustard coloured suit. He had that lightly tanned, angular sort of face that reminded me of pictures of celebrities trying hard to look good.
The door opened with a whoosh. Wind and the smell of jet fuel filled the cabin.
‘Good to see you, Isabel,’ boomed a voice. ‘Looks like I got here just in time.’ The man in the mustard suit sat in the seat beside her. Both of them were facing me.
‘It’s a bit tight in here,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Isabel.’ He patted her knee. Then he turned to me.
‘This is the man, eh, Isabel?’
‘Sean,’ she said. ‘Meet Peter Fitzgerald. He works in the Consulate.’ As if that explained everything. Then I remembered. This was the guy who’d told me about Alek’s death.
‘Peter, this is Sean Ryan, from the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford. He co-founded it. He’s their Director of Projects.’
Not for long, I thought, after the way this project in Istanbul had gone, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. In any case, the expression on Peter’s face was that of a wine waiter who’d just been asked for plum juice.
‘We spoke on the phone,’ he said. ‘So sorry about your colleague. What a dreadful death. It’s certainly stirred things up here.’ He put his hand out. I shook it.
‘Alek didn’t deserve that,’ I said.
Isabel was staring at me.
‘I’m sure. What a terrible nightmare,’ said Peter. ‘And what about you, how are you? I heard you had a difficult night.’
‘I’m alright,’ I said. I didn’t need his sympathy.
I heard scuffling, looked around.
Two leather bags were being loaded into the passageway between the seats and the door to the pilot’s cabin. My own small bag, with everything from my hotel room packed into it, had been waiting at the private jet terminal when we’d arrived.
I’d seen, straight away, that my stuff had been rifled through, that some items were missing, but compared to what had happened to Alek, and what could have happened to me last night I felt fortunate.
‘Tell me all about yourself,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I was a bit abrupt on the phone the other day. A lot on my plate right now.’ He tapped his nose.
Peter seemed to be fascinated by everything I had to say. It was an hour, at least, and we were many miles from Istanbul before the flow of his questions slowed. By then he knew all about my origins, my father’s Purple Star background, our life in Norfolk, and in upstate New York, where I started college after my father left the military, and all about my very English mother, my one-year research extension in London, how I met Irene, my first job, how we founded the Institute. Surprisingly, there were things he didn’t ask about though. Like what had happened to my wife. Maybe he knew the answers to those questions already.
‘Tell him about the mosaic Alek took a picture of,’ said Isabel, when Peter seemed to have finished his questioning.
I told him the little I knew. Isabel took the photo of the mosaic out of her bag and passed it to him as I was talking.
‘Very interesting,’ he said. When I finished, he looked around, as if he was afraid someone might be listening to us.
‘And you have no idea where this picture was taken?’ He waved the photo at me.
I sat back. ‘I told Isabel already, and the answer is still no. Our project is about assessing how the mosaics in Hagia Sophia have changed over the years. It was never about identifying unknown mosaics.’
‘Your colleague was working only in Hagia Sophia, correct?’ He was staring at me.
I nodded.
‘There’s a lot of interesting stuff besides mosaics in Hagia Sophia, isn’t there?’
‘Yes. It goes back a long way. The building we see there now was put up in the 530s,’ I said.
Peter’s eyebrows shot up. ‘It’s older than that, I think. Didn’t that old treasure hunter, Schneider, find out during the excavations he carried out in ’35 that the foundations were from an earlier church?’ He knew his stuff.
‘The first Christian church on the site was probably built in 351.’
Isabel looked amused.
‘Yes,’ said Peter, drily. ‘Hagia Sophia is one of the foundation churches of Christianity.’ His right hand slapped his armrest. ‘And it’s the best of them by far. Don’t some people say it’ll be returned to Christianity one day?’ He looked at me innocently.
Was he trying to trap me? I didn’t reply.
‘So you don’t go along with all this Christian revival thing, do you, Sean?’
‘No.’
‘And you don’t know anything about the stories in the Turkish papers?’
‘No.’
I felt myself getting irritated. Not only was he asking too many questions, I was also beginning to feel boxed in with his long legs blocking access to the corridor.
‘If any of those journalists poked into the dusty corners of your life, Sean, would they find anything … smelly?’
Now he was really annoying me. I shook my head, fast. ‘Not a single thing. I have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing.’
‘Not that it would be just journalists doing the investigating,’ he said, gesturing towards Isabel and himself. His tone was haughty, detached, as if he knew things I didn’t.
He looked me in the eye and smiled. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
‘There’s going to be a lot of interest in this story over the next few days, Sean. It’ll blow over, of course, but until then every blogger in Europe will be looking for an angle on Alek’s death. I do hope you’re not hiding any nasty little secrets.’
‘How many times do I have to repeat myself?’ I said. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’ I raised my hands, held them in the air, palms forward, as if I was going to push him and his accusations away.
He rubbed at his trousers, fixed the crease.
‘I understand you’re upset, Sean, but this story has real legs. I don’t know if Isabel warned you, but all the security services, MI5, and 6, and all the rest, they do an under-every-stone trawl in cases like this. And if they do find anything funny, I must tell you, unofficially, they’re not beyond a little bit of mild torture, given what we’re up against now.’ He put his hands together, then braced them on his knees. ‘When it comes to defending our country we do get a bit of leeway these days, you know. But I’m sure you’ve nothing to hide.’
Was he joking? I’d imagined the local police in Oxford going around to the Institute, asking a few questions. Not a platoon of security service types trawling through every chapter of my life.
‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I’ve nothing to hide.’
The cabin was quiet except for the rumble of the plane’s engine.
‘So there’s nothing you want to tell us?’
‘Not a thing,’ I said, emphatically.
