by Parker Bilal
Makana felt himself being hauled up and dumped onto a wooden platform at sea level. Someone rolled him on his side and he vomited a thin stream of acid bile.
Chapter Thirty-three
Istanbul Day Seven
Trying to open his eyes had never been this difficult. Once upon a time, he recalled, it had needed no effort at all. Now, he felt as though his every thought was being telegraphed from a great way off. He imagined the words jangling along a line in the air before him. Then came a thump and he felt the rising and falling of a heaving deck, the whine of an engine toiling against the waves. He could taste the sea on his lips. He was shivering with cold. His clothes were soaked through and stuck to his skin.
He was on the open rear deck of some kind of motor launch. He was hauled up and deposited in a large chair that swivelled from side to side. His arms were secured at the wrists to the frame, his feet bound together at the ankles. Hands tore at his jacket, ripping the seams. A knife cut through his shirt. Then a needle was stuck into his shoulder. There were two of them doing this, a man and a woman. It came back to him, as if from a lifetime ago. They were the couple at the quayside café where he had sat with Kara Deniz. And again before that: the night he had been mugged. Staggering into the lift at the Pera Palas hotel to find a smartly dressed couple. He in a cream suit and she in a long dress.
A movement from behind made him turn his head, as much as he was able to. Someone was coming down the steps from the bridge to his left. The Dutchman, Snowfleet or whatever his name was. He smiled as he came to stand in front of Makana, feet apart, balancing expertly in the swell.
‘So, here we are again.’
‘Mossad,’ muttered Makana. He had trouble moving his lips. The cold perhaps, or whatever they had just injected him with. The Dutchman nodded.
‘Well, that’s dispensed with the introductions. We both know who we are. You’ve played a long game, Abu Hilal, but now we come to the end of the line.’
‘You’re wrong. I’m not ...’
The woman was tucking the syringe back into a small case. She and the man, both dressed in black, had stepped back to watch him with their arms folded. Makana wondered exactly what they had injected him with.
‘It’s a simple relaxant.’ Snowfleet said, reading his mind. ‘It takes the fight out of you.’
‘You pulled us out of the water.’ Makana’s jaw was chattering uncontrollably.
‘We don’t want you dead just yet.’
His head felt fuzzy. It seemed to take a lifetime to process a thought, to move a word from the back of his mind to the tip of his tongue.
‘The truth is I admire you.’
‘Why?’ It seemed the obvious question.
‘It’s important to empathise with one’s adversaries.’ The tall Dutchman seemed to be enjoying himself, as though he had waited a long time for this moment. ‘The only way to defeat the enemy is to see into their minds.’
‘The enemy?’ It all seemed so absurd that Makana was having difficulty making sense of anything. He stared dully at the inky dark sea and the distant constellation of lights that was dry land floating just out of reach.
‘Nizari?’ Makana managed to get the word out, more or less complete.
‘Ah, interesting question. Your Merlin, your magic-potion man.’
The man and woman had disappeared somewhere inside the boat. Makana tested his bonds, tensing to discover there was very little give. A strange sense of calm came over him. The boat’s engine had stopped and they were drifting gently. Waiting for something, but what? The light, the moon? Some signal from far away? Makana could hear voices. A telephone conversation. Whoever was on the other end was on speaker. He couldn’t understand any of the words and he wondered if that was normal, or if the drug was taking effect. Far away a muezzin’s steady call spiralled up into the night sky.
Makana wondered why Boris had betrayed them. Perhaps it wasn’t just money. Boris was a businessman. He had weighed up the pros and cons and decided it was in his interest to hand them over, probably around the time he heard about Kara Deniz.
‘That’s a first, being saved by you.’
‘Ah, do I hear a note of thanks?’ The Dutchman was fiddling with an electronic device. A transmitter of some kind. ‘Music to my ears. We are so often depicted as the epitome of evil, the man in the black hat, when really we are trying to save the world from a terrible threat.’
‘Please,’ Makana groaned. ‘Spare me.’
‘Of course, it is wasted on you. But nevertheless, we get tired of always being demonised.’
‘What happened to your Bosnian friends?’
‘They served their purpose.’ The Dutchman clicked his tongue in disappointment. ‘They were a temporary measure, a compromise. In my opinion a bad choice.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘Why should this concern you? As I said, they served their purpose,’ the Dutchman shrugged.
So if he was still alive, Makana reasoned, it was for a reason. He wondered if Nizari was dead, and whether they had recovered his body or left him in the sea.
The other two returned. They brought with them the smell of coffee and tobacco which made Makana long for a cigarette. He looked back out at the water and wondered how far they were from the shore. Far enough to make no difference, he guessed. There was some conferring going on between them now. Everything sounded fuzzy in his head. Makana shook his head to try and clear it. Where was Mek Nimr and his team, where was Nasra? He realised that the others had fallen silent; some kind of decision had been settled between them. Makana braced himself.
‘What have you done with Nizari?’
‘All in good time.’ The Dutchman was smoking a foul-smelling cheroot, blowing smoke at the stars. Makana felt his teeth chattering. He saw the glint of light on metal as the woman unzipped the pouch that was strapped to her waist and produced another syringe. The hypodermic needle winked in the deck lights. ‘No need to be alarmed,’ she laughed. ‘Your time hasn’t come yet.’
She drew near, avoiding his gaze. He felt the needle go into his arm. He tried to speak, to summon a shout, but as with everything in his life, or so it seemed, he was much too slow.
Chapter Thirty-four
The first thing he noticed was the smell. A harsh acid reek that stung his nostrils and made his eyes water. There was a dull ache in his head and he was shivering. He couldn’t move. He was still tied up, but the situation had changed. The chair was different, and the deck had stopped moving. When he opened his eyes he knew why.
It took him a moment to realise where he was. What had been a long, empty space was now filled with objects. The windows along one side were covered with newspaper. He remembered peering through them from the other side when he’d been here with Koçak. Now the faint orange glow of streetlights filtered through from outside, throwing long shadows here and there in skewed geometric patterns. A table ran along the wall underneath the windows. A long sheet of transparent plastic covered it. In the gloom he could make out objects underneath, the vague outline of bottles, jars, scientific instruments.
The chair he was seated in was an old one. His hands were taped to the rear of the frame and it creaked beneath him when he tried to shift his weight. This seemed like a good sign. If the chair was weak, perhaps he had a chance of getting free. On the other hand, what he saw when he turned his head to look round wasn’t encouraging. In the corner behind him stood a row of oil drums. From the stencilled images painted on the sides he could guess what they contained. Highly inflammable, toxic, hazardous chemicals. He counted six barrels. Next to these a row of six tall gas cylinders stood like sentinels against the wall. An olive-green tarpaulin was bundled in the corner.
In front of him, part of the room appeared to have been turned into a makeshift chamber sealed off by a wall of heavy plastic sheeting. Through the opaque layer he could make out a bank of machines, what looked like a laboratory workstation, airtight chambers, measuring instruments. Thick tubes and r
ubber pipes connected them to a large tower in the corner that looked like an extractor or air filter.
What most surprised Makana was that none of this had been here when he had visited the place just a few days ago. He was pretty sure he was inside the long room he had seen from the yard of the house in Eyüp where he had been taken by the two ‘Bosnians’. Now it was a lab, and there were no prizes for guessing what it was intended to be used for. The restricted area behind the curtain seemed to be for the containment of sarin gas, or whatever kind of nerve agent they were supposed to be making here. Somebody had worked very fast indeed, no doubt using Nizari’s plans.
There was no sign of anyone else. He wondered where the Dutchman and the two others might be. He couldn’t tell what time it was, although he had the feeling it would soon be light outside. He shifted around, not so much to free himself as to ease the pain in his shoulders and arms, which had been clamped in the same position for hours. But there was something encouraging about the way the chair creaked. He rocked back and forth, trying to work the joints of the chair loose without tipping over. If he went over he would be stranded like a turtle on its back. His arms shrieked in protest as he strained this way and that. The good news was that it felt as if something was coming loose.
He stopped his struggling for a moment as something caught his eye. Through the heavy plastic sheeting Makana thought he could make out a shape sprawled on the floor inside the sealed-off area. He couldn’t be sure what it was. It could have been an old coat, or a person. But something told him it had to be Nizari. He tried calling his name a few times without getting a response.
With renewed energy he resumed his work on demolishing the chair, his hopes rising when he was rewarded with a loud cracking sound. The chair was coming apart. He rocked his weight onto the front legs and then back again, coming down as heavily as he could. Once, twice, three times, bringing his full weight to bear. On the tenth try he broke one of the legs and found himself sprawled on the floor. Blood gushed from the point where a sharp splinter had embedded itself into the palm of his left hand, and made it hard to grip anything properly. He rolled over and managed to work his other hand free. It took another five minutes of struggling but finally Makana could strip off the duct tape and toss aside the wreckage of the chair.
Moving across the room, he looked over the drums and gas tanks. He gently rocked one of them to check that it was full. He peered under the tarpaulin to find the shaven-headed ‘Bosnian’ and his friend, a day or so dead by the look of them. The bodies were wrapped in plastic sheeting. Makana was more interested in what was next to them. It looked like an improvised incendiary device. Large cans of what appeared to be hairspray, probably to act as an accelerant, had been taped together along with an electronic detonator and a mobile phone. It didn’t appear to be activated, but it was reason enough not to hang around here longer than was necessary.
He let the tarpaulin fall back into place and went over to examine the sealed-off chamber. Heavy-duty plastic sheeting was taped firmly at the top and bottom. A steady mechanical hum came from within, where a polished steel drum was turning and a fan was sucking air through a vent. The entrance was a sealed rectangle held in place with Velcro strips. Makana put out a hand.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said a voice behind him.
He turned to find her there. She was holding a gun. Not pointing it exactly, but it was in her hand, her arm hanging by her side.
‘You’re bleeding.’ She pointed with the barrel of the pistol. Makana looked down and saw the blood dripping from between his fingers. She reached into her pocket and produced a scarf which she threw over to him. He wrapped it roughly around his hand.
‘You should clean it before it gets infected,’ she said.
‘I’ll try to remember that.’ The gun was a small Beretta. She was, he noted, left-handed, just like her mother. ‘You know what’s in there?’ Makana nodded at the plastic chamber.
‘It’s a protective screen. If something escapes one of the incubators or vacuum chambers, then you have a problem. It’s dangerous stuff. You can kill someone with a drop the size of a pinhead.’
‘Nobody is actually making sarin here, right?’ Makana looked around at their surroundings.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that, but’ – she waved the barrel of the gun – ‘if you’re feeling lucky …’
It was hard to look at her and not think how much she reminded him of Muna. But there was something else as well. A hardness, an anger that would have been alien to her mother. It was that part of her that he didn’t know, the part that told the story of the years between, of how she had gone from the little girl he had last glimpsed inside a car just before it went over the side of a bridge to the young woman who stood before him holding an automatic pistol. There was something there that he suspected he would never know. Her eyes gave nothing away. She was watching him as carefully as he was watching her.
Makana turned to the plastic screen.
‘I need to know if he’s dead.’
‘You think he wouldn’t leave you?’
Makana didn’t need to be told. He knew enough about Nizari to be certain the Iraqi scientist would never risk his own neck for him. Still, it felt strange to be listening to her telling him what to do. She was right, of course. It didn’t make much sense to take the risk, but he’d never been very good at taking advice.
‘Well, I’m not him.’
He took a deep breath and tore the Velcro open. Then he stepped inside, sealing the plastic curtain behind him. Nothing happened. How long would it take before he started to feel the effects? Would he feel anything before it was already too late? He knew nothing about toxic nerve agents.
‘We don’t have much time,’ he heard Nasra call. Makana glanced back towards her. He wasn’t sure what she meant, nor indeed what her part in all of this was. Through the translucent plastic her outline seemed blurred, as if her very existence was in doubt. He could almost believe that she wasn’t real, that she had somehow sprung from the well of his imagination. When he came back out she might have vanished. He wasn’t sure which was the harder to live with – the memory of her, or with her existence in this new form.
‘Is he still alive?’
Makana knelt beside Nizari and felt for a pulse. There was nothing. He leaned over him, trying to establish the cause of death, and found the thin red line around his neck where a plastic zip tie had cut into the skin. There was a reason they hadn’t bothered to tie him up.
He rocked back on his haunches and looked around him. They had gone to a lot of trouble to make it all look convincing. When it was discovered it would be an embarrassment for the Turkish government. Tourism would be hit of course, but that was not the point. The Israeli plan was to expose a chemical weapons lab right in the heart of Turkey’s greatest city. Erdoğan, would look like a gullible fool who allowed dangerous terrorists like Abu Hilal to operate right under his nose. To Israel it would be a victory in the propaganda war. They would gain a bargaining point. It all seemed so petty. Makana rose to his feet and came out of the plastic chamber.
‘The Mossad team set all of this up.’ She was silent, so he went on. ‘You were watching them all the time. You let them do this.’ Makana nodded at Nizari. ‘You let them kill him.’
‘He was a liability. It was only a matter of time before someone killed him.’
‘Is that what Mek Nimr taught you to believe?’
She shifted her weight and glanced at her watch. Makana was trying to work out what was coming next.
‘Where are they now? On their way back to Tel Aviv?’
‘Not quite.’
‘At the airport, then, to be picked up by Turkish intelligence?’
She tilted her head. He had to admit it was a neat plan. Turning the tables on the Israelis. If they were caught operating in this country without authorisation it would be a major international scandal for the Mossad. If they were tied to this laboratory it would be a vict
ory for Turkey. He wondered why they hadn’t killed him as they had Nizari. Was this some kind of gift to the Turks? Surely if he was alive there was a chance he could prove that he wasn’t Abu Hilal? Makana thought of the incendiary device. There was something here that neither of them was seeing.
‘Why did you come back?’ he asked.
‘I wanted to see for myself.’
‘You wanted to make sure I was dead.’
She hesitated, shifting the gun from left hand to right before reaching into the pocket of her coat.
‘This is yours,’ she said, holding something out. He took it from her. It was the old photograph that had been sitting on the bedside table in the hotel. Worn from years of travelling with him in his wallet, a cracked and folded fragment of time. All the more precious for being the only reminder he had of them: the picture of Muna smiling, holding their baby daughter in her arms.
‘You were in my room at the Pera Palas.’ He looked up to see her shrug. ‘You killed Marty Shaw?’
Nasra shook her head. ‘When I got there it was all over.’
‘The Dutchman?’
‘I didn’t see. Shaw went into the room. Someone was waiting there. I heard the shot. When I went in he was dead and the room was empty.’
‘The balcony. They went over to the next room.’
She nodded. ‘I followed, but they were gone. And I couldn’t stay, the hotel staff were already suspicious of me.’
Makana handed the picture back. ‘You should keep it.’
‘It doesn’t mean anything to me.’
‘If that was true you wouldn’t be here.’
She looked at him and for a second he thought he saw something in her eyes, doubt perhaps, the faint glint of another possibility. Then something caught his eye and he reached towards her neck. She didn’t try to stop him. He pulled the gold chain until it came free to reveal the little crescent moon dangling on the end of it. A trinket Muna had bought and hung in their car. The sight of it made his throat suddenly dry.
