by Rob Sinclair
‘You want me to track him down?’
‘I do. We know that Nilay was in Turkey just a few months ago. It’s not hard to see now who she was probably visiting. Which suggests this Kamil may well know something about Talatashar.’
‘Even better, Istanbul might be exactly where he’s headed next.’
‘It’s got to be better than chasing shadows.’
‘There’s only one way to find out.’
THIRTY-FIVE
Aydin had never seen anything like this in his life. The blazing sun beat down on him as he stared in wonder across the crowds, mostly men and boys, as far as the eye could see. Tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands travelling to the Great Mosque in Mecca. He and three other boys from the Farm had made the trip in a rickety minibus that had taken several days, with their imam and Qarsh as chaperones. Being the youngest, Aydin and his brothers were the last of the boys to have performed the Hajj, an obligatory pilgrimage for all Muslims to the holiest of cities. This was a rite of passage that Aydin hoped would finally make him a man. Yet this was also the first time he’d been outside the barricade of the Farm in years. If ever there was a chance to run . . .
Since arriving in Saudi Arabia they’d already passed through the Miqat, one of several stations around the outside of the city where people prepared themselves for the Hajj, entering the spiritual state known as Ihram. Aydin and all the others had undertaken the necessary cleansing rituals and were now dressed in the traditional prescribed clothing consisting of two pieces of plain white cloth; one wrapped around the waist reaching below the knee and the other draped over the left shoulder and tied at the right side. Together with the thousands of others, they were now slowly converging on the Great Mosque, its towering minarets visible several hundred yards in the distance.
Once inside Aydin and the others would perform Tawaf, the first of several rituals. Of all the rituals he was to face, Sa’ay was the one he looked forward to the most, which involved running or walking seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah, and was derived from one of his favourite stories.
According to ancient texts, Abraham had left his wife, Hagar, and son, Ishmael, in the desert on the instruction of God. The mother desperately sought water for her infant son. To make her search easier she went alone, leaving the infant on the ground. She first climbed the nearest hill, Safa, to look over the surrounding area. When she saw nothing, she then went to the other hill, Marwah, to look around. While Hagar was on either hillside, she was able to see Ishmael and know he was safe, but in the valley between the hills she couldn’t see him at all, so decided to run through the valley, back and forth through the searing heat, getting thirstier and more desperate by the second. She found nothing, but when Ishmael began to scrape at the land with his feet, water suddenly sprang out. That spring became the Well of Zamzam, from the phrase Zomë Zomë, meaning ‘stop flowing’, a command repeated by Hagar during her attempt to contain the spring water.
The story of survival felt both personal and relevant to Aydin. The story of a father who’d abandoned his wife and son, and of a mother and her unbridled sacrifice for her child.
Aydin clenched his fists and chastised himself for so arrogantly comparing his own situation to Hagar and Ishmael. He looked over and saw Qarsh was glaring. At the Farm there was no doubt that Aydin was terrified of Qarsh. But out here? He was just another man. And one of the key conditions of Ihram was that no one could carry weapons of any sort. What exactly could Qarsh do if Aydin decided to suddenly break away from the group and run? He didn’t even need to do it overtly. With the masses of people all around he could just slowly separate himself and wait for the right moment.
‘Whatever you’re thinking, Talatashar . . . don’t,’ Qarsh said with a ghoulish smile.
Aydin looked away, trying not to show any reaction. Was he really that obvious? Then Aydin remembered something else. There used to be fifteen of them, now there were only thirteen. None of the boys knew the full truth of what had happened, but they also didn’t believe in the coincidence. One of their missing brothers had successfully completed the Hajj, had even returned to the Farm, but the very next day had vanished without a trace. The rumour was that during his time in Mecca he’d managed to send a message out. What the message was, or who he’d given it to and how, none of the boys knew. Some believed it was a letter home, others an SOS to the Saudi authorities. Whatever it was, he’d paid for his indiscretion with his life – or so Aydin and his brothers believed.
Up ahead the calls of an imam blasted through loudspeakers, catching the attention of the many pilgrims. Aydin and the other boys all looked at each other. Aydin saw the wonder, the hope and expectation in his brothers’ eyes.
He felt his shoulders drop. No, he couldn’t run. Not at such an important transition in his life. God had brought him to Mecca – how could he ignore that? If this life was the path that had been chosen for him, then he saw no choice but to follow, wherever it took him.
THIRTY-SIX
Rome, Italy
Aydin once again used a variety of public transport to leave Bruges and travel further south through Europe. After events in Belgium his paranoia was growing by the hour, and more than once he’d halted his plans abruptly, leaving a train or a bus at the first opportunity each time someone had inexplicably looked in his direction for a second longer than seemed necessary.
On the train crossing the border into Italy he’d been a second away from slitting a man’s throat, pulling the emergency stop cord and jumping from the train to escape through the pine forests of the Alps. The dark-skinned man playing on a high-end smartphone had caught Aydin’s eye one time too many from across the open carriage. When Aydin had passed him to go to the toilet he was sure the man had tensed and twitched, as though readying for a confrontation. Then, when Aydin emerged from the toilet, the man was coming towards him, just yards away, and Aydin’s hand had slunk inside his jacket. His fingers were coiled around the grip of the blade when the man simply looked up and smiled and said, ‘Mi scusi.’ Aydin, hand still on the knife, had stepped out of the way and then watched as the man made his way through to the next carriage. Minutes later, with Aydin back in his seat, the man had returned with a paper bag containing a sandwich and small bottle of wine from the restaurant car.
Aydin jumped from that train at the very next stop. The man hadn’t.
The occasional jitters had slowed Aydin’s progress, but he made it to the Italian capital unimpeded. Coming into Italy from the north, he stepped off the Rome metro at Colosseo. As he walked up the stairs to the outside, his eyes busy as ever, the knife wound he suffered on his leg in London twinged with each step he took. Having done his best to stitch the wound himself, he’d put antiseptic cream on daily, and replaced the dressing whenever possible, but the whole area around it was a swollen mess and he worried it might be infected. The wound on his arm from Bruges was faring better, but caused him serious discomfort nonetheless. Regardless, he would have to make do with the limited recuperation afforded from the stop-start journey he’d just endured. There was no time for resting now to let himself heal.
He reached the top of the stairs and limped across to the exit, out onto the stifling streets of Rome. The temperature was much warmer than in Belgium, the air thick and heavy with exhaust fumes. He pushed past the throngs of tourists cramming the pavement who had come to see the Colosseum, its monstrous structure with its stacked rows of archways looming into the sky just across the road. As he passed the historic stadium, where gladiators had battled ferociously all those years ago, he compared his own predicament to theirs. Gladiators. In a way that’s what he and the other boys were trained to be; nothing more than slaves skilled in all manner of combat and warfare, for the ultimate benefit of their masters.
The men he’d come to hunt in Rome were prime examples. But his brothers weren’t just brutish brawlers. Like him, they were trained to be so much more than that. Each of them was cunning and resourceful beyo
nd compare, and Aydin knew he had to plan his move against them with the greatest care. He knew Wahid was in Rome. The laptop he’d stolen from Itnashar would lead Aydin to his door. But he had no way of knowing what hell might be lying in wait to greet his arrival.
Just metres away from the Colosseum, Aydin walked down a narrow street with crumbling apartment blocks standing shoddily on either side. Cars and mopeds were crammed along the pavement, most of them grimy, with large dents and prangs speckling their bodywork.
The uneven slabs underfoot wobbled and clacked beneath his feet as he moved, but he was alone. He heard the high-pitched whine of mopeds snaking through the city streets all around. Two of the bikes grew louder. Without breaking his stride, he turned to see a pair of black mopeds hurtling down the road towards him. But the young, helmetless drivers barely registered him at all as they sped past.
Aydin only realised what was wrong with the picture as the mopeds headed away in front of him: on the lap of the second driver were two large handbags – one red leather, one chequered fabric. Seconds later Aydin heard the grating siren of a police squad car. He didn’t look behind, just kept his head down as the siren howled louder on its approach. Did anyone know he was there? He continued apace and exhaled deeply as the flashing blue light of the Fiat raced past him without slowing, and then turned left up ahead on the tail of the fleeing mopeds.
Aydin took a left at the end of the street onto a wide, bustling pavement filled with tables and chairs for the many cafes and restaurants. Offices, apartments and eateries were crammed side by side, and, looking at the numbers, Aydin realised he was already close.
As he passed a bus stop he saw the building across the road. It had to be the one; a fifteen-storey, ultra-modern structure with huge panels of glass bisected with thin grey metal frames; modern Western high-rise architecture at its most pristine and showy.
To the left of the large double-doored entrance, the ground floor was taken up by a trendy wine bar, with hundreds of bottles filling the windows. On the right, an exclusive-looking restaurant and a gym visible through the windows of the floor above. Above that, all the way to the top, it was apartments.
Aydin didn’t cross the road, but headed for the bar across from the building. It wasn’t exactly a dive, but it was certainly more traditional than the modern block opposite, with a dusty wooden floor underfoot and more beer taps than he cared to count. The place wasn’t too busy, so Aydin ordered a coffee at the bar and took a small table by the front window. Content that no one had followed him in, he removed Itnashar’s laptop from his rucksack.
Since leaving Bruges, Aydin had already scoured the machine for information, hacking his way into messages and documents as best he could, but there remained areas of the hard drive where the encryption was simply too complex. Just like his own communications back in Paris, Wahid and Itnashar had used several layers of security for their conversations – predominantly by using message boards on the Dark Web. By utilising the Tor network so that traffic from the host ISP was scrambled through numerous randomly selected relay networks, they could essentially muddy the waters as to where the beginning and end chatter originated.
But the breadcrumbs remained, and Aydin had long been trained in how to back-trace such communications, allowing him to follow tracks to an Internet exchange point in Italy, and finally to the originating ISP which was linked to an address
in the building he was now looking at: Wahid’s home. In fact he’d also discovered that Hamsah – number five – was also based in Rome. Aydin didn’t have an address for him yet though. Only Wahid. That was okay, because it was Wahid that Aydin had come to see. He wanted answers. About his sister, his mother. His father.
After two hours in the bar, the dying words of Itnashar still ringing uncomfortably in his mind, Aydin had seen no sign of any faces he recognised outside, though he’d had some further luck in accessing the files on Itnashar’s laptop. Not that he liked what he’d found: a link to a satellite map of his mother’s street in London. But the file attached to the link was three months old. There was no context for him to understand what that meant, but he was left wondering whether he really was the cause of his mother’s death, or had something else happened earlier that made it necessary for his brothers to target her?
Whatever the answer, Aydin couldn’t hang around the bar all day. He suspected Wahid lived on the top floor of the building across the street, in the penthouse apartment. Craning his neck, he looked up.
In Rome, Wahid went by the name Ismail Obbadi. The legend had aided Aydin’s brother in growing the group’s modest wealth to breathtaking effect. Obbadi was not just rich but super rich, and in the few short years since leaving the Farm he’d built a business empire that ensured their operation was utterly entrenched in Western society – built from within it, even. They were hiding in plain sight – Obbadi was just another head of another corporation and making a killing. As number one in the group, this was Wahid’s fate.
Around four p.m. Aydin felt a lull fall around him. Gone were many of the lunch-time drinkers and eaters, and it was too early for the rush-hour footfall.
Then he spotted Katja Bonetti. He recognised her, even at distance. After all, he’d been looking at a photograph of the young woman just moments before. She strode on tall heels, wearing a knee-length silvery dress over her lithe figure. A pair of aviator sunglasses were pushed up over dyed blonde hair that flapped on slender shoulders as she walked.
Katja Bonetti looked, and strutted, like a catwalk model. But from what Aydin had learned she was just a wannabe actress who’d found love – and a little bit of the limelight – by dating the wealthy Ismail Obbadi.
Aydin had found pictures on the Internet of the two of them together, attending various balls, ceremonies and dinners for the city’s rich. With each picture he gazed at he felt a renewed sense of anger flow through his veins as he set eyes on the smiling face of his brother with his outrageously expensive suits, his manicured looks and the glamorous woman dangling off him.
He wondered whether Wahid genuinely enjoyed that lifestyle. Or did it leave a sour taste to know he was living the life of the people he had been built to destroy? Aydin certainly saw no embarrassment on Wahid’s gurning face, but then that was the reason he was made number one; he was the best of them, in every sense – everything the Teacher wanted them to be. Wahid would surely have little problem pretending to be the type of man he was raised to hate.
Aydin kept Katja in his sights as she reached the large doors to 221 and dug into her purse for a keycard. She pushed the card up against the panel beside the doors then stepped inside.
Aydin kept his eyes on the building, looking up to the top floor. After a couple of minutes he saw the reflection on the penthouse windows begin to change, the glare increasing, sweeping from top to bottom. Electronic blinds lifting up.
So it looked like he was right. Wahid wasn’t home. But his girlfriend was.
Aydin quickly packed his things up and headed for the exit. Outside he meandered for a while, moving down the pavement a few yards before crossing over the road and doing the same the other side. Number 221 was a big building, with lots of people coming and going, and he didn’t have to wait long for his opportunity. Within a few minutes a smartly dressed man approached the door. Aydin increased his pace as he headed up behind, and by the time the man opened the door and stepped inside, Aydin was in tow.
A concierge desk was positioned off to the left with a single uniformed man sitting down behind it. The guard gave Aydin a customary moody glare, but when Aydin returned the look with a nod the guard turned back to his computer screen. No way he could recognise every face that came and went in a building that size.
Aydin followed the smartly dressed man into a lift. The man pressed floor ten, and Aydin fifteen. Was that a sideways glance? A glint of suspicion? Did the man know Wahid? Or perhaps he just didn’t think Aydin looked the part of a penthouse owner.
Aydin exhaled in relief as t
he man departed at floor ten, and soon found himself at penthouse level. Outside the lift there were just two doors in front of him. One was plain white and led out onto the stairwell, the other much wider and sturdy-looking. He walked up, knocked and then stepped to the side so his face wasn’t quite in clear view of the spyhole, but ensuring he wasn’t fully hidden from the viewer either.
Soft footsteps shuffled from behind the door, followed by a couple of seconds of silence as Katja – he presumed – looked out to see who was there.
Then, one by one, the locks turned, the door opened, and he was looking into her twinkling green eyes.
‘Katja?’ Aydin asked before she could offer any questions herself.
‘Yes?’ she questioned, her eyes pinching as she eyed Aydin with distaste, visibly annoyed by the interruption.
‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said, reaching out to shake her hand. She returned the gesture dubiously. ‘I’ve heard all about you. And . . . wow, you’re even more beautiful than Ismail said.’ She didn’t react as he lightly pecked each of her cheeks. Aydin wondered for the first time how much this woman knew – of Wahid’s other life, of where he came from. Had she been expecting Aydin? He was certainly never known for his charm or quick wit – after all, he’d spent most of his life at the Farm with no females and only his brothers and the psychotic guards for company – and his nerves standing in front of Katja confirmed this.
‘I’m Aydin. An old friend of Ismail’s, from back home.’
‘Well, he’s not here.’
‘That’s a shame. Do you know when he’ll be back?’
‘No I don’t know when he’ll be back. He’s gone back home.’
‘To Morocco?’ Which was both Wahid’s real home country, and the fake Obbadi’s. Aydin sighed. ‘And I find myself here. Can you believe it?’
