The Istanbul Puzzle

by Laurence OBryan

  Without thinking I stepped forward, kicked out and connected. The gun spun in the air. Then there were more snaps, like nails being banged into a wall. Malach’s head – I discovered his name later – spurted blood in four or five places. Reddish pink craters opened in the side of his forehead. They pulsed slickly. Blood poured like gushing oil onto the stone. He was gone. He had to be.

  Then Isabel was hugging me. It was the hug of someone who’d been reborn. I hugged her back.

  ‘Were you hit?’ she said, softly.

  I touched my side carefully. The armour felt rough at one point, but unbroken. I slipped the vest off, felt all around under my shirt. Such relief. I was bruised, but there was no blood.

  I shook my head.

  She went over to Peter. He was lying perfectly still, as if he was resting. But there was a small red hole in his pale blue shirt, in the centre of his chest.

  ‘You bastard,’ she said, as she bent down over him.

  ‘I hope the world finds out what he did,’ I said.

  An officer with a red armband, who I hadn’t seen before, was kneeling beside Peter, taking his pulse. He turned to Isabel and shook his head. Then he stood.

  My heart rate was retuning to normal but my breath was still coming in gasps.

  And I was glad Peter was dead.

  ‘He got what he deserved,’ I said, as I knelt down beside her. She was as pale as chalk.

  She stood. She was surprisingly steady. She walked over to a table on the other side of the mound. I followed her. On the table was the manuscript we’d found. Sergeant Smith was beside us as she peered down at it.

  ‘This item is supposed to be in the custody of the Foreign Office,’ she said. She looked at Sergeant Smith. ‘The Turkish Government owns it.’

  ‘Forensics will tag and bag everything, Miss Sharp. You can put in a request for it.’

  ‘We will, don’t worry. And don’t lose it. It could be the most valuable thing you’ll ever put in a bag.’

  Sergeant Smith looked at it. ‘I’ll make sure I don’t drop it then,’ he said. He had black rubber gloves on. He placed the manuscript into a plastic bag another officer was holding open beside him.

  He looked at me. His face looked carved out of marble.

  ‘We have medics waiting for you both,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad you were behind me, Sergeant.’ I said.

  ‘You’re lucky to be alive, mate,’ he replied. He shook his head.

  Amazingly though, I felt calm.

  It wasn’t until an hour later that I realised how close I’d come to dying, but I was still elated. I suppose part of the reason was that I was just so happy to see Isabel, and that I also knew we’d probably caught one of the bastards who’d been after me in Istanbul. One of the bastards who’d killed Alek.

  I’d looked down at Malach as I was being hustled out of that chamber, and I knew why he’d seemed familiar when I first saw him. His build, his bald head. I’d only seen the guy for a few seconds, but it looked like the bastard who’d chased us when we’d fled my hotel room. And he was now dead.

  ‘Who was Malach working with?’ was the question I asked Sergeant Smith, when my debriefing was finally over, three hours later. I’d met four other officers in the meantime.

  We were standing near a nondescript government building not far from the Chancery Lane debriefing centre we’d been taken to.

  ‘I can’t say anything about that.’ He glanced away.

  ‘You can’t tell me anything?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I just signed the Official Secrets Act, Sergeant. And I didn’t even argue. Give me a clue, at least. I’d like to know if any of the bastards got away.’

  Isabel leaned forward. ‘What’s the official line, Sergeant?’

  He glanced at her. ‘We’re looking into it. Be happy about that. And if there are others involved, I’m sure they’ll be dealt with appropriately, sir.’

  ‘Is there anything happening in Istanbul?’ I said. ‘About what we found there?’

  ‘The Turkish authorities have arrested two people, sir. They don’t take kindly to this sort of thing. That’s all I can say. Goodbye to you both.’

  He turned away.

  We stared as the door closed behind him. The puffy clouds above our heads were tinged with purple and gold from the most spectacular late evening cloudscape I’d seen in London in years.

  Isabel looked downcast.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said.

  She nodded, but she didn’t look OK. ‘There’s a car coming to pick us up.’

  She sat down on the kerb. Her clothes and hair were a mess. I’d been given blue sweat pants and a blue top. My own wet clothes were in a black plastic bag by my side. We must have looked like a couple of tramps.

  She looked at me, as if she was weighing something up. Then she said, ‘Why don’t you come back to my place?’

  I smiled. It was exactly what I wanted her to say.

  She looked at me, shivered a little.

  ‘Good idea,’ I said.

  She looked in my eyes. ‘I don’t want to be alone right now. I just found out something that’s upset me.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Not now.’ She nodded toward a black Vauxhall Astra that was pulling up beside us.

  She didn’t tell me what was bothering her in the car either. She just gave the driver directions and sat in the back, beside me, staring out the window, looking all the while as if she was going to cry.

  Was this a delayed reaction to her kidnapping? We’d been separated during the debriefing and the first person I’d seen was a medical officer who’d gone through a checklist before getting me to sign a waiver at the bottom. I knew Isabel had received the same check up, as the officer had said his colleague was talking to her, when I said he should look at her first.

  All the way to her place in the car I worried about her. I tried to talk a few times, but she just kept shaking her head.

  When we got to her apartment block in St John’s Wood, I was exhausted and concerned. I asked her again on the way up in the elevator what she’d found out, but she just shook her head. All sorts of theories were going around in my mind. As she turned the key in the lock, she said, ‘I need a shower. We’ll talk about it later.’

  Her hand shook as she pushed the door open. Then she stepped inside.

  ‘You’re going to tell me now,’ I said. I pushed the door closed behind us. ‘Please, Isabel. I’m worried about you. You can’t bottle everything up. I tried that. It doesn’t work.’

  She stared at me as seconds ticked by. ‘You’re not going to believe this.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I don’t even know if I can tell you.’

  ‘Isabel, I’ve signed my life away. If I tell anybody anything that’s happened I’ll be arrested in five minutes. What the hell is it? Come on.’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘Peter was on our side. It was all a ruse to get the telephone numbers of Malach’s accomplices.’

  ‘But he tried to kill me. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Neither did I, until the officer who told me asked me to explain why Malach shot Peter, if it wasn’t because he was sure he’d been betrayed. Then he told me that they’d arrested two of Malach’s accomplices as a direct result of a text message sent from Peter’s phone to their numbers.’

  ‘It was a ruse?’ I felt angry. He’d left me to die. He’d tasered Isabel.

  She nodded.

  We were standing in the hall staring at each other.

  ‘What was so important that I could be left to die?’

  ‘Remember that threat to bring Armageddon to London? They believe it was stopped when those arrests were made.’

  She looked around, as if seeing the place for the first time. ‘I shouldn’t have doubted him.’

  ‘No one could blame you,’ I said.

  Then it came to me. That was why Peter hadn’t tied my ankles. That was why I’d been able t
o stand in that pool. Peter had done that. He’d given me a chance. He could have made sure I’d drown. Isabel was right.

  ‘He gave up his life.’ She sounded weary. ‘No one knew what he was up to, until he sent a text message saying the people his next text was going to, were all to be arrested asap. He was the most secretive person ever. He never told anybody in the consulate anything about his undercover work. We used to joke that he’d gone deep. But he died because of it.’ She trembled.

  It was weird thinking the man who’d pushed me into the water was a hero, but I couldn’t deny it.

  ‘I thought I was going to die back there,’ she said. She stopped herself talking.

  ‘Me too.’

  I looked around. Her apartment was stark, modern, almost all white.

  ‘Thanks for coming back,’ she said.

  I got the feeling she wasn’t sure if she’d been right to tell me everything she’d just told me.

  She was looking up at me. Her green eyes were so beautiful.

  ‘Go on inside, you look like an idiot standing there. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.’

  She pointed me into her living room. Plants were thriving like a rain forest on her balcony. I sat on an enormous white sofa and looked out at a spectacular sunset as I waited while she had a shower. I listened to the sound of cars passing, the shower hissing distantly, and tried to work out what I thought about Peter now. I went through it all over in my mind again, and it felt right the more I thought about it. Doing this sort of thing, infiltrating groups, was probably what he was supposed to do.

  Twenty minutes later, Isabel emerged rubbing her hair with a black towel, wearing a tight black gym suit.

  ‘The news is coming on,’ she said. ‘Let’s see what they’re saying about that demo.’

  The ten o’clock news started a few minutes later. They showed a clip of one of the princes at St Paul’s earlier. He was standing on the steps leading to the cathedral wearing a navy uniform with gold braid and white buttons. I wasn’t entirely sure why he was there. The voiceover said something about him paying a visit that evening. It was almost as if he was reclaiming the building.

  The doors of the cathedral were closed again behind him. Apparently, after holding a small demonstration inside, the Muslims who’d surged through the doors had left peacefully without damaging anything.

  The TV announcer switched to another story, about the outbreak of plague in Istanbul. A hundred people had been quarantined, he said. Six people were dead, including an Iranian scientist and an Indian national who had been discovered in a basement the day before. The mortality rate was high among those who’d been quarantined, but the authorities had been fortunate that no other sites of infection had been found.

  And everything fitted together neatly.

  ‘That was why Alek was killed,’ I said softly. ‘Those bastards must have found traces of plague in that chamber under Hagia Sophia. This plague outbreak in Istanbul is involved. It has to be. Plague was probably the reason why that underground cavern was sealed up for so long. It had been used to bury people who’d died of it.’

  ‘I’m not going to argue with you,’ Isabel said.

  ‘They must have seen Alek when he went into the tunnel. Maybe he followed them. Then they kidnapped him. They had to make sure he wouldn’t spill the beans. He could have stopped them if he’d gone public with what he’d found. This was why they came after me. Then they blamed fundamentalist Islamists in that video. Was that part of their plan too, to stir things up? But why the hell did all these people have to die?’

  She lowered her voice.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I was told. I know I can trust you, Sean. And after what you’ve been through I think you deserve to know.’ She was sitting near me on the white sofa.

  ‘The two people who were arrested near St Paul’s this afternoon, the ones Malach was trying to text, were about to distribute a thousand boiled sweets from two plastic carrier bags. The sweets are being tested. We believe they’re laced with the plague virus, the same as from that outbreak in Istanbul. Apparently, the people giving them out didn’t even know about it. They were stooges. They said they were just told to wait until they were texted, then give one to everyone they could find in the crowd until they ran out.’

  ‘They wanted to infect people with the plague?’ It was hard to imagine what kind of people would want to spread sickness and death, but when I remembered what Malach had been like I knew such people existed.

  ‘A thousand infected people is enough to start something serious if a virus spreads quickly and is widely disbursed. Muslims would have been blamed too, for bringing the virus into communities.’

  ‘And they killed Bulent because he helped me?’

  She nodded. ‘The bastards must have figured it out. Maybe someone saw you together.’

  ‘I need some air,’ I said.

  She turned the TV off and opened the glass door to the balcony. We went outside and stood watching the city for a while. It was late twilight now, and four floors up, the view over slated rooftops towards the futuristic office towers of central London was as good as you could get.

  I could see the dome of St Paul’s glittering on the horizon. I felt a warm summer breeze on my face. The temperature was perfect, not too warm, not to cool.

  ‘There were other people involved with that guy Malach. There had to be.’

  ‘We’re tracking them. It’ll take a while. They’ll go to ground when it gets out that their plan failed. But we have leads we can follow up.’

  ‘I hope you get them all.’

  She was standing beside me. I gripped the shiny steel railing.

  ‘What did you mouth at me when I was about to be thrown into that pool?’ I asked.

  The tangled branches and leaves of the upper reaches of a white-skinned London plane tree, which stood at the side of the apartment block, were behind her. I could smell a mustiness from the leaves as they shimmered in the warm air.

  She looked down to ground level, where a car was being parked.

  ‘I said, take a deep breath.’

  ‘You were right.’

  And in that moment I knew what I wanted more than anything. The loss that had buffeted my heart, which I had lived with every single day since Irene had died, was gone. I felt normal again, as if I’d been reborn. And I felt strangely off-guard, as if my heart had left a way in.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she said.

  ‘Everything’s changed.’ I felt a little light-headed. My life with Irene was a memory, a faded sepia picture, still valued, but from the distant past.

  ‘You know,’ she said. ‘If those buggers hadn’t wanted to do all this, we’d never have met.’

  We looked out over the city. We were about a foot apart.

  ‘What’s your plan for the next few days?’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to rest, then see what’s happening at the Institute. Get back on track.’

  ‘Why don’t you stay here tonight?’ Her smile was inviting. She turned and brushed against me. My arm tingled.

  ‘On the couch.’

  Our arms touched again.

  She looked up at me. ‘You know, I never thought I’d trust another man after my marriage ended.’

  We were inches apart.

  I took her hand and pulled her to me. I could feel her skin under her cotton T-shirt.

  A rush of longing rose like a cresting wave inside me. I pulled her nearer. She didn’t resist. I was ready this time. It was right this time. We kissed. I felt it would never end.

  I spoke softly then, ‘I should warn you, I’m damaged goods. I used to roam the streets at night after Irene died. My psychotherapist used to get calls from a nice cop in Fulham police station whenever he spotted me.’

  ‘We’re all damaged,’ said Isabel softly. ‘Every one of us.’

  Epilogue

  I’d started running again, early in the mornings. The summer had turned into a perfect autumn. I always loved
London when the sky was blue and the weather was warm.

  I was sweating lightly. The traffic was building up on Park Road, even though it was only 6.45 AM. I took the silver key out of my pocket and held it between my fingers as if it was a lucky charm.

  As soon as I put it in the lock, the door opened. Isabel was standing on the other side in a long white T-shirt. It stopped at her thighs. She looked amazing.

  She kissed me on the cheek. Every time she did that, I still felt a tingle of relief. Maybe it was an echo of the relief I’d felt when I’d found her alive in that dungeon at Malach’s mercy. And there was something else mixed in with it too. Happiness.

  ‘Coffee?’ she said.

  ‘Love some.’

  ‘It’s on the balcony. I’ll be out in a minute.’

  I sat on one of the wicker chairs, poured my coffee and Isabel’s too. I took a sip.

  A lot of things had happened in the past few months. We’d attended a Greek Orthodox funeral service for Alek in Islington. His mother was Greek after all. She was traced after a week by the Polish authorities. We’d also attended a service for Peter in St James’s in Piccadilly.

  The manuscript we’d found under Hagia Sophia had been sent to Cambridge University for tests.

  I did some research on that diagramme on the inside back page. I didn’t find out anything new. It could have been a Byzantine magic symbol, an astrological chart or a puzzle, as Gülsüm had said, or it could have been something else completely.

  I’d done some research on riddles from that era and I’d found out a lot about Byzantine magic. Apparently, the Emperor Heraclius had been a big collector of Jewish, Egyptian and other magic books. The manuscript we’d found could well have been from his collection, from the end of his reign. But I can’t say that for sure. We were just going to have and wait and see what the researchers at Cambridge came up with.

  I’d tried to get back in to Kaiser’s photos on that website to have another look at them, but they’d all disappeared. I wasn’t surprised.

  I’d also tried to get the Institute involved in doing some chemical and spectral analysis on the manuscript, but I was told to wait until the people in Cambridge had finished their work. No applications were being considered for any further analysis until then.