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  Once inside, he found himself in a long corridor. The woman disappeared down a hallway to the right. There was nobody else in sight. The reception area had a stone floor and battered walls on which hung a couple of canvases of nude figures that might have been human or animal. Perhaps a mix of the two. Not so much a display of talent as of confusion. On the left-hand side another arched door led deeper into the building. It was slightly ajar. Makana knocked and pushed.

  The way was barred by heavy drapes. Fighting his way through these he found himself in a large, cluttered room, its high ceiling browned with age, stained with dirt and nicotine. The corner windows offered a welcome surprise: a panoramic view of the skyline descending towards the Golden Horn, and beyond that, across the water, to Seraglio Point and Topkapi Palace. The open vista stood in stark contrast to the cluttered room. Here it was hardly possible to move for the cardboard boxes stacked waist-high. Some of these contained books or stacks of files, others sprouted styrofoam pellets, heaps of magazines and newspapers, even pairs of jeans. The office seemed to function as a showroom, depot, archive and general living quarters.

  The eye at the centre of this storm sat with his back to Makana. He was reclining in a large leather chair in the midst of the chaos, a telephone in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. His feet, shod with a pair of unlaced basketball boots, rested on the windowsill alongside a row of half-finished cups of tea and boxes that had once held takeaway meals.

  ‘Yes?’ the man asked as he swung round.

  ‘We had an appointment.’ Makana tapped his watch. ‘I came from Cairo.’

  Nadir Sulayman could only be described as scruffy-looking. Around fifty years old, he dressed like a man twenty years younger. His hair was long and his eyebrows thick and dark, almost joining in the middle. The grey streaks in his hair betrayed his age, as did the expanding waistline, a comfortable paunch that jutted from his denim jacket when he stood up to shake Makana’s hand.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said, wagging the telephone in the air before dropping it onto the table. ‘My mind was distracted. Some people can’t get over the sound of their own voice.’ He gestured for Makana to sit before rushing round the desk to clear the chair he had just offered him. An armful of clothing wrapped in plastic was unceremoniously dumped onto the mountain of objects that partially concealed a sofa.

  ‘Please,’ he gestured again. Makana sat, inadvertently dislodging a stack of travel brochures as he did so. The other man ignored them.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Sulayman, going back behind his desk and picking up a pack of Marlboros. ‘Everything is okay? No problems?’

  ‘No problems.’

  ‘Good. Good.’ Nadir Sulayman lit a cigarette, dropped the lighter on the table and rubbed a hand over his face as if to clear his mind. He sank back down into the big chair and glanced left and right, as if expecting another question to appear before him. ‘This is good. We want everything to proceed smoothly.’ He nodded to himself and then looked up. ‘Did you make contact with your passenger?’

  ‘No luck, I’m afraid. It might take a couple of days.’

  Sulayman held up both palms. ‘All of that is your business. I don’t want to know anything. When you are ready you call me and we go to work, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ Makana took another look around the room. Whatever else it might have said about Nadir Sulayman, it didn’t proclaim his skills of organisation. ‘What exactly is your plan?’

  ‘No problem. I tell you but …’ Nadir Sulayman sat back. ‘Before we go into details, do you have something for me … ?’

  Makana produced an envelope containing five thousand dollars. Sulayman took a moment to thumb through the contents.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘I was told you would receive half now and half later.’

  ‘Yes, but this is not enough.’ He tossed the envelope back onto the desk. ‘Not enough. I have people who are waiting to be paid. Additional costs. A job like this is complicated. You can’t take chances.’

  ‘I’m sure we can reach an agreement.’

  ‘I hope so, because otherwise I can do nothing.’ Nadir Sulayman tapped ash into a heavy cut-glass bowl out of which a winged sprite rose up. ‘I only work with the best. In this business they don’t wait around. Either you produce the money or they are gone.’

  ‘I can check with Cairo.’

  ‘You call Winslow. I told him the price would be higher.’

  ‘The main thing is that everything is in place. Once I have our passenger we’ll have to move fast.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry. Everything will be taken care of.’

  Sulayman waved smoke aside as he rummaged through the clutter on the table until a map of the city surfaced. Spreading it out, he pinpointed a spot with a stubby finger, sprinkling a halo of cigarette ash around it. ‘Ortaköy Mosque. The van will be waiting there for you. Blue van. No windows. Two drivers. Nobody else. The van is not there, you see another car, anything at all, and you walk away. You go somewhere else. Not back to hotel. Somewhere new. You give me a call.’

  From his desk Sulayman produced a small mobile phone which he handed over. ‘Only one number on it. Not registered. You call me if you have problems. I do the same.’ He leaned back and studied Makana for a moment.

  ‘You’re not what I expected. I don’t know who you are or what you are transporting. It’s better I don’t know.’ He got to his feet again and held out his hand. ‘I’m sorry about the misunderstanding, but people don’t realise the risk I am running here. If things go wrong I am the one who is caught with his trousers down. You understand?’

  ‘I think so.’

  The two men shook hands.

  ‘The rest of the money. Tomorrow, please, or else my hands are tied.’

  As he left the building Makana wondered what it was that was making Sulayman so nervous. Perhaps he was always like that, or perhaps it was just Makana’s own imagination running rings around itself.

  It wasn’t that late and yet the street felt oddly quiet. The rain had stopped and the sky appeared to have cleared. He even thought he could see a couple of stars out over the dark water, above the glow of the city. He breathed in the night air and began what was becoming routine, walking in a seemingly aimless fashion, moving up and down the streets, changing direction until he felt sure that no one was behind him. The walk cleared his head, but it also reminded him that he hadn’t eaten for hours. He was just off the main pedestrian street when he came across a small restaurant tucked into the corner of a tiny square.

  The interior was deserted but for the staff. A woman knelt behind a low table patiently rolling out rolls of dough into flat sheets. She looked up as he came in but said nothing. Makana chose a table close to the door. There was no menu, no plastic-coated sheets with pictures on them. It was almost as if you had stepped into somebody’s living room. A bearded man emerged from a doorway in the back and came over to speak to him. Makana signalled that he didn’t understand, so the man repeated what he had said in Turkish interspersed with a few words in English, all the time pointing to the low grill that sat in an open fireplace at the far end of the room. A cook was stoking the coals using tongs and a set of leather bellows that looked as though they had been borrowed from a museum. The bearded man growled something and the cook held up several long steel skewers with elaborate brass handles. Makana nodded and they took that for an answer.

  While he waited they brought him tea. The bearded man lost interest in him and went back to sit cross-legged on the floor totting up numbers in a battered school exercise book to which a broken biro was attached by the use of string and Sellotape. The woman rolling out the dough got to her feet slowly and moved across the room as if sleepwalking towards a round clay oven. She stretched a sheet of dough onto a large glove and then reached in through the circular mouth to slap them on the inside of the bulbous oven. The flickering flames bathed her face in a warm glow.

  Makana was happy to be ignored. He had been in Istanb
ul for only a few hours, and yet he had the feeling that he had walked into something much deeper than he had expected. If he was in such a hurry to leave here, Ayman Nizari should have been at the meeting place today as agreed. Did that mean something had happened to him? Had the Mossad caught up, or someone else?

  If they had not, then Nizari was somehow managing to stay alive and out of sight. How? Where was he sleeping? Who was feeding him? Nizari didn’t want to end up in the hands of the Israelis, and that was understandable. His past record made him a dangerous asset, even without the association with Abu Hilal. What had happened in Marbella had clearly scared him – also understandable. He’d scrapped his dreams of cashing in on his skills and decided to trade in what he knew about a dangerous terrorist in exchange for asylum in Britain and medical treatment for his wife. Whichever way you looked at it, Ayman Nizari was playing a dangerous game.

  Through the window he saw a few stray people hurrying by across the square. None of them paid attention to the restaurant. They looked as if they were making their way home. A boy carrying a bundle of newspapers leaned through the doorway and shouted something. The old man replied without looking up and the boy took himself off. There seemed to be no real rush, which was fine, had he not been starving. The cook was wagging a fan made of straw at the coals. He seemed to be taking his time. The smell of roasting meat stoked Makana’s hunger.

  Nizari would have known that hinting he had information about Nasra would make it impossible for Makana not to come to Istanbul. So the question was, did he really know something, or had he just picked up information somewhere that he decided to use in his hour of need? Chief Haroun was one of the straightest people Makana had ever known. He asked for loyalty and disliked intrigue. He had a strong sense of right and wrong. It was hard to reconcile that kind of a man with someone who developed chemical weapons for a living. What kind of relationship could have existed between the two men? It was always possible that Haroun had known nothing of Nizari’s past, that while he was living in Khartoum he had another story to tell, one that gave nothing away about his profession, but that was asking a lot. Had Nizari and Haroun been close? What had happened to Nizari during his years in Khartoum?

  The woman appeared at the table, breaking into his train of thoughts as she set down a basket of bread fresh from the oven. Makana thanked her. She held his gaze for a moment too long before turning away. He ignored it, having accepted that here he was something of an unknown quantity. His clothes, his accent, the colour of his skin, all painted him as an outsider.

  When the kofta arrived, it was as good as his instincts had told him it would be. When he came to leave he found the woman blocking his way. Close up he could see she was older than he had thought, in her late forties or early fifties. She began to speak. The bearded man came over but the woman shook off his efforts to lead her away. Speaking urgently, she seemed to be repeating the same words over and over.

  ‘What is it? What is she saying?’

  The man pried her hand loose from Makana’s arm and tugged at her, trying to lead her away.

  ‘Crazy woman.’

  Makana reached out to stop her.

  ‘Wait. What is it? What are you trying to tell me?’

  The woman turned to face him. He searched her eyes for some sense of meaning. Something was upsetting her. Then, to his surprise she smiled at him. She stretched out a hand to take his.

  ‘She is here.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Makana. ‘Who is here?’

  But the man had had enough. He was yelling by now. Shoving her ahead of him.

  ‘Wait a moment. Let her speak,’ said Makana, but it was too late. With a final, mournful glance, the woman turned and made for the back of the restaurant, disappearing through a doorway on the right.

  ‘Majnun,’ said the man, tapping the side of his head to make his meaning clear. It was unnecessary. The word was the same in Arabic.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’ he asked. The man nodded, impatient to get him out of the door and away from there, a mixture of impatience and embarrassment.

  Makana had once known a woman, a neighbour of his grandmother’s, years ago, who claimed to have the gift of seeing things. She saw the dead and could commune with departed relatives. All of that was strictly speaking haram, but like so many things it came from another place, older, more deeply rooted in the African beliefs that had existed long before Islam arrived. People don’t just shake such things off. They hide them, put them aside until there is a need for them. As a child it had been somewhat alarming, but what surprised Makana was that his feelings right now were not so much different from then.

  What had she meant? He knew what he wanted to believe she meant: that she was referring to his daughter, Nasra. But the fact was she could have been talking about anything, or anyone. She might be so far out in her own little orbit that she was not connected to anything in this world.

  Back on Istiklal Street men stood idly around in the shadows, calling out offers of illicit pleasure: contraband cigarettes, hashish, willing women. It was late now and groups of men had replaced the families that had been strolling through earlier. Drunken tourists were making a nuisance of themselves. Makana cut through the crowd, remembering a shortcut to his hotel he had discovered that afternoon. He was almost there when it happened.

  At first he thought it was an accident. The three figures in dark clothes turned into the shortcut through the alleyway. He moved to step aside to let them by. They brushed past him, a little too close, a little roughly, but still, not enough for him to take offence. If it had ended there. Only it didn’t. Instead of moving on they fenced him in, pressing him against the wall. His shoulders were forced back as one of them tried to grab his arm. Makana managed to slip his right arm free and swung his elbow, feeling it connect with someone’s jaw. There was a satisfying cry of pain, but his triumph was short-lived. The third one stepped up in front of him. He had the hard face of a man who had seen the inside of a prison. The youngest was in his twenties. The others were older. A smell of alcohol and some kind of machine oil came off the man to his right, the one nursing his jaw.

  All further thoughts were suspended as the man in front of him hit him low down in the gut. He felt the air fly out of him and doubled up, receiving another blow to the side of the head. Not from a fist, but a hard, solid object that sent him reeling. They let him slide down, out of their hands, no longer a threat, and he landed up on the cold, damp ground that smelled of cats. He felt their hands running expertly over him, reaching into his jacket, and he remembered with regret that he had his passport on him. Through the ringing in his head he heard a shout. Then came the sound of feet running away, and they were gone. Makana tried to sit up. A man wearing a kitchen apron had stepped out from a doorway, about to light a cigarette. He threw this aside as he was joined by another, and both of them spoke to him as they helped him to his feet, Turkish first and then in English.

  ‘You okay? Good? Police?’

  Makana insisted that he was fine. He was not keen on involving the police at this stage. He assured them he would be all right and thanked them for their kindness. Leaving them muttering about what the world had come to, he walked on, a little unsteadily. His wallet had also been taken, but he still had the phone Nadir Sulayman had given him.

  The Pera Palas was closer than he had thought. It took him less than ten minutes to get back. Haluk, the receptionist, raised his eyes when he saw the state he was in.

  ‘Mr Amin, you have accident?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Nothing too serious.’

  ‘Oh, but it looks terrible! The head. I call doctor for you?’ The little man was beside himself.

  ‘I don’t think that’s necessary. But perhaps you have something so I can clean myself up?’

  ‘But of course.’

  Haluk produced a large first-aid kit for Makana to take up to the room with him. Already they were receiving more than enough attention from other hotel guests in the lobby an
d reception. The prospect of climbing the stairs was beyond him, but then he had to endure the stares of a young couple in the lift. He nodded a civil greeting that was completely ignored. They were dressed up in evening clothes, as if they had spent the night on the town. Beside them, he felt like a caveman who had wandered in from the wilderness.

  Chapter Eight

  Istanbul Day Two

  Makana took a long warm shower before cleaning up the cuts on his forehead and the scrapes on his hands and knees. The damage wasn’t too bad, although the trousers he had on were ruined. He opened up the safe to check that everything was still there, and weighed the Yavuz in his hand before replacing it, grateful that he hadn’t been carrying it. It could have ended much worse for him.

  After closing the safe he collapsed, exhausted, onto the bed and fell at once into a deep sleep. He woke a few hours later feeling better, although the slightest movement told him his body had stiffened up. He could feel the soreness in his ribs and arms as well as a dull ache in his head. He got up and swallowed a couple of aspirins and then stepped out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette.

  In his mind he ran over the attack again. Was there anything to indicate it had been more than a simple mugging? He didn’t exactly look like a wealthy tourist, but he was off the beaten track. Perhaps he had presented too tempting a target?

  As Makana looked down over the city, he realised how completely he was working in the dark. He had to assume that everything could be connected. Nadir Sulayman, who ought to have been an ally, struck him as the kind who would trade off any partnership against a better offer. The mercenary kind. Come to that, Makana wasn’t even sure how far he could trust Winslow. Even if he was being entirely truthful with Makana, there was always the fact that, no matter which way you looked at it, he was an Englishman. Winslow had his own interests at heart, and what he understood of the world would not always chime with how things really were. Winslow was an outsider. They both were. Trusting him was one thing, relying on his judgement was something else again. Makana ground his cigarette butt under his heel. He had a bad feeling it was all about to unravel, right before his eyes.