The Istanbul Puzzle

‘I think Alek must have gone off and done some exploring, Sean.’

‘He couldn’t have done it in Hagia Sophia. The place is guarded day and night. It’s a museum housing priceless treasures. Their security is tight.’

I took a sip of my coffee, placed the cup on the table and picked up one of the pictures. It was of a floor mosaic, a representation of a Madonna with child in dull blues and pale greens. The faded IH letters near the baby represented the word Jesus. It was a classic and beautiful image, an archetype of Christian art. There was a giant Virgin and Child wall painting in Hagia Sophia, which was like it.

‘Did Alek tell you anything about what he was up to? You were friends weren’t you?’

‘Yeah, we were, but he never said anything about this.’ I motioned at the pictures again. ‘What about you, did he tell you anything? This is a picture of you, isn’t it?’ I pointed at the thumbnail.

‘We went for lunch, Sean. The Consulate likes to keep itself informed about what’s happening in this city. He was a nice guy, but he hardly spoke about his work. And he never said anything about taking pictures anywhere else, before you ask.’

Why hadn’t Alek told me he’d met her, and about these odd photos? Was he planning to when he got back? Or was I being naïve?

‘I’m sure you have experts who’ve examined this already,’ I said, pointing at the picture in my hand. ‘What do they make of it?’

‘It’s an almost classic representation of the Virgin, so I’m told.’

‘What do you mean, almost?’

She moved towards me. I caught a faint lemony perfume smell.

‘Look at the Virgin’s dress. It should have gold stars. And the colours are wrong too. It needs expert examination.’

‘Your people know their stuff.’

‘But not enough,’ she said. ‘We don’t know where the photo was taken.’

She was holding something back though. I could feel it.

‘In a few weeks I might have an answer,’ I said. ‘My Institute has access to a lot of people. Maybe we can figure this one out.’

‘You don’t have to go to all that trouble,’ she said. ‘The greatest living expert on early Christian mosaics of the Virgin is an Orthodox priest. We’re going to contact him, find out what kind of mosaic this is, where it might be found.’

‘We’ll do our own investigation too.’

She looked at me coolly. ‘You’ll get a copy of these images, I promise, Sean, but not yet. They’re part of our evidence chain. Alek’s death was a serious criminal act. We think these pictures have something to do with it.’

I knew where this was going. I’d be lucky if they gave me a copy of these in six months. My best friend had been murdered, I’d been shot at, and I was about to be cut out of what was going to happen next. I felt anger bubbling up inside me.

‘Do your superiors know that Alek and you were close?’ It was a long shot, but it was worth a try.

‘You’ve got to be joking, right?’ Her smile was gone. Her expression was glacier-like now.

I’d met some officials in the last two years who’d tried to protect me, tell me as little as possible, whenever I’d asked about Irene’s death. I wasn’t going to accept all that this time.

‘I bet the British tabloids would love to find out that one of Her Majesty’s Consular officials had been involved with a guy who was beheaded. Wasn’t there a campaign to discredit the Foreign Office a while back for bungling? I’m sure there’s plenty of journalists who’d run with this story.’

She looked calm, unmoved by my anger.

‘Alek was a good friend, not just a colleague. I will find out what happened to him. I’m not going to walk away from this. Neither is my Institute. Not now. Not ever.’

She shook her head slowly, indicating I was heading the wrong way. I didn’t care.

‘We consulted with the Greek Orthodox community when we planned this project. So it won’t be hard to find this expert of yours and a few of our own.’ I reached for the photo of the mosaic and picked it up.

‘And I’m sure the Turkish media would love to know about our research material being confiscated, an important UNESCO project being interfered with by the British government.’

Now she pointed a finger at me.

‘I don’t like being threatened, Sean. But I’ll put it down to what happened last night, for your sake.’

‘You can put it down to whatever you like, after I tell the media about this.’ I waved the photo in front of her face.

We looked at each other. Her expression was a mask of grim determination.

‘Your Institute is involved in something it shouldn’t have been,’ she said.

‘You’re talking crap. And you know it. But I don’t care what lies you make up about us. This is too personal.’ An annoying jingle from what sounded like an early morning TV show came up from the apartment below.

I felt a slight breeze on my skin. It barely alleviated the rising heat.

‘You’re upset,’ she said. ‘I’ll see what I can do. But I’m not making any promises.’ She stood up and went inside.

I waited. It was getting hotter by the minute and it was still only 8:30.

I shifted my chair around. A thick pad of lined green paper lay discarded under the table. I imagined Isabel or her colleagues sitting here taking notes.

She had a frown on her face when she came back half an hour later. ‘You can come with me, if you want. Someone thinks it might be a good idea to have you along.’

She sat down opposite me.

‘When are you going?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘I love being kept in the dark.’

She spoke slowly. ‘I can show you this.’ She placed a netbook on the table in front of me. The sound of a car beeping angrily echoed from the street below.

She pointed at the screen.

On it was an English language version of a Turkish newspaper’s website. The top of the screen read ‘Zamiyete – Breaking News’ in big letters.

Below the banner there was a picture of the iconic dome of Hagia Sophia. The headline underneath read:

‘Greek Plot to Steal Hagia Sophia’s Treasures.’ I pulled the screen towards me. The article was about Alek.

It claimed that a shadowy group of Greek businessmen had been trying for years to penetrate the tight security at Hagia Sophia, and that the man whose decapitated body had been found in its grounds was connected to them. It claimed that man had been murdered by fundamentalists who wanted Hagia Sophia to become a mosque again, against Atatürk’s explicit wishes.

The man who’d died, the article went on to say, had used the cover of working on an official UNESCO project to conduct unauthorised electronic tests at Hagia Sophia.

The article also claimed that there’d been speculation in the Greek media that the Labarum of Constantine, a banner used to rally the first Roman Christian legions, was one of the artefacts being sought by the Greek businessmen.

‘I thought you said your little project wasn’t controversial?’ She sounded tired.

What concerned me though was what they were saying about Alek.

‘I don’t know anything about Greek businessmen. And we weren’t doing any unauthorised electronic tests. How can they make this stuff up and get it published?’

A horrible sense of déjà vu came over me. There’d been speculation in the press in London too, after Irene had died. Some stories had claimed that she’d been killed by friendly fire. It had been totally unsettling. It was one of the reasons I’d gone out there.

‘You think they made it all up?’ Her tone was sceptical. ‘You know nothing about this Labarum thing?’

Her arms were folded.

‘I didn’t say that.’ There was no point in denying it. ‘Alek told me all about Constantine military standard, the Labarum thing, as you call it. He claimed …’ I hesitated. The craziness of what Alek had said when he was alive seemed spookier now that he was dead.

‘He claimed …’ Was this how he’d be remembered?

‘Do go on,’ said Isabel.

I sighed. ‘Alek said the Labarum of Constantine would reappear at a time of great change.’

That was enough for her. She raised her hands in the air as if she didn’t want to hear any more.

I shrugged. I’d always been a cynic when it came to Alek’s crazy theories. This one was only a bit stupider than the rest.

‘If he’d found even a part of this banner of Constantine, it’d be worth a mint, right?’ she said.

‘Yeah, but he wasn’t looking for it.’

‘Why do you think they’re talking about it?’ she said.

‘It’s one of the legends of Hagia Sophia. That’s enough reason for them to write this stuff. Some people like stirring things up. It sells newspapers. But whatever they say, there’s no way the Institute was part of a search for the Labarum. And whatever you say about him, I honestly don’t think Alek was either. He would have told me. We should sue that newspaper.’

She shook her head. ‘Not a good idea, unless you like spending a lot of time in hot court rooms.’

‘Well, their story is full of crap.’

‘So where did Alek take this photograph?’ She tapped her finger against the print lying on the table.

‘Like I said, I’ve no idea.’

I shaded my eyes. The sun was way too hot already. My skin was burning.

Despite my insistence that Alek was innocent, I knew I had to consider that there was a chance, if even an outside one, that he might have become involved in something he hadn’t told me about. Sure, he valued his job, but what about all the weird stuff he used to go on about?

Had he spread his crazy ideas about Constantine’s Labarum? Had someone persuaded him to look for it?

Isabel gazed out at sea. Then she turned to me.

‘Why did you go to Afghanistan after your wife died?’

Someone had been digging about me. But it was a question I’d answered many times before. I put my hands on the table, palms downward.

‘I went to Afghanistan because the Institute I work for got permission from the Ministry of Education there to do an aerial survey.’

‘You’re telling me it was a coincidence? Your wife had died out there six months before; then you get to go out there. Come on Sean, I’m not stupid.’

I pressed my palms down on the table. I’d heard this response before too. ‘What would you do if your husband was murdered, and no one was ever caught for it, never mind punished, and the whole incident ended up almost forgotten?’ I was getting louder, but I couldn’t help it, ‘If the whole thing is brushed away as if it never happened?

Her voice was softer when she responded. ‘I heard you almost got yourself killed. That you were lucky to be deported.’

I stared out to sea. We sat in silence.

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

What she’d said was all true. I’d managed to visit the nearest village to where Irene had been murdered by a roadside bomb. I’d ended up in a room with ten armed men and a nervous translator. I’d been hoping to find out which group had killed her. To get closure. Put a name to the bastards.

An American patrol was called in by a local guy. I was taken into custody, handcuffed, put on a plane out within seventy-two hours. They’d threatened to charge me too, but my visa to get into Afghanistan had been legitimate. I must have had ten people shouting in my face before the plane doors closed. I’d put lives at risk. I had to accept I shouldn’t have done it.

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

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

‘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.’