City of the Lost

CITY OF THE LOST

WILL ADAMS

To Hattie and Mark

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Epilogue

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by Will Adams

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Alashiya, Eastern Cyprus, 805 BC

She’d thought she’d have till dawn, but it wasn’t to be. They came at dusk instead. From the ramparts of her palace, she watched them landing on the beach. Between the breaking of the waves, she could hear the muffled roars of their triumph and the jubilant clashing of spears on shields as they saw they were unopposed and realized that her people had abandoned her.

She didn’t blame them for that abandonment. She’d brought it upon herself through neglect of her queenly duties. What cut her, what truly cut her, was that the man she’d neglected them for had abandoned her too. She could see his fugitive sails still, the splash of frantic oars. She thought scornfully: Aeneas of the Teukrians indeed! No doubt he’d be telling himself comforting lies about how Sicherbas was her brother and could therefore be trusted to treat her honourably. She wanted, suddenly, for him to be confronted with the brutal truth of it. And, with him already so far distant, there was only one way to achieve that.

It was time.

Her palace was on three levels. The subterranean treasuries and storerooms, hewn out of raw bedrock. A ground floor of grand chambers with walls of ashlar masonry and roofs of cedar timbers shipped in from her childhood homeland. And, finally, the upper quarters of wood and thatch. The bottom level would never burn; the top would burn easily. It was the middle floor, therefore, that needed work.

Her sister Anna was waiting below with two lit torches. She, at least, had no illusions about what their brother would do if they fell into his power. Nor did she have any stomach for letting him regain his claimed treasure. That was why, when word had first reached this new city of theirs that he was on his way with his full fleet, pledging terrible revenges upon them both, they’d sent every man they had to chop down the surrounding forests and fill these rooms with timber.

She and Anna touched their torches to the largest stack now, then stood back to watch the contagion spread, flaming embers spitting and drifting to neighbouring chambers, where new fires quickly started. The smoke made her eyes water so that tears spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them angrily away lest Anna mistake them for self-pity. When the heat grew too much for them to bear, they retreated to the treasury steps, then hugged and wished each other well on their respective journeys. Once Anna was gone, she went alone down the steps into the vaults, fetched her sword from her armoury. His sword, more properly, for it was what they’d exchanged instead of vows. She used its blade and hilt to pry and hammer away the stone chocks, releasing cascades of sand from the walls, allowing the vast marble slab to sink slowly beneath its own unimaginable weight until it slotted neatly into place above her, sealing these steps off forever.

One entrance closed. One more to go.

Through dark and twisting corridors, she hurried to and down the long staircase. Usually, when she stepped out into the great cavern at the foot, it was already aglow with the myriad constellations of oil lamps in the walls. But her handmaidens had left with Anna and the others, to found their next new city on the Libyan coast, beyond even her brother’s vengeful reach. And so, for once, this place looked gloomy rather than magical. She closed and barred the heavy bronze doors behind her. Now for the second entrance: the twisting cave passage down which she and Aeneas had first discovered this place while seeking refuge from a storm. The mouth was high above the chamber floor, reached only by a staircase pegged to the left-hand wall, where the camber was easiest. She climbed it to the top, then crossed the short bridge to the narrow slit in the limestone. She ducked her head as she passed through it into the shaft beyond, then climbed the crude steps hacked in the rock up to and beyond the trap-doors.

High above her, the night sky flickered orange. Her palace was ablaze. Her heart twisted with a kind of bitter triumph, knowing her lover couldn’t help but see this pyre as he fled his cowardly way. But she had no time to waste. She hacked at the two ropes until they both cleaved and slithered off upwards like startled snakes, then stood there for a moment, panting from the exertion. Rumblings began, as though Mother Earth herself were hungry. Her engineers had warned her to be swift. She climbed back below the trap-doors then closed them flat across the shaft and fixed them in place with their locking-bars. She was barely done when it began, a soft pattering that abruptly turned into a thunderous deluge before being so muffled by the sand already fallen that it grew silent again.

Her tomb was sealed. As was her fate.

Back across the bridge and down to the cavern floor. She held her torch to the staircase until it caught and began to burn with gratifying vigour, a spiral of fire spreading gloriously up and around the gallery. Wood and rope fizzed and crackled; steps and struts clattered blazing to the ground. With no more need for her torch, she tossed it into the general conflagration then went to their bed and set the pommel of his sword into a corner so that it couldn’t slip. Then she tore open her robes and pressed the tip of the blade sharp and cold against her stomach, pointing upwards beneath her breastbone towards her heart.

A last hesitation as she looked down. How many times had they lain here together? How many times had he talked of sailing towards the setting sun, of founding a new city of his own somewhere across the great sea? He’d called it destiny. She’d called it avoiding marriage. Now he’d got his chance at last. And no doubt, if it went well for him, his entourage would tell stories to make heroes of themselves, as survivors always did. But he, at least, would know the truth of it.

And, one day, maybe the world would too.

ONE

I

Daphne, Southern Turkey

They said this was where the Trojan War had started. They said that it was here, among Daphne’s wooded hillsides, glades and waterfalls, that Paris had awarded his golden apple to Aphrodite, rather than to Athena or to Hera, thus winning himself Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, and precipitating the Greek armada and ten years of brutal, bloody war into the bargain.

Iain Black smiled as he took another sip of his sweet strong tea. Men going crazy over a beautiful woman. How far the world had come. ‘Now her,’ he said, nodding along and across the road to the steps outside the black-glass fronted Daphne International Hotel. ‘She’s more like it.’

Mustafa glanced over his shoulder, snorted in amusement. ‘What is it with you and scrawny women?’ he asked. Then he flushed as he realized what he’d said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—’

‘It’s okay,’ Iain assured him. ‘Anyway, she’s not scrawny. She’s elegant. There’s a difference.’

‘Elegant!’ retorted Mustafa. ‘Can’t you see what she’s wearing?’

Iain laughed. He liked her clothes, the student chic of them, the way they showed off her figure without seeming to. A plain blue sweatshirt, baggy cream cheesecloth trousers, well-worn tan sneakers. Silver rings on her fingers and her left thumb, a back-to-front baseball cap through which poked unruly tufts of her straw-coloured hair, and a pair of John Lennon shades with shiny dark blue lenses. ‘Give her a break,’ he said. ‘She’s on holiday.’

‘A woman should always make the most of herself,’ said Mustafa. ‘Especially a woman who can afford to stay in a place like that.’

‘You’re a chauvinist and a snob, my friend,’ smiled Iain.

‘Yes,’ agreed Mustafa.

The woman was carrying a tattered blue-vinyl day bag. She now half drew a bulky manila envelope from it so that she could check its address. She put it back, looked both ways, turned left and headed away from them, towards the main road. Iain watched her out of sight with a mild pang of regret, not for her in particular so much as for the companionship of an attractive woman. It had been too long; that was the fact of it. And he was ready again, he suddenly sensed it inside himself. Yet this was hardly the time or place. With Butros Bejjani and his entourage on their way, he needed his game-head on.

He checked his laptop again, the feed coming in from the various cameras they’d set up to monitor the approach roads and the hotel lobby. No sign of them yet. ‘How are we for time?’ he asked.

‘Another half hour at least,’ said Mustafa.

Iain nodded at their empty glasses. ‘More tea?’

‘Need you ask?’

He picked up their glasses and took them inside, the door banging closed behind him. An elderly thin German woman with hennaed hair, silver jewellery and an embroidered crimson scarf was agonizing between juices. When finally she’d plumped for lemon, Iain gave his own order and asked for the drinks to be taken out. Then he headed for the rest-room. He was on his way in when it happened, a thunderous boom and the rest-room door slamming sideways into him like a small truck, throwing him down onto the white tiled floor. He rose with difficulty onto hands and knees. His ears were muffled yet he could still hear alarms outside, people screaming. The years of training and service kicked in, so that instead of panic he felt the familiar calm coldness spread through him, almost as though he was watching it happen to someone else. He tried to stand but his balance was off and he fell back down. He didn’t let this bother him but kept trying until he succeeded and made his way unsteadily out. There was glass, debris and dust everywhere. The waiter was down behind the counter, groaning softly. The German woman was on her side, her scarf splayed like blood around her throat and head. Her eyes were open but dazed and he couldn’t see any injuries, for she’d been protected from the worst of the blast by the solid side wall which—

Mustafa.

He hurried outside. A glimpse of hell, daytime turned to night by a canopy of noxious black smoke. A blue van with shattered windows was blazing furiously. Dust and fragments of stone whispered down around him like dry rain; and even as he watched, a misshapen and charred sheet of once-white metal crashed from a nearby roof onto the cobbles. His eyes watered with dust and toxic smoke. He had to squint to see. The café’s forecourt had been cleared as if by a giant arm. He went to the edge, looked down. The air was clearer here. Three cars had tumbled all the way down the steep slope to the tree-line of the valley beneath. Tables, chairs, sunshades and other debris were scattered everywhere. Great chunks of rubble, the tossed cabers of telephone poles, the black serpents of their wires. And there was Mustafa, two-thirds of the way down. The gradient was so steep and the ground so loose that he set off little avalanches with every step, earth cascading around his ankles. Mustafa was on his back, wheezing from the effort to breathe. His cheek was lacerated and bleeding and his left arm looked badly broken below the elbow. Iain knelt beside him. He’d dealt with trauma often enough in the army, but that didn’t make it easy. He unzipped Mustafa’s leather jacket. His white cotton shirt beneath was sodden with blood. A piece of shrapnel had torn into his friend’s gut and gone to grievous work inside, releasing that hateful sick sweet smell. He looked up the slope in hope of help, but there was no one, he was on his own. A shredded cotton tablecloth fluttered like defeat a little way off. He made a wad of it, pressed it over Mustafa’s wounds, bleakly and increasingly aware that it was futile, a gesture, that his friend was losing blood too fast for anything short of a miracle to save him. And he didn’t believe in miracles.

Mustafa groaned and opened his eyes. He lay there for a moment, taking it in, assimilating what had happened to him, what was about to happen. He felt for and took Iain’s hand, looked him in the eyes. ‘My wife,’ he said softly. ‘My daughters.’

‘You’re going to be fine,’ Iain told him. ‘Help’s on its way.’

He shook his head. ‘My wife,’ he said again, more urgently. ‘My daughters.’

Iain blinked back tears. ‘I’ll see they’re all right. I give you my word on it.’

Mustafa nodded faintly, satisfied by this pledge. ‘Who did this?’ he asked. ‘Was this us?’

Iain grimaced. For eighteen months now, Turkey had been caught up in a spiral of violence that approached a state of war. Not just the overspill from Syria, a few miles south of here, but also from Kurdish separatists, Islamicists, Armenians and even Cypriots who’d taken advantage of the growing chaos to press their own particular causes. Yet that this should happen outside this hotel today of all days was too big a coincidence to ignore. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Find out,’ said Mustafa.

‘I promise.’

‘Find out and make them …’ He grimaced in pain or shock. He gave a little cry and clenched Iain’s hand tight. His left leg twitched briefly, as though trying to kick off a slipper. Then he stiffened and his body arched for a moment or two before something seemed to puncture inside him and he relaxed again and was still.

II

Georges Bejjani was tapping a cigarette from its soft pack when the bomb exploded a short distance ahead. He didn’t see the blast itself, for it took place on a side road and thus was obscured by the black glass exterior of the Daphne International Hotel. And, because it was a fraction of a second before the first sound reached them, he thought momentarily that he was suffering some kind of weird hallucination, perhaps an optical illusion caused by sunlight and the midday haze. But then a silver 4×4 came back-flipping out onto the road and he heard the sudden thunder of it, and alarms began tripping all around them as a canopy of thick black smoke spread low across the sky.

Faisal slammed on the brakes, began instantly to turn. He was trained, after all, for such emergencies. But the traffic had been squeezed into a single lane by an unloading lorry and an oncoming van screeched to a halt right beside them, pinning them in. A fist of stone punched the passenger-side window, buckling the frame and turning the glass seawater green for a fraction of a second before it shattered and fell away. Debris pattered and then pounded upon their roof like a sudden squall of hail. Even while it was still coming down, Georges whipped out his mobile to call his elder brother. ‘Bomb,’ he said, the moment Michel answered. ‘Get Father back to the boat.’

‘Are you okay?’ asked Michel.

‘We’re fine. Just get him safe.’

‘On our way now,’ Michel assured him. ‘Was it for us?’

‘I don’t know. It went off ten seconds ago. But it was right outside the hotel.’

‘Then it was for us,’ said Michel.

‘I’ll check into it.’

‘Be careful.’

Georges snorted. ‘Count on it,’ he said. He turned to Faisal and his bodyguard Sami. ‘Let’s take a look,’ he said. ‘But we’re out of here before the police show. Okay?’

They ran forward in a crouch, wary of a second device or of gunmen waiting to ambush the first responders. Childhood in Lebanon was a harsh teacher. Dazed people appeared like a zombie army from the smoke, clothes torn and ashen, faces bloody and smeared. The smoke grew black as night, choking and eye-burning. They passed cars on their roofs and sides, reached the front of the stricken hotel. Only the right-hand side of the road here had been developed, affording hotel guests uninterrupted views of Daphne’s gorgeous valley from the balconies. But the bomb had chomped a vast bite from this road, tarmac and hardcore tumbling in a great rubble avalanche down the hillside. The resultant crater had also been partially filled with shattered black glass, broken masonry and other debris from the hotel itself. A forearm protruded from beneath a chunk of grey concrete at such a grotesque angle that Georges couldn’t be sure it was even still attached. The block was too heavy for him alone, but Faisal and Sami helped him lift it high enough to reveal the man beneath. They looked away, sickened, let the masonry fall back down.

In the distance, sirens. Police, medics, maybe even the army. They were near to a war zone here, and this whole region was prone to earthquakes. They’d have experts and heavy lifting machinery. Staying here wouldn’t help anyone, would only invite the kinds of questions he wished to avoid. He needed to find answers before returning to the boat, but this wasn’t the place. Sami looked meaningfully at him. He gave the nod and they ran together back to the car, then pulled a sharp turn in the road and drove away even as the first emergency vehicles raced past them to the site.

III

The shameful truth was that fine music bored Deniz Baştürk. Two years in the steelworks had done damage to his ears and left him with coarse tastes: music to dance to, to drink to, lyrics made for bellowing. When his son Orhan had told him that he wanted to transfer to the Ankara State Conservatory to study it, therefore, he’d thought – or perhaps more accurately hoped – it was a joke.

But such were the perils of falling in love with an artistic woman.

On the concert platform, his son packed his oboe away into its case, took a zurna from his music-bag instead. He’d been granted the rare honour of choosing a piece to perform, to showcase his own talent. But what it was, Baştürk didn’t know. He frowned inquisitively at his wife Sophia; she gave him in return only an enigmatic smile. The lights dimmed a little. The players took up their instruments. His son put the zurna’s reed to his lips, readied his fingers for the first note. Baştürk found himself tensing, hope fighting fear. If this was what his son wanted, it was what he wanted too. But he’d learned the hard way, these past six months, that aspiration wasn’t the same thing as ability.

The first notes, so soft he could barely hear them. Baştürk made sure to keep his hands and expression relaxed, but his feet were clenched like fists beneath his seat until with a shock he not only recognized the piece but then quickly realized that Orhan had mastered it completely, that he was good; and now the other instruments joined in and the music began to soar raucously and joyously and he knew it was going to be okay, his son would have the life he coveted, and he sagged a little with the relief of it, and he took and squeezed his wife’s hand, and he felt quite ridiculously proud.

Now that he could relax, the music went to work on him. It was a personal favourite of his, conjuring childhood memories of his own father, of being carried on his shoulders at protest marches, of watching him holding union crowds enthralled with his fierce rhetoric. Then the music hit its first melancholic passage, and it took him with it. For it had been a mixed blessing to have such a man for a father, dooming him to a life of falling short. And he had fallen short, he knew. He’d let his father down. He’d let his wife and son down. He’d let his country down. He felt, again, the almost crippling sense of inadequacy that had blighted him so often since he’d started his new job.

A door banged behind him. He looked irritably around at this disruption of his son’s performance. Shadows conferred in those urgent low voices that were somehow doubly intrusive for being hushed. On stage, the players hesitated, uncertain whether to treat this as a rehearsal or a full performance, before staggering to an ugly, ragged stop. Baştürk slapped his knee in anger then got to his feet. ‘I thought I said no interruptions.’

‘Forgive me, Prime Minister,’ said Gonka, his senior aide, hurrying down the aisle to him. ‘But there’s been an incident. A bomb.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Not another.’

‘I’m afraid so,’ she nodded. ‘In Daphne. And I wouldn’t have disturbed you even so, but the press have found out you’re here. And they’re already gathering outside.’

TWO

I

There was nothing more Iain could do for Mustafa, and others might need his help. He made his way down the slope to the cars that had rolled to its foot. The first two were empty, but a middle-aged woman was strapped unconscious behind the wheel of the third, a green Peugeot settled on its roof. He couldn’t see any flames but its interior was clouding with smoke. The doors were all jammed shut, but its passenger-side window had partially buckled so he smashed it with a stone until it caved. He took a deep breath then wriggled inside. He released her seatbelt, took her under her arms, hauled her out and laid her on her back. Her pulse was weak but she was alive and breathing unaided.

He clambered back up the hillside. It was steep enough to make his calves and hams ache. Shrieks of pain and wails of grief greeted him. The smoke had cleared to reveal the blast’s full devastation. A great bite had been taken out of the road in front of the Daphne International Hotel and its black-glass frontage had shattered and fallen away, exposing a honeycomb interior of ruined rooms, of broken baths and toilets dangling grotesquely from twisted pipes. The scale of damage, and the lack of any residual smell of cheap explosive, suggested to him military-grade ordnance. And not some stray shell from the Syrian war: it would take a large missile or a truckload of Semtex to wreak this much—