style="font-size:15px;"> ‘You understand the term?’ Ertas said, scathing.
‘I was brought up a Catholic,’ Tallis gasped, eyes watering. That was true. His Croatian grandmother had insisted on it.
‘And now?’
Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. ‘I’m lapsed,’ Tallis grunted. The pain was searing.
Ertas frowned incomprehensibly. Koroglu explained in Turkish then let Tallis go with a final squeeze of his genitals.
Ertas turned his eyes to Tallis. ‘You have not converted to Islam?’
Jesus, now Tallis knew exactly what they were driving at. After the London bombing of 7/7, many nations, the USA in particular, were critical of Britain for spawning its very own breed of homegrown suicide bombers. Originally termed ‘clean skins’ by the British security services, it had since been revealed that the culprits had already come to the attention of MI5 and were associates of those later convicted of a fertiliser plot that amongst other targets would have had the Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent blown to smithereens. As much as the British Government was viewed as an important ally, its citizens were regarded with a great deal of suspicion. Tallis had just fallen under that particular cloak of distrust.
‘Look, guys, I already explained. You have this all…’ Tallis shot out of the chair, threw his head back, heard the sickening crunch as it connected with Koroglu then made a grab for Ertas. Knocking the captain to the ground, he made a dive for the door, tore it open and ran.
The level was approximately three hundred metres long with a metal staircase leading down. Tallis ran the full length, took and charged down the steps. Christ knew where he was heading. All he knew was that if he wanted to breathe air again, see the sun, he had to get out. He’d heard too much about places where only the people holding you knew you were there.
The building opened onto another level: gangway to the left; railings on the right. Below was a long row of openbarred cells with men tightly caged together. An alarm sounded, the noise triggering them into action. Immediately, they started shouting abuse, rattling against the bars of their prison, jeering as a group of armed officers speeded past. Tallis kept running, muscles in his legs knotted, bare feet pounding, oblivious to the sound of shouts and clattering feet behind him as he leapt down the next staircase. On hitting the bottom, a guard, younger than the rest, raised his weapon, but Tallis twisted away, the ensuing shot missing him by a whisker.
More men now. More shouts. Tallis zigzagged as much as he could in the confined space, eyes to the front, focused on the end set of doors, wondering how he was going to get through, how to operate the security lock, how…
The doors snapped open. Koroglu stepped out, blackeyed, mean and moody. Didn’t look like a man to bargain with. Tallis put both his hands up in a defensive gesture. ‘All right, let’s be cool about this,’ he said.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Koroglu snarled before delivering a knockout blow.
6
THE cell in which Tallis surfaced was no improvement on the original. Concussed by the second serious blow to his head in less than twenty-four hours, he still, mercifully, retained a sense of direction. If the previous guest suite was located on the third floor down, he guessed his current quarters were four floors. It stank of human excrement and despair. The single light hanging from the ceiling only further illuminated the hopelessness of his situation. Same old squat hole. Same lack of water. Thin layer of cardboard replaced by a stone plinth for reasons that soon became obvious—his cellmates were a small family of rats. The way his stomach was growling from lack of food, the best thing he could do was kill and eat them. Welcome to the Turkish Hilton, Tallis thought, taking immediate advantage of his new bed.
Resting back, hands tucked behind his head, he replayed Koroglu’s last words. Shut the fuck up! Pure Brooklyn. CIA or FBI, Tallis wondered, or some other covert organisation that the world knew nothing about? He didn’t like to consider the political implications, but he had to. Surely the Americans weren’t conducting their war on terror from the bowels of a Turkish detention centre? He couldn’t envisage the Turkish government allowing it. Yet stranger things had happened. Governments the world over passed off dodgy or ambiguous dealing with regimes not to their taste with phrases like in the national interest, real politic, or the more recently popular in the interests of national security.
Any of the above usually involved obscene heaps of money, sometimes armaments, often the granting of power and influence. Poor old Turkey had been stonewalled by the Europeans for so long, why be surprised if they looked to America to win them some grace and favour? That the Americans used their considerable funds to oil the wheels of various intelligence services throughout the world, Pakistan being one of them, was common knowledge. Like Pakistan, Turkey was also open season to religious fundamentalism. Lately, the political situation had grown considerably worse.
He let out a knackered sigh. And where did all this leave him, apart from being stuck in this rodent-infested gulag? They, whoever they were, obviously thought he was someone he wasn’t, which was true, but not the someone they thought he was. He very much doubted his cover was shot. If so, they’d have come out and said so. What worried him far more was their mistaken intelligence about his connection to the dead Moroccan. They clearly didn’t think he’d killed him. If the bloke had been that serious a threat, and they suspected him of being involved in his death, why not treat him like an ordinary criminal, or even someone who’d done them a favour? No, they had him down for an associate.
He rolled over, tried to get comfortable, finding it virtually impossible. The skin on his back felt sandpapered from being dragged unceremoniously along the concrete floor. Escape seemed less possible now. His only hope was that when they took him away to do God knew what, he’d be presented with another opportunity. He wasn’t overly optimistic. In the absence of having any better ideas, he decided to try and sleep.
Napier, Morello, Ertas, Koroglu, all puppets and players in his dreams, clamoured for his attention, each morphing into another in such a cacophony of sound and vision he wasn’t sure whether his waking thoughts were part of his subconscious or the here and now. Gingerly opening one eye, he swore the walls were shaking. A deep rumbling sound appeared to be coming from the centre of the earth. He sat bolt upright. The light above his head flashed, jittered and cut out. Then followed a thunderous noise, which shook the entire cell, followed by popping, not like gunfire, but as if the planet was splitting. Tallis threw himself under the bed. The rats had the same idea. The walls were really shaking now, the earth shuddering. Lights flashed back on, as if a generator was kicking in. Before his eyes he could see the floor near the makeshift latrine begin to lift and tear, then open.
The cell resembled a house of moving floors like he’d seen at a fairground when he’d been a kid.
No doubt about it, this was an earthquake. Gripping the side of the stone plinth, he hung on, determined not to be lost to Mother Earth, his greatest fear being buried alive. Nothing felt fixed and what little there was in the cell was moving. Everything that had seemed quiet was dancing with noise. Shouts and screams rent the air. Tallis rolled himself into a ball, mute, every sinew in his body tensed for action. When the wall nearest the door started to yaw, crumble and disintegrate, he seized the opportunity and lunged through the gap.
Out into the corridor, Tallis saw a vision of chaos. Two officers were lying on the ground, their heads mashed in by fallen masonry. Tallis checked their pulses. Both dead. Either a bomb had gone off or, as he’d originally suspected, there’d been an earthquake. If the latter, it seemed to have lessened in potency. Aftershocks, however, could prove as powerful and devastating to already weakened structures. He needed
