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.’
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—
A cracking, splintering noise ripped the air, sending the fire-crews and search-and-rescue teams scurrying for safety. Then, a second or two later, the hotel’s left-hand wall simply sheared away and toppled forwards into the general rubble, bringing the rear wall down too, throwing up more clouds of noxious dust and reducing still further any hope of finding survivors.
Ambulances were now arriving in large numbers. He led a pair of paramedics down the hill. While one of them treated the Peugeot driver, he and the other strapped Mustafa onto a stretcher and carried him back up to the top, loaded him onto an ambulance. He asked to go along with him, but the paramedic gave an expressive little shrug. It wasn’t an ambulance right now, but a body-cart; and they needed all of it. ‘Did he live around here?’ the man asked.
‘Istanbul,’ answered Iain. He nodded at the wrecked hotel. ‘He was staying there.’
‘Wife? Family?’
‘I’ll call them myself,’ said Iain.
‘We still need to know who they are.’
