thanks.’
‘Your people say anything else?’
‘Nothing.’
The American reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. He appeared to read a message, but kept the contents to himself. Dishonour among spies. HITCHCOCK was an SIS Joe, but the courier, the exfil, the plan to pick Shakhouri up in Doğubayazit and fly him out of Van, that was all Langley. Wallinger would happily have run the risk of putting him on a plane from Imam Khomeini to Paris and lived with the consequences. He heard the snap of the American’s lighter and caught a backdraught of tobacco smoke, then turned to the mountains once again.
The tank had now parked at the side of the mountain road, shuffling from side to side, doing the Tiananmen twist. The gun turret swivelled north-east so that the barrel was pointing in the direction of Mount Ararat. Right on cue, Landau said: ‘Maybe they found Noah’s Ark up there,’ but Wallinger wasn’t in the mood for jokes.
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Then, at last, he saw it. A tiny bottle-green dot, barely visible against the parched brown landscape, moving towards the tank. The vehicle was so small it was hard to follow through the lens of the binoculars. Wallinger blinked, cleared his vision, looked again.
‘They’re here.’
Landau came to the window. ‘Where?’
Wallinger passed him the binoculars. ‘You see the tank?’
‘Yup.’
‘Follow the road up …’
‘… OK. Yeah. I see them.’
Landau put down the binoculars and reached for the video camera. He flipped off the lens cap and began filming the Mercedes through the window. Within a minute, the vehicle was close enough to be picked out with the naked eye. Wallinger could see the car speeding along the plain, heading towards the tank. There was half a kilometre between them. Three hundred metres. Two.
Wallinger saw that the tank barrel was still pointing away from the road, up towards Ararat. What happened next could not be explained. As the Mercedes drove past the tank, there appeared to be an explosion in the rear of the vehicle that lifted up the back axle and propelled the car forward in a skid with no sound. The Mercedes quickly became wreathed in black smoke and then rolled violently from the road as flames burst from the engine. There was a second explosion, then a larger ball of flame. Landau swore very quietly. Wallinger stared in disbelief.
‘What the hell happened?’ the American said, lowering the camera.
Wallinger turned from the window.
‘You tell me,’ he replied.
Ebru Eldem could not remember the last time she had taken the day off. ‘A journalist,’ her father had once told her, ‘is always working’. And he was right. Life was a permanent story. Ebru was always sniffing out an angle, always felt that she was on the brink of missing out on a byline. When she spoke to the cobbler who repaired the heels of her shoes in Arnavutköy, he was a story about dying small businesses in Istanbul. When she chatted to the good-looking stallholder from Konya who sold fruit in her local market, he was an article about agriculture and economic migration within Greater Anatolia. Every number in her phone book – and Ebru reckoned she had better contacts than any other journalist of her age and experience in Istanbul – was a story waiting to open up. All she needed was the energy and the tenacity to unearth it.
For once, however, Ebru had set aside her restlessness and ambition and, in a pained effort to relax, if only for a single day, turned off her mobile phone and set her work to one side. That was quite a sacrifice! From eight o’clock in the morning – the lie-in, too, was a luxury – to nine o’clock at night, Ebru avoided all emails and Facebook messages and lived the life of a single woman of twenty-nine with no ties to work and no responsibilities other than to her own relaxation and happiness. Granted, she had spent most of the morning doing laundry and cleaning up the chaos of her apartment, but thereafter she had enjoyed a delicious lunch with her friend Banu at a restaurant in Beşiktaş, shopped for a new dress on Istiklal, bought and read ninety pages of the new Elif Şafak novel in her favourite coffee house in Cihangir, then met Ryan for martinis at Bar Bleu.
In the five months that they had known one another, their relationship had grown from a casual, no-strings-attached affair to something more serious. When they had first met, their get-togethers had taken place almost exclusively in the bedroom of Ryan’s apartment in Tarabya, a place where – Ebru was sure – he took other girls, but none with whom he had such a connection, none with whom he would be so open and raw. She could sense it not so much by the words that he whispered into her ear as they made love, but more by the way that he touched her and looked into her eyes. Then, as they had grown to know one another, they had spoken a great deal about their respective families, about Turkish politics, the war in Syria, the deadlock in Congress – all manner of subjects. Ebru had been surprised by Ryan’s sensitivity to political issues, his knowledge of current affairs. He had introduced her to his friends. They had talked about travelling together and even meeting one another’s parents.
Ebru knew that she was not beautiful – well, certainly not as beautiful as some of the girls looking for husbands and sugar daddies in Bar Bleu – but she had brains and passion and men had always responded to those qualities in her. When she thought about Ryan, she thought about his difference to all the others. She wanted the heat of physical contact, of course – a man who knew how to be with her and how to please her – but she also craved his mind and his energy, the way he treated her with such affection and respect.
Today was a typical day in their relationship. They drank too many cocktails at Bar Bleu, went for dinner at Meyra, talked about books, the recklessness of Hamas and Netanyahu. Then they stumbled back to Ryan’s apartment at midnight, fucking as soon as they had closed the door. The first time was in the lounge, the second time in his bedroom with the kilims bunched up on the floor and the shade still not fixed on the standing lamp beside the armchair. Ebru had lain there afterwards in his arms, thinking that she would never want for another man. Finally she had found someone who understood her and made her feel entirely herself.
The smell of Ryan’s breath and the sweat of his body were still all over Ebru as she slipped out of the building just after two o’clock, Ryan snoring obliviously. She took a taxi to Arnavutköy, showered as soon as she was home, and climbed into bed, intending to return to work just under four hours later.
Burak Turan of the Turkish National Police reckoned you could divide people into two categories: those who didn’t mind getting up early in the morning; and those who did. As a rule for life it had served him well. The people who were worth spending time with didn’t go to sleep straight after Muhteşem Yüzyil and jump out of bed with a smile on their face at half-past six in the morning. You had to watch people like that. They were control freaks, workaholics, religious nuts. Turan considered himself to be a member of the opposite category of person: the type who liked to extract the best out of life; who was creative and generous and good in a crowd. After finishing work, for example, he liked to wind down with a tea and a chat at a club on Mantiklal near the precinct station. His mother, typically, would cook him dinner, then he’d head out to a bar and get to bed by midnight or one, sometimes later. Otherwise, when did people find the time to enjoy themselves? When did they meet girls? If you were always concentrating on work, if
