The Istanbul Puzzle (19 page)

Sergeant Mowlam paused the stream of text messages flowing across his screen. The one he was interested in had two red stars against it. The first indicated it was related to a current threat. The second indicated that a fatality was involved.

He clicked on the link. Another screen opened. He began reading a translated summary of a Turkish Interior Ministry emergency warning notice.

‘What the hell is this?’ I said. Musty air flowed over us.

The space beyond the door stretched away into a gloomy distance of dark shadows and evenly spaced columns holding up the roof. This wasn’t just a room. This was a vast underground cavern, similar to the Basilica Cistern not far away, used all the way back to ancient times for storing water. But there was no water here.

Bright bare bulbs were suspended crudely from the ceiling near where the door was, but further away there were no lights at all. This space looked even older than the one we’d come through. It’s ceiling was lower too and the thin pillars gave it a crypt-like feel.

I looked down. The floor was a faded mosaic with an endless chequerboard pattern. It stretched away into the distance between the red marble columns. They were about twenty foot high and six inches thick and were spaced equally, maybe twenty feet apart. It was like looking into a wood of young trees.

‘This place is the find of the century,’ said Isabel.

Nearby, on a metal table, was a small black-and-white LCD screen. It was turned off. It had one red switch on its front panel. I pressed it. The screen came on.

The image on the screen was a view of the stairs from the security camera we’d turned away from us only minutes before. The camera angle was weird too, not straight, as if whoever had moved it back had positioned it wrong. I couldn’t see the door we’d come through, but I could see polished black boots and baggy black trousers. A guard was standing to attention on the stairs. They hadn’t arrived with the locksmith yet.

Then something struck me. Did the fact that the guard was wearing black trousers mean that he wasn’t one of the ordinary Topkapi security detail I’d seen earlier? Was this guy connected with the people doing the exploration work down here? If he was, our chances of experiencing Alek’s fate had just risen by a factor of a hundred.

‘Let’s close this door,’ I said.

We grabbed the door and pushed it closed.

Isabel’s skin was shining like a mannequin’s in the yellowy light.

‘Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to keep all this hidden,’ I said.

‘I wonder why,’ she said.

The unease I’d felt since I’d seen that guard was growing. We had to get out of here, and quickly.

I started walking towards an open area straight ahead, about the size of a tennis court. I was hoping we’d see a far wall beyond it, another door.

Through the columns I’d seen aluminium tables. I ran towards them. Isabel followed.

The tables were bare. There were four of them. One was upside down. It looked as if someone had cleared the place out.

Beyond them, at the centre of another open area, there was something on the floor. I ran toward it. It was a zodiac circle pattern in a three-foot wide grating made of interwoven bands of black and white marble.

‘There was a lot of blood to be washed away in old temples,’ said Isabel.

‘Messy,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t have liked to be a slave cleaning this place up.’

I could see a red brick wall now, about fifty feet further on. It was almost totally in shadow. But there was no door.

I headed towards the wall, running now. Was there another way out? The pillars in the row in front of the wall were thicker than the others, maybe a foot across. Something about them looked familiar. Unsettlingly familiar.

Then it hit me. The photo on the Internet from the video of Alek’s beheading was coming alive in front of me.

I reached the thicker pillars. I didn’t want to be here, but I was being pulled forwards, like iron to a magnet. I felt cold.

The only sound I could hear now was my own breathing. I looked along the row of pillars, saw a dark stain below the next one along. Was this where it had happened? I walked over to it, bent down and touched the stain. It was bone dry and crumbled a little as I rubbed at it.

Images flooded my mind. I saw Alek lying in the morgue, blue-veined, his head oddly distant from his body. Then I saw Irene in her coffin, the top of her head covered by a cream veil. Then that picture of the poor receptionist. So many deaths. So much evil. I wanted the images to go away. But they wouldn’t.

‘They usually drug them before…’ Isabel’s voice trailed off.

Her hand was on my shoulder.

‘They mustn’t give a damn, leaving a stain like this,’ I said.

‘They probably haven’t finished cleaning up yet.’ She gripped my shoulder tight. ‘Come on, Sean. I can get the Consulate involved now. I’ve got pictures. It’s the proof we need. The Turkish authorities will go berserk when they find out what’s been going on down here, right under their noses.’

I could feel malevolence all around us, as if it was alive.

‘Which way should we go?’ she said.

The forest of pillars ran away ahead of us into darkness. There was no visible way out. We could follow the wall, see if there was another door somewhere, but which way should we go, left or right?

A low creak echoing through the hall answered my question. It only took a second to work out what it meant.

‘Someone’s coming,’ hissed Isabel.

Her face was pale. ‘What do we do?’ she said.

‘You won’t like this.’

Her eyebrows shot up.

‘Follow me.’

I ran, crouching, to the marble grating in the floor. A low grinding noise echoed through the hall. They were pushing the doors open. We had seconds.

I reached down. The marble grating reminded me of a manhole cover. I pulled at it. It wouldn’t budge.

‘We’re going to go down here,’ I said.

The marble cover was cold. I pulled, bracing my knee on one side.

‘What’s down there?’ she hissed. She pushed a pebble through one of the holes. I didn’t hear it hit anything.

‘Just help me,’ I said. My fingers were covered in slime. I pulled again, harder this time.

Isabel went to the other side.

‘There’s a catch. There’s gotta be,’ I said. ‘See if you can find it.’ I moved my fingers under the edge of the grating, felt around. The slime on the underside was thicker in some places than others.

‘Found it.’ I pushed at something sticking out.

We pulled again. I half stood. The grating moved. We slid it sideways. The grinding noise had stopped. They wouldn’t see us straight away, but it wouldn’t take them long if they were searching.

The hole looked like a well. My skin crawled as I thought of what might be down there. There was a sour smell coming out of it too.

‘Look, handholds,’ I whispered. ‘Come on. You go first. I can pull the grating back.’

‘I can’t,’ she said softly. ‘It’s horrible.’

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘It’s not that bad. I’m not going to watch you being beheaded.’

I looked up. I’d heard a noise. I couldn’t see the door we’d come in by, because of the pillars, but I could see the tables. When they reached them they would see us.

She put her legs over the edge, reached down, grabbed the handholds. She looked terrified, her eyes were wide, but she swung herself down.

I glanced in the direction of the tables. There was still no one there.

I pulled the grating halfway over the hole as noiselessly as I could. Then I swung my legs over, and took a deep breath.

I went down. The sickly smell was stronger suddenly. A rotting sourness engulfed me.

Isabel had turned the torch on and was pointing it downwards. The beam of light bounced around the encircling brick wall. I had an awful feeling I was being sucked into something which wouldn’t be easy to get out of.

‘Turn it off,’ I whispered quickly, leaning down.

She did.

My head was parallel with the floor. I slid the grating forward, pulled it over on top of me. For one horrible second I thought the grating might tip over into the hole. But then it slid into place with a little snap. As my reward, most of the light went out. It felt as if a thick shroud had been thrown over us.

And the rotting smell just got worse with each step I went down.

The exclusive St George’s Hotel, on Park Lane in central London, looked from the outside like a large top-of-the-range townhouse. Inside, however, once you got past the punctilious English butler and deferential Spanish housemaids, lay a haven for the platinum class.

Once a guest had been ushered in to their self-contained suite, they’d never even have to see another guest if they didn’t want to. It was like having your own Mayfair townhouse, with a two-lane swimming pool, a marble jacuzzi, a canopied balcony overlooking a private garden, a chef, a driver and a personal masseuse – Thai or Swedish – all to yourself.

Arap Anach was well used to such simple pleasures. Having recently arrived, he was sitting alone in the main reception area of his suite watching a wall-mounted LCD TV.

The channel he was tuned to, Al-Jazeera English, was showing images of a riot. He had the sound turned down. On the screen a veiled woman was running towards the camera. She was screaming. Blood was streaming down her face from a deep cut in the centre of her forehead. Behind her a line of black-scarved and hooded rioters was throwing stones at a distant police line. Arap sat back in his chair. It was all going exactly to plan, better than he could have expected.

The riots and demonstrations against the mosque raids in London and Paris were producing the desired effect. It was easy to stir things up if you knew how; to incite hatred if you had the right connections.

A buzzer sounded. Arap stood, walked to the desk, picked up the electronic tablet that came with the suite and pressed a button.

An image popped on to the screen. It showed the hallway of the hotel. A man was being helped from a long navy overcoat.

The butler turned to the camera and bowed. ‘Your guest has arrived, sir.’ The microphone he spoke into was on a stalk running from his ear to his cheek.

‘Show him up.’

The butler nodded.

Arap reached out for a slim laptop that sat on a long walnut cabinet. He tapped the screen. An image flashed onto it; two faces side-by-side, passport photo sized, a man and a woman.

Images of people who’d soon be dead.

He flicked his fingers over the mouse pad. The images of Isabel and Sean grew larger. The discovery of their bodies might not even be noticed once the events on Friday reached their climax, but even if their deaths were covered in the media it would send a perfect signal.

Peaceful co-existence was no longer an option. New policies were needed. And they would be implemented, once the change had taken place.

I gagged at one point, the smell was so disgusting. I stopped, took a slow breath and looked up. So far, nothing. I imagined the grating above us being opened at any moment. I needed to cough. I suppressed it. Seconds went by.

The grating above me, a bright criss-cross, didn’t move. After the wave of silent gagging passed I kept going down.

Then I heard someone shout in Turkish. It sounded as if they were right above us. Isabel turned the torch off. I stopped, absolutely sure that the grating above would be moved aside, that we’d been caught. But the seconds turned into a minute, and only silence followed.

In the stinking dark, gripping each handhold as tightly as I could, my hands like claws, I moved down one rung at a time. And the deeper I went, the smellier it got, until something slapped at my foot and I almost shouted.

‘Careful,’ Isabel hissed. She pinched my ankle. I moved up a rung. How was I supposed to know she’d stopped? All around there was only shadows. The only light was a faint glow from the grating far above.

I was scared now, and nauseated by the smell. A tiny part of me almost thought it might be better to go back up and face whoever was up there.

Then I heard another shout, and a moment later louder voices, different voices, someone angry.

Shoes tap-tapped across the grating above. The light dimmed, as if there’d been an eclipse. A vein throbbed in my neck.

Then the light dimmed more and I distinctly heard a match being struck, and the tiny sound of something dropping onto the grating.

Someone was standing up there. And they were smoking. Maybe they were looking down at the grating. Did they know we were down here? Were they doing this deliberately?

Looking up, I thought I could make out the shape of boots cutting the light out. This was it. Any second. It were over.

I thought about Alek, what had happened to him up there. Something tightened inside me, as if a cable was being pulled. I wasn’t going to give up. They’d have to come down here and get me.

Then there was another distant, excited shout. The shadow moved. A sprinkling of dust fell on my face. I closed my eyes. Something touched my leg. I jerked, shook it. An image of a giant rat pawing at me flashed through my mind.

‘Stop,’ whispered Isabel.

I put my foot back on the rung.

‘There’s a passage down here. Maybe we can use it.’

She switched her torch on, her hand covering it almost completely, making the light dim and red. Slimy grey brick appeared all around. I looked down.

When Isabel had said passage, I’d imagined a walkway we could stand up in. What she’d meant was a brick-lined pipe about four foot high, running off horizontally from the drain we were descending. Its slope must have been only a few degrees.

The pipe’s entrance was next to the rung Isabel was holding on to. I had serious doubts about going into it – we’d have to crawl – and God only knew what was in there.

‘What’s it like?’

‘It looks dry at least,’ she said, softly. ‘I’m going in.’

‘Excellent,’ I whispered. ‘That means I’m coming after you.’ I don’t think she heard me.

I moved down another rung. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I imagined. I could see a little bit of the passage now. It didn’t look slimy. In fact, it looked inviting.

And it would be a good idea to be out of this shaft, if they opened that grating up above.

Isabel had disappeared into the passage.

‘Sure glad you found some use for my torch,’ I whispered. I was in almost total darkness. Then, just for a moment, she shone the torch beam back through the pipe, so I could see enough to pull myself into it. She must have heard me that time.

In the pipe, all I could see of Isabel were the dark soles of her runners. There were long fingers of green slime embedded in them. She pointed the beam in front of her most of the time, illuminating the grey bricks all around us as she moved forward.

The smell was different now. It was more clayey, less rotting water. And I could feel the enormous weight of the earth above us, because of the way the tunnel bulged in places, as if it had blisters, as if it might burst.

As I moved forward I scuffed my hands on pieces of brick lying on the curved floor of the tunnel. Who or what had put them there?

‘Can you go a bit faster?’ I said. I wanted out of the place, and to stand up.

After about fifty knee-scraping feet, I stopped. It was stuffy now. Sweat was prickling my brow. My head was ringing too. The ear-splitting explosion in Iraq had left me with a dull headache that came and went at odd times. I could ignore it in the open air, but down here, with walls pressing in around us, it was coming back for another shot at the title.

I closed my eyes, took three deep breaths, held each of them and released them slowly. I’d done a course in Pranayama yogic breath control, where I’d learned to control my breathing, the summer before as a way to improve my free diving times and to help me feel calmer. As I slowly let out the last breath a distant voice came to me. Was I imagining it? I opened my eyes. I couldn’t hear Isabel moving anymore. She must have stopped. And she’d turned the torch off. The darkness had enveloped me completely. It felt as if I’d been swallowed.

I took another deep breath.

Then, just ahead, as my eyes adjusted, I saw a faint light, dancing about twenty feet away, playing on the floor of the tunnel like an apparition. Then a shadow blocked my view. Isabel was moving forward again. I followed her, slowly, my hands and knees scraping on the brick under me.

As I came closer to it, I saw the light was a faint beam streaming down from a pipe heading up into the roof of the tunnel. For a brief moment, hope surged inside me as I imagined a hole just wide enough for us to escape through. When I came closer though, I saw, to my disappointment, that the pipe wasn’t even a foot wide. Isabel was beyond it. I could hear her breathing.

I looked up the pipe when I reached it. There was a grating at the top, maybe fifty feet away, tantalisingly close, but sickeningly far. The grating was casting a pattern in the shaft of light streaming down.

I pulled back. I could just about make out Isabel’s shadow now beyond the beam of light. The light gave the tunnel floor a ghostly sheen. A feeling of being trapped, buried alive, rose up in me as I looked up the pipe again. It felt as if the walls around me were tightening, moving in slowly.

Then I heard the voice again. It was clearer this time. It sounded as if whoever had spoken was only a few feet above us. The man had only said a few words –‘Have you found them?’ – but unsettlingly I knew the voice. Could it be?

Our heads banged softly as we both peered up towards the grating. I rubbed mine, pulled back to let her look up.

Isabel moved back after a few seconds. I looked up again. Through the grating above, as my eyes focused on it, I could make out an arched brick roof. That was all.

Then the voice spoke again.

‘She didn’t tell us she was coming here.’

My suspicions were confirmed. I don’t know how close Peter was to the grating, but the sound of his voice had travelled down clearly to me, as if he was only a few feet away.

I said the word ‘Peter’ softly to Isabel. I could just about make out her expression. Her gaze was fixed on something in the middle distance. She blinked and nodded.

We heard Peter’s voice again, but it was more distant, indistinct now. He was moving away.

I put my hand on Isabel’s shoulder. She’d moved a little closer to the beam of ghostly light and was looking upwards into it. She seemed to be about to fall towards me, she was stretching forward so much.

‘What’s he doing up there? Why is he talking about us?’ I asked.

‘Don’t jump to conclusions.’ She sounded angry, and her expression was as dark as a storm.

‘We simply heard a conversation. It proves nothing.’

‘So who’s he talking to?’

‘Honestly, I don’t know.’

‘What the hell’s he doing here? He’s walking around up there as if he owns the place.’

She didn’t reply.

Thoughts were racing each other through my head. If Peter knew about this dig, was he also involved with the bastards behind Alek’s murder? Was that too crazy? But why else would he be up there, talking like that? Then something clicked, like a lock opening. This was why he was being so weird, why he hadn’t told me that Isabel wasn’t going to meet me, why he wanted me out of Istanbul quickly.

He was working with them, the people who’d murdered Alek. It would certainly explain a lot.

I felt stupid. I shouldn’t have told him anything.

‘We gotta keep moving,’ I hissed. ‘Look for another way out. I’m not hanging around here.’

‘Can you hear water?’ said Isabel.

‘No.’ The thought of water down here was not pleasant. I imagined slimy, unrecognisable creatures living in it. At least with a dry tunnel you knew what you were dealing with.

‘I can hear water,’ she said. She turned the torch on, pointed it ahead and crawled on.

When I caught up with her, she was sitting on the far side of a three-foot wide circular opening in the floor, shining the torch beam down into it. Below, an arm’s length away, I could see water. I felt a sinking feeling as I looked at it. This could well be a way out of here, but there was almost definitely something disgusting down there too. I just knew it.

‘I wonder if we’re still under Hagia Sophia?’ I said, glancing around.

‘No idea, but this has to go downhill. It’s flowing. There has to be a way out for all this water.’

‘I’m going to put you forward for the Nobel Prize for Observation for that.’

‘Stop, Sean. Feel this. It’s marble.’

She had her hand below the opening. I put my hand in the same place. Our fingers touched. She gripped my hand. I could just about make out her troubled expression in the torchlight reflecting back from the water below.

‘I hate this place,’ she said, softly. Her grip tightened. I felt her shiver. ‘I hate it so much. Don’t ever bloody leave me down here.’ She sounded angry again.

‘I won’t. I promise. What makes you think I would?’

She paused before answering. ‘I was left behind before. It was the worst thing that ever frigging happened to me.’

I looked into her eyes. ‘It won’t happen here.’

She released her grip on me. ‘The bastard said he’d come back.’ I could hear her take a deep breath. ‘But he didn’t.’

‘Who?

‘Mark. My ex. The guy you met in Mosul. I was married to him once.’

‘Why the hell did he leave you?’

She looked into my eyes, as if assessing whether to tell me more. Then she looked down at the water flowing below us.

‘There’s not much to say. We were with a British building contractor in Kurdish Iraq. The guest house we were staying in was attacked. Mark went out the back door, left us. That’s it.’ She shrugged. ‘I waited with this big Scottish businessman who’d actually shitted himself. We were lucky. The attackers fled after they shot the place up a few times.’

‘Mark didn’t come back?’

‘He said he wanted to, but the Iraqi police unit he found detained him. The next time I saw him was in a police station in Kirkuk. He was full of apologies. But things were never the same between us.’

‘I can definitely understand that,’ I said. ‘And I promise you. We’ll find a way out of this together.’ I was trying to be positive for the both of us.

‘This has to run into one of the old underground cisterns. They had them all over the city for when they were besieged. They had the best aqueducts here, the best water management system in the whole Roman Empire. We’re probably near a way out.’

A smile crossed her face. She looked down at the water. It was black, unpleasant looking.

‘This is very scary, Sean.’

‘It’s only water,’ I said.

‘The odds of dying underground are a million to one, right?’

‘Unless you’re underground already,’ I said.

‘Thanks.’

There was a salty fishy smell in the air. It was coming up from the water.

‘Can you smell salt water?’ I said.

She sniffed. ‘A little. Is that good?’

‘The Bosphorus is very salty. We can’t be that far from it.’

The light from the torch became dimmer. Now it was only about half the strength it had been when I’d turned it on. Why hadn’t I bought extra batteries? Beyond the beam of fading light, the darkness pressed in, like an animal that knows when its prey is faltering.

If we were going to do this, we had to get moving. ‘I’m going down to have a look,’ I said.

The torch beam became weaker.

‘I won’t be able to pull you back up,’ she said. There was anxiety in her voice.

‘Don’t worry, I can wedge myself against the sides if I have to.’ I peered down. It looked doable, just. ‘I have to check this out, Isabel. We could be near an exit.’

That was the optimist talking again. I’d definitely have preferred to stay in the dry tunnel. But if anyone came after us they’d probably come through the tunnel first, before going down into this water. Going this way would buy us time.

Then I felt something fall on my shoulder. Something heavy.

‘Uuuhhhh.’ I jerked and brushed frantically at whatever it was. Something black fell in front of me. It was the biggest spider I’d ever seen. It had hair like an old hippie’s. It scuttled away into the darkness. I shuddered, half stood, banged my head against the roof, sickeningly hard, bent down quickly and rubbed it.

‘Are you OK?’ said Isabel.

‘Sure. No problem. I just love it down here.’

‘Look, a fish,’ she said. She pointed upwards. A fish shaped sign had been carved into a brick above our heads. ‘Amazing.’ She traced her finger over the sign in the jaundiced light from the torch.

‘You know a Byzantine emperor, Alexius III, was supposed to have escaped this city through a tunnel under Hagia Sophia just like this?’ I said.

She shook her head.

‘That’s what they say. He got away in a fishing boat waiting for him in the Bosphorus. He fled with his mistress, a Serbian princess, and his daughter the night before this city was taken during the fourth crusade. A wonderful crusade that was. That was about this time of year too.’ I leaned over the hole.