The Dervish House, page 27
‘It’s not a movie. It’s an installation.’
On a Third Date you’re allowed a refusal—only one, you don’t want to look like a whiner—to show that you’re not a complete pussy. He should have held on to it. I don’t do cinemas, but I do installations even less.
‘It’s more like a game,’ Ayşe said, using her Third Date First Flicker of Telepathy.
The art students weren’t as good looking as he’d expected but they handed them each a laser pointer and told them to spread out through the stalls. There were already a few dozen scattered across the auditorium, crouching down in the rows, behind the curtains, the speakers, the sound baffles.
‘Is this like the army?’ Adnan asked loudly because it irritated the liberals.
‘Sort of,’ Ayşe said. Then the lights went off. Someone not Ayşe brushed past Adnan, from across the auditorium a laser beam sparkled through the dusty dark, was at once answered by five others, and Adnan got the rules. It was duelling lasers in the dark. Every shot might find a target, but it immediately flagged your location. Within fifteen seconds Adnan has tactics: listen, stick your head over the scalloped row of chair backs, shoot and move. Shoot and move. Shoot and move. The dark was velvety, dusty, warm and complete as the secret places of a body.
‘Adnan.’ He turned his laser on the whisper at his feet, then recognized the voice and took his thumb off the trigger. ‘Are you enjoying it?’ Ayşe whispered. A web of lasers criss-crossed the humid vault of the cinema.
‘More of this kind of art, please.’ Then he said, ‘It’s like the market. I never thought. You signal your intent, you take a shot, everyone knows where you are and moves against you.’
‘I would probably never have thought of it that way,’ Ayşe said. ‘I just came here because it seemed like the kind of place you could do this.’ And without any sighting or ranging or the least flicker of laser light she had her hand on his thigh.
‘So you can,’ Adnan said and pulled her down on top of him.
That has always been the difference to Adnan between the light and dark markets. The light market was the never-ceasing duel of lasers, all signalling to each other, all reacting to each other, like starlings dashing between the minarets of the Blue Mosque or cars on the Atatürk Approach. The dark was stumbling, feeling out the contours of a body, groping, whispering, recognizing, then the stifled exchange of body fluids.
Billions flow daily through pools of dark liquidity, between massive institutional buyers and sellers who risk exposure should the market sense their submarine mass move against them. But no darkness is ever absolute. Every night holds whispers. Analysts run algorithmic programmes of searing complexity, looking for statistical patterns and premonitions in the prices of stock. Raiders mount financial skirmishes into the dark to discern what might be for sale, how much and at what price. Some apply thermodynamics, looking for localized, minute decreases in the overall entropy of the dark market to game the price. The Cygnus X project is a degree of abstraction beyond even those, designed to probe the darkest of dark pools. Two terrifyingly smart quants, Haluk and Hilmi, reasoned by analogy to black holes and information theory. The darkest dark pools, the black holes, give no sign of their presence or mass until a buyer enters their gravitational fields. They swallow all information of price and quantity. A black hole has no hair, the physicists love to joke. Adnan’s never understood that. Nor can he begin to comprehend the quantum field equations and Stephen Hawking’s own formulae Haluk and Hilmi use to extract price information from the Great Dark Ones. But he can admire it. All Özer was exhorted to praise Haluk and Hilmi. Quantum Field Pricing Theory was bold, was brilliant, was the stuff of Nobel prizes. Adnan can admire it as long as it’s in the money. And Kadir says it’s not. Catastrophically not.
‘The theory gave them beautiful data,’ Kadir says. ‘They could see in the dark. Then they tried to get clever. They reckoned they could arbitrage the dark market.’
‘I’m trying to imagine the amount of processing power you’d need to crunch and arbitrage in real time.’
‘The kind of amount that requires sign-off from the fortieth floor.’
‘Mehmet.’ Mehmet Meral, Chief Operating Officer. Mehmet the Conqueror, he liked to call himself. His office was decorated with Janissary military antiques. He preached martial virtues: swiftness, sureness, discipline, a sipahi’s cavalry boldness. Mehmet the Cunt, they called him on the trading floor.
‘He specifically put Kemal on settlements to make sure it was covered right and, just for a moment, Kemal took his eye off the ball.’
‘Kemal doesn’t do that.’
‘He does when the ball is Turquoise.’
‘Fuck.’
‘He passed the Cygnus X account to a group of juniors on the assumption that they would keep each other right. They didn’t. They made a small mistake, they tried to hide it. Errors to cover errors. You know how it is.’
Sometimes, in the small, hot, smelly Ferhatpaşa bedroom, Adnan is wakened by a sound in the night. It’s not the roar of the highway or the television from next door beating T-pop against the wall or the shouts of youths from down at the petrol station. It’s a huge sound that fills the sky around Apartment Block 27 and the earth beneath it, an endless rip as if God were tearing apart the seven heavens and every spirit that lived there, down to the atoms. It leaves him paralysed, sweating, heart pounding unable to find sleep again. It’s the sound of the money rending. The deals are so fast, the opportunities so brief and the numbers so huge that a mistake must happen. Such is the pressure behind that hole, that flaw, that the whole thing will go, all the way down. Thousands can escalate into millions, into losses that can stagger entire economies. The money, tearing. When he married, when he bought the nasty little apartment out in Ferhatpaşa and realized that he had shamed Ayşe before her family though she would never say, that she would sleep in a gecekondu if his arm were her pillow, he heard the heavens tear almost every night. He was a junior trader, an order filler, always running, never a moment away from the indices to make sure, to check he hadn’t made a fatal flaw that could run up the side of the Levent tower and shatter it into dust. He can’t remember when he last heard that shriek but he knows he will tonight.
‘How did you find out?’
‘He told me. He thought maybe I could edit the records. I’ve looked at it. It’s terrifying. Moving losses off the balance sheet and reporting them as profits, setting up error accounts inside error accounts, using margin payments to make trades on his own account to cover losses, faking hedge trades. All the classics. It’s almost textbook.’
‘Fucking Kemal. Why did he have to try and cover it up? Just fire the bastards and take it from Mehmet the Cunt. Özer’s capitalized to much more than two hundred and eighty million.’
‘Mehmet the Cunt has problems of his own. Mehmet, Ercan, Pamir; Özer is rotting from the head. We’re overextended in every division to six times our capitalization. We’re an accounting fiction. It’s a house of cards, but it’s Cygnus X that will bring the whole tower down. Pamir may throw Kemal to the wolves to forestall the Financial Regulation Authority launching a wider investigation into Özer as a whole.’
‘We’re exposed. Fuck!’
The mosque warden, patiently sweeping the court with a besom, looks up and frowns.
‘Can we call off Turquoise?’ Kadir asks.
Adnan rounds on him.
‘If Özer goes down I’m not going to be the one on the ten o’clock news sitting on the steps with everything I own in a cardboard box. Turquoise is my redundancy cheque. There is a way out of this. We can do this. It’s our money. We can do this. We’re the Ultralords of the Universe; we’re still the smartest guys in the room.’
He can’t lose it. He won’t lose it. Not now, not after all he’s done, after all the work and the contacts and the meetings and the careful deals and the planning, years of planning, from that first casual question out in the east on military service, So where does that pipe go? To the moment, so clear in his memory, so bright and crystalline, deep as a turquoise, riding up in the scenic elevator with Istanbul’s hills and waterways at his feet, when the idea of the most audacious gas scam of the century came to him, made him choke with suppressed laughter at the whole ballsiness of it; Turquoise, whole and entire by the time the door opened on to the trading floor. He can’t let his grip relax, see it fall away from him swashing down through the dark water. Lost.
Water drips from the battered copper spouts of the çeşme. Adnan stoops, fills his cupped hands, dashes cold water from the deep aqueducts and cisterns beneath Istanbul into his face. Again, it runs through his fingers, he splashes the heat and the tiredness from his face. He gasps at the purity of the cold.
‘If we were drug dealers, or even the security police,’ Kadir ventures.
‘We’re not those men,’ Adnan says fiercely. ‘We’re not even going to think like those men. I don’t want to hear that again.’
‘I had to float it though.’
‘Consider it floated.’ Beads of cold water run down Adnan’s neck and under his collar.
‘Have you any better suggestions?’
‘Better ones, meaning ones that don’t make us murderers and land us in jail? No. How do you silence a man who knows too much?’
‘Maybe he doesn’t have to be silenced,’ Kadir says. Always the well-spoken and educated one, an old Istanbul name from an old Constantinople family; now he is his most Ottoman. ‘Maybe he just needs to forget the salient details.’
‘What, designer amnesia?’ Water spills have turned Adnan’s shirt translucent and glued it to his chest. His body hair makes spiral, animal patterns.
‘The nano gives and nano takes away.’ Kadir is the Ultralords’ dealer, little racks of plastic vials, from the grey market in the underpass at Galata tram station. Adnan’s been there once, a piss-reeking tiled toilet of neon-lit stalls selling cigarettes, replica guns and non-prescription nano. ‘Designer amnesia, no, that’s beyond us. Memories are stored holographically, in multiple locations. The nano would have to locate and bind to the memory locations and repolarize the neurons without affecting any other memories using that architecture. Editing specific memories is maybe ten, twenty years away. However, for every scalpel there is a baseball bat. We all make jokes to the Kebab Prophet that we’re the pharmacological front line, experimenting on ourselves, a neurological time-bomb waiting to go off. What if it did?’
‘Do you mean, overdose Kemal?’
‘No, it’s unreliable; we mightn’t get the desired effect. Kemal might end up dead anyway. The nanoware designers can’t edit specific memories, but general amnesia might be achievable.’
‘You’re talking about giving him a chemical lobotomy.’
‘A moment ago we were floating the possibility of killing him so I think it’s a moral improvement. It would be nothing like what you say; the technology exists to target locations in the brain that correspond to different types of mental activity; emotions, smell, short-term memory. Short-term memory I think is the way to go. I can make some enquiries. It will have to be customized, and it will cost, but once the manufactory is programmed they have it for us next day. I think I can guarantee what will look like a massive short-term amnesia. We’ll point to his work-load, pressure to deliver, increasing reliance on nano to meet deadlines. Does he have anyone? Apart from his mother? We’re even doing Özer some good; who knows what else he’ll forget along with Turquoise?’
‘God between me and evil,’ Adnan says. ‘You are a cold fucker.’
‘Do you have another suggestion?’
‘You know I don’t. Temporary amnesia.’
‘I can’t guarantee it.’
Adnan turns his face up to the cascade of domes. Water everywhere in this mosque; in the heart of every mosque.
‘If I could see any other option I would tell you to stuff your nano up your ass but I can’t. I’m in.’
‘I’ll tell Oğuz. He needs to know.’
‘He’ll be staunch.’
‘He will. Good then, we’re agreed. I will source the nano. I leave it to you to administer it.’
‘Wait. I give it to Kemal?’
‘I’m in Oversight and Compliance. If I come down there’ll be mass pissing of pants. You’re on the Trading Floor, you see him every day. I’ll source the stuff; it’s up to you to get it to him. I’m sure you’ll think of something.’
‘Fuck you, Kadir.’
‘Everybody tries.’ He smiles weakly. ‘That’s the job of Compliance.’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Good. We know what we have to do. Shall we head back to the office?’
‘No, I want to stay here a while. God, this is a nightmare.’
The heat and reviving afternoon bustle of Beyazıt Square swallow Kadir. Adnan sits on the edge of the loggia. The mosque attendant comes and sweeps deliberately around him, solicitous of a tip.
6
The ship explodes. White light, a blinding flash, a fireball too hot and pure to be mere flame. The first few seconds of destruction are in silhouette, the dark shoulders of Asia and Europe, the taut bow of the bridge between them, the flecks of ships in the channel. The world blinks back into colour. The blast has blown the centre span of the bridge upwards to tear. It tears, cables snap. The roadbed twists and plunges like an amputated snake. Cars are scattered like leaves. Trucks pour from the severed bridge. They plummet very slowly among the falling road sections. Whole sections of tanker—bulkheads, pieces of superstructure, ruptured tanks, entire engines the size of houses—are blasted into the air and fall to earth, destroying houses, highways, taking out whole columns of suddenly stalled traffic trapped on the approaches to the bridge, tumbling end over end, crushing vehicles like ants. The shock wave capsizes the squat, grubby ferries like toy yachts in a sudden blow. The blazing hulk of the tanker swings across the main channel, collides with an upbound bulk carrier. Together they settle slowly down into the deep black water. The Bosphorus is aflame with burning ships, a fire fleet of carriers and oil tankers and Black Sea freighters. A cruise liner shoots flames from every deck of shattered windows. Along the shore the blast front shatters the houses and apartment blocks of the well to do. Roofs are stripped away, cheap konaks collapse and crumble. The last of the old Bosphorus wooden yalıs are swept away like straw. Cars tumble like dice, speedboats are thrown up hillsides and into trees. A fraction slower than the shock wave and the fire, the tidal wave hammers the shore communities, turning shards of roof and smouldering timbers into a rip tide of churning, crushing wood and metal. The blast-tide peaks, then ebbs, drawing cars, boats, shops, houses, clingers to the flotsam of their homes out into the Bosphorus. Sleek and prosperous Bebek and Kanlıca are shattered, lovely old Kuzguncuk burns. Gas flares from broken mains. Marshalled along their hilltops the glass towers of Levent and Maslak are eyeless, every pane of glass smashed, a hail of diamond daggers on to the streets and plazas. In a flash, in a blast, Istanbul is smashed. Finally the twin pylons of the Atatürk Bridge, trailing cable and decking plates and weakened by the fireball, break at the knees and slide into the black water. Only stumps like broken teeth remain.
‘It’s damned impressive,’ Emrah Beskardes whispers to Georgios Ferentinou, ‘but I did see this on Discovery Asia.’
The video ends. The screen retracts. The delegates of the Kadikoy Group blink and shuffle and rearrange their papers and sip water.
‘Five hundred thousand tons of liquefied natural gas,’ Ogün Saltuk says.
He sounds like a Discovery presenter, Beskardes the zoologist writes on his magic slate, then pulls it clean.
‘Of course, that’s a special effects piece from a television programme you might have seen a few months ago about the particular vulnerability of Istanbul to a concerted terror attack on a Russian gas carrier. I actually served as a technical adviser on that programme . . .’ (Told you, Beskardes scribbles) ‘but the details are accurate, with a little televisual licence. But half-million tonners regularly pass down the Bosphorus.’ A ship clicks up on the screen, a monstrous floating monolith of a thing, bridge and accommodation units squatting low behind the monstrous, coffin-shaped pressure body. ‘This is the Ararat Star; the largest gas carrier currently afloat, a Russian three-quarters-of-a-million tonner that began operating five months ago. You might have seen it; it’s been through the Bosphorus four times already. It will make a passage through the Bosphorus on April 19th. What you saw in the excerpt was based on a ship smaller even than the half-million tonners that have become industry standard. The Ararat Star has twice the capacity. Twice the destructive power. That has to be irresistible to a terror group.’
‘To whom?’ Georgios hears himself ask. His voice holds a quiver of anger; he can’t take much more of this stupidity. ‘Who would want to destroy Istanbul? Kill eighty thousand people? What would that achieve? The Islamists aren’t blowing up symbols of Western decadence any more. The jihad is on the streets. I know, I’ve seen it. Tarikats, kadıs, shaykhs; they solve problems, make the peace, keep social order, judge in a dispute. There’s a new shariat: street law. It works. People use it.’
Ogün Saltuk chews on his bottom lip. ‘Turkey has always had enemies, within and without; even more now that we are the front door of Europe. We’re seen to have made a decision, aligned ourselves.’
Georgios Ferentinou would speak but a louder voice talks over him, ‘Surely we have tight enough security at the Black Sea and Sea of Marmara; you see them out there every night, waiting for security clearance to enter the Bosphorus. A three-quarter-of-a-million-ton gas tanker can’t be that easy to hijack.’
‘They are on autopilot through the Bosphorus, to prevent accidental collisions. That could be hacked,’ a new voice says while Emrah Beskardes whispers to Georgios, ‘I think I saw that movie; it was an old one. The cook saved the day. He was good with knives.’
