Spoils of War, page 27
‘They? Are we talking about the Mukhabarat?’
‘Who else would be interested? But I never told Karim I was coming here. They’ve been following my movements. Why?’ An even more startling thought struck him then. ‘Jesus! My family.’
He dialled the number in Banstead at once. Camilla answered the phone, whooping at the sound of his voice.
‘Daddy! Are you still in the Alps?’
She told him Alison was out with the Reynolds for the evening and they had a babysitter in. The news reassured him; she wouldn’t have left the twins if she had any serious cause for worry. He spoke to Camilla and Claudia in turn, asking them what was happening at home and listening patiently to accounts of their doings. No untoward event, no visit from a stranger for instance, would have escaped comment by those two busybodies.
When he said goodbye, after telling them he wasn’t yet sure when he would be home, he felt a little less alarmed. He considered phoning Reg Kilmartin and asking if there was any news about Karim, but thought better of it; Reg didn’t know he was in Zurich, and now the fewer people who did know, the better.
‘It doesn’t sound as if they’ve been asking questions at my house,’ he said to Dale, ‘perhaps because they didn’t need to. Somehow they know I’m here. Why are they interested in me?’
‘Because they think you know something that affects them, presumably.’
‘But I don’t, damn it! All Karim can have told them is that I wanted to find Jalloul, and that I’d come across some financial details about a man called Ghani. But Ghani was General Malik, who is now dead. And if Jalloul is dead too . . . they must have known that my enquiries wouldn’t lead anywhere.’
‘You talked to Karim about something else,’ Dale said. ‘You talked about the stolen gold.’
He stared at her. ‘That can’t be the reason. Neither of us knew anything about it worth speaking of.’
‘But now you know more. Jack, I’ve seen the Mukhabarat at work and I don’t think you should waste time trying to analyse their motives. I think you should get out of here. Head straight home, call the police and get yourself some protection.’
He tried to collect his wits. It was a scary feeling, scarier than he would have imagined possible, to think of nameless people tracking his movements, people who wouldn’t stop short of kidnapping and murder to achieve their ends. It had thrown his thoughts into disarray as well as stretching his nerves, which were suddenly jangled by the ringing of the phone.
It was the hotel switchboard, asking if he would pay for a reverse-charge call from England.
Colonel Thorpe said: ‘You’re in luck. Purchase’s wife, the woman that French girl worked for, has come up trumps again. She remembered the name of the Turk. It’s Yashar Delkin.’ He spelt it out. ‘He had the rank of acting major at the time. But they never heard from him after he left Camberley, so God knows where he is or what he’s doing now.’
Jack thanked him and said: ‘If you get any more queries about me, please don’t tell anyone where I am.’
‘All right. I’m not going to ask what you’re up to, but it sounds a bit dicey. Remember something else from Sun Tzu: When capable, pretend to be incapable. When near, you should seem to be far away; when far away, seem near.’
On this bewildering note of advice he rang off. Jack sat on the bed, staring at Dale. She was right; it would be sensible to get out of Zurich. There was nothing more for him here, anyway. On the other hand, he shouldn’t let himself be panicked into flight. This was a big city and surely he would not be easy to find. Besides, if he did go back to London and talk to the police, what could he say without revealing the background to his recent activities? He had promised to keep Hamadi’s agreement with Jalloul a secret, a promise that had been easy enough to make at the time but that now seemed a burden.
Dale could be right about another thing. The gold. No matter how hard he tried to dismiss it as an irrelevance, it kept re-emerging, demanding his attention.
Perhaps he was only seeking excuses not to go home to Alison’s frostiness and the bitter dregs of their marriage. But in spite of the conclusions he had come to after talking to Nadine Schuster, what he had just learned from Thorpe could justify his continuing what he had begun.
He could make one more attempt to find out what had happened to Jalloul.
He searched in his address book for Eric Padey’s number in Dhahran. One more contact, one more link in a chain that now drew him towards the settling of unfinished business.
He dialled the number. While he waited for it to ring he said to Dale: ‘Yes, I’ll get out of Zurich. But London isn’t the right place to go just yet. If you meant what you said about us staying together, how about coming with me to Istanbul?’
Part Three
25
The road from Yesilköy airport ran along the shore of the Sea of Marmara, parallel to the railway line that carried the more intrepid kind of traveller the last few miles of the long journey from western Europe to its eastern edge. The sunshine of early afternoon was strong and the water was deep blue, the coastline littered with rickety wooden jetties and beached fishing boats. Inland, huddled slums alternated with high-rise blocks of flats. For a time the view was blocked by the towering grey heights of the old city walls, and then a turn in the road revealed a hilly skyline surmounted by the breathtaking domes and minarets of St Sophia and the Blue Mosque.
The taxi ground its way into Istanbul, a blur of chaotic impressions after decorous, orderly Zurich. Ancient American cars jostled and hooted for road space among milling pedestrians. The Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn seethed with street traders, food sellers and Sunday strollers. Things were quieter up among the shabby buildings of Beyoglu, part of the old European quarter, where the taxi dropped them in front of the Second Empire façade of the Pera Palace Hotel.
It had to be the Pera Palace or nothing, Dale had insisted. The hotel had been built a century before to accommodate travellers arriving on the Orient Express, and, in consequence, was almost as famous as the train itself. The interior seemed to live up to her expectations: the lobby and the adjacent public rooms were all plush seating, dark wood panelling and gilt-framed mirrors; the lift was an ornate contraption of wrought iron – the oldest lift in Turkey, the bellboy who took them up in it informed them proudly. The room he showed them into had a small balcony overlooking a garden, and a huge bathroom with a marble floor and a bath big enough for three people.
Dale hummed contentedly as she unpacked her clothes and hung them in the wardrobe. Jack’s mood was not so buoyant. He did not regret their decision to come here, but felt less easy than he had about the circumstances that had led to it. Consulting the travel office at the Meilenhof Hotel, he had learned that there was no chance of getting a flight to Istanbul until this morning; even then, it turned out that the quickest way had been to travel via Frankfurt. At the airport there he had picked up a couple of British Sunday newspapers just flown in, and read that Abdel Karim had been found dead, shot through the head and dumped at the side of the Ml. He appeared to have been tortured first. If proof were needed of the ruthlessness of the people who had now shown their interest in Jack himself, there it was in black and white.
The murder of Karim, though, was only a side bar to the main stories. The consequences of the Gulf War were now focused here in Turkey and the papers were full of pictures of Kurdish refugees, huddled in their thousands on bare mountain slopes along the Iraqi border. Western planes were about to start dropping supplies to them, but the relief that this would provide seemed entirely inadequate to the problem. In Ankara, Turkey’s president was discussing the crisis with the visiting American Secretary of State.
‘Well, where do we start?’ Dale said.
She had bought a map and a guidebook at the airport. They had the names of two people in Istanbul, Nadine’s friend Yashar Delkin and Eric Patley’s old acquaintance, the retired gold smuggler Manolis Zakarios, but they had addresses for neither. There was no telephone directory in the room so they went downstairs and asked a receptionist for help. He found several Yashar Delkins in the phone book; the one whose number corresponded with the one Dale had filched from Nadine lived at a place called Yildiz Kalesi. Jack couldn’t be sure, but he thought the man had lifted an eyebrow slightly at the mention of the name. As for Zakarios, all that Eric had been able to tell Jack was that the jewellery shop that had once been a front for his operation had been in the Phanar, the old Greek district of the city. But they were in luck again: three or four people called Zakarios were listed, one of them with the first name Manolis; his address was in a village named Sariyer, which the receptionist said was some way out along the Bosphorus shore. They could get there by bus or boat, he told them, but if they were in a hurry he suggested a taxi.
Dale had already located Yildiz Kalesi on her map. ‘It’s next to Yildiz Park, on the way to Sariyer,’ she said. ‘We can stop there first.’
Jack had his briefcase full of documents with him. Good manners would normally have suggested phoning both men before turning up, but they had decided to arrive unannounced, offering no chance of being avoided. The receptionist said they needed a taxi driver who spoke English, and sent the bellboy out to find one. He returned shortly, followed by a grave, middle-aged man who led them out to a vintage Pontiac, down on its springs but with its paintwork and chrome highly polished. Dale gave him the address they wanted and he merely nodded before setting off.
The taxi negotiated more noisy streets and busy squares, down to a waterfront crowded with mosques, cafés, small hotels, and an occasional crumbling Ottoman palace. Cargo ships lay at anchor in the straits and ferries ploughed across the mile-wide strip of water that separated Europe from Asia. In spite of the hotel receptionist’s assurance, the traffic along the coastal road was dense, the taxi reduced to a stuttering crawl. Finally it turned to the left, up a road that ran beside terraced parkland with ornate pavilions set among cypresses and firs. Higher up the hill was a grassy embankment with stonework exposed on it, the remains of what looked like some old fortification. About halfway along it the driver swung into a narrow opening, on to a sandy road that ran dead straight between high walls, a curious kind of alleyway cut through the embankment. After a hundred metres or so it made a sharp right turn, and here the car halted at a pair of mesh gates topped with barbed wire.
From the doorway of a sentry's hut behind the barrier a soldier emerged, dressed in combat fatigues and with a machine carbine slung from his shoulder, and scowled at them suspiciously.
‘This is it?’ Jack asked with misgiving.
‘Yildiz Kalesi,’ the driver confirmed. Jack had begun to suspect that the man actually had no English, but now he said: ‘Yildiz Fort. You have the permission to visit?’
‘No, but –’
‘No permission, no visit.’ The driver pointed at a sign beside the gates that said: Askeri bolge; arac giremez. ‘Military area. No entry,’ he translated.
‘Now he tells us,’ Dale muttered.
‘We’ll have to try to talk our way in. Will you help us?’ Jack asked the driver.
The soldier had been joined by another one, but they showed no inclination to approach the gates, let alone open them. In fact, as the three visitors stepped out of the car the sentries unslung their carbines and pointed them in their general direction. The roadway behind them led past a stand of eucalyptus. Beyond that half a dozen modern bungalows were grouped, and in the distance were other buildings with a functional military look. The whole area was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, with more guards patrolling inside it. What Jack and Dale had taken for a simple street address was evidently an army residential compound, and a well-protected one, at the edge of the park they had passed by.
‘Can you tell these men we’d like to see Yashar Delkin?’ Jack said. ‘That we don’t have a prior arrangement to visit him, but it’s an important matter and if they would just ask . . .?’
The driver called to the sentries and they exchanged a few sentences in Turkish.
‘It’s what I told you,’ he said, turning back to Jack and Dale. He pointed up the hill. ‘Over there, Istanbul army headquarters. That way, Istanbul War College. Here at Yildiz Fort is officers’ houses. Nobody can go in without the written permission.’ He crooked a little finger to indicate a gun being fired. ‘Terrorists. They must be careful of terrorists.’
‘I understand that they’re only doing their duty,’ Jack said, ‘but we’ve come a long way to see Mr Delkin, and if one of them would just go and speak to him, or phone his house . . .’ He pulled out his passport. ‘Look, they can see that we’re foreigners, not terrorists. They can tell him it’s an urgent matter about a friend of his in France,’ he improvised.
Another exchange ensued between the soldiers and the driver, who eventually shrugged and said, ‘It’s no good. Anyway, they say General Delkin is not here to ask. He went away this morning.’
‘General Delkin?’
The Turk gave him a look that was almost as sceptical as the sentries’. ‘You ask for a man you don’t know? They say he is a . . . general of brigade? The Jandarma,’ he added with a significant air.
‘A brigadier-general?’ Dale said. ‘But what’s the Jandarma?’
‘Gendarmerie.’ The driver held his wrists together to suggest handcuffs. ‘Special military police. Fighting terrorists.’
‘Can they tell us when he’ll be back? Or where we can find him? Or even just let us talk to someone in his house?’
This time the driver’s questions were met with sharper answers and impatient gestures. ‘They will say nothing,’ he reported nervously. ‘They say to go now or they arrest us.’
Jack seethed with frustration as they got back in the car. So near and so far again. It had all seemed a bit too simple, he supposed. They should never have let themselves imagine they could just turn up in Istanbul and expect Yashar Delkin to be available at their convenience.
Reading his thoughts, Dale said: ‘Sorry. It was my idea originally. Not such a good one, huh?’
‘I took up the idea. It’s not your fault. But we’ve lost the initiative. Knowing what he is now, it hardly seems likely that he’s going to be accessible to two complete strangers. Particularly since he’s already refused to talk to us once.’
And yet, Jack thought, the fact of what Delkin was, a brigadier-general in a branch of Turkish military security, made it that much less probable that his visit to Nadine last month had been merely casual. It made the idea of talking to him even more tantalizing. Delkin had obviously, risen through the ranks even faster than his Iraqi friend and former fellow-student, Jalloul. More than ever, Jack was convinced that Delkin knew something definite about the circumstances of Jalloul’s disappearance, and that the hunch he himself was following was right.
‘Delkin was obviously at home yesterday when Nadine called him,’ Dale said. ‘Maybe he didn’t go away this morning. Maybe those jokers were told to turn away any strangers who turned up.’
‘Perhaps they were just lying to save themselves the bother of arguing,’ Jack said. ‘We’ve got to find another way of reaching Delkin.’
‘Let’s work on it. Meanwhile let’s hope for better luck with Zakarios.’
Even in the richer days of large oil revenues, the Mukhabarat had never had a lot of money to spend on elaborate organization or sophisticated equipment. One result of this was that its young agents were taught to be self-reliant as well as thrifty. The new Mudeer was particularly insistent on these two points. Although with his expensive tastes he seemed to be quite wealthy in his own right, he was not fooled into believing that money was any substitute for hard work when it came to gathering intelligence. He taught his disciples that there was no point in paying for information that could be had for nothing, just as there was no sense in being devious when it was possible to appear straightforward.
This approach had produced results for Ali Shakir from the old soldier, Thorpe, and it might work again here in Zurich.
Ali and Issa had arrived on a midday flight from London, carrying Egyptian passports. The first thing they did was go to the tourist office on the Bahnhofplatz and pick up a comprehensive list of the city’s hotels – not for themselves, for they intended to check into a modest pension on the Sihl-Quai, near the industrial quarter. At the newsagent’s stand in the adjoining station they bought thirty francs’ worth of phone cards and then occupied two adjacent telephone booths in the concourse. Dividing the list between them, they began calling every hotel and asking if a Mr Rushton was registered.
It was a simple procedure, one that the Mudeer would have described as eliminating the obvious. Rushton was a businessman, not a trained agent who automatically covered his tracks. Unless he and his woman had friends in Zurich to stay with, they had to be in a hotel.
Ali’s fourteenth call yielded information, though not quite the sort he had hoped for. The switchboard operator at the Meilenhof Hotel told him Mr Rushton had checked out that morning.
‘That is Mr Jack Rushton, from England?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Do you know where he has gone, please?’
The operator asked him to wait. After a minute she came back on the line. ‘He left no forwarding address, sir, but our travel office says he bought tickets for flights to Istanbul.’
‘Thank you.’
There was enough credit left on his card for a quick call to London. When he told the Mudeer what he had learned he was relieved that his chief did not sound disappointed. He seemed quite pleased, in fact.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Get to Istanbul as quickly as possible. Phone me again once your arrangements are made, and I’ll see to it that you are met.’ There was a moment’s silence on the line. ‘We have good friends in Turkey. From our point of view, he couldn’t be in a better place.
