Authors: Will Adams
A man holding a placard was shoved from behind by a youth in a Fenerbache scarf. He stumbled into one policeman and his placard hit another. They laid into him with their batons. He staggered off a few dazed paces, blood streaming from his forehead, then collapsed in an ugly heap. A roar went up. A volley of empty bottles and other litter was launched at the police, with rocks and other nastier missiles mixed in. Skirmishes broke out, turned quickly into running battles. Mounted police charged from one side; tear-gas canisters were fired from the other. Pandemonium took hold as panicked people tried to get away. A throng crushed up against temporary barriers set up to seal off a shopping street. The pressure proved too much for them, they gave way. The crowd spilled down it like a river in full spate. Most simply wanted to get to safety but others saw a chance for easy pickings. Plate-glass windows were smashed, clothes and jewellery grabbed. The steel shutters outside a large department store were jemmied up while a TV camera crew filmed it live for the news.
Police reinforcements were urgently summoned. But reports were now streaming in of trouble elsewhere. A builders’ merchant was on fire in Be
ş
ikta
ş
; a carpet shop in Üsküdar. Cars had been upturned and set ablaze all across the city. The Interior Minister went on television to assure the nation everything was in hand, but the split-screens showed the truth of it: the worsening mayhem in Taksim Square; a TV helicopter circling a city block on fire; young men with their faces hidden by hoods and scarves calmly looting an electronics store while police officers stood helplessly by.
And all that was before the bombs started going off.
Iain came out of the bathroom pulling on his last clean shirt to discover that Karin had indeed turned on the TV. A news channel was showing bewildered people covered in cement dust emerging from smoke, so that his first thought was that it was more footage from Daphne. But then he realized that this was something new. He sat on the bed beside her. ‘Where?’
‘Izmir,’ Karin told him. ‘But there’s been one in Bursa too. And you should see Istanbul. The whole country’s on fire. What the hell’s going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Iain. ‘Not for sure.’
She looked sharply at him. ‘But you think you do?’
Iain hesitated. He didn’t much want to open the door onto that part of his life; but she had a right to know. ‘Do you remember, when you were a kid, a scandal in Holland about things called Stay Behind Organizations?’
‘No. What are they?’
It would sound crazy if he came straight out with it. He had to give her some background first. ‘Okay. It goes back to the end of World War Two. We’d defeated Hitler, only to be faced with Stalin instead. Churchill fully expected war. It needed to be prepared for. Resistance groups had proved their value against the Nazis, even though they’d been set up on the hoof. Think how much more effective they’d have been if we’d been able to set them up in advance.’
‘Stay Behind Organizations,’ murmured Karin.
‘Our enemies were communists,’ said Iain. ‘Our natural allies, therefore, were nationalists and ultra-right-wingers – pretty much exactly the same people we’d just been fighting. We brought likely prospects to England, taught them how to identify and recruit others, raise funds, make bombs, assassinate and sabotage. We effectively wrote the handbook of modern terrorism then gave it to them. When we Brits ran out of cash, the CIA took over. They weren’t scared only of the Soviets invading, they were equally nervous that some European country would vote the communists into power and so bring down NATO from within. Their response was something called the strategy of tension. It involved having their pet Stay Behind Organizations run high-casualty bombing campaigns then blame them on left-wing terrorist groups – of which there were plenty, mind you. The idea was that the situation would get so out of hand that the public would demand the restoration of security, whatever it took. That would give the army the perfect excuse to step in. They’d arrest a long list of left-wing politicians, academics, trade unionists and writers, and the bombings would magically stop.’
Karin looked horrified at him. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know all this?’
Iain sighed, reluctant to admit that for years this had been his own life, and that he’d been proud of it too. For the curse of it was that it always seemed to start with honourable intentions, with a refusal to watch passively as good people suffered under terrible regimes. But the violence needed to overthrow those regimes poisoned everything. And so, one day, you’d walk unexpected into a compound captured by men you’d trained yourself only to find them standing among the executed corpses of their former enemies, and their young families. For no one back home ever seemed to learn the bitter truth of it: that the enemy of your current enemy all too often simply became your next enemy. ‘It’s public domain,’ he told her. ‘It came out in the early 1990s. The Gladio investigations. Every country in Western Europe had its own version, including Holland. But they never got all the way to the bottom of it. Too many powerful people and institutions were implicated. Besides, there was no real appetite for it. The Cold War had been won, you see. It was history.’
Karin looked bleakly back at the TV. ‘Oh hell,’ she said.
It was a curiously telling way to learn about a man, looking through his photographs of himself and his friends. By that light, Zehra didn’t much warm to Yasin Baykam. The only thing to be said in his favour was that at least he’d taken them down and hidden them in his closet; as though he’d grown ashamed of the man he’d once been.
It was easy to work out which ones had been in the picture frames. They were backed with card, and mostly had dates and locations pencilled upon them. She examined one now: black and white, unevenly faded, starting to curl up a little at the edges, revealing the dried yellow glue beneath, and exuding a faint yet evocative chemical smell. In the next, six young men were sitting around a campfire in a clearing in a forest, roasting chunks of meat on skewers. Now they were marching down a city street, parading the banners of the Nationalist Movement Party and carrying placards demanding war with Greece. He and three friends then held their forearms up for the camera, showing off matching tattoos of grey wolves. Now he was in army uniform, a rifle in one hand, his other draped around the shoulders of a young woman struggling not to show her fear. Then a very different shot, Baykam standing sheepishly alongside a stick-thin teenage girl, an older woman with a broad flat nose and an older version of himself that could only be his father. Home on leave. When she saw where it had been taken, she tapped Andreas on his arm. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘He came from Antioch.’
Andreas had made discoveries of his own: a sheaf of handwritten letters on distinctive thick yellow paper. ‘Did you read these?’ he asked.
‘They’re in foreign.’
‘They’re from the daughter of the family who used to own his house.’
‘Ah,’ said Zehra. There’d been a plague of these pests since the border with the south had been opened. They came to gawp at your house and make pointed comments about the improvements you’d made, trying to make you feel guilty for building a new life after having been chased out of your own childhood home. ‘And?’
‘The first one is very formal. Merlina introduces herself. She lived in his house as a young girl. She has her own children now. With his permission, she’d love to show them where she grew up. But these later ones …’
‘Yes?’
He held up another letter, a colour photograph pinned to its top corner. Yasin Baykam looking faintly bewildered, surrounded by a family of five, all smiling broadly for the camera, the little boy standing in front grinning crazily and giving two thumbs-up while his elder sisters each held gifts of food they’d brought. Zehra’s heart gave an unexpectedly powerful thump as she looked at it, at the thought that even a man like this could find a new family after he was grown old. She gestured at the photographs spread out on the floor. ‘These used to be on his walls,’ she said. ‘He must have taken them down before these people came to visit. Then he never put them back up again.’
‘Men of violence often mellow as they grow old,’ nodded Andreas, getting onto his hands and knees to look at her photos. ‘They come to regret the things they once did. Imagine that you’d been a fiercely nationalistic Turk, the Greeks your sworn enemies. You’d defeated them on Cyprus, you’d taken one of their houses as rightful booty. But now the former owners come to visit. And they’re nothing like what you’ve imagined. They’re nice. They’re warm. They bring you pies. And, despite yourself, you
like
them. That would have to shake your view of the world, wouldn’t it?’
‘That’s why he went to see the Professor,’ murmured Zehra. ‘He wanted to make amends.’
Andreas was still glancing over her photographs. Suddenly he froze. ‘I’ll be fucked,’ he said. He rested his weight on one hand and reached across to turn one of the photographs around to face him. It showed Baykam standing in front of a tank with a tall, good-looking officer, a bandanna around his forehead. ‘It’s the Lion,’ he said. ‘I’ll swear to God that’s the Lion he’s with.’
Zehra shook her head. ‘The who?’
‘The Lion of Famagusta. General Kemal Yilmaz. Turkey’s Chief of the General Staff himself.’
General Yilmaz had hand-picked every member of the team overseeing that day’s deployments from his Ankara command centre. Using the growing chaos as excuse and cover, they sent increasing numbers of units to take control of arterial routes, to guard key buildings and the homes of Turkey’s ruling elite. The vast majority of these units were unaware that they were participating in a coup, but they hadn’t been chosen at random. They’d been chosen because Yilmaz had reason to believe their first loyalty was to the uniform, not the government.
His buzzer vibrated in his pocket. He checked Asena’s message then beckoned Major General Hüseyin Yazo
ğ
lu aside. ‘You’re in command, Hüseyin,’ he told him. ‘You know what to do.’
‘Yes, General. We won’t let you down.’
He walked briskly back to his private office, established a secure line. Asena was waiting for him. ‘You do realize I have work of my own today?’ he asked drily.
‘There have been developments,’ she told him. ‘Black got to his girlfriend before we could. It’s possible they’ll go public. And something else: an incident outside that Famagusta house you wanted watched.’
Yilmaz’s heart clenched like a fist. ‘An incident?’ he asked. ‘What kind of incident?’ He swivelled almost subconsciously in his chair as he listened, until he was facing his ego-wall, dozens of photographs of himself with some of the world’s most powerful people. But the photograph in pride of place actually showed him on his own: a young officer, at the turret of his tank, leading his squadron south to Famagusta, his wife’s golden silk scarf knotted around his forehead, trailing him like a mane in the wind. He hadn’t even noticed the photographer. She must have been crouching by the side of the road. But, two weeks later, this photograph had adorned the front cover of one of Turkey’s bestselling news magazines, in celebration of their triumph over the Greeks. They’d captioned it ‘The Lions of Famagusta’. But only one lion had been visible, so that was what he’d become, to the envious joshing of his comrades. The Lion of Famagusta! And the photograph had become iconic. It had come to symbolize victory.
He’d
come to symbolize it. And because a lion was brave and fierce and handsome and noble, he’d come to personify those virtues too.
The woman with the dyed blonde hair. The youngster squinting fearfully up at him through his horn-rimmed glasses.
He scowled at them until they went away again. Everyone had ghosts. His were more persistent than most, that was all.
‘There’s no danger,’ Asena was saying. ‘The police have already let our three men go. And it’s not like there was anything left in the house anyway. I had Emre and his men go in that first night, remember? They swore to me they cleared out all his papers, so there’s nothing left to link him to you. Besides, it’s almost certainly a coincidence. I wouldn’t even have bothered you with it except that—’
‘Almost certainly a coincidence,’ he said. ‘
Almost certainly a coincidence
. An anonymous tip-off today of all days. The house left unwatched so that anyone could have waltzed in. And you think it’s
almost certainly a coincidence
?’
‘My love,’ she said. ‘If you’re so worried, let me help. I’m in Cyprus myself now. Tell me what needs doing and I’ll—’
‘No.’
‘But—’
‘No.’ Yilmaz touched fingers to his desktop. For forty years, he’d lived in a kind of denial, pretending it had all happened to someone else, that it was a scene from a movie he’d once watched. Yet, somewhere deep inside, he’d always known this day would come. ‘You concentrate on finding Black and the girl before they can go public. Leave Famagusta to me.’
‘My love,’ pleaded Asena. ‘You need to stay in Ankara. Who knows what may come up? But if you just tell me what—’
‘I said leave Famagusta to me.’ He ended the call before she could argue further, then sat there brooding. He’d accepted, from the beginning, the possible failure of their enterprise. He could endure that kind of disgrace, as well as the life imprisonment or even execution that would surely follow, just so long as Turkey understood that he’d acted out of principle, to avenge the humiliations inflicted upon the army by corrupt politicians and a crooked justice system.
But this was a very different kind of disgrace, and it terrified him.
He didn’t need to panic, however. The commander of the Turkish forces in Famagusta had already doubled Varosha’s perimeter security at his request. He could have him redouble it. But that would provide only a temporary fix. He needed something more permanent. And he’d have to oversee it himself. In part that was because he’d never have full peace of mind unless he’d witnessed it for himself. It was also because he needed to be there to make sure no one sneaked a look before they closed it up. But mostly it was because it had all happened so long ago that he’d forgotten where it had taken place, and only by returning there in person could he hope to find it again.