Читать книгу City of the Lost - Will Adams - Страница 6

They said this was where the Trojan War had started. They said that it was here, among Daphne’s wooded hillsides, glades and waterfalls, that Paris had awarded his golden apple to Aphrodite, rather than to Athena or to Hera, thus winning himself Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, and precipitating the Greek armada and ten years of brutal, bloody war into the bargain.

Iain Black smiled as he took another sip of his sweet strong tea. Men going crazy over a beautiful woman. How far the world had come. ‘Now her,’ he said, nodding along and across the road to the steps outside the black-glass fronted Daphne International Hotel. ‘She’s more like it.’

Mustafa glanced over his shoulder, snorted in amusement. ‘What is it with you and scrawny women?’ he asked. Then he flushed as he realized what he’d said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—’

‘It’s okay,’ Iain assured him. ‘Anyway, she’s not scrawny. She’s elegant. There’s a difference.’

‘Elegant!’ retorted Mustafa. ‘Can’t you see what she’s wearing?’

Iain laughed. He liked her clothes, the student chic of them, the way they showed off her figure without seeming to. A plain blue sweatshirt, baggy cream cheesecloth trousers, well-worn tan sneakers. Silver rings on her fingers and her left thumb, a back-to-front baseball cap through which poked unruly tufts of her straw-coloured hair, and a pair of John Lennon shades with shiny dark blue lenses. ‘Give her a break,’ he said. ‘She’s on holiday.’

‘A woman should always make the most of herself,’ said Mustafa. ‘Especially a woman who can afford to stay in a place like that.’

‘You’re a chauvinist and a snob, my friend,’ smiled Iain.

‘Yes,’ agreed Mustafa.

The woman was carrying a tattered blue-vinyl day bag. She now half drew a bulky manila envelope from it so that she could check its address. She put it back, looked both ways, turned left and headed away from them, towards the main road. Iain watched her out of sight with a mild pang of regret, not for her in particular so much as for the companionship of an attractive woman. It had been too long; that was the fact of it. And he was ready again, he suddenly sensed it inside himself. Yet this was hardly the time or place. With Butros Bejjani and his entourage on their way, he needed his game-head on.

He checked his laptop again, the feed coming in from the various cameras they’d set up to monitor the approach roads and the hotel lobby. No sign of them yet. ‘How are we for time?’ he asked.

‘Another half hour at least,’ said Mustafa.

Iain nodded at their empty glasses. ‘More tea?’

‘Need you ask?’

He picked up their glasses and took them inside, the door banging closed behind him. An elderly thin German woman with hennaed hair, silver jewellery and an embroidered crimson scarf was agonizing between juices. When finally she’d plumped for lemon, Iain gave his own order and asked for the drinks to be taken out. Then he headed for the rest-room. He was on his way in when it happened, a thunderous boom and the rest-room door slamming sideways into him like a small truck, throwing him down onto the white tiled floor. He rose with difficulty onto hands and knees. His ears were muffled yet he could still hear alarms outside, people screaming. The years of training and service kicked in, so that instead of panic he felt the familiar calm coldness spread through him, almost as though he was watching it happen to someone else. He tried to stand but his balance was off and he fell back down. He didn’t let this bother him but kept trying until he succeeded and made his way unsteadily out. There was glass, debris and dust everywhere. The waiter was down behind the counter, groaning softly. The German woman was on her side, her scarf splayed like blood around her throat and head. Her eyes were open but dazed and he couldn’t see any injuries, for she’d been protected from the worst of the blast by the solid side wall which—

Mustafa.

He hurried outside. A glimpse of hell, daytime turned to night by a canopy of noxious black smoke. A blue van with shattered windows was blazing furiously. Dust and fragments of stone whispered down around him like dry rain; and even as he watched, a misshapen and charred sheet of once-white metal crashed from a nearby roof onto the cobbles. His eyes watered with dust and toxic smoke. He had to squint to see. The café’s forecourt had been cleared as if by a giant arm. He went to the edge, looked down. The air was clearer here. Three cars had tumbled all the way down the steep slope to the tree-line of the valley beneath. Tables, chairs, sunshades and other debris were scattered everywhere. Great chunks of rubble, the tossed cabers of telephone poles, the black serpents of their wires. And there was Mustafa, two-thirds of the way down. The gradient was so steep and the ground so loose that he set off little avalanches with every step, earth cascading around his ankles. Mustafa was on his back, wheezing from the effort to breathe. His cheek was lacerated and bleeding and his left arm looked badly broken below the elbow. Iain knelt beside him. He’d dealt with trauma often enough in the army, but that didn’t make it easy. He unzipped Mustafa’s leather jacket. His white cotton shirt beneath was sodden with blood. A piece of shrapnel had torn into his friend’s gut and gone to grievous work inside, releasing that hateful sick sweet smell. He looked up the slope in hope of help, but there was no one, he was on his own. A shredded cotton tablecloth fluttered like defeat a little way off. He made a wad of it, pressed it over Mustafa’s wounds, bleakly and increasingly aware that it was futile, a gesture, that his friend was losing blood too fast for anything short of a miracle to save him. And he didn’t believe in miracles.

Mustafa groaned and opened his eyes. He lay there for a moment, taking it in, assimilating what had happened to him, what was about to happen. He felt for and took Iain’s hand, looked him in the eyes. ‘My wife,’ he said softly. ‘My daughters.’

‘You’re going to be fine,’ Iain told him. ‘Help’s on its way.’

He shook his head. ‘My wife,’ he said again, more urgently. ‘My daughters.’

Iain blinked back tears. ‘I’ll see they’re all right. I give you my word on it.’

Mustafa nodded faintly, satisfied by this pledge. ‘Who did this?’ he asked. ‘Was this us?’

Iain grimaced. For eighteen months now, Turkey had been caught up in a spiral of violence that approached a state of war. Not just the overspill from Syria, a few miles south of here, but also from Kurdish separatists, Islamicists, Armenians and even Cypriots who’d taken advantage of the growing chaos to press their own particular causes. Yet that this should happen outside this hotel today of all days was too big a coincidence to ignore. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Find out,’ said Mustafa.

‘I promise.’

‘Find out and make them …’ He grimaced in pain or shock. He gave a little cry and clenched Iain’s hand tight. His left leg twitched briefly, as though trying to kick off a slipper. Then he stiffened and his body arched for a moment or two before something seemed to puncture inside him and he relaxed again and was still.