Читать книгу City of the Lost - Will Adams - Страница 9

There was nothing more Iain could do for Mustafa, and others might need his help. He made his way down the slope to the cars that had rolled to its foot. The first two were empty, but a middle-aged woman was strapped unconscious behind the wheel of the third, a green Peugeot settled on its roof. He couldn’t see any flames but its interior was clouding with smoke. The doors were all jammed shut, but its passenger-side window had partially buckled so he smashed it with a stone until it caved. He took a deep breath then wriggled inside. He released her seatbelt, took her under her arms, hauled her out and laid her on her back. Her pulse was weak but she was alive and breathing unaided.

He clambered back up the hillside. It was steep enough to make his calves and hams ache. Shrieks of pain and wails of grief greeted him. The smoke had cleared to reveal the blast’s full devastation. A great bite had been taken out of the road in front of the Daphne International Hotel and its black-glass frontage had shattered and fallen away, exposing a honeycomb interior of ruined rooms, of broken baths and toilets dangling grotesquely from twisted pipes. The scale of damage, and the lack of any residual smell of cheap explosive, suggested to him military-grade ordnance. And not some stray shell from the Syrian war: it would take a large missile or a truckload of Semtex to wreak this much—

A cracking, splintering noise ripped the air, sending the fire-crews and search-and-rescue teams scurrying for safety. Then, a second or two later, the hotel’s left-hand wall simply sheared away and toppled forwards into the general rubble, bringing the rear wall down too, throwing up more clouds of noxious dust and reducing still further any hope of finding survivors.

Ambulances were now arriving in large numbers. He led a pair of paramedics down the hill. While one of them treated the Peugeot driver, he and the other strapped Mustafa onto a stretcher and carried him back up to the top, loaded him onto an ambulance. He asked to go along with him, but the paramedic gave an expressive little shrug. It wasn’t an ambulance right now, but a body-cart; and they needed all of it. ‘Did he live around here?’ the man asked.

‘Istanbul,’ answered Iain. He nodded at the wrecked hotel. ‘He was staying there.’

‘Wife? Family?’

‘I’ll call them myself,’ said Iain.

‘We still need to know who they are.’

He summoned up Layla’s number on his smartphone, wrote it along with Mustafa’s name on the back of one of his own business cards, then added the name of his Antioch hotel should they need to contact him. The paramedic thanked him and moved off in search of further grim duties. Remarkably, it was only now that he remembered what he and Mustafa had been here to do. Or, more precisely, remembered the footage that would have been streaming into his laptop right up to the moment of detonation. If his hard-drive had somehow survived, and the footage could be recovered, it could prove vital to the investigation. On the other hand, if the police discovered it for themselves it would be a nightmare to explain away.

He went back down the slope to where he’d found Mustafa then searched in an ever-widening spiral until he spotted an edge of the toughened black casing protruding from loose earth. He pulled it free. Its screen was shattered, its hinges broken and its casing pocked by shrapnel, but it could have been far worse. He carried it obliquely back up the slope to his hire-car, locked it away in his boot. His next job promised to be harder. He took out his phone again. No signal. The masts had to be overwhelmed. He walked away in search of coverage. Still nothing. A wicked little voice whispered that the paramedics or the hospital would take care of it for him, maybe even handle it better than he could. They’d be calm, clinical, practised.

In Istanbul, last year, Layla had cooked a feast in his honour, to thank him for bringing good employment to her husband. Their two daughters had sat either side of him upon their divan while he’d read them stories from the lusciously illustrated copy of the Thousand and One Nights he’d brought as a gift.

A signal at last. Tenuous but undeniable. He felt light-headed as he dialled Mustafa’s home number, like the first hint of flu. The phone had barely rung before Layla snatched it up. She began talking Turkish so fast that it was a struggle for Iain to follow. He tried to slow her. When she recognized his voice, she burst into sobs of relief. ‘You’re safe,’ she said, switching to English. ‘Thank God you’re safe. I’ve been watching on the news. I’ve been so worried. Where’s Mustafa? Is he with you? I’ve been trying his phone.’

‘Layla,’ said Iain.

There was silence. It stretched painful as the rack. ‘He’s hurt,’ she said. ‘He’s hurt badly, isn’t he?’

‘Layla,’ he said again.

She began to wail. It was a desperate, inhuman sound, like an animal being tortured. He didn’t know what she needed from him, whether to respect her grief with silence or to tell her what he knew. He decided to talk. It would be easy enough for her to shut him up if she wanted. He described their morning in the café, how he’d gone for more tea immediately before the blast. He told her how he’d knelt beside her husband in his last moments. She wept so loudly that it was hard to believe she could hear him, but he kept talking anyway, about how Mustafa had seized his hand and asked him to look out for her and their daughters. He told her of his promise, reiterated it now. Her sobs abruptly stopped. ‘Layla?’ he said. He’d lost signal. He felt sick and bruised and drained and guilty all at once as he walked around trying to reacquire it. When finally he succeeded, to his shame he couldn’t bring himself to call Layla again. He called the London office instead, asked for Maria. Maria had known Mustafa a little, had a wonderful gift of empathy. He braced her for bad news, told her what had happened. He asked her to get in touch with Layla, arrange for her and her daughters to fly down to Antioch if she so wished, plus whatever else she needed; and also to start the paperwork on Mustafa’s life insurance.

‘Are you okay?’ Maria asked. ‘You yourself, I mean?’

‘I’m fine,’ he assured her.

‘You don’t sound fine.’

‘I just watched Mustafa die,’ he told her. ‘I thought I was past all this shit.’

‘I’ll talk to Layla,’ she promised.

‘Thank you,’ said Iain. ‘And put me through to Quentin.’

‘Now?’

‘Now.’ He went on hold. His boss picked up a few moments later. ‘Maria told me,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it. Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘What are you going to do? Are you coming home?’

‘No. I need to be here for Layla.’

‘Layla?’

Iain clenched a fist. ‘Mustafa’s widow.’

‘Ah. Yes. Of course. Layla.’

‘Listen, Quentin,’ said Iain. ‘Before Mustafa died, he asked me if we had anything to do with the blast. I promised him I’d find out.’

‘How could you even think such a thing?’

‘Because I don’t know who our client is,’ said Iain. ‘Or what they wanted from this job.’

‘You do know our client. Hunter & Blackwells.’

‘They’re lawyers, Quentin,’ said Iain. ‘Who do they represent?’

‘They had nothing to do with this. Take my word for it.’

‘No,’ said Iain.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said no, I won’t take your word for it. Not on this. I need to know who they are and why they’re so interested in the Bejjanis.’

Silence. ‘Very well,’ said Quentin, finally. ‘I gave them a pledge of confidentiality, but under these circumstances, I think I can ask permission to share. Though I make no promises.’

‘I do,’ said Iain angrily. ‘Either you tell me or I’ll make it my business to find out. And they really don’t want me going after them, not in the mood I’m in.’ He ended the call, rubbed the back of his neck. His first few months at Global Analysis had been such a relief after the army: stimulating, demanding and rewarding, yet no one getting killed or even hurt. This past year or so, however, it had turned increasingly sour. The secrecy. The offshore accounts. The relentless push for profits. The downright nastiness of some of their clients. That was why, for several months now, he’d been making vague plans to set up on his own, maybe invite Mustafa and a few of the others to go with him. Yet he’d done nothing concrete about it.

And now this.