‘Don’t try anything like escaping,’ Barry said from the front seat. ‘You’re not really alone.’
They’d touched down in Istanbul twelve hours ago. She was done with buses, borrowed cars and stolen passports: with Mark in charge, an unmarked plane had flown them out of Split and straight to Ataturk Airport. A delegation of hard-faced men in rigid suits had met them and escorted them through a private channel past customs and immigration.
‘The government here can’t wait to get their hands on Dragović,’ Mark had explained during the drive from the airport. ‘They had him in prison three years ago and he escaped – that was a big embarrassment. They don’t appreciate what he did to Muslims in Bosnia either, for that matter. They giving us everything they can.’
‘How do they know Dragović will come? If he was in prison here once before, won’t he be shy of risking it again?’
‘He’ll come,’ Mark had said confidently. ‘All our networks are telling us he’s absolutely obsessed with this thing. Won’t trust it to anyone else.’
Abby got out of the car, made a show of sticking a ten-lira note through the window to Barry, and walked down to the mosque. She’d been to Istanbul once before, for an ICC conference, but that had been high summer when the city groaned with tourists and dust clogged the hot air. Now, in late autumn, the city seemed to have shrunk as it cooled. There was more air; the spaces between the buildings felt wider. The noise of the ships in the Bosphorus sounded unnaturally loud.
The tourists had gone home, but the street was still busy with locals shopping or visiting the mosque for their devotions. A white police van sat on the corner; two more policemen with automatic weapons wandered down the street, chatting to each other. Abby wondered if that was normal.
Mark had given her a guidebook as part of her cover. She opened it to the right page, and read the brief entry on the Fatih Mosque. Fatih meant conqueror, she learned. On the highest point of the highest hill in the city, the Ottomon sultan Mehmet the Conquerer had razed the old Church of the Twelve Holy Apostles and built his mausoleum on its foundations, when he captured Constantinople in 1453. Three hundred years later, an earthquake had destroyed his mosque; his successors had rebuilt it in what the guidebook called Ottoman Baroque style.
She went through the gate, into a wide open park of square lawns and leafless trees. The mosque stood in the centre, as if in a state of siege. Steel hoardings surrounded its base; scaffolding climbed its outer walls. Abby looked for any sign of the Roman building that had once stood there, but couldn’t see anything. She wondered, not for the first time, how a treasure like the labarum could have remained hidden through all the centuries of renovations, excavations, demolitions and rebuildings. Surely someone would have noticed something. Or perhaps it lay buried under a thousand years of rubble.
Mark had given her a camera. She took some pictures – a few general tourist views, some of less obvious features like doors, culverts and drainpipes. Make it look as if you’re scoping it out, Mark had told her. Look furtive. That part was easy enough.
She didn’t go into the mosque, but skirted around the outside to the back. This part was a cemetery: flat graves surrounded by wrought-iron fences; pillars that had once supported canopies now chopped off at the knees. And beyond them, far grander than the others though still dwarfed by the mosque, an octagonal mausoleum topped by a dome.
Abby’s heart beat a little faster. The octagonal shape was exactly like Diocletian’s mausoleum in Split. Could this be Constantine’s? She opened the guidebook again.
‘Behind the main mosque stands the türbe or tomb of Mehmet the Conqueror, reconstructed in the Baroque style after the earthquake …’
She should have known. And yet she still found the parallel intriguing. Mehmet the Conqueror and Constantine the Unconquered. Two men separated by religion and geography and a thousand years, but both wanting the world to know they had dominated. Two men who, for all their differences, had chosen to be buried in the same place. Was it Mehmet’s way of conquering the past – burying Constantine beneath him the same way the mosque buried the church? Abby didn’t think so. It was affinity, not rivalry, that had brought him here. He wanted the company.
Gruber: There are certain places where power abides. This was one of them – she could feel it. She thought of the dead man in Kosovo, Gaius Valerius Maximus, and wondered if he’d walked through this same courtyard, in the service of the Emperor who first built it.
She snapped a few more pictures, finished her circuit of the mosque and went back out on to the street. A taxi rolled by, the same number as before. She pretended to hail it and got in.
‘Well?’ Mark said.
She clipped on her seatbelt as the car started moving. ‘I didn’t see Dragović, if that’s what you were expecting. There’s a lot of building work going on, though. It looks as if they’ve excavated down near the foundations. That might give him a way in.’
‘We’ll get on to the Culture Ministry. Perhaps we can slip a couple of people into the crews to look out for anything dubious.’
His phone buzzed. He tapped the screen, read the message and grunted.
‘No sign of Dragović moving yet. We’re watching the airports in all his known haunts. We’ve also put out the word to our networks. Nothing yet.’
Abby remembered the man in the black room in Rome, his silver gun against her head. She shivered.
‘Will he suspect anything?’
‘We gave the necklace and the text to a man called Giacomo in Belgrade.’
‘I’ve met him.’
Mark’s head flicked up; he gave her a suspicious stare. ‘You’ve got some interesting connections. When we get you back to London, we’ll have to sit down and have a conversation about all the people you’ve met.’
‘Can’t wait.’
They drove past a vast brick aqueduct, so huge that buses could easily drive through its arches. Just beyond it, Barry stopped the taxi on the kerb by a park. Mark ushered Abby out.
‘Go back and keep an eye on the mosque,’ he told Barry. ‘Call if anything happens. And no guns,’ he added. ‘If we start shooting up a mosque, we’ll have another fatwa on our hands before we know it. Starting from Whitehall.’
The taxi roared away and carved an aggressive U-turn across seven lanes of traffic. If Barry was trying to impersonate a Turkish taxi driver, he had the cover perfect. Almost as soon as he’d gone, an unmarked blue hatchback pulled up in its place. Mark and Abby climbed in; Abby wondered how many SIS agents – she assumed they were SIS – were swarming around Istanbul.
‘Where now?’
‘You wait at the hotel with Connie. I need to go to the consulate to talk to some people.’
The thought of sitting in another hotel room, watching canned TV and waiting for other people to decide her fate made her ill.
‘Isn’t there something I can do?’
‘Leave it to the professionals.’ He was so condescending she wanted to slap him. ‘Even if we did trust you – which we don’t – there’s nothing you can do.’
Thanks for spelling that out.
‘So what was that business at the mosque for? If Dragović’s people are watching me, you think they’re going to believe I just turn up, take a few photos and go back to the hotel? Don’t you think you can make it a little more convincing?’
‘What did you have in mind?’ Mark was looking out of the window, not really listening. Abby thought quickly.