Deadline (20 page)

‘I want to go . . . sir,’
İ
zzet Melik added the last word grudgingly. Ardıç was being obstructive inasmuch as he was not letting
İ
zzet do what he wanted.

The commissioner puffed on his cigar and then sighed. ‘Two Special Forces officers are going in,’ he said. ‘Two young, very highly trained, very fit, very fast, completely ruthless men. Now, Sergeant Melik, if you can tell me what you possess in common
with these men, I will let you go. And before you tell me that you’re highly trained, yes, you are, but not like them and you know it.’

There was no arguing with anything his superior had said. But that didn’t stop
İ
zzet from wanting to go into the hotel with the Special Forces officers anyway. Ay
ş
e was in there and he wanted to be the one to get her out.

Ardıç, who knew human nature better than even he cared to acknowledge, said, ‘This bears out everything I have ever believed about relationships between police officers. They are wrong. You want to rescue your fiancée but it just isn’t appropriate in this situation. Do you understand?’

Of course he did. Melik put his head down. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘You have to trust that Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu knows what she’s doing,’ Ardıç said. ‘I do.’

İ
zzet looked up at him. A contradictory beast, Ardıç was both a traditionalist and a liberal, a man of religious faith who also believed passionately in the necessity for secular authority. He could be misogynistic and his tolerance for people who lived ‘alternative’ lifestyles was low, but there were always exceptions to his ‘rules’ and he was the first to admit it.

‘Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu is one of our best officers,’ Ardıç continued. ‘Without her intervention we wouldn’t have known anything about this situation.’

That was true. Although why
she’d been at the Pera Palas at all still bothered
İ
zzet.

‘We all have our jobs to do, Melik,’ Ardıç said, ‘and yours, this time like my own, is to wait.’ He looked over into a corner of the room where two young men were putting on Kevlar vests and slotting weapons into their boots and round their waists. ‘Quite apart from Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu, we need to get Hüseyin Hikmet out,’ Ardıç continued. ‘We need to talk to him and we have to get someone on the inside who can actually provide us with some intelligence.’

Not talking to what was actually a woman at her side was no easy task. Dressed all in black as anonymously as Nar herself, she nevertheless looked undoubtedly woman-shaped. She also wanted to talk.

In a way Nar wanted to talk too. The woman was clearly part of the gang and if she could talk to her then she might be able to find out who these people were. But the woman just wanted to gossip.

‘Do you see that girl over there?’ she said to Nar as she pointed towards a young woman sitting at a table, idly smoking a cigarette. ‘That’s Senay Tuna. You know who her daddy is? A proper spoilt little madam!’

Nar didn’t know who Senay Tuna was, much less her father, and so she said nothing. That had to be better than saying the wrong thing. Her other fear was that this woman would pick up the
girly tones in her voice and start to become suspicious. There was only one woman in this crew, as far as Nar knew, and there certainly wasn’t one as tall as she was.

She’d had a text which may or may not be from Sergeant Farsako
ğ
lu. She’d felt the phone vibrate against her calf. But she hadn’t been able to do anything about it. She’d been ordered to keep guard over the guests with this woman and that was where she had to stay.

In the middle of the room, she could see Inspector
İ
kmen and one of his Armenian doctor friends talking to a man who, to Nar, looked a bit sweaty and slug-like. She couldn’t hear what was being said but the woman beside her had to comment. ‘Look at them!’ she sneered. ‘Useless! They’re never going to solve it.’ Then her eyes slid across to a woman dressed entirely in green. ‘Oh, I do like that gown,’ she said. ‘That’s
very
nice.’

Nar had observed that the gunmen didn’t seem to approve of alcohol. They didn’t want their hostages to drink and they were very vocal about it. Only the men she’d seen down in the kitchens had smoked and no one had eaten anything that Nar had noticed. Of course they didn’t want anyone to see their faces but there was something else too. There was a sort of a puritanism about them which could point towards Islamic fundamentalism. But she
hadn’t heard any of them say anything of a religious nature and this woman at her side was very interested in what was an extremely revealing gown.

Was the woman’s chat all just smoke and mirrors? But if that was the case, why was she doing it with a ‘man’ she thought was one of her own? Nar began to become very paranoid that maybe the woman had tumbled that she was not who she appeared to be and she began to sweat. That text was really worrying her too. Who had sent it? What was it about? And was it important?

‘I don’t like sequins on a gown, I think they look common,’ the woman at Nar’s side said as she watched a lady whose dress was covered in sequins pour herself a glass of water. ‘The only sparkly things any woman should wear are diamonds.’

Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu stood outside the fridge she had once hidden inside and waited. Her heart was still thudding painfully inside her chest after the precarious journey she’d made from the hotel lobby down to where she was now. Guests, escorted by gunmen, had been in and out of the toilets almost all the time. They felt sick or they had diarrhoea, mainly because they were frightened. Ay
ş
e couldn’t blame them for that, but it had made her progress difficult. Now she was waiting for the two Special Forces officers. One
of them would help her take the gunman she’d put in the fridge out and the other would, hopefully, take over from Nar. If Nar made an appearance.

Ay
ş
e looked back into the kitchens to see whether Nar was coming and it was in that moment that two men silently appeared at her side. She hadn’t heard the back door open, or feet on the floor or anything. To stop herself from audibly gasping, Ay
ş
e put her hand over her mouth. One of the men looked first at her and then at what she imagined was an image of her face on his phone and said, ‘Sergeant, where’s your insider?’

‘Nar? I don’t know,’ Ay
ş
e whispered. ‘I sent her a text.’

‘So she may be unable to get away.’

‘Or she’s been exposed as an impostor,’ Ay
ş
e said. It didn’t bear thinking about but she still had to say it. It was, after all, a real possibility.

The other man, young and good-looking and grave, just like his colleague, said, ‘Was the man in the fridge unconscious when you left him?’

Ay
ş
e thought back to the limp body she had watched Ersu drag into the fridge. ‘He grunted,’ she said, ‘when we put him in. We covered him with our coats.’

‘So he could be awake or waking up.’

‘He could be, yes,’ she said. He could also, Ay
ş
e knew, and in spite of the grunting,
be dead. She hoped he wasn’t.

One of the men looked at his watch, at his partner and then he said, ‘OK, let’s do this.’ He pushed the fridge door handle down while the other man stood across the corridor with his gun pointed out in front of him. Light burst into the corridor from the fridge and all three of them looked inside. The man was exactly where Ay
ş
e and the others had left him, on the floor, covered up with coats. Maybe he was dead, after all. But as the officer who wasn’t wielding a gun went inside, she heard the man on the floor very softly mutter, ‘Allah!’ She was relieved.

‘Do you want me to help . . .’ Ay
ş
e let her offer die as she watched the officer lift the man up and sling him across his back as if he weighed nothing. He walked out of the fridge and closed the door behind him. He looked at his colleague. ‘I’ll take this one and the sergeant out,’ he said.

‘OK. I’ll stay here.’

Ay
ş
e looked back towards the kitchen again but she still couldn’t see Nar.

‘I’ll wait,’ the officer said. ‘You have to go now, Sergeant.’

Ay
ş
e bit her lip. She didn’t want to leave the hotel without Nar.

‘I—’

‘You can’t do any more
here,’ the officer said. ‘Go now.’

He was not to be argued with. His voice as well as his body told her to go. And so Ay
ş
e reluctantly left the hotel with the other officer and the man who could, possibly, tell them who the gunmen in the Pera Palas were.

Now that they were all being watched so closely, Çetin
İ
kmen didn’t feel able to say what was on his mind, even to Süleyman. The atmosphere in the Kubbeli Saloon was getting more and more claustrophobic, more and more unbearable. Did these gunmen have any interest in them working this out or not? Logically, if the four people their captors had shot hadn’t really been shot at all, then those who had fired at them had to have been using blanks. No other explanation was possible. And whilst
İ
kmen knew that it would be rash to assume that just because one or two people were carrying blanks, everyone else was as well, it had to be possible that at least some of them were. What if they were all actually being held hostage by unarmed men?

According to Krikor Sarkissian’s assistant, Burak Fisekçi, the clinic’s receptionist, Selma Hanım, knew Yiannis Istefanopoulos in some capacity and so he was her suggestion. Krikor knew Aysel Ökte, but neither he nor Burak could remember
suggesting either Mert or Demir. Their names had probably originated with one or more of Krikor’s nurses.

İ
kmen knew that he was moving away from the central issue and he had to get back to that. Who had killed Söner Erkan? He looked around the Kubbeli Saloon and into the ballroom and realised that he didn’t have the first idea. No one who knew the boy seemed to have liked him, Lale Aktar had found him, but who else could have killed him and why? None of those who had been out of the ballroom when the boy was murdered had any sort of connection to Söner Erkan except for Burak Fisekçi. But his connection, via Krikor Sarkissian, was only slight. Could a clue possibly exist in the fictional scenario the Bowstrings were to have enacted?

The young prince (Söner) was blackmailing his sister-in-law (Ceyda) over an affair she had once had with the Italian Garibaldi (Metin Martini). He wanted to be paid off not to tell his sister-in-law’s husband, the prince (Alp), about the affair. But rather than pay the young prince, his sister-in-law had killed him.
İ
kmen sighed. If there was anything there, he couldn’t see it. He was tired and stressed and in an ideal world he needed some space to wander about and think. But they wouldn’t let him go anywhere on his own. Escorted he could go to the toilet or up to room 411 again, but they weren’t going to allow him to
go anywhere else. Or rather he thought that they probably wouldn’t. What if he was wrong?

He looked up and caught the leader’s eye.

‘I want to go for a walk, I need to think,’ he said. ‘Can someone take me for a walk?’

The man thought for a moment and then he said, ‘In order to be fair, I suppose I have to agree to that, yes.’ He beckoned one of his men over to him.

İ
kmen inclined his head in thanks.

Süleyman, who was sitting beside him, said, ‘I’ll come with you.’

But
İ
kmen put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘No, Mehmet, thank you,’ he said. ‘I need to be as alone as I can be. I need to think.’

‘I can understand that, Inspector,’ Lale Aktar said. ‘Sometimes the solitary path is the best, especially when you’re trying to solve a problem.’

One of the gunmen came over to
İ
kmen and said, ‘Where do you want to go for this walk?’

He sounded annoyed. Not a person,
İ
kmen imagined, who walked for pleasure. But at least he wasn’t the man with the camera on his helmet.

‘I want to go up to the fourth floor and walk round and round the central space and contemplate the nothingness above and below,’
İ
kmen said. Above the Kubbeli Saloon was a vast space around which were suspended the floors of the hotel
in rising galleries. Above that was the massive glass roof. It was a lot of thinking space.

‘Why the fourth floor?’ the gunman asked.

But before
İ
kmen could answer, the leader said, ‘So that he can smoke with a clear conscience.’

İ
kmen smiled. ‘Ah, I see you know me very well,’ he said.

As usual, climbing four flights of stairs wore Çetin
İ
kmen out and he had to spend a few moments when he reached the top of the last flight standing still and catching his breath. His legs as well as his lungs didn’t like such exercise any more. In fact, they hadn’t liked it for years. Çetin
İ
kmen had been unfit for ever.

But walking on flat surfaces was OK and so he did that. Round and round the gallery, always feeling a little queasy whenever he reached the door of room 411. The masked man watched him with his Kalashnikov always ready in his hands. At a distance he didn’t look so much frightening as absurd.
İ
kmen almost laughed. He lit a cigarette. But then he realised that he didn’t have an ashtray and so he riffled in his jacket pocket for the empty cufflink box he knew was in there and he took the lid off and used that. Just after he passed the door of room 411 for the third time, a masked figure came out of one of the rooms much further down towards the lift. He or she was carrying
something. It was something that
İ
kmen recognised and which, if it was what he thought it was, made him sweat with fear. It provoked a whole sequence of terrible memories of appalling events.

Hüseyin Hikmet, or whoever the man was,
refused to speak except to say that ‘Allah is great!’ They’d thrown everything they knew about the situation at him – and that included the intelligence about the fake blood that Ay
ş
e Farsako
ğ
lu had given them. Now they wanted to progress to harsher measures. Ardıç and the Special Forces commander,
İ
pek, were conferring about it behind the bar.