Chapter 5
The Receiving Line
There were forty-one billboards for the Doruk Tower between the airport and the Bosphorus. Every one said the same word.
GÜVEN. Trust.
It was written in white letters six feet high over a photograph of a silver-haired man in a hard hat, smiling at a little girl in a yellow one. David Morgan counted the billboards from the back of a taxi, because counting gave his face something to do.
"He's very consistent," said Nell beside him. She wore a headscarf and a mackintosh, playing a retired schoolteacher from Leeds on her first trip abroad since her husband died. It was a part she played easily, because every word of it was true.
The team's flat was in Cihangir, above a bakery, with a view over the water that Ravi refused to look at.
"It's a very high third floor," he said, sitting with his back to the window and a sandwich in his hand.
"If you fall," said Camille, "you land on a bun."
"That is not the comfort you think it is."
On the table lay the plan for Doruk's ceremony: a site map, a running order, and nine hundred photographs of one man's chest. Round his neck, on a fine chain, he wore a small steel object like a lighter. It was his key. It opened his accounts in four countries and a vault in Zurich. He never took it off.
"A hardware key," said Ravi. "Fingerprint reader, secure chip. I can't hack it from outside. We need the key itself. But once we have it, Nell's calling his bank in Zurich, and I know who she's calling and in what order. I don't need his thumb. I need him not to know it's gone for six hours."
Camille lifted a cloth. On a square of black velvet lay a steel rectangle on a chain. From three feet away, it was impossible to tell from the real one. She had made it from thirty-one photographs and a lump of dentist's steel.
"It is the finest piece of work I have ever done," she said, "and it will be in a river by Thursday."
"It's going in a safe in Zurich," said David. He weighed it on his palm. "It's too warm."
"It is not warm!"
"You've been holding it. His has been against his skin nine years. Nobody will notice at first. But there's one person who might." He laid down a photograph of a woman of forty-five in a navy suit with straight eyebrows and tired eyes. "Selin Aydın, his chief of staff. A former prosecutor. She runs his whole day. The Archivist says she's the only person he's afraid of."
"She sounds nice," said Anselm.
"She sounds like trouble."
"Those are not different things, my friend."
At two in the morning, Ravi found a photograph.
He was looking for something else: an old magazine profile of Gideon Strake, headlined THE QUIET PROFESSIONAL. It showed a younger Strake in shirtsleeves reaching for a glass. On his wrist was a plain steel watch on a canvas strap, with a crack in the glass at seven o'clock.
"He's got an ugly watch," Ravi muttered.
David was in the doorway before he finished. He stood in the laptop's light in a blanket, with his hair on end, and Ravi was so shocked by his face that he forgot to be afraid of it.
"Show me the wrist. Enlarge it."
Ravi did. The grain settled: the strap, the crack, and below it, a small deep crescent nick in the edge of the bezel.
David did not move for a long time.
"Is that something?" Ravi asked carefully.
"No." David drew the blanket tight, an oddly childlike gesture, then seemed to hear himself and let go. "I thought I recognised the style. It's an army watch. Go to bed, Ravi. We've a ribbon to cut."
In his room, he sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.
He was fourteen. He was on the third stair, in his pyjamas, in a house in Cardiff that smelled of toast and damp. In the kitchen a man in a grey suit spoke politely to his father. Just the working papers, Mr. Hale. We understand you're upset. His mother was crying without a sound. The man reached up to straighten his cuff, and in the yellow light a plain watch swung into view, with a crack in the glass.
He had not thought of it in twenty-five years.
Half the men in Europe have one, he told himself. He lay on top of the covers with his eyes open until morning.
The day before the ceremony, he went alone to the Yıldız Sitesi.
It was now a field. Between two rows of apartment blocks stood a long fence of blue boards, painted with flowers by someone. Behind it, flat brown earth, and at the far end a low stone memorial shaped like an open book, with a hundred and eighty-seven names in two columns. He read them all.
An old woman sat on the kerb with a bag of tea glasses. A photograph was pinned to her coat: a girl of eight, with plaits and a gap in her teeth.
"Third floor," she said in Turkish, without being asked. "Fourth window from the left. I used to wave. A young lawyer said the man who built it would be called to account. That was nine months ago. Now they say his company has no money. It is a very clever company."
"I'm sorry," David said, in Turkish.
"Are you from the newspaper?"
"No. Just passing through."
She poured him tea from a flask. He sat beside her in the cold wind for twenty minutes and drank it to the bottom. When he stood to go, she said, "God keep you, whoever you are."
He couldn't answer. Round the corner, he stood with one gloved hand on a wall. Then he rang Ravi.
"Is the Return ready?"
"For nine days. There's a lawyer who's been fighting for the survivors for nine months. Are you okay? I'd be fine if you said no."
David looked down the street at the painted flowers.
"I've never been less okay," he said. "That's why it will work."
That night they rehearsed on Nell.
It's an old trick. A man will always believe that someone untangling his jewellery is only untangling jewellery. Nell wore a heavy brass collar over a string of beads with a steel rectangle on it. Camille had filed every link so it would snag the moment the chains touched. Nell leaned forward. The chains caught.
"Allow me," said David.
His hands moved like a doctor's. For a second and a half, his body was between Nell and the room.
"There. Free."
She felt her chest. The rectangle hung where it had before, cool and smooth. "I think you've done it," she said slowly. "I couldn't tell you when. And I was looking at your hands."
"I know." David opened his left palm. The original key lay there, small and grey. He had taken it from her neck in the time it takes to blink. "That's why I'm the one who does it."
The kitchen was quiet. A cat got down from the radiator.
"I don't think you should be proud of that," said Anselm, not turning from the stove.
"I'm only proud of the rehearsal."
At the window, Ravi stood with his arms folded and his back to the room. "Is it just me, or is it unusually windy on the third floor?"
"It's only the third floor," said Camille.
"It's a very high third," said Ravi, and he did not look out.