Chapter 6
Six Hundred Handshakes
The Governor of Istanbul's protocol assistants wore navy blazers with a small gold crest, and nobody in history had ever looked one in the face.
That was why David chose the part. They stood a pace behind the Governor with clipboards and earpieces, and the public couldn't have said whether there were two of them or twenty. There were two. One was called Berk. The other, since ten past nine that morning, was Mr. Emre Kaya, newly transferred from Ankara: a polite man with rimless glasses, a short beard and a mild cough.
"You look like a dentist," said Nell in his ear.
"I'm meant to look like someone you don't remember."
On the plaza, a hard November wind snapped the flags. The Doruk Kule rose over everything, fifty-two floors of smoke-coloured glass, with the word GÜVEN in steel letters above the door. Six hundred people waited: ministers, bankers, ambassadors, three television crews, a choir of children in blue scarves. At the foot of the stage, Hakan Doruk shook hands with everyone. He gave each hand exactly two pumps. And every few seconds he touched his chest, two fingers on the chain under his collar.
"It's a tic," said Ravi from the van. "Forty-one times in twenty minutes."
"It's a man checking his keys," said David.
Anselm was parked on the corner with a forged permit. Camille was in the crowd with a camera, playing a bad photographer. Nell, far away, was holding the line.
At 11:02 the band stopped.
The Governor made a nine-minute speech that said nothing and was applauded for it. Then, to a roll of drums, two attendants walked out carrying a ceremonial collar on a cushion: a broad chain of gilt links with a medallion the size of a saucer, the Order of Civic Merit.
David was the second attendant.
"For the safety of our citizens," said the Governor, lifting the chain, "and the trust they have placed in the builders of this city—"
Doruk bent his head. Under his collar lay the fine steel chain with its small grey key. The Governor lowered the Order onto his shoulders. And, as Camille's filed links had been built to do, it slid across the steel chain and caught with a soft silver click.
The crowd laughed warmly. "A moment!" said the Governor.
"Allow me, Governor," said Emre Kaya, with a little cough.
He raised his hands to the gilt chain. Six hundred faces, and every camera in the square, watched the honoured man stand patiently with his chin down while somebody fiddled kindly at his neck.
It took nine seconds. David could never say what happened in them. It was the oldest trick of the music hall, and his fingers knew it like a tune. A steel ring opened under his thumbnail and closed again. Something grey slid into his cuff. Something almost identical hung down on Doruk's chest.
"There, Governor."
Doruk lifted his head, smiling, and put two fingers to the base of his throat. He found the cool steel and was content.
"I think I'm going to be sick," said Ravi.
"Not yet," David said softly, and walked off the stage.
He was halfway down the steps when Nell said, "Mr. Morgan." She said it differently. A quarter-tone lower. "There's a woman at the side of the stage."
In the glass of the tower he could see the whole plaza, tiny and upside down. At the foot of the steps stood a woman in a navy suit. She wasn't applauding. She was looking at the Governor's second assistant, walking away.
"She's touched her ear," said Camille. "She is speaking."
"She's asked for the staff list," said Ravi, his voice cracking. "She said, 'I saw two. Who is the other one?' A young man said, 'Mr. Kaya, from Ankara.' And she said, 'The Governor's office has never in its life sent a man from Ankara.'"
It was the first time in nine years anyone had looked at him and known.
"She's walking to Doruk," said Camille. "She has taken his arm."
"She asked him to press the key," Ravi said, almost with admiration. "There's a little blue light that comes on under his thumb. She checks it whenever they enter a room with money. The Archivist's file said 'the chief of staff checks the device on arrival.' We thought that meant the morning."
"Doruk's pressing it."
"Nothing's happening. He's pressing it again. Selin Aydın just said, in Turkish, 'Close the plaza.'"
David smiled a small smile. Nobody saw it. He had already turned down a service lane between two flower-banked marquees. He bought a ring of sesame bread from a woman with a tray and ate it, walking, like a tired man on his lunch break, while behind him a hundred and forty security men turned their heads, one by one.
"They've blocked Cumhuriyet," said Nell. "Anselm can't reach you."
"The ferry to Kadıköy," said Ravi. "Twenty minutes to the Asian side. It's a commuter ferry, full of people who've never been told what a thief looks like."
In a doorway David turned his blazer inside out. It was reversible: a workman's brown jacket with a torn pocket. He dropped the clipboard in a bin, put on a flat cap, and boarded the white double-decker ferry Barbaros as the gulls rose off the quay.
He sat in the stern among schoolchildren and old men with newspapers.
"They've found the ferry," said Ravi. "Selin found it. I don't know how. They've called ahead, and they'll search everyone. They have a photograph. They've got your hands."
"Where's Camille?"
"She— on the ferry. That was always Plan Three. She's the old woman right behind you. She's been there six minutes."
"I noticed at the pier," said David.
A small stooped old woman in a headscarf and a brown cardigan sat beside him, knitting. "Good morning," she said in Turkish, with a hint of Lyon. "I'm knitting a sock for my lazy grandson. Four years, and I'll never finish it. Would you hold my wool?"
He held out his hand. The ball of grey wool lay on his palm. Her dry fingers brushed his, light as a breath.
He felt the weight leave his sleeve.
"Thank you, young man. God keep you."
"And you," said David, to the sea.
At the Asian pier, a line of uniforms waited on the quay. At the front, arms folded, stood a woman in a navy suit.
They searched him for forty minutes.
They were polite about it. A young officer had been told to look for a tall, bearded man in a blazer, and he was looking at a clean-shaven worker with a bag of bread. They found ten lira, a ticket, a blank card and half a ring of simit.
Selin Aydın stood at his shoulder. Up close, her face was plain, strong and tired. She didn't speak to him. She looked at his hands for a long minute, knuckles to nails. Then she looked at his face.
There was nothing in her eyes. No triumph, no anger. She looked at him the way a good surgeon looks at a scan, and he understood: she knew. She couldn't prove it. But she knew.
"You may go," said the young officer.
"Let him go," she said, in Turkish. Then, in English, not looking away: "Another time."
David touched his cap. "Another time," he said, and climbed the quay steps into the cold bright street with nothing in his pockets. For thirty seconds, he didn't let himself breathe.
At nine that night, a young lawyer rang the old woman with the photograph on her coat, so excited he forgot to say hello.
"Madam, there's a transfer to the Yıldız Fund! From the company itself, marked 'error in the filing.' It's ninety-four million euros. All of it. The bond. For the families."
The old woman sat on the kerb by the memorial with her flask. She turned the little photograph over in its plastic sleeve and looked at the child's gap-toothed smile.
"I'm here," she said. "It's very cold."
In London, in a pale office off Berkeley Square, Gideon Strake watched the same Turkish television clip for the eleventh time, slowed and cleaned.
"Watch the left," he said softly.
At the ninth second he stopped it. A strange look crossed his narrow face, close to wonder.
"I've seen that done," he said. "Twenty-five years ago, at a dinner in Geneva, by an old Welshman with a bad chest. He made Conrad's ring vanish off his finger and found it in a loaf of bread. Everyone clapped."
The young woman in the doorway didn't understand. "Sir?"
"Get me everything you can find on a Cardiff magician called Emrys Morgan."
He turned to the window and smiled at his reflection.
"David Morgan," he said. "Of course."