Rubber squealed on the wet cobbles. If the driver hit them at terminal velocity the four-by-four would only be able to stop with the aid of Ottoman masonry. Rain became steam on the car’s bonnet as it skidded to a halt. Men fumbled with door handles and Jake recognized the barracuda profile of a silenced Heckler and Koch machine pistol. The gunmen opened fire; at once the ramparts became a blizzard of stone chips. Jake pulled Florence through the gateway into a small courtyard. Neither had been hit.
Inside grass glistened underfoot and a cherry tree spread its boughs low to the earth. Jake could see a row of ornate pavilions on the far side of the garden.
“Hey! You no allow now!”
Workers were everywhere – it appeared the annual deep clean was under way.
“Is closed mister! Mister, is closed!”
Now the gunmen were in the courtyard too, scanning for targets – but cleaners scattered in every direction and the killers were impeded by a screen of humanity. Jake and Florence made it into a double-domed room, a golden dais in one corner. This was the entrance to the Sultan’s harem: a gilded prison where wives once poisoned children in a bid for the succession. They kept on running. The second room bore murals of fruit on every wall. The third was a chamber of blue and white tiles, praises to Allah fluttering across the wall like kites’ tails. The rooms blended into each other as the pair headed deeper into the labyrinth. But the flight was uncontrolled and Jake lost his orientation.
He stopped running. “I don’t know which way is out.”
Left, right, straight ahead – from then on they chose the directions at random. Somewhere within the maze an alarm began to wail – and before Jake knew it they were looking at fruit murals again.
Florence was wild-eyed. “We’re back where we started.”
Jake led her into the mirrored throne room of the Ottoman Sultans. A marble colonnade skirted the chamber; a chandelier dangled like a glassy plum; the ivory throne was strewn with cushions.
Two gunmen walked in.
*
The MP5 is capable of firing nine hundred rounds a minute. That gave the men who now confronted Jake and Florence the firepower of three Second World War battalions. The machine pistols swivelled in parallel as they fired, tracking Jake and Florence’s dash. The throne room disintegrated around the fleeing pair: mirrors smashed, ivory splintered, clumps of stuffing were propelled through the air. The structural integrity of the pavilion was shot through and the structure sagged to the ground. Somehow they cheated the devastation. Florence was sobbing – out of breath, out of ideas, mucus trailing from one nostril. Jake steered her into a chamber where they could hide. It was pitch black in there.
A motion sensor switched on the lights.
They were in a Turkish bath with walls of marble, modesty screens intersecting the room. Jake sensed movement and he grabbed Florence by the neck, pulling her for the cover of a marble bathtub as the gunman fired a burst from his machine pistol. At once the bathroom was full of zings and cracks as the bullets ricocheted off the bath, the ceiling, the walls, bouncing around the enclosure in geometric angles. Jake tried to cover Florence’s body with his own as a bullet whipped past his cheekbone, warming the skin; another slammed into the floor by his foot. At last the rounds pummelled away their kinetic energy. The maelstrom ended.
Jake could hear what sounded like a seal slapping its flippers on the floor. He peered around the modesty screen. He winced. One bullet had travelled from bathtub to ceiling before revisiting itself upon the gunman – the flattened blob of metal had entered his kneecap from above and opened out a tennis ball-sized crater where it exited. His shinbone was barely attached. Snapped nerves trailed like vermicelli and the hapless man squirmed on the floor, mouth opening and shutting noiselessly.
“This way,” said Jake.
He felt himself take control. A new feeling. And a good one. Now their flight was ordered as they headed through the complex. There were no more encounters – perhaps the others were tending to their accomplice before he bled to death. Jake and Florence stepped onto a patio on the north side of the palace to see Europe and Asia splayed before them. Night-time Istanbul was sprinkled across the hills like mulched stars against the sky, a million-dollar view.
They dropped the small distance from patio to grass and sprinted through Gulhane Park to the perimeter walls, sirens closing in. The grounds were wooded and a few cleaners fled through the trees. Jake and Florence mingled with them, sneaking through the northern gate as the first police cars rounded the corner.
“What now?” Jake tried to take Florence’s arm, but she pulled from his embrace.
“We can’t go back to the hotel,” she said. “Let’s cross to Asia.”
The Kadikoy ferry terminal was nearby.
Once they were on board Florence went to clean herself up. Jake watched the Topkapi Palace diminish as the ferry buffeted across the channel. The park had come alive, like a termite hill ransacked by children; police cars prowled through the darkness. Only then did he reflect on what he had come through that night. Only then did he consider what he was mixed up in. Only then did he weep with fear and relief, the salt water on his cheeks mingling with the saltiness of the breeze and his sobs lost amid the slap of waves on the hull. Abruptly the tears ceased. He would try not to cry again. He was strong, he knew that now. And he was alive. The storm had blown itself out and a chink of moon winked at him through the clouds, a pale eye keeping up its watch on the affairs of men.