Only a few minutes’ drive from the centre of Washington DC, the Morrison House Hotel in South Alfred Street, Alexandria Old Town, was the perfect place for Ashe to collect his thoughts. A fine Federal-style red-brick house with arched sash windows, the hotel resembled nothing so much as a grand survivor of the 1864 Atlanta burning immortalised in Gone with the Wind. It was General Sherman who ordered the Atlanta conflagration and Ashe enjoyed the irony that it was another Sherman who introduced him to the warm Southern hospitality of the 4-star Virginian hotel 140 years later.
Having fixed a meeting with Kellner for later that afternoon, Beck left Ashe sitting quietly in the warm sunlight of an early eighteenth-century-style parlour ‘Grille’. A genial black pianist played not ‘As Time Goes By’, but Debussy’s ‘Danse Bohémienne’. Even so, Ashe could not but dream that from among the immaculately dressed, refreshingly discreet ladies who sipped champagne on polished antique Windsor chairs, a latter-day Ingrid Bergman might yet appear with a story and an ache for meaningful adventure. Finding little inspiration in the large splashes of colour framed like Picassos to encourage enthusiasm for cocktails, Ashe looked to the pianist’s fingers that acrobatically surmounted the tones and semitones, sharps and flats of the shiny keyboard.
While Ashe had felt hot on the trail where Crayke’s researches were concerned, it was by no means obvious how to apply his new knowledge to the key questions.
Who was responsible for the Kartal Lodge bombing?
How was Kartal linked to the attack on the Tower?
The picture was a tangle and the clarity of his surroundings mocked his attempts at untangling it.
There had been disappointments. Trust in Colonel Aslan might be misplaced; Aslan had his own concerns, lodged, it seemed, within Turkish security priorities. Though he had grounds to suspect Aslan had used him to locate Yildiz and Yazar for internal Turkish purposes, he could not prove it. Had Aslan misled him? That might be going too far, but there was something suspicious about Aslan’s reticence where the Baba Sheykh’s presence on the Lodge guest list was concerned; Aslan’s changed attitude struck Ashe as significant – but what did it signify?
If Aslan was not to be trusted, what of Aslan’s belief that the Kartal Lodge atrocity was connected to the Tower bombing? Was this a blind? Maybe, but a new concern had emerged: Sami al-Qasr.
There was certainly a British angle to al-Qasr. He was a contact of Hafiz Razak’s, the pro-al-Qaeda terrorist linked directly to attacks on British interests in Istanbul. Al-Qasr had significant British experience, including acquaintance with high-level scientific figures with intelligence contacts, such as Moses Beerbohm. Al-Qasr had quit Britain in the eighties to undertake secret work for Saddam and subsequently for the US. The British had tried to frustrate al-Qasr’s military-scientific work in 1992, when the RAF had bombed a facility he used north of Basra. That much was clear from al-Qasr’s old file. If al-Qasr followed his father’s beliefs, hatred for a so-called ‘Jewish-Masonic conspiracy’ could have been a motivator, as well as a grudge against Britain whose air force might have wrecked his plans.
Ashe looked at his watch. The meeting at Gadsby’s Tavern with Kellner and Beck was scheduled for 3 p.m. With only a quarter of an hour in hand, Ashe declined the hotel’s generous offer of a car and chauffeur, stepped down from the hotel’s pillared portico, and headed east along King Street, past the village-like colonial houses and overgrown grass verges towards the centre of Old Town Alexandria. Only the parked cars spoilt the near-illusion of a vanished America.
Ashe’s thoughts were racing. As Sami al-Qasr loomed larger in his investigations, he also had to contend with the emergence of another mystery figure. How had the Baba Sheykh entered the scene, and what did that mean?
It had been Laila who had mentioned him first. In her anxiety to find her brother, she had brought the sheykh to Ashe’s attention. Now the sheykh and Laila’s brother were in Germany, or so Laila believed. Meanwhile, Crayke’s work pointed to endogamy in the sheykh’s family, a fact of genetic importance still obscure to the overall picture.
Then there was Aslan.
Aslan either regarded the sheykh as insignificant, or else wished to deflect Ashe’s attention from the sheykh’s place on the Lodge guest list. But there was another possibility. Any link between the sheykh and the Lodge bombing might have been coincidental. After all, had it not been for Laila, Ashe would never have heard of him. Perhaps the Baba Sheykh was a red herring. But then there was the genetic side of the picture: an ancient link between Jews and Kurds. And genetics was al-Qasr’s territory.
An odd connection with Freemasonry ran through the picture. While al-Qasr may have been motivated to attack Freemasonry, Laila believed the Baba Sheykh wanted to harness Freemasonry in support of the Yezidi cause.
More confused than ever, Ashe turned into North Royal Street, opposite Alexandria’s Market Square. Feeling nervous, he approached the multi-storey Gadsby’s Tavern, opposite Alexandria’s City Hall with its splendid clock-tower. Ashe could only hope Kellner would shed light on the conundrum. If Kellner could not, Ashe had better keep his expenses to the minimum.