The plane banked and lined up for a landing at Samandira Air Base, twenty kilometres east of Istanbul. There was a uniformed detail waiting at the floodlit apron in front of a medium-size hangar, and de Payns led Danny, Shrek and Jéjé down the stairs and into a Mercedes van. They drove along the apron and arrived at a building with a low, flat profile and large antennas on the roof which reached hundreds of feet into the air.
A guard stopped de Payns and his team at the vestibule and searched them for weapons before they were allowed in.
‘Captain Marak,’ said the soldier who met them at the door of a large interview room, introducing himself. He was built like a middleweight, despite the disguise of the good suit. ‘Monsieur Droulez?’
De Payns stepped forward and shook his hand, and the Turk ushered him into the room, closing the door behind them. They sat at a table that looked over the night-time activities of the Turkish army air base.
‘This is not unheard of,’ said Captain Marak, ‘but it’s new to me.’
De Payns did as Briffaut had instructed and listened. Captain Marak was a Turkish intelligence officer from the MiT who, according to Briffaut, had been ordered to support the DGSE mission.
‘If I understand this correctly,’ said Marak, ‘your service has clear intelligence that a Libyan militia linked to the LNA is planning a terror attack at tonight’s Eastern Gas Conference?’
De Payns smiled, knowing that Turkey was a major backer of Haftar’s enemy in western Libya, the GNA. ‘That’s correct.’
‘May I ask how you retrieved that information?’ asked the captain.
‘I can’t tell you, because I don’t know,’ said de Payns.
Marak nodded. ‘The instruction from my government is that this conference must go ahead as planned. My government is very sensitive about perceptions that we are vulnerable to terrorism, and they have economic arrangements with half the participants at this conference, representing billions of dollars. The government hosts this conference every year to make Turkey look stable and …’ He clicked his fingers, searching for the word.
‘Investible?’ de Payns suggested.
‘Yes,’ said Marak. ‘So, we have to do it this way, but it will be my call. You can assist and observe, but there will be no bang-bang. This is all beneath the radar. Understood?’
De Payns nodded. ‘Got it,’ he said.
■
Shrek checked in to the Bridge Hotel as the sun came up in Istanbul. He was sharing with Danny, and Aguilar was rooming with Jéjé. The call to prayer echoed around the vast city and he made his habitual checks of the room, which was on the fourth floor. He could find no transmission devices, so he moved to investigate the hallway and the fire stairs as well as determining how many levels the elevators could access. Even in the security-obsessed Company he was known as ‘thorough’, which he preferred to ‘paranoid’. Paranoid was a pathological condition; being thorough kept him alive.
They met at the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel for breakfast, which in the usual Turkish way matched perfect coffee with over-sugared pastries.
Aguilar talked them through the evening’s operation. Captain Marak from the MiT was going to let the French observe, but they would only be armed with 9mm handguns and vests once they were inside the Istanbul Congress Center, and they would be under Marak’s command.
‘He used that word, “observe”?’ asked Shrek, as Aguilar spelled it out.
‘Those are the rules,’ said Aguilar. ‘And he also specified that there’s to be no bang-bang.’
‘Just as well I’m a pacifist,’ said Jéjé, which made the group laugh; the only person in the Company who loved fighting more than Templar was Jéjé.
Shrek left the crew and walked into the foyer, looking around the newsagent kiosk that was situated where the hotel met the footpath. He stood behind a postcard rack and observed the street, assuming there was an even chance of the MiT being nosy. Shrek wasn’t going to make a thing of it, but he liked to know who was where.
It was a mild morning, people starting to move down the street, and across the road he could see another hotel lobby, with the word ‘Budget’ in its name. A group of people milled near the sidewalk in front of it. They looked slightly out of place, maybe provincial or rural judging by their poor dress sense and cheap fabrics. He touched a postcard on a revolving rack but kept his eye on the other hotel, wondering what aberrant movement had drawn his eye. He was about to turn away and investigate the loading docks out the back of his hotel, when he saw a young man—perhaps more Tunisian or Berber than Turkish—step away from the group and walk swiftly along the street. He was conspicuous by his red jacket and baggy taupe pants, and he was followed quickly by an older man, perhaps thirty-five, who had noticeably big teeth, like a horse. Horsey swooped on the escapee, grabbed him by the left bicep, and hauled the Berber in the red jacket back into the hotel lobby.
It happened very quickly and Shrek pulled back into the shadows of the kiosk, bought a pack of chewing gum with loose change, and scanned the street for more action. It didn’t look like MiT—not professional enough—and Turkey’s organised criminals were an altogether better-dressed bunch than the thug with the teeth who’d descended on the Berber.
After a few minutes, satisfied there were no followers on the French crew, Shrek slid away to investigate a potential rear exfiltration route.