LITMIR.BIZ

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their empty glasses. ‘More tea?’

      ‘Need you ask?’

      He picked up their glasses and took them inside, the door banging closed behind him. An elderly thin German woman with hennaed hair, silver jewellery and an embroidered crimson scarf was agonizing between juices. When finally she’d plumped for lemon, Iain gave his own order and asked for the drinks to be taken out. Then he headed for the rest-room. He was on his way in when it happened, a thunderous boom and the rest-room door slamming sideways into him like a small truck, throwing him down onto the white tiled floor. He rose with difficulty onto hands and knees. His ears were muffled yet he could still hear alarms outside, people screaming. The years of training and service kicked in, so that instead of panic he felt the familiar calm coldness spread through him, almost as though he was watching it happen to someone else. He tried to stand but his balance was off and he fell back down. He didn’t let this bother him but kept trying until he succeeded and made his way unsteadily out. There was glass, debris and dust everywhere. The waiter was down behind the counter, groaning softly. The German woman was on her side, her scarf splayed like blood around her throat and head. Her eyes were open but dazed and he couldn’t see any injuries, for she’d been protected from the worst of the blast by the solid side wall which—

       Mustafa.

      He hurried outside. A glimpse of hell, daytime turned to night by a canopy of noxious black smoke. A blue van with shattered windows was blazing furiously. Dust and fragments of stone whispered down around him like dry rain; and even as he watched, a misshapen and charred sheet of once-white metal crashed from a nearby roof onto the cobbles. His eyes watered with dust and toxic smoke. He had to squint to see. The café’s forecourt had been cleared as if by a giant arm. He went to the edge, looked down. The air was clearer here. Three cars had tumbled all the way down the steep slope to the tree-line of the valley beneath. Tables, chairs, sunshades and other debris were scattered everywhere. Great chunks of rubble, the tossed cabers of telephone poles, the black serpents of their wires. And there was Mustafa, two-thirds of the way down. The gradient was so steep and the ground so loose that he set off little avalanches with every step, earth cascading around his ankles. Mustafa was on his back, wheezing from the effort to breathe. His cheek was lacerated and bleeding and his left arm looked badly broken below the elbow. Iain knelt beside him. He’d dealt with trauma often enough in the army, but that didn’t make it easy. He unzipped Mustafa’s leather jacket. His white cotton shirt beneath was sodden with blood. A piece of shrapnel had torn into his friend’s gut and gone to grievous work inside, releasing that hateful sick sweet smell. He looked up the slope in hope of help, but there was no one, he was on his own. A shredded cotton tablecloth fluttered like defeat a little way off. He made a wad of it, pressed it over Mustafa’s wounds, bleakly and increasingly aware that it was futile, a gesture, that his friend was losing blood too fast for anything short of a miracle to save him. And he didn’t believe in miracles.

      Mustafa groaned and opened his eyes. He lay there for a moment, taking it in, assimilating what had happened to him, what was about to happen. He felt for and took Iain’s hand, looked him in the eyes. ‘My wife,’ he said softly. ‘My daughters.’

      ‘You’re going to be fine,’ Iain told him. ‘Help’s on its way.’

      He shook his head. ‘My wife,’ he said again, more urgently. ‘My daughters.’

      Iain blinked back tears. ‘I’ll see they’re all right. I give you my word on it.’

      Mustafa nodded faintly, satisfied by this pledge. ‘Who did this?’ he asked. ‘Was this us?’

      Iain grimaced. For eighteen months now, Turkey had been caught up in a spiral of violence that approached a state of war. Not just the overspill from Syria, a few miles south of here, but also from Kurdish separatists, Islamicists, Armenians and even Cypriots who’d taken advantage of the growing chaos to press their own particular causes. Yet that this should happen outside this hotel today of all days was too big a coincidence to ignore. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

      ‘Find out,’ said Mustafa.

      ‘I promise.’

      ‘Find out and make them …’ He grimaced in pain or shock. He gave a little cry and clenched Iain’s hand tight. His left leg twitched briefly, as though trying to kick off a slipper. Then he stiffened and his body arched for a moment or two before something seemed to puncture inside him and he relaxed again and was still.

      II

      Georges Bejjani was tapping a cigarette from its soft pack when the bomb exploded a short distance ahead. He didn’t see the blast itself, for it took place on a side road and thus was obscured by the black glass exterior of the Daphne International Hotel. And, because it was a fraction of a second before the first sound reached them, he thought momentarily that he was suffering some kind of weird hallucination, perhaps an optical illusion caused by sunlight and the midday haze. But then a silver 4×4 came back-flipping out onto the road and he heard the sudden thunder of it, and alarms began tripping all around them as a canopy of thick black smoke spread low across the sky.

      Faisal slammed on the brakes, began instantly to turn. He was trained, after all, for such emergencies. But the traffic had been squeezed into a single lane by an unloading lorry and an oncoming van screeched to a halt right beside them, pinning them in. A fist of stone punched the passenger-side window, buckling the frame and turning the glass seawater green for a fraction of a second before it shattered and fell away. Debris pattered and then pounded upon their roof like a sudden squall of hail. Even while it was still coming down, Georges whipped out his mobile to call his elder brother. ‘Bomb,’ he said, the moment Michel answered. ‘Get Father back to the boat.’

      ‘Are you okay?’ asked Michel.

      ‘We’re fine. Just get him safe.’

      ‘On our way now,’ Michel assured him. ‘Was it for us?’

      ‘I don’t know. It went off ten seconds ago. But it was right outside the hotel.’

      ‘Then it was for us,’ said Michel.

      ‘I’ll check into it.’

      ‘Be careful.’

      Georges snorted. ‘Count on it,’ he said. He turned to Faisal and his bodyguard Sami. ‘Let’s take a look,’ he said. ‘But we’re out of here before the police show. Okay?’

      They ran forward in a crouch, wary of a second device or of gunmen waiting to ambush the first responders. Childhood in Lebanon was a harsh teacher. Dazed people appeared like a zombie army from the smoke, clothes torn and ashen, faces bloody and smeared. The smoke grew black as night, choking and eye-burning. They passed cars on their roofs and sides, reached the front of the stricken hotel. Only the right-hand side of the road here had been developed, affording hotel guests uninterrupted views of Daphne’s gorgeous valley from the balconies. But the bomb had chomped a vast bite from this road, tarmac and hardcore tumbling in a great rubble avalanche down the hillside. The resultant crater had also been partially filled with shattered black glass, broken masonry and other debris from the hotel itself. A forearm protruded from beneath a chunk of grey concrete at such a grotesque angle that Georges couldn’t be sure it was even still attached. The block was too heavy for him alone, but Faisal and Sami helped him lift it high enough to reveal the man beneath. They looked away, sickened, let the masonry fall back down.

      In the distance, sirens. Police, medics, maybe even the army. They were near to a war zone here, and this whole region was prone to earthquakes. They’d have experts and heavy lifting machinery. Staying here wouldn’t help anyone, would only invite the kinds of questions he wished to avoid. He needed to find answers before returning to the boat, but this wasn’t the place. Sami looked meaningfully at him. He gave the nod and they ran together back to the car, then pulled a sharp turn in the road and drove away even as the first emergency vehicles raced past them to the site.

      III

      The

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