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puffiest clouds he’d seen all year. His own office didn’t have a view like this.
    ‘Sergeant Mowlam,’ said a voice.
    He turned. The meeting had been organised by the Ministry of Defence. The conference room, with its dark panelled walls, held over twenty people. Just his luck to get called the second he’d got a proper look out the window.
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    The brigadier general who was leading the meeting from the top of the shiny oak conference table looked around the room, as if wondering who had replied.
    Sergeant Mowlam coughed. ‘How can I help?’ he said.
    ‘I was saying, Sergeant Mowlam, that we have some new chatter that’s just come in. Can you give us the latest on it?’
    ‘We’ve been picking up email and Twitter feeds this morning, sir. We discount most of this sort of stuff, but these messages are between the organisers of the demonstration planned for Friday. They are about supplies. Shall I read them out?’
    The general nodded.

Chapter 10
    The driver sped through the still-busy streets. I was in the back again. Inspector Erdinc had stayed in the hospital. His other colleague had disappeared. My forehead was pounding as if I had a migraine.
    A lot of things had been stirred up in me in the last few hours. There were so many links to the past in this city. So much was different here.
    My fists were clenched as we sped onto a wide, low bridge. It had black chest-high iron railings on each side. Below, eel-black water slid past. On the far side of the bridge the shadow of a hill loomed, crowned with the spot-lit outlines of Topkapi Palace, the palace of the Ottoman Sultans, and the dome of Hagia Sophia. The dome was glowing with yellow light, and with its four minarets it looked like an oil painting come to life. Above, stars shone weakly through a haze. We were crossing the Golden Horn.
    I asked the driver how soon we would get to the hotel. He didn’t answer. I had only one word of Turkish – Merhaba , hello – so I decided to shut up.
    He stared at me in his rear-view mirror. Then he touched one of those blue and white circular evil-eye charms they hang everywhere in Turkey. When we stopped at the traffic lights on the far side of the bridge he spoke.
    ‘Your friend, he played a dangerous game, no?’
    His eyes were fixed on the rear-view mirror.
    I looked over my shoulder. There was a car with blacked-out windows behind us.
    ‘It shouldn’t have been dangerous,’ I said.
    He tutted, as if he didn’t believe me. The lights changed. We sped on, cutting across two lanes in a way that would have spelled disaster in London.
    He turned the radio on. A wild song filled the car, part Arab lament, part Latin dance beat. Then he turned the radio down, as if he’d remembered he shouldn’t be playing music while on official business.
    Then we were rumbling up a cobbled street and after another tight turn, with the minarets and dome of Hagia Sophia looming over us, we stopped in front of a parchment- yellow building. It was an Ottoman era, five-tier, wedding-cake of an edifice. It dominated one whole side of a narrow and steep side street.
    Alek had picked the hotel, he’d said, because it was in the oldest part of Istanbul, near the summit of the hill Hagia Sophia was on. That was where the original Greek colony had been founded by someone called Byzas hundreds of years before Alexander the Great’s family even owned a single olive tree.
    The site had been chosen for reasons any child would understand. It was easily defendable. It had water on three sides; the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn.
    Not far from the hotel were the remnants of the old Roman Hippodrome, a stadium Ben Hur might have raced in.
    The Roman imperial legacy here was only part of the history of the place though. Within strolling distance of the hotel was the palace and harem of the Ottoman sultans, rulers of an empire which at one time stretched from Egypt almost to Vienna.
    I stepped out of the car. Old