City of the Lost Read online

  CITY OF THE LOST

  WILL ADAMS

  To Hattie and Mark

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Will Adams

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Alashiya, Eastern Cyprus, 805 BC

  She’d thought she’d have till dawn, but it wasn’t to be. They came at dusk instead. From the ramparts of her palace, she watched them landing on the beach. Between the breaking of the waves, she could hear the muffled roars of their triumph and the jubilant clashing of spears on shields as they saw they were unopposed and realized that her people had abandoned her.

  She didn’t blame them for that abandonment. She’d brought it upon herself through neglect of her queenly duties. What cut her, what truly cut her, was that the man she’d neglected them for had abandoned her too. She could see his fugitive sails still, the splash of frantic oars. She thought scornfully: Aeneas of the Teukrians indeed! No doubt he’d be telling himself comforting lies about how Sicherbas was her brother and could therefore be trusted to treat her honourably. She wanted, suddenly, for him to be confronted with the brutal truth of it. And, with him already so far distant, there was only one way to achieve that.

  It was time.

  Her palace was on three levels. The subterranean treasuries and storerooms, hewn out of raw bedrock. A ground floor of grand chambers with walls of ashlar masonry and roofs of cedar timbers shipped in from her childhood homeland. And, finally, the upper quarters of wood and thatch. The bottom level would never burn; the top would burn easily. It was the middle floor, therefore, that needed work.

  Her sister Anna was waiting below with two lit torches. She, at least, had no illusions about what their brother would do if they fell into his power. Nor did she have any stomach for letting him regain his claimed treasure. That was why, when word had first reached this new city of theirs that he was on his way with his full fleet, pledging terrible revenges upon them both, they’d sent every man they had to chop down the surrounding forests and fill these rooms with timber.

  She and Anna touched their torches to the largest stack now, then stood back to watch the contagion spread, flaming embers spitting and drifting to neighbouring chambers, where new fires quickly started. The smoke made her eyes water so that tears spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them angrily away lest Anna mistake them for self-pity. When the heat grew too much for them to bear, they retreated to the treasury steps, then hugged and wished each other well on their respective journeys. Once Anna was gone, she went alone down the steps into the vaults, fetched her sword from her armoury. His sword, more properly, for it was what they’d exchanged instead of vows. She used its blade and hilt to pry and hammer away the stone chocks, releasing cascades of sand from the walls, allowing the vast marble slab to sink slowly beneath its own unimaginable weight until it slotted neatly into place above her, sealing these steps off forever.

  One entrance closed. One more to go.

  Through dark and twisting corridors, she hurried to and down the long staircase. Usually, when she stepped out into the great cavern at the foot, it was already aglow with the myriad constellations of oil lamps in the walls. But her handmaidens had left with Anna and the others, to found their next new city on the Libyan coast, beyond even her brother’s vengeful reach. And so, for once, this place looked gloomy rather than magical. She closed and barred the heavy bronze doors behind her. Now for the second entrance: the twisting cave passage down which she and Aeneas had first discovered this place while seeking refuge from a storm. The mouth was high above the chamber floor, reached only by a staircase pegged to the left-hand wall, where the camber was easiest. She climbed it to the top, then crossed the short bridge to the narrow slit in the limestone. She ducked her head as she passed through it into the shaft beyond, then climbed the crude steps hacked in the rock up to and beyond the trap-doors.

  High above her, the night sky flickered orange. Her palace was ablaze. Her heart twisted with a kind of bitter triumph, knowing her lover couldn’t help but see this pyre as he fled his cowardly way. But she had no time to waste. She hacked at the two ropes until they both cleaved and slithered off upwards like startled snakes, then stood there for a moment, panting from the exertion. Rumblings began, as though Mother Earth herself were hungry. Her engineers had warned her to be swift. She climbed back below the trap-doors then closed them flat across the shaft and fixed them in place with their locking-bars. She was barely done when it began, a soft pattering that abruptly turned into a thunderous deluge before being so muffled by the sand already fallen that it grew silent again.

  Her tomb was sealed. As was her fate.

  Back across the bridge and down to the cavern floor. She held her torch to the staircase until it caught and began to burn with gratifying vigour, a spiral of fire spreading gloriously up and around the gallery. Wood and rope fizzed and crackled; steps and struts clattered blazing to the ground. With no more need for her torch, she tossed it into the general conflagration then went to their bed and set the pommel of his sword into a corner so that it couldn’t slip. Then she tore open her robes and pressed the tip of the blade sharp and cold against her stomach, pointing upwards beneath her breastbone towards her heart.

  A last hesitation as she looked down. How many times had they lain here together? How many times had he talked of sailing towards the setting sun, of founding a new city of his own somewhere across the great sea? He’d called it destiny. She’d called it avoiding marriage. Now he’d got his chance at last. And no doubt, if it went well for him, his entourage would tell stories to make heroes of themselves, as survivors always did. But he, at least, would know the truth of it.

  And, one day, maybe the world would too.

  ONE

  I

  Daphne, Southern Turkey

  They said this was where the Trojan War had started. They said that it was here, among Daphne’s wooded hillsides, glades and waterfall
s, that Paris had awarded his golden apple to Aphrodite, rather than to Athena or to Hera, thus winning himself Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, and precipitating the Greek armada and ten years of brutal, bloody war into the bargain.

  Iain Black smiled as he took another sip of his sweet strong tea. Men going crazy over a beautiful woman. How far the world had come. ‘Now her,’ he said, nodding along and across the road to the steps outside the black-glass fronted Daphne International Hotel. ‘She’s more like it.’

  Mustafa glanced over his shoulder, snorted in amusement. ‘What is it with you and scrawny women?’ he asked. Then he flushed as he realized what he’d said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Iain assured him. ‘Anyway, she’s not scrawny. She’s elegant. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Elegant!’ retorted Mustafa. ‘Can’t you see what she’s wearing?’

  Iain laughed. He liked her clothes, the student chic of them, the way they showed off her figure without seeming to. A plain blue sweatshirt, baggy cream cheesecloth trousers, well-worn tan sneakers. Silver rings on her fingers and her left thumb, a back-to-front baseball cap through which poked unruly tufts of her straw-coloured hair, and a pair of John Lennon shades with shiny dark blue lenses. ‘Give her a break,’ he said. ‘She’s on holiday.’

  ‘A woman should always make the most of herself,’ said Mustafa. ‘Especially a woman who can afford to stay in a place like that.’

  ‘You’re a chauvinist and a snob, my friend,’ smiled Iain.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Mustafa.

  The woman was carrying a tattered blue-vinyl day bag. She now half drew a bulky manila envelope from it so that she could check its address. She put it back, looked both ways, turned left and headed away from them, towards the main road. Iain watched her out of sight with a mild pang of regret, not for her in particular so much as for the companionship of an attractive woman. It had been too long; that was the fact of it. And he was ready again, he suddenly sensed it inside himself. Yet this was hardly the time or place. With Butros Bejjani and his entourage on their way, he needed his game-head on.

  He checked his laptop again, the feed coming in from the various cameras they’d set up to monitor the approach roads and the hotel lobby. No sign of them yet. ‘How are we for time?’ he asked.

  ‘Another half hour at least,’ said Mustafa.

  Iain nodded at 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.