Flowers from the black s.., p.1
Flowers from the Black Sea, page 1
By the same author:
The Dark Frontier
First published in Great Britain in 2024 by
The Book Guild Ltd
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Harrison Road, Market Harborough,
Leicestershire. LE16 7UL
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Copyright © 2024 A.B. Decker
The right of A.B. Decker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.
ISBN 978 1835740 668
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Forever indebted to Penelope for her patience and support
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 1
The cool wind that blew across the tarmac caught Matt Quillan off-guard as he negotiated the steps down from the plane. The shock of that early-morning breeze on his face was punctuated by a solitary drop of rain that hit him in the eye. He had not expected Istanbul to be so cold and damp in the dying days of September.
Picking up his bags `from the carousel some thirty minutes later, he headed outside for the buses. It was not a fear of flying with the local airline that prompted him to shun the transfer desk for domestic flights. He needed time to get his head around what he was doing on this southeasternmost fringe of Europe. For Matt, it had the hallmarks of a country moving into the fast lane to tyranny.
He really had no wish to be here. But a long-distance bus ride to the south coast of Turkey would at least delay his arrival by the best part of a day and give him time to think.
Walking out into the chill of the morning air to get the bus, he could not escape the presence of heavily armed guards. They lurked on every corner. At every exit. And did nothing to ease Matt’s apprehension. Or to allay his doubts about ever agreeing to come here in the first place.
His sense of foreboding was not diminished by what was about to follow.
He had agreed to locate a person of interest for his old friend Ben Braithwaite. Matt was no sleuth and had no idea what awaited him or what his first move should be. Ben had suggested only that he start the search in a resort on the Mediterranean coast. As to why he was even looking for the person, he had remained stubbornly evasive.
Matt felt forever indebted to his old friend for funding his start-up in the security business. Without this help, he would likely still be battling his demons of alcohol, cocaine and poker tables. Or at best floundering on a zero-hours contract somewhere.
So, when Ben called in the debt one day, Matt knew he had no other option. It was a good six weeks ago when, out of the blue, Ben called to say he was in town and why didn’t they meet for a drink. They had not seen each other for a good seven or eight years. It proved to be a drinking date he would never forget.
“This has nothing to do with company business, Matt. So, I’ll be paying you out of my own pocket, but you’ll be rewarded handsomely,” he said, before lifting the empty glass again.
“Another one?”
Matt nodded and mulled the prospect of financial compensation. With a divorce to deal with in the months ahead, the extra money was not to be sniffed at.
“So, just supposing I go along with this,” he said, when Ben returned from the bar with two more glasses of beer, “who am I looking for?”
“The man’s called Ahmet. Ahmet Karadeniz. He was last known to be in or around a tourist resort on the south coast of Turkey called Karakent. Runs a property business, so he should be quite easy to find.”
“If he’s so easy to find, why don’t you go and look for him yourself?” Matt asked.
“I’ll be sailing down that way in October. I’m hoping you’ll have found him by then,” Ben said.
This was no explanation. And it was his friend’s evasiveness that nagged at Matt’s thoughts now as the bus headed over the Bosphorus and into Anatolia.
While he pondered every angle of Ben’s motives and of what might lie ahead for him, both here in Turkey and back home in London with the pending divorce, the flicker of passing trees cast his thoughts adrift. His eyes closed, and he fell into a deep sleep.
It was the harsh sound of a jangling ringtone that rocked him from his slumber. On the opposite side of the aisle, the only other passenger still remaining – a young man in his late twenties perhaps – gazed out of the window. He spoke a few muffled words into his phone. Then slid the device furtively back into his pocket, peering over the seats in front as he did so, and glanced across the aisle towards Matt. Only a fleeting glance. But it was enough to give Matt a sense of being measured up.
The young man turned his gaze back to the road ahead. He appeared nervous. The bus was beginning to slow down. He picked up a laptop bag that lay at his feet, unzipped it and, slipping his hand quickly in and out of the bag, crossed the aisle and parked himself in the seat beside Matt.
“My name Rekan,” he said, extending a hand.
Matt was taken aback by this unwanted advance, but did his best to remain unfazed by the intrusion.
“Matt,” he said in return and took Rekan’s hand.
“You go to Karakent,” the young man said, making an imperative of what Matt took to be a question. Matt assumed it was his reddish-blonde hair that prompted the young man’s use of English, since he could not by any stretch of the imagination be taken for a Turk.
“Yes,” Matt replied, unable to conceal the suspicion in his voice.
“Please, go to Trabzon Ekmek Fırını and ask for Murat,” Rekan said, pressing something into Matt’s hand. “Give him this.”
Matt looked at the object. It was a USB stick. His suspicion hardened.
“Where?”
“Trabzon Ekmek Fırını,” he repeated, hastily pulling pen and paper from his pocket, writing out the words in bold capitals and thrusting the paper into Matt’s hand.
“Why don’t you give it to him yourself?”
“I must go,” he said. Then, as the bus eventually ground to a halt and the engine stopped, he implored Matt again with a “please” as he slipped back across the aisle to his seat, adding in a whisper, “Give it to Murat. Only Murat.”
At that moment, the door of the bus slid open and two uniformed men in berets climbed on board. One of them exchanged some words with the driver, while the other surveyed the rows of seats ahead of him before slowly making his way up the aisle to the back of the bus. He inspected each row of seats as he went, then turned and made his way back towards the only two passengers on the bus.
The gendarme stopped just behind the row where Matt and the mysterious Rekan were sitting. He muttered a few words in Turkish that Matt was unable to understand. The young man fished a document out of his pocket and handed it to the gendarme, who inspected it briefly as he gestured towards the door. Rekan rose from his seat, picking up his laptop bag, and made his way down the aisle towards the door.
“Pasaport,” said the gendarme, turning to Matt with a complete lack of expression in either his voice or his face. Matt presented his passport. The gendarme took it – with a long, piercing gaze at Matt as he did so – and slowly leafed through every page. He meticulously studied every visa and every stamp that Matt had accumulated in the last five or six years since he last renewed his passport. Still leafing through the document, he strolled back down the length of the bus, turning as he reached the door, and beckoned Matt to follow.
Matt had enough experience of the Jandarma from his very first trip to Turkey as a student to know that they are not to be messed with. He had almost been landed with a long jail term over a vestigial gram of cannabis found in his pocket. Fortunately, they had proved more inclined to bribery than they were to upholding the law. But this was a character trait he could not count on now with the country’s new tas
When he emerged from the bus, he saw the gendarme disappear into a van. Its red and blue flashing lights cast an eerily pulsating hue over the early evening sky around the bus. Rekan was already seated in the back of the van. Matt was left to wait and contemplate what lay ahead of him in the chill of the mountain air that bristled through the cedar trees. He walked a few metres off the road to escape the reach of the van’s pulsating lights, lit a cigarette and watched the white mountain in the distance gradually absorb the growing redness of the sky.
There was a portentous quality about this mountain. The way it would not let go: it had tracked his journey south for the best part of half an hour. As if it carried a message and would not give way until it was delivered.
The sound of the van door sliding open butted rudely into his stream of thought. He flinched and turned to see the gendarme approaching.
“Where you go?” he asked Matt.
“Karakent.”
“Otel?”
“Kelebek,” Matt replied. Ben had recommended he stay there.
“Good,” was all the gendarme said in reply. He returned Matt’s passport and walked back to the van. Rekan remained inside. Matt climbed back onto the bus, where he was now completely alone, apart from the driver, who had sat impassively in his seat throughout. As Matt relaxed back into his seat, the only sign that the driver was there at all was the sound of the engine starting up and the motion of the bus as it continued on its journey.
Matt had a sense of being cast adrift in a huge puzzle, none of whose pieces fitted. He had set out on this journey as a favour, although Ben had never made clear to him exactly what it was all about and left him no idea where it would lead. And now, acutely aware of the lump in his pocket that was Rekan’s flash drive, he had the distinct feeling he had just been thrown another huge piece in a completely different puzzle that had nothing to do with him.
When the bus emerged from the mountain landscape and lumbered now along a winding coast road, his mind wandered out across the vast expanse of sea to his left. The turquoise of the water had already turned a dark blue, as the peninsula jutting into the sea ahead swallowed up the crimson sun. Only another twenty kilometres to go if the road sign they had just passed was to be believed. But Karakent itself would prove not to be quite the tourist resort he had imagined it to be.
Chapter 2
As Matt stepped off the bus, he caught the cadence of the call to prayers. It drifted off through the eucalyptus trees beside the road, carried by the wind that blew in from the sea. He mopped his brow. It seemed to him, some five hundred or so miles south of Istanbul, to be unseasonably warm and humid for the time of day in late September.
There was little activity in the centre of town when he stepped onto the pavement. The only signs of life came from a solitary figure in an otherwise deserted restaurant and the call to prayer from a minaret that peered over the rooftops as if designed to vet the new arrivals in town.
Alone on the pavement in this off-season resort, Matt surveyed the scene before him by the light of the street lamp beside the bus. His eyes wandered over a row of small single-storey outlets. A car rental firm. The ticket office of the bus company. A carpet shop with kilims stacked either side of the door. And the restaurant. It sprawled out towards the street beneath a magenta canopy of bougainvillea. From the canopy hung a board bearing the name Osman’s Kitchen.
Matt’s gaze settled on the tables that spread out onto the pavement, where the solitary figure, a stout fifty-something, sat sipping tea. He watched the man take a handful of almonds from a small bag beside the glass of tea, place them on a block of wood alongside his chair and, with the single blow of a brass mortar, crack open a nut and slip it into his mouth. As he chewed on the nut, he hummed to the music that played faintly in the background. It came from a radio: the plaintive yearning sound of a clarinet which competed with the call to prayer.
Most of the tourists had long since left. Of the few remaining stragglers, a passing middle-aged couple stopped on the roadside opposite. They glanced up at a flag that fluttered in the wind, the white crescent bobbing on a sea of red, and exchanged a knowing look – as if they saw in this a signal. Then continued on their way past a string of yellow taxis that stood idly at the rank, waiting for the promise of a fare.
Matt gripped his rucksack tightly over his right shoulder and ambled over to the tea drinker.
“Good evening,” he muttered, exhausted from the long journey, and let the rucksack slip from his shoulder onto a chair at the table opposite the tea drinker.
“Iyi akşamlar,” came the response.
The man’s reply was almost inaudible through the almond nut that he was chewing on. But Matt recognised the words. It was one of the few Turkish expressions he had managed to memorise before setting off on his journey: ‘Good evening’ according to his phrase book. But he had little trust in the evening that lay ahead. It had all the makings of a very awkward one.
Glancing up at the flag that had caught the middle-aged couple’s attention earlier, the tea drinker rose to his feet and sauntered back into the darkness of the restaurant. Matt’s gaze now drifted from the flag, through the bristling eucalyptus trees, up to the building behind. Although it tried to hide the state of disrepair behind the trees – its broken or missing windows, the cream and red paint now faded and flaking off – the building was an imposing presence in the heart of this small town. A statement on the skyline that was destined to capture the attention as it looked out over the bay below Karakent. It left Matt with a deep sense of unease that he was unable to explain.
He was still running this edginess around in his mind when he became aware of an arm beside him. It reached down and planted a tulip-shaped glass of tea in front of him, nestled in a saucer with two sugar cubes and a spoon. Matt looked up to see the tea drinker.
“Welcome. My name Osman,” he said, putting his left hand to his chest and gesturing with the open palm of his right hand.
“Present. For you.”
“Oh, I think you mean it’s on the house?”
“On the house,” Osman repeated slowly. There was the trace of a smile on his lips as he practised the words.
“That’s very kind. I’m Matt.”
He was more in the mood for a beer than a glass of tea. But after the long trip from Istanbul, he was in no mood to press the point. As his host returned to his seat, Matt dropped the sugar cubes into the tea, gave it a vigorous stir and raised his glass to Osman.
Edging closer to the purpose of his visit, he took a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches from his pocket, reached over to Osman’s table and offered him a cigarette. His host declined with a wave of the hand, which he then placed on his chest and said simply “heart.”
“Do you mind if I do?” Matt asked, putting a cigarette between his lips and lighting up without waiting for a reply. “Can I ask you something?”
Osman’s dark eyes cast a doleful look that lay somewhere between suffering and suspicion. He said nothing. Had he understood? It was hard to tell.
“Ask something?” Osman repeated as Matt puffed on the cigarette. Then: “You want room?” he asked.
“I’ve been recommended to try the Kelebek,” Matt said. He was irritated by the deflection.
With a disdainful snort, Osman waved his hands in a gesture of dismissal.
“Şimşek Pansiyon better,” he said. “My brother. Ergün.”
When Matt asked how to find the place, Osman lifted his hand from his chest, ran it over his face, and wiped a smile onto his lips as he did so. His teeth still bore the trace of almonds as the lips parted, and he raised his arm, gesticulating up the hill in the direction of the dilapidated building.
“Thanks, I’ll try it,” said Matt, before finally getting to the question: “Do you know a man called Ahmet?”
“I know many Ahmets,” Osman said.
The smile was instantly replaced by an expression of downright suspicion.
