And that had become how she would live her life. She had searched for answers, for the truth. And now she was here, in a strange city in the cold north, being hunted because of the answers she had found.
Meliha was in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt, a city within a city: the old bonded warehouses looming above her and the dark waters of the canal at her side. A light mounted high up on one of the warehouses cast a puddle of light and the Hamburg rain danced as little silver explosions on the cobbles. She tried to get her bearings. The warehouse she sought was somewhere near here. If she could make it to the warehouse, maybe they wouldn’t find her. At the very least, she’d have time to think through her next move.
Meliha went through her pockets again. No cellphone. She had left it behind in the cafe she had had lunch in. She had left it on the table, switched on, and had placed her napkin over it. Then, when she had walked out of the cafe, she had left it behind.
One more check. Illogicaclass="underline" she knew she’d left it in the cafe, but she had to check her bag and pockets again. Just to be sure.
It could be that the staff in the cafe had found the phone and had put it to one side for her to claim it later. But the cafe had been in a run-down part of Wilhelmsburg, and Meliha guessed that it was more likely that someone had pocketed the phone on finding it. She thought about the obese pig of a man who had sat at the next table, making disgusting noises as he ate. It hadn’t been his eating habits that had most caught her attention, though: it had been the smartphone or hand-held PDA he had constantly tapped at with a stylus between overfilling his mouth.
Maybe he had taken her phone. Or perhaps another cafe customer was walking around Hamburg with her phone in their pocket.
Which was exactly what she wanted. Because when Meliha had rechecked her pockets, it had been to reassure herself that her cellphone was not there. Now it was out there somewhere, like a message in a bottle cast out on the sea. Maybe someone would understand the ringtone’s significance and decrypt the phone’s content. At the very least, it would send her pursuers on a false trail.
She took the street plan from her pocket. A booklet: print on paper, not a hand-held satnav device or GPS navigator. She plotted her position from where she had come into the Speicherstadt, across the bridge and along Kibbelsteg, then into Am Sandtorkai. The warehouse was near. If she had calculated it right, it was just a block away and around the corner.
The warehouses in the Speicherstadt were vast red-brick cathedrals of commerce dating back to the nineteenth century. But now it was all changing. They had extended the original Speicherstadt with a very twenty-first-century version of itself: the vast Kaispeicher A, the Speicherstadt’s most westerly warehouse which had once housed massive stores of tea and tobacco, was being built upwards and outwards and into the shape of a vast sailing ship that dominated the skyline. A building project that had lasted years and was transforming the storehouse into a massive concert hall, hotel, apartments. Like the Speicherstadt before it in the nineteenth century and the Kohlbrandbrucke in the twentieth, the Elbphilharmonie would become the landmark to define Hamburg in the twenty-first century and beyond, as distinctive as the Sydney Opera House, while reminding everyone of the city’s maritime past.
Even this part of the original Speicherstadt was changing: ad agencies and trendy bar-restaurants were making inroads, mainly to be near the stylish new HafenCity development that extended to the old bonded-warehouse city.
But the row of buildings outside which Meliha now found herself had remained largely unchanged. Just as there had been for two centuries, the cobbled canalside path was lined with huge storehouses containing imported rugs and textiles from Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan.
She moved out of the puddle of light cast by the warehouse lamp and checked up and down the cobbled canalside path. No one. No sign of them. But, she knew, that meant nothing. It was their function to follow, to shadow you unseen. To find you without you knowing they were there until the last moment.
And, of course, they had the kind of technology that you normally only expected the intelligence services of some superpower to have. Maybe they were watching her right now, able to see her in the dark. Maybe she was a bright infrared beacon in the cold dark of the Speicherstadt.
So close. Meliha ran. Her feet hurt even more with every footfall. She had walked for kilometres to get here. No taxi. No public transport. Nothing that was connected to a computer system or radio network. She had crossed a city without crossing a circuit, without connecting with a technology: even avoiding the few parts of the city that had CCTV, taking circuitous detours to avoid the spots marked in red pencil on her map.
She stopped suddenly, realising she was at the right block. The signs on the warehouse were in Turkish, English and German. This was the one. There was no alarmed keypad entry, just an old-fashioned brass keyhole in a sturdy, traditional German warehouse door: robust, dense wood, reinforced with brass plates. Reassuringly low-tech: a door that had protected the contents of the warehouse for more than a hundred years. She took the heavy key from her bag and unlocked the door. She slipped through it and into the warehouse’s darkness, with just one last check of the canalway outside.
Maybe she was going to be all right, after all.
Meliha took a small wind-up LED torch from her handbag and scanned the warehouse. She was in an entry foyer and a sign listing the tenants told her that what she was looking for — Demeril Importing — was on the third floor. She pushed through the glass-panelled doors and into the main warehouse. Over to one side of the warehouse was a large goods lift, but Meliha decided it was better to take the stairs and make as little noise as possible.
When she reached the door of Demeril Importing, she took a second key from her bag and let herself in through an ornate Jugendstil door. She shone her torch around the warehouse. Textiles piled high: rugs, carpets, kilims. Rich Turkish designs revealed on the folded edges. Tags revealed names she knew so welclass="underline" Kayseri, Yesilhisar, Kirsehir, Konya, Dazkiri… Somehow the familiarity of the names gave her comfort. There was a robust, ornate wooden desk and a kilim-upholstered chair near the door; the desk was piled high with paperwork and ledgers, bills and orders impaled on two spikes. Business was done here as it had been done in the last century and the century before that. No computers. No websites. No electronics.
Moving across the warehouse Meliha continued searching until she found an alcove at the back of the main storage area, filled with less carefully stacked carpets. She chose a lowish pile of carpets right over in the farthest corner of the alcove and lay down on them, switching her torch off. She could rest. She could rest, but not sleep. Sleep would be dangerous. She would be safe here until the morning. Then… well, then she would try to get in touch with Berthold. How she could do so without using a phone or any other electronic medium she had not yet worked out. But she must get to Berthold. Tell him what she knew. But now she could rest, but not sleep.
She fell asleep.
It probably had been the quietest of sounds. Maybe it had been the main door, three floors below: an indistinct, dull clunk that had fired into her sleeping brain like a bullet. Whatever the sound had been, she had been asleep and now she was totally, nerve-janglingly awake. For a sliver of a second she wondered if she had slept all night and if what she had heard was the arrival of the warehouse staff; but it was still dark. She lay still on the pile of rugs, only her head raised. She didn’t breathe; straining to hear any further sound. A few seconds passed, stretched intolerably long by the adrenalin surging through her system. Silence. Then she jumped as she heard another sound. Faint and muffled. Voices. Two, three, maybe more. The floor below. Far apart from each other but talking calmly and quietly.