The Few

that he was the commercial attaché. The swapping technique he used with Tayyar was called a dead drop in MI6 lingo. It was a method of exchange where the giver and the receiver never met face to face. It saved them from having to use a safety deposit box or something like that, like they had had to before. But there had to be some sort of signal to show if the drop point was empty or full. Steven had chosen a streetlamp on the street leading to the cemetery. A streetlamp post, to be more precise. After leaving an envelope, he put one of two bike locks around the post. One was blue, the other red, two bike locks. They passed between Tayyar and Steven, back and forth. The result was first and foremost that the exchange was secure. The safest place to do such an exchange was a cemetery where hardly anyone ever went. There are no casual passersby in a cemetery. Because there, the majority of eyes are underground. But maybe Steven chose the cemetery on account of his own personal style of dark romanticism. After all, it was called a dead drop.

The reason for Tayyar’s treason was a lot simpler. It amounted to nothing more than a mere sentence Sheik Gazi had said years before: “Know that Hıdır Arif is my only successor.” But Tayyar had devoted his life to Sheik Gazi. Tayyar, when he was just eighteen years old, threw himself into the middle of a missile assault orchestrated by a man known as Tehran Selahattin and saved Sheik Gazi’s life. He was in a coma for seven days. And then he acted as witness as Sheik Gazi and Tehran Selahattin made peace, kissing each other’s cheeks and agreeing to divide the region between the two of them. The result was, like his spiritual father had said once upon a time, there was no reason for him to cry anymore. Steven was experienced enough to know how to find the rotten tooth in a mouth of tens of thousands of teeth, and to know how to pull it out. In the end Tayyar accepted Steven’s offer. In any case, since the day the successor had been indicated, that is, for years, Tayyar had been waiting for such an offer. What he did wasn’t treason exactly. It was taking his due. In cash. It was impossible for Derda to have known about any of that.

He was putting the papers back in the white envelope and burying it where he’d found it. If he didn’t, maybe Tayyar would catch him. But Derda, with the mugger’s instinct he’d inherited from his father, with some strange unconscious motivation, decided to take half of the papers. He stuck them up under his T-shirt, securing the corners in the waistband of his pants. He quickly buried the rest and ran away. While he was running, he thought that if these papers were really worth money, then he wasn’t going to have to clean tombstones anymore. But he wasn’t going to take money from the yellow envelope that day, he said to himself. Two misdeeds in one morning were enough for the kid.

With the five bills in his pocket he ate and smoked cigarettes for five days. Eventually he even forgot to knock on Süreyya’s mother’s door at night. He hid the papers he’d taken from the white envelope in his pillowcase on the floor mattress, and every night he lay his head on them and dreamt of being rich. But it wasn’t long before he realized he didn’t know who he could sell the documents to. “That’s Ok,” said Derda. “I’ll find a way.” Then, after waking from dreams of becoming a professional thief, he slipped into sleep like a child.

While Derda was sleeping, Steven was sitting in the consulate’s safe room, typing a cryptograph into a keypad. Each typed letter was encoded into holes punched into a paper ribbon inside a machine. The yellow ticker tape was vomited out of the machine like a snake emerging from its hole. It curled and coiled. While he finished the code, he inspected the ribbon like it was the receipt from a cash register. Using his thumb and his index finger, he counted out eight figures. Then he put it into an envelope, sealed it, and waited for the M16 courier to come. They came from London twice a month. With diplomatic passports in their pockets, of course. For an intelligence service, a courier was an arrangement as antiquated as messenger pigeons. But Steven was like that. Old-fashioned enough to write a letter. Nothing had pleased him so much as the fact that the Internet program specially designed for cryptography they’d loaded into his computer had been a terrible failure. Thinking of the choice words to write in his text, he fondled the yellow ribbon hanging out of the side of the machine in front of him. As for what he wrote, this was the header:

SURVEILLANCE REQUIRED FOR BEZIR, MEMBER OF HIKMET

And he continued:

Notwithstanding the arrangements made on your orders to process with due order the visa requests of a laborer previously convicted of murder and his daughter, I believe that having more comprehensive, continual profiles of Ubeydullah and his son Bezir would be ultimately profitable for our cause. In light of the most recent documents I have obtained, it appears to me that Bezir has become a fanatic inclined to violence. As for Ubeydullah, he is attached to Hıdır Arif with an unshakeable allegiance. Accordingly, in my view, approaching him with the offer was a mistake. In sum, given my assessment of him as a potential mudjahadeed, I would request that as soon as feasible Bezir be placed under strictest surveillance.

Steven didn’t return to his Beyoğlu home till it was practically morning. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to sleep, he turned once again to Thomas Edward Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Maybe for the thousandth time. As he read, he still