Free Deadline by Barbara Nadel Page A

her typewriter. The bed, which was new, like all the beds in the refurbished hotel, had the body of the young boy who had played the prince’s younger brother sprawled across it, face up. By the look of him, he had been stabbed at leastfive times, once in the throat.
    İ kmen, bending as low as he could over the body without touching it, said, ‘So fiction becomes reality.’
    ‘Makes you wonder if this character was the one that was supposed to die in the land of fictional crime and mystery,’ Süleyman replied. Then he said, ‘I suppose he really is dead . . .’
    ‘Oh, he’s dead all right,’ İ kmen said. He checked his watch, it was ten past eleven. ‘Although we will have to get Dr Sarkissian up here in order to confirm that.’ He moved his head the better to see the deep wound in the neck and then looked at the bed and the headboard. ‘Must’ve still been alive when he was stabbed in the carotid or whatever artery that is in the neck. Blood spatter.’
    ‘I wonder how Mrs Aktar is managing downstairs,’ Süleyman said. ‘I left Dr Sarkissian in charge of her but if she starts telling everyone about this . . .’
    ‘You go down and send Dr Sarkissian up here,’ İ kmen said. ‘We’ll have to secure the building until we can get a team in here.’
    Süleyman left and İ kmen began looking around the room, moving as little as possible. The prints from Lale Aktar’s stiletto-heeled shoes were easy to see retreating across the floor from the bed to the door of the room. There were splashes of blood on the walls and even a few handprints where the novelisthad probably tried to steady herself against the wall.
    What, İ kmen wondered, had the boy been doing in Lale Aktar’s room? Unless she had invited him in, how had he got into room 411 and why? Had he perhaps tried to rob her and then been killed by her when she tried to stop him? Given the ferocity of the wounds he had sustained, this seemed to be unlikely. But if Lale Aktar hadn’t killed the boy, and turning up with his blood all over her did seem to be a bit of a giveaway for a cold-blooded killer, then who had?
    Whether it was the sound of a woman’s screams or the gunshots he heard coming from somewhere down on a lower floor of the hotel that made İ kmen sprint for the door, he didn’t know. But he was out of room 411 and on to the landing before he could really think about what came first. He got there just in time to see a tall man dressed in black, his face covered by a balaclava helmet, coming towards him. İ kmen reached inside his jacket pocket for his phone. But then the man in black pointed a gun at him and said, ‘Take your phone out and throw it on the floor or I’ll kill you.’
    İ kmen did as he was told. The phone, when it hit the floor, skittered along the surface until it hit the man’s boot. He crunched his heel down on it and said, ‘Now you come with me.’
    It wasan absolutely textbook psychological technique. They shot four people, three men and a woman, straight away, dragged their bodies into the bar and then stood in the middle of the saloon panning their guns around the survivors, asserting their dominance. People screamed in terror, some even tried to hide underneath furniture, which was exactly the effect these people had wanted. There were ten of them, that Süleyman could see, and they all wore black, anonymous jumpsuits or shirts and trousers and balaclava helmets. One of them wore a headset which Süleyman recognised as the type that included a camera, and they all wore microphones. Through his fear, Süleyman wondered what terrorist organisation the nine men and possibly one woman represented. Was it a knee-jerk assumption to brand them as terrorists? Süleyman thought not but then he remembered a recent report he’d read on the finances of one of the city’s most powerful criminal gangs and realised that perhaps his first thought had been a rash generalisation. These people could be anyone.
    Everyone,