Free Deadline by Barbara Nadel Page B

including Süleyman, was down on the floor. The only exceptions were Lale Aktar who was still sitting, covered in blood, in the chair İ kmen had guided her to, and Dr Arto Sarkissian who was standing next to her. Süleyman could just see the four bodies of the dead through the doorway into the bar. Laid down or slumped, they had the look ofdrunken sleepers – or they would have done if they hadn’t been covered in blood. One of them Süleyman thought he recognised as the owner of some sort of health club. Why him? But then why not him? When one asserted dominance through terror, it didn’t matter who got killed.
    ‘I want all your phones, cameras and any other mobile devices in the middle of the room now.’
    The one who spoke was shorter than the others. The timbre of his voice was of a man in his middle years and when Süleyman raised his head to look at him, he saw that he was also more thickly set than his colleagues. Was he the oldest? Was he also, therefore, the slowest and least agile as well?
    With shaking hands people began to throw their phones and cameras into the middle of the floor.
    ‘Don’t try to conceal anything from us,’ the man said as he watched the people empty their pockets. ‘We’ll be searching every one of you. Hold anything back and you’ll end up like them.’ He pointed at the dead bodies.
    Süleyman threw his phone into the middle of the room but not before he’d put the device on and pressed 155. Hopefully the operators at the police emergency control room would hear what he was hearing, at least for a short while. But as the phone flew through the air one of the masked men shot it and his colleagues all laughed. Then their leader walkedover to Süleyman, and said, ‘Nice try, Inspector Süleyman.’
    Every cell of Süleyman’s body turned cold. ‘How do you know who I am?’ he said.
    The man poked the side of his head with the muzzle of his submachine gun. ‘Everything will become clear soon enough,’ he said. Then he beckoned one of his subordinates over and told him to search the policeman. He pulled what had been an expensive jacket so hard that one of the arms ripped at the shoulder.
    ‘Even when my daughter got married here I never actually used this beautiful lift,’ Çetin İ kmen said as he climbed into the Pera Palas’s glamorous wooden elevator. He realised that he was babbling but then what else could he do under the circumstances? A faceless man was pointing a gun at his head for no reason that he could as yet understand.
    ‘Sit.’ The man pointed to the velvet-covered seat at the back of the lift and then shut the doors and started the mechanism.
    İ kmen sat. Under normal circumstances this short journey to the ground floor in the historic Pera Palas lift would have been a joy and a delight. But with guns and screams and at least one murder already committed, there was very little levity to be found in the situation. Just before he’d been pushed into the lift, İ kmen had seen two of the actors, theones playing the older prince and the Armenian gentleman, being hauled out of a room on to the landing and pushed to the floor by two other anonymous creatures in black. He’d heard at least one of them grunt with pain but what had happened after that he didn’t know.
    The lift creaked. ‘Amazing how this thing has kept going all these years,’ İ kmen babbled. The eyes above the balaclava face mask looked at him with what the policeman interpreted as pity. He probably thought he was a stupid old bastard, way past his prime. He was wrong – probably – but İ kmen was quite happy for that to be the impression he gave.
    ‘Of course we could observe the normal pleasantries and I could ask you your name, but I don’t suppose you’d tell me,’ İ kmen continued. ‘I could just call you “faceless, frightening person who wants to kill me” but that is somewhat long-winded and also I don’t actually know that you actually want to kill me per