Authors: Ian Mcdonald
The Dervish House (34 page)
‘Doing what?’ Kemal asked. ‘Sticking them up each others asses?’
‘Never judge a place by its airport,’ Adnan said, sliding his shades up his nose. There was ice from Ararat in the wind and he had forgotten to tell everyone to bring a coat.
‘Only judge a place by its airport,’ Oğuz said.
There was no drink on the helicopter. Kemal sat out the flight with his forehead pressed against vibrating window, gazing down at the sparse hugeness of the east. The glass rubbed a red weal on to his forehead.
‘You look like a Shi’ite at Ashura,’ Oğuz said. Then Adnan picked out the first silver shine of the feeder pipeline, bestriding ridge and valley, village and hard-scrabble field, throwing itself up mountain-sides and swooping across high snowfields. He motioned the pilot to fly in over it.
‘Can you take us down?’ Adnan shouted.
‘This is a military secure-fly zone,’ the pilot shouted back. ‘There’s a low-altitude restriction.’
‘How low can you go?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to get much under thirty metres.’ Adnan grinned under the aviator shades he had made all his co-conspirators buy at Atatürk Airport so they could look like hoods and jabbed his finger downwards.
‘Take her to the ground.’
Çaldıran Transfer Station was an alien outpost, an invasion base of silvery tubes and corrugated iron cubes, chain-link fences and yellow hazard signs, solar panels and heavy-metal valves, set down in a long sculpted valley of winter-browned grass and sheets of naked rock. Mountain ridges stood on either side, ice-capped, snow-dusted. One helipad, a two-rut road cut straight as a wound down the valley, sheep paths on the hillsides. Three pipelines, a steel Y, a triskelion.
‘What a shit-hole. You were stationed here?’ Kemal asked.
‘I was stationed at Erzurum. We came up here on exercises. You should see this place in the spring. The flowers are incredible. You can stand here for hours and hear . . . nothing.’
‘This is the spring,’ Kemal said, pulling his jacket around him. The alcohol, the high-altitude, low-pressure mild-delirium, had crept into his blood and chilled it. ‘And what I’m hearing is a little voice saying,
hypothermia, hypothermia
.’
hypothermia, hypothermia
.’
‘Does anyone actually work out here?’ Kadir said.
‘I see a guy with some sheep,’ Kemal said squinting up the valley. ‘And an AK47.’ The light was actinic and harsh, sharpened by high snow.
‘The station is automated,’ Adnan said. ‘A maintenance man will come out from the main Ozer office in Erzurum maybe once a month to check everything’s working and the locals haven’t sold the pipework off for scrap.’
‘Does he come for the wild flowers and the beautiful silence too?’ Kemal asked.
‘Kemal, shut up,’ Kadir said. ‘I see pipes. Show me how you work the trick.’
‘Oğuz is Ultralord of Pipelines,’ Adnan said.
‘Simple. It’s a shell-game with a natural gas,’ Oğuz said. ‘Çaldıran was originally built as an intake plant from the Marand field in Iran to the Nabucco pipeline. It was only after the Green Line was shut down that Ozer and its partners in Nabucco realized Çaldıran could act as a bypass around Erzurum in case of an accidental shutdown or political problems.’
Kadir turned his airport shades to the flanking mountains. He had always been the aloof one, the lofty one, duly diligent. He pumped the blood of old Ottoman paşas. ‘That would be Azeris, Georgians, Armenians, the Kurds and half a dozen Islamist groups who want us out of Europe and in with the mullahs where we belong. Not forgetting the Iranians themselves.’
‘The folks around here are mighty friendly, yes. But this set-up allows us to do a simple swap. Lord Draksor didn’t waste his time out here. We arrange a shut-down of Nabucco in Erzurum. The gas is diverted here, but we have control of Çaldıran. We’re already running gas from the Green Line up to the station at Khoy.’
‘Won’t they notice a time lag?’
‘Oğuz can time it to the minute,’ Adnan said. ‘It will be seamless.’
‘The computers handle the fine details,’ Oğuz said. ‘No one will ever notice.’
‘And the Baku gas?’
Adnan shrugged. ‘Keep it in the tube, outgas it, burn it off, run it the other way down the Green Line and let the poor widows of Marand have three months of free cooking. What matters to me is I’m selling Iranian gas on the Istanbul market at Baku prices.’
Again Kadir looked long to the hills and the high, flat clouds streaming across the hammer-blue sky.
‘This is theft.’
‘We’re simply exchanging one supply of gas for another,’ Adnan said. ‘Özer keeps the profit on the Baku gas, the Iranians get the cash price, we keep the differential. This is not a zero-sum game.’
‘You have any Iranians in mind?’
‘I’ve got a contact,’ Adnan said.
‘Well, I suggest you cosy up to your Iranian, and get me the fuck back to Istanbul before something else blows out of Iran and fries my balls,’ Kemal said, jigging from foot to foot, shoulders hunched and hands thrust deep in his pockets.
That Iranian is a whey-faced, soft-worded, dodge-eyed, wisp-bearded, nail-manicured, cheap-shoed effete Ayatollah-follower who has feed from his kids’ social network sites on his ceptep, and not tits or sports like a proper Turk, but he’s a Sepahan fan who can name the entire 2025 IPL championship team and their positions so Adnan can work with him. When the deal’s done, when Turquoise goes down and everyone is divvied up; they’ll get him up around Taksim. This isn’t some pious piss-hole with sand up its ring like Esfahan, or Tehran for God’s sake. This is Istanbul, Queen of Cities. You sit there in your Islamic beige suit and no tie sipping your ayran, but anyone who’s prepared to divert thirty-three million cubic metres of embargoed gas through the Green Line can’t be too serious an Allah-botherer. Out on the town with the Lords. Then we’ll really see Seyamak Larijani.
The Iranian’s only public vice is his taste in accommodation. The Anadolu is a boutique hotel in the New Ottoman style, so fresh Adnan’s shoes leave prints in the carpet. Small, bespoke, it effortlessly advertises expense in every carefully sourced artwork and piece of furniture. Adnan wonders, Does Ayşe’s stock feature among the over-framed miniatures? She wouldn’t mention it to him, she wouldn’t think it worth it. The gallery is her business; Ozer his, that has always been the contract. Men’s world, women’s world. Except for Turquoise. Turquoise breaks all the conventions.
The rooftop bar is a glass box, high over Beyazit, extravagantly climate-controlled on this hottest, heaviest day yet.
Money and high places
, Adnan thinks.
Money and high places
, Adnan thinks.
The other three Ultralords of the Universe have already arrived and are comfortable in the over-sized leather chairs, ordering coffee from the staff; handsome Russians in faux Ottoman frock coats. The Iranian rises from his seat to shake Adnan’s hand.
‘So the contract is finally in place,’ Larijani says. The air-conditioning dews the side of his glass of chilled yoghurt ayran. A waitress with heartbreaking cheek-bones brings Adnan coffee though he doesn’t need it. He’s still buzzing from last night. ‘I had been concerned at the lack of . . . clarity.’
‘Adataş didn’t get where he is by not spotting a good deal,’ Adnan says. The thrill of the close glows still, a deep, red throb at the base of his belly, in his balls, in the bulb of his prostate. He should have fucked last night. Why the hell did he let himself fall asleep?
‘I look at it,’ Kemal says in his bad English. The contract came through to Adnan in a ceptep chime as he was spinning, yawning but glowing, down the snake of pre-dawn taillights into Europe. White Castle lawyers know no sleep. Flesh and blood lawyers would have drawn it up; this was not the sort of contract you could entrust to Artificial Intelligences. In a blink he flicked it across to Kemal, on the Bağrantı Yolu. He would have put the car on autodrive and gone through the heads of the agreement while his last season Lexus was swept along, a corpuscle in Istanbul’s concrete arteries towards Beyazit. The Lexus 818: the car of the executive who lives with his mother. You talk dirty but you get your underwear ironed, Adnan thinks. Kemal is uncharacteristically clean-mouthed and restrained this morning. Adnan doubts that it’s out of respect for the Iranian’s sensibilities. ‘It’s pretty much a boiler-plate short-term loan agreement, with some non-standard clauses.’
‘Non-standard?’ Larijani asks. His voice is soft but carries enormous presence. His English is precise and distinctly English, unusual for that nation with a long mistrust of the British. He commands rooms.
‘With a deal like this, I’m sure you can understand that Mr Adataş needs to protect himself,’ Kadir says.
‘I had assumed that Mr Adataş would cover his investment by hedging. That is what White Castle does.’
‘We mean, protection from identification as being involved in any part of Turquoise,’ Kadir says.
‘It’s a question of multiple layers of Special Investment Vehicles and Special Purpose Entities,’ Adnan says. His English is the best of the four UltraLords; Kaş English, beach-boy English.
‘I’m familiar with those financial vehicles,’ Larijani says. ‘What is true for Mr Adataş is doubly true for TabrizGaz. I remind you that the terms of our agreement stipulate once the monies are paid there can be no recourse to us in case of loss to yourselves or Mr Adataş. Everything must be deniable.’
‘Oversight, compliance and due diligence are all my department, Mr Larijani,’ Kadir says.
‘What he means is, as soon as the deal’s done and we’ve all got what we’re due, we’ll close Turquoise down, roll it up and wipe its ass so clean you could eat figs off it,’ Adnan says. ‘Until we all decide we had so much fun we’d like to do it all again.’
‘We shall see, Mr Sarioğlu.’ Larijani meets his eyes for a moment. ‘Now, concerning payment. I require the funds to be in a special purpose secure account by seventeen hundred today.’
Adnan looks at Kemal. His English is the weakest of the four Ultralords’, but this is his fiefdom. Kemal sits forward in his chair, hands folded, softly chewing his bottom lip. He says nothing. Adnan says quickly, ‘The funds will be transferred as soon as the documents clear Ferid Bey’s legal department.’
‘Yes, quite. Nevertheless, my deadline stands. It’s a security issue. Oh yes, I’d almost forgotten.’ Larijani slips his hand into the breast pocket of his jacket and sets a plastic vial across the low, Iznik-tiled table. ‘Who is making the transfer?’
‘I’m the named signatory on the SIV,’ Adnan says.
Larijani slides the vial towards Adnan.
‘You’re fucking joking.’
‘I assumed use of nano was commonplace in Özer?’
‘Yes, mass-market general performance-enhancing products.’ Plus an internal market of greyware from the bazaars of Fenerbahçe and the pressed aluminium start-up sheds on the bleached hills outside Ankara. ‘That’s . . .’
‘Iranian?’ Larijani smiles. ‘What do you think it’s going to do, turn you into a raving mullah? It’s a one-shot optical security ware. It will imprint the account code on to your retina in a form that the lasers of your eyewriter can read.’
‘This is military grade technology,’ Kadir says.
‘We are not so backwards at TabrizGaz as people think.’
‘Balls,’ Adnan says, snatching up the plastic container. ‘I’ll take your Islamic nano and run a fucking mile.’ Kadir’s hand stays his as Adnan prepares to twist off the seal.
‘Maybe you should wait until Ferid Bey’s people have signed off.’
‘As long as you are aware of my terms,’ Larijani says.
‘Here are mine,’ Adnan says. ‘I call Turquoise. The quants have forecast an eighteen-hour minimum, ninety-six-hour maximum for the twenty-four-hour spot market to peak. Quants couldn’t find their dicks in the dark. I say the market peaks on Thursday morning. The gas will be in Istanbul twelve hours later.’
‘You can foresee when a market is peaking?’ Larijani, ‘Truly you are a latter-day prophet.’
‘I’m the fucking Gas Prophet, you’d better believe it.’ Adnan sits back easily and comfortably in his chair.
Yes, I know the markets; yes. I make the deals; yes, I call in the money, yes, I am never wrong. Do you know why, you no-ass, beige-suit, cheap-shave, wife-hiding, ayran-sipping Sepahan supporter? Because it loves me. The money fucking loves me
. ‘So keep your cellphone charged, you wouldn’t want to miss that call.’
Yes, I know the markets; yes. I make the deals; yes, I call in the money, yes, I am never wrong. Do you know why, you no-ass, beige-suit, cheap-shave, wife-hiding, ayran-sipping Sepahan supporter? Because it loves me. The money fucking loves me
. ‘So keep your cellphone charged, you wouldn’t want to miss that call.’
‘I await it eagerly, Mr Sarioğlu,’ Larijani says. ‘You’ll find TabrizGaz and the Green Line ready.’ He raises his glass of ayran. The white yoghurt has coated the inside of the glass and dried into cracks and crazes. ‘My friends.’ The Ultralords raise their coffees. Coffee and yoghurt; that’s no toast for the gods of money. ‘To Turquoise, to success, and to profit.’
‘Turquoise,’ Adnan mumbles.
As the other three Ultralords fold away their cepteps and unhook their eyewriters, Kemal calls over the handsomest Russian to settle the bill. Larijani leans across the table to whisper discreetly to Adnan, ‘I say this to you because you are a married man. When this is done and we’ve made our money, you must come and see us in Isfahan. It’s really rather a lovely city, and I have do that executive box season ticket to Sepahan.’
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