No Place of Refuge Read online

  ‘Sir,’ she said. ‘What’s special about Apaydin?’

  ‘It’s guarded by Turkish patrols.’

  Rachel was confused. She was having a hard time following the politics involved.

  ‘Is the Turkish government trying to prevent people from moving on?’

  ‘It’s trying to protect the inhabitants of this camp from other refugees. And from questions from the outside world.’

  Rachel’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Why? Who’s being held at that camp?’

  Khattak’s tone was thoughtful. ‘It’s a camp for Syrian defectors. Defectors from Assad’s forces, the Syrian Army.’

  25

  Hotel Athena, Chios

  Esa wasn’t asleep. The ferry to Cesme was so early in the morning that he hadn’t been able to snatch more than a few hours’ rest. The sky was still black, the stars erased by the glare of streetlamps on the harbor. He’d woken early out of habit to pray, then he’d searched for background information on Camp Apaydin. He judged it was time for a call to Ambassador Mansur, who might have information on the camp. She was due an update on his investigation anyway.

  She would ask him whether Audrey was safe, a question he couldn’t answer.

  The thought he didn’t allow himself to examine was that Audrey could be dead, her body irrecoverable. Nate had sent him an e-mail, advising that he’d hired a team of private investigators to continue the search on the islands. He had another team working in Izmir.

  He updated Nate on his findings. As an afterthought, he sent a politely worded e-mail to Sehr. He didn’t know if she was still in Athens or if she’d returned to Lesvos. He couldn’t guess where Nate would find her skills most useful. Perhaps Rachel was right and he should have used his influence with the police in Athens. He shouldn’t be tiptoeing around Sehr. But she was pushing past his boundaries when he viewed her only as a friend.

  Samina’s friend.

  Wasn’t that the issue?

  Sehr was attractive, accomplished, yet he denied her ability to compel anything deeper from him: affection, desire… love. He’d told her it wasn’t possible.

  She’d asked this of him too soon; he blamed her for pushing past his grief. She’d come to the hospital to visit him, but Esa had refused to see her. She’d waited outside his room, passing messages to him through his mother. Later, when he’d recovered, she’d gone with him to the cemetery, a visit he paid each Friday.

  He’d taken selfish consolation from the fact that while he was in Iran, Samina had had Sehr to keep her company. She’d been going to visit Samina long before he’d been discharged, the injuries he’d sustained nearly healed. Samina was her oldest friend. A sister, she’d said at the ceremony, after the funeral Khattak had missed. He’d been in surgery. Samina’s parents had refused to delay; he couldn’t bring himself to ask them to wait. He accepted the expedience of the funeral, it was merciful; more than that, he wouldn’t have taken any step that caused his in-laws further pain.

  Sehr had spoken of these things at the grave. She’d spoken of their long friendship, she’d told him things Samina had said, confidences shared between friends, things he hadn’t known that had lightened his spirit, easing his grief with love.

  When he’d wanted to mourn in peace, she’d respected his wishes and left him at the grave.

  A few months later, when his father died, Sehr had come again, this time to aid his mother. She assisted in carrying out the customs that followed upon a funeral, bringing food, company… solace. She’d spoken with his family long into the night.

  At the forty-day mourning ceremony, he felt Sehr’s eyes on him, felt the gentle caress of her glance, and with sudden clarity, he’d known. He’d understood that she loved him: his suffering and loss were personal to her – she ached for him and longed to console him.

  He viewed it as a betrayal.

  Of his trust in her, of the way Samina had loved her.

  He said as much at the cemetery on the anniversary of Samina’s death. They hadn’t come to the grave together as they’d done in the past. He’d stopped seeing her, his rage and grief bound up in a festering knot.

  He assumed she’d come not for Samina’s sake, but his.

  She’d listened to his bitter evisceration of her motives, drawing her scarf over her hair. The gesture was frozen in his mind: her delicate hands pulling up her scarf, staring down at Samina’s headstone, her lashes dark on her cheeks.

  To this day, the sight of a woman drawing up her scarf caused him acute distress.

  When his torrent of rage had expunged itself, he’d felt the knot in his chest dissolve. He’d wanted to say these things for so long. He wanted her to accept the crushing weight of blame so he’d cease to blame himself.

  Sehr had reached for his hand. Numbly, he let her take it. She wasn’t wearing gloves; her thin, strong fingers were cold.

  ‘The accident wasn’t your fault. But it wasn’t my fault, either. From God we come, to God we return. Doesn’t that help you at all?’

  ‘Don’t pretend,’ he said, with the last vestiges of a desire to hurt. ‘I know why you’ve come.’

  He caught the shimmer of tears on her lashes. It didn’t check his anger. He cast her hand away.

  Sehr pressed her palms to her eyes. ‘So what’s my crime, Esa? What are you punishing me for?’

  ‘Do you need me to say it? Are you really so lacking in shame?’

  ‘I didn’t realize loving you was something to be ashamed of.’

  After that, he didn’t see her at the cemetery. But when he came on Fridays, there were flowers at Samina’s grave. They lasted a day or two, then a new arrangement would be laid.

  Sehr was still coming. She was just avoiding him, the way he avoided her at his parents’ house. A casual word in his mother’s ear resulted in a plea that he treat Sehr with kindness, with something approaching the gratitude she deserved.

  ‘I’m trying to be kind,’ he said.

  There he’d left it, until matters had come to a head.

  Doubting whether he should, he passed the information on to Sehr: the details of the storage unit in Delft, and the word written on the back of the receipt. CIJA. Or was it Cija, a person’s name? A Greek name? If so, who was Cija?

  The smell of smoke reached his nostrils, accompanied by a noise that sounded like a log being split. The windows of his room led to a tiny balcony, and through these the smoke drifted up in a curl of black cloud. There was a sudden silence, like a breath being sucked in. The exhale came like a hammer blow: a full-throated, heavy chant, shouts of alarm and cries of fear, the unmistakable crackle of fire. The smell of burning plastic singed the air. Something was thrown down hard into the ground. Khattak raced to his window to see.

  It was Souda. Souda was on fire, its entrance ringed by two dozen men in black, wearing the same insignia as the men in the restaurant. They’d struck their red flag, and on its banner was a Greek meander, a design with a clear resemblance to a swastika.

  Khattak threw on his clothes. He pounded down the stairs to Rachel’s room at ground level. Papadakis met him in the lobby.

  ‘Call the police,’ Khattak shouted, hammering on Rachel’s door. She appeared fully dressed, her gun holstered, her bright, brown eyes alert, responding to Khattak’s alarm.

  Papadakis didn’t move to the phone.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’

  He shook his head. ‘They won’t come. These men are connected to police.’

  ‘Call them,’ Khattak demanded. ‘I’ll speak to them.’

  The call was put through as Rachel scouted the street.

  ‘They have torches, sir,’ she called. ‘They’re not armed.’

  Khattak spoke curtly into the phone, relaying who he was and what he was witnessing. He promised a call to his country’s prime minister was next.

  ‘Let’s go, sir.’
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  He told Papadakis to bar the front entrance, following Rachel up the road to the camp. They heard the wail of a siren in the distance.

  If not police, at least the fire brigade was on its way. But they were too late, whoever they were. The tents were burning, families were scrambling to find safe exit from the trench. Hundreds of people had fled to the perimeter, blocked by men who formed a human chain.

  If the chain wasn’t broken, the camp’s inhabitants would burn. From the corner of his eye, Khattak caught sight of Peter Conroy, shepherding families through the trench. He was joined by a dozen volunteers, each working to clear the tents.

  He could see the fire truck hurtling down the road, but there was still no sign of the police. Like Rachel, he had his gun, and after motioning to her to take shelter behind a concrete block, he fired over the rise.

  The gunshot so close at hand startled the men who formed the chain. The attackers wheeled, threatening Khattak with their fists. Rachel stepped out into the street, her gun poised and sighted. Abruptly, the men fell back.

  ‘The police are on their way,’ Khattak warned.

  Conroy caught sight of him and shouted at the men in Greek. They moved against the barricade; Khattak raised his arm to fire again.

  A second siren joined the first – this time it was the police. Khattak murmured a prayer of thanks. The men began to disperse as a whooshing sound came from the hill. Khattak looked up at the ruins. A handful of men were stationed on the hill, hurling stones down at the camp’s panicked residents. A man lay bleeding from his head.

  Khattak made for the hill. Conroy followed his movements, calling up the hill.

  ‘Astynomia!’ he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. ‘Astynomia, astynomia!’

  A man flung a block at Conroy, who ducked in time. The men on the hill vanished into the darkness, their chants echoing behind them.

  They’d left one of their flags behind in the pandemonium created by ambulances, fire trucks, and the police car that had finally appeared on the scene.

  The Greek police officer who took his time disembarking approached Khattak with his handcuffs in his hand. Conroy clambered over the barricade to meet him, speaking at a furious pace, gesturing at Khattak. The police officer spit at his feet, but he put the handcuffs away. He signaled to the fire crew to proceed.

  For the next hour, Souda burned. Refugees huddled in clusters along the edges of the camp, bewildered that the world had more cruelty to offer. The sight of children lost and scared, their faces grimy with smoke, was captured on camera by a furious volunteer who looked little older than the children, but who had the tenacity of a bulldog.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she kept saying as she snapped her photographs. ‘It’s to make them see.’ She was talking to herself; the children didn’t understand. Firefighters barked at her to get out of the way, and she clambered up the hill for a better view.

  Khattak called a warning after her. ‘There are others up there, be careful.’

  ‘Just let them try anything,’ she shouted back.

  Khattak, Rachel, and Conroy gave what assistance they could. At the end of the night, when the clamor had died down, Papadakis showed up at the entrance to the trench. He took a look at the children who hadn’t found anywhere to rest. He offered beds to women and children, taking down names on a pad.

  When the police officer tried to interfere, Papadakis waved him off. ‘Give them our rooms too,’ Khattak said. ‘We’re heading out. We’ll be there in a minute to get our things.’

  Rachel picked up the abandoned flag and held it up. ‘What in the holy hell was that, sir? A sea of fucking swastikas?’

  Catching herself, Rachel apologized for her language. She wasn’t just upset. He could see that she was shocked.

  ‘What were they chanting?’ he asked Conroy. ‘Who were they?’ Conroy brushed back his hair, leaving a black mark on his forehead.

  ‘That was Golden Dawn, the local neo-Nazi variant. They were chanting something along the lines of “People! Army! Nationalism!” There’s been a lot of unrest in Greece because of the economic situation. The flow of refugees onto the islands has exacerbated tensions, but I didn’t know they were so close to boiling over.’

  The coordination and volunteer effort went on around them as they followed Conroy to the W2W service tent on the far side of the alley. Most of the refugees’ tents had burned to the ground, the scant possessions within destroyed, the smoke hanging low and heavy over their heads, leaving traces of grit on their faces, acrid and painful to the throat.

  On the service side, the tents had escaped damage – a matter more of luck than anything else. Had the sirens not sounded, the whole camp would have been destroyed.

  Khattak came to a halt in front of the Woman to Woman tent.

  It was the only tent on the service side to lie in ruins. He’d told Conroy he’d return to the tent in the morning to collect Audrey’s package.

  But everything in the tent had burned; Khattak couldn’t find any sign of the jackets among the wreckage. Either they had burned, which he thought unlikely given the flame-retardant material used on life vests – or someone had stolen the package from the tent.

  Someone had taken advantage of the destruction of Souda, someone close at hand, who’d been monitoring his activities.

  He looked over at the Australian volunteer, a single question on his mind.

  Was that someone Peter Conroy?

  26

  Port of Chios

  They met Nate at the ferry. He was arriving on Chios just as they were leaving, the silver-gray of the sky overshadowed by livid clouds.

  ‘I hope this means no crossings today,’ Rachel said. ‘The waves will overturn any dinghies that set out.’

  She studied Nate’s face for some sign of his mood. His private investigators hadn’t turned up anything new. He’d sent them into Moria, Kara Tepe, and Souda, where they’d frightened the camps’ inhabitants, who were so often at the mercy of the authorities that they’d closed their ranks in silence. Nor were the islanders much help – some had their own reasons for refusing to cooperate. Rachel guessed that those reasons were tied to the Golden Dawn raid.

  She knew Nate was casting about for a lead, for anything that could make him feel like he was doing something useful. Khattak tried to reassure him. Nate had brought word of Sehr’s discussions with the Greek police. They hadn’t issued an arrest warrant, though Sehr believed it was coming. They needed to push ahead; they needed answers before the Greek police decided what those answers were.

  What had Audrey meant when she’d said she was going to ‘beard the lion in his den’? Who was the lion? All they knew was that Audrey had gone to Izmir for this purpose. They’d have to find out why. They were hoping Amélie Roux would help them. She was meeting them on the ferry. She’d agreed to come along, but Rachel wondered if her reason for doing so was to keep abreast of their discoveries. She might not trust them to share information that implicated Audrey. Funny, given that she wasn’t all that forthcoming herself. But fair enough. Cooperation on both ends would need to be earned. She could only hope that Audrey didn’t pay the price of their discretion.

  She didn’t say this to Nate, who took her by the arm and led her away from the ramp. Cars were being loaded; the process would take some time.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said to Khattak. ‘I’ll catch up.’

  Rachel looked up into Nate’s worn face and felt a familiar stab of compassion. She was attracted to Nate in a way she couldn’t explain. A frank examination of her feelings told her it wouldn’t end well. The minute she’d stepped out of place, Nate had spurned her closeness.

  Nate thrust a hand through his hair, a nervous habit Rachel recognized.

  ‘Look, I get it,’ she said. ‘Audrey is your sister and you have the right to call the shots. I was talking like a cop before, not bein
g a friend the way you’ve been to me.’

  Nate dropped his hand. He stared at Rachel searchingly. ‘Don’t say that, Rachel, it makes me feel terrible. What I said to you was uncalled-for. You faced something much worse, yet you didn’t fall apart. That should be a lesson to me.’

  Rachel’s reply was quiet. ‘There’s no right way to handle this.’ They looked at each other without speaking, though it was obvious there was more to be said. Nate locked their fingers together. ‘I don’t know how you kept the faith. When I think of you looking for Zach on your own I’m ashamed of how I behaved.’

  He tugged her closer. Rachel let him, her stern lecture to herself swept aside by Nate’s desire to be forgiven – more than that, by his ability to empathize with the suffering she’d never described, the time she thought of as the lost years.

  ‘You don’t need to apologize. Believe me, I understand.’

  She remembered how she’d turned on Khattak when they’d met, how insubordinate she’d been, which Khattak had taken in his stride. He’d handled her rudeness with such careful consideration – he’d learned about Zachary, something she hadn’t known then.

  Nate released her hands, slipping his own around her waist. Rachel froze in the circle of his arms. He was crossing that line – that careful dance between them where they could fall back upon friendship as an excuse.

  He was taking a risk. Rachel didn’t know if she was ready.

  What if he was turning to her because he felt abandoned without Audrey? What if this had nothing to do with her? She didn’t belong in Nate’s world. She couldn’t picture herself in his life. But that didn’t necessarily mean she wanted to push him away.

  ‘Nate, are you sure –’

  ‘Rachel.’ His gold eyes gleamed. ‘I wish you’d stay with me. Let Esa handle Izmir, I could use your help. You’re a lot less clumsy than I am when it comes to asking questions.’

  So it was about Audrey – and how could she blame him, even if she’d hoped for something else? She sighed to herself, chancing a glance at Khattak. He was leaning against the rail, deep in conversation with Roux, whose change in manner suggested that she was succumbing to Khattak’s pervasive charm. Why was everything so easy for him? A little angry at the contrast, Rachel freed herself from Nate’s arms. She promised him she’d be back before he had a chance to miss her. She didn’t ask herself whether he would miss her, doubtful of her own attraction. When she’d told her father that there was a man in her life, her mother had said, ‘Rachel has to take what she can get.’ The words had burrowed inside her, wounding places she couldn’t protect.