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the wealthy middle-class district of Suadiye, some two miles away. The rooms were sparsely furnished and not especially welcoming. Hakan told the two men to stay, put and that somebody would be in touch with them.

No longer under the protection of open spaces, still less of National Intelligence, Mert was now worried that Çağatay was on his way to sort him out. Unbeknownst to him, Mustafa had placed a trojan virus on Mert's laptop on the instructions of Cha0, and that infection was now revealing to Cha0 all of Mert's secrets, a dense jungle of duplicity. Cha0 was not only a master criminal; he was also an unforgiving one. He now had solid evidence that Mert was working for the police. Mert assumed (and certainly hoped) that Lucy Hoover had somehow organ- ised surveillance of the apartment, but he could not see any signs of it. So if Çağatay, Şahin, Hakan or any combination of the three turned up, he was in serious trouble.

At ten o'clock on Sunday morning, 18th May 2008, Mert was alone when the doorbell rang at Sözdener Apartments. He opened up to find Hakan standing in front of him. His visitor didn't speak, but strode brusquely past Mert, closing the door behind him. Mert said cheerfully that he had been expecting him. Hakan glared at him. 'One minute,' he said. Then he opened the door and in walked Çağatay. Mert's colour changed from red to purple to white.

Çağatay pushed Mert into a chair and started slowly pacing up and down in front of him, ritually intoning, 'Mert . . . Namert . . . Mert . . . Namert' — a play on words in Turkish in which the antonym of the word mert (courageous) is namert (cowardly).

Then Mert found himself on the floor being kicked in his stomach, chest and legs. Two more heavies walked in, threw a blanket over his head so that he could not recognise them and joined in the beating. Occasionally Mert caught a glimpse of a gun being pointed at his head.

He blacked out. When he came to, he was still on the floor, but he noticed a video camera filming everything that was going on. By placing the trojan on Mert's laptop, Cha0 had not only been able to access information about the relationship with Lucy Hoover, but would also have discovered that National Intelligence had been running Mert (albeit with only partial success).

'Right,' said Çağatay, who, acting as master of ceremonies, switched on the record button. 'Now you are going to tell us the whole story

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