The Dervish House Read Online Free PDF Page A

heard of any deaths,’ Father Ioannis says. In as small and intimate a community as the Greeks of Istanbul, every death is a small holocaust. Then the bomb goes off. The sound of the explosion echoes flatly, flappingly from the house fronts. It is a little blast, barely distinguishable from the growl of morning traffic, but the four men at the table look up.

    ‘How far was that?’

    ‘Under a kilometre, I’d say.’

    ‘Well under a kilo. It might well have been just the detonator.’

    ‘Whereabouts would you say?’

    ‘I would guess down towards Tophane Meydanı.’

    ‘No guesses. This is an exact science.’

    Constantin taps up news feeds on the smartpaper lying among the tea glasses and coffee cups.

    ‘Necatibey Cadessi. Tram bomb,’ Constantin says.

    Behind the counter, Bülent clenches a fist.

    ‘Yes!’

    ‘Bastard!’ says Lefteres. ‘What’s he made now?’

    Georgios Ferentinou pulls out his ceptep. His thumb moves unswervingly over the icons.

    ‘The Terror Market is up twenty points.’

    ‘Lord Jesus Son of God have mercy on us,’ says Father Ioannis. His fingers tie a knot on his prayer rope.

    ‘Breakfast is on the house then,’ says Bülent.

    Georgios Ferentinou never saw economics as the Dismal Science. To him it is applied psychology, the most human of sciences. There are profound human truths in the romance between want and aversion; delicate beauties in the meshing intricacies of complex financial instruments as precise and jewelled as any Isfahan miniature.The blind wisdom of the mass still amazes him as it did when he first discovered it in a jar of plushy toys. The jar had sat on the desk of Göksel Hanım, his morning-school teacher. She had brought it back from a visit to her sister in Fort Lauderdale. Seduced by the Mouse, she had gone on a plushy spree across Disneyworld. Goofies and Mickies, Plutos and Stitches and little Simbas were packed together like pickles, eyes gazing out at eight-year-old Georgios Ferentinou. Çiftçi, Göksel Hanım had insisted on calling him. A Turkish transliteration of his name. Çiftçi had found the compressed figures strangely attractive. It would be quite good, he thought, to be squeezed into a jar full of other soft bodies.

    ‘Guess how many there are,’ Göksel Hanım said to her class, ‘and you will win them.’

    Çiftçi was lazy. He was told that every day by Göksel Hanım. Lazy and dull. He wanted the bodies in the jar so he did what any lazy and dull boy would. He asked his classmates. Their answers ranged for fifteen to fifty. Dull, lazy and reluctant to commit to decisions, Çiftçi added the answers and divided them by the number of pupils in the class, rounding up for luck.

    ‘Thirty-seven,’ he said confidently to Göksel Hanım. Thirty-seven there were, exactly. Göksel Hanım gave him the jar grudgingly. He stared at it for months, on his bedside table, enjoying their captivity. Then one day his mother had taken them away to clean them. She returned them all to their confinement but damp had got in and within two weeks they were green and bad-smelling and were thrown out. It was his first exposure to the power of aggregation. The mass decides.

    There is a market for anything. Debts. Carbon pollution. The value of future orange harvests in Brazil and gas output in the Ukraine. Telecommunications bandwidth. Weather insurance. Buy low, sell high. Self-interest is the engine; aggregation, like the class of ’71, the gear-train. Georgios Ferentinou has merely extended the free market principle to terrorism.

    The market is played this way. A network of a thousand traders is strung across Istanbul. They range from economics students to schoolchildren and their mothers to real traders on the Stamboul Carbon Bourse. All night AI sift the news networks - those deep channels that Georgios Ferentinou took with him when he left academia, and less exalted sources like chatrooms, forums and social and political networking