all, the image of their immaculate white gloves as they placed the
refreshments on the table in front of him stayed in his mind. He felt
a surreal sense of well-being and controlled excitement. But this did
not last long.

Accompanying him was a colleague from the Senior Sciences Tech-
nology Institute, but Mert did not know the three others who greeted
him. Once the waiters had silently withdrawn, these men turned their
attention to Mert. 'We wish to ask you a few questions,' one of them
began. Then they placed a digital recorder on the table in front of him.

Before long he was sweating under the pressure of the interrogation.
But this was not the third degree. Instead, for six and a half hours
Mert was required to solve a set of fiendishly difficult mathematical
problems. Under normal circumstances he would not even have
attempted answering them without a computer. His three hosts asked
him to use a methodology popular in coding that involved dividing the
number fifty-two into odd numbers. It was highly advanced maths and
he only had a pen and paper to assist him.

The young computer programmer had already failed the selection
exam that would have made him eligible as a probationary member of
the Intelligence Agency. He passed his foreign-language test (English)
and his maths, but failed his Turkish-language exam abysmally. None-
theless the Agency was still fascinated by his computer skills. His
programming ability was genuinely remarkable and he had an extraor-
dinary record, so they took him on as a freelance collaborator.

Back in 2003 Mert was the subject of a criminal investigation for
fraud. He was only seventeen at the time, but he had succeeded in
cracking the code that encrypted the smart cards used by the satellite
television station Digiturk. This was a lucrative skill. Digiturk had
recently won the rights to broadcast the Süper Lig, the wildly popular
top flight of Turkish football. To decrypt the channel, subscribers had
to buy a smart card from Digiturk and slip it into the satellite receiver
before being ushered into soccer heaven.

Once Mert had worked out how to crack these cards, he set about
reproducing them for illegal sale on the streets of Istanbul, pulling in
significant sums of money in the process. No sooner were the Turkish
lire filling up one pocket than they were pouring out of the other. Mert
would throw parties for friends whom he would invite up from Ankara,
paying for their travel and accommodation once they reached Istanbul.