The Dream World Of Mert Ortaç

outfits, it boasted a sophisticated counter-intelligence capacity and, as such, was one of National Intelligence’s trickiest surveillance targets.

On one raid agents had picked up a laptop, and it was handed to Mert in the guesthouse where he was first interviewed and where he now always worked. His handler explained that the user had been accessing a website called DarkMarket. The handler was also a geek and told Mert that he had followed DarkMarket’s connections as far as a server in Singapore, which looked to him like a proxy. After that, he said, he lost the digital trail. He knew nothing about who was behind this site, although the evidence strongly suggested to him that the DHKP/C was involved in carding as a way of maximising its revenue and perhaps also investigating the use of botnets and whether this might assist the DHKP/C in achieving its goals.

Suddenly DarkMarket was no longer just a criminal website: it was helping to fund a designated terrorist organisation.

Did Mert, the handler asked, know anything about this site?

Mert did not. He, too, tracked DarkMarket’s server back to Singapore, but try as he might he could not trace it any further. This was in fact thanks to Grendel’s sterling efforts. Nonetheless, Mert told his handler he knew somebody who might be better acquainted with DarkMarket.

Mert was tired. National Intelligence invariably expected him to complete these assignments overnight. His new job was working for the Turkish concession of Fox TV. Fox Turkey was not wholly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International because, according to Turkish law, a local citizen had to control 51 per cent of the stock. This majority shareholder was a former diplomat who was known to have links to the police and secret service. At Fox, Mert’s colleagues noticed that he was frequently, if not always, distracted. And that he would find it difficult to finish even simple jobs – not because he couldn’t do them, but because he was up to something else at the same time.

One of Mert’s contacts had asked the young man to keep an eye out for a certain Sadun Özkaya, a middle-class teenager whose parents were worried that he was straying. He had just been extracted from jail, where he was under investigation for fraud. The contact asked Mert to keep Sadun on the straight and narrow – which was like engaging a wolf to preach the benefits of veganism to another wolf, as the two of them lick their chops over the remains of a juicy young lamb.