MIDDAY EXPRESS

the chance to meet Cha0 in person. After a long wait I was taken through three thick revolving steel gates whose mechanism had a biometric print of my hand, and was introduced to the Director of the prison. Far from the ogre one might have expected, he was charming and affable. He said that they had not received any directive from Ankara and that after lunch in the canteen I would be able to talk to Mr Evyapan.

Eventually I was led through the small, oblong room. Çağatay Evyapan is cautious but self-confident. Just as Bilal Şen had told me, his instincts would detect immediately if I was trying to ferret out some snippet of information in a devious way. He reminded me of Julian Assange, the mastermind behind WikiLeaks – super-smart, but with an iron conviction in his own intellectual superiority, which at times might be taken for extreme narcissism.

When I suggested to him that Lord Cyric was Tony – the tubby, bespectacled businessman named by Mert Ortaç – he emitted a snort of the deepest contempt. 'You’ve been talking to Turkish intelligence, haven’t you?' he said sharply. In a manner of speaking Cha0 was correct: if Mert was lying (let’s face it, a real possibility), then the bespectacled man must have been planted in his story by MIT, Turkish intelligence.

But as we talked Çağatay confirmed some very important aspects of Mert’s story, including the location of the apartment where Mert was kidnapped and the existence of exchanges between Mert and the local American Embassy worker, Lucy Hoover. He also conceded that once again his own arrest had been prompted by a real-world error.

For all his self-possessed intelligence, Cha0 indicated he had one great fear – ironically the same unspoken worry that stalked his nemesis from the Turkish police. He claimed that during his questioning one of his interrogators offered him the opportunity to go into witness protection. In exchange, he would be asked to testify in the Ergenekon investigation. They demanded that he admit to having established a secret cyber network for the Deep State conspiracy among the military, intelligence services and media. The police flatly deny that any such offer was made.

Cha0 refused – the last thing he would want, like Inspector Şen, is to come under the wheels of a struggle between the Deep State and the government. They do things differently in cyberspace.