The Cypriot Girl: A Franklin Polk Thriller

By Rowan Hodge

Spies, lies, sex and power

A suicide bomber unleashes hell in the ancient capital city of Nicosia drawing CIA operative, Frank Polk into a deadly international conspiracy.

It’s Easter 2017 and everyone is trying to step into the Trump foreign policy vacuum. The political storm engulfs players from Washington to Moscow, Antwerp, Jerusalem to Istanbul.

Polk must find out who’s behind the bombing before the world order is upended, and he must do it while a mole is working with the conspirators to take him out.

Along the way he must learn, “Who is the Cypriot Girl?”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: May 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543751505

Rowan Hodge

About the author Rowan Hodge is a gyrocopter pilot and author who likes to plant trees. He was born and raised in North Queensland and earned business and law degrees from the Queensland University of Technology. He has lived in New Zealand, Argentina, Australia, France and Belgium. Rowan resides in Brisbane with his wife, Greta, and their two children. This book was written in Cyprus, Belgium, Israel, New Caledonia, Australia, New Zealand, The United States and the United Arab Emirates.

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Copyright © 2019 by Rowan Hodge.

ISBN:                  Softcover                        978-1-5437-5149-9

                            eBook                             978-1-5437-5150-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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CONTENTS

Wednesday 11 January 2017

Sunday 16 April 2017

Chapter 1     Cyprus

Chapter 2

Monday 17 April 2017

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Tuesday 18 April 2017

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Wednesday 19 April 2017

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Thursday 20 April 2017

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Friday 21 April 2017

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Saturday 22 April 2017

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Sunday 23 April 2017

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Tuesday 25 April 2017

Chapter 61

Sunday 30 April 2017

Wednesday 17 May 2017

Author’s Note

About the Author

For Craig and Nicole Thompson

"I think that the Trump administration is slow when it comes to Russia.

They have a blind spot on Russia I still can’t figure out."

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican, South Carolina,

speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press 22 October 2017

Wednesday 11 January 2017

BuzzFeed published the Christopher Steele Dossier. Included were details of numerous interactions alleged between the Trump campaign and Russians. Also alleged was that Russia had footage of Trump with sex workers in a Moscow hotel room. The details contained in the dossier had already been presented to President Obama, President-elect Trump, the FBI and the nation’s top lawmakers.

The United Arab Emirates helped set up a secret meeting between Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and a Russian official close to President Putin named Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles.

Sunday 16 April 2017

The first operational usage of the mother of all bombs (MOAB) in combat took place during an airstrike against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria militants in Afghanistan.

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May called a snap poll for 8 June. The move was seen as an attempt to tighten her grip on a fractious Conservative party to strengthen her hand ahead of Brexit negotiations.

The British Pound rallied.

The US judiciary vexed the attempt by the state of Arkansas to execute eight inmates in 11 days.

Volkswagon surprised the market with huge profits shrugging off any tarnish to its brand from the emissions reporting scandal.

Ex-South Korean Leader, Park Guen-hye faced charges of corruption which could see a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Frank Polk was in Capetown, South Africa.

CHAPTER 1

CYPRUS

The stone buildings and streets soaked up the springtime sun in the bustling marketplace. Throngs of tourists crowded the wonky walkways and cafés. Small boutiques peddled knock-offs of big name brands for cheap. The Turkish vendors accepted the local currency, lirasi, of course, but this close to the UN checkpoint, they could each perform quick-fire conversions in their head for Euros, with a healthy exchange margin naturally.

The shop workers and waiters included some locals but their ranks were stacked with Filipinas and Africans. The customers were mainly continental Europeans, with a sprinkling of Canadians, Americans and Australians.

There’d been an increasing number of Russian accents among the visitors in recent years. It wasn’t only the oligarchs who came to Cyprus these days. Now, even the folding street maps sold at gas stations sported Cyrillic script.

Being Easter Sunday, it was an unusually busy day. A quarter mile away on the Greek side of the border, the capital of Nicosia was quiet. Orthodox Christians had shuttered their businesses today to spend celebrating the resurrection of Christ with their families. As a result, the tourists poured across the border to eat, drink and shop with the heathens. There were children with parents. There were the elderly, spending a little of their kids’ inheritance. There were French, Slovenian and German tour groups. The prices were low, the food was hot, the beer was cold and people were smiling. Nobody was in a hurry. Nobody was stressed out. The sky was blue.

Groups of three of four young local men wandered about. They walked slowly. Sort of strolling, talking among themselves. They wore smart jeans and t-shirts, and carried a lot of styling product in their fastidiously coiffed black hair. They snuck sly looks at any girl with big tits or a curvy ass. They probably didn’t think anyone could tell. Everyone could.

There was something about these young guys. The way they moved in a clique. A posse. They belonged because they were local, but the way they blended in was as part of a small community. A Turkish man walking alone might not be noticed. But to the trained eye, on a day like this, in a town like Nicosia, it was actually conspicuous.

Cyprus is a geographical oddity. A very large island as islands go, but a small enough country with a scant population concentrated at the coast with the exception of the capital, here in Nicosia. It is about as close to Syria and Lebanon as it is to Turkey. And it is nowhere near Greece, which held the closest ties with it in a see-sawing title as old as time itself. It also represents the collision of the EU with the orient, but it is just as close to Moscow as Paris.

Its location is not its only anomaly.

Today was the last day of campaigning for the Turkish referendum to alter that country’s constitution, to crystalize the dictatorship of President Erdoğan. The nationalist surge behind the yes vote would surely see the end of the decades-long hope for Turkey to be admitted to the European Union. It was a moment in history that also could not have been less opportune for the people of Cyprus, who for decades had crept haltingly towards the political reunification of their little Mediterranean land mass. Recent media murmurings even dared to speculate that this diplomatic miracle might be poised to take place this month.

The Greeks and the Turks had fought wars against one another since Troy, and for a long time before that. The endless waves of conquests, coupled with millennia of commerce, immigration, study and tourism, overlaid with the same climate, diet and booze, meant theirs was among the most mixed blood stock of any two nations on earth. It meant that plenty of Turks look a bit like Greeks. And plenty of Greeks look a bit like Turks. Cyprus was a microcosm of this phenomenon, and despite this, plenty among the two modern groups still managed to hate one another since the Turkish invasion of 1974.

And yet, even with such entrenched divisions, plenty among each demi-state actually longed for unification. This trend was strongest among the youth who lived in their ever-smaller internet-connected world and who found it easier to shrug off the baggage of religious and cultural division. One Cyprus was grafitied here and there in English. The language of this script was indicative in and of itself - the language of the youngest generation who longed for the secular modernism of the west.

The extra geo-political sensitivity was that US president and man-child, Donald Trump had ordered 59 Tomahawk missiles be lobbed onto the airfield of Russia’s ally, Syria, just a week earlier, a relatively docile but symbolic wrist slap for Assad using chemical weapons on his own citizens. If the confluence of diplomatic tossed salad that is modern day Cyprus had ever been more complex, it was not since the life of Christ.

So it was extra odd on Easter Sunday at 1pm, that it was a young man, walking on his own, who looked like he could be Greek or Turk (or Bulgarian, or Lebanese), and who ignored the girls the others ogled. He wore baggy, dated clothes, and he had no styling product in his hair. He was walking, not strolling. And while everyone else had shaken off jackets as soon as the sun was up, he sported his still, a denim thing that was three sizes too big, and hadn’t been in vogue for a decade. Somebody had carefully stenciled the stars and stripes of the US flag on the blue fabric with a bleach solution marking it like a cheesy American tribute.

His face and neck were slim, and so were his legs, but his waistline beneath the jacket was bloated at his gut, hips and groin. He had a sickly sheen of sweat on the lean planes of his jaws, and his lips silently mimed a chant only he could hear. He had a wire down the inside of each sleeve that extended across his palms and terminated in a loop around the base of each middle finger.

He walked straight into the midst of two dozen Russian tourists gathered around a guide holding a bright green flag affixed to the end of telescopic selfie-stick. He bumped a couple of the tourists with his hips, and that was the first time anyone paid him any attention. He shook open the front of his jacket to reveal the strips of plastic explosives. Taped crudely over these were three dozen zip lock plastic bags of zinc plated Philips-head screws. He bellowed out one last slogan in English, using an accent that the few horribly injured survivors could not later identify. Then he clapped his hands in front of him.

The moment the wires touched, the small DC circuit was complete. Powered by a simple 9 Volt battery, the sort you’d put in a ceiling mounted smoke detector, the current passed through the detonators and ignited the Semtex.

Those closest to the center suffered the full brunt of the explosion, blown to bits and torn to shreds. The carnage didn’t end there though. The two story ancient stone buildings and the confined narrow walkways only made matters worse. At a radius of two hundred feet up each slender street there was a microscopic sudden gust of wind in the direction of the bomber, followed by a deafening boom behind the shockwave, replete with sharp metal shrapnel that knocked people clean off of their feet.

It took YouTube and Facebook 19 minutes to get the first sketchy cell phone footage. It took RT News in Moscow 49 minutes to get footage fed into a live broadcast. They beat CNN by six minutes. By then the two main airports were closed. The consular offices were in lockdown. Vladimir Putin was briefed in the Kremlin eight minutes later. Trump was not briefed until the morning in D.C. When he was he had to ask, Where’s Cyprus?

Four hours later, the investigators agreed on a preliminary assessment of about 61 fatalities including the bomber, together with a further 169 injured, half of whom were barely clinging to life. The injuries of the victims were as bad as you could imagine, with whole limbs torn off, to torsos full of tiny missiles bedded deep in their pulverized flesh and eviscerated vital organs. There were terrible burns to skin and eyes, scores of concussions, burst ear drums, and muscle bruising that penetrated all the way down to the bone.

Second and third-hand accounts suffered the usual innocent exaggerations and improvisations of hearsay. Chinese Whispers. But just as Trump had succeeded in dumbing down his 2016 messaging enough to make it memorable with nonsense like, Lock her up, and Build that wall, as it happened, the one and only thing all retellings had in common, was the slogan that the bomber had screamed, plagiarized as it was from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election campaign, Make America Great Again!

CHAPTER 2

Frank Polk was sitting in a jazz bar in Cape Town. The band was taking a break between sets. They were unbelievable. They were a Finnish trio – piano, bass and clarinet – and they’d blown the place away. The clarinet player doubled as the vocalist, and when he sang, he drew upon an accent that was as Louisiana as anyone in the Big Easy. Now, in place of the live entertainment, elevator suitable muzak piped through the venue’s speaker system. It was a feeble stand in. Polk gave his glass a shake and there was no bourbon left among the ice cubes. He was about to get up and fix that when both of his phones went off in unison - his work device and the local pre-paid throwaway he’d bought at the airport. He put his glass down and fished the pair out of his pockets. One of the incoming numbers had blocked ID, the other was the office in Langley. The number being blocked didn’t mean much. He’d often noticed when traveling through foreign phone jurisdictions, that the number of the caller became lost. He decided to answer the work call first, but the decision needn’t have mattered. Both calls were on the same topic.

A hundred and sixteen minutes later Polk was aboard a flight to Dubai from where he would connect to Larnaca in Cyprus. The first call had been concise, but he got some background from a hasty and evolving briefing delivered over the phone en route to the terminal. He managed to fill in some more gaps with BBC and Al Jazera news services on board and in the Dubai terminal respectively. He barely had time to buy a change of underwear from an overpriced Calvin Klein concession before he showered and shaved in the Business class Emirates lounge. He had to hustle to catch the connecting flight. From his orders, coupled with the mess of trivia and background he managed to pull together, Polk thought he had a reasonable enough brief: Find out who was behind the bombing of a crowded tourist market in Turkish Cyprus before the dominos fell and the world went nuts over the only place on earth more politically complex than the West Bank of the Dead Sea.

Monday 17 April 2017

An MSNBC reporter was in Cyprus investigating three suspicious unsecured loans with no maturity date from a Russian oligarch linked to the Kremlin, to former Trump presidential campaign CEO Paul Manafort.

Speaking from the zone dividing North and South Korea, US Vice President Mike Pence warned of a nuclear-armed Pyongyang, The era of strategic patience is over.

In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won sweeping quasi-dictatorial powers in a constitutional referendum by a slender majority of 51% to 49%. His numbers were surely bolstered by an influx of Syrian refugees who, having gained citizenship and voting rights courtesy of his largess, rewarded Erdoğan nine to one.

North Korea tested, unsuccessfully, two mid-range ballistic missiles. They crashed harmlessly into the ocean.

The Economist Magazine endorsed Emanuel Macron to be that newspapers’ preferred candidate for the French Presidency. He would need to make it through to the run-off election against the right wing nationalist candidate and front-runner, Marine Le Pen.

The Canadian government introduced a bill to legalize weed.

The Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzō Abe sacked and nominated replacements for two central bank positions. All nine such roles would now be his nominees.

Donald Trump ordered a review of the nuclear deal with Iran under which wide ranging sanctions were eased in exchange for the dismantling of much of Iran’s nuclear capability.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation reported that President Jacob Zuma dismissed recent civic action calling for him to step down as being merely the defense of colonialism.

CHAPTER 3

The second flight followed a curious dog leg to avoid Jordan and Israel, preferring instead Eastern Egyptian airspace, before turning north by north-east and commencing its descent over the Eastern Mediterranean.

Airport security in Larnaca was on high alert and the place was crowded having only recently re-opened since the bombing in the capital city. There were huge lines at immigration and heavily armed Cypriot soldiers looking serious and twitchy. Their worn looking Russian weapons were slung over their shoulders and the grips were held in sweaty palms. They kept their index fingers laterally poised alongside their trigger guards for safety the way they’d been trained, but if someone yelled out BANG! Polk reckoned people would get shot out of sheer panic.

He managed to clear the queues, his diplomatic passport getting him through a line normally reserved for airline crew, but he still copped the third degree from the immigration officer manning the station about why he was travelling without any carry-on or checked luggage. Polk was about to joke that he was Jack Reacher and all he carried was BO, STDs and a can of whip-ass, but one look at the guy behind the counter was enough to discourage him from making wise.

When he finally stepped out into the bright sun he was met by a cloud of cigarette smoke from the amassed taxi drivers.

Frank Polk! someone called out in a Midwest accent. Polk turned a saw a man fast walking his way on the footpath. The guy was checking Polk’s look against an image he had on an iPad. He stretched out a hand. Polk shook it, I’m Marty Higgins. I’m with the US Embassy here. Have you got bags?

No. I’ll need to kit up here.

OK. The car’s over here. They started to hustle down the footpath past the cabbies who had gathered around a confused Belgian backpacker. They looked like bullies in a school yard crowding around in their black leather jackets, except the Belgian was nearly a foot taller than all of them.

Are you briefed, Marty?

Briefed? What do you mean? Oh, you mean, the bombing?

Yeah Marty, the bombing.

Only what I’ve seen on the news. Polk waited him out. I don’t have intelligence clearance.

You don’t?

No, I’m the agriculture envoy.

The whatnow?

You know, animals and vegetables. Husbandry. Export-import…

Look Marty, don’t take this the wrong way, but who’s in charge here? Who’s on point for the bombing?

Higgins looked confused, They told me you are.

It turns out there are diplomatic missions and there are diplomatic missions. Polk always knew that the more innocent ones existed without a CIA presence. He’d just never been part of one before. What about Athens? Have they got anyone on the ground here already? This is part of Greece, right?

Well, not really. He sensed Polk’s confusion, but pushed on anyway, There’s a junior agent named Van Der Poole.

Van Der Poole, huh? Not a very Greek sounding name there, Marty.

Ah not exactly. I think she’s from Cincinnati.

Why have they sent a junior with no native contact?

You’ll have to ask her that. She’s over the border already.

They climbed into a big gleaming black Chrysler that screamed US government vehicle. There would come a time, and it might be very soon that day, where being so conspicuous might not be such a grand idea. For now it would clearly have to wait. To his credit, Higgins showed a familiarity with the roads and the traffic that was comforting, and he drove that big SUV like he’d stolen it. At one point Polk was about to comment when they were overtaken by a local in a shitty dented Spanish hatchback going like a bat out of hell. Christ! Polk saw some sort of speed limit signage. One said 65, another said one hundred. He asked, What is the limit here anyway?

Hard to say.

What do you mean?

I’ve been here a year. And I can say that I think one of those is imperial, and one is metric. And none of them matters worth a damn. Not to anybody. You’ll regularly see people howl past a police car at a hundred miles an hour without raising eyebrows.

Just as well, thought Polk looking at the speedometer. Higgins had the needle at 150km per hour as they spoke. A large wave shaped soccer stadium loomed on the left-hand side of the road, while on the far horizon, a gigantic Turkish flag had been fashioned out of white stones on a mountainside. Meanwhile a big roundabout crested the motorway with the distinctive sky-blue-and-white Greek flag beside another one Polk didn’t recognize.

Yeah, Higgins said, picking up on Polk’s surprise. They’re kinda impatient on the roads here. You wouldn’t know why. When they get wherever the heck they’re going, you’ll never in your life see a Cypriot walking anywhere in a hurry but they drive like it’s the end of the world. As he said those words, the highway traffic ground to a halt. Higgins said, Speaking of traffic, I’ve never seen it like this here. This place has gone ten types of crazy this last day. He nodded ahead at three stalled lanes of traffic stretching up a rise in the freeway towards a cluster of dust colored buildings, each with one or more identical, white, roof-mounted, pig-barrel-shaped water tanks, Welcome to Nicosia.

Polk saw the sign by the highway in two languages. One was in Greek – Polk had never gotten a handle on the alphabet let alone the language. The English translation beneath the Greek said Lefkosia. Higgins saw his confusion, "It’s called Lefkosia on the signage, but it’s actually Nicosia. Don’t ask. It’s easier to just go with it. Another big city here is called Lemesos on the signage, but everyone on the island calls it Limassol."

Polk thought Limassol sounded more like a fungal cream than a city. Is it some sort of Bombay-Mumbai thing?

No idea… I’m just the agriculture guy, remember.

Higgins pulled the SUV onto the left shoulder and unleashed the powerful engine again catapulting the three ton beast along in a hail of gravel and angry horns from the stalled motorists.

They eventually wound their way through the streets of the city where the gridlock gave way to an eerie calm in the CBD. There before them rose a huge stone wall. Jesus, is that the border?

I think parts of it are. It’s the ancient city fort walls. Now I think they maybe use the wall for some of the UN green zone, but parts of the old city are in the Greek part and part is Turkish.

Where is everyone?

Scared I guess. This area’s normally teaming with students and foreigners.

Higgins turned the big car into suddenly narrow cobblestone streets and in a few blocks he pulled up across a deserted pedestrian mall near a border crossing. Higgins passed Polk his business card and said to call if he could be of any help. Van Der Poole will pick you up on the other side of the border. Just show your Passport at that office – they’re the Greek Cypriots – then again two hundred feet down there to the Turks. And oh, I nearly forget, this is two thousand Euros, he handed Polk an envelope, And I grabbed you a local phone. The local networks are lousy for roaming. Here, I wrote the number on the back there.

Is that Tippex?

Yeah, sorry.

It’s fine, I guess. Thanks.

It’s pre-paid with about a hundred minutes talk time and a whole bunch of data.

Thanks Marty. He took the South African burner out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Higgins, Can you throw this one out for me?"

Sure.

Hey, how will I know Van Der Poole?

"She’s the only woman in the whole of Cyprus who