Jean-Christophe Grangé - The Empire Of The Wolves

Kudseyi was sure that Azer and Sema would turn out to be far more than mere scholarship students, or anonymous soldiers serving the extreme right-wing cause or his network of organized crime. They would be his protégés. But they would not know this. He would help them from a distance, from the shadows.

The years went by and the two chosen ones lived up to their promise. At the age of twenty-two, Azer had earned a master's degree in physics and chemistry at Istanbul University; then two years later, an international business degree in Munich. Meanwhile, Sema was seventeen, had left Galatarasay school with full honors and had gone to the Robert College in Istanbul. She spoke fluent Turkish, French, English and German.

Both of them had remained political militants, baskans who could have run local clubs. But Kudseyi pushed them toward different horizons. He had greater ambitions for his creations projects linked with his own drug empire…

He also wanted to cast light on certain darker regions. Azer's behavior revealed dangerous fault lines. While still at the French school, he had disfigured a fellow pupil during a brawl. The wounds were serious and clearly inflicted not in a fit of anger but instead with a terrifyingly calm determination. Kudseyi had to use all his influence to stop the boy from being arrested.

Two years later, Azer had been caught skinning live mice. Some female students also complained of the obscenities he addressed to them. They had later found the gutted bodies of cats rolled up among their underwear in the changing rooms at the swimming pool.

Kudseyi was intrigued by Azer's criminal impulses, which he at once saw could be exploited. But he was still unaware of their true nature. A freak incident was to reveal it. While studying in Munich, Azer Akarsa was hospitalized after his diabetes got out of control. The German doctors had decided to treat him in an unusual way: periods spent in a pressurized chamber so as to oxygenate his body better.

During these sessions, Azer had experienced the rapture of the depths and had started to rant. He had yelled out his desire to kill women-all women!-to torture and disfigure them, until he had reproduced the ancient masks that spoke to him in his dreams. When he was back in his room, this fit continued, despite the sedatives he was given, and he scratched effigies of such faces into the wall beside his bed. Mutilated features, with their noses cut off and bones crushed, around which he had stuck his own hair with his sperm-dead remnants, eaten away by the centuries, but with heads of living hair…

The German doctors alerted the foundation in Turkey that was paying the student's medical fees. Kudseyi himself made the journey. The psychiatrists explained the situation and suggested committing him at once. Kudseyi agreed but had Azer sent back to Turkey the following week. He was sure that he could control, and even exploit, his protégé's murderous streak.

Sema Hunsen's problems were of a totally different order. Solitary, secretive and obstinate, she was constantly slipping away from his organization. She had run away from school at Galatarasay several times. Once, she had been arrested at the Bulgarian border. On another occasion, at Istanbul 's Atatürk Airport. Her independence and will to be free had become pathological, leading to aggressiveness and a constant desire to run away. Once again, Kudseyi had seen this as a plus. He would turn her into a nomad. An elite drug smuggler.

In the mid-1990s, Azer Akarsa, the brilliant businessman, had also, become a Wolf, in the occult sense of the term. Via one of his lieutenants, Kudseyi had given him several missions of intimidation or escort, which he had carried out brilliantly. He was to cross the sacred line-of murder-without the slightest qualm. Akarsa liked blood. Too much so, in fact.

There was another problem. Akarsa had set up his own political group of dissidents whose opinions were far more violent and excessive than the official party line. Azer and his companions showed their disdain for the old Grey Wolves, who had sold out, and even more so for nationalistic Mafiosi like Kudseyi. The old man felt increasingly bitter. His child was turning into an increasingly uncontrollable monster..

He sought comfort by turning toward Sema Hunsen. But in a purely abstract way. He had never seen her and, since leaving the university, she had practically disappeared. She accepted transport missions-aware of what she owed the organization-but in exchange had demanded a quite exceptional isolation from her masters.

Kudseyi did not like that. Yet each time, the dope arrived at its destination. How long would this reciprocal agreement hold up? But at the same time, he found her mysterious personality more and more fascinating. He followed her career, delighting in her abilities…

Soon, Sema was a legend among the Grey Wolves. She had faded away into a labyrinth of languages and borders. There were many rumors about her. Some said that she had been seen on the border with Afghanistan, wearing a veil. Others claimed to have spoken with her in an underground laboratory on the Syrian frontier, but she had been wearing a surgical mask. Others still swore that they had had dealings with her on the coast of the Black Sea, in a dark nightclub torn by strobe lights.

Kudseyi knew that these were all lies. No one had ever really seen Sema. At least not the original Sema. She had become an abstract being, changing her identity, movements, style and technique depending on the objective. A shifting being, with just one concrete aspect-the dope she was transporting.

Sema did not know it, but in fact she had never really been alone. The old man was always by her side. Not once had she conveyed dope for anyone else but the baba. Not once had she run a consignment without his men watching over her from afar. Ismail Kudseyi was inside her.

Unbeknownst to her, he had had her sterilized when she had been hospitalized for acute appendicitis in 1987. Her fallopian tubes had been tied, an irreversible mutilation that does not disturb the menstrual cycle. The operation had been done using laparoscopic surgery via minute incisions in her abdomen. No traces. No scars…

Kudseyi had had no choice. His fighters were unique. They could not reproduce themselves. Only Kudseyi could create, develop, or kill his soldiers. Despite his certainty, he was always worried about that mutilation, with an almost holy dread, as though he had broken a taboo, had trodden on forbidden ground. Sometimes, in his dreams, he saw his white hands holding her innards. He vaguely sensed that a catastrophe would be born of that organic secret…

Today, Kudseyi had admitted his failure regarding both of his children. Azer Akarsa had become a psychopathic murderer, at the head of an independent group of activists-terrorists who made themselves out to be ancient Turks who were planning attacks against the Turkish state and those Grey Wolves who had betrayed the cause. Kudseyi himself might well be on their list. As for Sema, she was more than ever an invisible messenger, both paranoid and schizophrenic, awaiting the moment to run away for good.

All he had done was to create two monsters. Two rabid wolves ready to tear out his throat.

And yet, he continued to give them important missions, hoping that they would not betray a clan that thought so highly of them. Above all, he hoped that destiny would not inflict such an affront, such negation on him, who had invested so much in their lives.

That was why, last spring, when he had to organize a consignment, which would inaugurate a new alliance in the Golden Crescent, he mentioned just one name: Sema.

That was why, when the inevitable finally happened and the renegade vanished with the dope, he had chosen just one killer: Azer.