DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [96]
Life would have been incomparably easier if Mert had been an unashamed fantasist who simply talked nonsense. Tracking down the hackers, members and cops associated with DarkMarket was among the most enervating experiences in my journalistic career. But nothing was quite so exasperating as the attempt to establish the veracity of Mert’s story. Actually, that is not quite accurate: much of his tale turned out to be true and verifiable in essence, but embellished at times with such frills and twirls that it was transformed into something quite different. Bizarrely, when Mert told straight untruths, they often related to the most mundane matters that were the easiest to check. He told me boldly, for example, that he was born on 10th April 1982. In fact, he was born on the same day four years later.
In the following chapters I tell Mert’s story largely as he told it to me. But there are two key moments when his narrative simply doesn’t add up, where I am unable to confirm his claims; indeed, in the first instance, one of the main characters flatly denies Mert’s version of events. When we arrive at those moments, I will alert the reader.
The ultimate test of Mert’s credibility lay in his answer to the question that has vexed many aficionados of the cyber underground since the inception of DarkMarket. Who was Lord Cyric?
30
THE DREAM WORLD OF MERT ORTAÇ
Istanbul, Turkey, May 2007
Mert Ortaç drew in his breath as he was shown into the drawing room of the opulent guesthouse. The room reminded him of the Sultan Suite at the Çiragan Palace, the late nineteenth-century masterpiece built at the behest of his imperial highness, Sultan Abdülaziz, and acquired more recently by the Kempinski hotel chain. Swirls of gold leaf adorned the sofas and chairs, while the wallpaper, with its Arabic patterns, glittered as it caught the sun.
In fact, the Çiragan Palace stood only 800 yards away from the guesthouse, which was itself sealed off in a heavily guarded compound. Agents stalked the environs and scowled at anybody with the temerity to try to park there. Set at the very edge of Besiktas district, the mansion stared imperiously from atop a hill in Europe, across the Bosphorus Straits to Asia. Most surprising was that the drawing room, into which they had shown Mert, boasted no portrait of Kemal Atatürk, modern Turkey’s revered founder. Portraits of Kemal are de rigueur throughout Turkey, and not just in private and public offices: they will often be found in every room of a building. Not in this room, though, despite this being the guesthouse at the Istanbul regional headquarters of the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati (MIT), Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency.
In most anxiety-inducing situations, Mert would react either by giggling gently behind his infectiously mischievous smile or he would cut and run. On this occasion, neither was appropriate. Mert was transfixed by the elegant waiters as they served tea and coffee. Above 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 Technology 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