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The young computer programmer had already failed the selection exam that would have made him eligible as a probationary member of the Intelligence Agency. He passed his foreign-language test (English) and his maths, but failed his Turkish-language exam abysmally. Nonetheless the Agency was still fascinated by his computer skills. His programming ability was genuinely remarkable and he had an extraordinary record, so they took him on as a freelance collaborator.

Back in 2003 Mert was the subject of a criminal investigation for fraud. He was only seventeen at the time, but he had succeeded in cracking the code that encrypted the smart cards used by the satellite television station Digiturk. This was a lucrative skill. Digiturk had recently won the rights to broadcast the Süper Lig, the wildly popular top flight of Turkish football. To decrypt the channel, subscribers had to buy a smart card from Digiturk and slip it into the satellite receiver before being ushered into soccer heaven.

Once Mert had worked out how to crack these cards, he set about reproducing them for illegal sale on the streets of Istanbul, pulling in significant sums of money in the process. No sooner were the Turkish lire filling up one pocket than they were pouring out of the other. Mert would throw parties for friends whom he would invite up from Ankara, paying for their travel and accommodation once they reached Istanbul. He was never able to control his spending, even later on when he was making considerable sums of money from his carding activities.

Mert’s friends were very important to him, in part because he sometimes found affection hard to come by. Whether he was aware of it or not, he used the Digiturk money to buy friendship – and there were plenty of twenty-somethings in Istanbul who were prepared to become pals with a young man apparently willing to underwrite expensive partying. Of course, whenever the money ran out, most of those characters went missing.

He was also desperate to prove that he was something special (which, given his computer talents, he undoubtedly was). And so he would systematically exaggerate his achievements. As this tendency developed, so did Mert’s consciousness start to float permanently between reality and fantasy. He seemed to lose the ability to distinguish between the two at an early stage. So complete was this meshing that, were he ever to take a lie-detector test, it would probably either go off the scale or not register a blip. Of course, in one respect this meant that he adapted to the culture of the Internet – the valley of lies – with ease.

Following a series of jobs in IT for various companies, Mert was taken on, in June 2006, by the local concession of Toshiba, whose personnel department failed to spot that he was under criminal investigation for the Digiturk fraud. Nonetheless, it did not take long for Mert’s colleagues at Toshiba to start wondering at some of his behaviour. They were also a touch suspicious of the certificate which purported to show that he had a degree in the Science of Cryptology from the University of Cambridge.

The trustees, so read the certificate, ‘have granted this diploma as evidence thereof given in the city of London in the Cambridge at the twenty-second day of june two thousand four’.

Perhaps they conferred the diploma in the Cambridge Arms in the City of London? Wherever the fictitious ceremony had taken place, the certificate was so crude that it hardly merited the epithet ‘counterfeit’.

One of his colleagues at Toshiba’s IT department was struck by how often Mert boasted about his relationship with National Intelligence. He, too, had offered occasional assistance to the spooks, especially in the late 1990s when the Agency had yet to develop its own effective cyber division. But one did not brag about such matters. Mert’s constant mutterings about his close relationship with intelligence really did jar. However, Toshiba kept him for six months because whenever his bosses there asked him to come up with a