DARKMARKET

the prison's high, faded cream walls and watchtowers manned by
silhouetted machine-gunners. My first impression suggested that
nothing had changed since Parker's movie.

Inside, however, I was relieved to learn that in this part of the country
at least prison conditions had improved beyond recognition. All inmates
had a television, shower and toilet in their cell. The food was a touch
spartan, but undoubtedly nutritious and reasonably tasty, while the
guards acted with courtesy, not just towards me, but towards the pris-
oners as well. In several respects conditions here were preferable to
those found in many British prisons.

There were some notorious convicts in Tekirdağ, including the
instigator of the murder of Hrant Dink, the ethnic Armenian writer
assassinated by extremists for, well, being an ethnic Armenian writer.
It was also no surprise that the prison contained some of Turkey's most
notorious drug lords.

And among the terrorists and mafia dons there was a representative
of the most state-of-the-art form of malfeasance - cybercrime. It had
taken me more than a year to get an audience with Çağatay Evyapan:
I had needed to convince both the Turkish authorities and Evyapan
himself. For months, this seemed completely impossible. My astonish-
ment was boundless when I received a message one Monday in early
March 2011 from the Prison Directorate in Ankara informing me that,
if Çağatay was willing, I would be permitted to see him that very
Wednesday. After that, I was told, Çağatay would be moved and my
window of opportunity would be slammed shut.

What the Turkish authorities did not know, nor would they have
cared, was that my passport was deep in the bowels of the consular
section of the Chinese Embassy in London, having a visa processed.
My attempts to extract the passport in order to fly to Istanbul on Tuesday
were dismissed robotically by the Chinese officials. Instead, I contacted
Tekirdağ prison directly and begged them to allow me to postpone the
interview for one day. I was informed that if they received the order
to move Cha0 before Thursday, then regardless of whether or not I
travelled there, I would not be permitted to see him. The hunt would
be over.

So I was extremely agitated as I battled my way through the snow-
storm from Istanbul to Tekirdağ on Thursday morning, a day late. It
was quite possible that I would arrive only to be told that I had lost