The head of A Certain Community is a learned man of many tongues, the Empire's chief of state security, Aziz Sefa Bey by name. He is elderly, spectacled, and grey of beard, cut altogether to the pattern of a great servant of the government. Formal in his speech, Aziz stands close to the political life of the Empire and its governance, serving as a broker between contending interests and keeping an alliance with Osman Hamdi Bey. He would see a single, unified Turkey, and holds no prejudice against the several minority faiths, caring above all for order.
He pressed Jean-Zera to prevail upon Osman to give over what he called his "ecumenical flights," urging that the Empire needed one strong voice if harmony were to hold; Osman, he feared, lent his ear to too many, and so bred confusion. He would have their conversation kept secret, saying the service would gather what it required by its own means; and he named "Kavalan Pasha," the beleaguered governor of Egypt, hinting that Claude Mongé might be tangled in those same troubles.
At a weighty audience with the newly crowned Padishah and the Sultan, Aziz presented the trio as assets cultivated by Osman. He explained that Kavala Pasha had sent a Skilled Assassin ahead of his own coming, and set the three to mark the assassin's position without disturbing his plan; he gave them a silver box holding a scroll to wipe the meeting from the assassin's memory once contact was made, and offered two addresses for safe follow-up — the one a government office, the other a hidden Janissary safe house in a poor quarter. He dwelt upon the moment's importance and the need to take the man in the very act, laid out the political stakes, observed that the Sublime Porte could look for no interference from Kavala Pasha, and at the last thanked the trio and professed his confidence in them.
In a dream of Gizem Faruki's, Aziz appears as a younger man, escorting her to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. His name recurs in talk of the political landscape, of the Padishah and the sway of the several factions, of alliances and of the perils posed by powerful beings such as The Shahmeran — with which he is implied to have some connection.
Aziz Sefa Bey afterward turned openly against the party. As they crossed to the mainland and made for Mira's farmhouse near the archaeological dig, he lay in wait with riflemen of the Bostanji Imperial Guard and a secret-service escort, himself racing to reach and kill Mira — the diviner whose death would loose the full power of Haseki Sultan Bergüzar Hatun — before the party could shield her. Sidra al-Najjar, reading his mind through the Crown of Sargon, marked him the ambush's calm and unhurried master and learned his purpose. Walking into the firefight with cane and monocle, he put his shots at Jean-Zera Mongé's feet without meaning to kill — "I would have thought you would have learned from our last meeting" — yet, shaken and overmatched as the party cut down his men, he worked a ring into a cloud of fog and was gone, leaving the road to Mira open.