The Templar Salvation (2010) (24 page)

Ertugrul exchanged some words with their hosts, and one of them picked up the phone and mumbled away in Turkish. A moment later, a younger cop brought in a folded map, which was spread out on the table. Ertugrul had another to-and-fro with the local officials, then turned to Reilly.

“Actually, it’s not a range, it’s just one mountain, over here,” he explained, pointing out a wide, darker-shaded area in the center of the country. “It’s a dormant volcano.”

Reilly checked out the scale at the bottom of the map. “It’s about, what, ten miles long and the same across.”

“That’s a big haystack,” Tess said.

“Huge,” Ertugrul agreed. “Also, it’s not the easiest area to canvas. It goes up to eleven, twelve thousand feet, and its flanks are heavily wrinkled with valleys and ridges. It’s no wonder the monastery managed to survive all those years, even after the Ottomans took over. It could be tucked in any one of those folds. You’d need to trip over it to find it.”

Reilly was about to respond when Tess spoke up. “Do you think you could get hold of a detailed map of that whole area?” she asked Ertugrul. “A topographic map maybe? Like the ones climbers use?”

Ertugrul thought about it, then said, “I imagine we should be able to,” his tone somewhat belittling of her request. He explained her request in Turkish to their hosts, and one of them picked up the phone again, presumably to source one for her.

Reilly flicked her a quick quizzical glance, then went back to studying the map. “How far is it?”

“From here? Five hundred miles, give or take.”

“So how would he get there from here? Drive? Fly? A small plane, or a helicopter maybe?”

Their hosts exchanged a few words, and shook their heads vigorously. “He could fly,” Ertugrul replied. “Kayseri’s close by and it’s got an airport. There are a couple of flights a day from here. But I don’t think he’d need to. Depending on the traffic and on what road you take, it’s eleven, twelve hours by car versus under two by plane, but it’s less risky, especially now that the airports are on high alert.”

Which, presumably, they also were last night
,
but that didn’t stop him
, Reilly wanted to say, but he held back.

“There’s also a train,” the chief of police remembered. “But if he has a hostage with him, it’s not really doable.”

“Okay, so if he’s going to drive there, where’d he get the car?” Reilly asked Ertugrul. “What do we know about the cars he used in Rome? The ones Sharafi and Tess were in?”

Ertugrul flicked through his papers, then found the relevant report. “All they have right now is that they had fake plates. The prelim VIN number check on the one Ms. Chaykin was in says it wasn’t reported stolen, but it can take time for a stolen car claim to filter through. And it’s too early to tell with the other one—they have to find the VIN tag first.”

“It’s the same MO of car bombs we’ve seen in Iraq and in Lebanon,” Reilly noted. “The cars are stolen, or they’ll have been bought for cash with fake IDs. Either way, we don’t usually find out which one it is until after they’ve been blown up.” He fumed. “We need to know what he’s driving now.”

“We’re going to need a list of all stolen car claims since, well, yesterday,” Ertugrul told Izzettin. “And we’ll need to have a constant feed of any new reports that come in.”

“Okay,” the cop answered.

“How many roads are there that lead to that mountain?” Reilly asked him. “Can you put up roadblocks? We know he’s heading there.”

The chief of police shook his head as he leaned into the map. “Even knowing he’s coming from here, there are many different roads he could take to get there. And it depends on what part of the mountain he’s going to. There are different approaches from all sides.”

“Besides,” Ertugrul added, “we’d still have the same problem as the airport guys. We don’t have a clear photo or a name to give to the guys at the roadblocks. They can only look for Simmons.”

“It’s not possible,” Izzettin concluded. “The area around the mountain is very popular with tourists. Cappadocia is very busy this time of year. We can’t stop everyone.”

“Okay,” Reilly shrugged, his eyes darkening with frustration.

Tess’s voice broke through the gloom. “If you’re saying he might be working for the Iranians, wouldn’t they have people here helping him?” she asked. “They could get him a car. A safe house. Weapons.”

“It’s possible,” Reilly agreed. It was something he’d been wondering about too, but he knew that it was tricky territory. He asked Ertugrul, “What level of surveillance do we have on their embassy?”

Ertugrul hesitated, then ducked the question. “The embassy isn’t here, it’s in the capital, in Ankara. They just have a consulate here.” He didn’t offer more. No intel officer liked to talk in front of their foreign counterparts about who he and his colleagues were or weren’t watching, unless they knew they could trust them—which was, basically, never.

“Do we have them under watch?” Reilly pressed.

“You’re asking the wrong guy. That’s Agency business,” the legat said, reminding Reilly that the CIA handled foreign intel gathering.

Reilly understood and dropped it for now. He turned in frustration to one of the Turkish officers at the table, Murat Celikbilek, from the MIT—the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, otherwise known as the National Intelligence Organization. “What about your people?” he asked him. “You must have some kind of surveillance in place.”

Celikbilek studied him for a beat with the inscrutable concentration of a vulture, then said, “It’s not really a question one can answer casually, especially not in front of “—he nodded somewhat dismissively in Tess’s direction—”a civilian.”

“Look, I don’t need to know the sordid details of what you guys are up to,” Reilly said, with a disarming half smile. “But if you’re keeping tabs on them, particularly on their consulate here, someone might have seen something that can help us.” He held Celikbilek’s gaze for a long second, then the intelligence officer’s hooded eyes blinked and he gave Reilly a small nod.

“I’ll see what we’ve got,” he said.

“That would be great. We need to move fast,” Reilly reiterated. “He’s already killed three people in your country, and it could get worse. He’s probably already on his way to the monastery, and unless we can figure out what he’s driving or where he’s headed, he’s got an open playing field.” He paused long enough to make sure his comment sank in, then turned to Ertugrul and, in a lower voice, said, “We’re going to need to talk to the Agency boys. Like, right now.”

Chapter 24

W
ith the setting sun turning his rearview mirror into a blazing lava lamp, Mansoor Zahed settled into the stream of evening traffic that was leaving the city and concentrated on the road ahead.

He glanced to his side. Simmons was sitting there, in the passenger seat, his head slightly slumped, the now familiar half-vacant stare in his eyes, the tranquilizer having once again sapped his vibrancy and turned him into a docile, subservient pet. Zahed knew he’d need to keep him sedated for a while. They had a long drive ahead of them, far longer than the one they had completed earlier that day.

Zahed wasn’t thrilled to be on the road again. He wasn’t one to dawdle, especially not after what he’d done at the Vatican. He would have preferred to fly to Kayceri, just as he’d have preferred to fly straight from Italy to an airfield close to Istanbul. Steyl had kiboshed that idea, though they were both well aware of the fact that the Turkish military kept a tight grip on all the country’s airfields. Steyl had reminded Zahed that the risks, after Rome, were too high, and Zahed hadn’t questioned his judgment. He knew that when it came to flying in and out of countries without drawing too much attention to whatever illicit cargo he had on board, Steyl knew exactly what was doable, and what wasn’t. You could count on him to fly any payload into pretty much anywhere and get it past the airport checks unchallenged—but you could also count on him not to land you in hot water, metaphorically speaking. And so they’d flown slightly north instead, to Bulgaria, and landed in Primorsko, a small resort town on the country’s Black Sea coast. It had a small, civilian airfield—not a military one—the kind where exactly who was on what small plane wasn’t the first thing on the local officials’ mind. It was also less than twenty miles from the Turkish border, making the drive from the airfield to Istanbul a not-too-taxing five-hour stint.

This drive would be more than twice as long, but there was no other option. Zahed hadn’t particularly enjoyed negotiating the never-ending traffic nightmare that was evening-rush-hour Istanbul. The chaotic free-for-all had reminded him of the less attractive aspects of Isfahan, his home-town back in Iran, another arena of outstanding architectural beauty that was marred by its drivers’ demented jousting. But in contrast to his earlier outing that day, when evading Reilly, he’d exercised careful restraint while driving out of the city and avoided getting into any dick-measuring contests with the aggressive taxi and
dolmu
drivers, allowing them to barge through instead, knowing that the smallest fender bender could have dire consequences given that he was driving a stolen car and transporting a heavily drugged captive.

As the highway snaked through some fast, sweeping bends and rose into a series of gentle hills, Zahed was finding it hard to relax. He’d never seen as many trucks and buses, big, overloaded mastodons that were hurtling down the Istanbul-Ankara
otoyol
, as the six-lane highway was known, oblivious to its often hazardously patchy road surface and ignoring its 120-kilometer-per-hour speed limit. Turkey had one of the worst accident rates in the world, and the car Zahed had been given, a black Land Rover Discovery, while ideal for any off-road sections of his journey, was definitely too tall for cruising comfortably down a highway. Like a light sailboat caught in a storm, it was constantly getting buffeted by the passing heavyweights, forcing Zahed to correct his heading repeatedly by banking into the turbulent air to keep the car facing forward.

As he always did after each step in the course of an assignment, Zahed ran through a quick mental assessment of his mission’s status. So far, he had no major quibbles with how it was working out. He’d made it into Turkey undetected. He’d gotten the information he needed from the Patriarchate. He’d evaded Reilly, who, somehow, had managed to track him down with unsettling efficiency. He reeled his attention back to the previous day’s events, at the Vatican, triggering a pleasing cascade of images in his mind’s eye. A deep-seated feeling of delight swept over him as he relived the rush he’d felt when he’d watched the coverage of his actions on the televised news and all over the day’s newspapers. More would follow, no doubt, after his brief visit to the Patiarchate. He thought about his quest and took great solace in the fact that, even if he weren’t able to find what Sharafi had unearthed, or if it turned out to be worthless, his venture had already turned out to be more than a worthwhile undertaking. This was better than anything he had achieved in Beirut, or in Iraq. Far better. It had given him the opportunity to attack his enemies at the very heart of their faith. Their news-hungry media would keep milking it for days, searing it into the minds of his target audience. The financial markets were already doing their bit to add to the pain, plummeting as expected, wiping out billions of dollars from the enemies’ coffers. No, his act would not be soon forgotten, of that he was certain. And with a bit of luck it would only be the beginning, he thought, imagining how it could awaken a thousand other warriors and show them what could be done.

His mind wandered back to another beginning, to another time, and the faces of his younger brothers and his sister swam into view. He could hear them, running around, playing around the house back in Isfahan, his parents never far from sight. His thoughts migrated to his parents, and he thought of how proud they would have been of him right now—had they been alive to witness it. Memories of that cursed day came raging back and stoked the flames of the fury that had consumed him ever since—memories of that Sunday, the 3rd of July, 1988, a torridly humid day, the day on which his family was blown out of the sky, the day on which his fourteen-year-old world was incinerated, the day that sparked his rebirth.
Not even the merest hint of an apology
, he thought, thinking back to the empty caskets they had buried, an upwelling of bile scorching his throat. Nothing. Just some blood money for him and for all the others who had also lost loved ones. And medals, he seethed. Medals—including the Legion of Merit, no less—for the ship’s commander and for the rest of the Godless perpetrators of that mass murder.

He stifled his anger and took in a deep breath, and let his mind settle. There was no need to lament what had happened or, as his countrymen were fond of telling him, what had been willed to happen. After all, he kept hearing, everything was written. He chortled inwardly at the backward, naive thought. What he had come to believe, though, was that the lives of his parents and siblings weren’t lost in vain. His life, after all, had taken on a far greater purpose than it otherwise would have had. He just needed to make sure he achieved everything he’d set out to do. To do any less would dishonor their memories and was simply not an option.