afternoon, the air was still stiflingly hot and dry, made worse by the stench of aviation fuel.
Two black Suburbans with tinted windows were waiting for them by the plane’s front landing gear. Moments later, the armored SUVs were being waved through the airport’s security gates and storming off toward the Queen of Cities.
Ertugrul, riding in the middle row directly in front of Reilly, twisted around to face him and handed him a holstered handgun and a box of shells. “These are for you.”
Reilly took the gun and checked it over. It was a standard issue Glock 22 with a fifteen-round magazine, no scratches on it and freshly oiled. He clipped the holster onto his belt and slipped the gun into it. “Thanks.”
“I’ll need you to sign for them,” Ertugrul said, handing Reilly the forms and a pen. “I spoke to Tilden just as your plane came in,” he added, “and, well, it’s not looking great.”
“Nothing from the prints?” Reilly asked as he signed the forms.
Ertugrul shook his head. “New York’s liaising with Langley, the NSA, and the DOD on trying to pin an ID on this guy, but so far, nothing.”
“We’ve got to have him on file somewhere,” Reilly grumbled as he handed him back the paperwork. “This guy’s no amateur. He’s done this kind of thing before.”
“Well if he has, he’s been pretty good about ducking the limelight.”
Reilly fumed for a beat and looked out at the cloudless sky. Several jets were lined up on final approach, an array of silver dots that stretched as far as he could see. It was peak season in Istanbul, and tourists were flocking in from all over. “What about the border controls here?”
The chief of police, who was seated next to Ertugrul in the middle row, turned and caught his eye.
“He’s coming here,” Reilly told him. “If he’s not here already.”
“You’re assuming he’s already reached the same conclusions as the boys from the Vatican archives,” Ertugrul queried.
“I’m sure he has,” Reilly insisted. “He’s still got Simmons to figure things out for him.”
Ertugrul and the cop exchanged a few words in Turkish, then Ertugrul told Reilly, “Our friends have the country on a tight lockdown. Most of the airports here are also military airfields, and given the situation with the Kurds and with everything that’s going on in Iraq, the security is usually pretty tight anyway. The thing is, we don’t have much to go on for the main perp. We don’t even know what kind of passport he’s using.” He rummaged through his briefcase and pulled out a couple of printouts that he passed back to Reilly. “The only face we can really ask them to look out for is Simmons’s.”
Reilly perused the all-ports alert. It had parallel paragraphs in both Turkish and English and consisted of the usual bold, urgent lettering and a couple of short, descriptive paragraphs alongside two photographs: one, a grainy, pretty useless one from the Vatican CCTV cameras of the bomber; the other, a clear, smiling passportlike portrait shot of Simmons, showing a ruggedly handsome man with shoulder-length, wavy hair and probing eyes. A young, ruggedly handsome man.
It was the first time Reilly had seen a picture of the missing archaeologist. He turned to Tess, surprised. She was seated next to him on the rear bench. “
“Yeah, why?”
Reilly studied her with a bemused look on his face, then shrugged. “Nothing.”
“What?”
He saw that Ertugrul and the Turkish officer were having a sidebar, and leaned in a bit closer to Tess. “When you said he was this famous archaeologist and this big Templar expert and all that … I kind of pictured someone older. And nerdier.” He paused, then threw in, “Maybe uglier too.”
Tess let out a small chuckle. “That, he ain’t,” she teased. “And he’s so fit. I mean, my God, you should see him kitesurf. Talk about ripped.”
“Professor Jed Simmons, brainbox-slash-hunk. Who knew?” Reilly muttered wryly.
Tess studied him curiously for a beat, then whisper-laughed. “Oh my God. You’re actually jealous, aren’t you?”
Before he could find an answer to that, Ertugrul turned again to face them.
“We also tracked down Behrouz Sharafi’s wife and kid. I went and saw her last night. She’s in bad shape, as you can imagine. Our friends here have got them under protective custody.”
Reilly frowned. “What are they going to do?”
“It’s a tough one. They can’t exactly go home to Iran, not given who might be behind all this.”
“You talked to our guys?” Reilly asked him.
Ertugrul nodded. “Yeah. The station chief spoke to the ambassador and the consul. Shouldn’t be a problem to get them political refugee status. She’s got cousins in San Diego, so that’s a possibility.”
“And the research assistant?”
“There’s no sign of him. It looks like he got out of Dodge already. Around the same time Sharafi went to Jordan it seems.” His expression darkened as his mind seemed to latch on to something else. “That poor bastard. I wonder if he was still alive before …” His eyes darted hesitantly sideways at Tess, and his voice trailed off. He then remembered something else, causing him to rifle through the paperwork in his hands before passing another sheet back to Reilly.
“On that front, we got something,” he told him. “The unexploded bomb, the one that was in the car with you, Miss Chaykin?” He gave her a glance that was somewhat apologetic. “The bomb tech guys’ report came in. It was a serious piece of hardware. Twenty pounds of C4 jacked to a cell phone.”
Reilly was already scanning the sheet. “No taggants?”
“None.”
“What are taggants?” Tess asked.
“Manufacturers of explosives such as C4 and Semtex are bound by international conventions to add unique marker chemicals to their products, to help identify their provenance if needed,” Ertugrul explained. “And surprisingly, the system works. You rarely see untagged material. One place we have seen it, though, is in Iraq. In car bombs.”
“Car bombs attributed to Iranian-backed insurgents,” Reilly added.
Ertugrul turned back to Reilly. “Also, the architecture was identical to devices we’ve seen there. The way the circuit board was hot-wired. The solder points on the detonator caps. Right down to the wiring itself. Whoever put it together studied under the same jihad master.” He gave Reilly a pointed look. “We may not have much, but what we do have all seems to be pointing at Tehran.”
Reilly caught a noticeable hardening in the Turkish intelligence officer’s jawline at the mention. The Turks and the Iranians weren’t exactly BFFs. It wasn’t a big secret that the Iranians had been supporting the Kurdish Workers Party separatists inside Turkey for more than two decades, supplying them with weapons and explosives and participating in their drug smuggling operations. The fact that the Kurdish militants had, in the last few years, spread their theater of operations to inside Iran itself, was only of little solace to the long-aggrieved Turks. If their quarry—who was already a wanted man in Turkey for the beheading of Sharafi’s daughter’s teacher—was an Iranian agent, the Turks would want nothing more than to get their hands on him and string him up to an outraged world.
The highway ramped upward as they reached the big Karayolu interchange, opening up a clear view of the city’s full majesty. Its seven hills rose and fell gently in the distance, each one of them topped by a monumental mosque, their massive, squat domes and thin, rocketlike minarets giving the imperial city its unique, otherwordly skyline. In the far distance, to their right, was the largest of them all, Hagia Sophia, the church of the holy wisdom, for close to a thousand years the largest cathedral in the world, before it was converted into a mosque after the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453. The city that was once known as “the city of the world’s desire,” the imperial capital that had endured more sieges and attacks than any other city on Earth, was the only city on the planet that straddled two continents. Ever since it was founded more than two thousand years ago, it had been a place where East and West met—and battled. A dual role that it was still, it seemed, destined to play.
“So this piece of info … you said you think the target’s coming to Istanbul to try and find out where some old monastery is?” Ertugrul asked.
“The Templar at the heart of what’s going on is a knight called Conrad. There’s very little about him out there, but the guys at the Vatican archives found references to him in the scans of the Registry,” Reilly explained. “That’s what our target was after. See, Conrad was in Cyprus after the crusaders got kicked out of Acre in 1291.
