be right back,” and headed down the road to change.
He was halfway there when he remembered something, and fished out his BlackBerry from his jacket. Aparo picked up on the first ring.
“Fill me in, buddy,” his partner urged.
“I lost him. The guy’s a fucking lunatic.” The sideswipe that catapulted the bus off the bridge flashed in his mind’s eye. “You said you had something for me?”
“Yeah,” Aparo confirmed. “We finally got a hit from military intel. Talk about pulling teeth. These guys are really cagey about who they share with.”
“So who is he?”
“We don’t have a name. Just a previous.”
“Where?”
“Baghdad, three years ago. You remember that computer expert, the one that was grabbed from the Finance Ministry?”
Reilly knew about it. It had caused quite a furor at the time, back in the summer of 2007. The man, an American, had been plucked out of the technology center of the ministry along with his five bodyguards. The kidnappers had shown up in full Iraqi Republican Guard regalia and just marched in and grabbed the men under the guise of “arresting” them. The specialist had only arrived in Baghdad a day earlier. He was there to install a sophisticated new software system that would keep track of the billions of dollars of international aid money and local oil revenues that were flowing through Iraq’s ministries—billions that were going missing almost as fast as they were coming in. Intelligence sources knew that a lot of the missing funds were being diverted to Iran’s militia groups in Iraq, courtesy of Iran’s cheerleaders who occupied many top Iraqi government posts and who, no doubt, helped themselves to a healthy commission along the way. No one wanted the corruption to stop, or for it to be exposed. The Finance Ministry had been shamelessly resisting the software’s implementation for more than two years. And so the man who’d been finally flown in to try to put a stop to the embezzlement was snatched less than twenty-four hours after landing there, right from his keyboard in the very heart of the Finance Ministry.
The kidnapping had been meticulously planned and executed, and was attributed to the
“He was there. Your target. He was one of the guys who hit the base,” Aparo told him. “His prints match a print they lifted off one of the cars they left behind. And according to the intel we had, both ops were pulled off by the same team, so it’s possible—even probable—that he was also involved in the programmer’s kidnapping.”
“Do we know anything about him?”
“Nope,” Aparo told him. “Nothing at all. The guys behind the raids just vanished. All I can tell you is that it looks like he was there. But it gives us some insight into what the rest of his CV might look like. I mean, who knows what else this asshole’s been involved in. It sounds to me like he’s their go-to guy when they need something special done.”
Reilly frowned. “Lucky us.” He knew that if history was anything to go by, this wasn’t looking promising at all. In every confrontation between the U.S. and Iran since Khomeini came to power in 1979, Iran had come out on top.
“You’ve got to nail his ass, Sean. Find him and wipe him off the face of the Earth.”
A siren startled Reilly. He turned to see one of the ambulances rushing down the road, and stepped aside to let it through.
“Let’s find him first,” he told Aparo, “and when we do, I’m not exactly planning to split a six-pack with him.”
Chapter 23
Given the internal and external political tensions gripping the country, the Turks took matters of national security very seriously, and this was no exception. Within an hour of getting back to the Patriarchate, Reilly, along with Tess and Ertugrul, were seated in a glass-walled conference room in the Turkish National Police’s Istanbul headquarters in the city’s Aksaray district, trading questions and answers with a half- dozen Turkish security officials.
One question was at the root of Reilly’s frustration. “How did he get into the country?” he asked, still pissed off by the slipup. “I thought you guys had military-level security at your airports?”
None of his hosts seemed to have an immediate answer for him.
Suleyman Izzettin, the police captain who was at the airport with Ertugrul, waded into the pregnant silence. “We’re looking into it. But remember,” he said, clearly as vexed by it as Reilly, “our border controls didn’t have a clear photo or a likely alias for him. And besides, maybe he didn’t fly in.”
“No way,” Reilly countered. “He didn’t have time for a road trip, not from Rome. He flew in. Definitely.” He glanced around the room, speaking a bit slower than usual and slightly overenunciating to make sure they all understood him. “This guy managed to move his hostages from Jordan to Italy without a problem. Now he’s here, and he’s still got one of them. We need to figure out how he’s just hopping around from one country to another. And finding out which one of your airports he slipped through would be a big help.”
The security officers erupted into a brief, heated debate in Turkish. Clearly, they didn’t take kindly to being embarrassed in front of a foreign official. Izzettin seemed to call a time-out among them before simply repeating, to Reilly, what he had said before: “We’ll look into it.”
“Okay. We also need to figure out how he’s moving around now that he’s here,” Reilly pressed on. “If we’re going to track him down, we need to know what we’re looking for. How did he get to the Patriarchate? Did he have a car parked there somewhere that he abandoned when he saw us arrive? Did he just take a cab? Or was someone waiting for him, does he have people here helping him out?”
“Also,” Ertugrul chimed in, “assuming he’s brought Simmons here with him, where did he park him in the meantime?”
“We took control of the area immediately after the shoot-out,” Izzettin told him. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a driver waiting for him. No one drove away from there.”
“He could have just abandoned his car and walked off,” Reilly countered.
“The research assistant,” Tess asked Ertugrul, “the snitch who kick-started this whole mess by selling out Sharafi? You’re sure he left the country?”
He nodded. “He’s long gone.”
“This guy’s moving too fast to be doing this alone,” Reilly said. “He’s got to have some backup. Remember, he didn’t know the trail led back to Istanbul until last night, when he got the Registry from the Vatican. It’s not like he’s had a lot of time to plan this. He’s winging it. He’s reacting as the information comes in, just like us—but he’s one step ahead of us.” He turned to Ertugrul. “This monastery … Who else can we talk to about finding out where it is?”
“I had a quick word about that with the patriarch’s secretary, after the shooting,” Ertugrul said. “He wasn’t in the clearest state of mind. But he said he’d never heard of it.”
