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
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
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.
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.
He thought ahead and knew he’d have to stop in a few hours. He didn’t want to be driving through the night, when traffic would be sparse and when police roadblocks might pop up. He couldn’t chance staying in any hotels either. A motel would have been doable, but Europe had never embraced the concept or the anonymity such places afforded. No, he and Simmons would be spending the night in the SUV. In a few hundred miles or so, at around the halfway point of his journey, he’d pull into a lay-by, tuck in between some eighteen-wheelers, and, after giving Simmons a knockout dose, wait for morning. Then he’d be on his way again, bright and early, riding the
Chapter 25
The thing is, with an area this big,” the CIA station chief told Reilly and Ertugrul, “it’s going to be tough getting hold of something that’ll do the trick.”
They were in a windowless room deep inside the U.S. Consulate, a squat concrete bunker of a building that huddled defensively behind fortified walls and security checkpoints. Located twelve miles north of the city, it looked more like a modern prison than a proud emblem of its mother nation. It was a far cry from the stately, old-world elegance of the Palazzo Corpi, the previous consulate that had mingled with the bazaars and mosques in the bustling center of the old city. That consulate, sadly, was part of a long gone world. The new facility, built on a hill of solid rock shortly after 9/11, looked like a prison for a reason. It had to be impervious to any kind of attack. Which it was, so much so that one of the terrorists who was captured after the bombings of the British Consulate and a British bank there told the Turkish authorities that he and his men had originally intended to attack the U.S. Consulate but had found it to be so well secured that, to quote the terrorist himself, “they don’t even let birds fly there.”
Three men did try to attack the consulate a few years later. All three were shot dead before they even made it to the gate.
“What do you mean?” Reilly asked.
“Well, we can probably re-task a Keyhole satellite to pass over the area within the right time frame, but we won’t get real-time video or a constant feed, it’ll just show us what’s going on during the time that it passes over the area with each orbit. And that’s not gonna do it for you.”
Reilly shook his head. “Nope. We don’t know when he’s going to show up.”
“Better would be to see if we can wrangle one of our UAVs out of Qatar for a constant grid search, but —”
“—he’ll spot it,” Reilly interjected, shaking his head, nixing the suggestion of using a remote-controlled, unmanned surveillance drone.
“I’m not talking about Predators. I’m talking about the new kids on the block. RQ-4 Global Hawks. Those
