The Templar Salvation (2010)

Chapter 1

ISTANBUL,TURKEY

PRESENT DAY

Salam, Professor. Ayah vaght darid keh ba man sohbat bo konid? ” Behrouz Sharafi stopped and turned, surprised. The stranger who’d called out to him—a darkly handsome, elegant man, mid to late thirties, tall and slim, black gelled-back hair, charcoal roll-neck under a dark suit—was leaning against a parked car. The man flicked him a small wave from a folded newspaper in his hand, confirming the professor’s uncertain gaze. Behrouz adjusted his glasses and regarded the man. He was pretty sure he’d never met him, but the stranger was clearly a fellow Iranian—his Farsi accent was perfect. Which was unexpected. Behrouz hadn’t met a lot of Iranians since arriving in Istanbul just over a year ago.

The professor hesitated, then, egged on by the stranger’s expectant and inviting look, took a few steps toward him. It was a mild early evening, and the square outside the university was winding down from its daily bustle.

“I’m sorry, have we—”

“No, we haven’t met,” the stranger confirmed as he extended an inviting arm out, shepherding the professor to the passenger car door he’d just opened for him.

Behrouz stopped, tense with a sudden, crippling unease. Being in Istanbul had been, up to that very instant, a liberating experience. With each passing day, the looking-over-your-shoulder, worrying-about-what-you-said tensions of daily life as a Sufi professor at Tehran University had withered away. Far from the political struggles that were strangling academia in Iran, the forty-seven-year-old historian had been enjoying his new life in a country that was less insular and less dangerous, a country that was hoping to join the European Union. A stranger in a dark suit inviting him to take a ride had obliterated that little pipe dream in a heartbeat.

The professor raised his hands, open-palmed. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who you are and this—”

Again, the stranger interrupted him with the same courteous, non-threatening tone. “Please, Professor. I apologize for this rather sudden approach, but I do need to have a word with you. It’s about your wife and your daughter. They could be in danger.”

Behrouz felt twin spikes of fear and anger inside him. “My wife and—What about them? What are you talking about?”

“Please,” the man said without a trace of alarm in his voice. “Everything will be fine. But we really need to talk.”

Behrouz glanced left and right, not quite able to focus. Apart from the bloodcurdling conversation he was having, everything else seemed normal. A normality that, he knew, would be banished from his life from here on.

He climbed into the car. Even though it was a new, top-of-the-line BMW, it had an odd, unpleasant smell that immediately pricked his nostrils. He couldn’t quite place it as the stranger got in behind the wheel and pulled out into the sparse traffic.

Behrouz couldn’t contain himself. “What’s happened? What do you mean, they might be in danger? What kind of danger?”

The stranger kept his gaze straight. “Actually, it’s not just them. It’s all three of you.”

The even, unflustered way he said it made it sound even more unnerving.

The stranger slid a sideways glance at him. “It has to do with your work. Or more specifically, with something you recently found.”

“Something I found?” Behrouz’s mind skidded for a beat, then latched onto what the man meant. “The letter?”

The stranger nodded. “You’ve been trying to understand what it refers to, but so far, without success.”

It was a statement, not a question, and said with a firm assurance that made it all the more ominous. The stranger not only knew about it, he seemed to know about the walls Behrouz was hitting in his research.

Behrouz fidgeted with his glasses. “How do you know about that?”

“Please, Professor. I make it my business to know everything about anything that piques my curiosity. And your find has piqued my curiosity. A lot. And in the same way that you’re meticulous about your work and your research—admirably so, I must add—I’m just as meticulous about mine. Some might even say fanatical. So, yes, I know about what you’ve been doing. Where you’ve been. Who you’ve spoken to. I know what you’ve been able to deduce, and what still eludes you. And I know a lot more. Peripheral things. Things like Miss Deborah being your little Farnaz’s favorite teacher at school. Like knowing your wife’s prepared you some gheimeh bademjan for dinner.” He paused, then added, “Which is really sweet of her, given that you only asked her for it last night. But then, she was in a vulnerable position, wasn’t she?”

Behrouz felt the last vestiges of life drain from his face as panic flooded through him. How can he—He’s watching us, listening to us? In our bedroom? It took him a moment to regain control of his body long enough to eke out a few words.

“What do you want from me?”

“The same thing you want, Professor. I want to find it. The trove that the letter refers to. I want it.”

Behrouz’s mind was drowning in a sinkhole of unreality. He struggled to sound coherent. “I’m trying to find it, but—it’s like you said. I’m having trouble figuring it out.”

The stranger turned to face him only briefly, but his hard stare felt like a physical blow. “You have to try harder,” he told Behrouz. Facing forward again, he added, “You have to try as if your life depended on it. Which, in this case, it does.”

He swerved off the main road and turned into a narrow street that was lined with shuttered storefronts, where he pulled over. Behrouz gave the surroundings a quick scan. There was no one around, and no lights from the buildings above the shops.

The stranger hit the start/stop button to kill the engine and turned to face Behrouz.

“I need you to know that I’m serious about this,” he told him, still with the infuriatingly smooth tone. “I need you to understand that it’s very, very important to me that you do everything possible— everything—to complete your work. I need you to fully grasp how crucial it is to your well-being, and to that of your wife and daughter, that you devote all your time and energy to this matter, that you dig deep into any untapped resources inside you and figure this thing out for me. From this point onwards, you should be thinking about nothing else. Nothing.”

He paused to let his words sink in. “At the same time,” he added, “I also need to make sure you understand that acting on any silly fantasies you might have about going to the police for help would be, frankly, catastrophic. It’s vital that you understand this. We could walk into a police station together right now and I guarantee you the only one of us who would suffer any consequences would be you—and they would be, again, catastrophic. I need to convince you of this. I need you to have absolutely no doubt about what I’m prepared to do, what I’m capable of doing, and how far I’m prepared to go, to make sure that you do this for me.”

The stranger palmed the key fob and clicked open his door. “Maybe this will do the trick. Come.”

He climbed out.

Behrouz followed him, exiting the car on wobbly legs. The stranger walked around to the back of the car. Behrouz glanced upward, looking for any sign of life, wild notions of making a run for it and yelling for help swelling and bursting inside him, but he just joined his tormentor, walking listlessly as if he were in a chain gang.

The stranger hit a button on the key fob. The trunk of the car clicked open and hovered upward.

Behrouz didn’t want to look in, but as the stranger reached in, the professor couldn’t rein in his eyes. The trunk was mercifully empty, except for a small travel case. The stranger slid it closer to the edge of the trunk, and as he unzipped it, a putrid smell accosted Behrouz’s nostrils, causing him to gag and falter back a step. The stranger didn’t seem to mind it. He reached into the bag and casually pulled out a mess of hair, skin, and blood that