He followed it upward and saw an old man just sitting there, in the middle of nowhere, perched on a rickety wooden chair in a small, exposed chapel that had been carved into the rock face. The man was waving at him with a slow, frail arm. A small table next to him displayed a few cans of soft drinks, while a tin kettle stood ready on a small camping gas burner.
The man flashed him a mostly toothless smile.
Reilly shook his head and looked at him for a curious second, making sure the man was actually there and not some figment of his battered mind, then hurried over to him.
IT WAS ANOTHER THREE HOURS before he made it back to Tess. He’d brought help with him, in the form of the old man’s son and two grandsons, along with plenty of rope and a few flashlights.
He hadn’t been able to explain where he’d left her, not that he knew himself. The surest way to get back to her was to retrace his steps. With the aid of the locals, it was an easier journey than his solo trek. The submerged part of the channel was the only real challenge they faced; a bucket, held upside down like a diving bell, was the only available solution, but it did the trick. Reilly had also taken along the one thing he knew Tess would be happier to see than his own face: a plastic bag, one that was big enough to seal shut. To keep the codices, and Hosius’s document, dry.
The grin on her face when she saw it told him he was right.
That was the good news.
The bad news was confirmed once they finally got back to the entrance of the subterranean citadel that they had gone through on the way in.
Abdulkerim was still dead. And the Iranian had, it seemed, vanished.
Chapter 49
It didn’t take long for the canyon to be swarming with cops. The Jandarma had been on alert in the area, and the old man’s call to his local cop had brought them storming in. There was little they could do. The roadblocks they’d set up hadn’t netted the Iranian. The cavalry had ridden in too late.
The procession of grim news—confirmations, really—continued. Ertugrul hadn’t survived his head wound. Keskin, the captain of the Ozel Tim unit, was also dead, along with several of his men. The troops scurrying across the canyon were clearly enraged by the bloodbath up the mountain and desperate for payback, but there was none to be found. All they could do was cart off Abdulkerim’s body and seal off the handful of entrances to the underground settlement while awaiting the arrival of a bomb disposal expert who would disarm the detonator in the rigged belt Tess had been wearing—assuming they ever found it.
An urgent alert was sent out to local cops to contact all doctors and medical facilities in the region. From what Reilly had seen, the Iranian’s gunshot wound hadn’t seemed trivial. He wasn’t sure where the bullet had struck, but he knew enough about gunshots to know that a hand injury like that was never an easy wound to fix. Without the proper debridement, fracture stabilization, and antibiotics, the likelihood of the Iranian’s being able to keep all five fingers and not lose significant usage of his hand was far from certain. He’d need a good trauma center and a skilled surgeon to avoid an irreversible disability.
One thing the Turkish authorities wouldn’t be doing was analyzing the codices Tess had found. Tess hadn’t mentioned going into the rock church to them. She insisted on keeping that little segment of her misadventure out of the debrief, and Reilly had agreed.
Once the formalities had been dealt with, they were driven to a nearby hotel, pending further instructions. The hotel, a fifteen-room warren built into a cliff overlooking a small stream, had been fashioned from the remains of a monastery. Stables and dormitories had been turned into guest rooms, and niches in its passageways had been fitted with glass fronts and used to display archaeological curiosities from the monastery’s past. Reilly and Tess were given a room that was a converted chapel. Pale sunlight from a small, solitary window suffused the dark space with a timeless glow and hinted at the remains of thousand-year-old frescoes that adorned its decoratively carved walls. Tess had initially balked at the idea of spending any more time in any cave-like surroundings, but the hotel owner’s soothing demeanor and the smell of his wife’s white bean, lamb and tomato stew soon quelled her unease.
FUELED BY A CONSTANT SUPPLY OF THICK, sweet Turkish coffee, Reilly spent the better part of an hour in the owner’s office, on the phone with Jansson, Aparo, and a handful of other agents who were all huddled into a conference room back at Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan.
The news wasn’t good, but then again, Reilly hadn’t expected much from their end. This was way outside their playground. If the Iranian was going to be found, it was going to happen because of the efforts of the Turkish authorities, not the FBI. They had no significant intel that was relevant to share with Reilly regarding the Vatican bombing or the attack on the Patriarchate in Istanbul, and there was no point in calling in another drone, not until they had some kind of lead on Zahed’s whereabouts.
They had one new piece of info, though. A body had been recovered in Italy, close to a summer resort, in the mountains. It was identified as that of an administrator from a small airfield about an hour and a half east of Rome. The man’s corpse was unlike anything the authorities there had seen. Extreme body trauma didn’t even begin to describe it. Every bone in his body had been pulverized. They’d concluded that the man must have fallen from a great height, either from a helicopter or from a plane. Fallen, or thrown out, more likely. And given the proximity of the airport to Rome, they’d flagged it as potentially linked to the Vatican bombing. Which, Reilly thought, was probably on the money.
He filled them in on what the Iranian had told Tess about Operation Ajax and the airliner. He wasn’t surprised at having to explain what they were to most of the personnel on the call. Jansson told him they’d go through whatever intel they had on the downed flight’s passenger manifest.
“You should get back here now,” Jansson concluded. “It looks like our guy’s gone dark. Who knows where he’ll resurface. In the meantime, there’s nothing more you can do out there. Let the Turks and Interpol take it from here and do their job.”
“Sure,” Reilly grunted. He was too tired to argue, and much as he hated to give up the hunt, he knew Jansson was probably right. Unless something new came up, there was little he could do to justify sticking around.
“Get back to Istanbul,” the assistant director in charge of the New York field office told him. “We’ll get the embassy to sort out some transportation for you.”
“Make sure they factor Tess in,” Reilly said.
“Okay. I’ll see you when you get back. We’ve got a few things to talk about,” Jansson added somewhat stiffly before ending the call.
Reilly didn’t like the sound of that. Jansson obviously wasn’t going to let Reilly’s solo adventure slide. He’d be getting his ass handed to him, no question.
He went back to the room and found Tess coming out of the bathroom, freshly showered, wrapped in a thick white towel. A radiant smile lit up her face when she saw him, the same smile that reached deep into his very core and never failed to ignite him like a blowtorch. Despite everything that was swirling around in his head, he craved her more than ever before and felt like pulling her into his arms and spending a few days in bed with her. He drew her over and gave her a long, deep kiss, enjoying the smooth feel of her shoulders under his fingers, but it didn’t go further. There was too much bouncing around inside him.
Tess must have sensed it. “What’s the scoop?”
Reilly grabbed a can of Coke from the minibar and settled himself on the bed.
“Not much. Our guy’s gone. That’s about it.”
Tess puffed up her cheeks and exhaled slowly. “So what do we do now?”
“We go home.”
Her face sank. “When?”
“I’m waiting to hear back. They’re going to send a plane to fly us back to Istanbul.”
Tess nodded. Then she dropped her towel and, instead of joining him on the bed, reached for her
