Chapter 52
Tess cloaked her unease as she watched Reilly go into no-nonsense, steamroller mode to get past the two Jandarma soldiers who were posted outside the hotel.
He told them he’d lost his BlackBerry somewhere in the canyon during the shoot-out, and insisted in no uncertain terms that he absolutely had to go back there to try to recover it since it held confidential FBI material. At the first balk, he ratcheted his tone up a notch and made it sound like a full-bore diplomatic incident was in the offing if any delay resulted in his not getting the device back and that, if he didn’t get there soon, the area would be swarming with American troops in order to secure the missing cache of state secrets.
The snow job worked. Twenty minutes later, the hotel’s van deposited them in the clearing at the mouth of the canyon. A Jandarma Humvee was still stationed there. The only other car in the lot was the dead Byzantinist’s dusty Cherokee, a grim reminder of the blood-soaked trail that had claimed its owner.
They were soon trudging past the cone house where the man had been gunned down. The blood spatter had soaked into the soft, porous rock by the doorway, its faded appearance already making it look like a remnant from the distant past. There were no cops cordoning off the area, no yellow tape, no crime scene investigators poring over every indentation in the tufa. There was no need for any of it. It was all pretty cut and dried, and if the Iranian were to be caught, he wasn’t going to face a trial by jury.
As she went by, Tess found herself shivering and couldn’t shake the image of Abdulkerim’s face bursting with anguish the moment the bullets ripped through him. She’d barely met the man, barely gotten to know him. She realized she knew nothing about him, whether or not he was married or had kids. And now he was dead. All within hours of her meeting him.
They climbed up to the church. Using flashlights borrowed from the hotel, Tess pointed out the mural in the apse’s half dome to Reilly before leading him down to the crypt. She was still shivering as they entered the burial chamber, which was just as they’d left it. Being there was making her relive the scene. It was as if she were watching herself in a 3-D holographic diorama, a haunting replay with Abdulkerim’s worried face front and center.
Reilly must have sensed it. “You okay?” he asked.
She shook the disturbing images away and nodded, then showed him Conrad’s open grave. The broken pieces of the cooking pot were lying beside it. Nothing had been moved.
Reilly glanced around the room. “What about these other graves?”
She raked the beam across the markings on the walls. “Church dignitaries and benefactors.”
“They could be hiding something else.”
“Maybe,” Tess told him, her tone skeptical. “Short of digging them all up, it’s impossible to tell. The thing is, if that’s where Hosius’s stash is buried, I think they would have left something behind, some clue to point to it. Otherwise, it could be lost forever. But they’re just names, and none of them stand out as being out of place.”
“Okay. So there’s the mural and this crypt. Anything else?”
Tess shook her head. “We looked around the rest of the church before we left. That’s it.” As she said it, she remembered something—something that had occurred to her back when she was online and getting Hosius’s letter translated, at the hotel. She went back to what he said. “The mural.”
Almost in a trance, she led him back up to the apse. She studied the mural again, aiming her light at the Greek lettering above the painting.
“It’s just weird,” she said, almost under her breath, “having lines from a Sufi poem here, in a church.”
“Sufi being … ?”
“It’s a mystical form of Islam,” she explained. “Very popular in Turkey. It was, anyway, before it was outlawed in the 1920s.”
“Hang on, a Muslim saying in a church?”
“Not exactly Muslim. Sufism is different. It’s so different that hardcore Muslims like our Saudi friends and the Taliban consider its followers dangerous heretics and have totally banned them. They’re terrified of them because Sufism is very pacifist and tolerant and liberal—and it’s not about worship. It’s a personal experience, it’s about seeking one’s own path to God and trying to reach spiritual ecstasy. Rumi, the mystic who wrote this poem, was one of Sufism’s founding fathers. He preached that Sufism was open to people of all religions and that music, poetry, and dancing were the way to open the gates of paradise and reach God—a god who’s not the god of punishment or the god of revenge, but the god of love.”
“Sounds groovy,” Reilly smirked.
“It is. Which is why Rumi’s really popular back home. Massively popular. I even read somewhere that Sarah Jessica Parker does her aerobics to rock ‘n’ roll versions of his poems. He’s been turned into this New Age guru, which doesn’t really do justice to the intensity and depth of his writing, but it’s understandable given that he wrote things like, ‘
“I can see why the Saudis don’t want his message to spread.”
“It’s sad, really. Tragic. It’s a message that could do a lot of good out there right now.”
Reilly stared at the fresco again. “Okay, but heretic or not, we still have a Muslim-lite line of poetry on a thousand-year-old church wall. Which, like you said, is pretty weird. What does it say anyway?”
“Abdulkerim read it out for us.” She highlighted the Greek writing above the wall painting and translated it aloud, remembering the Byzantinist’s words. “’
Reilly shrugged. “’
“Sure. But Rumi died in 1273. He had to have written it long before Conrad lost his hand.”
Reilly reflected on the lines. “What does it mean anyway?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve got the rest of the poem here, I pulled it up online.” She fished a bunch of printouts from her rucksack and found the right sheet. “Here we go. The poem is called ‘Light Breeze.’ It says,
“Read it out again?”
Tess concentrated on the Greek letters, comparing them to what was on her printout. “The mural says the heroic deeds are ‘noble,’ not ‘weary and futile.’ And it’s the deeds of ‘a man and a woman,’ not of ‘men and women,’ plural. The rest of it’s very different too.” She paused for a beat, concentrating on the parallel sentences. “Whoever put that inscription up there must have been trying to tell us something.” Her breathing quickened. “Maybe it’s telling us where the rest of the chests are.”
“The result of Conrad’s ‘worried, heroic deeds’?” Reilly asked.
“Not just Conrad’s. It says the deeds of ‘a man and a woman.’ Could that mean Conrad and some woman?” She frowned, deep in thought. “Was there a woman with him? And if there was, who was she?”
“Hang on, weren’t the Templars monks? Like with vows of chastity and all that?”
“You mean celibacy, and yes, they were celibate. No women allowed in their world.”
“And they did this voluntarily? At a time when there was no ESPN?”
She ignored him and brooded over it for a few seconds, then pulled out a pen from her sack and scribbled down the version from the mural on the sheet of paper, next to the printout of the original.
She compared them again. “Okay. Let’s assume the changes were made for a reason. To point us somewhere. So whoever wrote this changed the deeds from being ‘weary and futile’ to being ‘noble.’ What if that refers to recovering the stash of Nicaea and keeping it safe?”
“Keep going.”
A wave of heightened awareness flooded through her. It was a sensation she loved, the feeling of being in the zone and knowing it. “The deeds aren’t weary and futile, they’re noble. To ‘the draper.’ ‘Where’ the dervishes relish the light breeze of spirit.”
