was no way around that. They kissed and held each other quietly for a long minute in the cocoon of their unlit room, then Reilly pulled out his phone and dialed Aparo’s cell. Tess crossed over to the window and stared out, lost in thought. The city had settled into sleep mode, and the street below her was deserted. A lone street lamp stood sentinel to the left of the hotel entrance, bathing the cracked sidewalk with its jaundiced light. The only movement came from a trio of stray cats that slipped in and out from under some parked cars as they hunted for scraps.
As her eyes tracked them absentmindedly, she thought back to the last time she’d noticed any, outside the Patriarchate in Istanbul, just after she’d been told they were revered in Turkey as bringers of good fortune. The memory made her shiver. They hadn’t been particularly auspicious on that occasion. She looked out across the canopy of trees and rooftops and, for a moment, pictured herself out there, on her own, roaming the town, without Reilly close by. The thought gave her little comfort. The Iranian was still out there, somewhere. Out there and pissed off. No, Reilly was right. She couldn’t stay. It wasn’t the sensible thing to do, and right now, with a daughter and a mother waiting for her back home, sensible was definitely the way to go.
She turned to join Reilly, and her gaze swept downward, finding the cats again. They skirted the edge of a storefront before slipping into a darkened alleyway—past a lone figure that was standing at the alley’s mouth.
A lone figure that was looking up in Tess’s direction.
Tess stiffened. There was something familiar about its silhouette. Her eyes locked in on the sight, her retinas straining to sharpen the image bouncing off them.
It was a teenage girl.
Not just any teenage girl.
The girl from the ceramics shop.
She didn’t move. She was just standing there, in the shadows, watching the hotel. And despite the darkness, Tess could make out the white of her eyes, tiny twin beacons of light in the desolate nightscape.
Their eyes met. Tess felt a jolt at the base of her neck. It seemed mirrored in the girl, who turned abruptly and scampered into the alley.
Tess bolted for the door, screaming to Reilly, “It’s the girl from the shop, she’s outside watching us,” before rushing out.
She flew down the stairs and out the hotel doors and tore down the alleyway, with Reilly close behind. There was no sign of the girl. Tess kept going until she reached an intersection with a narrow street. She looked left and right. The street was lifeless.
“Where the hell did she go? She couldn’t have gone that far that fast,” she blurted.
“You sure it was her?”
“Definitely. She was looking right up at me, Sean. She must have followed us back. Why would she do that?” Then she remembered something. “Shit. The gospels. They’re in my rucksack.”
She moved to head back to the hotel, but Reilly stilled her with an arm and brought around her rucksack, which was slung over his shoulder, with the other. “Calm down. It’s here.” The bag was all they’d brought with them to Konya. In addition to the two codices, it also held Reilly’s handgun.
Tess exhaled heavily with relief. “You think this is what they’re after? You think she was scoping us out to try and grab them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Reilly glanced around and got his bearings. He gestured right. “Their shop’s in that direction. Maybe that’s where she’s headed.”
Tess thought about it for a quick second, then nodded. “Makes sense. Let’s go there.”
“Why?”
“I want to know what the hell she was doing here.”
Chapter 55
Finding the shop was easier said than done. The old district’s narrow streets and alleyways were a confusing maze, even more so at night, with very few street lamps around. And when they finally reached it, it was all dark and locked up for the night.
Tess marched right up to it and started slamming her palm against its aluminium shutters. “Hey,” she yelled out. “Open up. I know you’re in there.”
Reilly stepped in and stopped her. “You’re going to wake up the whole neighborhood.”
“I don’t care,” she blurted back. “Maybe their neighbors need to know about what kind of scams these people are running.” She pounded the shutters again, shouting, “Open this door. I’m not leaving.”
Reilly was about to interfere again when a light came on behind the louvered, wooden shutter of a window above the store. Seconds later, it squealed open, and the head of the shopkeeper poked out.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “What do you want?”
“I want to talk to your daughter,” Tess said.
“My daughter?” The shopkeeper was clearly dumbfounded. “Now? Why?”
“Just tell her I’m here,” Tess insisted. “She’ll know.”
“Look, I don’t know what you think you’re—”
A voice coming from a narrow alley that ran down the side of the store interrupted him.
“
The old woman stepped out of the shadows, addressing her son sternly and waving him back inside with both hands. “
The woman turned to Tess and just eyed her without saying a word, though the tension in her face was evident, even in the dim light of a lone street lamp farther down the road. When she moved aside, the teen girl was there, behind her.
“What was she doing outside our hotel?” Tess asked, her whole body buzzing with anticipation.
“Lower your voice,” the woman hissed. “You’re going to wake everyone up.” She rattled off a quick sentence in Turkish, and the girl slipped away.
“Hey,” Tess blurted, stepping forward. “Where’s she going?”
“The girl did nothing wrong,” the woman countered. “You should leave.”
“Leave? I’m not leaving. I want to know why she followed us back to the hotel. Or maybe we should just report it to the police and see if she’d like to tell them instead.”
This made the old woman flinch. “No. No police.”
Tess opened out her palms questioningly and gave her a “well then?” look.
The woman frowned, visibly tormented by something. “Please go.”
Something in the way she said it lit up a different pathway in Tess’s mind. She’d been so protective of the codices she’d failed to consider the other possibility.
Her tone softened and she inched closer to the old woman. “Do you know something about these books?”
“No, of course not.”
Her rapid-fire denial was far from convincing.
“Please,” Tess insisted. “If you do … you need to know this. There are others looking for these books. Murderers. They’ve killed many people while trying to find them. And just like we found you, they could find you too. If you know anything about them, you should tell us. It’s not safe for you right now.”
The woman studied Tess, her mouth a tight line, her brow knotted, her hands shivering perceptibly despite the balmy weather, her eyes betraying some intense debate going on deep within her.
“I’m telling you the truth,” Tess added. “Please. You’ve got to trust me.”
The seconds stretched interminably, then a verdict seemed to scrape through with the thinnest of majorities, and the woman grudgingly said, “Come with me,” before turning and heading down the side alley.
The shop was a small, detached, stone structure, two stories high—the shop itself and the apartment above. Tess and Reilly followed the old woman past a freestanding flight of stairs that led up to the shopkeeper’s living quarters and stopped outside an old oak door at the back of the building. After some fussing with some keys, the old woman snapped its lock open and led them inside.
