The Babylon Idol

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Nowhere near,’ Ben said. ‘We’re going the other way, south-east to Athens, and from there to see your guy in Ankara.’

  ‘We’ll never make it to Athens in this car. The police will be searching for it.’

  Ben nodded. ‘And when they find it, we’ll be long gone. Relax.’

  Anna said, ‘Relax? We’re escaping in a stolen car and we’re being hunted by the police and a gang of professional killers who want to kidnap me, and everywhere we go the locals are trying to trap us and rob us at gunpoint, and you say relax?’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate.’

  ‘What if the police arrest us at the airport?’

  ‘What occupation does your passport say?’

  ‘Author.’

  ‘If they’re looking for anyone specific at all, the only lead they have right now is for some unnamed history professor. As long as none of the cops have read any of your books and twig the connection – and I seriously doubt these guys read much other than comic books – we’ll be fine. For now, at any rate.’

  ‘This is how you live all the time, isn’t it?’ she asked him, arching an eyebrow. ‘This is just a normal day for you.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Ben replied. ‘In the meantime, let’s concentrate on getting out of Greece as fast as possible.’

  ‘This isn’t exactly what I would call fast,’ she said, eyeing the speedometer. The old Lada was struggling to reach a hundred kilometres an hour as they roared along a straight section of the mountain road.

  ‘The moment we spot a nice Ferrari, we’ll do a switch. What colour would you like?’

  The chance for a switch came unexpectedly as they were winding down through the hills before hitting the motorway. It wasn’t a Ferrari, and there was little choice of colour. Their new vehicle was a mud-brown, rust-speckled Ford Granada that Ben spotted in the backyard of a row of rundown cottages outside a village. Nobody was about, and a barking dog was the only witness to their presence. Moments later, Ben was inside the Granada and hotwiring it, to Anna’s consternation.

  ‘I don’t know if I’m comfortable with this, Ben. I’ve never stolen a car before.’

  ‘You’re not doing anything.’

  ‘I’m a witness to a criminal act.’

  ‘Then close your eyes. In any case, we’re not stealing it, we’re buying it.’

  The Ford fired up and seemed to run well enough, so true to his word he left a generous roll of cash, more than the thing was worth, on the cottage’s kitchen table. Which meant he first had to get inside the house, a quick and easy job.

  Anna was shaking her head. ‘Let me get this right. You break into someone’s home to pay them for the car you just stole?’

  ‘Where else can I leave the money? Someone might steal it.’

  Chapter 31

  They were soon back on the motorway, speeding along in the second dodgy old car Ben had been forced to buy since landing in Greece only yesterday. He wasn’t sorry to be leaving the country. Just over four hours later, they arrived at Athens airport. By late afternoon, they were in the air, heading for Turkey.

  But the long, frustrating journey wasn’t over yet. The only plane they’d been able to board at such short notice was terminating at Istanbul, making it necessary to jump on a domestic flight to take them the extra five hundred kilometres south-east to Ankara. That ate up a lot more time, and until the last minute it was uncertain whether the internal flight would even depart, with adverse weather conditions and threats of severe snow in the capital.

  Finally, late that evening, they touched down in a sub-zero, white-frosted Esenboga International Airport outside Ankara, where crews were working hard to clear ice off the runways. The airport was teeming with a heavy paramilitary police presence in the wake of terror bombings by Kurdish separatists, to add to the failed attempt by rogue elements in the Turkish Army to overthrow the government a few months earlier. Ben and Anna filtered slowly through the scrutiny of customs, who paid close attention to the contents of Ben’s battered green canvas haversack.

  ‘Is this a bullet hole?’ asked one of the officials, poking his finger through it.

  ‘Cigarette burn,’ Ben told him. Which, of course, wasn’t the case. The official, a dumpy little guy in what looked like a military uniform, did a lot of frowning before he finally let them through. The bag would have excited him a good deal more if Ben hadn’t dumped the MPX machine pistol and ammunition on a quiet mountainous stretch of their drive through Greece.

  Esenboga Airport abounded with gift boutiques, cafés and restaurants, and even featured its own dozen mosques for travellers to catch up on their prayers, but to Anna’s bitter disappointment she couldn’t find anywhere to buy clothes and had to endure the humiliation of wearing the same travel-stained rags as before. Ben was more concerned about getting her some appropriate winter wear. She was shivering with cold as they left the airport and searched for a taxi rank, but it took more than freezing temperatures to diminish her fascination for history.

  ‘Did you know that right here, on this very spot, more than six hundred years ago, a huge battle was fought?’ she said. ‘It was a bloody conflict between the Mongolian warlord Timur the Lame and the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid the First, and it achieved very little. The Ottomans were defeated but would return to take back Ankara just the following year. It’s claimed there were more than a million soldiers on the battlefield, exactly where we’re standing now.’ She shook her head. ‘A million men, full of hate and trying to hack each other to pieces, and all for nothing. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like. It’s so senseless. What makes people want to wage war and slaughter one another like that?’

  Ben ignited a Gauloise and clanged his lighter shut. ‘You mean, aside from money, power, territory and the fact that most of them were probably just doing what they were ordered? You’re the history expert. What would I know?’

  ‘But you were a soldier. You must surely know.’

  ‘War is what human beings do best,’ Ben said. ‘Always has been. It’s what sets our species apart from all the others and until we wipe ourselves out, that’s how it will always be.’

  ‘When you fought in wars, did you believe you were doing a good thing?’

  He looked at her. ‘Sometimes. Mostly not. That’s why I left.’

  ‘Why did you join?’

  ‘You know, I really don’t remember.’

  ‘The more I study history, the more I realise what very strange creatures men are.’

  ‘You don’t need a doctorate to work that one out,’ Ben said.

  Soon afterwards, they found a solitary taxi waiting at a rank nearby. The engine was running to keep the heater going, melting the snow into a pool below its steaming exhaust. Anna had Ercan Kavur’s address on a slip of paper, and passed it to the driver through the window. The driver nodded. They got in. The inside of the car was stifling. ‘Hey, no smoking,’ the driver complained as Ben climbed in with his Gauloise. Ben replied in Turkish, ‘Who are you kidding? This shitbox smells like an ashtray. Let’s go. And you can start the meter. I know all the tricks.’

  Cheated out of the opportunity to stiff a couple of tourists by quoting a fixed rate fare, the driver sullenly set off. Ben kept glaring at him in the mirror. Roguish cabbies weren’t his favourite people right now.

  ‘I didn’t know you could speak Turkish,’ Anna said.

  ‘Just phrasebook stuff. Let’s hope this guy Kavur is at home tonight.’

  ‘Ercan doesn’t get out much,’ she replied. ‘He used to be married, until he became too eccentric to keep his job at the University, and his wife left him. Nowadays, if he’s not on a dig somewhere, which he wouldn’t be at this time of the year, he spends nearly all his time in his study, translating ancient languages and deciphering old manuscripts and tablets. He’ll be there, I’m sure of it.’

  The white-dusted motorway flashed by for half an hour as the taxi’s wipers slapped away drifting snowflakes and the spangling expanse of cit
y lights gradually swelled on the horizon. Coming into Ankara, the taxi cut eastwards towards the centre, through streets piled at the edges with dirty brown slush. They passed the Grand National Assembly building, Turkey’s parliament, which had been badly hit by F16 strikes during the military coup attempt and was now half-hidden behind scaffolding as it was slowly pieced back together. It hadn’t been very long since tanks and troop convoys had been rolling through these same streets as the government and rebel factions struggled for power. ‘There’s the Kocatepe Mosque,’ Anna said, pointing out another of Ankara’s landmarks with its lit-up dome and four tall towers piercing the night sky like spikes.

  Ercan Kavur lived right across town on the south-eastern edge of Ankara, within an area called Dog˘ukent Caddessi, where crumbly traditional red-roofed houses intermingled with suburban high-rise developments that looked unfinished and neglected. Arriving in a narrow street with houses spaced far apart and back from the road, Anna told the driver to pull up. The night air seemed to have dropped another degree as they stepped out of the car. Their breath fogged in the chill. Snowflakes spiralled gently down to add themselves to the whiteness of the empty street.

  ‘That’s his house there,’ Anna said, pointing, as the taxi disappeared into the night. ‘I think I see the study light on. What did I tell you?’

  Ben glanced at the house, a squat single-storey building that looked from a distance like a concrete bunker. A small area of garden in front was lined with bushes that were caked in snow. A winding path led through a gate to the front door. All the windows were dark except one, from which a chink of light was shining through a narrow gap in the drawn curtains.

  ‘I take it you’ve been here before,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘After finishing with the excavations in Iraq, Ercan and I brought the pieces of the damaged Muranu tablet back here together. I stayed with him for three days, during which time he showed me some of his work. He’s a fascinating man. Dry as a rock and a little strange, but fascinating nonetheless. You’ll like him.’

  ‘A little strange how exactly?’

  ‘You’ll soon see for yourself. Let’s just say that his world view goes a little bit beyond not using telephones and email.’

  It was after midnight. Anna led the way towards Ercan’s gate. The slab pavement was slick with frozen snow, and Ben held her arm to catch her if she slipped. Italian designer shoes weren’t made for this.

  ‘Walk on the crunchy bits,’ he said.

  ‘I go down, we both go down,’ she replied, flashing a nervous smile at him.

  Ben was about to reply when he looked down, his eyes narrowed to slits and he stopped. His grip tightened on her arm.

  ‘You say Ercan lives here all alone? Doesn’t get out and has no friends?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  Ben pointed at the path leading to the house. Anna looked down where he was pointing, and her smile dropped. At least four sets of footprints led from the front gate and up the path towards the front door.

  ‘Then his social life must have improved since you last saw him.’

  Ben bent down to examine the tracks. The prints were mostly overlapped and the individual sole treads hard to make out, but judging by the clearer imprints he reckoned the tracks had been made by at least four different people, rather than by just one person going back and forth. The crushed snow was powdery, the impressions of the sole treads not yet frozen hard by the cold night. Enough to discern that Ercan’s visitors had been wearing boots with chunkier treads than regular shoes. Which wasn’t too much of a tell, in itself, on a cold and snowy night. Then again, as Ben knew well, a good solid pair of boots were good for other things than walking. That was why soldiers wore them, and assault teams who might have to kick down doors and get a little rough.

  One of the sets of prints was unlike the others. Shoes, not boots. Making sloppy drag marks, like the footsteps of someone too drunk to walk steadily and needing to be supported. The tyre tracks that curved away from the kerb and merged with the fresh ones just made by the taxicab explained where Ercan’s visitors had gone.

  Anna was reaching the same disturbing conclusion Ben was. ‘Someone’s been here before us,’ she said, looking at him anxiously.

  ‘And not long ago, or they’d be covered by fresh snowfall.’

  ‘Ben, you don’t think—?’

  Ben walked up to the front entrance. The door was reinforced, set into a steel frame that made it as strong as concrete. To the right of the door was a panel with keypad and an intercom speaker behind a grille. A wall-mounted camera stood guard over the doorway, its red power light blinking at them.

  ‘I thought you said he hated technology,’ Ben said as Anna caught up with him.

  ‘Only when it’s for communication,’ she replied. ‘Not when it’s for security. I told you, he’s a very cautious man.’

  But not cautious enough to keep his front door shut. It was hanging ajar by half an inch. Ben gave it a shove and it swung a quarter open on its reinforced hinges. It was a beefed-up security door, welded steel like the entrance to a bank vault. It would have needed some kind of serious dedicated door-breaching munitions to take out the lock, but there wasn’t a scratch to suggest forced entry. Whoever they were, the four booted visitors who’d called earlier that night hadn’t had a hard time getting inside.

  No sound, no movement from within. The house felt empty. But there was only one way to find out for sure.

  Ben put his finger to his lips, telling Anna, ‘Quiet’, then held the finger up to signal, ‘Wait here.’

  Ben eased the heavy door open the rest of the way and stepped inside the dark silence of Ercan Kavur’s house.

  Chapter 32

  In that vulnerable moment when the eyes need time to adapt to the darkness and the other senses step protectively in to provide the missing data, Ben stopped, set down his bag and stood completely still, as alert as a wild animal tuned into the tiniest sound, even a scent, that could alert it to danger. He could hear nothing.

  As the darkness began to resolve itself into distinct shapes and shadows, he moved on deeper into the house. The small entrance hall was cold from the open door, but not freezing, telling him that the door hadn’t been lying ajar all that long. The hallway extended into a long, narrow corridor that passed through the middle of the building and was sectioned off by first one heavy glass interior door, then a second.

  It was an unusual layout, but Ben didn’t have time to dwell on that now. Other doors radiated off left and right, leading to rooms that he checked one by one. For a few moments he experienced a strange sense of déjà vu, like a replay of entering Carlo Scanzi’s office in Florence, and he half expected to find a dead body slumped across the floor, bled out from a slashed throat like Anna’s agent. Or a sudden violent attack from multiple armed intruders. Ben’s whole body was jangling into full-on combat mode, ready to explode into action any instant and inflict serious damage on anything that moved.

  The inside of the house was warm and smelled closed up, with aromas of stale cigarette smoke and cooking oil and spices that all but smothered an unpleasantly familiar background chemical tang lingering in the air which Ben couldn’t quite put his finger on. Daring to risk a little light, he dug his torch from the bag on his shoulder and flashed it around him. It wasn’t a big house. In the ninety seconds that it took him to sweep its half-dozen rooms he found no mutilated corpses, and no lurking intruders either.

  But he did find the obvious signs of a struggle in the spare bedroom that Kavur had converted into a chaotically cluttered study. The overturned chair and the upset desk lamp, lying on its side in a sea of scattered papers and books, told him that Kavur had been deep in his work when his first set of unexpected visitors that night had turned up.

  And now Ben understood what that odd, lingering chemical odour was, because he could smell it loud and clear inside the small study. The same type of alcohol-based sedative that Anna’s would-be kidnappers had intended to use on h
er in Olympia. This time around, the snatch had been successful. That explained the dragging footprints in the snow outside. Kavur had been dragged semi-conscious from the house and bundled into a waiting vehicle.

  ‘Someone was here, all right,’ Ben said when he went back to bring Anna inside and retrieve his bag. ‘Been and gone. And your friend with them.’

  He shut the door and flipped the hallway light switch. Decor-wise, Kavur’s home was as drearily and unimaginatively furnished as might be expected of a reclusive single guy with no interests outside of his work. Except now that it was all brightly lit up, Ben could see a few unusual details about the place. The heavy glass doors that divided the corridor into sections were internal security doors with sophisticated electronic locks and full-height mesh-reinforced panes, probably capable of deflecting a rifle round. The doors off the corridor were set into metal frames and likewise fitted with combination keypads. The alarm system master control panel in the front hall near the door could have belonged in a high-security prison.

  ‘Who took him?’ Anna asked, eyes darting nervously about as though Kavur might still be hiding in a recess, waiting to jump out and surprise them.

  ‘You want to hazard a guess?’

  ‘But how did they know where to find him?’

  ‘And why did he let them in?’ Ben added. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as strange that a guy who obviously hasn’t spared any expense when it comes to security would just open the door to a bunch of kidnappers?’

  ‘Speaking of security –’ Anna flipped open a cover on the master control panel by the door. ‘July twentieth, 356 BC,’ she muttered to herself as she tapped in a code with a polished red fingernail.

  ‘You seem to know your way around,’ Ben commented.

  ‘That’s an easy one to remember, for a historian. It’s the birth date of Alexander the Great.’