The Templar Salvation (2010)

by Raymond Khoury

  One after another, the trapped passengers streamed out in a mad frenzy, a shoal of desperate arms reaching out to Reilly and taking hold of his outstretched hand before kicking away and gliding up toward the light. He hung on as long as his lungs could last, then he finally let go and followed them up to the surface, the elation of knowing all the passengers were safe not quite making up for the bitter frustration that was gnawing at his gut.

  Chapter 22

  By the time Reilly made it back to the Patriarchate, the compound was one big, chaotic mess. The approach road was choked by fire engines, ambulances, and police cars. Emergency services personnel were swarming around frenetically, doing what they did best.

  He’d swum onto one of the support piers and climbed back onto the bridge. A cop had finally made it onto the scene and, after some wrangling, agreed to drive him back to the Phanar. He’d taken off his shirt and slipped on his jacket, which he’d pulled off before jumping into the water, but his trousers were still drenched, which hadn’t exactly endeared him to his driver either. Because of the mess and the security lockdown, he’d had to walk the last couple of hundred yards and found Tess standing by the gates. Ertugrul was alongside her, as were a couple of young paramilitary soldiers who looked a bit too trigger-happy for comfort. Frustrated cops were having a hard time keeping reporters and curious bystanders away while a small army of cats—revered in Istanbul as the bearers of good luck—sprawled on the walls and sidewalks around them and calmly observed the proceedings.

  Tess’s face erupted with relief when she spotted him, then her expression went all curious as his shirtless-and-soggy-pants look came into focus.

  She gave him a quick kiss and held his arms. “You’ve got to get out of those clothes.”

  “My bag still in the car?” he asked Ertugrul.

  “Yeah,” the legat answered. “It’s parked down the road.”

  Reilly glanced into the compound, where some paramedics were loading a gurney into an ambulance. The body lying on it was fully covered up by a gray blanket, head included. A gaggle of priests were crowding around it, their expressions forlorn, their shoulders sagging.

  Reilly looked a question at Ertugrul.

  “Father Alexios. The grand archimandrite of the library. One bullet, right between the eyes.”

  “They also found the body of a dead priest in an alleyway down the road,” Tess added.

  “No cassock,” Reilly deduced.

  Tess nodded.

  He expected as much. “And the fire?”

  “It’s out, but the library’s a mess, as you can imagine,” Ertugrul said. After a frustrated grunt, he added, “I guess he got what he came for.”

  “Again,” Reilly noted, the word laced with acid.

  He stood there, his fists balled with rage, and took in the scene silently for another moment, then said, “I’ll be right back,” and headed down the road to change.

  He was halfway there when he remembered something, and fished out his BlackBerry from his jacket. Aparo picked up on the first ring.

  “Fill me in, buddy,” his partner urged.

  “I lost him. The guy’s a fucking lunatic.” The sideswipe that catapulted the bus off the bridge flashed in his mind’s eye. “You said you had something for me?”

  “Yeah,” Aparo confirmed. “We finally got a hit from military intel. Talk about pulling teeth. These guys are really cagey about who they share with.”

  “So who is he?”

  “We don’t have a name. Just a previous.”

  “Where?”

  “Baghdad, three years ago. You remember that computer expert, the one that was grabbed from the Finance Ministry?”

  Reilly knew about it. It had caused quite a furor at the time, back in the summer of 2007. The man, an American, had been plucked out of the technology center of the ministry along with his five bodyguards. The kidnappers had shown up in full Iraqi Republican Guard regalia and just marched in and grabbed the men under the guise of “arresting” them. The specialist had only arrived in Baghdad a day earlier. He was there to install a sophisticated new software system that would keep track of the billions of dollars of international aid money and local oil revenues that were flowing through Iraq’s ministries—billions that were going missing almost as fast as they were coming in. Intelligence sources knew that a lot of the missing funds were being diverted to Iran’s militia groups in Iraq, courtesy of Iran’s cheerleaders who occupied many top Iraqi government posts and who, no doubt, helped themselves to a healthy commission along the way. No one wanted the corruption to stop, or for it to be exposed. The Finance Ministry had been shamelessly resisting the software’s implementation for more than two years. And so the man who’d been finally flown in to try to put a stop to the embezzlement was snatched less than twenty-four hours after landing there, right from his keyboard in the very heart of the Finance Ministry.

  The kidnapping had been meticulously planned and executed, and was attributed to the Al-Quds force—the word was Arabic for “Jerusalem”—a special unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard for covert foreign operations. When the American specialist and his bodyguards were found executed a couple of weeks later, the anti-Iranian rhetoric coming from the White House escalated. A half dozen Iranian officials were caught and detained by U.S. forces in the north of the country. Never one to resist stoking the flames of conflict with reckless abandon, Iran’s leadership—via a supposedly unaffiliated, rogue militia group called the Asaib Ahl Al-Haq, or the “Righteous League”—proceeded to launch an even more brazen attack, this time on the provincial headquarters in Karbala, during a high-level meeting between U.S. and Iraqi officials. It was even more audacious and brazen than the earlier kidnapping. A dozen Al-Quds operatives showed up at the gates of the base in a fleet of black Suburbans that were identical to the ones used there by U.S. military contractors. They were dressed just like the mercenaries and spoke perfect English, so much so that the Iraqis guarding the gates were convinced they were American—and let them in. Once inside, the commandos ran amuck. They killed one American soldier and grabbed four others, whom they executed shortly after storming out of the compound. It ended up being the third-deadliest day in Iraq for U.S. troops. Amazingly, no Iraqis had been injured in the raid.

  “He was there. Your target. He was one of the guys who hit the base,” Aparo told him. “His prints match a print they lifted off one of the cars they left behind. And according to the intel we had, both ops were pulled off by the same team, so it’s possible—even probable—that he was also involved in the programmer’s kidnapping.”

  “Do we know anything about him?”

  “Nope,” Aparo told him. “Nothing at all. The guys behind the raids just vanished. All I can tell you is that it looks like he was there. But it gives us some insight into what the rest of his CV might look like. I mean, who knows what else this asshole’s been involved in. It sounds to me like he’s their go-to guy when they need something special done.”

  Reilly frowned. “Lucky us.” He knew that if history was anything to go by, this wasn’t looking promising at all. In every confrontation between the U.S. and Iran since Khomeini came to power in 1979, Iran had come out on top.

  “You’ve got to nail his ass, Sean. Find him and wipe him off the face of the Earth.”

  A siren startled Reilly. He turned to see one of the ambulances rushing down the road, and stepped aside to let it through.

  “Let’s find him first,” he told Aparo, “and when we do, I’m not exactly planning to split a six-pack with him.”

  Chapter 23

  Given the internal and external political tensions gripping the country, the Turks took matters of national security very seriously, and this was no exception. Within an hour of getting back to the Patriarchate, Reilly, along with Tess and Ertugrul, were seated in a glass-walled conference room in the Turkish National Police’s Istanbul headquarters in the city’s Aksaray district, trading questions and answers with a half-dozen Turkish s
ecurity officials.

  One question was at the root of Reilly’s frustration. “How did he get into the country?” he asked, still pissed off by the slipup. “I thought you guys had military-level security at your airports?”

  None of his hosts seemed to have an immediate answer for him.

  Suleyman Izzettin, the police captain who was at the airport with Ertugrul, waded into the pregnant silence. “We’re looking into it. But remember,” he said, clearly as vexed by it as Reilly, “our border controls didn’t have a clear photo or a likely alias for him. And besides, maybe he didn’t fly in.”

  “No way,” Reilly countered. “He didn’t have time for a road trip, not from Rome. He flew in. Definitely.” He glanced around the room, speaking a bit slower than usual and slightly overenunciating to make sure they all understood him. “This guy managed to move his hostages from Jordan to Italy without a problem. Now he’s here, and he’s still got one of them. We need to figure out how he’s just hopping around from one country to another. And finding out which one of your airports he slipped through would be a big help.”

  The security officers erupted into a brief, heated debate in Turkish. Clearly, they didn’t take kindly to being embarrassed in front of a foreign official. Izzettin seemed to call a time-out among them before simply repeating, to Reilly, what he had said before: “We’ll look into it.”

  “Okay. We also need to figure out how he’s moving around now that he’s here,” Reilly pressed on. “If we’re going to track him down, we need to know what we’re looking for. How did he get to the Patriarchate? Did he have a car parked there somewhere that he abandoned when he saw us arrive? Did he just take a cab? Or was someone waiting for him, does he have people here helping him out?”

  “Also,” Ertugrul chimed in, “assuming he’s brought Simmons here with him, where did he park him in the meantime?”

  “We took control of the area immediately after the shoot-out,” Izzettin told him. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a driver waiting for him. No one drove away from there.”

  “He could have just abandoned his car and walked off,” Reilly countered.

  “The research assistant,” Tess asked Ertugrul, “the snitch who kick-started this whole mess by selling out Sharafi? You’re sure he left the country?”

  He nodded. “He’s long gone.”

  “This guy’s moving too fast to be doing this alone,” Reilly said. “He’s got to have some backup. Remember, he didn’t know the trail led back to Istanbul until last night, when he got the Registry from the Vatican. It’s not like he’s had a lot of time to plan this. He’s winging it. He’s reacting as the information comes in, just like us—but he’s one step ahead of us.” He turned to Ertugrul. “This monastery … Who else can we talk to about finding out where it is?”

  “I had a quick word about that with the patriarch’s secretary, after the shooting,” Ertugrul said. “He wasn’t in the clearest state of mind. But he said he’d never heard of it.”

  “That’s not surprising,” Tess added. “The inquisitor who came across it said it was abandoned, and that was back in the early 1300s. Seven hundred years, it’s probably little more than rubble now, just some ruins in the middle of nowhere.”

  “The secretary’s going to talk to the other priests there,” Ertugrul said. “Maybe one of them will know.”

  Reilly turned to their hosts, frustrated. “You’ve got to have access to some experts at the university, someone who knows their history.”

  The police chief shrugged. “It’s an Orthodox Church, Agent Reilly. Not just Orthodox, but Greek. And this is a Muslim country. It’s not exactly a priority area for our academics. If no one at the Patriarchate knows …”

  Reilly nodded glumly. He was well aware that there was no love lost between the Greeks and the Turks, not since the dawn of the Seljuks and, subsequently, of the Ottoman Empire. It was a deep-seated animosity that went back more than a thousand years and continued to this day, flaring up over thorny issues such as the divided island of Cyprus. “So right now, all we know is that it’s in the Mount Argaeus region, the Erciyes Dagi Mountains. How big an area are we talking about?”

  Ertugrul exchanged some words with their hosts, and one of them picked up the phone and mumbled away in Turkish. A moment later, a younger cop brought in a folded map, which was spread out on the table. Ertugrul had another to-and-fro with the local officials, then turned to Reilly.

  “Actually, it’s not a range, it’s just one mountain, over here,” he explained, pointing out a wide, darker-shaded area in the center of the country. “It’s a dormant volcano.”

  Reilly checked out the scale at the bottom of the map. “It’s about, what, ten miles long and the same across.”

  “That’s a big haystack,” Tess said.

  “Huge,” Ertugrul agreed. “Also, it’s not the easiest area to canvas. It goes up to eleven, twelve thousand feet, and its flanks are heavily wrinkled with valleys and ridges. It’s no wonder the monastery managed to survive all those years, even after the Ottomans took over. It could be tucked in any one of those folds. You’d need to trip over it to find it.”

  Reilly was about to respond when Tess spoke up. “Do you think you could get hold of a detailed map of that whole area?” she asked Ertugrul. “A topographic map maybe? Like the ones climbers use?”

  Ertugrul thought about it, then said, “I imagine we should be able to,” his tone somewhat belittling of her request. He explained her request in Turkish to their hosts, and one of them picked up the phone again, presumably to source one for her.

  Reilly flicked her a quick quizzical glance, then went back to studying the map. “How far is it?”

  “From here? Five hundred miles, give or take.”

  “So how would he get there from here? Drive? Fly? A small plane, or a helicopter maybe?”

  Their hosts exchanged a few words, and shook their heads vigorously. “He could fly,” Ertugrul replied. “Kayseri’s close by and it’s got an airport. There are a couple of flights a day from here. But I don’t think he’d need to. Depending on the traffic and on what road you take, it’s eleven, twelve hours by car versus under two by plane, but it’s less risky, especially now that the airports are on high alert.”

  Which, presumably, they also were last night, but that didn’t stop him, Reilly wanted to say, but he held back.

  “There’s also a train,” the chief of police remembered. “But if he has a hostage with him, it’s not really doable.”

  “Okay, so if he’s going to drive there, where’d he get the car?” Reilly asked Ertugrul. “What do we know about the cars he used in Rome? The ones Sharafi and Tess were in?”

  Ertugrul flicked through his papers, then found the relevant report. “All they have right now is that they had fake plates. The prelim VIN number check on the one Ms. Chaykin was in says it wasn’t reported stolen, but it can take time for a stolen car claim to filter through. And it’s too early to tell with the other one—they have to find the VIN tag first.”

  “It’s the same MO of car bombs we’ve seen in Iraq and in Lebanon,” Reilly noted. “The cars are stolen, or they’ll have been bought for cash with fake IDs. Either way, we don’t usually find out which one it is until after they’ve been blown up.” He fumed. “We need to know what he’s driving now.”

  “We’re going to need a list of all stolen car claims since, well, yesterday,” Ertugrul told Izzettin. “And we’ll need to have a constant feed of any new reports that come in.”

  “Okay,” the cop answered.

  “How many roads are there that lead to that mountain?” Reilly asked him. “Can you put up roadblocks? We know he’s heading there.”

  The chief of police shook his head as he leaned into the map. “Even knowing he’s coming from here, there are many different roads he could take to get there. And it depends on what part of the mountain he’s going to. There are different approaches from all sides.”

  “Besides,” Ertugrul ad
ded, “we’d still have the same problem as the airport guys. We don’t have a clear photo or a name to give to the guys at the roadblocks. They can only look for Simmons.”

  “It’s not possible,” Izzettin concluded. “The area around the mountain is very popular with tourists. Cappadocia is very busy this time of year. We can’t stop everyone.”

  “Okay,” Reilly shrugged, his eyes darkening with frustration.

  Tess’s voice broke through the gloom. “If you’re saying he might be working for the Iranians, wouldn’t they have people here helping him?” she asked. “They could get him a car. A safe house. Weapons.”

  “It’s possible,” Reilly agreed. It was something he’d been wondering about too, but he knew that it was tricky territory. He asked Ertugrul, “What level of surveillance do we have on their embassy?”

  Ertugrul hesitated, then ducked the question. “The embassy isn’t here, it’s in the capital, in Ankara. They just have a consulate here.” He didn’t offer more. No intel officer liked to talk in front of their foreign counterparts about who he and his colleagues were or weren’t watching, unless they knew they could trust them—which was, basically, never.

  “Do we have them under watch?” Reilly pressed.

  “You’re asking the wrong guy. That’s Agency business,” the legat said, reminding Reilly that the CIA handled foreign intel gathering.