The Templar Salvation (2010)

by Raymond Khoury

  Reilly understood and dropped it for now. He turned in frustration to one of the Turkish officers at the table, Murat Celikbilek, from the MIT—the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, otherwise known as the National Intelligence Organization. “What about your people?” he asked him. “You must have some kind of surveillance in place.”

  Celikbilek studied him for a beat with the inscrutable concentration of a vulture, then said, “It’s not really a question one can answer casually, especially not in front of “—he nodded somewhat dismissively in Tess’s direction—”a civilian.”

  “Look, I don’t need to know the sordid details of what you guys are up to,” Reilly said, with a disarming half smile. “But if you’re keeping tabs on them, particularly on their consulate here, someone might have seen something that can help us.” He held Celikbilek’s gaze for a long second, then the intelligence officer’s hooded eyes blinked and he gave Reilly a small nod.

  “I’ll see what we’ve got,” he said.

  “That would be great. We need to move fast,” Reilly reiterated. “He’s already killed three people in your country, and it could get worse. He’s probably already on his way to the monastery, and unless we can figure out what he’s driving or where he’s headed, he’s got an open playing field.” He paused long enough to make sure his comment sank in, then turned to Ertugrul and, in a lower voice, said, “We’re going to need to talk to the Agency boys. Like, right now.”

  Chapter 24

  With the setting sun turning his rearview mirror into a blazing lava lamp, Mansoor Zahed settled into the stream of evening traffic that was leaving the city and concentrated on the road ahead.

  He glanced to his side. Simmons was sitting there, in the passenger seat, his head slightly slumped, the now familiar half-vacant stare in his eyes, the tranquilizer having once again sapped his vibrancy and turned him into a docile, subservient pet. Zahed knew he’d need to keep him sedated for a while. They had a long drive ahead of them, far longer than the one they had completed earlier that day.

  Zahed wasn’t thrilled to be on the road again. He wasn’t one to dawdle, especially not after what he’d done at the Vatican. He would have preferred to fly to Kayceri, just as he’d have preferred to fly straight from Italy to an airfield close to Istanbul. Steyl had kiboshed that idea, though they were both well aware of the fact that the Turkish military kept a tight grip on all the country’s airfields. Steyl had reminded Zahed that the risks, after Rome, were too high, and Zahed hadn’t questioned his judgment. He knew that when it came to flying in and out of countries without drawing too much attention to whatever illicit cargo he had on board, Steyl knew exactly what was doable, and what wasn’t. You could count on him to fly any payload into pretty much anywhere and get it past the airport checks unchallenged—but you could also count on him not to land you in hot water, metaphorically speaking. And so they’d flown slightly north instead, to Bulgaria, and landed in Primorsko, a small resort town on the country’s Black Sea coast. It had a small, civilian airfield—not a military one—the kind where exactly who was on what small plane wasn’t the first thing on the local officials’ mind. It was also less than twenty miles from the Turkish border, making the drive from the airfield to Istanbul a not-too-taxing five-hour stint.

  This drive would be more than twice as long, but there was no other option. Zahed hadn’t particularly enjoyed negotiating the never-ending traffic nightmare that was evening-rush-hour Istanbul. The chaotic free-for-all had reminded him of the less attractive aspects of Isfahan, his home-town back in Iran, another arena of outstanding architectural beauty that was marred by its drivers’ demented jousting. But in contrast to his earlier outing that day, when evading Reilly, he’d exercised careful restraint while driving out of the city and avoided getting into any dick-measuring contests with the aggressive taxi and dolmu drivers, allowing them to barge through instead, knowing that the smallest fender bender could have dire consequences given that he was driving a stolen car and transporting a heavily drugged captive.

  As the highway snaked through some fast, sweeping bends and rose into a series of gentle hills, Zahed was finding it hard to relax. He’d never seen as many trucks and buses, big, overloaded mastodons that were hurtling down the Istanbul-Ankara otoyol, as the six-lane highway was known, oblivious to its often hazardously patchy road surface and ignoring its 120-kilometer-per-hour speed limit. Turkey had one of the worst accident rates in the world, and the car Zahed had been given, a black Land Rover Discovery, while ideal for any off-road sections of his journey, was definitely too tall for cruising comfortably down a highway. Like a light sailboat caught in a storm, it was constantly getting buffeted by the passing heavyweights, forcing Zahed to correct his heading repeatedly by banking into the turbulent air to keep the car facing forward.

  As he always did after each step in the course of an assignment, Zahed ran through a quick mental assessment of his mission’s status. So far, he had no major quibbles with how it was working out. He’d made it into Turkey undetected. He’d gotten the information he needed from the Patriarchate. He’d evaded Reilly, who, somehow, had managed to track him down with unsettling efficiency. He reeled his attention back to the previous day’s events, at the Vatican, triggering a pleasing cascade of images in his mind’s eye. A deep-seated feeling of delight swept over him as he relived the rush he’d felt when he’d watched the coverage of his actions on the televised news and all over the day’s newspapers. More would follow, no doubt, after his brief visit to the Patiarchate. He thought about his quest and took great solace in the fact that, even if he weren’t able to find what Sharafi had unearthed, or if it turned out to be worthless, his venture had already turned out to be more than a worthwhile undertaking. This was better than anything he had achieved in Beirut, or in Iraq. Far better. It had given him the opportunity to attack his enemies at the very heart of their faith. Their news-hungry media would keep milking it for days, searing it into the minds of his target audience. The financial markets were already doing their bit to add to the pain, plummeting as expected, wiping out billions of dollars from the enemies’ coffers. No, his act would not be soon forgotten, of that he was certain. And with a bit of luck it would only be the beginning, he thought, imagining how it could awaken a thousand other warriors and show them what could be done.

  His mind wandered back to another beginning, to another time, and the faces of his younger brothers and his sister swam into view. He could hear them, running around, playing around the house back in Isfahan, his parents never far from sight. His thoughts migrated to his parents, and he thought of how proud they would have been of him right now—had they been alive to witness it. Memories of that cursed day came raging back and stoked the flames of the fury that had consumed him ever since—memories of that Sunday, the 3rd of July, 1988, a torridly humid day, the day on which his family was blown out of the sky, the day on which his fourteen-year-old world was incinerated, the day that sparked his rebirth. Not even the merest hint of an apology, he thought, thinking back to the empty caskets they had buried, an upwelling of bile scorching his throat. Nothing. Just some blood money for him and for all the others who had also lost loved ones. And medals, he seethed. Medals—including the Legion of Merit, no less—for the ship’s commander and for the rest of the Godless perpetrators of that mass murder.

  He stifled his anger and took in a deep breath, and let his mind settle. There was no need to lament what had happened or, as his countrymen were fond of telling him, what had been willed to happen. After all, he kept hearing, everything was written. He chortled inwardly at the backward, naive thought. What he had come to believe, though, was that the lives of his parents and siblings weren’t lost in vain. His life, after all, had taken on a far greater purpose than it otherwise would have had. He just needed to make sure he achieved everything he’d set out to do. To do any less would dishonor their memories and was simply not an option.

  He thought ahead and knew he’d have to stop in a few h
ours. He didn’t want to be driving through the night, when traffic would be sparse and when police roadblocks might pop up. He couldn’t chance staying in any hotels either. A motel would have been doable, but Europe had never embraced the concept or the anonymity such places afforded. No, he and Simmons would be spending the night in the SUV. In a few hundred miles or so, at around the halfway point of his journey, he’d pull into a lay-by, tuck in between some eighteen-wheelers, and, after giving Simmons a knockout dose, wait for morning. Then he’d be on his way again, bright and early, riding the otoyol east to Ankara and on to Aksaray before taking the ancient silk road toward Kayceri and to the prize he so desperately sought.

  Chapter 25

  The thing is, with an area this big,” the CIA station chief told Reilly and Ertugrul, “it’s going to be tough getting hold of something that’ll do the trick.”

  They were in a windowless room deep inside the U.S. Consulate, a squat concrete bunker of a building that huddled defensively behind fortified walls and security checkpoints. Located twelve miles north of the city, it looked more like a modern prison than a proud emblem of its mother nation. It was a far cry from the stately, old-world elegance of the Palazzo Corpi, the previous consulate that had mingled with the bazaars and mosques in the bustling center of the old city. That consulate, sadly, was part of a long gone world. The new facility, built on a hill of solid rock shortly after 9/11, looked like a prison for a reason. It had to be impervious to any kind of attack. Which it was, so much so that one of the terrorists who was captured after the bombings of the British Consulate and a British bank there told the Turkish authorities that he and his men had originally intended to attack the U.S. Consulate but had found it to be so well secured that, to quote the terrorist himself, “they don’t even let birds fly there.”

  Three men did try to attack the consulate a few years later. All three were shot dead before they even made it to the gate.

  “What do you mean?” Reilly asked.

  “Well, we can probably re-task a Keyhole satellite to pass over the area within the right time frame, but we won’t get real-time video or a constant feed, it’ll just show us what’s going on during the time that it passes over the area with each orbit. And that’s not gonna do it for you.”

  Reilly shook his head. “Nope. We don’t know when he’s going to show up.”

  “Better would be to see if we can wrangle one of our UAVs out of Qatar for a constant grid search, but—”

  “—he’ll spot it,” Reilly interjected, shaking his head, nixing the suggestion of using a remote-controlled, unmanned surveillance drone.

  “I’m not talking about Predators. I’m talking about the new kids on the block. RQ-4 Global Hawks. Those babies hang out at forty thousand feet. Your guy doesn’t have bionic vision, does he?”

  Reilly frowned. He didn’t like it. “Even with the high altitude … This guy knows what he’s doing, he knows what they look like. The skies will probably be clear this time of year. He might spot it. Can’t we get one of the big birds?”

  Like the station chief, Reilly knew the more widely used surveillance satellites—the Keyhole class popularized in movies and on TV—wouldn’t do, not in this case. They were more suited to monitoring a location once every couple hours for, say, the construction of a nuclear plant or the appearance of missile launchers. What they couldn’t do was provide live, constant monitoring of a fixed location. For that, Reilly needed something the National Reconnaissance Office tried to keep under the radar, so to speak: a surveillance satellite that could maintain a geosynchronous orbit above a fixed point on the Earth’s surface and relay live video back in real time. It was a very hard thing to achieve. Satellites drifted away from their positions due to all kinds of perturbations—variations in the Earth’s gravitational field in part due to the moon and the sun, solar wind, radiation pressure. Thrusters and complex “station-keeping” computer programs were needed to keep the satellite over its target for extended periods. And as the birds needed to be deployed at an altitude of twenty-two thousand miles to make this possible, they also needed to have exceptionally advanced imaging technology. Which was why they were bigger than a school bus and were rumored to cost more than two billion dollars each—if, that is, they existed at all. And why there weren’t enough of them to go around.

  The station chief’s face crinkled at the request. “Not a chance. With all that’s going on out in that idyllic little part of the world, they’re constantly fully tasked. It’d be impossible to get hold of one. Besides, I don’t think we could even re-task one within the time frame you’re talking about.”

  “We need something,” Reilly insisted. “This guy’s already done some serious damage, and he’s intent on causing more.”

  The station chief spread out his hands appeasingly. “Trust me on this. An RQ-4 will give you what you need, and then some. Our boys in Iraq and in Afghanistan swear by them. More to the point—they’re your only option. So I’d say, embrace it and hope for the best.”

  The station chief was underplaying the Global Hawk’s talents. It was an awesome piece of technology. A big aircraft with a wingspan of more than a hundred feet, the unmanned, remote-controlled drone could travel three thousand miles to its target zone, where it would have “long-dwell”—meaning it could spend many hours watching the same spot—and “broad area coverage” capability. It could carry all kinds of imaging cameras and radars—electro-optical, infrared, synthetic-aperture—and relay back images of the target, day or night, no matter the weather. At a unit cost of thirty-eight million dollars, it was a stunningly powerful and cost-effective way of obtaining IMINT—imagery intelligence—without any risk of ending up with a Francis Gary Powers kind of debacle.

  The station chief regarded the map of the mountain again. “Now, assuming we get one, we still have some problems to work out. For one thing, there are too many approach routes to keep under watch. The target area’s just too big to have a constant fix at any resolution that’s useful. Unless we can narrow it down, we’ll need to rotate around it. In which case we might miss our target.”

  “It’s all the information we’ve got right now,” Reilly grumbled.

  The station chief mulled it over for a beat, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll talk to Langley. See if we can get the guys over at Beale to free one up for us pronto.”

  “We just need it for a day or two,” Reilly told him. “But we need it now. No point in having it otherwise.”

  “We’ll bust some balls and get one lined up,” the station chief reaffirmed. “But then, we still don’t know what we’re looking for, do we?”

  “Just give me some eyes,” Reilly said. “I’ll make sure they have something to look for.”

  HE FOUND TESS IN AN empty interview room, sitting at a table that was swamped by big maps. She had her laptop open beside her and was deep in thought. She only noticed his presence when he was standing next to her, and she looked up at him.

  “So?” she asked. “How did it go?”

  Judging by the tone of her questions, his funk was clearly visible.

  He shrugged. “We can’t get the satellite I want, but I think we’ll get a surveillance drone. The target area’s too big, though … the coverage window won’t be as tight as I’d like it to be.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we might miss something,” he said, his tone somber and heavy with fatigue. He pulled out a chair and plopped himself into it.

  Tess smiled. “Maybe I can help.”

  Reilly’s brow furrowed, then he managed a small grin. “Not a good time to be taunting me with a back rub.”

  Tess shot him a look. “I’m serious, doofus.” She reached for a map of the whole country, laid it on top of the topographic map of Mount Erciyes, and tapped her finger on Istanbul, in the upper left corner. “Take a look.”

  He moved closer.

  “Okay,” she began. “Constantinople’s up here. That’s where Everard and his merry men, the
first Templars to visit the monastery, started their journey.”

  She glanced at Reilly to make sure she had his attention. He gave her a “go on, I’m all ears” nod.

  “They were trying to get back to here,” she continued, “to Antioch, the nearest Templar stronghold.” She pointed out its location, on the Eastern Mediterranean, in present-day Syria. “But, as we know, they only made it as far as here,” she said as her finger arced back to the center of the map, “Mount Argaeus, where the monastery is.”

  “That’s just … astonishing,” he ribbed.

  “Look at this mountain, you bonehead. It’s round. Round like a dormant volcano should be. They could have easily gone around it, right?” She derisively stretched out the word “round” and twirled her finger around it on the map. “It’s not like it’s a wall or a barrier that they had to cross. And yet, for some reason, they decided to climb up it.”

  Reilly thought about it for a second. “Doesn’t seem reasonable—unless they were trying to stay out of sight.”

  She grinned with mock admiration. “God, that Quantico training of yours, the way you just see the most obscure connections … It just boggles the mind, you know that?”

  “Well unboggle yourself and tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Her tone reverted to serious. “Everard and his troupe were trying to stay out of sight. They had to. This all happened in 1203, and back then, the Seljuk Turks had taken over a big chunk of this area.” Her fingers circled the middle of the country. “So as far as the Templars were concerned, it was enemy territory, teeming with roving bands of Ghazi fanatics. So if they had half a brain cell between them, our little gang of Templars would have definitely wanted to avoid wide open spaces. Hence sticking to mountain trails, wherever they could find them. Hence the pit stop at the monastery.”