by Cerys du Lys
But, no, the hardness around his mouth confirmed that this was a fallen angel. I seriously doubted that a dude with that face and body would ever be angelic.
He was directing operations on the yacht. When he yelled something, the other guy turned the yacht farther into the wind, decreasing the boat’s forward motion. As the blond man leaped gracefully to the bow to stow the jib canvas, my camera lens followed. Although he was tall, he wasn’t brawny—he was on the slim side, in fact—whipcord lean. He was dressed in faded jeans and a black T-shirt that pulled taut over the supple muscles in his chest. I couldn’t help but admire his long legs and the graceful, economical way he moved.
I needed to photograph him, too. Right now, with the early-morning sun bathing his skin and the wind ruffling his hair. I had to freeze his hard, cold grace in a golden moment of time. I got a couple shots of him tying down the sail. If he’d been a model and this a professional shoot, I’d have dressed him elegantly in a flowing white shirt with an open throat and black leather pants. Pirate-style.
He strolled back to the helm to consult with the dark-haired man. The wheel turned, the boom shifted, the craft came about. It tacked in toward the rocks at the most sheltered corner of the little bay. Were they going to land? I lowered my camera. I was perhaps a hundred yards from the water, standing in the lee of a gnarled olive tree. Although I had an excellent view of the sailboat, I doubted if anyone aboard could see me, and my motorbike was out of sight behind some rocks.
I moved deeper into the olive grove. I knew I ought to get on my bike and go, but I wanted to get a couple more pictures. The sound of an engine coming from somewhere behind me startled me. There was a narrow dirt road back there; I’d ridden along it on my bike. A car was on its way down to the bay. It stopped on the slope overlooking the water, and a fat, balding man got out.
My escape route was cut off. The man from the car was signaling the yacht now, waving his arms in the air. When he got an answering signal from the gilt-haired man, the newcomer turned back to his car. Using my powerful lens as a telescope, I saw him open the trunk and lean inside, then emerge moments later with a good-sized wooden crate in his arms. He lugged it down to the shore just as the sailboat dropped anchor in the bay and sent a rowboat in toward shore.
I let a breath whistle out of my constricted chest. I must have stumbled onto a rendezvous of some sort. I had a bad feeling about this. I huddled deeper into my shelter. I’ve heard reports of smugglers operating on the western coast. My mother’s words echoed in my brain. Was my golden god a thief?
The rowboat came ashore with both the men from the yacht. The blond man gestured as he talked to the newcomer; the subject was clearly the contents of the wooden container. The fat man kept casting furtive glances around, seeming anxious to be gone. But the blond man looked cool and self-possessed as he tapped the surface of the crate, indicating that he wanted it opened.
While the fat man returned to his car to fetch a crowbar, I quietly changed the setting on my camera. I was going to document this transaction. I was witnessing a crime.
Apollo, as I had begun to think of him—wrongfully, I knew, since Apollo was the god of light and truth and this man was a crook—skillfully wielded the crowbar. The crate opened down the front to reveal a dusty stone statue.
Although I was no expert, my mom was a famous archaeologist, and she had taught me a few things. The piece, a half-clad figure of a woman, appeared from a distance to be an antiquity. Roman, perhaps, considering its drapery. It was somewhat stylized rather than lifelike. It looked reasonably well preserved.
After kneeling and running his hands over its curves with more care and gentleness than he might have shown a flesh-and-blood woman, Apollo nodded to his young sidekick, who carefully resealed the crate. They turned to the fat man, who was mopping his brow with a handkerchief. A wad of bills changed hands.
“They are smugglers,” I muttered. Having been raised by Sybil Matheson-Heath, I was furious about what I was witnessing. These criminals were removing precious antiquities from Turkish archaeological sites and smuggling them out of the country. I knew that Turkey had suffered greatly from this sort of crime. For hundreds of years, the nation had been stripped of its priceless historical relics by avaricious treasure hunters like these.
I yearned to erupt from my olive grove and challenge the men. But that would be suicidal. Clenching my fists, I assessed my adversaries once again. The youth was not particularly intimidating, but the fat man looked unpleasantly dangerous, and as for that cold sun god, there was no way I was going to tangle with him.
So instead, grimly, I used my camera. The whirr of its mechanism seemed loud, but I knew from experience that this was an illusion, induced by the adrenaline rush that made all the senses more alert. They could not hear me. They had no idea I was here.
The crate was loaded into the rowboat, and the blond-haired man stepped back on shore to confer once more with his associate. Their faces were close together, and they had both turned slightly, so they were looking roughly in my direction. I focused carefully, trying to get a clean shot, one I might later be able to blow up for the police. I’d heard that facial recognition technology was good nowadays.
Just as I was about to click the shutter, the climbing sun burst over the scrubby hillock directly behind the men. Its white brilliance poured through my lens, obscuring my shot and for a few instants blinding me.
“Damn!” I lowered the camera. I would get no more pictures from this angle.
Shading my eyes with my palms, I continued to watch the smugglers without the aid of the telephoto lens. I had to squint against the sun, which was why it took several seconds before I realized that the men had stopped conversing. They were staring at my small grove of trees. The fat man was pointing with one hand and gesticulating wildly with the other. I flattened myself in the dirt. Surely they couldn’t have seen me?
Calling out a sharp command to the dark, slender man, Apollo began to run up the hill toward me. Frozen, I watched him come. I must have given myself away. But how? I jerked to my feet, my camera swinging from its strap. Sunlight glanced off the lens, and then I knew. When the sun had crested the hill and blinded me, its reflection must have flashed from the olive grove, revealing my presence just as plainly as if I’d stood up and waved my arms.
I was poised for flight, but he was close now, running with such grace and speed I knew I’d never get away. Anyway, flight would proclaim my guilt. Perhaps I could convince him I had no idea he was up to anything illicit. That I was a simple American tourist who wouldn’t know a smuggler from a fisherman. That the pictures I’d been taking were innocent landscapes whose ultimate destination was a website labeled “My Trip to Turkey.”
If he believed that, the golden-haired man was a fool.
Twenty yards away, he stopped and said something in Turkish. The phrase was idiomatic, but the gist was clear. “Come out with your hands up.” It was then that I saw he was cradling something dark and metallic in both hands. I thought it was the crowbar. Then he aimed it, and I knew it was a gun.
Chapter 2
Ellie
“Don’t shoot!” Putting down my camera and raising my arms over my head, I stepped out from the olive grove into the sun. “Lutfen,” I added, the Turkish word for please. “I’m a tourist. Do you speak English? I’m sorry if I’m trespassing, but I thought this was public land.”
It sounded ludicrous, but with my heart thudding and my stomach so cramped I thought I might double over and collapse before he could bother to shoot me, it was the best I could come up with. He was advancing again, his hard face expressionless, his eyes narrowed to slits as they flicked over me, taking in my appearance from my long, ill-kempt hair to my new leather boots.
His gaze lingered for an instant on my breasts and hips. As he closed in on me, I could see that his eyes were light green, the color of tropical seawater. Beautiful eyes, thickly fringed with gold-tipped lashes. Yet for all their beauty, they were merci
lessly cold.
He was five yards away, then two, then one. He stopped. The gun, a large ugly pistol, was pointed dead at the center of my body. If he shot at this range, he couldn’t miss, nor would I survive. “Please,” I said again, lips trembling. “No English? French, then?” MyFrench was not terrific. “Je suis americaine.” Instinct warned me not to try Turkish—an American tourist wouldn’t speak more than a polite word or two of that language. “Je suis une touriste. Comprenez-vous?”
“Who are you and what the fuck are you doing here?” he said in English.
“Thank god, you do understand me. It would be stupid for you to shoot me just because we couldn’t communicate.”
He must have found this answer flip, since he reached out, caught my wrist and jerked me against his body. My yelp of surprise died in my throat as one hand captured my arms behind my back while the other held the barrel of the gun to a point just below my left breast. His touch was both impersonal and professional. It didn’t hurt, but this wasn’t reassuring. If he had to kill me, he would do so swiftly, with a minimum of fuss.
“You have five seconds to explain yourself.”
“I was camped here.” I nodded in the direction of my pack. His English was more than excellent; it was perfect. He sounded as if he might be British, although there were American inflections, too. “I had trouble with my bike. I couldn’t make it to the official campgrounds.”
“You were photographing us.”
“I was photographing the coastline. Not you.”
“You expect me to believe that?” He kicked at my camera, which rolled over in the dirt. Inwardly I winced, and would have cried out “Don’t hurt my camera,” if it hadn’t seemed a frivolous concern, given that he was probably about to end my life.
“That’s a telephoto lens, so cut the lies.”
His young sidekick had run after him and was now within hearing distance. The other man, the fat one, was following more slowly, toiling up the hill and muttering obscenities as he came.
My captor twisted my arm, and for the first time I felt a shiver of pain. “Who are you working for? The Turks? The Americans? Interpol?”
“I’m just a tourist.”
His hold on my arms grew rougher. He was twisting, putting pressure on ligaments and bone. It hurt and I think I whimpered. “Where’s your partner? Nobody sends a woman out on an assignment like this alone.”
“Please. I’m not a cop.” I could feel tears spring up behind my lashes. I squeezed them back. Courage was important to me. I knew about fear; I had suffered from occasional anxiety attacks for years. Numbing panic could grab me anytime, reducing me to a shaking, sweating wreck. But it hadn’t come yet, and until it did, I would try to hang on to whatever shreds of dignity I possessed. “My name is Ellie Heath, and I’m in Turkey on vacation. I arrived in Istanbul last week—my passport’s in my pack along with my camping guide, my first aid kit and my extra roll of toilet paper. I thought you were fishermen.”
He barked a command in Turkish at the young man, who was regarding me with the outright masculine appraisal that had been so conspicuously absent in the cold assessing gaze of the man who held me. The kid, who looked to be in his early twenties, was good-looking. He had curly dark hair cut close around his head and a profile that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an ancient fresco. His eyes were dark and liquid, full of the easy arrogance of youth.
He sauntered over to my pack and began going through it. “Here’s the passport.” He began reading out the information. His accent, unlike the blond man’s, was atrocious, although it was clear that he must have studied some English in school. “The name written here is Helen Heath.”
“Helen?” My left arm received a new wrench, and I bit back a cry of pain. “You said Ellie.”
“That’s what everyone calls me. My mother named me Helen. She’s an archaeologist. She has a keen interest in the legend of Troy.”
“Well, Helen of Troy, you’re only a few miles from the site where your namesake spent her captivity. Menelaus’s army could have come ashore anywhere along this part of the coast. Maybe right here in this inlet. It matches Homer’s description.”
I was impressed with his knowledge of Homer. I guess smuggling antiquities required some expertise in classical lit. I was also surprised by the educated quality of his voice and, once again, the accent. He sounded less British now and more East Coast American.
“Check the date and port of entry, Metin,” he ordered in English.
“Atatürk Havaalani, Istanbul. Third of April.”
“When’s your birthday, Ellie Heath?”
“February 24.”
“Year?”
I told him.
He looked at Metin, who nodded.
“The nickname is a nice touch. Along with the bit about your archaeologist mother. What’s her name? Is she someone I’ve heard of?”
“Sybil Matheson-Heath.” I didn’t add that anyone who knew anything about scholarly archaeology would recognize it.
There was a low whistle from behind my right ear. So he’d heard of my mother. Maybe I shouldn’t have revealed it. What if he decided to hold me for ransom? My mother was well known, but by no means rich.
“She is cok guzel, Nicholas, very beautiful,” Metin said. He had switched to rapid Turkish, but I had no trouble understanding. “I hope you’re not going to shoot her before we have the chance to fuck her.”
“Stop fantasizing and examine the rest of her things,” was the cold reply.
Nicholas. I concentrated on his name rather than the younger man’s words, which I was not supposed to understand. Nicholas. An American who spoke fluent Turkish, as I also did. He must have lived in Turkey, too. Yet he had no qualms about stealing its archeological treasures.
The fat man had lumbered up to us now. He was demanding, in harsh, expletive-laden Turkish, that I be put to death. He picked up my camera and began punching the delete button on the recent pictures. Then he dashed the camera to the ground and battered it, provoking an involuntary protest from me. Besides the fact that I loved the damned thing, I had several thousand dollars invested in my photography equipment. I expected to be in debt to Visa for the next twenty years.
If I lived so long.
“Be quiet,” ordered my captor as I protested the fat man’s assault on my equipment. “Better your camera than your life.”
Did that mean he didn’t intend to kill me?
“She is a journalist,” said Metin, holding up my press credentials. “Look.”
“A journalist?” Nicholas wrenched my arms so that I stumbled and nearly fell. He caught me and pulled me around to face him. “You’re a fucking reporter? Who do you work for?”
“I’m freelance,” I mumbled.
The fat man was quaking in outrage as Metin translated the words on the press card. He pulled out a gun and said in Turkish, “If you don’t shoot her, I will.”
“Put the weapon away,” Nicholas said in the same language. “She’s an American. For all we know, there’s a drone hovering nearby.”
The thug didn’t stash the weapon, but he stopped waving it and peered around suspiciously, shading his eyes to look up at the sky. Heavy clouds were moving in. The day that had started so brightly was turning dark.
The blond man returned his attention to me. “You’re a journalist snapping pictures with a telephoto lens of a criminal wanted in nine countries while he’s smack in the middle of his latest crime.”
Nine countries? “Actually, I’m a photographer doing a fluff piece on historical sites in Turkey. I have no interest in you, no matter how infamous you are.”
“I’m going to have to make certain of that.” He pocketed his gun and placed his hands on my throat. It happened too fast for me to panic. I’m going to die, I thought as his strong fingers slipped around to the back of my neck, slid between two vertebrae and pressed. It didn’t hurt, but I felt an odd numbness. The last thing I saw was his starkly beautiful, almost angelic, face b
ending over me, his gilt hair tousled by the wind. Then darkness took me.
Chapter 3
Ellie
My return to consciousness was slow, with my brain suggesting that it might be preferable to remain blissfully blank. But I didn’t. I remembered what had happened moment by moment, event by event, the images sliding in and out of my consciousness.
Even before opening my eyes, I knew where I must be. I was lying on a hard mattress, and it wasn’t my dizziness that was making it pitch up and down. Something was creaking with loud, monotonous regularity; the air smelled of the sea. I was aboard the smugglers’ yacht.
For several moments, I lay still, listening, feeling, sniffing the air. My wrists and ankles were bound, and I was afraid to open my eyes. I imagined myself stuffed in some dark tiny corner, locked in, unable to move, trapped. A film of sweat broke out over my body. Oh, God. I hadn’t had an attack for a couple of months—not since I’d broken up with Mark, in fact—but now it was happening again, my mysterious, much-dreaded claustrophobia.
It was dark and I was alone. I smelled the dusty earth; it crumbled beneath my fingers as I clawed at it. I screamed, but no one answered. I gasped for breath, the air burning my lungs. I screamed again, knowing I was trapped here, knowing I would never, ever get out.
Stop it! I ordered myself, forcing the nightmare images from my brain. My body was humming with panic. Fear was such a physical thing. How well I recognized the knifing cramps in my belly, the electric static of my heartbeat, the unspeakable feeling of impending doom. If this was a small, dark room I was locked in, I would die here. The absence of light was what freaked me out the most. That and the thought of suffocating in an airless place.
