The Poison Secret

by Gregg Loomis

  CHAPTER 17

  At the Same Time

  Although the room was dark, Gurt was pretty certain it had been carved from stone, perhaps the mountainside up which she had been half-carried, half-dragged.

  When there was a knock on the door of the hotel room, she had assumed Lang had forgotten something as well as his room key. Violating every rule she had been taught, she didn’t ask who was there. Just opened the door, only to have it slammed into her with enough force to snatch the chain lock from the doorframe. She had been knocked down and was getting to her feet when three men in ski masks charged into the room. Two held 9x18mm Makarov pistols. More frightening, the third held a syringe.

  The two with pistols pointed at her went to different sides of the room. Standard operating procedure: cover the captive from multiple angles. Their silence was as intimidating as their weapons. On her knees, she retreated toward the only available open space, the bathroom. The man with the syringe approached cautiously, motioning her to extend an arm.

  Quick decision: did these men want her alive for some purpose or were they perfectly willing to kill her? She was pretty certain the determination would not be hers to make if she let that man stick her with that needle.

  Her back was now against the sink. She had run out of room.

  The fact wasn’t lost on the man with the hypodermic. He lunged forward, needle extended. The instant he was committed to the move, Gurt threw up both hands, grabbing his belt. Using his momentum and the lower center of gravity being on her knees gave her, she jerked him forward.

  There were two satisfying sounds of shattering glass: a tinkle as the syringe shattered on the floor and a crash followed by a shower of glass slivers from the mirror over the sink as her assailant’s head hit it.

  Something hit the back of her neck, and her vision began to contract. She was aware of reaching for a dagger-shaped piece of the mirror, of its sharp edges biting into her hand, then her side as she slipped it into her blouse just as her world went completely dark.

  The next thing she had been aware of was being on the floor of some sort of vehicle, she thought one of the eight- to ten-passenger vans, dolmus, that were the backbone of Turkey’s public transportation system. Her hands were tied behind her back. Through slitted eyes, she confirmed she was indeed on the floor. Two men were silhouetted against the little bus’s lighted instrument panel. She had the sense the third was seated just above where she lay. The next impressions came simultaneously: the back of her head felt as though it separated from the rest of her skull with every motion of the vehicle.

  She had no idea how long she had been unconscious nor any means of ascertaining the time. Nonetheless, she succumbed to Agency training, keeping track of the seconds ticking by. The process partially diverted her from the throbbing of her head and would help her calculate the distance covered since coming to. If or why this information might become relevant she could not have said.

  The hum of tires on a paved road became the sound of loose gravel pinging off the undercarriage as the vehicle’s suspension rattled with each bump, jounces that sent bolts of pain along her already aching head. Once or twice she bit her lower lip to stifle a groan. After four minutes, the motion stopped, and the engine was switched off. A door slammed. Gurt closed her eyes. There was little benefit to alerting her captors that she had revived from both the blow and whatever might have remained in the broken syringe.

  A door beside her popped open, and she could feel the night’s cool mist on feet she had not realized were bare. Rough hands grabbed her ankles and tugged her across the floorboards. Someone grabbed her shoulders and dragged her uphill. She felt the wet rock on her feet as she was pulled up rough stone stairs, the edges banging painfully into her ankles.

  At last she was unceremoniously dumped on a rock-hard floor, her hands were untied, footsteps receded, and a heavy door slammed shut followed by the click of a key in a lock.

  Gurt lay perfectly still, listening for any sound that might betray another presence. After five minutes, she reached her hand into her blouse to confirm the sliver of glass mirror was still there. She touched its glazed surface but was careful not to grip it as she had earlier, an effort attested to by the dried blood and pain she could feel along the palm of her right hand. The knowledge she had a weapon gave her some comfort.

  Gingerly, she braced herself against the floor and stood unsteadily. The room spun out of control, and only a hand on the wall stopped her from falling. Gradually the dizziness dissipated, and she was able to conduct an inspection of her prison by touch. She had almost completed her circuit when she stumbled over a raised stone. Kneeling, she felt first a line of raised stone (or had it been carved from solid rock like the room?). Above this ridge and perhaps six or seven inches toward the wall, her fingers touched another vertical surface. It took a full minute to ascertain the object was oblong, box-shaped, and about three or four feet high and perhaps just as long.

  Remaining on her knees, she ran a hand along the smooth stone until she felt a small indentation, a line. Her fingers traced it. Parallel even lines intersecting parallel even lines at right angles. She sat back on her heels and tried to visualize what the sense of touch had portrayed.

  Then she grinned. Not a big grin but a small one, a smile that said she had achieved her first victory over her captors: she had a means of defense and an idea what her prison might be. Not where it was, but what it had been. As a captive, knowledge itself could be a weapon.

  CHAPTER 18

  Hotel Kardelen

  Seconds Later

  For an instant, both Kahraman and Lang stared at the ringing phone as though it might speak of its own accord.

  On the third ring, Lang reached for it. “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  At first, Lang thought the caller might have hung up before speaking.

  Then, “Mr. Reilly?”

  “Speaking.”

  What followed could have been dialogue from a hackneyed crime drama, although Lang was hardly in a mood to notice. “We have your wife. She will be returned to you unharmed if you give us what we want.”

  Lang swallowed his initial reaction of rage that someone had violently invaded his and Gurt’s life, jeopardized her safety, and then made demands, an anger all but eclipsed by fear, terror, actually, that he might never see her again.

  He forced himself to speak calmly as he reverted to standard hostage retrieval training. “I’m not discussing anything until I know she’s alive and okay.”

  Silence. Having a demand come from the victim’s side of the relationship had apparently not been anticipated.

  Then, “Is not possible.”

  Definitely an accent, though Lang couldn’t place it.

  “Look,” Lang said in the most reasonable tone one could manage through gritted teeth. “You went to a lot of trouble to get whatever it is you want from me. I’m not willing to discuss whatever that may be until I know you haven’t harmed her.”

  He could only hope the apprehension that was clinching his gut wasn’t reflected in his voice. Logically, he knew that in the United States, the vast majority of kidnappings were resolved within hours. But this wasn’t America, nor was the victim a child taken by a relative, also the overwhelming majority.

  Kahraman had been watching him closely, following the part of the conversation he could hear. He got up and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him as he took a cell phone from his pants pocket.

  Lang continued, “It’s not an unreasonable request. Just let her say a few words and I’ll listen to whatever you have to say.”

  There was a muffled conversation on the other end of the line, the sound of a discussion while someone had their hand over the phone.

  “Is okay, then. Will call you back, you hear her speak. But understand, American: any trick and she dies.”

  The line went dead.

  Kahraman stepped out of the bathroom. “No good. I called the station to have them try to trace, b
ut there were several calls coming into the hotel, one from a cell phone.”

  Lang leaned across the bed to replace the receiver. “Any luck triangulating on the cell?”

  The policeman shook his head. “Mr. Reilly, please try to understand: This is a remote area of Turkey, not a city in America where there are any number of relay stations within miles of each other. Unless that particular cell has a GPS transmitter . . .”

  He trailed off, the hopelessness of electronic tracking obvious.

  Lang was pacing the room, unaware he was doing do. “For whatever it’s worth, they are going to call back.”

  Two steps forward, two steps back.

  Kahraman had his cell out again. “I will see what can be done.”

  The wait was a short one, less than five minutes.

  Lang grasped the receiver with both hands as if by doing so he might touch her. “Gurt? You okay?”

  “Lang? I’m fine, hunky-dory, Kloster Kapelle. I . . .”

  “You’ve heard enough, Mr. Reilly,” the now recognizable voice interrupted. “The woman is, what did she say? Hunky-dory? I’m not familiar with, what, Kloster something?”

  “Means the same thing,” Lang assured him hurriedly.

  “Very well. Now to business: Mr. Reilly, we want the blood sample sent to your foundation from Trabzon.”

  It took Lang a moment or two to try to make sense of the demand. Dr. Walsh, a contemporary office, a conversation that now seemed distant in both time and geography. “You mean the blood sample from the kid who was bitten by some kind of snake?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Surely you don’t think I have it?”

  There was a chuckle. Over the phone, Lang could hear little humor in it. “Of course not, Mr. Reilly. But you could obtain it for us.”

  “That’s ridiculous! I can’t keep up with every medical test the Foundation performs. Now, if it’s money you want . . .”

  This time the voice had a dagger edge to it. “Find it, Mr. Reilly. Find it in the next 48 hours, or we start sending back your woman . . . piece by piece.”

  “But . . .” No use, they had hung up.

  Kahraman was shaking his head. “No luck on tracing the cell phone.”

  Lang smiled for the first time in what seemed like an eternity. “I think I know where she is. Two questions. First: how long will it take you to get together a company of the army?”

  He realized the error as soon as the words left his lips. With half a dozen military coups since 1966, plus the revelation of a military plot to overthrow the mildly Islamic government in 2002, the civilian power structure was wary of delegating troops to the army to keep domestic order.

  Ignoring the potential political blunder, Kahraman said, “I can have heavily armed police here in an hour perhaps, something like your SWAT teams. But, how do you know where she is?”

  “She told me.”

  “Where?”

  “Get your troops assembled first.”

  CHAPTER 19

  At the Same Time

  Gurt was surprised when the door to her prison rattled open and a man holding an AK-47 motioned her out into the dark dampness of night. Two things immediately told her she was farther above sea level than the hotel from which she had been abducted. First, there had been the steep climb, and now, even in the dark, misty clouds roiled below, shining with a luminescence as though illuminated from within.

  The guard shoved from behind, a flashlight playing along a path roughly hewed into stone, a straight drop on one side. A number of buildings lined the pathway, one or two stories, some carved into a rock face, props on a stage like the place she had been confined. Others had been constructed of stones fitted into rocks. Once, perhaps twice, she caught a fleeting view of colors, figures, painted on flat surfaces of structure, forms faded into near oblivion. She intentionally stumbled once, giving her a moment for the beam of the flashlight to confirm what she had already surmised.

  The flicker of an old-fashioned lantern from a building just ahead sent impossibly elongated shadows of human forms darting across the path. Inside, two men, one of whom had smashed the bathroom mirror with his face, waited. Although most of his features were swathed in an amateurish attempt at a bandage, there was no mistaking the hatred burning in his eyes.

  The other proffered a cell phone. “You will speak to Mr. Reilly,” he commanded. “Tell him you are unharmed.” He nodded toward the man with the bandage. “Anything more and you will belong to Arin there.”

  Lang was already on the line. Gurt spoke her few words before the phone was snatched away.

  “What means those words, “Kloster Kapelle”?

  Gurt stared at him with little girl innocence. “I thought you had a command of English. It means I’m hunky-dory, fine.” The explanation she and Lang had agreed upon for anything said in German in front of one who likely didn’t understand the language.

  It was clear that “hunky-dory” might well have been Sanskrit as far as Gurt’s captor knew, but she was fairly certain he wasn’t going to admit it to his comrades.

  The man who had escorted her here exchanged words with the other two. Although the phrases were foreign to her, the furtive looks of the three in her direction didn’t bode well. She knew she had served her purpose and keeping her around presented more problem for her jailers than benefit. She touched the glass shard in her blouse.

  The man who had brought her here apparently had been ordered to take her back to her prison. There was something different, though, about his attitude, the covert glances, the smirks of the other two.

  She was not surprised, then, when he grabbed her by the blouse as soon as they were out of the light generated by the lantern. She managed a convincing whimper as he ripped it from her shoulders and placed a groping hand on her breast. He pushed her up against cold stone, crushing her neck with the forestock of the AK-47 as he fumbled with the fly of his trousers.

  Snatching the glass from her shirt, Gurt’s arm moved swiftly up as though gutting an animal. A grunt, a gurgle, and the sour smell of a sewer as her assailant took a step backward. His face, what she could see of it in the beam of the flashlight he had dropped, showed puzzlement at the crimson gash that divided both his shirt and stomach into roughly equal vertical halves. The rifle clattered on the stone walkway as he eased down to his knees, as though to offer Christian prayer while his hands frantically tried to hold in his intestines.

  There was a weak cry that ended in a gurgle as Gurt whipped the glass shard across his trachea, severing it. He would live for a few more minutes as he futilely gasped for air but would die silently.

  Her hands were too slick with blood, hers and the dying man’s, to efficiently handle the rifle. She tore a strip from her ruined blouse and used her left hand and teeth to bind up the palm of her right where the glass dagger had sliced her own flesh.

  She dared not use the flashlight, so she went on hands and knees to search for the dropped rifle. She could only pray it had not fallen over the ledge into the pit of darkness below.

  If only she could find it before the morning star above dimmed and that gray streak in the eastern sky brought the new day’s light. In the dark, she had a chance. Dawn would lengthen the odds.

  CHAPTER 20

  King of Pontus, Foe of Rome,

  Story of a Hellenistic Empire

  by Abiron Theradoplis, PhD

  National Museum of Archeology

  Athens

  Translation by Chara Georopoulos

  University of Iowa Press

  (Excerpt)

  Although we do not know the precise date, Justin relates an incident that might be illustrative of the working of the mind of Mithradates, supposedly recorded by the young king’s best friend among the four, Gordius:

  Two of the four brought a boar they had killed into a woodland camp. As the animal was cooking, presumably over an open fire and spit, Mithradates wandered off into the forest. An hour later, Gordius came upon his friend who was bus
ily taking cuttings from a hemlock plant and putting them in a leather pouch he wore around his neck. For whatever reason, he said nothing but returned to camp.

  As the boar was prepared, Gordius noted his friend sprinkling the contents of the pouch on his portion of the meat. His youthful curiosity aroused, he observed Mithradates over the next few days, harvesting not only hemlock but belladonna, and other deadly poisons such as henbane and poisonous mushrooms. He knew small portions of some of these poisons brought on states of temporary madness, clairvoyance in which communication with the gods was possible, or stupor, but he observed none of these in the young king, nor did he note the toxic effects of drooling, convulsions, or paralysis.

  Gordius said nothing, knowing his lord and soon-to-be king knew best.

  CHAPTER 21

  On the Road from Trabzon

  Thirty Minutes Later

  Lang sat in the front seat of an FNSS Pars, a Turkish-manufactured 6x6 armored personnel carrier, between the driver and Kahraman, the Turkish cop. Behind them was a surprisingly quickly assembled squad of eight men, uniformed in camouflage under Kevlar body armor. He was less than happy that half carried the Baba, 12-gauge shotguns, and the other LMG MP5 submachine guns. Both weapons were more likely to level anything and anyone in sight than help in a surgically precise rescue operation.

  The policeman had insisted that Lang, a civilian and a foreign one at that, had no business going on what was essentially a police mission.

  Lang had simply shrugged. “Then don’t expect me to tell you where she is.”

  “But, Mr. Reilly,” the man had spluttered, “there may be gunfire. These men, if they are Kurds from the south as I would speculate, they may well kill her.”

  Lang had given the man a stare that could have frozen meat. “I’ll get her out myself.”

  “But, but . . .” the man protested. “You, an unarmed single person against an unknown number of those hajduk . . .”

  “Those what?”

  “Er, bandits, outlaws. You don’t know how many. What chance do you stand alone?”