by Rene Fomby
“Yes, Sire. Bosnia and Herzegovina have always been a problem in that region, as far as religion goes, but even though they are half Muslim, they’re also mostly half Christian, as well. I think it might take a little subtle diplomacy, and some flexibility on your part, but as hemmed in as they are, if they get surrounded by countries pledged to the Empire, they will almost certainly come on board as well.”
Constantine chewed on his lower lip, thinking. “Okay, here’s what we do. Promise them we’ll have nothing but respect for the Muslim elements of their population. Then, when the timing is right, we’ll do a little old-fashioned ethnic cleansing. It’s a win-win situation.”
“Excuse me, Sire? How is that a win-win?”
“It’s a win for us, and a win for the Bosnian Christians. For their Muslims, not so much. Eh, it’s a shithole country, so they gotta take what they can get.”
108
Siena
Sam stared longingly at the small pond. Had it really been just three weeks earlier that she had sat at this very same spot, watching Barley and Maddie splashing in the water and relishing the cool breeze that blew in off the vineyard? Life had seemed so complicated back then. Little did she know then what complicated truly meant.
For Mehmed, the meeting was a welcome break from long days sitting alone in his room, recuperating from his injuries. The doctors had yet to clear him for travel—they were still fussing over an infection in his left thigh—so he was stuck here for the time being. Stuck here with his family now safely stashed away in the American Embassy in Ankara, waiting for official permission to come join him. Permission Sanders had suggested could come any day now.
Sanders was arguing with someone on his phone, but finally he shoved it in his pocket and sat down next to Gavin, who was fiddling with a small laptop. “Sorry. Up until Saturday night, William Tulley was a niggling little detail nobody in the government seemed to care about other than me. Now he’s at the center of everyone’s cocktail conversations, and I keep getting dragged into all of it. What you got there, Gavin?”
“Mehmed wanted to take a look at the scans from the first five amphorae, so I’m downloading them from the servers we set up in Venice. The signal isn’t all that strong out here in the garden, so it’s taking a little longer than I thought. I might have to haul this thing back up the hill if it doesn’t pick up the pace.”
“It’s just a little something I didn’t pay much attention to at the time,” Mehmed explained. “Just a curious little poem from an old travelogue, but it might wind up being the key to unlocking a back door into Istanbul—or New Rome, or whatever we’re calling it these days.”
Sanders grimaced. “Unless you’ve developed an unnatural fondness for Tulley and his band of crazies, Istanbul will do fine for now. But, this key, what’s it about?”
Mehmed frowned. “Well, keep in mind my memory is kind of fuzzy, especially with all the meds they keep pumping into me, but I think it’s obvious that the best way to sneak into the Old City is through the aqueducts that feed the ancient cisterns. I seriously doubt anyone on Tulley’s staff is really all that much of an expert on Istanbul, so I doubt they’ve put much thought into the complex of tunnels that lie just under the surface of the city. So, if we can get down into the aqueducts, that will leave our guys free to navigate to almost any spot in Istanbul.”
“But dropping a team into Istanbul—even outside of the new walls— that would be a feat in and of itself,” Sanders protested. “The Turks would be on them in a second, particularly given how sensitive they are after the little trick Tulley pulled, taking the Old City from them in a matter of hours without any semblance of a fight.”
Mehmed nodded and pulled out a topographical map of the greater Istanbul area he had downloaded earlier from the Internet. “If I’m right, you’ll want to use those satellites of yours to get a more detailed picture of all this, but check out this area north of the city, just outside of all the populated areas.” He drew a small line with his fingertip along the top portion of the map. “This is close to where I grew up, and as a boy, I used to explore this area with my friends. Right around here is what I believe to be a major aqueduct leading into the city. We found a covered hatch that let us drop down into a tunnel, and were able to travel almost a mile to the south before the rising water levels made it impossible to continue any further.”
“That would work,” Gavin suggested. “But do you have any idea where it ends up?”
“No, like I said, we only made it a little ways in. But Bob’s satellites should be able to map out the entire underground aqueduct system, so with scuba gear and an underwater GPS system, you’ll be able to move freely into the Old City with no one being the wiser.”
Sanders grabbed the map and studied it for a moment. “That would work, but we’re still missing the element of surprise. No matter where we pop out, there’s no way we can get to Tulley in time before he detonates the bomb. I’ve seen aerial photos of the area—he’s got guards stationed everywhere.”
“Not everywhere,” Mehmed said with a twinkle.
109
Venice
Prime Minister Carlo Rossi was starting to run out of options. Or at least any acceptable options. He pulled his phone away and stared at it for a long moment, while the voice on the other end continued to jabber along. Finally, he pulled it back up to his ear and interrupted.
“I don’t care what the Americans are doing about the situation. If they want to recognize this idiot’s toy government, then they’re fools. And not for the first time. No, only two things matter right now. First, we all have to somehow put the brakes on Turkey’s attempt to take back the city at this point, at least until we can get a better handle on whether Tulley really has deployed a dirty bomb over the city. Second, we need to figure out a way to keep the rebels from joining forces with Tulley. If Southern Italy and Greece buy into the whole Roman Empire fiasco, the rest of the region will fall like dominos, and then we’ll have a fait accompli, a genie we may never be able to put back in the bottle.”
“But the Americans are blocking us on NATO—” The French president was still hesitant to take action, wanting to wait until the smoke had cleared a bit before engaging in anything more serious than light diplomacy. The same kind of faltering attitude that had lost Crimea to the Russians.
“Screw the Americans. We’ll call a NATO meeting without them. After all, they aren’t the be all and end all of the Western alliance, they’re just one of the seats at the table. And remember, this is at its heart a European issue, so we Europeans need to band together to solve it.”
“How about—Turkey?”
“If they want to join us, fine, as long as they behave. But no one’s holding a veto authority at this meeting. Majority rules, then we’re all in this game together, wherever it might take us. And whatever might happen in the end. Bomb or no bomb.”
110
Siena
“Download complete,” Gavin announced, handing the laptop over to Mehmed. The Turkish religious scholar scrolled through the images quickly, finally settling on the one he was looking for.
“Sam, do you have a printer available up there in the castle?”
“Sure, let me hook you up.” She pulled the computer into her own lap, locating the printer in her personal study and typing in the password. “You want me to just go ahead and print this?”
“Sure, make one copy for each of us.”
Sam nodded, her fingers busy on the keyboard. “Got it. I’ll call upstairs and have someone run them down here.”
While she made the quick phone call, Mehmed took one last look at the image on the screen, then closed the laptop and set it on the grass beside him.
“The thing is, Bob Sander’s right, Tulley’s guards have every important building in the Old City completely surrounded, so breaking into the Hagia Sophia or the Topkapı Palace would take no less than a small army. And if Tulley does have a dirty bomb, the game would be over long before we could even
get off a shot. But, what if we could get our men inside Tulley’s headquarters in the Topkapı from the inside?”
Sanders looked intrigued. “Inside? How is that even possible?”
Mehmed reached over and grabbed the map from Sanders, drawing a small circle with his finger over the eastern end of the Golden Horn. “This is where the Hagia Sophia and Topkapı Palace are located.” He moved his finger slightly to the left and up. “And this is the location of the Basilica Cistern.”
“That’s where Tulley shot his first video,” Gavin noted.
“Correct. But what doesn’t show on the map is what’s just underground. There’s a tunnel that leads from the Hagia Sophia all the way to the palace, almost directly beneath the Caferiye Sok. It was heavily used in ancient times by the emperor and his staff, so they wouldn’t have to use the streets to get back and forth to the church. Very helpful for all those times when the emperor wasn’t very popular, if you get my drift.”
“But that wouldn’t be anywhere near the cistern,” Sam pointed out.
“Right. But this part near the Hagia Sophia doesn’t end there, it takes a little bend to the northwest, toward the cistern. Normally, the tunnel is sealed off. The entrance inside the Hagia Sophia was closed off ages ago, and the entrance inside the palace has a padlocked metal door. But I’ve been in there, long ago, when I was just a student. It’s mostly just damp and stinky, and very dark. But past the Hagia Sophia, where it bends north again, that continues hundreds of feet, and it, too, ends in a door. Locked as well, but with an old, very simple locking mechanism. Basically just a skeleton key.”
“What’s on the other side of the door?” Gavin asked, picking up the laptop and tapping away on the browser.
Mehmed shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t say, I didn’t open it. But going by just rough measurements and directions, I’d say it should be very close to the cistern. Ah, I see our printouts have arrived, just in time.”
A butler handed the printouts to Sam and walked away with a small bow as she passed them out. “Here you go, fellas.” She looked down, and suddenly realized what she should have noticed earlier. “Hey, it’s all in Greek.”
“Oops!” Mehmed’s face went red. “What an idiot I am! I’m so used to reading Greek and Latin all the time, especially since I started working on the Project, it completely slipped past me. But, okay, let me translate for you.” He looked down at his sheet. “First, a little background might be helpful. This appears to have been written by a monk who traveled to Constantinople around 900 A.D. and stayed for a short time at the Topkapı Palace. He talks here about a tunnel that was used to connect the palace with the Hagia Sophia, just like I told you, and then describes an extension at the very end that leads to what he called the River Styx, the mythological river that separated the living from the land of the dead, part of the old Greek/Roman mythology regarding the end of life. You see, unlike the Egyptians, the Greeks were perhaps the first known civilization to believe in reincarnation, that men’s souls would be transported to an underground land when they died, where they would then wait until they were reborn at some point into a new body. You can see the similarity in all that to the mystical concepts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which is probably not a coincidence. Anyway, he described the so-called River Styx as a large body of water lying just beneath the streets of the city.”
Gavin looked up from the laptop. “Okay, that sounds very much like the Basilica Cistern. So you think there’s a door leading down from the tunnel to the cistern? How come nobody’s ever found a door on the other side? The place is usually packed with tourists, according to what I’m reading on this web site.”
“It is, and that’s a very good question. But let me continue. According to this monk, there were three separate entrances to the river, each of which was guarded by one of ‘three of the Devil’s handmaids.’ And that’s what threw me at first. There are in fact two examples of ‘the Devil’s handmaids’ lying in plain sight within the cistern—”
“The Medusa heads,” Sam suggested in a soft voice.
“Precisely. The Medusa’s heads are covered in writhing masses of snakes, snakes being the symbol most closely connected to Satan since the dawn of time.”
“But there are only two heads down there, not three,” Sam protested. “You showed them to me a few months ago when we went on a tour of the cistern.”
“You are absolutely right, Sam, there are only two heads down there.” He smiled and shook his head. “That is, there are only two heads down there now. But there is in fact one other head that matches the cistern’s Medusas precisely, because all three heads came from the same source originally, the Forum of Constantine, an area that marked the very center of Constantine’s new city. Apparently, all three of the Medusas made it into the cistern when it was built, but now only two remain. The remaining, third head now sits outside of Istanbul’s Archeological Museum. Obviously, it was removed at some point and relocated.”
“How could it have been moved?” Sam asked, trying to remember the details of her visit several months earlier. “Wouldn’t that head have supported a column as well? So, if it got moved, what happened to the other column?”
“That is a very good question, and I guess that’s why this poem intrigued me so much when I first stumbled across it. Historians have long speculated about why the Medusa heads were placed there, and most of them came to the conclusion that it was simply a question of available building materials. When the cistern was built, the heads were available and were worked into the ceiling supports, the columns. But now I think we were all wrong, all this time. I think the Medusas were intended to do what the original Medusa did, turn men into stone if they didn’t come prepared to deal with the Gorgon’s evil gaze, as Perseus famously did. And, in so doing, they served to protect the various portals into the cistern. To watch over them, as it were.”
“I get you,” said Gavin, barely remembering his own limited study of the classics. “But that still doesn’t explain what happened to the missing column, or why no one has ever located the doorway to the secret tunnel from the cistern side. That place has seen thousands, maybe millions of visitors over the years, all of them with cameras, flashing away. Plus historians like you, and from what I’ve been reading, not a single one of them has ever reported seeing a door. With walkways just a few short feet from every one of the walls.”
Mehmed smiled. “Okay, Gavin, what does your web site say about repairs to the cistern during the rule of Ahmed III?”
Gavin typed away on the laptop for almost a minute before looking up. “It appears that part of the western wall was sealed up and filled with dirt and rocks to keep it from collapsing.”
“Correct. And then another repair was made to the eastern wall at the beginning of the last century. I would be willing to bet that’s when the Medusa head was removed, since that location is consistent with a description of the cistern written in the mid-1500’s by a Dutch explorer who accidentally rediscovered the cistern, after it had lain forgotten and dormant for almost five hundred years. Rowing around the underground vault using only a torch for light, he provided an extensive description of the place, including a note about an alcove set in the western wall that gave access to an underground tunnel. Even more evidence that there is, in fact, a doorway there. A doorway now buried somewhere behind the new wall and tons of debris.”
111
Houston
It was early in the morning, well before sunrise, but Harry couldn’t sleep. He’d brewed a strong pot of coffee and was well into his second cup, thinking. His meeting with the local United States Attorney was scheduled for later in the day, but Harry was under few delusions that the meeting would go well. U.S. Attorneys were notorious assholes, and they didn’t get to where they were without absolutely owning the fine art of wiggling out of tight spots. And, of course, if they decided to be complete assholes, they could always rig up some phony charge or two to slap your ass in federal prison, just to keep you in
line.
The problem was, he had the three videos, plus the recanted testimony from the refinery worker, but that wasn’t enough. He needed some way to bring in the fourth file, the insider dope on how the whole game was being played out. But he couldn’t do that without breaking his promise to Gavin’s buddy. And he never broke a promise if he could help it. That left only one remaining alternative. Checking his watch, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed Gavin.
112
Siena
Sanders stood up and started pacing. “All right, you’ve convinced me, at least enough to give it a shot. But how do you propose getting to that doorway through all of that rock and dirt? It’s not like we can get a backhoe down there to clear it.”
“But you don’t need a backhoe, Bob. You just need a hose and a good pump.” Mehmed quickly sketched out a tried-and-true method archeologists had been using for years.
Sanders still looked skeptical. “But like you said, there must be tons of material behind that wall that we have to pull out to get to the door. That would take weeks at best. And where would we start? Cut into the left portion of the wall and just keep moving to the right until we find it?”
“No,” Mehmed explained. “To begin with, one of the Medusa heads is staring straight at it. Remember? The Medusas are guarding all the entrances. So the head that is staring at the western wall tells us exactly where to start digging.”
“Huh. Okay. I guess that’s a good start. But still, as soon as we start taking out the debris in that one area, the rocks and dirt stacked up on either side will just cave in from above, and that still leaves us at least a week—”
