The Shroud

by Harold Robbins

  Even if I was still being tracked by God knows who, quick changes in travel plans would at least keep them hopping.

  If I was going to be a target, I might as well make myself a moving one.

  A fast-moving one.

  PART THREE

  Istanbul

  A City of History

  The city of Istanbul extends from the European side to the Asian side of the straits called the Bosporus, making it the only city in the world situated on two continents.

  Once called Constantinople, the city has served as the capital of four great empires (Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman empires).

  It was here that the first Christian Roman emperor ensured the supremacy of Christianity in the Western world.

  It was here that the most sacred icon of Christianity, the Image of Edessa, also called the Mandylion, was brought.

  The Rape of Constantinople by “Christian” Crusaders

  The Latin soldiery subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale which even the ancient Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable. Constantinople had become a veritable museum of ancient and Byzantine art, an emporium of such incredible wealth that the Latins were astounded at the riches they found … The Crusaders vented their hatred for the Greeks most spectacularly in the desecration of the greatest Church in Christendom. They smashed the silver iconostasis, the icons and the holy books of Hagia Sophia, and seated upon the patriarchal throne a whore who sang coarse songs as they drank wine from the Church’s holy vessels … The Greeks were convinced that even the Turks, had they taken the city, would not have been as cruel as the Latin Christians …

  —SPEROS VRYONIS, BYZANTIUM AND EUROPE, P. 152

  24

  I crossed the terminal at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport wearing sunglasses and a headscarf. No doubt I looked like a woman hiding from killers or an abusive husband, but no one in the large, cosmopolitan airport gave me a suspicious look. Even better, no one from a limo service was grinning and holding a big sign with my name on it.

  I felt that I had succeeded in at least getting to Istanbul without someone stepping on my heels. Or putting a knife in my back. But, as they say, the day was young …

  I’d been in Istanbul once before. At that time I was on a buying trip for the Piedmont Museum and stayed at the Ciragan Palace Hotel on the banks of the Bosporus. A former palace where the last sultans of the Ottoman Empire lived, the Ciragan, like the Burq al-Arab, was a world-class hotel that hosted presidents and kings.

  The “Ottoman Empire” would be only a vaguely familiar name to many Westerners today, though most of us know an “ottoman” as a cushioned footstool. But right up until the twentieth century and World War I, the Ottoman Empire was one of the greatest empires on earth.

  At its peak, it included much of the Mediterranean region, including most of North Africa—places like Egypt, Libya, and Algeria; most of the Middle East, including what is now Israel, Syria, Iraq, and other Arabian nations; most of the Balkans, including Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania; and even much of Hungary, along with what today is modern Turkey.

  Most of us don’t realize that had a battle or two gone the wrong way when European armies fought the Ottoman Turks, we in the Western world would be getting down on our hands and knees several times a day and praying to Allah …

  My earlier trip to Turkey occurred during a much simpler time of my life. The expenses for the trip were picked up by my employer—and I wasn’t tangled in mystery and foreign intrigue and on the run from killers.

  Keeping up with Lipton’s technique of booking me into the best accommodations, my itinerary said I was staying in a suite at the Ciragan Hotel. Obviously, I wouldn’t be staying there …

  Lipton’s plan to keep me eager and distracted with world-class accommodations only worked when it didn’t include attempts to murder me.

  I told a taxi driver at the airport to take me to the Four Seasons in the Sultanahmet district. The Turkish-speaking driver understood immediately—hotels and restaurant names are part of the universal language spoken by taxi drivers.

  The Four Seasons was a classy hotel. Housed in a hundred-year-old former Ottoman prison, the hotel actually looked to me more like a Disneyland property than a former torture chamber.

  However, I wasn’t staying at the Four Seasons, either.

  After the taxi let me off at the Four Seasons, I walked in, did a quick change in a restroom, and walked out. My carry-on luggage was the kind that could be rolled or used as a backpack. I rolled it into the hotel and had it on my back when I walked out. I also ditched my sunglasses and headscarf.

  I walked up the street before I got into another taxi, this time having the driver take me to the mother of all malls: Kapali Carsi, the Covered Marketplace, famously known as the Grand Bazaar.

  I had decided that the best way to lose people who were tracking me was to get lost myself—and there was no better place to do it than the Grand Bazaar.

  The statistics about the place alone are mind-boggling: close to five hundred years old, it has more than four thousand shops, nearly two dozen gateways, five dozen streets, many of which are a winding labyrinth.

  Visited by several hundred thousand people a day, it isn’t just a shopping center, not even a city within the city—it is a world unto itself.

  Within its high-vaulted domed streets and buildings, everything under the sun is sold.

  I entered by one of the four main gates and hurried down vaulted corridors, ignoring the offers of merchants to save me vast amounts of money on everything from splendid-looking rugs and jewelry to tourist junk.

  I loved the Grand Bazaar. Looking closely, I could see beyond modern merchandise and storefronts to the vestiges of the past. However, my favorite Eastern marketplace was the older Khan el-Khalili in Cairo’s Old City.

  I truly have an old soul, at least in terms of the way the old-fashioned romanticism and exotic atmosphere of ancient sites speak to me in thrilling ways.

  I could wander the great old sites in Istanbul, Athens, Rome, and up the Nile for all my days … except for the fact that besides starving to death in a short time, I would be constantly bumping into tourists, not a small number of which were women showing too much bare flesh by wearing shorts and halter tops in socially conservative countries.

  With a sigh of regret, I found my way out of the maze by getting back to the jewelry corridor and back out onto the city street and into another taxi.

  I took the taxi back down to the Sultanahmet area, where the city’s stunning antiquity sites were lined up like ancient gems. I could have walked the distance, or even taken a tram, but the backpack was starting to give me a backache and I would have been down to crawling along on my knees by the time I got back to the area.

  I was getting tired of playing hide-and-seek, not really knowing if I was being followed. Besides, deep down I knew that my maneuvers wouldn’t work for too long anyway.

  Being clever with a plane reservation and hotel might have worked with an abusive husband, but not the kind of government-connected people I was trying to evade. However, knowing it and surrendering to it were two different things. For now, I’d keep making myself hard to find. If nothing else, it gave me some breathing space.

  At the moment, I needed a hotel room to dump my bag.

  I got out of the taxi by the Blue Mosque in the very heart of the city’s historical section. The Four Seasons was a few blocks from the mosque, but my intention was to find a less conspicious hotel. I knew the area had small hotels and bed-and-breakfasts and my preference was to go for one of them.

  I had taken a tour of the mosque during my first trip to the city, hiring one of the so-called guides there to explain the history.

  Officially called the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, it’s known as the Blue Mosque because of its blue and green interior tiles. Four hundred years old, with six towering minarets, the mosque was built on the site of
a palace of the Byzantine emperors and considered a great architectural achievement of the Ottoman Empire.

  Despite my aching back, I couldn’t resist wandering into the park in front of the mosque to admire what little was left of a great superstadium of the ancient world—the Hippodrome.

  The park setting, two ancient obelisks, and a couple other monuments were the only remnants left of the horse- and chariot-racing stadium.

  Awesome in size and grandeur, the Hippodrome sports arena had held a hundred thousand spectators in Roman times. In the days when the emperor Constantine the Great called the city New Rome and made it a capital of the empire, the city was the largest and most important city in the Western world. After he died the city began to be called Constantinople, “the City of Constantine.”

  The enormous ancient stadium with vast crowds and stunning pageantry had to be imagined, but walking on the hallowed grounds sent shivers up my aching back.

  To create a metropolis that rivaled great cities like Rome and Alexandria, Constantine and other emperors robbed art treasures of Egypt and Greece. An obelisk of an Egyptian pharaoh was among the loot that gave the Hippodrome some of its magnificence beyond its sheer colossal size.

  I stopped to admire the Egyptian obelisk, created by the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III. Dead now for nearly four thousand years, he left a magnificent monument behind.

  Fifteen hundred years ago the obelisk was transported from Egypt’s Temple of Karnak, down the Nile, and across the Mediterranean to the Hippodrome.

  The tall sphere in front of me was only one of three parts that the original obelisk was cut into for transportation. Another obelisk, called the Walled Obelisk, stood nearby. It was actually built for the stadium.

  I paused and looked down at a pit where the remains of another great looted piece of antiquity stood: the Tripod of Plataea.

  Cast by the Greeks to celebrate its victory over the Persians four hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Tripod was taken from the mystic religious Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece and set in the middle of the stadium.

  Its top was once adorned by a golden bowl supported by three serpent heads. While parts of the heads are displayed in the city’s archeological museum, the bowl was stolen during a sack of the city by Crusaders. Now all that remained in the recessed area near the obelisks was the base, called the Serpent Column because of its coils.

  Like in the marketplace, I had to look at what remained to imagine the whole picture; it excited me, though, and made me almost breathless, to stand on a spot surrounded by so much history and magnificent edifices of the ancient world.

  I’d heard that more pieces of the ancient stadium had been unearthed since I last visited the city, but I was too busy at the moment trying to stay alive to find out more about the discoveries.

  I was happy to be back in the Sultanahmet area—just thinking about the exotic riches of history I was surrounded by made me dizzy. I hadn’t chosen it for its historical sites and atmosphere, but because at any given time it had more Westerners per square foot than anywhere else in the city. I wanted people around I could mingle and fade into the crowd with.

  All tourists who came to Istanbul ended up in the Sultanahmet. As a Western woman, I would be less conspicuous here than anywhere else in the city.

  A young Aussie couple asked me if I’d take a picture of them, with their camera, standing in front of the Thutmose obelisk. After I took their picture, I asked them where they were staying.

  She pointed at a busy street running by the Blue Mosque. “Across the big street and up the smaller one. It’s a small bed-and-breakfast place. Clean rooms and nice people run it,” the girl said. “There’s plenty of rooms because it’s the off-season.”

  A tiny hotel off the beaten path sounded like the perfect place to hide.

  25

  I walked over to the bed-and-breakfast and checked out the room before registering. The room was small with little furniture, just an end table, lamp, and a double bed so low, it almost seemed like the mattress was on the floor. But the polished wood floor was shiny and clean, the linen smelled fresh, and the tiny bathroom was a big surprise—walled and floored in marble.

  Clean, safe, in the heart of things, and seventy dollars a night—including breakfast. Unbeatable.

  I left my backpack and went to find something to eat and to think about my next move.

  I had spotted a pizza joint down the busy street that ran by the Blue Mosque. I was in exotic Istanbul, a place of lamb kebabs and stuffed grape leaves, but I was hungry for pizza and a soda.

  I headed for the pizza place. Farther down the street were more of the crown jewels of the medieval and ancient worlds, while not much farther was a narrow waterway that has seen more history than Rome’s Appian Way.

  The Sultanahmet—named for Sultan Ahmed—is on a peninsula poking into the Bosporus, part of the waterway that divides the Black Sea from the Mediterranean, and Europe from Asia.

  Few places on the planet have seen so much of the rise and fall of empires, the clash of armies, and the incredible variances of civilizations over the eons, as this city, the Sultanahmet district, and the waterway that puts half of the city in Europe and the other half in Asia.

  The city had been the capital of the entire Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman-Byzantine Empire after the empire was split, the Latin Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and was now the main city of modern Turkey.

  Going back even further, centuries before the rise of the Roman Empire and a thousand years before the rise of Christianity, the region was important to the ancient Greeks memorialized by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

  For eons, armies of conquest had crossed the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

  One of the most famous occurred when a Persian king named Xerxes built “bridges” made of wooden ships spanning the Hellespont, a channel west of modern Istanbul. His intent was to invade the ancient Greek city-states of Athens, Sparta, and others.

  When a storm destroyed the bridges, he had the sea whipped …

  What an ego the king must have had. But maybe it worked, because he had the bridges rebuilt and managed to march an army of hundreds of thousands of men across from Asia to Europe.

  Despite all the effort—and vastly outnumbering the Greeks—Xerxes ended up being defeated because three hundred Spartans immortalized by history (and Hollywood) held up his army at a narrow pass until the Greeks could get their act together. His navy was also defeated by the Greeks with a little help from the wind god.

  Down the street from the Blue Mosque and the pizza joint is the Hagia Sophia, Church of the Holy Wisdom, with its mammoth central dome. It was the largest cathedral in Christendom for a thousand years—in fact, the largest freestanding structure on the planet for those ten centuries.

  Even older than St. Peter’s at the Vatican in Rome, it became a mosque when the city fell to the Muslims about five hundred years ago. Despite the march of armies, ravages of time, and brutal changes in religious orientation, it still stands proud as a museum now.

  Not far from there is the vast Topkapi Palace complex, another of the must-see, fascinating remnants of might and unlimited riches, built over five hundred years ago by Sultan Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople at the age of twenty-one and turned the citadel of Christian imperial power into a great city of Islam.

  Unimaginably opulent in the days when it was the residence of the Ottoman rulers, it once housed four thousand people, and had quarters for hundreds of women in the harem.

  It was thrilling to be in Istanbul again.

  I just wished that I could’ve concentrated on the incredible beauty and stunning historical sites rather than worrying about being shoved in front of a speeding truck.

  So much history, so little time—and I had to keep watching my back.

  As I devoured my pizza, I realized that my satellite phone had yet to ring. I found that strange. Lipton had to have known for hours that I
had ducked out on him.

  Then it occurred to me that Lipton might be busy staying alive himself.

  If he wasn’t behind Vahid trying to kill me, he might be ducking killers. And might not have ducked fast enough.

  No. I rejected the idea that Lipton could be dead. He was such a cunning bastard, he’d make sure that I went first.

  But another nasty thought struck me—was my role in his scheme as bait to throw others off his track? Had he staked me out like a lamb to sidetrack his mafia pals or whoever else was looking for him?

  I was building on the sacrificial lamb theory when the phone suddenly went off and I nearly jumped off the restaurant seat.

  I stared at it, unsure of whether I wanted to answer it. The vibration mode was on and the phone made a sound that reminded me of a rattlesnake shaking its warning.

  I finally picked it up. “Yes?”

  A deep sigh, full of disappointment and regret, came from Lipton on the other end.

  “My dear, I went through so much trouble and expense to make things run smoothly for you, and you take wing like a startled bird. So much planning and you play hooky. If we weren’t such old friends, I’d think that you were deliberately avoiding me.”

  “Tell me, old friend, did the planning include having me run over?”

  “Run over?”

  “Your friend Vahid shoved me in front of a truck. A moving one.”

  “I know nothing about that. You don’t think—”

  “Yes, I do. In fact, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. Including why you sent me all the way to Urfa to get information that you could have gotten with a phone call.”

  “I told you, it’s the nuances, those little clues that can only be picked up by—”

  “I picked up some nuances and clues, all right. Something more is going on here than researching the Image—that you’re not telling me.”

  “You have been paid well, my dear.”

  His voice was chilly—colder than a Dubai ski run. I’d heard it before—this was the tone Lipton took in the old days when he didn’t consider the millions that were being offered enough for what he was selling.