The Babylon Idol

Chapter 32

In that vulnerable moment when the eyes need time to adapt to the darkness and the other senses step protectively in to provide the missing data, Ben stopped, set down his bag and stood completely still, as alert as a wild animal tuned into the tiniest sound, even a scent, that could alert it to danger. He could hear nothing.

As the darkness began to resolve itself into distinct shapes and shadows, he moved on deeper into the house. The small entrance hall was cold from the open door, but not freezing, telling him that the door hadn’t been lying ajar all that long. The hallway extended into a long, narrow corridor that passed through the middle of the building and was sectioned off by first one heavy glass interior door, then a second.

It was an unusual layout, but Ben didn’t have time to dwell on that now. Other doors radiated off left and right, leading to rooms that he checked one by one. For a few moments he experienced a strange sense of déjà vu, like a replay of entering Carlo Scanzi’s office in Florence, and he half expected to find a dead body slumped across the floor, bled out from a slashed throat like Anna’s agent. Or a sudden violent attack from multiple armed intruders. Ben’s whole body was jangling into full-on combat mode, ready to explode into action any instant and inflict serious damage on anything that moved.

The inside of the house was warm and smelled closed up, with aromas of stale cigarette smoke and cooking oil and spices that all but smothered an unpleasantly familiar background chemical tang lingering in the air which Ben couldn’t quite put his finger on. Daring to risk a little light, he dug his torch from the bag on his shoulder and flashed it around him. It wasn’t a big house. In the ninety seconds that it took him to sweep its half-dozen rooms he found no mutilated corpses, and no lurking intruders either.

But he did find the obvious signs of a struggle in the spare bedroom that Kavur had converted into a chaotically cluttered study. The overturned chair and the upset desk lamp, lying on its side in a sea of scattered papers and books, told him that Kavur had been deep in his work when his first set of unexpected visitors that night had turned up.

And now Ben understood what that odd, lingering chemical odour was, because he could smell it loud and clear inside the small study. The same type of alcohol-based sedative that Anna’s would-be kidnappers had intended to use on her in Olympia. This time around, the snatch had been successful. That explained the dragging footprints in the snow outside. Kavur had been dragged semi-conscious from the house and bundled into a waiting vehicle.

‘Someone was here, all right,’ Ben said when he went back to bring Anna inside and retrieve his bag. ‘Been and gone. And your friend with them.’

He shut the door and flipped the hallway light switch. Decor-wise, Kavur’s home was as drearily and unimaginatively furnished as might be expected of a reclusive single guy with no interests outside of his work. Except now that it was all brightly lit up, Ben could see a few unusual details about the place. The heavy glass doors that divided the corridor into sections were internal security doors with sophisticated electronic locks and full-height mesh-reinforced panes, probably capable of deflecting a rifle round. The doors off the corridor were set into metal frames and likewise fitted with combination keypads. The alarm system master control panel in the front hall near the door could have belonged in a high-security prison.

‘Who took him?’ Anna asked, eyes darting nervously about as though Kavur might still be hiding in a recess, waiting to jump out and surprise them.

‘You want to hazard a guess?’

‘But how did they know where to find him?’

‘And why did he let them in?’ Ben added. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as strange that a guy who obviously hasn’t spared any expense when it comes to security would just open the door to a bunch of kidnappers?’

‘Speaking of security —’ Anna flipped open a cover on the master control panel by the door. ‘July twentieth, 356 BC,’ she muttered to herself as she tapped in a code with a polished red fingernail.

‘You seem to know your way around,’ Ben commented.

‘That’s an easy one to remember, for a historian. It’s the birth date of Alexander the Great.’

‘Of course.’

Anna pointed at the alarm system. ‘Now we’re safe in here. Windows and doors are sealed and the electrified perimeter circuit is armed, but none of the internal security devices, like the pepper blaster, will activate. That was the first thing I made Ercan show me when I was here, in case I set it off by mistake.’

Ben stared at her. ‘Electrified perimeter? Pepper blaster?’

‘He was left some money by a rich relative. Rather than buy a house in a better part of town, he spent most of it on turning this place into a fortress. You have to disarm the system every time you open the front or back doors, or you can get an electric shock from the handles. And those —’ She pointed upwards at a small nozzle that pointed down at them from a ceiling light fitting. Ben noticed three more of them poking discreetly from elsewhere overhead. ‘Those will spray liquid pepper at any intruder who sets off the motion sensor. And you see those vents on the wall? An infrared tripwire triggers a fog device that fills the whole hallway so you can’t see.’

‘Which you couldn’t anyway, if your eyes were full of pepper spray.’

‘Those are just some of the modifications Ercan has made. Even the windows can withstand bullets.’

‘You told me he was a little strange,’ Ben said. ‘I wouldn’t say that at all.’

‘No?’

‘He’s a raving paranoid headcase.’

‘It’s not paranoia if they’re really after you,’ Anna said.

‘Hasn’t done him much good. They got in and grabbed him as easily as falling off a log.’

‘So it seems, and I don’t understand it,’ Anna said, anxiously chewing her lip. ‘What can have happened? Oh my God, I hope he’s all right.’

‘We’ll worry about that later. For the moment, let’s make sure that we are. Given that your friend is so obsessive about security, any chance he keeps a firearm around the place? Any kind will do.’

‘No, Ercan hates guns. He believes they’re responsible for war and violence.’

‘That’s logical. Did those million Mongolians and Ottomans all fight with guns at the Battle of Ankara six hundred years ago?’

She shrugged. ‘I guess he hates swords and spears and arrows too.’

Ben grunted. ‘Never mind. I’m sure he has plenty of lethal weapons in his kitchen, like normal people do.’

He returned to the tiny kitchen. Pots and pans and plates were stacked all over the place. He jerked open a drawer, found a carving knife and tucked it diagonally through his belt, pirate-style. ‘If you can’t have a gun, you can still have an edge,’ he said to Anna, who was staring at him. He could see she was on the edge of panic. He touched her arm and felt the rigidity of her muscles through the sleeve of her coat.

‘Where could they have taken him?’ she groaned. ‘What could they want with him?’

‘I can’t answer the first question,’ Ben told her. ‘And you already know the answer to the second. Whatever he discovered and was going to tell you that was so important, it’s important to Usberti as well. They took him away to work on him.’

He regretted that last part the moment he said it. It was a little more information than Anna could handle. But it was out now, and too late to retract it.

‘Work on him?’

‘Like they did to Gianni. Whatever it takes to get them to open up.’

‘Will they torture him?’ she blurted, horrified. ‘Kill him? Ben? Answer me.’

He said no more, deciding to keep his thoughts to himself. Such as the fact that he sensed something not quite right about the situation. This was a solidly built house, with thick walls, extremely efficiently sound-insulated by so many layers of security doors and well detached from the nearest neighbour. If you wanted to tie a guy up and torture information out of him, you’d have all the privacy you needed right here on the spot, and plenty of time to get your victim to spill whatever information you were after.

So why, in fact, had they taken Kavur away? That was another question Ben couldn’t fully answer — and not knowing was triggering his trusted sixth sense for danger and making him feel unsettled.

‘Now we’re here, let’s stay calm and have a look at what we came to see,’ he said after a few moments. He led her up the corridor, through the first security door, and to the room on the right which was Kavur’s study.

‘Look at this place,’ Anna breathed when she saw the state it was in.

‘This is where they took him,’ Ben said. ‘Seems he put up quite a struggle before they doped him. Now, we don’t want to stay here any longer than we have to, so show me what’s what.’

She pointed at a framed picture that was hanging away from the wall on a hinge. ‘That’s where he was keeping the pieces of the tablet.’

‘The old hidden wall safe,’ Ben said. ‘Not the most original hiding place.’ It was the size of a shoebox and inset in a rectangular hole in the plasterwork, with a small combination panel built into its half-inch steel door. The door was open. Ben peered inside. Empty, naturally.

‘They took the tablet fragments,’ she said.

‘They seem to know a lot, don’t they?’

As Anna stared helplessly around the wrecked study, Ben went to the window and tugged at the edge of the drawn curtain to take a look at the empty, snowy street outside. The uneasy feeling nagging at him kept intensifying as the minutes ticked by.

‘Wait,’ Anna said. ‘Of course. The document safe. That’s where he would have hidden whatever he had to tell me about.’

‘I hope it’s in a better place than the first one.’

‘Under the floorboards, somewhere about there,’ she said, pointing down at the large sheepskin rug that covered most of the floor. ‘Can you help me? We have to shift the desk to get to it.’

She removed her coat and laid it neatly over the back of an armchair. Ben was too warm inside the house but kept his leather jacket on. He went over to the desk and hooked his fingers under it to test its weight. It would be considerably lighter without the piled stacks of archaeology books and papers that littered its surface. He swept them to the floor with a crash. The place was a mess anyway.

‘Careful. Some of those books are rare and valuable.’

‘I think Ercan has bigger problems right now than a couple of dented books,’ Ben said. He heaved the desk aside, crouched down and pulled away the corner of the rug. The boards under it had been sawn to make a square trapdoor about two feet across. Ben used the carving knife to prise it up, revealing the upward-facing grey steel door of the floor safe.

‘Locked,’ Anna said with grim satisfaction. ‘They wouldn’t have thought to look here.’

‘Or they drugged him up before he could tell them about it. Either way, unless you have a crowbar in your handbag we’re going to need a key to get into this thing.’

‘Kitchen,’ she said. Ben followed as she hurried from the study, turned right, darted further up the corridor, heaved her way through the second glass door with a small grunt, then entered the room on the left. As he joined her she was bent down by Kavur’s fridge and entering a code to unlock it. The kitchen was tiny, with a small table and a single chair shoehorned in between worktops and cupboards. The back door was another high-security affair. As, it seemed, was at least one of Ercan Kavur’s appliances.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he muttered. ‘The fridge squirts poison gas at anyone who tries to pinch Ercan’s beer.’

‘Ercan doesn’t drink beer, he’s a Muslim.’ Anna opened the fridge door, slid open one of the plastic compartments at the bottom and took out a large iceberg lettuce. Before Ben was able to make comment, she turned it upside down and he saw that it was actually a convincing resin fake, hollowed to contain a small key safe with another press-button number pad.

‘Mail order from the paranoid shop,’ Ben said.

‘Fourteen fifty-three. Fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires with the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans under Mehmed the Conqueror.’ Anna tapped in the number, and the hidden compartment flipped open to let a key drop into her palm.

‘You need a damn good memory to live in this place.’

‘The code to get inside the document safe is the most important of all,’ Anna said. ‘Ercan wanted me to know it, in case anything happened to him. He suffers from a lot of medical conditions, most of them probably psychosomatic, and has always believed he could die at any minute.’

‘This gets better and better,’ Ben said. ‘What friends you have.’

‘But neither he nor I could have predicted what’s happened to him now.’

Ben took the key from her hand. ‘Let’s go and find out what he had to tell you.’