The Last Templar

Chapter 55

W hen Tess woke up, daylight was filtering in from outside. She drowsily reached over, but her hand only found empty padding. She was alone in the sleeping bags, which had been zipped together. Sitting up, she remembered that she was naked and found the clothes that had been hurriedly discarded the night before.

Outside, the sun was higher than she expected, and on checking her watch she saw why. It was almost nine, and the sun was already halfway up a strikingly blue sky that was clear and unblemished. She squinted as she looked around, finding Reilly standing by the Pajero with his shirt off. He was shaving, using hot water from an immersion coil water heater plugged into the lighter socket.

As she walked up to him, he turned and said, "Coffee's ready." "I love this Ertugrul guy of yours," she marveled as she checked out a smoking thermos. The rich smell of the velvety black coffee roused her senses. "You guys really do travel in style."

"And you thought your tax dollars were being wasted." He wiped his shaving foam off and kissed her, and, as he did, she again saw the small, discreet silver crucifix on the thin chain around his neck that she had noticed the night before. It wasn't something people wore much these days, she thought, not in her neck of the woods anyway, and it had an old-world charm to it that threw her. She didn't think it would be something she'd find remotely 130

attractive, and yet, on him, it was somehow different. It seemed to fit; it was part of who he was.

A short while later, they were back on the road, the Pajero eating up the bumps and potholes of the pitted tarmac as they ventured further inland. They passed a few deserted houses and a small farmhouse before leaving the narrow road they were following to take an even narrower forest track that climbed steeply.

As they drove past a copse of balsam trees from which a young villager was tapping the fragrant resinous storax, Tess now saw the mountains looming ahead and felt a surge of excitement.

"Over there. See that?" Her pulse quickened as she pointed at a hill in the distance. Its peak had a distinctive, symmetrical profile. "That's it," she exclaimed. "The double humpback of the Kenjik ridge." Her eyes ate up the notes and the map in her hand as she reconciled them with the landscape before them. "We're there. The village should be in the valley just on the other side of those mountains."

The track cut through a thick cluster of pine trees, and as they emerged out of it and back into the light, they rounded a hillock and, with the Pajero now making use of the full might of its four-wheel drive, kept climbing up until they crested the ridge.

It wasn't what she expected. The sight hit her like a sledgehammer.

There, before them, nested in the valley between two ranges of lush, pine-covered mountains, stretched a huge lake.