The Templar Salvation

Chapter 18

ISTANBUL,TURKEY

Reilly spotted Vedat Ertugrul just as the Alitalia Airbus’s cabin door swung open. The legal attache of the Bureau’s Istanbul suboffice, a paunchy American of Turkish descent with a trumpet player’s jowls and puffy crescents under his eyes, was waiting for them at the edge of the jetway. They’d met briefly three years earlier, in the southern coastal town of Antalya, when the legat had proven to be very efficient and easygoing. Reilly hoped that was still the case as he stepped out to meet him, with Tess close behind.

A couple of darker-skinned men were standing there alongside Ertugrul, one in a navy blue police officer’s uniform with a gold star on each shoulder, the other in a charcoal-colored suit over a white shirt. Both had humorless, dark brown eyes, buzz cuts, and severe mustaches accessorizing the stern expressions on their faces. After quick introductions all around, Ertugrul, the chief of police, and the spook led Reilly and Tess out of the air-conditioned jetway through a side door and down some stairs to the tarmac. Even though it was late in the afternoon, the air was still stiflingly hot and dry, made worse by the stench of aviation fuel.

Two black Suburbans with tinted windows were waiting for them by the plane’s front landing gear. Moments later, the armored SUVs were being waved through the airport’s security gates and storming off toward the Queen of Cities.

Ertugrul, riding in the middle row directly in front of Reilly, twisted around to face him and handed him a holstered handgun and a box of shells. “These are for you.”

Reilly took the gun and checked it over. It was a standard issue Glock 22 with a fifteen-round magazine, no scratches on it and freshly oiled. He clipped the holster onto his belt and slipped the gun into it. “Thanks.”

“I’ll need you to sign for them,” Ertugrul said, handing Reilly the forms and a pen. “I spoke to Tilden just as your plane came in,” he added, “and, well, it’s not looking great.”

“Nothing from the prints?” Reilly asked as he signed the forms.

Ertugrul shook his head. “New York’s liaising with Langley, the NSA, and the DOD on trying to pin an ID on this guy, but so far, nothing.”

“We’ve got to have him on file somewhere,” Reilly grumbled as he handed him back the paperwork. “This guy’s no amateur. He’s done this kind of thing before.”

“Well if he has, he’s been pretty good about ducking the limelight.”

Reilly fumed for a beat and looked out at the cloudless sky. Several jets were lined up on final approach, an array of silver dots that stretched as far as he could see. It was peak season in Istanbul, and tourists were flocking in from all over. “What about the border controls here?”

The chief of police, who was seated next to Ertugrul in the middle row, turned and caught his eye.

“He’s coming here,” Reilly told him. “If he’s not here already.”

“You’re assuming he’s already reached the same conclusions as the boys from the Vatican archives,” Ertugrul queried.

“I’m sure he has,” Reilly insisted. “He’s still got Simmons to figure things out for him.”

Ertugrul and the cop exchanged a few words in Turkish, then Ertugrul told Reilly, “Our friends have the country on a tight lockdown. Most of the airports here are also military airfields, and given the situation with the Kurds and with everything that’s going on in Iraq, the security is usually pretty tight anyway. The thing is, we don’t have much to go on for the main perp. We don’t even know what kind of passport he’s using.” He rummaged through his briefcase and pulled out a couple of printouts that he passed back to Reilly. “The only face we can really ask them to look out for is Simmons’s.”

Reilly perused the all-ports alert. It had parallel paragraphs in both Turkish and English and consisted of the usual bold, urgent lettering and a couple of short, descriptive paragraphs alongside two photographs: one, a grainy, pretty useless one from the Vatican CCTV cameras of the bomber; the other, a clear, smiling passportlike portrait shot of Simmons, showing a ruggedly handsome man with shoulder-length, wavy hair and probing eyes. A young, ruggedly handsome man.

It was the first time Reilly had seen a picture of the missing archaeologist. He turned to Tess, surprised. She was seated next to him on the rear bench. “That’s Jed Simmons?”

“Yeah, why?”

Reilly studied her with a bemused look on his face, then shrugged. “Nothing.”

“What?”

He saw that Ertugrul and the Turkish officer were having a sidebar, and leaned in a bit closer to Tess. “When you said he was this famous archaeologist and this big Templar expert and all that … I kind of pictured someone older. And nerdier.” He paused, then threw in, “Maybe uglier too.”

Tess let out a small chuckle. “That, he ain’t,” she teased. “And he’s so fit. I mean, my God, you should see him kitesurf. Talk about ripped.”

“Professor Jed Simmons, brainbox-slash-hunk. Who knew?” Reilly muttered wryly.

Tess studied him curiously for a beat, then whisper-laughed. “Oh my God. You’re actually jealous, aren’t you?”

Before he could find an answer to that, Ertugrul turned again to face them.

“We also tracked down Behrouz Sharafi’s wife and kid. I went and saw her last night. She’s in bad shape, as you can imagine. Our friends here have got them under protective custody.”

Reilly frowned. “What are they going to do?”

“It’s a tough one. They can’t exactly go home to Iran, not given who might be behind all this.”

“You talked to our guys?” Reilly asked him.

Ertugrul nodded. “Yeah. The station chief spoke to the ambassador and the consul. Shouldn’t be a problem to get them political refugee status. She’s got cousins in San Diego, so that’s a possibility.”

“And the research assistant?”

“There’s no sign of him. It looks like he got out of Dodge already. Around the same time Sharafi went to Jordan it seems.” His expression darkened as his mind seemed to latch on to something else. “That poor bastard. I wonder if he was still alive before …” His eyes darted hesitantly sideways at Tess, and his voice trailed off. He then remembered something else, causing him to rifle through the paperwork in his hands before passing another sheet back to Reilly.

“On that front, we got something,” he told him. “The unexploded bomb, the one that was in the car with you, Miss Chaykin?” He gave her a glance that was somewhat apologetic. “The bomb tech guys’ report came in. It was a serious piece of hardware. Twenty pounds of C4 jacked to a cell phone.”

Reilly was already scanning the sheet. “No taggants?”

“None.”

“What are taggants?” Tess asked.

“Manufacturers of explosives such as C4 and Semtex are bound by international conventions to add unique marker chemicals to their products, to help identify their provenance if needed,” Ertugrul explained. “And surprisingly, the system works. You rarely see untagged material. One place we have seen it, though, is in Iraq. In car bombs.”

“Car bombs attributed to Iranian-backed insurgents,” Reilly added.

Ertugrul turned back to Reilly. “Also, the architecture was identical to devices we’ve seen there. The way the circuit board was hot-wired. The solder points on the detonator caps. Right down to the wiring itself. Whoever put it together studied under the same jihad master.” He gave Reilly a pointed look. “We may not have much, but what we do have all seems to be pointing at Tehran.”

Reilly caught a noticeable hardening in the Turkish intelligence officer’s jawline at the mention. The Turks and the Iranians weren’t exactly BFFs. It wasn’t a big secret that the Iranians had been supporting the Kurdish Workers Party separatists inside Turkey for more than two decades, supplying them with weapons and explosives and participating in their drug smuggling operations. The fact that the Kurdish militants had, in the last few years, spread their theater of operations to inside Iran itself, was only of little solace to the long-aggrieved Turks. If their quarry—who was already a wanted man in Turkey for the beheading of Sharafi’s daughter’s teacher—was an Iranian agent, the Turks would want nothing more than to get their hands on him and string him up to an outraged world.

The highway ramped upward as they reached the big Karayolu interchange, opening up a clear view of the city’s full majesty. Its seven hills rose and fell gently in the distance, each one of them topped by a monumental mosque, their massive, squat domes and thin, rocketlike minarets giving the imperial city its unique, otherwordly skyline. In the far distance, to their right, was the largest of them all, Hagia Sophia, the church of the holy wisdom, for close to a thousand years the largest cathedral in the world, before it was converted into a mosque after the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453. The city that was once known as “the city of the world’s desire,” the imperial capital that had endured more sieges and attacks than any other city on Earth, was the only city on the planet that straddled two continents. Ever since it was founded more than two thousand years ago, it had been a place where East and West met—and battled. A dual role that it was still, it seemed, destined to play.

“So this piece of info … you said you think the target’s coming to Istanbul to try and find out where some old monastery is?” Ertugrul asked.

“The Templar at the heart of what’s going on is a knight called Conrad. There’s very little about him out there, but the guys at the Vatican archives found references to him in the scans of the Registry,” Reilly explained. “That’s what our target was after. See, Conrad was in Cyprus after the crusaders got kicked out of Acre in 1291. Simmons knew that already. But there was more info in the Registry, about what happened to him after that.”

He deferred to Tess. She picked up the baton. “In the months and years after the arrest warrants were issued in 1307,” she told Ertugrul, “a small army of inquisitors were sent out to round up any fugitive Templars and confiscate whatever Templar assets they could get their hands on. One of those inquisitors, a priest who’d been dispatched to Cyprus to track down the Templars who’d been exiled from there, had sailed on to the mainland and spent a year roaming the area between Antioch and Constantinople hunting them down. In his journal, he recorded coming across a derelict monastery tucked away up in the mountains that was strewn with the skeletons of its monks. He then recorded finding the tombs of three Templars in a canyon not far from there. According to the markings he found by the tombs, one of the knights buried there is our man Conrad.”

“What mountains was he talking about?”

“Mount Argaeus,” Tess said. “It’s an old Latin name. You probably know it as Mount Erciyes.”

Ertugrul nodded, recognizing the name. “Erciyes Dagi. It’s an extinct volcano.” He gave them a dubious look. “It’s big.”

“I know,” Reilly said somberly.

“It’s bang in the middle of the country, in Anatolia. There’s a skiing resort there somewhere.” Ertugrul thought about it for a moment, then said, “So that’s the monastery you want the guys at the Patriarchate to help you locate?”

Reilly nodded. “Right now, Conrad’s trail ends with his grave. I think there’s a good chance that’s where our target’s headed, hoping to find some clue to the location of what the knights took back from the monks. But we don’t know exactly where those graves are, and he doesn’t either. In his journal, the inquisitor only described the location of the canyon relative to the monastery—but we don’t know where that is.”

“Can’t we extrapolate his journey by trying to fit it to the terrain around the mountain?”

“The area is riddled with valleys and canyons. Without knowing where the inquisitor set off from, we’d be guessing,” Tess told him. “We need to know where the monastery is to use it as a starting point, to know what direction to look in.”

“What we do know is that it’s a Basilian monastery,” Reilly added. “Meaning it’s an Orthodox monastery.”

“And if there’s any record of it, the first place to look would be at the heart of the Orthodox Church,” Ertugrul inferred.

“Exactly,” Reilly agreed. “If we find the monastery, we can follow the inquisitor’s pointers from there to get to the Templars’ graves. And if we can get there first, maybe we’ll find our bomber—and Simmons—there.”

“Well, I spoke to the archbishop’s secretary after we spoke,” Ertugrul told him. “They’re expecting us.” He shrugged and added, “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Reilly felt a boil of rage bubble up inside him as he remembered how perfectly the bomber had played his role, from the point he’d met Reilly at the airport in Rome until Reilly had confronted him in the Popemobile. The man didn’t seem to leave anything to chance, and Reilly didn’t think they ought to be hoping for a lucky break here either. It was going to take more than that to bring him down.

They got off the highway and slipped into the chaotic streets of central Istanbul. Loud diesel belches from old trucks and buses and irate car horns blared around them as they cut through the city, heading toward the defensive walls that lined the calm waters of the Golden Horn. The small convoy navigated through a few turns before veering into a narrow, one-way lane that rose up a gentle hill, skirting a tall wall to its left.

“There’s the Phanar,” Ertugrul told them, referring to the Patriarchate by its nickname as he pointed out the window.

Reilly and Tess looked out. Beyond the wall lay the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, which was to the Orthodox Church what the Vatican was to the Catholics—though nowhere near as grand. The Orthodox Church wasn’t a unified movement and didn’t have one spiritual leader at its head. It was fragmented and had a different patriarch wherever it had a large body of followers, such as in Russia, Greece, or Cyprus. The ecumenical patriarch of Istanbul, however, was considered its ceremonial leader—the “first among equals”—but his Patriarchate was still nothing more than a humble cluster of unprepossessing buildings.

The compound was built around the Cathedral of St. George, a plain, domeless church that had started off as a convent. The whole church could probably have fit inside the nave of St. Peter’s cathedral, with room to spare. Still, it was the spiritual center of Orthodoxy, a beautifully decorated church that housed several treasured relics, including part of the Column of Flagellation to which Jesus was tied and whipped before His crucifixion. The leafy compound also included a monastery, some administrative offices, and—of most interest to Reilly and Tess—the Patriarchate Library.

About seventy yards or so from the compound’s entrance, the cars ahead of the armored SUVs slowed to a crawl. The approach road, which rose to the top of the hill before dropping back softly, was lined with parked cars on both sides, and was only wide enough for a single lane of traffic, which was now grinding to a halt. A couple of impatient car horns were quick to challenge the delay. Reilly, frustrated by the holdup, leaned sideways for a better look. Up ahead, about a dozen cars down the lane, a small crowd was clustered around the Patriarchate’s main gate. They seemed agitated and were all looking at something inside the compound and pointing up at it. A small tour van and a taxi that were dropping off some visitors were also stalled there, their drivers out of their vehicles and looking up in the same direction.

Reilly followed their gazes across and into the compound, and saw what they were all looking at. A plume of black smoke was rising from the far corner of one of its buildings.

And then he saw something else.

A lone figure, walking out of the compound.

A man with short, dark hair, wearing the black cassock of a priest, walking with a casual gait, maybe a bit hurried, but not in a way that would draw attention.

A burst of blood flushed through Reilly’s temples.

“That’s him,” he blurted, climbing out of his seat as he pointed dead ahead. “That priest, right there. That’s our guy. The son of a bitch is right there.”