The Templar Salvation

Chapter 22

By the time Reilly made it back to the Patriarchate, the compound was one big, chaotic mess. The approach road was choked by fire engines, ambulances, and police cars. Emergency services personnel were swarming around frenetically, doing what they did best.

He’d swum onto one of the support piers and climbed back onto the bridge. A cop had finally made it onto the scene and, after some wrangling, agreed to drive him back to the Phanar. He’d taken off his shirt and slipped on his jacket, which he’d pulled off before jumping into the water, but his trousers were still drenched, which hadn’t exactly endeared him to his driver either. Because of the mess and the security lockdown, he’d had to walk the last couple of hundred yards and found Tess standing by the gates. Ertugrul was alongside her, as were a couple of young paramilitary soldiers who looked a bit too trigger-happy for comfort. Frustrated cops were having a hard time keeping reporters and curious bystanders away while a small army of cats—revered in Istanbul as the bearers of good luck—sprawled on the walls and sidewalks around them and calmly observed the proceedings.

Tess’s face erupted with relief when she spotted him, then her expression went all curious as his shirtless-and-soggy-pants look came into focus.

She gave him a quick kiss and held his arms. “You’ve got to get out of those clothes.”

“My bag still in the car?” he asked Ertugrul.

“Yeah,” the legat answered. “It’s parked down the road.”

Reilly glanced into the compound, where some paramedics were loading a gurney into an ambulance. The body lying on it was fully covered up by a gray blanket, head included. A gaggle of priests were crowding around it, their expressions forlorn, their shoulders sagging.

Reilly looked a question at Ertugrul.

“Father Alexios. The grand archimandrite of the library. One bullet, right between the eyes.”

“They also found the body of a dead priest in an alleyway down the road,” Tess added.

“No cassock,” Reilly deduced.

Tess nodded.

He expected as much. “And the fire?”

“It’s out, but the library’s a mess, as you can imagine,” Ertugrul said. After a frustrated grunt, he added, “I guess he got what he came for.”

“Again,” Reilly noted, the word laced with acid.

He stood there, his fists balled with rage, and took in the scene silently for another moment, then said, “I’ll be right back,” and headed down the road to change.

He was halfway there when he remembered something, and fished out his BlackBerry from his jacket. Aparo picked up on the first ring.

“Fill me in, buddy,” his partner urged.

“I lost him. The guy’s a fucking lunatic.” The sideswipe that catapulted the bus off the bridge flashed in his mind’s eye. “You said you had something for me?”

“Yeah,” Aparo confirmed. “We finally got a hit from military intel. Talk about pulling teeth. These guys are really cagey about who they share with.”

“So who is he?”

“We don’t have a name. Just a previous.”

“Where?”

“Baghdad, three years ago. You remember that computer expert, the one that was grabbed from the Finance Ministry?”

Reilly knew about it. It had caused quite a furor at the time, back in the summer of 2007. The man, an American, had been plucked out of the technology center of the ministry along with his five bodyguards. The kidnappers had shown up in full Iraqi Republican Guard regalia and just marched in and grabbed the men under the guise of “arresting” them. The specialist had only arrived in Baghdad a day earlier. He was there to install a sophisticated new software system that would keep track of the billions of dollars of international aid money and local oil revenues that were flowing through Iraq’s ministries—billions that were going missing almost as fast as they were coming in. Intelligence sources knew that a lot of the missing funds were being diverted to Iran’s militia groups in Iraq, courtesy of Iran’s cheerleaders who occupied many top Iraqi government posts and who, no doubt, helped themselves to a healthy commission along the way. No one wanted the corruption to stop, or for it to be exposed. The Finance Ministry had been shamelessly resisting the software’s implementation for more than two years. And so the man who’d been finally flown in to try to put a stop to the embezzlement was snatched less than twenty-four hours after landing there, right from his keyboard in the very heart of the Finance Ministry.

The kidnapping had been meticulously planned and executed, and was attributed to the Al-Quds force—the word was Arabic for “Jerusalem”—a special unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard for covert foreign operations. When the American specialist and his bodyguards were found executed a couple of weeks later, the anti-Iranian rhetoric coming from the White House escalated. A half dozen Iranian officials were caught and detained by U.S. forces in the north of the country. Never one to resist stoking the flames of conflict with reckless abandon, Iran’s leadership—via a supposedly unaffiliated, rogue militia group called the Asaib Ahl Al-Haq, or the “Righteous League”—proceeded to launch an even more brazen attack, this time on the provincial headquarters in Karbala, during a high-level meeting between U.S. and Iraqi officials. It was even more audacious and brazen than the earlier kidnapping. A dozen Al-Quds operatives showed up at the gates of the base in a fleet of black Suburbans that were identical to the ones used there by U.S. military contractors. They were dressed just like the mercenaries and spoke perfect English, so much so that the Iraqis guarding the gates were convinced they were American—and let them in. Once inside, the commandos ran amuck. They killed one American soldier and grabbed four others, whom they executed shortly after storming out of the compound. It ended up being the third-deadliest day in Iraq for U.S. troops. Amazingly, no Iraqis had been injured in the raid.

“He was there. Your target. He was one of the guys who hit the base,” Aparo told him. “His prints match a print they lifted off one of the cars they left behind. And according to the intel we had, both ops were pulled off by the same team, so it’s possible—even probable—that he was also involved in the programmer’s kidnapping.”

“Do we know anything about him?”

“Nope,” Aparo told him. “Nothing at all. The guys behind the raids just vanished. All I can tell you is that it looks like he was there. But it gives us some insight into what the rest of his CV might look like. I mean, who knows what else this asshole’s been involved in. It sounds to me like he’s their go-to guy when they need something special done.”

Reilly frowned. “Lucky us.” He knew that if history was anything to go by, this wasn’t looking promising at all. In every confrontation between the U.S. and Iran since Khomeini came to power in 1979, Iran had come out on top.

“You’ve got to nail his ass, Sean. Find him and wipe him off the face of the Earth.”

A siren startled Reilly. He turned to see one of the ambulances rushing down the road, and stepped aside to let it through.

“Let’s find him first,” he told Aparo, “and when we do, I’m not exactly planning to split a six-pack with him.”