The Templar Salvation

Chapter 54

As Tess had deduced, the carpet seller was indeed the descendant of a draper. In her desperation, Tess had been more forthcoming with him than she had been with the Sufi master, telling him that she had come across some old biblical manuscripts and was trying to find out more about their provenance. After a bit of hesitation, she’d even reached into her rucksack and shown him one of them. Sadly, he didn’t turn out to be any more helpful than the elder.

It wasn’t that he was being evasive or difficult in any way. The man just genuinely seemed not to know what Tess was talking about, despite being very candid about his family history and about being a practicing Sufi himself.

It didn’t deter Tess. She felt sure that they were on to something. It wasn’t necessarily a draper and his fabric store they were looking for. It was a name. A family name, one that could be associated with any profession or any kind of shop. And in that sense, the carpet seller had been helpful. He wrote down a list of all the other Kazzazoglus he was aware of and where their places of business were. There were more than a dozen of them, everything from other carpet sellers to potters and even a dentist. He also listed several other possibilities where the family names were also derived from the other ways of saying “draper” in Turkish, using the same words the taxi driver had given Tess.

They thanked the man and left him to close down his shop.

Tess felt rekindled. “We can’t leave,” she told Reilly, holding the list up to him. “Come on. One more day. Just buy us one more day. Give them some line about a lead concerning the Iranian. You can come up with something.”

He rubbed the weariness from his face and looked at her. Her infectious drive was hard to resist at the best of times. Given what he’d been through the last few days, he didn’t stand a chance.

“You’re bad,” he said.

“The worst,” she smiled, and led him back to the hotel.

REILLY GAVE AOARO THE LOWDOWN on what they were going to do and set up a vague lead story for his partner to give their boss. He and Tess then left the hotel bright and early the next day and spent it scouring the shops the carpet seller had listed for them.

The people they met were overwhelmingly kind and welcoming. With each inquiry, Tess found it easier to be more open and felt no qualms about showing around the two codices. But it was ultimately pointless. No one knew anything about a stash of ancient books, and if they did, they weren’t saying and were hiding it well.

She and Reilly closed out the day with the last name on the list. It was a ceramics and earthenware shop with an astounding variety of multicolored and intricately decorated tiles, plates, and vases in its front window, run by a chubby, soft-spoken, and easygoing fortysomething-year-old with intensely dark eyelashes that would have made him the perfect plus-size model for Maybelline if they ever chose to market mascara for men. They spoke openly for ten minutes or so, helped by the fact that there was no one else in the store apart from the owner’s teen daughter, who shared her father’s eyelashes but not his corpulent physique and was a much better Maybelline bet, and a shrunken, elderly woman the owner introduced as his mother, who was equally clueless about Tess’s inquiries.

Despite their not being able to help Tess, the sight of the rare book had piqued a surge of interest in both the shopkeeper and his mother, as it had with many of the others. The old woman shuffled over and, softly, asked if she could take a closer look at the codex. Tess handed it to her. The woman opened it gently, glancing at the inside page and turning over a couple more.

“It’s beautiful,” the woman said as she perused its contents. “How old do you think it is?”

“About two thousand years old,” Tess replied.

The woman’s eyes widened with surprise. She nodded slowly to herself, then closed the codex and gave its brittle leather cover a soft pat. “This must be worth a lot of money, no?”

“I suppose so,” Tess answered. “I never really thought about that.”

Which seemed to surprise the old woman. “Isn’t that what you’re after? You’re not hoping to sell this?”

“No. Not at all.”

“What then?”

“I’m not sure,” Tess said, thinking aloud. “This gospel—and any others that might be out there—they’re part of our history. They need to be studied, translated, dated. And then, whatever’s in them needs to shared with whoever’s interested in learning more about what took place in the Holy Land back then.”

“You could still do that by selling it to a museum,” the woman pressed, her eyes now alive with a hint of mischief.

Tess half-smiled. “I’m sure I could. But that’s not what I’m looking for. It never was. And these books …” Her expression darkened as she reached out and took the codex back from the woman. “A lot of people got hurt on the way to finding them. The least I can do is make sure their pain and suffering wasn’t entirely in vain. These books are their legacy as much as anyone’s.”

The woman tilted her head with a kind of “too bad” shrug. “I’m sorry we couldn’t help you,” she offered.

Tess nodded and tucked the ancient book back into her rucksack. “That’s okay,” she replied. “Thanks for your time.”

With nothing more to discuss, all that was left for her and Reilly was to politely extricate themselves from the shop once the conversation turned to the fine ceramics the family produced and the bargain prices that were on offer.

They left the three generations of Kazzazoglus to close up their store and stepped out into the still night. The hotel wasn’t too far, a ten-minute walk from the shop. It was a simple, medium-sized place. Modern, three stories high, the kind of hotel one usually associated with a secondary airport. Long on functionality, short on charm. Then again, Reilly and Tess weren’t exactly on their honeymoon. Their room, which overlooked the main street from the top floor, provided them with a decent shower and a clean bed, and that was all the charm they needed right now. It had been a long day, the latest in a string of long days and longer nights.

Tess felt glum. She knew she was out of time. They’d be heading home the next day, empty-handed. There was no way around that. They kissed and held each other quietly for a long minute in the cocoon of their unlit room, then Reilly pulled out his phone and dialed Aparo’s cell. Tess crossed over to the window and stared out, lost in thought. The city had settled into sleep mode, and the street below her was deserted. A lone street lamp stood sentinel to the left of the hotel entrance, bathing the cracked sidewalk with its jaundiced light. The only movement came from a trio of stray cats that slipped in and out from under some parked cars as they hunted for scraps.

As her eyes tracked them absentmindedly, she thought back to the last time she’d noticed any, outside the Patriarchate in Istanbul, just after she’d been told they were revered in Turkey as bringers of good fortune. The memory made her shiver. They hadn’t been particularly auspicious on that occasion. She looked out across the canopy of trees and rooftops and, for a moment, pictured herself out there, on her own, roaming the town, without Reilly close by. The thought gave her little comfort. The Iranian was still out there, somewhere. Out there and pissed off. No, Reilly was right. She couldn’t stay. It wasn’t the sensible thing to do, and right now, with a daughter and a mother waiting for her back home, sensible was definitely the way to go.

She turned to join Reilly, and her gaze swept downward, finding the cats again. They skirted the edge of a storefront before slipping into a darkened alleyway—past a lone figure that was standing at the alley’s mouth.

A lone figure that was looking up in Tess’s direction.

Tess stiffened. There was something familiar about its silhouette. Her eyes locked in on the sight, her retinas straining to sharpen the image bouncing off them.

It was a teenage girl.

Not just any teenage girl.

The girl from the ceramics shop.

She didn’t move. She was just standing there, in the shadows, watching the hotel. And despite the darkness, Tess could make out the white of her eyes, tiny twin beacons of light in the desolate nightscape.

Their eyes met. Tess felt a jolt at the base of her neck. It seemed mirrored in the girl, who turned abruptly and scampered into the alley.

Tess bolted for the door, screaming to Reilly, “It’s the girl from the shop, she’s outside watching us,” before rushing out.

She flew down the stairs and out the hotel doors and tore down the alleyway, with Reilly close behind. There was no sign of the girl. Tess kept going until she reached an intersection with a narrow street. She looked left and right. The street was lifeless.

“Where the hell did she go? She couldn’t have gone that far that fast,” she blurted.

“You sure it was her?”

“Definitely. She was looking right up at me, Sean. She must have followed us back. Why would she do that?” Then she remembered something. “Shit. The gospels. They’re in my rucksack.”

She moved to head back to the hotel, but Reilly stilled her with an arm and brought around her rucksack, which was slung over his shoulder, with the other. “Calm down. It’s here.” The bag was all they’d brought with them to Konya. In addition to the two codices, it also held Reilly’s handgun.

Tess exhaled heavily with relief. “You think this is what they’re after? You think she was scoping us out to try and grab them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Reilly glanced around and got his bearings. He gestured right. “Their shop’s in that direction. Maybe that’s where she’s headed.”

Tess thought about it for a quick second, then nodded. “Makes sense. Let’s go there.”

“Why?”

“I want to know what the hell she was doing here.”