It had been worth the wait.
He opened his eyes slowly as he came out of his reverie, and his gaze found the man sitting facing him. Simmons was awake and conscious, but his eyes were straining wide. Judging by the horror radiating from them, Zahed knew that the archaeologist had witnessed what he had done.
Zahed gave him a thin, humorless smile.
Knowing that Simmons had been watching in a helpless daze made the event even more memorable.
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.”