He glanced at the stunned faces around him—a mixed bag of young and old, men and women, all in shock, blabbing and looking down gloomily—and moved.
No more deaths. Not because of me. Not if I can help it.
He kicked off his shoes, yanked off his jacket, and leapt in.
The water around him was littered with pieces of luggage and cardboard boxes, hampering his progress, but he managed to reach the back of the bus and grab on to its roof rail just before it disappeared with a final belch of air.
He hung on as the bus slid under, slowly. Through the murky water, he could see the ghostly, fear-stricken faces of the passengers on the other side of the bus’s rear window. They were tugging at the emergency release handle, which wasn’t responding, and banging their fists against the glass in desperation. Hanging on with one hand, he reached down to his side holster and pulled out his gun, then waved it at the passengers closest to him, hoping they’d understand. They weren’t moving away, but it didn’t stop him. He just put the gun against the very top of the glass and angled it right up, aiming it at the underside of the bus’s roof—and fired, again and again—five quick shots that punched through the window before dying out in the water inside the bus. The shots weakened the window enough for him to be able to kick and hammer it in with the butt of his handgun, until it finally gave way and blew out with a big whoosh of trapped air that almost made Reilly lose his grip.
One after another, the trapped passengers streamed out in a mad frenzy, a shoal of desperate arms reaching out to Reilly and taking hold of his outstretched hand before kicking away and gliding up toward the light. He hung on as long as his lungs could last, then he finally let go and followed them up to the surface, the elation of knowing all the passengers were safe not quite making up for the bitter frustration that was gnawing at his gut.
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.