“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.”
Chapter 23
Given the internal and external political tensions gripping the country, the Turks took matters of national security very seriously, and this was no exception. Within an hour of getting back to the Patriarchate, Reilly, along with Tess and Ertugrul, were seated in a glass-walled conference room in the Turkish National Police’s Istanbul headquarters in the city’s Aksaray district, trading questions and answers with a half-dozen Turkish security officials.
One question was at the root of Reilly’s frustration. “How did he get into the country?” he asked, still pissed off by the slipup. “I thought you guys had military-level security at your airports?”
None of his hosts seemed to have an immediate answer for him.
Suleyman Izzettin, the police captain who was at the airport with Ertugrul, waded into the pregnant silence. “We’re looking into it. But remember,” he said, clearly as vexed by it as Reilly, “our border controls didn’t have a clear photo or a likely alias for him. And besides, maybe he didn’t fly in.”
“No way,” Reilly countered. “He didn’t have time for a road trip, not from Rome. He flew in. Definitely.” He glanced around the room, speaking a bit slower than usual and slightly overenunciating to make sure they all understood him. “This guy managed to move his hostages from Jordan to Italy without a problem. Now he’s here, and he’s still got one of them. We need to figure out how he’s just hopping around from one country to another. And finding out which one of your airports he slipped through would be a big help.”
The security officers erupted into a brief, heated debate in Turkish. Clearly, they didn’t take kindly to being embarrassed in front of a foreign official. Izzettin seemed to call a time-out among them before simply repeating, to Reilly, what he had said before: “We’ll look into it.”
“Okay. We also need to figure out how he’s moving around now that he’s here,” Reilly pressed on. “If we’re going to track him down, we need to know what we’re looking for. How did he get to the Patriarchate? Did he have a car parked there somewhere that he abandoned when he saw us arrive? Did he just take a cab? Or was someone waiting for him, does he have people here helping him out?”
“Also,” Ertugrul chimed in, “assuming he’s brought Simmons here with him, where did he park him in the meantime?”
“We took control of the area immediately after the shoot-out,” Izzettin told him. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a driver waiting for him. No one drove away from there.”
“He could have just abandoned his car and walked off,” Reilly countered.
“The research assistant,” Tess asked Ertugrul, “the snitch who kick-started this whole mess by selling out Sharafi? You’re sure he left the country?”
He nodded. “He’s long gone.”
“This guy’s moving too fast to be doing this alone,” Reilly said. “He’s got to have some backup. Remember, he didn’t know the trail led back to Istanbul until last night, when he got the Registry from the Vatican. It’s not like he’s had a lot of time to plan this. He’s winging it. He’s reacting as the information comes in, just like us—but he’s one step ahead of us.” He turned to Ertugrul. “This monastery … Who else can we talk to about finding out where it is?”
“I had a quick word about that with the patriarch’s secretary, after the shooting,” Ertugrul said. “He wasn’t in the clearest state of mind. But he said he’d never heard of it.”
“That’s not surprising,” Tess added. “The inquisitor who came across it said it was abandoned, and that was back in the early 1300s. Seven hundred years, it’s probably little more than rubble now, just some ruins in the middle of nowhere.”
“The secretary’s going to talk to the other priests there,” Ertugrul said. “Maybe one of them will know.”
Reilly turned to their hosts, frustrated. “You’ve got to have access to some experts at the university, someone who knows their history.”
The police chief shrugged. “It’s an Orthodox Church, Agent Reilly. Not just Orthodox, but Greek. And this is a Muslim country. It’s not exactly a priority area for our academics. If no one at the Patriarchate knows …”
Reilly nodded glumly. He was well aware that there was no love lost between the Greeks and the Turks, not since the dawn of the Seljuks and, subsequently, of the Ottoman Empire. It was a deep-seated animosity that went back more than a thousand years and continued to this day, flaring up over thorny issues such as the divided island of Cyprus. “So right now, all we know is that it’s in the Mount Argaeus region, the Erciyes Dagi Mountains. How big an area are we talking about?”
Ertugrul exchanged some words with their hosts, and one of them picked up the phone and mumbled away in Turkish. A moment later, a younger cop brought in a folded map, which was spread out on the table. Ertugrul had another to-and-fro with the local officials, then turned to Reilly.
“Actually, it’s not a range, it’s just one mountain, over here,” he explained, pointing out a wide, darker-shaded area in the center of the country. “It’s a dormant volcano.”
Reilly checked out the scale at the bottom of the map. “It’s about, what, ten miles long and the same across.”
“That’s a big haystack,” Tess said.
“Huge,” Ertugrul agreed. “Also, it’s not the easiest area to canvas. It goes up to eleven, twelve thousand feet, and its flanks are heavily wrinkled with valleys and ridges. It’s no wonder the monastery managed to survive all those years, even after the Ottomans took over. It could be tucked in any one of those folds. You’d need to trip over it to find it.”
Reilly was about to respond when Tess spoke up. “Do you think you could get hold of a detailed map of that whole area?” she asked Ertugrul. “A topographic map maybe? Like the ones climbers use?”
Ertugrul thought about it, then said, “I imagine we should be able to,” his tone somewhat belittling of her request. He explained her request in Turkish to their hosts, and one of them picked up the phone again, presumably to source one for her.