Reilly flicked her a quick quizzical glance, then went back to studying the map. “How far is it?”
“From here? Five hundred miles, give or take.”
“So how would he get there from here? Drive? Fly? A small plane, or a helicopter maybe?”
Their hosts exchanged a few words, and shook their heads vigorously. “He could fly,” Ertugrul replied. “Kayseri’s close by and it’s got an airport. There are a couple of flights a day from here. But I don’t think he’d need to. Depending on the traffic and on what road you take, it’s eleven, twelve hours by car versus under two by plane, but it’s less risky, especially now that the airports are on high alert.”
Which, presumably, they also were last night, but that didn’t stop him, Reilly wanted to say, but he held back.
“There’s also a train,” the chief of police remembered. “But if he has a hostage with him, it’s not really doable.”
“Okay, so if he’s going to drive there, where’d he get the car?” Reilly asked Ertugrul. “What do we know about the cars he used in Rome? The ones Sharafi and Tess were in?”
Ertugrul flicked through his papers, then found the relevant report. “All they have right now is that they had fake plates. The prelim VIN number check on the one Ms. Chaykin was in says it wasn’t reported stolen, but it can take time for a stolen car claim to filter through. And it’s too early to tell with the other one—they have to find the VIN tag first.”
“It’s the same MO of car bombs we’ve seen in Iraq and in Lebanon,” Reilly noted. “The cars are stolen, or they’ll have been bought for cash with fake IDs. Either way, we don’t usually find out which one it is until after they’ve been blown up.” He fumed. “We need to know what he’s driving now.”
“We’re going to need a list of all stolen car claims since, well, yesterday,” Ertugrul told Izzettin. “And we’ll need to have a constant feed of any new reports that come in.”
“Okay,” the cop answered.
“How many roads are there that lead to that mountain?” Reilly asked him. “Can you put up roadblocks? We know he’s heading there.”
The chief of police shook his head as he leaned into the map. “Even knowing he’s coming from here, there are many different roads he could take to get there. And it depends on what part of the mountain he’s going to. There are different approaches from all sides.”
“Besides,” Ertugrul added, “we’d still have the same problem as the airport guys. We don’t have a clear photo or a name to give to the guys at the roadblocks. They can only look for Simmons.”
“It’s not possible,” Izzettin concluded. “The area around the mountain is very popular with tourists. Cappadocia is very busy this time of year. We can’t stop everyone.”
“Okay,” Reilly shrugged, his eyes darkening with frustration.
Tess’s voice broke through the gloom. “If you’re saying he might be working for the Iranians, wouldn’t they have people here helping him?” she asked. “They could get him a car. A safe house. Weapons.”
“It’s possible,” Reilly agreed. It was something he’d been wondering about too, but he knew that it was tricky territory. He asked Ertugrul, “What level of surveillance do we have on their embassy?”
Ertugrul hesitated, then ducked the question. “The embassy isn’t here, it’s in the capital, in Ankara. They just have a consulate here.” He didn’t offer more. No intel officer liked to talk in front of their foreign counterparts about who he and his colleagues were or weren’t watching, unless they knew they could trust them—which was, basically, never.
“Do we have them under watch?” Reilly pressed.
“You’re asking the wrong guy. That’s Agency business,” the legat said, reminding Reilly that the CIA handled foreign intel gathering.
Reilly understood and dropped it for now. He turned in frustration to one of the Turkish officers at the table, Murat Celikbilek, from the MIT—the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, otherwise known as the National Intelligence Organization. “What about your people?” he asked him. “You must have some kind of surveillance in place.”
Celikbilek studied him for a beat with the inscrutable concentration of a vulture, then said, “It’s not really a question one can answer casually, especially not in front of “—he nodded somewhat dismissively in Tess’s direction—”a civilian.”
“Look, I don’t need to know the sordid details of what you guys are up to,” Reilly said, with a disarming half smile. “But if you’re keeping tabs on them, particularly on their consulate here, someone might have seen something that can help us.” He held Celikbilek’s gaze for a long second, then the intelligence officer’s hooded eyes blinked and he gave Reilly a small nod.
“I’ll see what we’ve got,” he said.
“That would be great. We need to move fast,” Reilly reiterated. “He’s already killed three people in your country, and it could get worse. He’s probably already on his way to the monastery, and unless we can figure out what he’s driving or where he’s headed, he’s got an open playing field.” He paused long enough to make sure his comment sank in, then turned to Ertugrul and, in a lower voice, said, “We’re going to need to talk to the Agency boys. Like, right now.”
Chapter 24
With the setting sun turning his rearview mirror into a blazing lava lamp, Mansoor Zahed settled into the stream of evening traffic that was leaving the city and concentrated on the road ahead.
He glanced to his side. Simmons was sitting there, in the passenger seat, his head slightly slumped, the now familiar half-vacant stare in his eyes, the tranquilizer having once again sapped his vibrancy and turned him into a docile, subservient pet. Zahed knew he’d need to keep him sedated for a while. They had a long drive ahead of them, far longer than the one they had completed earlier that day.
Zahed wasn’t thrilled to be on the road again. He wasn’t one to dawdle, especially not after what he’d done at the Vatican. He would have preferred to fly to Kayceri, just as he’d have preferred to fly straight from Italy to an airfield close to Istanbul. Steyl had kiboshed that idea, though they were both well aware of the fact that the Turkish military kept a tight grip on all the country’s airfields. Steyl had reminded Zahed that the risks, after Rome, were too high, and Zahed hadn’t questioned his judgment. He knew that when it came to flying in and out of countries without drawing too much attention to whatever illicit cargo he had on board, Steyl knew exactly what was doable, and what wasn’t. You could count on him to fly any payload into pretty much anywhere and get it past the airport checks unchallenged—but you could also count on him not to land you in hot water, metaphorically speaking. And so they’d flown slightly north instead, to Bulgaria, and landed in Primorsko, a small resort town on the country’s Black Sea coast. It had a small, civilian airfield—not a military one—the kind where exactly who was on what small plane wasn’t the first thing on the local officials’ mind. It was also less than twenty miles from the Turkish border, making the drive from the airfield to Istanbul a not-too-taxing five-hour stint.
This drive would be more than twice as long, but there was no other option. Zahed hadn’t particularly enjoyed negotiating the never-ending traffic nightmare that was evening-rush-hour Istanbul. The chaotic free-for-all had reminded him of the less attractive aspects of Isfahan, his home-town back in Iran, another arena of outstanding architectural beauty that was marred by its drivers’ demented jousting. But in contrast to his earlier outing that day, when evading Reilly, he’d exercised careful restraint while driving out of the city and avoided getting into any dick-measuring contests with the aggressive taxi and dolmu drivers, allowing them to barge through instead, knowing that the smallest fender bender could have dire consequences given that he was driving a stolen car and transporting a heavily drugged captive.