Her expression didn’t soften. She wasn’t buying it. She pulled her hand back. “I’m serious, Sean. I don’t want you dying on me. Not here. Not now. Not ever. We’ve still got a lot to do together, don’t we?”
Her comment took him by surprise and made his mind wander back, to what they’d been through months earlier. After a moment, he said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”
A sadness darkened her face. “But I did. I bailed on you. And I’m sorry. I’m really sorry about that. But you understand, don’t you? You understand why I had to go, right?”
Sound bites from their parting conversation echoed faintly in his ears. “Has anything changed?”
Tess took in a deep breath and glanced out the window. It wasn’t a question she was keen to think about. “What if it doesn’t happen for us?” she finally said. “Will we ever be able to really move beyond it, or will it be a hole in your life that I’ll never be able to plug?”
Reilly pondered it for a beat, then shrugged. “Given what we do, what’s brought us out here again … It all makes me wonder whether or not we should have even tried.”
Counfusion and surprise flooded her face. “You’re having second thoughts now? About us having a baby?”
“It’s probably a moot point now, isn’t it?”
“What if it wasn’t?”
He thought about it for a moment, and surprised himself by realizing he wasn’t so sure anymore. “I don’t know. You tell me. I mean, this is what we do, isn’t it? You, with your long-lost mysteries that seem to bring all kinds of whackos out of the woodwork. Me, with my job, running down guys who get wet dreams about slamming planes into towers. What kind of parents would we have been?”
Tess waved it off. “What are we gonna do, give it all up and play Scrabble every night while sipping chamomile tea? Like you said, this is who we are. It’s what we do. And regardless of that, we’d be great parents. I don’t doubt that for a second.” She gave him a slight grin and tightened her hand around his again. “Look, don’t worry about it. You’re a guy. You’re not supposed to get these things. Just leave that part of it to me, okay? All I need you to do is tell me we can get past it if it doesn’t work out for us on that front … and make sure you don’t make yourself too big a target for that creep in the meantime. Deal?”
An acute sense of tiredness overcame Reilly. He nodded with a faint smile, his eyelids now feeling like they were made of lead. “Deal.”
Despite her words and despite his exhaustion, images of the carnage at the Vatican kept swooping through the dark recesses of his mind. He shut his eyes and decided that maybe a nap wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all, and leaned back against his headrest. But much as he needed to sleep, it just wouldn’t come, and might not for a while, he knew.
Not until the hunt was over.
Chapter 28
Alpine meadows and vast orchards of vine and fruit gave way to a harsher, rockier terrain as Zahed and Simmons followed the guide’s battered SUV up the mountain.
The paved road, its tired asphalt fissured and patchy from the big seasonal swings in temperature, was barely wider than their cars. After a couple of miles, it turned into an even narrower path that mules would have a hard time climbing, but none of that seemed to faze the guide. He kept on going, the Toyota’s tired diesel engine straining against the bone-rattling incline, its suspension springs stretching and compressing like four big Slinkys, leading them farther up the desolate mountain, until the trail finally came to an end in a small clearing at the foot of a big rock slide.
Sully glanced up at the midday sun, then checked his watch.
“We’ll leave the tents and everything else here for now and travel light,” he told Zahed and Simmons. “We’ll be able to cover more ground that way. But we’ll need to be back down here by sunset, which is in about eight hours’ time.”
“I hope you managed to pick up some hiking gear for us?” Zahed asked.
“I think I’ve got everything you need.” He retrieved a big duffel bag from the back of his car and handed it to Zahed. “T-shirts, shorts, fleeces, socks, and shoes. Let’s go, gentlemen,” he smiled. “The mountain’s waiting.”
ONCE THEY MADE IT UP the narrow path that snaked along the steep rock face that abutted the clearing, they had a relatively easy trek for the first hour, traversing several yaylas, the high-altitude meadows that ringed the volcano in a series of undulating hills. Despite the August sun, the air felt more crisp and dry with each new meter of altitude, a marked difference from the humid furnace at the base of the mountain. Scattered herds of animals—sheep, cattle, and the Angora goats the region was famous for—grazed peacefully in the arid grassland, while overhead, flocks of pink rose finches swooped past for a look before resuming their aerial ballet.
Despite the pastoral serenity surrounding him, Zahed was not at ease. Time was draining away, time in which Reilly and the rest of his enemies could pick up his trail and close in on him, and yet here he was, out on a leisurely hike with sketchy information and little more than a hope that the stranger he’d selected hastily knew what he was doing.
Simmons hadn’t said much throughout the climb, which was just as Zahed had instructed him to do. Sully, however, and much to Zahed’s irritation, more than took up the slack, yapping almost nonstop, clearly suffering from another form of diarrhea.
The terrain soon became more challenging as the slope steepened and the meadows gave way to slippery bowls of scree and coarse volcanic rock. High above, a series of jagged rock spires delineated the valley head. Two hours into the climb, the guide suggested they take a break in the shelter of a thicket of trees. He handed them some water bottles and spicy sujuk sandwiches, along with some energy bars, all of which they consumed heartily while taking in the breathtaking view.
The Anatolian Plain stretched out far below them, an infinite, striking golden-beige plateau that was punctuated by an array of unusual shadows from the late-afternoon sun. Hot air balloons drifted slowly by, multicolored gumdrops gliding over the distant valleys and the hidden canyons. Even from this distance, one could make out the distinctive features that made the area one of the most unusual—and spectacular—landscapes on the planet.
More than thirty million years ago, during the Cenozoic Era, the entire area had been smothered by volcanic eruptions from Mount Argaeus and a couple of other volcanoes. They’d dumped lava all over it on and off for tens of thousands of years. Once the eruptions had petered out, stormy weather, rivers, and earthquakes all colluded to churn the deposits and turn them into tufa, a soft, malleable stone made up of lava, mud, and ash. Centuries of erosion then carved the plain into valleys and canyons, and lined them with an astonishing landscape of undulating, sensuous rock formations that looked like mammoth dollops of whipped cream, endless fields of massive cones of rock, and “fairy chimneys,” strange spires of bone-white tufa that looked like asparagus tips topped by gravity-defying caps of reddish-brown basalt stone. And if nature’s work wasn’t phantasmogoric enough, man had added to it by burrowing into the tufa wherever he could. Small holes poked out of rock formations of all shapes and sizes, windows to the most unlikely of human habitations, entire valleys carved into warrens of underground cities, hermit cells, rock churches, and monasteries.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Sully asked.
“Very,” Zahed replied.
The guide took a swig from his canteen and said, “You’re from Iran, right?”
“Originally, yes. But my family left the country when I was seven.” He lied with ease. It was a profile he’d used before.