He felt like his heart had been released from a bear trap. The sight of her blasted a wave of relief through him. She wasn’t free, or safe—but at least he’d caught up with her.
The three tiny figures reached a thicket of trees where Reilly saw a parked vehicle, a beige SUV that he recognized as a Jeep Cherokee, the smaller, boxy one from a couple of generations back. He turned his attention to the third figure, wondering if it was friend or foe, then watched as all three of them climbed into the car. The new guy was behind the wheel, with Tess next to him and the Iranian in the back. There was nothing in the arrangement that indicated whether the driver was an ally of the Iranian or someone else, maybe someone he was using to drive them around or some kind of a local guide. For the time being, Reilly had to assume the man was an enemy. Not that it really mattered just yet. His gut was already twisting at the thought of what was happening.
Sure enough, they were now driving off, away from him—and he was half a mile away and sitting on a half-dead horse.
He spurred the horse on, kicking and yelling and slapping its rump to get it moving. The tired animal lurched forward hesitantly, clearly reluctant to head down the slope.
“Come on, damn it, let’s go,” Reilly yelled as he tried coaxing it on by squeezing his thighs together and nudging the back of each of the animal’s front legs as it came toward him. The horse grudgingly picked up a bit of speed, whinnying in protest and kicking up dust as it finally clambered down the hill. Reilly tried to keep track of the Jeep’s movements while guiding his ride onward, and saw the SUV bouncing across the plain, heading west. He steered his mount to the right as soon as it hit level ground, putting it on a diagonal trajectory to the Jeep’s motion, but he was still a few hundred yards away from the SUV. Then he saw it reach a small road and turn onto it. It was now heading directly away from him, and his heart shriveled up as he realized there’s wasn’t much he could do to catch up with it.
Still, he kept the pressure on, summoning his inner cowboy and urging the horse on as best he could. The SUV had disappeared from view by the time he reached the road. He guided the horse onto the cracked asphalt, but he knew it was moving too slowly to have any chance of catching up with Tess. He had to find another way to keep going. A car, a truck, a motorcycle, anything motorized—even an old, beat-up pickup truck creaking under the strain of a mountain of watermelons, which was what he got, trundling up the road and honking for him to move aside.
He had little choice.
He steered the horse into the road, then tugged on the reins, forcing it to stop sideways and block the way. The pickup truck slid to a halt just a few feet short of him. Two men were in its cab, the driver jabbing his horn angrily, his passenger leaning out the window, both men yelling and waving for Reilly to get out of the way.
It didn’t take long.
A wave of the handgun did the trick with ruthless efficiency, and a few frantic seconds later, Reilly was on the road again, hurtling after the long-gone Jeep with a truckful of watermelons in tow.
Chapter 39
With every leaden step, reality receded further and further from Tess’s mind as she followed Zahed and Abdulkerim across the alien terrain.
She wasn’t sure where she was anymore. Her eyes were having a hard time focusing, and her feet felt like they were made of lead. The relentless strain of the last few days, compounded with the heat and the lack of sleep, was debilitating. Worst of all was the haunting mirage that was Reilly. It wouldn’t leave her. She was desperate to know that he was all right, that he hadn’t died on that mountain, but she knew she wasn’t about to find out soon, and possibly never would. The uncertainty was crippling and added to the sense of disorientation that she felt, a feeling that was heightened even more by the bewildering landscape around her.
The valley they were hiking through was very different from the canyon where they’d found the Templars’ grave. In fact, it was unlike anything she’d ever seen before. It was broader and was edged by bizarre clusters of huge, pinkish-white stone cones and turrets. Fields of fairy chimneys dotted the plain haphazardly, mushroomlike spires twenty or more feet tall that were topped by caps of rust-red basalt. Framing the whole surreal spectacle were gentle slopes that rose up to a crowning cornice of vertical tufa. And while the valley may have looked disconcertingly like a behemothian meringue tray, it was the canyon within it, the one that they were now traversing, that threw Tess the most. Everywhere she looked, dark openings in the rock formations peeked out at her. One of three parallel canyons that held the ancient—and now deserted—village of Zelve, its walls were riddled with living quarters, hermitages, churches, and monasteries that had been excavated out of the most unlikely of places. From the narrowest of “fairy chimneys” to the soaring rock walls that lined the ravines, there didn’t seem to be a patch of smooth rock that wasn’t studded with a small window. Hundreds of rock-hewn sanctuaries were scattered across the region, tucked away in its valleys and hidden ravines, their walls covered with a veritable trove of Byzantine art.
From the earliest days of the faith, Cappadocia was an important cradle of Orthodox Christianity, second only to Constantinople. Paul of Tarsus—St. Paul—preached throughout the area just twenty years after the Crucifixion. Cappadocia soon became a refuge for the first followers of the Cross who were fleeing Roman persecution, its maze-like landscape providing a natural shelter from danger. In the fourth century, Basil the Great, the bishop of nearby Kayseri and one of the so-called “Cappadocian Fathers” of the faith, witnessed monasticism on a trip to Egypt and brought the concept back with him. Monks started colonizing the area like moles, building anything from individual prayer cells in ten-foot-wide spires to rock-cut churches of surprising grandeur and multilevel monasteries that reached high into the cliffs.
The burrowing didn’t only extend aboveground. With the Mongol and Muslim conquests under way, it expanded below the surface. Dozens of underground cities—some whose origins dated back to the Hittites—riddled the area, and many of them hadn’t yet been fully explored. Some of them extended as much as a dozen levels below the surface, perhaps even more, vast labyrinths of tunnels, living quarters, and storage rooms. With their ingeniously designed air shafts and one-ton “millstone” trapdoors to keep enemies out, they served as sanctuaries for entire communities whenever invading hordes were running rampant aboveground and helped the Orthodox Christian population cling to the valleys and ride out the centuries of Seljuk and Ottoman rule pretty much unscathed.
Ironically, it wasn’t until 1923, in the dawn of the secular Turkish Republic, that the Christians were finally expelled from the region. Under the forced repatriation agreement between Turkey and Greece that followed the four-year war between the two countries, the local Orthodox population was resettled in Greece while Muslim Turks moved into the valleys in its place. Following the exodus, most of the churches and monasteries there gradually fell into disrepair, through neglect and vandalism, a sad end to the last surviving link to the glory of Byzantium that had started over one and a half thousand years earlier.
As they moved through a cluster of thirty-foot-tall rock cones, Tess was finding it hard to keep in mind that the canyon had been colonized by humans. In her exhausted, weary state, it looked more like something trolls would inhabit, and her mind kept dredging up disturbing images of Morlocks and sand people creeping out of the dark recesses and dragging her away.