Which was why Zahed raised his gun and fired.
TESS SCREAMED AS SHEWATCHED Abdulkerim drop to the ground. Blood was spewing out of his mouth, pumped up from the hole that been punched through his chest.
She spun her head back around. The Iranian was charging at her, now only a couple of cone houses away. A crippling fear surged through her. If the Iranian was up and coming for her, maybe he had his phone back.
With chilling synchronicity, he raised his hand—the one with the phone in it—to show her that he did. His scowl had one clear message in it:
Don’t move an inch—or else.
Something snapped inside her. A surge of rage pushed her fear aside, fight taking over from flight. Her hands moved to either edge of the rucksack and slid it across her midriff so it was now pressed against the bomb in her canvas belt. Her face hardened as she glared at him defiantly, and she caught a reaction across his face and in his step. It wasn’t any more than his eyes widening and his jaw tightening and him faltering for just a split second, but it was there, and it was enough to send a burst of badly needed satisfaction through her.
It didn’t change the fact that he was still coming at her.
She had to move.
She cast one last glance at the fallen Byzantinist. The gurgling had stopped, and his eyes were staring out in a dead glaze. She forced herself to accept that there was nothing she could do for him now—then, with the rucksack still clutched against her midriff, she dove through the doorway.
She knew she had to get deep inside, and fast. The cone house was basically a habitable cave. Whatever faint light was seeping in from outside wasn’t reaching far in. There was nothing but darkness ahead.
She rushed into it.
REILLY ROLLED INTO COVER BEHIND the cone house and risked a fast peek in time to see the Iranian make a break for it.
He managed to loose a couple of rounds, but had to pull back from the barrage of gunfire the Iranian rained back at him. He cursed inwardly as he rode it out for a couple of seconds, then he peered out again, knowing the Iranian wouldn’t be there anymore.
He wasn’t.
Fuck.
Reilly bolted out and chased after him, hoping against hope that the bastard hadn’t already caught up with Tess.
Chapter 44
Tess gave the cave-like interior a quick scan. The room had been hollowed out of the soft rock, the walls around her riddled with carved-out niches, some small, others big enough to sleep in. Its floor was littered with debris—a broken-up rattan chair, the faded sheets of an old Turkish newspaper, a few discarded water bottles and soda cans. It didn’t look like anyone had lived there in years.
She spotted some stairs that spiraled upward in a far corner and stepped toward them, hoping the way down was there too—and her feet stumbled against a wooden hatch that was sunken into the floor. She dropped to her knees and ran her hands across it, brushing the dust off its uneven surface. It was hinged on one side. At its opposide end, her fingers found an old piece of rope that was fashioned into a handle, embedded into the dirt floor around it.
She yanked the hatch open. A cloud of dust billowed up, prickling her eyes and throat. She coughed as she pointed her flashlight into the gaping hole. A very steep flight of steps, also carved out of the tufa, led downward.
A growing rustle from outside, the crush of footfalls drawing near, spurred her to move. With the flashlight clasped tightly in one hand, she clambered down the stairs as fast as she could.
ZAHED CAREENED TO A STOP outside the cone house, by the blood-soaked body of the Byzantinist.
There was no one around, but he still didn’t like the idea of leaving him lying there, signposting what had happened. He stuffed his gun in his pants and dragged Abdulkerim inside, dumping him just inside the doorway, out of view from anyone walking by.
He saw the open hatch and, in the far corner, the stairs leading up. He drew his gun and looked down through the opening in the floor. There was no sign of movement, no noise coming from there. He thought about it for a second, then crossed over to the stairs and climbed up a few steps, listening intently. He didn’t need to go any higher—he could see debris littering the landing. It didn’t look like it had been disturbed. His instincts had told him she’d gone through the hatch anyway.
He hurried back down and ducked into the black hole.
TESS WAS BREATHING HARD as she moved through the narrow tunnel.
The batteries in Abdulkerim’s flashlight were clearly on their last legs, and the light it was giving off was weakening noticeably. She knew it wouldn’t last long, and did her best to save batteries by not keeping it on all the time. She would flick it on and off intermittently, using it to get her bearings before advancing to the next landmark in total darkness. Electric cabling ran along the walls, linking one light fixture to another. There hadn’t been any current running through the wiring for years, but it was still a useful trail to follow, and Tess did her best to keep one hand running along its thick, black rubber coating as it led her deeper and deeper into the subterranean maze.
By now, with more than a dozen caverns and tunnels behind her, her sense of direction was completely overwhelmed. She had no idea where she was. The “underground city” may not have been a city exactly, but it was still—literally—mind-boggling: a seemingly endless warren of chambers of all shapes and sizes connected to one another by low-ceilinged tunnels and narrow steps. There wasn’t a right angle or a sharp corner to be found. Instead, every edge was rounded, every wall and ceiling curved, and it all had the same numbing color, a chalky off-white tinged with the dirty brown wash of time.
And it was tight. Maddeningly, suffocatingly tight. Even the larger chambers that were used as communal spaces felt unnervingly claustrophobic. The tunnels and stairs were the worst. They were little wider than her shoulders, and she had to stay hunched to get through them. They were that way by design. Invading warriors, if they managed to get past the handful of strategically placed millstones that could be rolled out with the flick of a small stone to block access to the entire underground maze, would have to advance single-file after leaving their bulky shields behind. That made them easier to repel. In fact, the entire honeycomb was brilliantly designed as a refuge: There were huge storage spaces for food and animal feed, wineries, wells for water and air shafts for ventilation. Everything was planned defensively; even the chimneys of their fire pits branched out into many small outlets before they emerged aboveground, to spread out the smoke and help avoid detection.
As she advanced farther into the hollowed-out ground, Tess did her best to try to not think about the fact that the entire canyon above her had been condemned because of unstable ground and rock slides. Instead, she tried to remember that there was a saving grace to her being there: The bomb she was carrying around her waist was probably not a threat right now. Still, it wasn’t enough to calm her nerves, as her earlier fear was now being replaced by one that was even more terrifying: whether she’d ever find her way back out of that rocky labyrinth and see daylight again.
After going down some steps and banking right through a particularly narrow passage, she found herself in a larger, airier room that had three rough-hewn columns down its center. A stable, perhaps, or an underground church. It didn’t really matter. She paused to catch her breath and think. She guessed she was now on either the second or third level, and knew that there could be many more below her. She didn’t want to venture too far down—the place was a maze and she ran a real risk of not finding her way back. She couldn’t go back out yet, though. Not until she knew the Iranian and his cell phone were no longer a threat.