Her eyes blazed into him. “We’ve got to find it,” she insisted. “It’s an incredible, crucial key to our history, but it can also be devastating. We’ve got to find it and make sure it’s handled the right way. These writings could answer a lot of questions for those who can handle the truth, but they’ll also kick up one hell of a crisis for those who can’t, and there are a whole lot more of those out there. A few years ago, one line, just one line from some fragments of a supposedly earlier version of the Gospel of Mark, was enough to whip up a storm of controversy because it insinuated that Jesus had spent a whole night teaching ‘the secrets of his kingdom’ to another man who was only wearing a ‘linen garment,’ with all the connotations that entails. Imagine what a truckload of alternate gospels might do.”
Reilly studied her thoughtfully, absorbing her words, but even before she was done, he already knew he couldn’t head home. Not yet. Not before doing everything he could to try to find those chests. In the wrong hands, they were potentially a weapon—a weapon of mass despair, if you considered that a third of the planet’s inhabitants were Christian, and that a lot of them considered every word in the Bible to be sacred and inerrant. The problem was, he didn’t want to involve the Bureau and, by association, the Vatican. Things hadn’t turned out too well on that front the last time around. And he certainly didn’t want the Turks involved either. Historic artifacts, especially religious ones, would get confiscated before they’d even had a chance to look at them.
No, if he and Tess were going to do this, they were going to have to do it on their own. Below the radar. Way below. Subterranean below.
“I’m with you,” he finally agreed. “But how? What more can we do? You hit a wall, didn’t you? You said the trail went cold.”
Tess was up now, pacing around, a bundle of nervous enthusiasm. “It did, but … we’re missing something. Conrad must have left us a clue, even in death. He must have.” A realization ignited her eyes. “It’s got to be in that church, where he’s buried.”
“You were just there. You said there was nothing else buried with him.”
“There’s got to be something else,” she insisted. “Something we missed. We have to go back there.”
Chapter 52
Tess cloaked her unease as she watched Reilly go into no-nonsense, steamroller mode to get past the two Jandarma soldiers who were posted outside the hotel.
He told them he’d lost his BlackBerry somewhere in the canyon during the shoot-out, and insisted in no uncertain terms that he absolutely had to go back there to try to recover it since it held confidential FBI material. At the first balk, he ratcheted his tone up a notch and made it sound like a full-bore diplomatic incident was in the offing if any delay resulted in his not getting the device back and that, if he didn’t get there soon, the area would be swarming with American troops in order to secure the missing cache of state secrets.
The snow job worked. Twenty minutes later, the hotel’s van deposited them in the clearing at the mouth of the canyon. A Jandarma Humvee was still stationed there. The only other car in the lot was the dead Byzantinist’s dusty Cherokee, a grim reminder of the blood-soaked trail that had claimed its owner.
They were soon trudging past the cone house where the man had been gunned down. The blood spatter had soaked into the soft, porous rock by the doorway, its faded appearance already making it look like a remnant from the distant past. There were no cops cordoning off the area, no yellow tape, no crime scene investigators poring over every indentation in the tufa. There was no need for any of it. It was all pretty cut and dried, and if the Iranian were to be caught, he wasn’t going to face a trial by jury.
As she went by, Tess found herself shivering and couldn’t shake the image of Abdulkerim’s face bursting with anguish the moment the bullets ripped through him. She’d barely met the man, barely gotten to know him. She realized she knew nothing about him, whether or not he was married or had kids. And now he was dead. All within hours of her meeting him.
They climbed up to the church. Using flashlights borrowed from the hotel, Tess pointed out the mural in the apse’s half dome to Reilly before leading him down to the crypt. She was still shivering as they entered the burial chamber, which was just as they’d left it. Being there was making her relive the scene. It was as if she were watching herself in a 3-D holographic diorama, a haunting replay with Abdulkerim’s worried face front and center.
Reilly must have sensed it. “You okay?” he asked.
She shook the disturbing images away and nodded, then showed him Conrad’s open grave. The broken pieces of the cooking pot were lying beside it. Nothing had been moved.
Reilly glanced around the room. “What about these other graves?”
She raked the beam across the markings on the walls. “Church dignitaries and benefactors.”
“They could be hiding something else.”
“Maybe,” Tess told him, her tone skeptical. “Short of digging them all up, it’s impossible to tell. The thing is, if that’s where Hosius’s stash is buried, I think they would have left something behind, some clue to point to it. Otherwise, it could be lost forever. But they’re just names, and none of them stand out as being out of place.”
“Okay. So there’s the mural and this crypt. Anything else?”
Tess shook her head. “We looked around the rest of the church before we left. That’s it.” As she said it, she remembered something—something that had occurred to her back when she was online and getting Hosius’s letter translated, at the hotel. She went back to what he said. “The mural.”
Almost in a trance, she led him back up to the apse. She studied the mural again, aiming her light at the Greek lettering above the painting.
“It’s just weird,” she said, almost under her breath, “having lines from a Sufi poem here, in a church.”
“Sufi being … ?”
“It’s a mystical form of Islam,” she explained. “Very popular in Turkey. It was, anyway, before it was outlawed in the 1920s.”
“Hang on, a Muslim saying in a church?”
“Not exactly Muslim. Sufism is different. It’s so different that hardcore Muslims like our Saudi friends and the Taliban consider its followers dangerous heretics and have totally banned them. They’re terrified of them because Sufism is very pacifist and tolerant and liberal—and it’s not about worship. It’s a personal experience, it’s about seeking one’s own path to God and trying to reach spiritual ecstasy. Rumi, the mystic who wrote this poem, was one of Sufism’s founding fathers. He preached that Sufism was open to people of all religions and that music, poetry, and dancing were the way to open the gates of paradise and reach God—a god who’s not the god of punishment or the god of revenge, but the god of love.”
“Sounds groovy,” Reilly smirked.
“It is. Which is why Rumi’s really popular back home. Massively popular. I even read somewhere that Sarah Jessica Parker does her aerobics to rock ‘n’ roll versions of his poems. He’s been turned into this New Age guru, which doesn’t really do justice to the intensity and depth of his writing, but it’s understandable given that he wrote things like, ‘My religion is to live through love,’ which, you’ve got to admit, is pretty radical for a thirteenth-century Muslim preacher.”