Coincidence? Perhaps. But perhaps the sculpture had been reconstructed for a reason. Perhaps it had been dug out of the earth so many years ago and reassembled so that it could be pointed in a very specific direction. Perhaps the sculpture was a sign.
That said, I didn’t know where it was going to lead us. Probably further back down into the past. Down through the archeological layers. I expected that, like it or not, I was going to have to do some digging. I craned my neck upward as Meryem joined the two marble surfaces, holding Augustus’s arm to his shoulder at the approximate angle it was supposed to be. It wasn’t hard to do. The angle of the break at the shoulder meant there was really only one way to put it on.
“Look,” Meryem said.
I stared forward, squinting my eyes in the new rising sun. The marble columns of the ancient city rose all around us, but Augustus wasn’t pointing to them. He was pointing outward, far beyond the ancient city of Aphrodisias. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, was pointing to a gleaming silver mosque, a lone minaret rising in the distance.
Chapter 24
EVEN ACCOUNTING FOR a generous error in the angle, it had to be the mosque that the old Roman was pointing to. There was nothing else up in that direction. But I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it because our presence had been discovered. Two all-terrain vehicles drove our way, plumes of dust rising behind them. The vehicles were slightly bigger than golf carts but with truck beds in the back. The men in the back of the nearer ATV shouted and waved shovels. Clearly, they didn’t like strangers in their city.
I lowered Meryem off my shoulders. She pulled out her phone.
“You see that we have guests,” I said.
“Yes. This I can see.”
I tapped my fingers anxiously. It went without saying that it wasn’t the ideal time to be surfing the web. Meryem, however, didn't seem terribly bothered. She pulled up a satellite map on her phone, zooming in to Aphrodisias. I could see the stadium and the agora. I could even see the monument where we stood. But the strange part was that the entire area to which the statue was pointing had been blacked out. Redacted. Obviously a governmental request had been made to the map provider. I’d seen similarly blacked-out areas before: the HAARP site in Alaska, a clandestine research facility in Oregon and, for whatever reason, this part of Turkey had been blacked out as well.
“Government lab, military facility, what do you think?” I asked Meryem.
“I think there is nothing like that here.”
The ATVs were getting closer. A man standing in the back of the nearer vehicle screamed and made an obscene gesture. Whoever they were, they were angry.
“What do we do with the arm?” Meryem said.
“We keep it. We might still need it.”
“Are sure you do not want to give them part of it?”
“Which part?” I asked.
“Perhaps the finger?” Meryem said.
She grinned. It took me a moment to realize that she was being funny.
“We keep all of it then, the finger also,” Meryem replied.
I quickly strapped the arm back down to the rack and we roared away, the ATVs adjusting course to head us off. They went wide, one to the front of us and one to the rear. I popped the bike into third gear and hammered the throttle. Soon we were in the scrub, the main road we had come in on visible in the distance. The marble arm made the bike heavier than I would have liked, but we made good time. Then I saw a full marble column laid down across the tall grass like a fallen tree. It was a good three feet in diameter and I was too close to stop.
“Hang on.”
I hit the throttle and lifted the front of the bike lightly, allowing my body to shift back in the seat. The front wheel immediately lifted off the ground. I found the rear balance point and put my weight on the pegs as we climbed over the column with a rousing bump. We were over it in a second, but before I could settle back into the saddle, we were confronted with another column. I hit the throttle again, lifting the front wheel, and we rolled up and over the second column. It was like riding through history. I glanced up and to my right and saw that the men in the vehicle in front of us were still coming. It was no problem, though. We were almost at the road.
Then I had to recalibrate because I saw the fence. It was long and metal and rusted, and it separated us from the road. I jammed on the rear brake putting the bike into a fishtail and headed east, parallel with the fence.
“Do you want them to catch us?” Meryem said.
No, I didn’t want them to catch us. But I didn’t want to end up wrapped in chain-link either. The scrubby land rose and fell as I followed the fence line. If the ATV in front of us continued on its present vector, we’d probably run into each other in about half a minute. We’d probably hit the guys behind us in a similar amount of time if we turned back. It was a geometry problem. Except, then I heard the crack of a rifle.
I glanced behind us. The shot had gone high. The guy in the back of the ATV was using the roof of the cab to support his right arm as he aimed. It was a haphazard firing position, but he had the advantage of a long barrel. If he hit a flat stretch, he might just be able to make the shot. I focused my attention forward again. I couldn’t see the driver because of the low angle of the sun, but I did see a second rifleman and a third guy waving a shovel. It wasn’t the usual welcoming party for a couple museum crashers. It stood to reason that out pursuers had been tipped off.
“Go faster!” Meryem yelled.
But it wasn’t that easy. There was an open excavation pit ahead of us. It was maybe forty feet wide, but at least a hundred and fifty feet long. Another section of the city was being dug out, foundations and standing columns and sculptures slowly being unearthed from the hole in the ground. I had a decision to make. I could go around. But it would be a gift to the gunmen behind us. Or I could go over.
I gunned it toward the pit.
“What are you doing?” Meryem shouted.
“Getting us out of here.”
I steered toward what looked like an intact triangular pediment bridging the gap over the pit, intact columns supporting the underside of it. At one time it would have supported the roof of a temple, but from where I stood on the pegs of the bike, it looked more like a ramp. I hammered the bike forward and lifted the front wheel. We jumped the gap into the pit and landed on the marble pediment. The back tire bit in and we were soon cruising up the narrow pediment, the pit descending on either side of us. I kept a steady hand on the bars and piloted the bike all the way up and over the ancient marble pediment, keeping a straight, true line.
Halfway down the other side of the pediment, I goosed the throttle and lifted the front wheel again. We jumped the gap onto solid ground, the pit behind us, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. Another shot rang out from the rear. The men in front were now less than a hundred feet away.
“Faster!” Meryem yelled.
“No shit!”
They fired from the front. I felt it whistle by my right ear, while Meryem grasped me tightly. We headed up one side of a scrub hummock, while our pursuers headed up the other. The fence was lower down the slope of the hummock, but it was still a barrier. When we finally crested the hill on a collision course with the ATV, we were so close that I could see the white of the rifleman’s eyes. I had a decision to make. A bullet or a wire wrap. Either could hurt.
“Hang on.”
I cut left hard. Straight for the fence below us. Only this time, I didn’t stop. I dropped the bike back down a gear and twisted the throttle hard. I was hoping for just a little more torque and the Transalp delivered. I lifted the front handle bars and shifted my weight to the rear. The front wheel went up and a fraction of a second later, the rear wheel left the ground. Even though it wasn’t towering above us, I knew that we didn’t have enough height to clear the fence. Not completely. Still, I hoped we had enough for what I had in mind.
Time seemed to slow as the front wheel sailed over the ragged, rusted chain-link. Meryem
grabbed me tighter still, and then our rear wheel hit the fence. I took that as a good sign because the skid plate at the bottom of the bike had cleared. I felt a jarring sensation as the fence pulled back at the rear wheel of the bike, but I also felt the rusted old fence give. I twisted the throttle all the way, the front rim glinting in the sunlight as the back of the bike rose, knobby rear tire biting into the chain-link.
Then, like that, we were clear of the fence. A fourth bullet flew by as we sailed though the air, finally landing on our back wheel in a giant pneumatic whoosh. The Transalp had a lot of travel in its rear suspension and I praised its engineers in that long moment. When the front wheel finally landed, I threw the bike into fourth gear. After that, we left our pursuers in the dust. Unfortunately, as I was to soon learn, we were accelerating towards our problems, not away from them.
Chapter 25
A FEW TWISTS and turns aside, the gritty two-lane blacktop headed straight for the mosque. But I wasn’t convinced that our pursuers wouldn’t try to catch up with us again, so I took the long way around. To our advantage, the rolling hills undulated enough to break the line of sight between Aphrodisias and our destination. I drove past the mosque’s gleaming silver dome before doubling back along a dirt track, keeping our speed low to avoid kicking up a rooster tail of dust as we approached from the rear.
The mosque was an old building of roughly quarried stone and brick. I shut down the bike in the shadow of the rear wall and Meryem pulled out her phone again. We were in the middle of it now—the satellite map’s black spot.
“You know they can track that thing, right?”
“Yes. This is the idea. You think MIT does not know that I come here with you?”
“I’m sure they know now.”
“Exactly,” she said. “They watch their agents. Your CIA could learn from this.”
Meryem got off the bike and I kicked it onto its stand. What could I say? She had a point.
“You know, you drive like a crazy person,” Meryem said.
“Sorry if I scared you,” I said. “I made a call.”
I thought I saw her smile. But it wasn’t a smile. It was laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“It will take more than a motorcycle ride to scare me,” she said.
“Like what?”
Meryem shrugged.
“I do not know.”
“Come on, think about it. Something must scare you. Purple dinosaurs? Birthday parties?”
Meryem thought about it.
“None of these things. Perhaps spiders,” she said. “I do not like spiders.”
“Spiders, huh? Good to know.”
“What about you Mr. Raptor? What scares you?”
“I guess small spaces. Or knives. I really don’t like knives.”
“You have a Swiss Army knife, no?”
“It’s the part about the guy trying to cut me that I don’t like.”
I looked south. There were a few houses and a small store where the main road met the dirt spur that led to the mosque, but other than that, the mosque stood alone. The only unusual feature was a disused gravel road that headed out toward the mountains in the distance. What was odd was that the road didn’t intersect with the dirt spur. The weed-infested gravel simply dead-ended in a shallow ditch.
I turned back to the mosque, its single round brick minaret rising high into the air. The minaret had two balconies encircling it, like rings on a stick, one above the other. The lower balcony was about a hundred feet up, the upper balcony probably twenty-five feet above that. The upper balcony had loudspeakers encircling it. This balcony was where the muezzin would have traditionally sung the call to prayer, though these days it was done from the prayer hall below. Nestled among the loudspeakers was a satellite dish, not necessarily odd, but worth investigating. From base to tip, I made the minaret at about a hundred and sixty feet high.
“Augustus pointed right here,” I said.
“You must go in,” Meryem replied.
“What about you?”
“I am a woman. This might be a problem for me.”
I didn’t argue. Instead, I took a quick look around the front of the mosque, but I saw nothing unusual. Wherever our gun-toting pals were, they weren’t here yet, so I slipped through the gate to the front door. I slipped off my shoes, carrying them in my hand, but the mosque was empty, ornate tiles decorating the interior of the cupola. There was an arched wooden door to the right of the entrance where I had come in. I heard the rustle of fabric and saw that Meryem had changed her mind about coming inside. She wore her sunglasses and a loose scarf over her head, shoes in hand. She looked like a fashion throwback to the sixties. A very attractive fashion throwback to the sixties.
“Don’t stare,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“It’s empty,” I replied.
“Up there.”
So far we were still alone, but wherever the mullah was, it was unlikely that he was far away. I cautiously tried the arched door. It was secured by a simple mortise lock. I didn’t think I’d need much more than a nail to open it, but I had the luxury of a lock pick kit. The kit folded into a flat, credit-card sized piece of metal so it was simultaneously effective and unlikely to draw unwanted attention. The bonus was that I’d already spent a fair amount of training time learning how to use it. I had the tool out of my pocket and the lock picked before Meryem could tell me to hurry up.
The door opened outward with a soft squeak and I stepped inside to find a tight spiral staircase. I switched on a round Bakelite switch and a bare bulb lit the claustrophobic ascending stone stairs. Fabric-covered wiring drooped and twisted up the circular walls, a black coaxial cable stapled neatly above it. I clicked the deadbolt below the mortise lock shut.
“Do you have any idea what we are looking for?” Meryem whispered.
“We’ll know it when we see it,” I said.
“And if not?”
“Then we’ll look harder.”
I started up the tight, narrow stairwell, the light from the bulb below gradually fading as the bulb above slowly took over. I counted one hundred and twenty-six stairs before we hit the door at the first balcony. It was locked, but I didn’t bother with the pick because it was the upper balcony that interested me. As I continued climbing the twisting stairs, I noticed that the round interior walls had become soft at some spots. They were scaly with lime dust. Probably water damage. Forty-six steps later we reached a second low, arched doorway.
“Now we look,” Meryem said.
I didn’t need my pick this time. I simply turned the brass handle. The low door opened inward with a groaning scrape, its sill tight with the stone step below. I forced it all the way open, light flooding the stone staircase. As my pupils adjusted to the bright daylight, I saw the ornately decorated rail surrounding the round balcony. The rail wasn’t more than a couple feet high and beyond it was a panoramic view of the entire valley. Loudspeakers had been mounted at intervals around the circumference of the minaret, the satellite dish bolted slightly above the door. Meryem pulled up the satellite map on her phone, revealing the blacked-out area.
“This black spot is very large,” she said. “We could be looking for anything.”
“Or it could be simpler than that,” I said, careful to remain inside the shadow of the doorway.
“Simple how?” Meryem said.
I looked down at the tiled, domed roof of the mosque below us, and beyond it, the homes by the crossroads. They had flat concrete roofs, iron rebar sticking out of them, ready for the owners to build a new level once time and money would allow. Beyond that were green farm fields in every direction. Green except for the field adjacent to us. That field, the one with the disused gravel road running down the length of it, was brown. It obviously wasn’t under cultivation.
Overall, there wasn’t anything to indicate why the area should be blacked out on the map. There wasn’t a chain-link fence, or a radio tower, or anything resembling a sensitive military inst
allation in sight. Not even a gateway or checkpoint that would certainly be required for an underground facility. All there was was a mosque, a few houses, and a store. Hardly a reason to redact the region.
My eyes drifted up to the speakers, and then to the satellite dish. The speakers were standard equipment. The satellite dish was a little stranger, but television was popular everywhere. What made less sense were four rusted, L-shaped metal brackets that had been secured to the wall of the minaret. They were bolted all the way through the brick and fastened with large nuts on the interior wall of the tower. I stared down at them for a long moment before redirecting my attention inside the stairwell.
And that’s when I saw it—what was out of place—the wire. The coaxial cable led out from the back of the satellite dish, over the top of the doorway, and down the side of doorframe where it snuck inside at the base of the door and followed the stairs down the wall of the tower. The speaker wires followed a similar path down the side of the doorframe. But they didn’t go inside the door. Instead, they went through a drilled hole in the brick wall. Then they disappeared. Interesting. I remembered the water-damaged walls I had seen climbing the tower.
Meryem moved aside as I shut the door behind us. She turned to me in the low light, her breath warm on my cheek.
“What is it?” Meryem asked. “Tell me what you see.”
“Wait a minute,” I replied.
“Why do you want me to wait?”
“So I can be sure I’m right.”
Chapter 26
I HURRIED DOWN the steps two at a time, running my fingers along the rough plaster walls until I found the area of greatest water damage to the wall. It was an irregular splotch, about four feet wide by three high. I reached into the pockets of my cargo shorts, pulling out a flashlight and my Swiss Army knife. Flashlight between my teeth, I popped open the knife, inserting the flathead screwdriver deep into the moist plaster.
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