The Templar Salvation (2010) ts-2

by Raymond Khoury

  Zahed tensed up. “What does he want?”

  Steyl studied the man curiously. “Damned if I know. I already paid him the landing fee and gave him our flight plan.”

  They watched as the man pulled up in front of the plane, raised his right hand up, and moved it horizontally in a slicing motion, across his throat—the international marshaling sign for the pilot to kill the engines. Steyn nodded and complied.

  “Get rid of him,” Zahed said.

  Steyl stepped out of the cockpit area. Zahed followed him back to the cabin door.

  The fireman, a balding, middle-aged carnival of twitches, climbed onto the retractable steps and peered into the cabin. He stank of cigarettes, and his T-shirt had big sweat stains on it. He looked all hot and bothered and a bit dazed as well, as if someone had roused him by shouting into his ears. In his hand were some documents that he was waving at Steyl.

  “Mi scusi, Signore,” the man wheezed in between gulps of breath. Beads of sweat were trickling down his forehead. “I apologize for the trouble, but,” he continued, straining to find the right words, “as you know, there was a big terrorist attack in Rome yesterday. And now we have to check the passports of everyone flying in or out of this airport and fill out these papers.”

  Steyl eyed him thoughtfully for a second, then slid a sideways glance at Zahed before giving the fireman a wide smile. “It’s not a problem, my friend. Not a problem at all.” He turned to Zahed. “This gentleman needs to see your passport, sir.”

  “Of course,” Zahed replied politely.

  Steyl then pointed toward the cockpit and addressed the fireman slowly and with exaggerated enunciation, as if he were trying to explain something to a Martian infant. “I’ll just get my passport from my flight bag, all right?”

  The man nodded and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Grazie mille.”

  Zahed stepped back into the cabin, found his briefcase, and fished out the passports—both fakes. The one he picked out for himself, from a handful of passports of different nationalities, was Saudi. The one he’d had hastily crafted for Simmons had him as a citizen of Montenegro, like the ones he’d had made for Tess Chaykin and for Beyrouz Sharafi, courtesy of a boxload of blank passports previously acquired from a corrupt employee of that country’s interior ministry. Zahed hadn’t needed the documents on the way in. Two days earlier, after landing at the airfield, Steyn had locked up the aircraft, disembarked alone, and casually trudged over to the tower to deal with the landing formalities. He’d then returned to the plane with the rental car later that evening and helped Zahed smuggle his sedated companions under cover of darkness. This was getting more complicated, which Zahed had somewhat expected. And as he glanced at the fireman, he saw that the man’s gaze had settled on Simmons, who was just sitting there, facing forward, immobile and expressionless, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Zahed felt a twinge of unease, and shielded from Steyn and the fireman by the seat back, he reached into his case, pulled out his lightweight Glock 28 handgun, the one with the expanded nineteen-round magazine that he favored, and tucked it under his belt at the small of his back.

  He and Steyl rejoined at the cabin door, passports in hand.

  “Your friend—he is okay?” the fireman asked.

  “Him? Oh, he’s fine,” Zahed shrugged as he handed the Italian the passports. He gave him a complicit wink. “A bit too much of your local Montepulciano last night, that’s all.”

  “Ah,” the man relaxed as he flicked through the passports.

  Zahed eyed him carefully, his muscles taut, his senses on edge.

  The harried fireman was struggling to keep Zahed’s passport open while he filled out one of the forms on his knee. He completed it, moved it to the back of the pile, opened Simmons’s passport, then set it aside as he flicked through the clutch of papers in his hand, evidently looking for something. He looked up at Zahed and Steyn with embarrassment and gave them a sheepish smile, then went back to his sheets—then one of them snagged his attention. He flicked past it, then stopped, did a double-take and went back to it. He pulled it out of the pile and studied it curiously. And then he did what he shouldn’t have done: he glanced at Simmons. A glance that wasn’t casual or accidental. A furtive glance, one that was loaded with information. A glance that made Zahed reach behind his back and, in a calm and fluid motion, pull out the handgun and aim it at the fireman’s face.

  Zahed moved his other hand to his own face, index pointed up and tapping softly against his lips, signaling the fireman to keep quiet. Then he stretched that hand out toward him and gestured for him to hand over the bundle of papers and the passports that were in his hand. The fireman’s face clenched up further and his eyes did a nervous left-and-right flick, again telegraphing the options he was thinking about. Zahed gave him a calm “no-no” gesture with his finger before the man nodded his understanding and handed him the documents.

  Zahed’s eyes left the fireman for the briefest of moments as he said to Steyl, “Help our friend into your plane, won’t you?”

  Steyl hesitated, then said, “Sure thing.” He bent down and clasped his hand around the man’s forearm. The fireman nodded nervously and climbed into the cabin. He stood there, sweating even more profusely now, fear flooding his face, his puffy body all hunched up by the open cabin door in the low-ceilinged fuselage.

  Zahed flicked through the paperwork and found the sheet that had caused the problem. It was the all ports alert. A picture of Simmons was on it. Interestingly, Zahed noted, there was no photo of him. He deduced that none of the vidcaps from the Vatican’s CCTV footage had been clear enough—which was good news. He had to make sure it stayed that way.

  He looked up at the fireman and gestured invitingly at the seat across the aisle from the one Simmons was in. “Prego.” Please.

  The man nodded. As he turned his back to him and went to sit down, Zahed raised his handgun and slammed it sideways against the man’s head, the hardened steel colliding against the man’s skull with a dull crack. The official crashed heavily into the chair, face first. Blood was seeping out onto the hair at the back of his head and oozing down onto the leather seat. He wasn’t moving.

  “Aw, man,” Steyl grimaced, annoyed. “That’s gonna make a bitch of a mess.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Zahed told him calmly as he pulled the man off the chair and dumped him on the cabin floor. “Just get us out of here.”

  “We can’t land there with him on board, you know that,” Steyl told Zahed.

  The Iranian thought about it for no more than a second, then shrugged. “So we won’t.” He gave the pilot a pointed look.

  Steyl nodded his understanding.

  The pilot shut the cabin door, took his seat, and restarted the engines. He guided the plane off the runway, and within seconds, they were climbing into the cloudless sky. Zahed was seated facing backward, with Simmons across from him. He looked out his window and waited.

  A few moments after takeoff, Steyl slid the right cup of the headset off his ear and leaned back into the cockpit’s opening. “We’ve been cleared to five thousand feet,” he informed Zahed.

  The view was spectacular, all the more so as Steyl banked the plane in mid-climb. The high-country plains around L’Aquila quickly gave way to forest-cloaked mountains. The small aircraft soon crossed over the fortified hill town of Castel del Monte, and within minutes, they were skirting a bold line of jagged peaks, with the snowcapped tip of the Gran Sasso, the highest peak in Italy, to their left.

  Steyl leaned back across. “Leveling off at five thousand feet,” he told Zahed. “We’ve got about a minute or so before I have to start climbing again.”

  Zahed felt the aircraft slow down and knew Steyl was throttling back to an airspeed of a hundred knots. When he sensed they’d stabilized, Zahed pushed himself out of his seat. He took Simmons’s shades off, tucked them in his pocket, and gave him a quick check. Simmons was awake, but still heavily tranquilized, his dimmed eyes staring at Zahed from a
vegetative face. Zahed tugged on the archaeologist’s seat belt to check that it was secure, gave Simmons a patronizing pat on the cheek, and crouched over to the cabin door.

  The Conquest’s door consisted of two sections that opened like a clam—the upper panel, a third of the height of the opening, was hinged from the top and opened upward, the other, which also contained the stairs, opened downward. Zahed held the latch with both hands and twisted it slowly, then held his breath for a second and nudged the upper part of the door out about an inch. It instantly flung open, the edge of the panel catching the airflow that was rushing away from the fuselage. He released the handle of the bottom panel, and it too flew open.

  A blast of cold air rushed in, filling the cabin with a deafening roar. Zahed steadied himself. He had to act fast. Air traffic control would already be giving Steyl the all-clear to ascend to his next flight level and would start questioning him if he didn’t resume his climb soon after. He stepped over to the fireman, leaned down, slid his hands under his armpits and yanked him up. He grunted under the man’s sheer weight and had started pulling him when he felt him stir. The man was groggy, but conscious. His arms flailed around a bit, weakly. Zahed moved with added urgency. He half-lifted, half-dragged the fireman the four feet to the cabin door, keeping to his side, alert for any sudden movement. None came. He got him to the doorway and set him down on the cabin floor, then moved to his feet and started pushing.

  The fireman’s head went out first. It hit the fierce airflow and twisted sideways violently, wrenching him awake and causing his senses to fire back to life. It was something he would have probably preferred to avoid. His eyes snapped open, and after a brief moment of confusion, what was happening to him clearly hit home as he stared down the back of the aircraft, then strained against the wind and hauled his gaze into the plane, where Zahed had his arms locked around the fireman’s legs—and he was still pushing.

  Their eyes met for a second, long enough for Zahed to see the absolute terror in the fireman’s expression—then he gave him a final shove. The fireman’s body tumbled out of the plane and instantly plummeted out of view, trailing the briefest, split-second scream. Zahed hung on as the aircraft’s nose pitched down violently, its center of gravity shifting forward the instant the fireman flew out, just as Steyl had told him it would. Steyl controlled it and steadied the plane. Zahed glanced toward the cockpit. Steyl glanced back. Zahed nodded. Steyl nodded back and turned to face forward.

  Zahed felt the plane yaw slightly to the left, as if it were sitting on a turntable that someone turned counterclockwise. Steyl had the Conquest under crossed controls and was, as planned, forward-slipping the aircraft. It was now plowing ahead at a slight angle away from its fuselage’s main axis. The move redirected the airflow around it: It was now curling around the plane’s body from the windward side rather than from the front, and hitting the open door panels from behind. Zahed was ready. The wind blew the panels so they were now sticking out almost horizontally, within easy reach. Zahed reached out for the bigger of the two, the lower door, pulled it in, and secured it shut. He then grabbed the upper part of the door and locked it into place. The noise inside the plane went from hurricane roar to lawnmower buzz instantly. Zahed relaxed and inhaled deeply, then turned and saw Steyl’s face leaning across the cockpit opening. The pilot give him a thumbs-up. He returned it and took another deep breath.

  He settled back in his seat as the small aircraft resumed its climb. He felt the pressurization start to kick in, shut his eyes, and leaned back against the lush headrest, punch-drunk from the wild sensation that was coursing through him. Mansoor Zahed had experienced things most men could never conceive of, but he’d never been through that before. It took a lot to get his pulse racing, and it sure as hell was racing now. He felt electric. He inhaled deeply and allowed the sensation to anchor itself into his memory more intensely. It pleased him no end to realize that, even for someone like him, there were still new experiences to be sought out in this lifetime.

  He and Steyl had talked about this, a few years earlier, when the Iranian had first hired the South African for one of his covert jaunts. They’d discussed the possibility that something like this would happen one day. One night, over a few beers, Steyl had told Zahed about his days in the Angola bush wars, where he used to ferry UNITA rebels around in an old Cessna Caravan. He’d told the Iranian how one of the rebels’ favorite pastimes was taking a bunch of captured SWAPO men—the Soviet- and Cuban-backed government forces they were fighting—and chucking them out of his plane while whooping it up in drunken frenzies. Zahed had been deeply intrigued by Steyl’s story, but up until this moment, he hadn’t had a chance to experience it firsthand.

  It had been worth the wait.

  He opened his eyes slowly as he came out of his reverie, and his gaze found the man sitting facing him. Simmons was awake and conscious, but his eyes were straining wide. Judging by the horror radiating from them, Zahed knew that the archaeologist had witnessed what he had done.

  Zahed gave him a thin, humorless smile.

  Knowing that Simmons had been watching in a helpless daze made the event even more memorable.

  Chapter 18

  ISTANBUL,TURKEY

  Reilly spotted Vedat Ertugrul just as the Alitalia Airbus’s cabin door swung open. The legal attache of the Bureau’s Istanbul suboffice, a paunchy American of Turkish descent with a trumpet player’s jowls and puffy crescents under his eyes, was waiting for them at the edge of the jetway. They’d met briefly three years earlier, in the southern coastal town of Antalya, when the legat had proven to be very efficient and easygoing. Reilly hoped that was still the case as he stepped out to meet him, with Tess close behind.

  A couple of darker-skinned men were standing there alongside Ertugrul, one in a navy blue police officer’s uniform with a gold star on each shoulder, the other in a charcoal-colored suit over a white shirt. Both had humorless, dark brown eyes, buzz cuts, and severe mustaches accessorizing the stern expressions on their faces. After quick introductions all around, Ertugrul, the chief of police, and the spook led Reilly and Tess out of the air-conditioned jetway through a side door and down some stairs to the tarmac. Even though it was late in the afternoon, the air was still stiflingly hot and dry, made worse by the stench of aviation fuel.

  Two black Suburbans with tinted windows were waiting for them by the plane’s front landing gear. Moments later, the armored SUVs were being waved through the airport’s security gates and storming off toward the Queen of Cities.

  Ertugrul, riding in the middle row directly in front of Reilly, twisted around to face him and handed him a holstered handgun and a box of shells. “These are for you.”

  Reilly took the gun and checked it over. It was a standard issue Glock 22 with a fifteen-round magazine, no scratches on it and freshly oiled. He clipped the holster onto his belt and slipped the gun into it. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll need you to sign for them,” Ertugrul said, handing Reilly the forms and a pen. “I spoke to Tilden just as your plane came in,” he added, “and, well, it’s not looking great.”

  “Nothing from the prints?” Reilly asked as he signed the forms.

  Ertugrul shook his head. “New York’s liaising with Langley, the NSA, and the DOD on trying to pin an ID on this guy, but so far, nothing.”

  “We’ve got to have him on file somewhere,” Reilly grumbled as he handed him back the paperwork. “This guy’s no amateur. He’s done this kind of thing before.”

  “Well if he has, he’s been pretty good about ducking the limelight.”

  Reilly fumed for a beat and looked out at the cloudless sky. Several jets were lined up on final approach, an array of silver dots that stretched as far as he could see. It was peak season in Istanbul, and tourists were flocking in from all over. “What about the border controls here?”

  The chief of police, who was seated next to Ertugrul in the middle row, turned and caught his eye.

  “He’s coming here,” Rei
lly told him. “If he’s not here already.”

  “You’re assuming he’s already reached the same conclusions as the boys from the Vatican archives,” Ertugrul queried.

  “I’m sure he has,” Reilly insisted. “He’s still got Simmons to figure things out for him.”

  Ertugrul and the cop exchanged a few words in Turkish, then Ertugrul told Reilly, “Our friends have the country on a tight lockdown. Most of the airports here are also military airfields, and given the situation with the Kurds and with everything that’s going on in Iraq, the security is usually pretty tight anyway. The thing is, we don’t have much to go on for the main perp. We don’t even know what kind of passport he’s using.” He rummaged through his briefcase and pulled out a couple of printouts that he passed back to Reilly. “The only face we can really ask them to look out for is Simmons’s.”

  Reilly perused the all-ports alert. It had parallel paragraphs in both Turkish and English and consisted of the usual bold, urgent lettering and a couple of short, descriptive paragraphs alongside two photographs: one, a grainy, pretty useless one from the Vatican CCTV cameras of the bomber; the other, a clear, smiling passportlike portrait shot of Simmons, showing a ruggedly handsome man with shoulder-length, wavy hair and probing eyes. A young, ruggedly handsome man.

  It was the first time Reilly had seen a picture of the missing archaeologist. He turned to Tess, surprised. She was seated next to him on the rear bench. “That’s Jed Simmons?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  Reilly studied her with a bemused look on his face, then shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  He saw that Ertugrul and the Turkish officer were having a sidebar, and leaned in a bit closer to Tess. “When you said he was this famous archaeologist and this big Templar expert and all that … I kind of pictured someone older. And nerdier.” He paused, then threw in, “Maybe uglier too.”

  Tess let out a small chuckle. “That, he ain’t,” she teased. “And he’s so fit. I mean, my God, you should see him kitesurf. Talk about ripped.”