Veil of the Goddess

by Rob Preece

  After a quick shopping trip garnered them a bar of scratchy soap and some used clothing that smelled clean, they headed for the room they'd rented.

  Zack really wanted a shower, but settled for soaking in the diminutive bathtub in the bathroom down the hall.

  He had to replace the filthy water three times before he was clean enough to dry off. Then he dressed himself in the rough but clean wool pants and heavy cotton shirt he'd bought and knocked on the door to their room.

  "Finished,” he admitted. “The bath is all yours."

  "Good. How's our money holding out?"

  "I've got a few thousand left. Plus the gold coins."

  "Good. If we can buy a truck, we should be able to move more quickly."

  "Take your bath and we'll talk about it.” Now that they had a safe hiding place, Zack's military instincts were telling him to lay low, resupply and recuperate, and let the hunt die down. Ivy seemed ready to push ahead, but pushing without a plan and without adequate preparation was asking for failure.

  His face must have given his thoughts away because he saw Ivy biting her tongue to keep from snapping back at him. She grabbed the bundle of clothing and her towel and headed down the hall.

  Zack considered flopping on the lumpy bed, but the leer from the coffee shop owner kept coming back to him. Instead, he forced himself to his feet, followed Ivy down the hall, and parked himself outside the bathroom door.

  Ivy could take care of herself, but there was no lock on that door and Zack figured the police wouldn't be sympathetic if he had to explain why Ivy had murdered their host.

  A couple of minutes later, large brown eyes and a mop of dark brown hair peeked up from the steep stairway leading from the coffee shop downstairs. “You are needing something, perhaps?"

  It wasn't the proprietor but his teenaged son.

  "Everything's under control,” Zack said.

  "Ask him about a truck,” Ivy shouted from the other side of the thin bathroom door.

  "Right. My uh-wife and I are wondering if anyone in Simak has a truck they're interested in selling. I'll give you twenty dollars if you find one we can afford.” Plus whatever commission he could wangle out of the seller.

  The young man studied him. “Euros would be better than dollars. And are you sure you only want a truck? I can find you Hashish. Plenty."

  Well, Zack had been right about the disguise. Nobody thought they were soldiers. “I'd rather have Euros myself, but what I've got is American dollars. And we're not interested in drugs."

  "No alcohol here."

  Now that he knew he couldn't get one, he craved a beer more than he could imagine. “What we need is a truck,” he repeated. “Not expensive, though."

  "Fifty dollars and I'll see if I can find.” The kid held out his hand.

  "Fifty dollars if you find one that we can afford. I'll pay you then."

  The kid's grin let Zack know he'd been suckered. Well, it wasn't the worst thing that had happened.

  That grin widened considerably when Ivy stepped out of the bathroom wrapped in nothing but a towel.

  Zack was used to seeing Ivy in baggy military pants and the armor-encrusted tunic. Not that he was unaware of Ivy as a female, but that awareness had always been somewhere in the back of his mind rather than a conscious thought. He'd never feel that way again.

  The small towel the coffee shop proprietor had supplied covered her strategic areas, but just barely. She was tall for a woman and there was definitely a lot of leg going on there.

  Both the kid and Zack puckered their lips to whistle, but Zack managed to stop himself before he actually let out any noise.

  No such luck from the kid.

  "If you two perverts would get out of my way, I'll put some clothes on,” Ivy snapped.

  "I was just guarding—"

  "Good. Keep on guarding.” She walked down the hall, gave the kid a hard stare until he blushed and looked away, then slammed their bedroom door.

  "Your wife, she is quite, uh, glamorous,” the kid observed. “Is that right? Glamorous? Movie star?"

  "Glamorous, yes. Movie star, not yet, kid.” But the discoverer of the True Cross was likely to be quite a media favorite when word got around. Who knew, maybe Ivy would make it to Hollywood and become an actor.

  "I go look for a truck.” But the young Kurd remained in place, as if glued to the floor where he sat, waiting for another vision.

  It took Zack a few seconds to figure out the problem. The kid was embarrassed to stand up because his arousal would be sticking out like that bird-god statue's.

  He pretended he had to look at a faded print on the wall so the kid could leave without being ashamed. “I appreciate your help,” he called to the kid's retreating back.

  "I'm very a big help. Maybe you give me one hundred dollars. Fifty U.S. dollars are not so much. Only thirty Euros."

  "Fifty dollars.” Zack wasn't going to get suckered again.

  He waited until the kid nodded and vanished before softly knocking on the door to the room he and Ivy shared. The kid might not think anything of it, but the proprietor would get suspicious if he learned Zack was waiting out in the hall while his supposed wife was getting dressed.

  * * * *

  Ivy planned on getting about twenty-four hours of sleep. She'd recognized the predatory look in Zack's eyes as well as those of the young Kurdish man who'd offered to help find them a truck, but she figured she could trust Zack to keep his pants zipped. He certainly hadn't caused her any problems before. Then again, before she'd had her bath, she reeked enough that she would scare a skunk.

  "Do you think one of us needs to stay awake?"

  Zack glanced at the thin door. It didn't have anything as sophisticated as a lock and wasn't strong enough to resist a kick even if they used a chair to prop it closed.

  "I don't—"

  Whatever he did or didn't became irrelevant because the hard knock on the door cut him off.

  "Police. Open."

  The proprietor's son, apparently drafted into translation duty, looked visibly nervous as three Turkish soldiers shoved him into their room and followed.

  A Sergeant barked something at the young man. He wasn't speaking Kurdish, which made sense. The Turks probably didn't trust local Kurds given their continuous low-level conflict against Kurdish insurgency.

  Fortunately, the multi-lingual young man seemed to understand.

  "He wants to know if you're English."

  "American,” Zack answered.

  The Kurd translated and got a growled response.

  "He wants to know where is your baggage. Your passports. They think you are carrying drugs."

  Since the Kurd had offered to find hashish for Zack, that wasn't a bad guess. Ivy remembered an old movie about Turkish drug prisons and was glad Zack had turned down the offer.

  "We lost our bags,” Zack claimed. Probably smarter than telling the truth.

  Zack's translated answer provoked a heated discussion amongst the three soldiers.

  "They want you to go with them,” the kid finally reported. “They're going to take you to their headquarters in Batman. Many kilometers away. They say maybe you are drug smugglers, maybe someone they have been told to look for. You want me call American Embassy?"

  From the young man's nervous expression, he feared the soldiers almost as much as Ivy did.

  "No Embassy,” she said.

  He gave her a strange look, almost as if they were somehow allied. “You come back, I have truck,” he said.

  Ivy didn't think he was translating. She also didn't think she'd be coming back if these soldiers had anything to say about it.

  "Thanks."

  He blushed and hung his head, unwilling to meet her eyes. Turkey wasn't supposed to be as conservative as a lot of the Middle East, but here in the eastern part of the country, looking a woman in the eye was still a bit more daring than this young man could quite bring himself to do. Not that he'd minded looking at her legs when she'd come out of the
bathroom.

  The soldiers hustled them downstairs, away from the lumpy mattress that had felt like paradise during the few moments when she'd actually been able to lie down and enjoy it.

  They left the young Kurd behind. Ivy hoped that meant the Army had its own translators in Batman, wherever that was. The alternative was worse.

  "Buck up,” Zack advised. “We're innocent of any drug charges. They'll have to let us go."

  Ivy didn't think so. Her time in Iraq had made her painfully aware of how little it takes to become a suspect, and how difficult it is for the system to let go once it has you in its grip. And the Turkish system definitely had Zack and Ivy in its grip now.

  The soldiers bypassed the World War II vintage jeep she and Zack had noticed when they entered Simak and led them to a panel truck with bars in the windows.

  "They must have sent for this the minute we walked into town,” Zack whispered as the soldiers patted him down, took his commando knife, and then shoved them aboard. “Because it sure wasn't here when we arrived."

  The rear hatch closed with a solid clang and the three soldiers headed for the comfort of the cab.

  Moments later, the engine fired up and the truck slowly gathered speed as it left the cobbled roads of Simak and hit the rough asphalt pavement of the Turkish highway.

  "Okay, Mr. Plan-man, it's time for you to come up with something to get us out of this.” Ivy shut her eyes and watched the distant glow of the old temple fade from the horizon.

  They'd jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. She didn't know whether the soldiers would turn them over to the CIA for torture, or handle the torture themselves, but it didn't really matter. Unless she and Zack figured something out in the next couple of hours, their lifespan would become measured in minutes and in pain rather than in years.

  Chapter 7

  "If we ever needed a key, now would be the time,” Zack said. “Although I don't suppose they would have let us bring the Cross along."

  "Don't joke about this stuff.” Ivy sat on the floor, trying to hold on as the truck made its way through hairpin switchbacks and splashed through small mountain streams that either hadn't ever been bridged or where bridges had long since been washed away.

  "Why? Is something worse going to happen to me?"

  A tear glistened in one of Ivy's eyes and he instantly felt like a complete heel for his response.

  "Sorry."

  "It's all right. I'm just scared."

  After fighting the Foundation, the Iraqi insurgents, the CIA, the Kurdish militia, some crazed Orthodox monks, and now the Turkish Army, Zack couldn't blame her for being scared.

  He took off his belt and looked at the buckle. Unfortunately the belt was of the military variety, with no tongue he could yank off to pick the lock. Still, it was metal. He smashed the buckle against the truck floor until the little roller piece came out. It would make the world's worst lock-pick, but he couldn't just sit and do nothing.

  Ivy noticed his feeble efforts just about the time the truck hit an especially large bump and the buckle bit slipped out of his hand and vanished into the dust behind them.

  "Damn.” Now he was still locked in and his pants would fall down.

  "What are you doing?"

  "What I'm trying to do is take advantage of skills learned in my misspent youth and pick the lock to this place. What I'm actually doing is banging up the knuckles on one hand and holding my pants up with my other."

  She perked up. “You know how to pick locks?"

  "If I had the picks I had back in south Dallas, I'd have this door opened in twenty seconds."

  "Really? What kind of tools do you need?"

  "Ideally? Professional locksmith quality picks would be perfect. In a pinch, a couple of nice hunks of spring steel would do the job. I've proven a one-inch-long round piece of tin won't do the job, though."

  "Oh. Turn your back for a minute."

  Zack started to ask her if she'd gone crazy, then decided not to bother. Given what was going to happen to them when they reached the Army interrogation center, insanity might be the best way out for both of them.

  He did as she asked, and stared out the barred window at the back of the truck.

  "Okay, here."

  She handed him her bra.

  The fabric still held the warmth from her breasts and carried the scent of clean woman.

  His brain instantly went into short-circuit mode. “Listen, I like you and everything, but I don't think this is the—"

  "The underwire, idiot. It's made out of springy steel."

  Smooth work, he assured himself. Not only had he missed the obvious, Ivy probably thought he suffered from delusions.

  He turned away again, mostly to hide the flush on his face. He used a sharp edge from the carcass of his smashed belt buckle to slice the two thin wires out of Ivy's bra and handed the ruined bit of fabric back to her.

  "What am I supposed to do with this?"

  "Put it on. It's better than nothing.” For him if not for her. He didn't have time to think about Ivy's breasts unbound.

  "You're a strange man, Captain."

  "You don't know the half of it."

  The underwires were a bit slender and flimsy for the size of the lock he was dealing with, but he had time. Zack managed to get the truck's rear hatch opened within a couple of minutes.

  It would have been smart to wait until they slowed for something, but Zack had a sneaking suspicion that even on this old truck, an open door would signal an alarm. At least they weren't on a freeway. The truck's top speed going up through the Turkish mountains couldn't have been more than twenty-five kilometers an hour and they weren't going top speed right then. “Jump,” he ordered.

  Ivy leapt off the truck and he followed as soon as she was clear.

  The ground came up and hit him hard but he managed to protect his head. Still the impact had him seeing stars.

  "Come on, we've got to move.” Ivy must have landed better than he had. She was dragging him off the road before he recovered.

  "Where to?"

  "Back to Simak. Back to the Cross."

  "The entire Turkish Army is going to be looking for us now."

  "Everyone in the world is looking for us. Why should the Turkish Army be different? Besides, would you want to abandon the Cross after all we've been through?"

  "It didn't hurt anyone when the Kurds left it in Mosul for seven hundred years."

  Ivy shook her head angrily. “That was before the Foundation came looking for it. They aren't going to give up, Zack. It might take them a few months, but our hiding place isn't perfect."

  Unfortunately, she was right. “We'd better stay off the road, then. Because I have a feeling we're about to have company. A lot of company."

  * * * *

  The distance that they'd covered in less than an hour in the Army paddy wagon took close to twenty-four hours to retrace on foot.

  The Turkish Army had plenty of experience tracking small bands of Kurdish guerillas in the area and used that experience to hunt for Ivy and Zack. Their low-flying helicopters and the ambushes they set up on fords and bridges crossing the fast-moving mountain streams were bad enough.

  The dogs were worse.

  Three times, she and Zack waded miles in impossible streams, climbed out on low-hanging trees, and tried to escape the scent-sniffing animals. Each time, the lead they gained was temporary. The Turks knew those tricks. Zack's urban background was no help at all, and Ivy's small-town Pennsylvania upbringing wasn't much better. Nobody had used tracking dogs in her neighborhood since it had been a stop on the Underground Railroad a century-and-a-half earlier.

  Every muscle in her body complained, wanted to surrender and get this over. But surrender was no option. If they'd gone peacefully to Batman, maybe they could have persuaded the Turkish authorities that they were no threat. It wasn't likely, but it had been possible. With their breakout, they'd given up that option. If they were captured, the Turkish Army would be so cert
ain they'd found drug smugglers that she and Zack would spend the rest of their lives in some Turkish prison—unless the Turks handed them over to the CIA.

  "How hard would it have been for me to grab a GPS before I bailed out of my tank?” Zack complained. “I don't even know where we are any more. For all I know, we passed Simak hours ago."

  Her second sight didn't help, either. But Ivy was pretty sure they hadn't gone far enough.

  "It doesn't matter. The longer we stay free, the wider the Turks will have to spread their net and the more likely they'll be to miss us."

  He grabbed her arm as she stumbled over a rock, then froze.

  "What?"

  "I smell someone."

  Ivy couldn't smell anything other than herself. She'd had that wonderful bath, but one thing they'd forgotten to buy had been deodorant. It was an error she swore she'd never repeat."

  "That's me, you idiot. I smell like a horse."

  "I don't—"

  "Stop, please."

  The coffee shop owner's son stepped from behind a tree. “No more talking. I have found you when the others couldn't."

  She couldn't see his cocky grin, but she could hear it in his voice. She relaxed, inhaled, prepared to launch herself at the latest threat.

  The hard ratchet of a shotgun cartridge being seated stopped her. The sound came from behind her. They were surrounded.

  "If you think you're going to get a reward, don't count on it,” Zack warned.

  "The talking is dangerous. You must shut up. You will please to follow me. We have kilometers to walk."

  Ivy looked toward Zack but didn't see any inspiration there. “Guess we have no choice."

  "Talking is bad,” the kid repeated. “The Turks have sensors. Hear long distances."

  Great. With her big mouth, Ivy had probably been leading the Turkish Army around like a dog pulling on a leash.

  She forced herself to follow the kid as he climbed higher into the mountains.