Covert Evidence

by Rachel Grant

He kicked a rock, sending it skittering across the rugged ground. “You beautiful fool. Don’t you get it? They know. That’s why you were chosen to be the mule. You were about to embark upon an expedition deep into Eastern Anatolia to find the most valuable tunnel since…fuck. I don’t know…ever. And you tell me this now? Me. The only person in the entire country who is helping you.”

  She jumped to her own feet and stared him down. “Get your head out of your ass and listen up. I didn’t tell anyone about that map. No one. So Hejan couldn’t have known what I was about to do or why. And you can drop the outrage that I didn’t trust you enough to tell you, because I don’t trust ANYONE!”

  It was true. How on earth could she trust anyone, when everyone—even her own mother—let her down? Hell, especially her mother. No one, ever, had loved her enough to put her first. So she’d never put anyone else first. It was simple math.

  She grabbed her backpack and shoved the water bottle and gun back inside.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m done resting. You can come with me or not, your choice.”

  “You aren’t calling the shots here, sweetheart. It’s going to get damn hot in the next hour. We aren’t going to walk fifty miles in the worst heat of the day. So sit your ass back down. You aren’t escaping me now that I know why you’re so valuable.”

  He might be right about the heat, but his choice of words rankled. They were back to the vocabulary of kidnapping. He considered her his prisoner. Screw that. One thing she did know about Ian at this point—probably the only thing she knew—was that he would never hurt her.

  She backed away from him, slowly. “You’re wrong. I’m not valuable to anyone. Certainly not to Zack—how could he possibly know about the tunnel? No one knows.”

  “He knows.” Ian spoke with such certainty.

  “I didn’t tell my advisor or Suzanne, or Mara, Trina, or Erica. Hell, I didn’t even tell Todd, when I lived with him and we were supposedly in love—”

  She stopped abruptly as her own words hit her.

  She dropped her backpack, which landed on the ground with a dull thunk. “Oh. Shit. Todd.” Her stomach burned, and she wondered why this realization hurt so much. She’d faced and accepted Todd’s betrayal months ago. She’d boxed him up and put him where he could never hurt her again.

  Except, he just had. What a lovely, double-edged sword he wielded.

  She paced in a tight circle. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” She sucked in a gasping breath. “It must have been Todd.” She could barely breathe as the connections came together, a mental assault, so many betrayals.

  Ian grabbed her shoulders, halting her frenetic pacing. “Tell me everything. Everything about Todd. Everything about the map.”

  She cleared her throat against the pain that had lodged there. “Todd and I started dating right before I went to DC for my internship. I really liked him. He was different. Really smart, for starters. His parents were immigrants from Jordan, which he’d visited a lot along with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, before the civil war started. He was exotic. Well traveled. Fascinating. But his parents put a lot of pressure on him, being an only child and first-generation American.”

  “Jordanian immigrants named their son ‘Todd’?”

  “His real name is Todros.” She glanced at him askance. “But I’m guessing you already know that.”

  He nodded. “Checking to see if you knew.”

  “Yeah. I knew my boyfriend’s frigging name.”

  Ian raised a brow, a silent reminder that she’d been ready to jump into bed with him the first night—when they both were using aliases.

  “We lived together,” she said flatly.

  Did his hand clench into a fist at that? Was it possible James Bond was jealous?

  Don’t flatter yourself.

  “My DC internship was…amazing. I mean, it was cool to be working for Mara Garrett and Erica Scott.” She cocked her head. “I’m guessing you know who Erica Scott is.”

  He nodded. “Better known as Erica Kesling.”

  “The wedding was last spring.” She paced the small strip of ground between Ian and the bike. “I lived with Trina, and we really clicked. Between Trina, Erica, and Mara, they’re hella connected. I got to go to fundraising parties at the Smithsonian and National Geographic. They even took me along to a political schmooze fest for Alec Ravissant at Dr. Patrick Hill’s Annapolis mansion.”

  “Dr. Hill, the oceanographer?”

  “Yes. The head of the MacLeod-Hill Exploration Institute. His organization is a large source of funding for the shipwreck excavation I was working on in Antalya. He’s tight with my advisor, so going to a party at his house was a pretty big deal. Such a big deal I invited Todd to go to the party with me,” she said, returning to the reason for the tangent in her explanation. “He flew up for the weekend so he could go.”

  “So you were pretty serious already?” Had Ian’s voice turned flat? No. She was imagining things.

  “Not then. We’d only just started dating. Suzanne said later—after he was arrested—she thought he’d originally asked me out because of my internship—he knew I’d get to meet Dr. Hill and wanted an in.” She didn’t bother to say how much Suzanne’s suspicion had hurt—the idea that Todd’s interest in her had stemmed from his ambition. “But I liked him, and I thought he liked me. I didn’t want to go to the garden party as a fifth wheel, tagging along with the high-profile couples. I didn’t think Curt Dominick would appreciate hanging out at a political event with a lowly intern.” She smiled, thinking of Trina. “It was right before Trina met Keith, and at the time she had the hots for Dr. Hill’s assistant. Some jackass whose name I forget…but I knew she’d be busy at the party pursuing that guy, so I invited Todd.” She let out a humorless laugh. “I was wrong about Todd and Curt. Todd was so busy sucking up, he ditched me, and I spent the afternoon playing pool with Mara, Curt, and Lee.

  “When we left the party, I thought Todd would be pissed because I hadn’t hung out with him, and he was worried I was mad for the same reason. Trina had left with Keith—and had her own man issues to deal with—but really, I’d had a great time. Todd had a great time. We’d both been invited to join Dr. Hill on his next submarine mapping demonstration he was setting up for Erica’s benefit. Hill really wants his institute to be locked tight with the Navy’s underwater archaeology program…”

  “Get to the point about Todros Ganem and how he’s involved.” There was no mistaking the hostility in Ian’s voice.

  She glared at him. “After that weekend, things shifted between Todd and me. It was a good weekend for us, relationship-wise. We became more serious.”

  Yeah, his jaw was definitely clenching. So maybe the spy felt something for her after all. “The next two weeks were insane. Keith’s townhouse blew up. Alec Ravissant assigned Sean Logan to act as Trina’s bodyguard. Eventually, I was moved to Alec’s house. The bomber was identified right before I flew back to Tallahassee. It had been so crazy, I hadn’t set up a place to live. I stayed with Suzanne while I apartment-hunted. I couldn’t find anything that wasn’t a craphole and was frustrated. Todd suggested I move in with him. It was early in the relationship, but I figured what the hell, I needed a place. And”—she fixed Ian with a glare—“I liked him. A lot. I figured my luck had changed, and I’d finally found a good guy.”

  Her breath hitched. Things really had started off great with Todd. She’d forced herself to forget that last spring but couldn’t deny it now. “That Thanksgiving, he flew home to visit his parents in Delaware. I hadn’t met them yet, and he wanted to prepare them for his non-Middle Eastern, non-Muslim girlfriend. I was pretty much their worst nightmare, and we talked about making a joint visit over winter break, after he’d softened them up.

  “I stayed in Tallahassee over the holiday weekend and, with nothing to do, decided to study the maps I’d photographed over the summer. It had been such a busy semester, I hadn’t had time to even look at them until that point.” Sh
e paused. “It was just a cursory examination. Nothing about the particular map stood out. It wasn’t like T. E. Lawrence had labeled it ‘Eastern Turkey’ or anything. There was no scale. It was just a sketch map. Matching his hand-drawn lines to the terrain without a scale was…a challenge. It wasn’t until I realized that what I thought was a label was actually the mapmaker’s signature that things got interesting. A quick Google search on T. E. Lawrence, and I was pretty sure the map I’d photographed back in DC was a genuine Lawrence of Arabia original. The signature looked good, and why would anyone forge his signature on a map that had been filed away and forgotten?”

  From Ian’s fixed gaze and intent eyes, she knew she had his rapt attention. “After that, I researched T.E. and learned he worked at Carchemish, on the Euphrates River in northern Syria in 1911 and again in 1914. Once I had Carchemish as a starting point, I was able to narrow my search, and eventually matched the map to the area west of Cizre, east of Nusaybin. Historic maps generally ignored that area, so it wasn’t easy. T.E.’s notes indicated an archaeological site, but not just any site, an underground Roman aqueduct. My guess is it was a Roman effort to route water from the Tigris, and I think it originates near the current village of Kefshenne and goes south from there, filling in the dry stretch of land between the Tigris and Euphrates.”

  She glanced to the southeast. Somewhere in the distance beyond the near hills, the river flowed. “I suspect T.E. mapped it right before World War I broke out. In 1914, he went on a mapping expedition on the Sinai Peninsula after Carchemish—but the expedition was really cover for British Intelligence, who wanted reconnaissance of the area—and he must have explored the area near Cizre either before or after that excursion. Most, if not all, of his maps from that period went to the British War Department. A stamp on the back indicated the map had been property of the British Naval Attaché, and I know they regularly trade information with the NHHC. Basically, I think the Attaché gave it to the US Navy anywhere from sixty to eighty years ago, and it was filed away with intelligence gathered during both World War I and World War II, and forgotten.”

  Ian had been silent for a long time. But she didn’t doubt he was keeping up with the story.

  “So, back to Todd. He returned from Thanksgiving, and I debated whether or not I should tell him what I’d found. I mean, I’d just been handed an amazing subject for dissertation research—except, it wasn’t underwater. I had to work my ass off to sell the topic to my advisor, using the trade routes angle—without mentioning Lawrence.”

  “If you’d told him about the Lawrence connection, would he have approved it without question?”

  “Probably. Maybe.” Cressida rubbed her arms, feeling chilled as she admitted to the one thing she felt guilty about. “I didn’t mention the map or Lawrence, because academia can be cutthroat. I worried my advisor would…try to steal my lead. Take my glory. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened to a graduate student.” She bit her bottom lip. “But the hardest part was not telling Todd. He was desperate—really, really desperate—for a dissertation topic. He squeaked by on his MA. It was well written and hit all the right notes, but in the end, his underwater survey of a Sint Maarten bay turned up nothing. He’d hoped to find the hull of a Spanish naval vessel sunk by the Dutch in a 1630s battle, but he got nada. If he didn’t come up with something better for the PhD, he’d be done academically. And his parents were pissed that he was pursuing academic underwater archaeology and not computer science.”

  “Do you think he would have stolen your project?”

  “He didn’t have the power to steal it—not like a professor could—but he certainly would have wanted in on it. Equal billing. I knew him well enough to know he’d take over. It would’ve become his. I’ve been pushed around by enough men in my life to know I didn’t want to open that door with Todd. But there is enough research involved to feed a dozen dissertations, and I would have happily shared—after I found the site and got full sole finder’s credit.”

  She shook her head as guilt stabbed at her. “Todd didn’t know why I’d fixated on Roman aqueducts in Eastern Anatolia, but he must have guessed something had triggered my sudden shift in research.” She resumed pacing. “If he found out, it would explain a lot, actually. He could have hacked my computer the weekend I went to visit my mom. I usually bring my computer, but Mom insisted I unplug. She told me in no uncertain terms to leave my work at home or don’t bother visiting. It must have been too much for Todd to resist, being home alone with my laptop.”

  She closed her eyes, imagining how Todd must have felt when he discovered her secret. “A few days after I returned, he broke into the department and stole the Lidar. Looking at it now, my guess is he wanted to cut me out. He probably had some insane notion of heading out here on his own and finding the site before I could. With his Jordanian family, he would certainly have had an easier time arranging the trip.”

  “More likely he intended to sell the equipment to his Jordanian relatives.”

  “Yeah. I heard the FBI found emails on his hard drive that indicated he was trying to sell the equipment. I was told he wasn’t anti-American or pro-Jordanian. He just wanted money. When he was caught, he implicated me. I was stunned. I’d been in love with him, and he claimed I’d put him up to the task of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment from the department I’d devoted my life to.” She met Ian’s hard gaze. “It appears the fact that I didn’t trust Todd is what set him off. It might even be what set this entire horrid fiasco in motion.”

  She took a deep breath as she digested her own words. “He may have promised his uncle or Hejan’s group he’d find the tunnel in exchange for getting him out of the US. It could explain why he’s in Turkey.”

  She looked out over the landscape, toward the Syrian border. She guessed they were forty or fifty miles away. “To me, it’s an archaeological site. A rare find that could launch my career, establish me as an expert in something.” She frowned. “But I wonder if Todd saw modern implications.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Ian had known the potential for illicit purposes when she first described ancient tunnels, but the proximity to an international border changed everything. The fact that it could be a route into a NATO country from volatile Syria—and vice versa—well, the implications were huge. And horrifying if the knowledge got into the wrong hands.

  “My plan for this trip was a scouting mission,” Cressida said. “To see if Lidar could be effective for survey. The Gadara Aqueduct was built by digging a series of well-like vertical shafts—called qanats—every twenty to two hundred meters, then workers tunneled between the shafts. The shafts were later filled in, but archaeologists have found over three hundred entrances so far. Lawrence marked two qanat entrances on the map, but there must be more. He indicated the tunnel was several miles long.”

  “What does Todros know?” Ian refused to call the sonofabitch Todd. Todd was Cressida’s boyfriend. A man she’d been in love with. Whereas Todros Ganem was a traitor with Jordanian ties who might have given terrorists the coordinates to a smugglers’ tunnel. “Does he have the map?”

  “If he found Lawrence’s map on my computer, he won’t have everything he needs. I cut the key from the jpeg file and buried it on my hard disk. Just the map wouldn’t tell him a thing. My guess is he found my composite map—one I’d drawn as I was trying to narrow down the location.”

  “Where is your composite map?” He looked at her bag. “Do you have it?”

  She pointed to her temple. “It’s in here. I created it. I know every contour line. So I didn’t bring it. I didn’t trust the other grad students. After the fallout with Todd, some of them turned on me. And they all wanted to know what my lead was. So I left the map behind in Tallahassee.”

  “So Todros knows the general area of where to look, but not the exact coordinates?”

  “I don’t even know the exact coordinates. I calculated the accuracy of my map to be within five kilometers. That
isn’t a huge area for a pedestrian survey if you know what you’re doing.”

  “And Todros knows what he’s doing.”

  “Yes. He teaches survey courses to the undergrads.” She paused. “Taught. He taught survey courses.” Her gaze dropped, preventing Ian from seeing her pain at Todros’s actions.

  Todros had lived with Cressida. She’d loved him, yet the motherfucker had betrayed her. For what? Academic glory? Revenge? Or was there a political ideology behind it all? Had he seen the potential of the tunnel and wanted to exploit it? What drove a man to betray a woman like Cressida? To betray his country? Because sure as hell the moment Ganem popped the lock on the anthropology department door, he’d made his choice.

  Why had he shown up in Antalya when he did? And where was he now?

  Ian wished he could see Cressida’s composite map. “Why didn’t you bring a computer?”

  “I was warned traveling to Eastern Anatolia with sophisticated mapping software and data would be a bad idea.”

  She took a step toward him, then stopped. “Ian, I know you’re mad I didn’t tell you, but you need to understand, this has been my secret, and mine alone, for months. I had no idea anyone had seen my composite map. I honestly didn’t think it was relevant to what was going on. I’m sorry—” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I haven’t told anyone. Not my best friend. Not my mother. Not my advisor. I didn’t even tell the man I lived with. It never even occurred to me it was something you needed to know.”

  Put that way, it was hard for Ian to hold it against her. But he tried. He was developing feelings for her—which was flat out forbidden in his world—while in Cressida’s world, Ian was just another mistake on a long list of them.

  She’d kissed Ian once. Not that he was counting…except apparently he was…

  All he really knew was his life was forever changed thanks to this screwed-up mission, and Cressida Porter had managed to steal a piece of him he hadn’t known was up for grabs. “You can find an entrance to the tunnel?”