The way back up, if there was one, wasn’t going to be much fun either.
The tunnel didn’t widen, which allowed him to make it all the way down until his foot felt water, after what he estimated was a descent of not far from a hundred feet. He held there for a moment and caught his breath, hesitating. He had no way of knowing how deep the channel was. If he let go and allowed himself to fall into it, and if it was too deep for him to stand in, he risked getting carried away by the current—and drowning, if the canal didn’t have an air gap above it.
He didn’t have much choice.
He took hold of the cable and, slowly, eased himself off the wall and onto it, his legs the last to let go of the tunnel. The cable held. He breathed out with relief and, one hand at a time, lowered himself down into the water. The stream was, surprisingly, freezing. Surprisingly, because of the intense heat aboveground. Tess’s comment about the melting snow brought a small smile to his face. He kept going until the water was up to his armpits—then his feet felt something and landed on solid ground.
“I’m down,” he yelled up. “I can stand in it.”
“Can you see anything?” she shouted back.
He looked downstream. The pale shimmer on the water’s surface disappeared into blackness. He turned the opposite way. It was just as dark.
His heart sank.
“No,” he shouted, trying to keep his voice even.
Tess went quiet. “What do you want to do?” she finally asked.
He moved away from under the shaft and took a couple of steps upstream, his hands holding on to the cable tightly. There was an air gap between the surface of the water and the roof of the channel. If he bent his knees and crouched through, he’d be able to walk upstream—for a while, anyway. He couldn’t see how far it stayed that way. He tried the same downstream. The roof was lower there, and after barely a half dozen steps, it disappeared underwater.
He called up to her. “I’m going to see if there’s another shaft out of this place. Upstream looks doable.”
Tess went quiet again. After a beat, she said, “Good luck, tiger.”
“I love you,” he hollered back.
“I’m almost thinking it was worth getting into this mess just to hear you say it,” she laughed.
He reeled in the cable and tied its end around his waist, then started hiking up the channel.
The bottom was smooth and slippery, the soft tufa buffed and polished by eons of water. He had to move slowly and with extreme care, and even though the flow of the stream wasn’t too overpowering, it was still there. The difficulty was in having to use his arms to keep feeling the roof of the channel in search of another shaft. He narrowly lost his footing twice from the awkward stance, but before long it became a moot point as the roof dropped down and disappeared underwater.
The air gap was gone.
Reilly stood there for a beat, frozen, exhausted, his fingers and toes aching from the constant exertion. He stared into the blackness, contemplating what it meant if he had to make his way back to Tess without having found a way out. He cursed inwardly, wanting to yell out his rage and pound his fists against the damn tunnel walls, but he held back and sucked in some deep breaths and tried to calm himself down.
He refused to give up.
There had to be a way out.
He couldn’t fail Tess. Nor could he let the Iranian win.
He had to keep going.
He filled his lungs with air and exhaled twice, then sucked in a deep breath and held it and crouched underwater. The water chilled his eyes as he strained to look ahead, then he kicked forward and started swimming upstream. He struggled to make any headway as his arms and feet pushed the water back furiously, and he kept darting one hand upward, over his head, running it against the roof of the tunnel, hoping it would find an opening and present him with another air gap. He felt his lungs about to explode, and turned and headed back, counting the number of strokes he took, and with a greedy gulp burst out into the air pocket he had left.
He stood there, letting his breathing settle, and mulled it over. He thought he’d felt the roof rising slightly before he’d had to give up and turn back. The problem was, there was a point of no return in venturing up that tunnel, and he needed to know what it was. At some point, he’d have to decide whether to turn back or keep going—knowing that if he did the latter, he would run out of oxygen before he made it back to the air pocket. He decided to test it and see how long he could stay under. He took in as deep a breath as he could, then ducked under the surface, staying in place but imagining himself swimming, and counted how many strokes he could make before he had to come up for air.
He managed sixteen. Which would be less if he were actually doing it and pushing against water, so he factored it down to fourteen. Which meant that after seven strokes underwater—or possibly eight or nine, given that the way back would be faster as he’d be swimming with the current—he’d need to decide whether to keep going, and possibly drown, or head back. He thought he’d managed about five or six strokes on his earlier attempt, and he’d barely made it back, so that sounded about right.
He moved back upstream and got right up to the point where the roof of the tunnel hit the water. With his knees splayed wide and bent, he crouched right down and craned his head back and sideways until his forehead was literally scraping the roof. He paused for a short rest to allow his muscles to regroup, then he took the three breaths, kept the third in, and went under.
This time, he tried moving faster, his feet kicking harder, his arms staying down and not looking for an air pocket he knew they wouldn’t yet find. As he fought the streaming water, still in utter darkness, he counted down each stroke in his mind.
His heartbeat rocketed ahead as he took his sixth stroke.
Then his seventh.
Then his eighth.
His hand rose up, but it was still submerged. There was still no air above him.
He had to decide. Right there and then. He had to decide whether to keep going or turn back. He thought he’d sensed the roof rising the last time around, but right now, he wasn’t sure anymore. Too many variables were clouding his mind.
Nine.
Ten.
He kept going.
Chapter 48
His lungs were on fire. Maybe clear air was only five or six strokes ahead of him. Maybe he could make it there—if he calmed down. But the awareness of the impending drowning, the awareness of the finite amount of time he had left, was making it worse. It was flooding his body with adrenaline and stoking his heartbeat to a point where his lungs were ready to explode outward.
For a split second, Reilly imagined what drowning would be like, but he quickly quashed the thought and pushed harder, moving even faster now. His hand was still sliding against the smooth roof of the tunnel, desperately seeking out his salvation. For an instant there, it did feel like the roof was sloping upward, barely perceptibly, but enough to give him hope, enough to make him fight the water even harder—then something pulled against him, yanking him back.
The cable, the one around his waist. He’d run out.
His hands went into a frenzy, working feverishly at the knot, pulling and tugging ferociously until he broke free from its grip. He flung it aside and started again, but the reality of it all was flooding in, the realization that he had to die now, that his willpower was fighting a losing battle to contain his lungs’ need to let something in, anything, even if it was freezing cold water.
He felt a surge of blood in his forehead, a panic that raced through every neuron in his body and choked his very soul, and although he wasn’t ready to give up, although he absolutely did not want to die, the need to breathe in was stronger than him, stronger than he could now overcome—and in that moment of pure terror, in that instant when his life seemed like it was about to get flushed away in a surge of molten snow, something broke through, a signal, coming from the tips of his fingers, fighting off the dread with a stab of hope.
A coolness.
The coolness of air slipping past damp skin.
His fingers were in open air.
It sent an electric shock through his body and spurred him forward even faster. He planted his feet against the bottom and took a couple of steps forward, his hand groping the roof of the tunnel frantically, the water splashing against it and confusing his senses, his face turned up and staring desperately into the inky blackness above him—then he rose. He couldn’t last another second. He just burst up, his face tilted sideways, hoping his face wasn’t about to collide with solid rock.
He found air. The clearance was no more than a couple of inches, but it was enough. He inhaled furiously, letting the air howl into his lungs, coughing and sputtering from the water that was also trickling in, dizzy with oxygen and elation.
He didn’t move, not for a minute or so. He just let his heart calm down, let his lungs gorge themselves with air, let the tension seep out of his muscles. When he felt settled again, he took a couple of steps farther upstream, checking the roof as he did. It was rising again, slowly but surely. And in the distance, as if congratulating him on passing some kind of sadistic test, a wraithlike halo of light was beckoning him from the roof of the channel, maybe thirty or so yards upstream.
GETTING INTO THE SHAFT was the hardest part of the ordeal.
Reilly used the pick to hoist himself up into it, the move all the more arduous due to the added weight of his drenched clothes. His first few attempts ended in defeat as the soft tufa he’d planted the pick into crumbled under his weight and sent him splashing back into the stream, but he finally managed to hook it into a more solid patch and lift himself into the vertical shaft.
Like a moth drawn to the light, he climbed up and found himself in a similar passageway to the one he had left Tess in. He found the cabling on the wall and followed it first in one direction, then in the other until he found some steps that led upward.
Upward.
He found his way back to the mouth of the shaft and pulled the cabling off the wall beside it as a marker for his return trip, then followed the cabling through a seemingly endless series of chambers and passageways, smashing the light fixtures wherever he encountered them to lead him back to the shaft. And then it appeared, first as a hint of its presence, then quickly growing so it brought back the caves around him into view: sunlight, bright, glorious, and inviting.
He emerged in a canyon he didn’t recognize. There was no one around either, just a bare, desolate landscape. It was similar to the one that had led into the underground city—more rock formations of what looked like huge, upside-down incisors, more meringue-like hills—but it was a different canyon, of that he was certain. He used his pick to gouge a big X by the entrance of the cave dwelling he had emerged from, then, making sure he made a mental note of every turn he took and using his pick to leave markers behind at every bend, he staggered ahead, looking for help.
A lone mule, tied to a stake in the ground, interrupted his aimless wander. Then the rasp of a throat that had endured decades of nicotine damage added to his confusion.
“Merhaba, oradaki.”
He stopped and scanned his surroundings. There was no one around.
“Iste burada. Buradayim,” the voice called out.
He followed it upward and saw an old man just sitting there, in the middle of nowhere, perched on a rickety wooden chair in a small, exposed chapel that had been carved into the rock face. The man was waving at him with a slow, frail arm. A small table next to him displayed a few cans of soft drinks, while a tin kettle stood ready on a small camping gas burner.
The man flashed him a mostly toothless smile. “Icmek icin birsey ister misiniz, efendi?” he asked, pointing at the cans on the table.
Reilly shook his head and looked at him for a curious second, making sure the man was actually there and not some figment of his battered mind, then hurried over to him.
IT WAS ANOTHER THREE HOURS before he made it back to Tess. He’d brought help with him, in the form of the old man’s son and two grandsons, along with plenty of rope and a few flashlights.
He hadn’t been able to explain where he’d left her, not that he knew himself. The surest way to get back to her was to retrace his steps. With the aid of the locals, it was an easier journey than his solo trek. The submerged part of the channel was the only real challenge they faced; a bucket, held upside down like a diving bell, was the only available solution, but it did the trick. Reilly had also taken along the one thing he knew Tess would be happier to see than his own face: a plastic bag, one that was big enough to seal shut. To keep the codices, and Hosius’s document, dry.
The grin on her face when she saw it told him he was right.
That was the good news.
The bad news was confirmed once they finally got back to the entrance of the subterranean citadel that they had gone through on the way in.
Abdulkerim was still dead. And the Iranian had, it seemed, vanished.
Chapter 49
It didn’t take long for the canyon to be swarming with cops. The Jandarma had been on alert in the area, and the old man’s call to his local cop had brought them storming in. There was little they could do. The roadblocks they’d set up hadn’t netted the Iranian. The cavalry had ridden in too late.
The procession of grim news—confirmations, really—continued. Ertugrul hadn’t survived his head wound. Keskin, the captain of the Ozel Tim unit, was also dead, along with several of his men. The troops scurrying across the canyon were clearly enraged by the bloodbath up the mountain and desperate for payback, but there was none to be found. All they could do was cart off Abdulkerim’s body and seal off the handful of entrances to the underground settlement while awaiting the arrival of a bomb disposal expert who would disarm the detonator in the rigged belt Tess had been wearing—assuming they ever found it.
An urgent alert was sent out to local cops to contact all doctors and medical facilities in the region. From what Reilly had seen, the Iranian’s gunshot wound hadn’t seemed trivial. He wasn’t sure where the bullet had struck, but he knew enough about gunshots to know that a hand injury like that was never an easy wound to fix. Without the proper debridement, fracture stabilization, and antibiotics, the likelihood of the Iranian’s being able to keep all five fingers and not lose significant usage of his hand was far from certain. He’d need a good trauma center and a skilled surgeon to avoid an irreversible disability.
One thing the Turkish authorities wouldn’t be doing was analyzing the codices Tess had found. Tess hadn’t mentioned going into the rock church to them. She insisted on keeping that little segment of her misadventure out of the debrief, and Reilly had agreed.
Once the formalities had been dealt with, they were driven to a nearby hotel, pending further instructions. The hotel, a fifteen-room warren built into a cliff overlooking a small stream, had been fashioned from the remains of a monastery. Stables and dormitories had been turned into guest rooms, and niches in its passageways had been fitted with glass fronts and used to display archaeological curiosities from the monastery’s past. Reilly and Tess were given a room that was a converted chapel. Pale sunlight from a small, solitary window suffused the dark space with a timeless glow and hinted at the remains of thousand-year-old frescoes that adorned its decoratively carved walls. Tess had initially balked at the idea of spending any more time in any cave-like surroundings, but the hotel owner’s soothing demeanor and the smell of his wife’s white bean, lamb and tomato stew soon quelled her unease.
FUELED BY A CONSTANT SUPPLY OF THICK, sweet Turkish coffee, Reilly spent the better part of an hour in the owner’s office, on the phone with Jansson, Aparo, and a handful of other agents who were all huddled into a conference room back at Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan.
The news wasn’t good, but then again, Reilly hadn’t expected much from their end. This was way outside their playground. If the Iranian was going to be found, it was going to happen because of the efforts of the Turkish a
uthorities, not the FBI. They had no significant intel that was relevant to share with Reilly regarding the Vatican bombing or the attack on the Patriarchate in Istanbul, and there was no point in calling in another drone, not until they had some kind of lead on Zahed’s whereabouts.
They had one new piece of info, though. A body had been recovered in Italy, close to a summer resort, in the mountains. It was identified as that of an administrator from a small airfield about an hour and a half east of Rome. The man’s corpse was unlike anything the authorities there had seen. Extreme body trauma didn’t even begin to describe it. Every bone in his body had been pulverized. They’d concluded that the man must have fallen from a great height, either from a helicopter or from a plane. Fallen, or thrown out, more likely. And given the proximity of the airport to Rome, they’d flagged it as potentially linked to the Vatican bombing. Which, Reilly thought, was probably on the money.
He filled them in on what the Iranian had told Tess about Operation Ajax and the airliner. He wasn’t surprised at having to explain what they were to most of the personnel on the call. Jansson told him they’d go through whatever intel they had on the downed flight’s passenger manifest.
“You should get back here now,” Jansson concluded. “It looks like our guy’s gone dark. Who knows where he’ll resurface. In the meantime, there’s nothing more you can do out there. Let the Turks and Interpol take it from here and do their job.”
“Sure,” Reilly grunted. He was too tired to argue, and much as he hated to give up the hunt, he knew Jansson was probably right. Unless something new came up, there was little he could do to justify sticking around.
“Get back to Istanbul,” the assistant director in charge of the New York field office told him. “We’ll get the embassy to sort out some transportation for you.”
“Make sure they factor Tess in,” Reilly said.
“Okay. I’ll see you when you get back. We’ve got a few things to talk about,” Jansson added somewhat stiffly before ending the call.