Blown Circuit (14 page)

“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 installation 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.
 

“What are you doing?”

“Digging,” I said.

I tried to pry the plaster out, but got no purchase. I dug back in until I felt the knife connect with a more solid surface below. But the surface wasn’t hard. It was strangely flexible.

“What does this mean ‘you are digging’?”

“What do you see?” I asked.

Meryem looked at the wall.

“I see a wall.”

“What else?”

“I see a wire. Two wires. Electricity and cable.”

“Good,” I said, digging at the plaster with the knife. “Now, what don’t you see?”

Meryem stared at the water-damaged wall. I visualized the cogs in her head turning.

“The speaker wire. I do not see this.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The speaker wire runs into the wall, but the cord for the light and satellite don’t. I think there’s a second wall here.” I levered the knife. “This plaster wall was built later, after the speaker wire had already been installed.”

“Why?”

“Let’s find out.”

I levered the handle of the knife down again and managed to loosen a whole section of plaster. I dug my fingers into the soft hole I’d made and lifted it in a jagged triangular section. It took a second, but the whole thing came out. Then when I shone my flashlight, it revealed what was behind the plaster. Not the brick exterior of the minaret, but a smooth black surface with tiny beads of moisture on it. I poked it with my finger. It was rubber. Solid, inch-thick, black rubber. I guessed that the rainwater had found its way in through the minaret’s roof, eventually forcing a gap between the materials, until it had begged for a way out. The way out had been the sodden plaster before me. But why a rubber wall?

“Tesla’s Energy Device would have carried a great deal of current, correct?” I asked.

“Yes,” Meryem said.

“And that current would have had to have been insulated from its surroundings to protect whoever operated the Device.”

“This is true,” Meryem said.

“Rubber,” I said. “Rubber is an excellent insulator.”

I clicked my tongue. The puzzle had fallen into place.
 

“This is a Tesla Tower,” I said. “For the Device. Just like Wardenclyffe Tower back on Long Island. Whoever stole the Device back in the 1950s needed a mount to use it—to get it into the air, above obstructions. This minaret was retrofitted for that purpose. The rubber shielding is for safety, the metal brackets are to mount the focusing array. That’s why the statue pointed here. Whoever reassembled Augustus made sure he pointed directly at this tower.”

Meryem didn’t look as if she believed a word I was saying.

“You think this because the inside of the minaret is rubber?”

“I think it because it makes sense. There aren’t two parts to the Tesla Device, there are three. This tower, the triggers, and the focusing array. Think about it. The focusing array, that sphere on top of the metal tower in the photo, is big. It would need to be raised over the surrounding area.”