Blown Circuit (23 page)

“Yes, yes, no problem,” he said. “I will bring you. You come with me.”

I let Meryem off onto the gulet, then piloted the launch straight up onto a tiny sand spit between two rocky outcroppings. I could have anchored her, but she was half full of seawater now and unlikely to stay afloat much longer, and the point was, I wanted her to be seen. Once I felt the sand beneath her hull, I walked the anchor onto the beach, and trailed my footprints off into the tall grass. I didn’t think the ruse would last for long, but even if it could distract Kate and her crew for a few minutes, it would help. After I’d sufficiently cluttered the beach with footprints, I waded back into the sea and swam to the gulet. A minute later we were under way, the gulet’s diesel engine throbbing with a staccato beat.

“Thanks,” I said to the Captain. “How long until we reach Bodrum?”

“With this wind, perhaps five hours or six,” he said. “You are my guest. Relax. Shower. Sleep. You like olives? I have olives. I have bread.”

“You don’t have to worry about us.”

“No, no. You are on a Blue Water Cruise now. I will give you the best of Turkey.”

When I looked up at the banner on his furled sail, I saw a telephone number and a painted boat. I had no idea what Meryem had promised to pay the Captain, but we were indeed on a Blue Water Cruise. I was salty and tired. If I was going to sleep, or bathe, or generally behave like a human being, I’d have to do it now, before we got to port.

I
HAD
ASKED
Meryem whether she wanted to use the shower before me, but she had insisted that I go first. The shower was good. There was decent water pressure and the stall was wide enough for me to reach around and soap my back. The sea had calmed and the sun was out as well. The day was looking bright. Before I was quite done, Meryem entered the cramped bathroom. I turned off the faucet and grabbed my towel.

“Knock much?”

“I want to know about you and this woman, Kate Shaw.”

“You don’t beat around the bush do you?”

“If she is trying to kill me because of you, no, I do not beat around the bush.”

Meryem had a point. I cinched the towel around my waist.

“Last year my father went missing. I thought he was dead but he wasn’t. He’d been kidnapped.”

“This is a terrible thing.”

“Tell me about it. Kate and I worked together in China, trying to find him.”

“And at this time you became lovers, yes?”

“Lovers is pushing it. Like I told you, it was a onetime thing.”

“What happened after that?”

“She tried to kill me, and I handed her over to the CIA for questioning.”

“What happened to your father?”

“I’m still looking for him.”

Meryem looked me up and down. She was still wearing the same wet clothes, but there was no denying she looked good, hardened, yet at the same time vulnerable.

“I think there is more to it than this.”

“Kate says she had an affair with my father too.”

“Do you believe her?”

I thought about it.

“On some level, yeah. Yes, I do.”

“How does this make you feel?”

I laughed.

“How do you think it makes me feel? It makes me angry. Angry for my mom and angry at my dad and angry that on some level I bought Kate’s crap in the first place.”

Meryem seemed to think about it.

“Thank you, Michael. Thank you for telling me this.”

Meryem’s cheek had developed a bruise from when they had kicked her into the storage locker. I ran my finger over it. She lifted her chin toward me.

“Does that hurt?”

“No, it is nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Meryem had asked me what she wanted to know. Now I needed to ask her something. I needed to ask her about a situation that had been bothering me. A low-grade worry that wouldn’t quite go away.

“The man in Istanbul? Azad?” I said. “ What is he to you?”

“Not
is
.
Was
. Azad was a job. That is all.”

“Is that everything?”

“Yes.”

I stepped toward her, but she turned from me. I was closer, but I still wasn’t sure that I had the truth. I put a hand on her waist and turned her toward me. She was close, very close, her body tight with mine. I felt the warmth of her smooth olive skin, her rhythmic breath on my neck, her heart beating next to mine. I looked down into Meryem’s eyes. I knew that the truth was there, somewhere, and somehow, in that moment, our lips met. I kissed her, gently at first, then longer and more deeply, tasting her, feeling her there beside me. My hand was on her back, the other in her hair, and for those few seconds we were one. Then something changed. The boat was suddenly quiet. Meryem and I broke gently apart and turned to the porthole. The Captain had cut the engine.

I thought he might be raising his sails, but then I felt a large wave hit us on the port side of the ship in what had been a calming sea. And I knew what that meant. A wake. Then I heard another engine. It didn’t take long to see where it was coming from. The Fox. She pulled across our bow, men yelling in Turkish. Meryem put a finger to my lips.

“What are they saying?” I whispered.

“They are asking him if he has seen a launch.”

“Has he?”

“Yes. Yes, he has seen one.”

“That’s not ideal,” I said.

I listened to the talk from the deck above. Then the Fox rafted up against us. She had her bumpers down and there was a loud squeak as the air-filled plastic balloons contracted in unison. I knew that a boarding party would follow. We were in the head. There was nowhere to hide. I took Meryem’s hand and moved toward the door. The rear stateroom would provide more options. There were portholes there. Windows over the sea that could provide us with a way out. But Meryem put her left finger to her lips and her right hand on the doorknob. I heard footsteps above, and then the bumpers squeaked again. A moment later the Fox’s engines growled and she pulled away.
 

“How did you know they would go?” I asked.

“Turkish people believe that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” she said.

“Freud?” I asked.

“Yes. The psychologist Freud said this. It means that sometimes a thing is exactly what it seems. The Turkish people, many times they believe this. They saw the boatman and they believed him when he told him he had no passengers. So a cigar is just a cigar.”

“But he did have passengers. The cigar wasn’t just a cigar,” I said.

“No,” Meryem said. “It was not. In my experience, the Turkish people are often wrong about this. Freud as well. A cigar is never just a cigar.”

“Can I quote you on that?”

I put a hand on her waist, drawing her near.

“I think maybe this is not a good idea, Michael.”

“Maybe not, but is it such a bad one?”

“At this time, I think so, yes.”

 
Meryem gently turned her cheek and removed my hand from her waist and even though I really wanted to stay, I brushed past her and away.

Chapter 44

T
HE
MOMENT
HAD
been lost with Meryem, but I was too exhausted to dwell on it. Instead, I lay down in the rear stateroom. I was out before my head hit the pillow, and when I finally awoke, several hours later, we had already reached our destination. Meryem stared out of the porthole.

“Bodrum?” I asked.

“Yes. We got here quickly. The wind picked up, I think. It was very strong.”

The harbor was filled with the masts of sailing yachts, white against the blue sky, but that wasn’t what made the harbor unusual. It was the castle. The fortress sat on a peninsula, its walls on three sides plunging directly down to the cliffs that sprung up from the sea below. It was an imposing structure, and its location high above everything else meant that not only would it be difficult to attack from the rear, it would be almost impossible to breach from the sea.
 

“Is that the place?” I said.

“Bodrum Castle,” Meryem said. “It is very old. Not so old as the temple of Apollo, but old. The knights from long ago, they built this castle.”

I stared up at the castle. It fit. I saw the tall rock wall around it and four towers, yachts moored all around the structure. I knew that Turkey was on the way to the Middle East, a good stopover point en route to the Holy Land, but I hadn’t imagined that there was enough call to build a castle. Still, there it was, testament to the knights who had built it.

I thought about Tesla. I thought about Bayazidi, a rogue sculptor, a champion of the arts. I thought about irony. The irony that the many orders of knights who were great plunderers, also had a legacy of keeping articles of great power safe. And then I thought about my shorts. I needed to get into my back pocket.

“Excuse me,” I said.

I shuffled forward and pulled on my shorts, reaching into my pocket to pull out a folded sheet of paper. Meryem recognized it immediately.

“How did you get that?” she asked.

“On the Fox. With Kate. She showed me this page from the journal. Then she asked me whether I needed anything else. I managed to tear it out while she pushed the triggers away from me.”

“So they do not have it. This page?”

“Not unless they made a scan. If we were lucky, they didn’t get around to it.”

I unfolded the wet page, brown ink running together in long rivulets.

“So what does it tell you?”

“Are you sure that’s the castle?”

Meryem looked at me like I was stupid.

“Yes, of course. There is no other castle here.”

“And are you sure the knights used it as a base, a stopover point to raiding the Holy Land?”

“What you call raiding, they called protecting, preserving in God’s name. But, yes, they used this place.”

“Then I don’t think there’s any question that Bayazidi was telling us something when he drew this.”

I displayed the page to Meryem. It was only a brown ink drawing, but the figure drawn there seemed almost alive. It was a figure of a man chained to a block wall, but Bayazidi had taken liberties. The man had lacerated skin and a torn ear, but most strikingly, he had the head of a wolf. Sharp incisors dripped saliva, the wolf-man staring directly at us with sad, pleading eyes, a collar around his neck and a manacle on each wrist. The worst part wasn’t the lupine head, or the manacles, it was the knife through the figure’s heart. Blood spurted in every which direction. Nobody could say Bayazidi didn’t have an imagination. The drawing was really creepy. There was a caption in Cyrillic below it.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“I think it is a Kurdish proverb,” Meryem said. “It says death.”

“What about death?”

“It says the wolf repents only in death.”

Chapter 45

W
E
GOT
OFF
the boat, just past the castle, smack in the middle of Bodrum Harbor. The town was built along the waterfront with a pedestrian street set behind the first row of whitewashed buildings. It was very hot out, the midday sun high in the sky, and there were backpackers everywhere, strolling the narrow streets and lounging in the cafes. Bodrum was known for its party atmosphere and I could see why. Every second business was a nightclub. I even saw a giant catamaran called the Turk Club that cruised the harbor after closing to keep the booze flowing past dawn.

I saw no sign of the Turquoise Fox, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t in the other harbor. She had certainly had ample time to arrive. What it meant was that we needed to be cautious. Meryem and I were hungry, so we grabbed lamb kebabs and a couple Cokes in worn glass bottles. From the first bite of the tangy, grilled lamb, I couldn’t help but wonder why Kate had opted to butter me up with steak and potatoes when the local cuisine was so good. Some people were like that, I figured. Always looking so far ahead that they couldn’t see what was right in front of their faces.

While we finished our food, an Irish backpacker family complete with a freckled mom and dad and two little, freckled kids asked to have their picture taken. The kids, a redheaded boy and a girl not more than five or six years old, were decked out in those running shoes with flashing LED’s in their soles and their own tiny backpacks. I downed the rest of my Coke and took a few shots for them, the boy and girl posing happily in the street. Reflecting briefly on how carefree the children looked, I found that it only steeled my resolve. I had a job to do, a city to save. To that end, Meryem and I picked up some basic supplies with the money that I had left and headed back to the castle.

“You understand there are other dungeons,” Meryem said. “Simply because this man drew a wolf-man in chains, does not mean that the Device is there.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But it means we should look.”

We soon learned that the castle was now being used as a museum of underwater archeology. It was also closed. Fortunately, the wrought-iron perimeter fence ran through a secluded area behind the gift shop that allowed us to scale it unseen.

We then climbed a long stone staircase until we reached a wooden gate set in a high stone wall. As soon as we got through the gate, I could tell that the castle was set out more like a fort than a single structure. The space was largely outdoors with wide paths winding upward to what looked like the top of the hill on which it had been built. There were CCTV cameras as well, but they seemed more focused on protecting the outdoor exhibits of amphorae and sculpture than stopping intruders. Careful to avoid the cameras’ prying eyes, I grabbed a fire axe bolted to the inside corner of the rock wall and went looking for the dungeon.

“This way,” Meryem said pointing up the path.

“That path goes up,” I said. “Dungeons are underground.”

Meryem pointed at a metal plaque nearly concealed by the shrubbery of a courtyard garden. The plaque read “Bodrum Kale” at the top and indicated that the dungeon was up the stairs to the right.

“In my country what is down, is up.”

“Roger that,” I said.

Then I grabbed Meryem from behind and pushed her down behind a headless marble statue. A museum guard approached from the far corner of the structure. We weren’t as alone as we had thought.