Return (Matt Turner Series Book 3) (43 page)

“Sad,” Joss said. “Probably thought they could just erase competing religions.”

“Yup. That exact mission has been more successful than people know, on multiple occasions. There’s a legend—I don’t know personally if it’s true—that a Muslim Caliph, after conquering Alexandria, was told of this great library of knowledge. He supposedly told his general, ‘If these books agree with the contents of the Qur’an, then they’re redundant and unnecessary—burn them. And, if they don’t agree with the Qur’an, then they’re heresy—burn them.’”

“Yikes. Society’s come so far.” He eyed her and she winked. She went on, “Sorry again, um … You said this Aviena didn’t know much about the Library and everything, so with only her wood reproduction, how’d you know where the other Tarias were?”

“I knew where Patra’s was.” He rinsed his razor in the sink, and continued shaving. “One of Philip’s daughters came back to Alexandria a decade after the tragedy. She made many of the greatest sculptures you find in Egyptian museums today. She and the other descendants always met beneath one of her most famous works: the statue of Cleopatra the Seventh. And when two of those families joined, they decided it probably wasn’t the smartest thing having two keystones in a single household. So the daughter, Philip’s daughter, I assume, created a secret compartment in the statue’s shoulder, and hid Patra’s Taria in it. A few weeks after I called Pete to tell him where to find the scrolls, I saw an underwater photo of that statue on the cover of National Geographic. Scooped my jaw up off the floor and got to work planning.”

“
Wow
,” Joss said. “So you
are
learning new things from Patra’s Taria.”

Matt nodded and continued shaving in silence. For some reason, his reticence to share
everything
he’d discovered about the Library’s stewards lingered on. Even what he’d earlier witnessed about Kaleb and Philip’s true fates. Why keep any of this from Joss, while also telling her so much?

Ever since that first time in the mirror—the startling eye contact. Patra’s words
“I hope your objectives are in accord with our society’s timeless principles …”
had been gnawing at his brain. Though separated by seventeen centuries, maybe he was, by default, a sort of honorary new member of a defunct society. It’d probably be wise to learn exactly what those
“timeless
principles”
were before he considered talking about it.

Joss gleaned that he wasn’t going to elaborate. “Backing up a little, you said this Aviena girl was a descendant of Kaleb’s, and that
two
of the stewards’ families joined. I didn’t think Kaleb or Patra had children, and you said both Kaleb and Philip died in that invasion.”

Just tell her. No, not yet.

He didn’t even know the answer. In Aviena’s memory, she’s got her mother and father, Sopatrius, and then there’s Sopatrius’s mother and father, Skyla and Neos, and Neos’s father is Kaleb of Kush. Kaleb, Neos, Sopatrius, Aviena.

“Good catch,” Matt said, “and nice to know you’re paying attention when I blabber on about Patra. The heirs thing is still up in the air. Patra definitely has no kids at the time of the attack, and she’s pushing forty. To my knowledge, Kaleb has no biological children, but he does have a wife in another land that he might’ve impregnated back when they got married. I’m not sure how long it’s been, or if they ever saw each other after. But somehow it
was
Kaleb and Patra’s families who merged. Maybe siblings or something.”

He set down the razor, rinsed himself off in the sink, and then toweled his face and neck.

Joss crossed her arms and smiled. “Ten years younger. And much more Matthew Turnery, I might add. Just need to grow out the top a bit and …” She mimed tousling her hair.

She moved to allow Matt out of the bathroom. He grabbed a white T-shirt from his bag and pulled it on.

Joss had followed him. “I’ve been wondering … Pete said there were seventy-something thousand scrolls in that room. Didn’t you say at some point that the Library had like seven
hundred
thousand scrolls?”

“In all, yeah, but let’s pick this up again later. I need to call Markus. And you were going to …
ahh
…” He motioned to her dusty, imprint-riddled clothes.

She peered down. “Oh,
yeesh
, you’re right. Sorry. Probably contaminating this whole room, too.” She spun about and marched to the bathroom, adding as she went, “Grab me some clean clothes when you have a chance, will you? I don’t want to transfer anything. I’ll leave this unlocked.” The door clicked shut.

Matt sighed.

She’s incorrigible.

“Another new phone?” Markus said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“For obvious reasons,” Matt replied. “Have you heard anything yet?”

“Yes, we have. Listen well, and no backchat. You need to stay out of this now. It’s escalated to something far beyond you and hobbies. Mr. O may reengage with you at a later date. If you’re able to leave the country, I advise doing so at your earliest convenience, and not under any existing passport.”

Muffled jet engines roared in the call’s background, trailing off just as a commercial jet soared over Matt’s hotel. Markus was in Alexandria.

“Further,” Markus went on, “and this is from me, not him—you should consider temporarily relocating known family and associates. Consider our business for the moment closed. This number will be deactivated upon our goodbyes.”

“Thank you, Markus.”

The line remained open for a moment, and then Markus hung up.

Good advice. He’d already taken most of it. The dojo would remain on break for the week, I.T. and Mom had gone north to visit Aunt Denora and Uncle Andy at their timeshare, and Isis and the baby were staying at some new dipshit’s flat in Manhattan. The latter was the least secure, but Paul had a detail of top folks watching the building.

As for fleeing the country to let the two gangsters battle it out?

Not so much.

* * *

Ninety-eight hours he’d stayed awake in Afghanistan. A separate stint of eighty hours that same year. Two and three-day-long operations had become the norm for the past decade. And yet this loathsome, monotonous drive was killing him.

In the SUV’s passenger seat, Yuri had fallen asleep again. Dima and Andru yammered on in back about asses, guns, tits, cars, and asses, and Rostik couldn’t decide if Andru’s deep, nasally, moronic voice was actually helping to keep him awake via ever-mounting rage. Along with his grating tone, the punk’s big, wide-set eyes, and his long neck saddled with an inexcusably large Adam’s apple, conjured such a dopey creature that Rostik found himself beset with visions of that extinct cartoon sloth, and fingers penetrating and twisting and snapping its neck.

“Would you, Rostik?” said a jubilant Andru, spit sluicing between teeth and cheeks. Rostik eyed him in the rearview mirror. “Would you do a sandy girl?”

Rostik’s gaze returned to the road, and the white van half a kilometer ahead.

Andru hardly skipped a beat. “I would. I absolutely would. Yuri did an Irani girl.”

“She was Uzbek,” Dima countered. “That doesn’t count. Huh, Yuri? That Uzbek girl … you consider her like a sandy girl?”

The van turned off the highway, and a plume of dust rose behind it.

“Shut your mouths!” Rostik barked, and slapped Yuri’s chest. “Wake up. They turned off.”

Yuri—supposedly a cousin of Rostik’s, somewhere across the tree branches—sat up without blubbering or signs of disorientation. Rostik always liked Yuri for that instant acuity.

“Any road signs back there?”

“No,” Rostik said, and veered onto the dirt road. “Look at the map if you still have signal.”

“Have signal. Hold.” He paused, zoomed, swiped, paused. “I don’t see this going anywhere special. It goes a long way.”

Rostik slowed as he entered the van’s thick cloud. Upside: they wouldn’t notice a pursuer. Downside: if they stopped, he might plow right into them.

“Can we just run them off the road now?” Andru whined. “No more other cars to witness.”

Rostik had been considering it, should wind or an opportune turn provide the necessary visibility, but now that the little sloth suggested it, Rostik felt an immature compulsion to wait for the van to stop.

Andru leaned forward, draping his hands over the two front seats. “What I’m saying is we ride up on them, scary-like, and-”

“Shut up and sit back, Andru,” Yuri said. “Your breath smells like diarrhea.”

This brought a genuine chuckle from Rostik, and Yuri—not intending humor—glanced over with surprise, and laughed himself. Dimu joined, as Andru grumbled and pouted in his seat.

After another ten minutes of jouncing pursuit, curving over, around, and between knobby dunes, the road widened and ended at the remnants of an Egyptian structure. The ruin was about the height of a one-story house, but as wide as a 747 jet was long. Turner and the woman had parked in front of the ruin’s only opening: a small, dark cave. Rostik guessed the structure had been a bridge across a river that had since dried up.

He promptly stopped and reversed, backing the SUV behind the small dune they’d just passed. The mound only rose as high as the hood, but patchy grasses and desert shrubs offered them sufficient cover, especially with the sun setting behind them. He killed the engine.

When the dust cleared, they were able to see between the hearty bushes’ gnarled branches to the van’s front half and cave entrance.

Yuri focused his binoculars on the van. “They left the vehicle. Must have gone in.”

“What if it goes all the way through?” Dimu said. “A tunnel. They could be getting away.”

“Let’s go!” Andru said, and a rifle rattled behind Rostik’s seat.

“Hold!” Rostik snapped. “My employers say Turner isn’t stupid—quite the opposite. Look at that approach. Wide open for a hundred meters in every direction. How do you know there won’t be a scope on you the second you pop your idiot head out?”

“I was just saying …” Andru muttered.

“Look at the map, Yuri. What’s on the other side?”

Yuri handed him the binoculars and looked at his phone. Rostik studied the entrance. This was interesting timing with sunset looming. The van had cruised at a static 110 kph the majority of the drive.

“The building’s as deep as it is wide, and it looks from this shadow that there’s either another cave on the opposite side, or a tunnel goes all the way through. See?” He angled the screen. “Looks like a depression with the sand all funneling toward this spot.”

“Good eye,” Rostik said, and returned to the binoculars. “What about farther back? Is there another road? And can we drive around this?”

“Nothing paved anywhere near, but a lot of farmland … Looks like hiking trails in the highland between. Thin trails … but maybe dirt bikes?”

It’d seem an awful lot of trouble to bring a tail all the way out here, just to pull a vehicle transfer and escape. That could’ve been done in a thousand better places between here and Alexandria. He didn’t think that was Turner’s game. Showing up at the office building despite surveillance, then slipping out the back in the same vehicle they’d been driving around in? He wanted to be followed here. But so remote, as if to provide a witness-free environment.

“Zoom out some more,” Rostik said. “Where are we? Give me the nearest town names.”

“Ahh … bunch more farmland … Tall San al-Haja, San al-Hagar, Ezbet Ata Allah, Ezbet Abou Shalaby … ezbet, ezbet, ezbet.”

“San al-Hagar?” Rostik squinted at the phone screen. “Show me San al-Hagar.”

Yuri swiped over and zoomed out. Indeed, to the north lay a sprawling, colorless area dotted with thousands of pale lines and squares—the ruins of an ancient city. Specifically, the ancient Egyptian city of
Tanis
. Rostik only knew this city because Ostrovsky had sent him there for photos just a couple weeks ago. Rostik knew then that it’d had something to do with the stone piece he’d pried from the statue under the bay. And here now was Turner, the man who’d stolen the artifact from Ostrovsky, at an isolated ruin only a kilometer from that well-known landmark.

Turner wasn’t drawing his pursuers here; he had no idea he was even being followed! Panic had driven him from the office building, and they’d come straight here without a single stop. Whatever Ostrovsky had hired Turner to find, it was here.

“I need to make a call,” Rostik said, and turned on his mobile as he stepped out of the SUV. He didn’t like using a phone, and avoided it as much as possible. That’s why his basic old brick of a mobile did one thing: send and receive calls.

He shut the door gently, leaning in and shoving it until the second clunk. As he clicked the arrow-pad downward through the device’s only recent calls, the rear passenger window slid down a quarter of the way, revealing Andru’s detestable profile, gazing off coolly as his head bobbed to a non-existent beat.

“Close the fucking window!” Yuri snarled, and reached back, swatting at the cringing imbecile until the window rolled shut. Much to Rostik’s pleasure, a muffled tirade continued. “How stupid are you? You know the man’s making a call …” as Andru pleaded ignorance.

Ostrovsky’s “red” mobile rang thrice before he answered. “What the shit is going on?”

“I followed them for the past three hours,” Rostik said. “He’s stopped somewhere you’ll be very interested to know. Whatever you’ve been looking for, I guarantee it is here.”

“I’m talking about the diver people building—the goddamn massacre!
Your
people being carried out in body bags!” Ostrovsky’s shouting voice crackled in the speaker. “But what? Where are you? Why are you only now calling me? Follow who?”

Yuri and the others in the SUV didn’t yet know what happened after they’d left the MERC building. At this point, it wouldn’t have been useful for them to be informed.

Rostik disregarded the ranting. “I want to know what the stone piece leads to. What’s the real value to you?”

The line hung quiet for a moment before Ostrovsky snorted. “You’re looking to renegotiate? With what I’m already paying you? Why would so wise and reliable an asset seek to jeopardize what has been such a long-standing, lucrative arrangement?”