The Sixth Station (28 page)

The Jew, unusually calm, simply whispered, “Myrrh. Just myrrh.”

25

I vaguely heard someone yelling, “Grab the Baby! Get the Baby!” But it was far, far off as I again slipped into a blessed form of blackness.

Once more, I had no clue of time passing—or not passing.

I began to wake after a while and realized I was no longer shaking and my head was no longer screaming in pain. I felt for blood on the back of my head. Nothing. I crawled out from under the bench totally disoriented in the blackened room.

Where the hell am I?
I smelled the thick scent of hashish mixed with some sort of incense.

I walked a few steps and heard a crunch under my feet. I reached down and felt the satin cloth and the shards of glass beneath it. The test tube! It had dropped out of my bag and onto the floor at some point.

If ever there was evidence of Demiel’s otherworldliness, it’s gone now. Not your problem right now. Now your problem is getting the hell out of this place.

I tried feeling my way around. I could see the glow of the hash pipe and the shadows cast by a candle through the arch in the other room. I got up. Father Paulo was sitting on the far side of the arch smoking the shisha with a bottle of wine before him.

“Where are they, Father?”

I felt around for my red satchel and found it lying on the floor—
had I left it there?
—and realized I may have been robbed.

Sadowski’s phone, the new ID, passport, credit card, money—all were in there.

I checked the time and the phone’s digital clock showed me that it was “17:24:53,” that it was almost out of juice, and that there was zero signal in the house.

Nearly 5:30
P.M.
An entire day had passed!

I started rooting around in my bag. Wallet? Check. Credit card? Check. Money? As closely as I could remember, it seemed to be the same amount of euros as I’d had earlier. Check. Passport? Check. I opened it. There was my picture with the crazy moniker “Alazais Roussel.” Check. Even my old Gap scarf was still in there—although, really, I couldn’t imagine who’d want that ratty thing. The answer I later learned was “everyone.”

I felt the leather binding.
The book.

No eReader, no iPad, no holographic tablet reader—nothing on earth—feels, smells, or gives comfort like the luxury of a well-bound book. Thank God, it was safe.

“You destroyed the blood,” Paulo said, his voice choked with anger and with tears. He got off his stool and stood hovering over me, seething. “You destroyed the blood.”

“What the hell just happened back there? What the
hell
is going on?”

“You were to see the holograph of the event. That was the plan. But then…” He started to drift again. “You began speaking in tongues before I could do that.”

“I don’t speak in tongues. Where is the girl? What have these people done with that child and her baby?”

“Headquarters had the technology way back then to produce it,” he said, as though I hadn’t asked him a question. “They needed to capture the magnificence of the moment, but you didn’t need any of that, did you?”

“You mean it was a holograph? You showed me a holograph?”

“No. It’s always the least deserving who see what others fail to see,” he sneered at me jealously and pulled a deep toke.

What the heck is he jealous of? I nearly had a heart attack.

“I don’t know why you were chosen,” he went on contemptuously. “I don’t even know why that animal was chosen to be the husband of the Girl. I only know that I was honored to be part of the Great Experiment. Then when you showed up … But you have ruined everything. Common people shouldn’t be sent to do uncommon jobs.

“Astonishing, really.” He took another deep drag; the smell of hashish filling the tiny walls was giving me a contact high. Or had I been drugged already?

Holograph, my ass.

I was still very shaky—no longer shivering, but just shaky—as I made my way to the door. I had to get the hell out of there. He didn’t attempt to stop me.

“What now?” I asked, hoping he’d give me a clue about where the heck I was supposed to find this “source” blood.

“They will come to collect what they can of the blood you spilled, then I don’t know,” he said, slipping into a good ole Middle Eastern drug high, which I recognized from my days with the guys in Iraq. He began chanting in a low rumble that sounded terrifying in the close confines of that tiny stone house.

I tried the door.

Damn! It’s stuck! No, it’s not. Breathe. Calm down. Breathe.

The knob finally turned, but the gate was still locked down. I reached down and saw that the padlock was locked from the inside and the key was still attached. He wasn’t apparently trying to keep me a prisoner here.

I unlocked it, lifted it, and took a huge gulp of the fresh spring air outside the confines of this sicko’s hashish den.

As the heavy gate began to rise, I could hear chanting that matched the priest’s coming from many, many voices. Fear—and a million more questions—ran through my brain.

Sensory overload. Get out. Get straight. You’ve probably been drugged. Get out. Get straight.

I lifted the gate all the way up and was astonished at the sight. Like a specter or a movie about the Middle Ages, coming up the path to the door where I stood were dozens of burning candles held by white-robed monks.

Their haunting chant—
“Pater noster qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum; adveniat regnum tuum”—
reverberated like angel song in the crisp night air. The closer they came the more clearly I could see them. Embroidered on their robes were large yellow crosses that shimmered in the dusk. The shape of the cross was the same as that worn by Father Paulo.

26

I stepped aside as the line of hooded monks—male and female, young and old—walked solemnly past me while bowing their heads to me as though
I
were some sort of religious figure myself.

The first monk, a woman of eighty years or so, walked inside the house first, and the others filed in after her, chanting,
“Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo,”
as she walked toward Paulo.

I turned and headed back toward the parking lot.

I could see still Mr. Cesur standing there, waiting outside the car as though we’d been gone for only ten minutes instead of one whole day. He asked no questions, nor did he even inquire about Father Paulo. He opened the car door for me, and I flopped into the backseat exhausted.

What now? Where the hell should I go?

Anywhere but here.
“The airport.”

I grabbed a bottle of mineral water from the stash in the seat console as the nearly battery-depleted phone began to ring. The ringtone was not the usual one I’d heard on Sadowski’s phone, but, bizarrely, the classic
Dragnet
theme:
dum-da-dum-dum
. Caller ID: “Unknown.”

“I swear every priest is insane!” I said out loud, although Mr. Cesur was in his own world at that point.

I immediately recognized the voice. “So the old SOB is still alive and kicking.” Maureen!

“Ms. Wright-Lewis!”

“I think you have earned the right to use my first name.”

“But how did you find me, and how the hell did you know about the priest?”

“You forget with whom you are dealing, dear. Old spies don’t
really
fade away.”

“You don’t know how good it is to hear your voice.”

Stop gushing. You don’t even know the woman. Just because she’s alive and not looking to kill you …

I continued, unashamed: “I was beginning to think I was trapped inside
Rosemary’s Baby,
” I joked. “Am I still a wanted woman?”

“More than you can imagine. It’s imperative that you keep deep undercover. No one—not your friends nor your family—must know your whereabouts or be able to contact you. I’ve lived most of my life this way, and now you have to. Until your name is cleared, that is.”

“But
you
found me. How hard would it be for everyone else? And I have two friends who are helping me.”

“Again, trust no one. The more contact you make with the outside world, the easier it will be to find you. I can’t stress that enough. Tell me, Alessandra…”

My name has never sounded so, well, seductive.

“Did you find any proof yet that the others survived?”

“I think so. The old priest had a book hidden away that has never been opened before. It is the supposed diaries of all the eyewitnesses to the event. The birth.”

I heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end. She may have been the greatest sleuth the world had ever known, but—damn!—if even
she
couldn’t keep a natural reflex from surfacing once in a while …

“I was shown a holograph too—or I know this sounds crazy, it might have been a, ah, a vision.”

“A vision or a holograph—which was it?”

“Does it matter right now?”
She has some bug up her rear. Dammit, lady.

“Alessandra? You need to find Pantera. I believe he’s still alive.”

“The World Cou—”

The phone then made the ominous “you’re out of time, lady” beep and went dead. How would I find this Yusef Pantera guy if the frigging World Court had declared him just—was it four days ago; who knew anymore?—dead in a plane crash. Talk about deep undercover.

“Excuse me, Mr. Cesur; do you have a cell I can borrow?”

He handed me his cell phone and told me I could charge my phone in the backseat lighter.

Thank God it’s Turkey, where everyone still smokes for a living!

It immediately lit up. I tried calling her back but couldn’t make a connection, and so I left it free, hoping Maureen would call back. Good luck with that.

I dialed up Sadowski’s voice mail from Cesur’s phone.

Two calls. First one Donald. “I hope you are off the grid and don’t get this, but in case you are foolish enough to check in, I got a bead on Wilson—the doorman you asked about? Well, I
had
a bead on him. But someone put a bullet in his brain. Last night. I went to the building where the old fella still worked—but I ended up photographing a crime scene. No witnesses, no suspects. Everybody loved him and all that crap.” Click.

One from Dona: “Interpol is on your ass. My contact at the Feds said they’ve traced you to Istanbul. Get out.” Click. The call had come in six hours earlier. Shit.

Airport it was then. “Mr. Cesur, take me to the commercial airport, please.”

He just turned around and smiled.

What the hell did that mean?

The route was fairly well lit. We drove down the long gravel path, and fifty yards on the left there was a two-lane road, which we entered. We drove past a tiny mosque, then a long promenade of mulberry trees surrounding an excavation site at the Temple of Artemis.

Where could I possibly hope to find this Pantera guy?

I opened Sadowski’s phone, still connected to the plug, hit a tab that disconnected the connection, and scrolled through his contacts.

You never know—right?

I typed every iteration and spelling that I could think of for “Yusef Pantera”—“Yusef,” “Pantera,” all the
P
s, all the
Y
s, and finally “YPanY” and found “Y, Pan, Y, Carcassonne + 33 4 68 88 98 71.” Could that possibly be him? With Sadowski, who the hell knew?

I checked Cesur’s map icon on his phone to put in “Carcassonne.” It was a city located in the Midi-Pyrénées in France and was tagged “eleventh-century, walled city.” The closest city with a large airport, however, seemed to be Barcelona, Spain. Air France seemed my best bet, after checking schedules.

“Air France, please, Mr. Cesur.”

He didn’t acknowledge what I’d said as I handed him back his phone, but I heard him call the airport, or so I hoped. He was speaking Turkish.

When we reached the airport junction, he turned the car left and headed toward the lower end of the Valley of the Ruins.
Boy, did I belong there!
I was surprised he didn’t take the right. There was a sign pointing to the
TURKISH AVIATION CLUB,
written in English and Turkish. I remember that sign when we drove out of the airport and passed the commercial airport. He was driving past it!

“Mr. Cesur, please. You passed the airport!”

He just kept driving—not acknowledging me at all. We came to road signs that pointed to Kusadasi to the left and the airports to the right.

He turned right and we passed what looked like the summer homes of the rich, visible through a forest of blackened pine trees.

“Miss, this forested area was destroyed by fire—the drought, you see.”

He sped up as we passed small village after small village, with greenhouses blending into each other, then farmland, then the Tahtali Dam and a drought-dried lake bed.

“Please, sir, where are you taking me?”

He broke his silence on the subject just to say, “It’s all good, miss, all good.” He was going too fast for me to attempt to jump out.

After another ten minutes at a steady 45 mph we reached the big public airport, but Cesur continued driving straight on past the passenger terminals and toward the private area where thirty or so private planes—from antique biplanes to sleek Learjets—stood idly by.

“No check-in, miss, no check-in,” he said as we pulled up to the same Gulfstream jet on which we’d come. Turkish police and security were swarming the field.

Are they looking for me? Do they know I came in with Father Jacobi? Is this a setup?

“Sir, I need to go to the Air France terminal—please!”

“This is the plane to take you where you need to go,” Cesur said as the pilot opened the plane’s door. He waved me aboard, and I rushed up the steps, trying not to look around, strapped in, and tried to make myself invisible. Two Turkish policemen approached, and the pilot calmly walked down the stairs to speak with them.

He showed them his papers, and he and the cops commenced walking around the aircraft, seemingly inspecting it for—what? I don’t know. They came around to the side where I was sitting, and they all looked up—right at me. The pilot even pointed at me as I tried to sink down farther into the seat.