Istanbul University
Beyazit Square
Istanbul, Turkey
19 March 2010
‘Get up.’ The redhead waved her pistol at Lourds.
Calmly, Lourds stood and blocked Olympia from Cleena’s field of fire. The move wasn’t out of bravery as much as it was feeling responsible for endangering Olympia. Obviously she’s still intent on collecting her bounty, Lourds thought sourly.
As clearly and calmly as he could, hoping his voice didn’t crack and she wouldn’t shoot him, he said, ‘Olympia, phone the police. Tell them what’s going on.’
‘Thomas, who is this woman?’ Olympia demanded.
Lourds couldn’t believe it. A woman had shown up in the office with a weapon, and Olympia wanted to know who she was in a tone that suggested jealousy.
‘This is the woman who kidnapped me from the airport. Call the police.’
Cleena glanced down the hallway. ‘We don’t have time for the police. They’re coming.’
‘Who?’ Lourds asked automatically. ‘The police?’
‘Not the police. If I knew who these people were, I’d have given you names. They’re big, scary guys. And they have guns.’
‘Everybody you know seems to have guns,’ Lourds said.
‘Don’t blame me. They’re after you. I could have ducked out and not risked my neck. And you want to blame me for this?’
‘How did you find me?’ he asked.
An exasperated look filled Cleena’s face. ‘You’re kidding, right? You’re here to speak at the university. It’s been in all the papers. Especially after the scene at the airport. All Istanbul, those who care, know you’re here.’
Without warning, she cursed and ducked into the room just as bullets shattered the doorframe. Lourds stepped back and nearly fell on top of the desk. Olympia’s frightened scream echoed in his ears and galvanized him into action. He reached down for his backpack and slung it on. Cleena ducked back round the door and fired several quick shots, then came inside and took cover.
She glared at Lourds. ‘At gunpoint, do you always have to ask so many questions?’
Lourds glared back. ‘I’m not up on all the protocol for getting abducted.’
‘I’m not abducting you. I’m protecting you.’
‘By bringing these men here?’ Olympia still had the phone pressed against her ear.
‘I didn’t bring those men here.’ Cleena sounded really put out.
‘I’d have seen someone following us,’ Olympia insisted.
‘You haven’t seen me for the last few days,’ the woman snapped. ‘You’ve been busy tearing up the sheets at the hotel. I’ve been expecting footage on YouTube. Now let’s get moving. They want the professor. I don’t think they care if either one of us are alive.’
‘I’m on the line to the police.’ Olympia spoke rapidly in Turkish.
Another fusillade of bullets slammed into the open door and tore gouges in the wood.
‘The police won’t get here fast enough.’ Cleena changed magazines in her pistol and released the slide. ‘By the time they get here, you’ll either be in the custody of those men – or you’ll be dead. It’s a cellphone. Take it with you. You can talk to the police on the way. Just try to keep up and dodge the bullets.’
She grabbed Lourds by the elbow, but he resisted. He trusted her not to shoot him. She had, in a way, saved his life down in the catacombs. And she hadn’t shot him. Yet. She cursed again and tried to push him into motion.
‘Cleena MacKenna,’ a man’s voice boomed.
Lourds immediately recognized the accent as American, probably by way of Philadelphia. He looked at Cleena as she returned to the door.
‘Cleena? That’s your name?’ Lourds asked.
‘So not the time for introductions,’ she growled.
‘Cleena MacKenna,’ the man called again, ‘you don’t have to die today. You can just walk away from this. We’re just here for the professor. Back away and you can go.’
Cleena looked at Lourds. ‘Do you believe him?’
Lourds started to answer, but wasn’t sure what he was going to say.
‘I don’t believe him,’ Cleena went on. She looked around. ‘There’s a back door to this room?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lourds replied.
Cleena shot a scathing glance at Olympia. ‘You could have mentioned there’s a back door to this office.’
Olympia crossed her arms and looked defiant. ‘The police are on their way. I have them on speaker phone.’
‘I don’t think the speaker-phone function is going to stop those guys.’
Olympia raised her voice and said for the benefit of the men outside, ‘I have called the police. They are on their way.’
Cleena ignored her and raced to the back of the room. ‘Where’s the door?’ she asked. A second later, she swivelled her head to the left and looked at the bookshelf covering one of the walls. ‘Shelving and books cover that wall.’
Lourds realized she was talking to someone else, not him. Then he saw the glint of metal in her ear.
‘Okay, okay. I’ll look.’ Cleena raked a shelf clear of books. The heavy volumes toppled to the floor, along with a snow globe containing a statue of the Greek god, Poseidon.
‘Hey!’ Olympia protested. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
Abruptly, out in the hallway the fire alarm rang, strident and harsh. Lourds guessed that someone, a student or a professor, had set it off. That had been good. At least all the students would get clear of the situation.
‘Ma’am,’ a man’s voice called from the phone in Turkish, ‘is something wrong? Is everything all right?’
Undeterred, Cleena moved on to the second shelf and began clearing those as well. In the shadowy recesses, the door was hard to see, but Lourds spotted the straight lines. Impulsively, he went to help the woman, wading over and through the books.
‘Thomas?’ Olympia called.
‘Ma’am?’ the Istanbul policeman enquired loudly. ‘Please stay on the line.’
‘There’s a door back here.’ Lourds pulled at the higher shelving.
‘Olympia, you don’t think those men are really here after me, do you? I don’t make enemies like this. They have to be after the book I got down in the catacombs. And if they find out you know something about it, they’re not going to stop at just questioning me.’
Cleena swung round with a shelf and nearly caught Lourds in the face with it. She locked eyes with Olympia. ‘Get over here!’
‘Don’t tell me-’
Out in the hallway, something metallic struck the floor and skidded to a stop near the door. Lourds took in the spherical shape, then redoubled his efforts to get to the door.
‘They’ve got a grenade!’
‘It opens inwards!’ Cleena yelled.
Understanding, Lourds reached for the doorknob but found it lacking. Someone had taken it off. As he turned to Cleena, she shoved him aside with her free hand and fired the pistol three times at the locking mechanism. The bullets cored through the cheap metal and splintered the wood. Before the echoes of the shots died away, Olympia had joined them and the grenade blew up.
The tremendous noise deafened Lourds and vibrated through his body. He expected shrapnel to rip through him, but it didn’t. Bright lights and gas followed the explosion. Flash-bang, he realized. He’d read about those in the novels he consumed during long plane flights and dead time at sites. Those grenades were used to confuse and disorient people.
Cleena grabbed his arm and shoved him towards the door, which still hadn’t opened. Lourds saw her mouth moving but heard nothing. Knowing what she wanted, he set his shoulder to the door and threw his weight against it. The door shivered and sprang open, revealing that it had been covered over by Sheetrock on the other side. Evidently some alterations had been done to increase office space.
The other room was thankfully empty. Lourds didn’t want anyone else in danger or joining their little group. His attempt to open the door ripped it from its hinges and it smashed into someone’s painstaking model reproduction of the Ottoman Siege of Constantinople in 1453. Ships and warriors went flying, followed by the blue waters of the Golden Horn and the fabricated brown coastline.
Olympia followed, almost running over Lourds in her haste. She held the cellphone to her ear, but if anyone was on the other end she apparently couldn’t hear any better than Lourds.
He looked round the room, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do next. They were still on the third floor, too high to risk jumping and breaking a leg.
Olympia grabbed his arm and, when he turned to face her, spoke to him anxiously. He read her lips, missing it the first time because she was speaking her native tongue, not English.
‘Where do we go?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied enunciating carefully. ‘Up? Down?’
He used his hands in case she couldn’t read his lips. His mouth, eyes and nose all stung from the gas contained in the flash-bang. Tears blurred his vision as he swept his gaze round the room. Two sharp cracks pierced his deafness and he recognized the sounds as gunshots. Anxiously, he peered back into the opening, wondering if Cleena had made it out of Olympia’s office alive.
She barrelled through and hit him full on. Lourds wrapped his arms round her and they fell to the floor on his back. Cleena glared at him as if he were a bumbling moron, which – Lourds reflected irritably – was unfair. He’d been concerned about her. She forced herself up and partially kneed him in the crotch while doing so. Lourds was certain he’d cried out and was glad no one had been able to hear him. Then his thoughts focused on survival again.
Smoke rolled into the room from the grenade. It got harder to breathe. He didn’t know how they were going to get out of the office. They were still in a death trap.
Eckart stood his ground in the hallway with his pistol up. His left hand was wrapped tightly round his right so the semi-automatic pistol’s recoil would respond perfectly and not jam. He peered through the smoke, expecting Lourds and the two women to emerge at any second. The flash-bang held pepper gas as well as the pyrotechnics.
No one came out.
‘Humboldt,’ Eckart called over the com. Three of his men had set up behind him. Three others held the stairs at the other end of the hall. There was no way their target could escape. ‘Set up outside that office.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The man ran forward without hesitation. He wore a mask against the effects of the pepper gas. He waited a moment, then peered round the door.
Two shots rang out in quick succession. Humboldt jerked, then stumbled back. He turned round and clutched at his face, but blood already poured from one of the shattered lenses of his mask.
Eckart cursed. For a home-grown terrorist, the woman was good.
Humboldt staggered twice more, then turned boneless and dropped to the ground. His head rebounded from the floor and Eckart knew the man was dead.
‘Are you sure there’s no other way out of the office?’ Eckart demanded.
‘No, sir,’ Mayfield replied over the com. ‘Two elevators. The stairs at each end of the building. That covers everything.’
Eckart tried to put himself inside the office and work out what he would do if he was trapped in there. You wouldn’t have been trapped in there, he told himself.
‘What about the windows?’
‘The grenade blew the glass out of the one in the office, sir, but the people inside haven’t left.’
‘Can you see inside?’
‘No, sir. The smoke’s too thick.’
‘Keep watch.’ Eckart kept his eyes on the door. ‘How much time has elapsed since the first shots?’
‘Two minutes thirty-seven seconds, sir. We’re coming up on the threshold for this mission.’
Eckart knew they couldn’t stay much longer. The local police would arrive shortly, and the college security armed-response teams had to be en route as well. If they didn’t leave soon, things were going to get messier. He willed himself to be patient. Whatever threat Lourds presented against the United States was about to end. Eckart fully intended to take the professor into custody.
Or kill him.
‘Sevki?’ Cleena cupped a hand over her ear and struggled to hear him at the other end of the earwig connection. ‘I can’t hear. A grenade deafened me.’
‘… other wall – elevator shaft – emergency.’ Sevki sounded as though he was breaking up as he shouted, and she could still barely hear him. But she understood what he was talking about. They’d managed something like this before.
Approaching the wall on the other side of the office, Cleena bent down and took her knife out of her boot. When she reached the wall, she fisted the hilt and drove the broad blade into the Sheetrock. The material gave way easily. Two strokes made an X. She stepped back and drove her boot through it. Big pieces of the material dropped to the floor but others vanished in the space beyond. In seconds, she’d stripped the Sheetrock away to reveal the 2 x 4 studs beneath. She used the knife again to score the wall on the other side. When she kicked this time, her foot went through it.
‘… you see – it there?’ Sevki asked. ‘Cleena – you – now?’
Cleena shoved Sheetrock out of the way and peered into the empty space. Darkness filled the area on the other side of the broken wall, but the light that filtered in around her exposed a greasy network of cables.
‘I’ve found the elevator shaft,’ she said.
She checked the wall studs again and hoped Lourds could squeeze through. If anything, it would be the professor’s big head that got him stuck. She almost smiled at that, but the thought of the men waiting out in the hallway with guns took the fun out of that possibility. The elevator sat at the first floor. When the fire alarm had been set off, the cages had all automatically gone to the ground floor.
She pulled her head back out and addressed Lourds and Olympia. ‘Elevator shaft. We can use it to get downstairs.’ This time she could hear herself a little.
Lourds nodded, then picked up a leg from the broken table that had held the miniature war pieces. He swung it experimentally, then went to work on the Sheetrock still barring the door.
Cleena had to admit that once the professor decided on a course of action, not much deterred him. When he was satisfied, he reached into his backpack and took out a mini-flashlight. The fact that he seemed to be prepared for everything except being kidnapped irked Cleena. But it was probably more because she hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight herself.
‘The elevator cage is downstairs,’ he said. ‘We can’t get through.’
‘We go to the second floor,’ Cleena said. ‘Then to the stairs.’
‘They’ve got to have men outside,’ Lourds told her.
Cleena nodded. ‘They do. We’ll have to get round them.’
‘No,’ Olympia said. ‘We go downstairs. To the basement. There are tunnels that connect this building to other buildings on the campus.’
‘Sevki?’ Cleena asked.
‘It’s true,’ Sevki said. He sounded tinny and far away. ‘There’s an infrastructure throughout the college. The maintenance people use the tunnels to move large pieces of equipment and check on the utilities.’
‘All right.’ Cleena gestured to Olympia. ‘You know the way.’
Olympia peered through the hole, then back at Cleena. ‘You expect me to jump?’
‘I’ll go first,’ Lourds volunteered. He took off his backpack and handed it to Olympia. ‘That way I can help you down.’ He shone the flashlight round, then put it in his mouth and eased down into the shaft. Tension wound Cleena almost to the breaking point. Images of the scar-faced man and others like him kept bouncing through her mind. The effects of the pepper gas had made her eyes and nose run and she knew she couldn’t rely on her damaged hearing to hear anyone approaching.
When he was below, thankfully without breaking his neck, Lourds talked Olympia into descending, guiding her feet with his hands. Cleena followed at her heels in case they decided to bolt and attempt to get away from her.
‘Sir, we’re about to enter the red zone on our time line,’ Mayfield stated calmly.
‘I know. Everyone outside be prepared to exfiltrate instantly. There should be confusion enough on the campus to cover some of our retreat.’ Eckart didn’t like giving those orders. It was too near admitting failure, and he wasn’t prepared to do that yet. ‘Let me know when the police are on site.’
‘Affirmative.’
Too much time had elapsed for Lourds and the women to emerge from the office. If they hadn’t come out by now, they’d either been overcome by the gas – or they’d found another way out.
He took a fresh grip on his pistol and stepped forward in a combat crouch. He wore Kevlar under his shirt, but his head was unprotected. He reached the door, took a breath to steady himself, then ripped away his gas mask to clear his vision. The gas stung his eyes, but he’d been exposed to it on close-quarter battlefields numerous times. Whipping around the doorframe, he dropped to his knees with the pistol gripped in both hands before him.
No one was inside the room. It took him a moment to spot the hole in the wall through all the lingering gas. He slipped his gas mask up from his neck and back over his face.
‘They’re not inside,’ Eckart growled. He coughed as vestiges of the gas raked through his lungs.
‘There’s no other way out.’
‘They found one. It looks like a door.’
‘It was a door. Evidently it had been sealed off some time in the past.’
‘Where does it lead?’
‘To the adjoining office. If you’ve got that office door covered, then you’re covering the office next door as well.’
Eckart looked down the hall and saw the office was next to the elevator.
‘They can’t get out of there,’ Mayfield said.
‘They couldn’t get out of the last room they were in.’ Eckart swung back to the doorway and fired a half-dozen rounds into the hole in the wall.
There was no response.
A bad feeling ripped through Eckart’s stomach as he gazed back at the elevator next to the other office. The woman was a street rat. She was clever and dangerous.
‘Open the elevator doors,’ Eckart ordered. ‘Check the shaft.’ As his men ran to do that, he ducked into the office and crossed over to the hole in the wall. The door lay inside the room, torn from its hinges. He cursed as he scanned the room over his pistol sights and saw no one.
Then he spotted the hole in the opposite wall.
‘They’re in the elevator shaft. Check the cameras on the second floor.’
Mayfield took a moment to reply. ‘Negative. They haven’t exited either set of elevator doors.’
‘All right.’ Eckart stepped across ships and soldiers and paused at the second hole. ‘They’re still inside the shaft. Kill the two women but I want our target alive.’
He took a mini-Maglite from his trouser pocket, flicked it on, then crossed his wrists so the flashlight beam and the pistol pointed in the same direction. He leaned into the hole and spotted movement below.
‘Let’s go.’ Olympia spoke in Turkish and yanked at Lourds’ arm.
Lourds looked up at the hole. The air inside the shaft seemed to burn his lungs and nasal membranes even more. The logical side of his brain that wasn’t hunkered down in fear realized that the gas was heavy enough to hug the ground and now it was settling into the elevator shaft.
‘Come on, Thomas. Let’s go before she gets down here.’ Olympia pulled at the elevator doors in front of her. Standing on the elevator cage, the second floor exit was almost at her chin. ‘Help me.’
‘We’re not leaving her,’ Lourds said as he joined Olympia.
‘What?’
‘We’re not leaving her.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
Lourds hooked his fingers into the seam between the door and yanked. The doors gapped open a few inches, then slid back into place.
‘We’re not leaving her,’ Lourds repeated. ‘She’s part of this. We need to know what she knows.’
‘As if she’s going to tell you.’
‘You don’t know where the Joy Scroll is, do you?’
Olympia hesitated. ‘No.’
‘I thought so. Otherwise you wouldn’t have needed the book.’
‘We have a copy of the book. We couldn’t translate it. That was why – that is why we need you.’
That stopped Lourds in his tracks. ‘Qayin didn’t have the only copy?’
‘No.’
‘How many copies are there?’
‘We don’t know. There can’t have been many.’
Lourds tried the door again. ‘I would hope not. And we’re not going to leave her. She has a gun.’
‘Do you think she’s going to shoot us?’
‘No, but she’s been doing fantastically well shooting the people chasing us.’
Cleena dropped into the elevator shaft and looked at them.
‘Too late,’ Olympia grumbled in Turkish.
‘Did I miss the lovers’ quarrel?’ Cleena asked.
Lourds ignored her and bent his attention and strength to prising the doors open. This time when the doors opened he kept pushing till he reached the breakover point. The doors slid back into the wall on either side. He turned and hooked his hands together in front of him.
‘Okay, Olympia, up you go.’
Olympia placed his backpack on the elevator cage beside him, then stepped into Lourds’ hands and he boosted her up over the second-floor edge. He handed his backpack to her and turned to face Cleena, who was shorter than Olympia.
‘I don’t think your girlfriend much cares for me,’ Cleena said.
‘She’s not my girlfriend.’ Lourds didn’t know why he felt the need to clarify that, especially in the heat of a pitched gunbattle. He thought it was more a reflex than anything. ‘We’re just good friends.’
‘Very good friends.’ Cleena ignored his clasped hands and lithely jumped to the second floor under her own power, then rolled to her feet.
Lourds leaped up after her. As he managed the final frantic scramble, darkness filled the elevator shaft and he knew someone had stepped into the hole in the wall on the third floor. He renewed his efforts to get clear. Olympia grabbed his arms and yanked. Cleena dropped to one knee and fired up into the shaft.
A brief flurry of bullets ricocheted off the elevator cage then stopped.
‘Let’s go.’ Cleena swapped magazines in her pistol and stood. ‘They know where we are now. We’re going to have company.’ She looked at Olympia. ‘Maybe you could lead the way.’
Shooting her a scathing glance, Olympia quickly took the lead and headed toward the stairs just ahead of them. Lourds grabbed his backpack and slid it over one shoulder.
‘You’d be faster if you left that,’ Cleena advised him.
‘That’s not going to happen,’ Lourds assured her.
He fell into a jog on Olympia’s heels. Gunfire blasted in the elevator shaft again.
Eckart touched the burning area on his neck. His fingertips came away wet with crimson. He cursed the woman and hoped he got the chance to kill her up close and personal. Home-grown terrorists were always the worst, and she was beginning to seriously tick him off.
Echoes of full-auto fire filled the room and boomed out of the elevator shaft.
‘Do you have the elevator shaft?’ he asked.
‘Affirmative, sir, but they’re gone.’
‘Gone?’ During the brief encounter, Eckart’s eyes hadn’t adjusted well enough to pierce the fog of white gas in the elevator chamber. He peered again, and this time he spotted the open doors on the second-floor landing. He cursed as his mind raced.
‘Do you have them on the cameras?’ he demanded.
Mayfield answered at once. ‘Yes, sir. Second floor. Headed for the stairs.’
‘Do we have anyone there?’ Eckhart jumped down into the elevator shaft. His boots thudded against the cage but he kept his feet.
Two of his men dropped in after him. Together, they headed into the hallway.
‘Negative,’ Mayfield said. ‘They’d closed on the office with you.’
The second floor was empty. The door at the end of the hall was shut. Eckart increased his pace.
Lourds followed Olympia and was in turn followed by Cleena. The sound of the shots fired above echoed around them. He wanted to talk, a thousand questions zipped through his mind, but his breath was ragged from the pepper gas and from exertion. His feet pounded against the concrete steps. They passed the first-floor landing and headed down to the basement. Footsteps struck the steps behind them.
‘Hurry,’ Cleena urged; Lourds didn’t know how she found the breath to speak.
Olympia never broke stride as she reached the basement and shoved through the door and turned right immediately. Security lights burned weakly in the darkness. Olympia fumbled in her pocket, then produced a key ring. She halted at a large steel security door and tried keys.
‘Don’t you know which key it is?’ Cleena stood nearby with the pistol clenched in her hands as she faced the door they’d just run through.
Olympia ignored her and concentrated on the keys. Lourds knew the history department would have needed to move exhibits or research materials through the tunnels beneath the university because it would have been much simpler than doing it in the open and possible even on inclement days.
The locking mechanism clicked and Olympia pulled the door open. She reached for a light switch and turned it on. A row of low-wattage bulbs flared to yellow incandescence down the length of the tunnel.
‘Let’s go.’ Cleena ushered them inside as the basement door flew open. She held her fire and Lourds knew she didn’t want to mark their positions. His confidence in her abilities grew. She was a remarkable young woman.
Lourds entered the tunnel after Olympia.
‘Which way does the tunnel go?’ Cleena asked as she closed the door behind them. She took a moment to lock it.
‘A short distance ahead,’ Olympia said, ‘it splits in three directions. All of them lead to different buildings.’
‘That’s a strong door,’ Cleena said. ‘It should slow them.’
Olympia nodded. ‘We’ll reach the intersection before they can open it.’
‘Unless they brought a rocket launcher,’ Cleena said.
That, Lourds thought sourly, was entirely possible given past history.
Eckart glared at the security door in front of them. Two of his men worked on the locking mechanism, but it was going slowly.
‘Where did they go?’ he asked.
‘Service tunnel infrastructure beneath the university,’ Mayfield answered. ‘I found a map. The tunnel they’re in branches off into three hallways a short distance from that point.’
‘Are there cameras in the tunnels?’
‘No. I’m blind there.’
A one-in-three chance didn’t sound appealing to Eckart. Not with the local police and the university security people closing in.
‘All right,’ Eckart growled. ‘Pack it up and let’s hit the wind.’ Without a word, his men pulled their gear together and fell in behind him. ‘We need a route out of here.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And we’ve left dead behind.’ That was something Eckart wouldn’t have done when he’d been back in uniform. Now there was no helping it.
‘I’ll take care of it, sir.’
Eckart called off the names of the three men Cleena had killed. Within minutes, Mayfield would have plugged fake IDs into Interpol’s intelligence centre. He’d also activate the false identification they had at the Pentagon. Eckart and his team operated off the books, but Vice-President Webster made certain they had access to all the resources they needed.
Professor Lourds may have been lucky in this first encounter, but Eckart intended to write a much different ending the next time.