The Templar Salvation (2010) (56 page)

A lone figure that was looking up in Tess’s direction.

Tess stiffened. There was something familiar about its silhouette. Her eyes locked in on the sight, her retinas straining to sharpen the image bouncing off them.

It was a teenage girl.

Not just any teenage girl.

The girl from the ceramics shop.

She didn’t move. She was just standing there, in the shadows, watching the hotel. And despite the darkness, Tess could make out the white of her eyes, tiny twin beacons of light in the desolate nightscape.

Their eyes met. Tess felt a jolt at the base of her neck. It seemed mirrored in the girl, who turned abruptly and scampered into the alley.

Tess bolted for the door, screaming to Reilly, “It’s the girl from the shop, she’s outside watching us,” before rushing out.

She flew down the stairs and out the hotel doors and tore down the alleyway, with Reilly close behind. There was no sign of the girl. Tess kept going until she reached an intersection with a narrow street. She looked left and right. The street was lifeless.

“Where the hell did she go? She couldn’t have gone that far that fast,” she blurted.

“You sure it was her?”

“Definitely. She was looking right up at me, Sean. She must have followed us back. Why would she do that?” Then she remembered something. “Shit. The gospels. They’re in my rucksack.”

She moved to head back to the hotel, but Reilly stilled her with an arm and brought around her rucksack, which was slung over his shoulder, with the other. “Calm down. It’s here.” The bag was all they’d brought with them to Konya. In addition to the two codices, it also held Reilly’s handgun.

Tess exhaled heavily with relief. “You think this is what they’re after? You think she was scoping us out to try and grab them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Reilly glanced around and got his bearings. He gestured right. “Their shop’s in that direction. Maybe that’s where she’s headed.”

Tess thought about it for a quick second, then nodded. “Makes sense. Let’s go there.”

“Why?”

“I want to know what the hell she was doing here.”

Chapter 55

F
inding the shop was easier said than done. The old district’s narrow streets and alleyways were a confusing maze, even more so at night, with very few street lamps around. And when they finally reached it, it was all dark and locked up for the night.

Tess marched right up to it and started slamming her palm against its aluminium shutters. “Hey,” she yelled out. “Open up. I know you’re in there.”

Reilly stepped in and stopped her. “You’re going to wake up the whole neighborhood.”

“I don’t care,” she blurted back. “Maybe their neighbors need to know about what kind of scams these people are running.” She pounded the shutters again, shouting, “Open this door. I’m not leaving.”

Reilly was about to interfere again when a light came on behind the louvered, wooden shutter of a window above the store. Seconds later, it squealed open, and the head of the shopkeeper poked out.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk to your daughter,” Tess said.

“My daughter?” The shopkeeper was clearly dumbfounded. “Now? Why?”

“Just tell her I’m here,” Tess insisted. “She’ll know.”

“Look, I don’t know what you think you’re—”

A voice coming from a narrow alley that ran down the side of the store interrupted him.

“
Yatagina don.”

The old woman stepped out of the shadows, addressing her son sternly and waving him back inside with both hands. “
Yatagina don,”
she repeated. “
Bunu halledebiliriz
.” She watched as he nodded, then he reluctantly closed the shutters and disappeared behind them.

The woman turned to Tess and just eyed her without saying a word, though the tension in her face was evident, even in the dim light of a lone street lamp farther down the road. When she moved aside, the teen girl was there, behind her.

“What was she doing outside our hotel?” Tess asked, her whole body buzzing with anticipation.

“Lower your voice,” the woman hissed. “You’re going to wake everyone up.” She rattled off a quick sentence in Turkish, and the girl slipped away.

“Hey,” Tess blurted, stepping forward. “Where’s she going?”

“The girl did nothing wrong,” the woman countered. “You should leave.”

“Leave? I’m not leaving. I want to know why she followed us back to the hotel. Or maybe we should just report it to the police and see if she’d like to tell them instead.”

This made the old woman flinch. “No. No police.”

Tess opened out her palms questioningly and gave her a “well then?” look.

The woman frowned, visibly tormented by something. “Please go.”

Something in the way she said it lit up a different pathway in Tess’s mind. She’d been so protective of the codices she’d failed to consider the other possibility.

Her tone softened and she inched closer to the old woman. “Do you know something about these books?”

“No, of course not.”

Her rapid-fire denial was far from convincing.

“Please,” Tess insisted. “If you do … you need to know this. There are others looking for these books. Murderers. They’ve killed many people while trying to find them. And just like we found you, they could find you too. If you know anything about them, you should tell us. It’s not safe for you right now.”

The woman studied Tess, her mouth a tight line, her brow knotted, her hands shivering perceptibly despite the balmy weather, her eyes betraying some intense debate going on deep within her.

“I’m telling you the truth,” Tess added. “Please. You’ve got to trust me.”

The seconds stretched interminably, then a verdict seemed to scrape through with the thinnest of majorities, and the woman grudgingly said, “Come with me,” before turning and heading down the side alley.

The shop was a small, detached, stone structure, two stories high—the shop itself and the apartment above. Tess and Reilly followed the old woman past a freestanding flight of stairs that led up to the shopkeeper’s living quarters and stopped outside an old oak door at the back of the building. After some fussing with some keys, the old woman snapped its lock open and led them inside.

They followed her through a small hallway and into a larger room, where the woman switched on a floor-mounted lamp. They were standing in a living room that had a set of French doors giving onto some kind of backyard. It was also cluttered with the memorabilia of a long, full life. Overcrowded shelves strained under the weight of books, picture frames, and vases. A couch and two armchairs were arrayed around a low coffee table and were barely visible under a camouflage of kilim throws and needlepoint cushions, while the walls were a patchwork of small paintings and old black-and-white family photos.

“I’ll make some coffee,” the old woman grumbled. “I know I’m going to need it.”

She padded out of the room. Moments later, the audible fumblings of a pot and a tap were quickly followed by the sound of a struck match and the soft hiss of a gas burner. Tess edged across to take a closer look at the framed photographs. She recognized younger versions of their reluctant hostess alongside various people, records of another era. A couple of dozen frames into the slide show, she stopped in front of one that reached out from the wall and grabbed her by the throat. It showed a young girl standing alongside an older man, a proud father-and-daughter pose. Behind them was a large wooden contraption from a bygone age, a semiautomatic loom of some kind.

A loom used to manufacture cloth.

A piece of machinery used by a draper.

“That’s my mother, and her father,” the old woman said as she returned from the kitchen with a small tray and settled down on the couch. “It was our family business for as long as anyone can remember.”

Tess’s skin was twitching. “What happened?”

“My grandfather lost all his money. He spent it all on a modern loom that was supposed to come from England, but the middleman he bought it from took all his money and disappeared.” She poured thick coffee into small, shot-sized cups and gestured for Tess and Reilly to join her. “He died heartbroken not long after that. My grandmother had to do something to make a living. She knew how to fire clay, it was her father’s business. And this”—she waved her hands around her—”is the result.”

“You sell some beautiful things,” Tess remarked with a smile as she sat down on the couch by the woman. Reilly joined them, settling into the armchair and putting the rucksack down by his feet.

The old woman casually waved away Tess’s comment. “We take pride in what we do, whatever it is. It’s not worth doing otherwise.” She took a sip from her coffee, decided it was too hot, and set it back down. She sat quietly for a moment, then let out a long sigh and raised her eyes to Tess. “So tell me … who are you, exactly? And how did you end up here, in this lost corner of the world, with these old books you’re carrying?”

Tess glanced at Reilly, unsure about what to say. A moment ago, she was seething with indignation, thinking the old woman was out to steal the codices. And yet here they were now, comfortably ensconced in the woman’s living room, sipping coffee and having a courteous little chat.

Reilly nodded her a go-ahead, mirroring her own feelings.

So she told her. Everything. The whole story, from Sharafi’s appearance in Jordan to the shoot-out in the underground city, although she skirted around the gorier parts of it, not wanting to shock her host. Throughout, the old woman listened intently, surprise and fear playing on her face, her eyes roaming Tess’s face and glancing away to Reilly every now and then, only asking for additional clarification a time or two. By the end of it, her hands were shivering. And once Tess was done, she sat quietly for a long moment, working the story over in silence, clearly racked by indecision and worry.

Tess hesitated to wade in. After giving her what she felt was enough time to process it all, she asked, “Why did your granddaughter follow us to our hotel? You asked her to, didn’t you?”

It seemed like the woman didn’t hear her. She just kept staring into her coffee cup, lost in thought, back in the grips of some momentous struggle. After another lengthy deliberation, her words came out slow and soft.

“They didn’t know what to do with them, you know,” she told Tess, barely able to look at her. “We’ve never known what to do with them.” She shut her eyes with remorse, then turned to face Tess. It was as if she’d just crossed a line from from which there was no return.

Tess stared at her blankly for a second, making sure she’d heard her right, then a searing charge of elation burst out of her heart and swept through her. “You have them? You have the other books?” She was now on the very edge of the couch, every pore in her body brimming with anticipation.

The old woman studied her, then nodded slowly.

“How many?”

“Many.” She was surprisingly casual about it, as if she were confirming the most trivial of comments. “The woman, Maysoon. She brought them here, for safekeeping. After Conrad died.”

Tess couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her face felt like it was on fire. Her eyes flicked across to Reilly and were met with a broad, supportive grin. She turned back to the old woman. “So Conrad did have a woman with him?”

“They met in Constantinople, where they both lived.”

“She was a Sufi?” Reilly asked.

“Yes.”

Tess asked, “So what happened to them? Conrad did die in Zelve, didn’t he?”

Chapter 56

CAPPADOCIA

MAY 1310

T
he villagers received them with a warm, if tentative, welcome. Conrad and Maysoon found the small settlement in a narrow canyon, tucked away from the outside world, a cluster of rock cones set around a church that had been carved into a cliff face. Their arrival was an unusual occurrence. The villagers didn’t get many visitors and were wary of them at first. Still, they brought with them news of the outside world and a sense of event that was rarely seen in the isolated, canyon-based community, and the locals soon relaxed. The priest who tended the rock church also ended up grudgingly giving them his approval, despite his obvious wariness at the sight of a knight of the Cross traveling with a heathen companion. The fact that Conrad had fought to free the Holy Land and lost his hand doing so forced the man to overcome some of his prejudice. Maysoon also helped win him over when, much to his surprise, she quoted lines of scripture that she had learned as a child while studying tolerance under her Sufi master.