“What do we do with the arm?” Meryem said.
“We keep it. We might still need it.”
“Are sure you do not want to give them part of it?”
“Which part?” I asked.
“Perhaps the finger?” Meryem said.
She grinned. It took me a moment to realize that she was being funny.
“We keep all of it then, the finger also,” Meryem replied.
I quickly strapped the arm back down to the rack and we roared away, the ATVs adjusting course to head us off. They went wide, one to the front of us and one to the rear. I popped the bike into third gear and hammered the throttle. Soon we were in the scrub, the main road we had come in on visible in the distance. The marble arm made the bike heavier than I would have liked, but we made good time. Then I saw a full marble column laid down across the tall grass like a fallen tree. It was a good three feet in diameter and I was too close to stop.
“Hang on.”
I hit the throttle and lifted the front of the bike lightly, allowing my body to shift back in the seat. The front wheel immediately lifted off the ground. I found the rear balance point and put my weight on the pegs as we climbed over the column with a rousing bump. We were over it in a second, but before I could settle back into the saddle, we were confronted with another column. I hit the throttle again, lifting the front wheel, and we rolled up and over the second column. It was like riding through history. I glanced up and to my right and saw that the men in the vehicle in front of us were still coming. It was no problem, though. We were almost at the road.
Then I had to recalibrate because I saw the fence. It was long and metal and rusted, and it separated us from the road. I jammed on the rear brake putting the bike into a fishtail and headed east, parallel with the fence.
“Do you want them to catch us?” Meryem said.
No, I didn’t want them to catch us. But I didn’t want to end up wrapped in chain-link either. The scrubby land rose and fell as I followed the fence line. If the ATV in front of us continued on its present vector, we’d probably run into each other in about half a minute. We’d probably hit the guys behind us in a similar amount of time if we turned back. It was a geometry problem. Except, then I heard the crack of a rifle.
I glanced behind us. The shot had gone high. The guy in the back of the ATV was using the roof of the cab to support his right arm as he aimed. It was a haphazard firing position, but he had the advantage of a long barrel. If he hit a flat stretch, he might just be able to make the shot. I focused my attention forward again. I couldn’t see the driver because of the low angle of the sun, but I did see a second rifleman and a third guy waving a shovel. It wasn’t the usual welcoming party for a couple museum crashers. It stood to reason that out pursuers had been tipped off.
“Go faster!” Meryem yelled.
But it wasn’t that easy. There was an open excavation pit ahead of us. It was maybe forty feet wide, but at least a hundred and fifty feet long. Another section of the city was being dug out, foundations and standing columns and sculptures slowly being unearthed from the hole in the ground. I had a decision to make. I could go around. But it would be a gift to the gunmen behind us. Or I could go over.
I gunned it toward the pit.
“What are you doing?” Meryem shouted.
“Getting us out of here.”
I steered toward what looked like an intact triangular pediment bridging the gap over the pit, intact columns supporting the underside of it. At one time it would have supported the roof of a temple, but from where I stood on the pegs of the bike, it looked more like a ramp. I hammered the bike forward and lifted the front wheel. We jumped the gap into the pit and landed on the marble pediment. The back tire bit in and we were soon cruising up the narrow pediment, the pit descending on either side of us. I kept a steady hand on the bars and piloted the bike all the way up and over the ancient marble pediment, keeping a straight, true line.
Halfway down the other side of the pediment, I goosed the throttle and lifted the front wheel again. We jumped the gap onto solid ground, the pit behind us, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. Another shot rang out from the rear. The men in front were now less than a hundred feet away.
“Faster!” Meryem yelled.
“No shit!”
They fired from the front. I felt it whistle by my right ear, while Meryem grasped me tightly. We headed up one side of a scrub hummock, while our pursuers headed up the other. The fence was lower down the slope of the hummock, but it was still a barrier. When we finally crested the hill on a collision course with the ATV, we were so close that I could see the white of the rifleman’s eyes. I had a decision to make. A bullet or a wire wrap. Either could hurt.
“Hang on.”
I cut left hard. Straight for the fence below us. Only this time, I didn’t stop. I dropped the bike back down a gear and twisted the throttle hard. I was hoping for just a little more torque and the Transalp delivered. I lifted the front handle bars and shifted my weight to the rear. The front wheel went up and a fraction of a second later, the rear wheel left the ground. Even though it wasn’t towering above us, I knew that we didn’t have enough height to clear the fence. Not completely. Still, I hoped we had enough for what I had in mind.
Time seemed to slow as the front wheel sailed over the ragged, rusted chain-link. Meryem grabbed me tighter still, and then our rear wheel hit the fence. I took that as a good sign because the skid plate at the bottom of the bike had cleared. I felt a jarring sensation as the fence pulled back at the rear wheel of the bike, but I also felt the rusted old fence give. I twisted the throttle all the way, the front rim glinting in the sunlight as the back of the bike rose, knobby rear tire biting into the chain-link.
Then, like that, we were clear of the fence. A fourth bullet flew by as we sailed though the air, finally landing on our back wheel in a giant pneumatic whoosh. The Transalp had a lot of travel in its rear suspension and I praised its engineers in that long moment. When the front wheel finally landed, I threw the bike into fourth gear. After that, we left our pursuers in the dust. Unfortunately, as I was to soon learn, we were accelerating towards our problems, not away from them.
Chapter 25
A few twists and turns aside, the gritty two-lane blacktop headed straight for the mosque. But I wasn’t convinced that our pursuers wouldn’t try to catch up with us again, so I took the long way around. To our advantage, the rolling hills undulated enough to break the line of sight between Aphrodisias and our destination. I drove past the mosque’s gleaming silver dome before doubling back along a dirt track, keeping our speed low to avoid kicking up a rooster tail of dust as we approached from the rear.
The mosque was an old building of roughly quarried stone and brick. Exactly how old, I had no idea, but if history were to be a guide, it had been erected millennia after Augustus had first pointed at the site. I shut down the bike in the shadow of the rear wall and Meryem pulled out her phone again. We were in the middle of it now — the satellite map’s black spot.
“You know they can track that thing, right?”
“Yes. This is the idea. You think MIT does not know that I come here with you?”
“I’m sure they know now.”
“Exactly,” she said. “They watch their agents. Your CIA could learn from this.”
Meryem got off the bike and I kicked it onto its stand. What could I say? She had a point.
“You know, you drive like a crazy person,” Meryem said.
“Sorry if I scared you,” I said. “I made a call.”
I thought I saw her smile. But it wasn’t a smile. It was laughter.
“What’s so funny?”