“It will take more than a motorcycle ride to scare me,” she said.
“Like what?”
Meryem shrugged.
“I do not know.”
“Come on, think about it. Something must scare you. Purple dinosaurs? Birthday parties?”
Meryem thought about it.
“None of these things. Perhaps spiders,” she said. “I do not like spiders.”
“Spiders, huh? Good to know.”
“What about you Mr. Raptor? What scares you?”
“I guess small spaces. Or knives. I really don’t like knives.”
“You have a Swiss Army knife, no?”
“It’s the part about the guy trying to cut me that I don’t like.”
I looked south. There were a few houses and a small store where the main road met the dirt spur that led to the mosque, but other than that, the mosque stood alone. The only unusual feature was a disused gravel road that headed out toward the mountains in the distance. What was odd was that the road didn’t intersect with the dirt spur. The weed-infested gravel simply dead-ended in a shallow ditch.
I turned back to the mosque, its single round brick minaret rising high into the air. The minaret had two balconies encircling it, like rings on a stick, one above the other. The lower balcony was about a hundred feet up, the upper balcony probably twenty-five feet above that. The upper balcony had loudspeakers encircling it. This balcony was where the muezzin would have traditionally sung the call to prayer, though these days it was done from the prayer hall below. Nestled among the loudspeakers was a satellite dish, not necessarily odd, but worth investigating. From base to tip, I made the minaret at about a hundred and sixty feet high.
“Augustus pointed right here,” I said.
“You must go in,” Meryem replied.
“What about you?”
“I am a woman. This might be a problem for me.”
I didn’t argue. Instead, I took a quick look around the front of the mosque, but I saw nothing unusual. Wherever our gun-toting pals were, they weren’t here yet, so I slipped through the gate to the front door. I slipped off my shoes, carrying them in my hand, but the mosque was empty, ornate tiles decorating the interior of the cupola. There was an arched wooden door to the right of the entrance where I had come in. I heard the rustle of fabric and saw that Meryem had changed her mind about coming inside. She wore her sunglasses and a loose scarf over her head, shoes in hand. She looked like a fashion throwback to the sixties. A very attractive fashion throwback to the sixties.
“Don’t stare,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“It’s empty,” I replied.
“Up there.”
So far we were still alone, but wherever the mullah was, it was unlikely that he was far away. I cautiously tried the arched door. It was secured by a simple mortise lock. I didn’t think I’d need much more than a nail to open it, but I had the luxury of a lock pick kit. The kit folded into a flat, credit-card sized piece of metal so it was simultaneously effective and unlikely to draw unwanted attention. The bonus was that I’d already spent a fair amount of training time learning how to use it. I had the tool out of my pocket and the lock picked before Meryem could tell me to hurry up.
The door opened outward with a soft squeak and I stepped inside to find a tight spiral staircase. I switched on a round Bakelite switch and a bare bulb lit the claustrophobic ascending stone stairs. Fabric-covered wiring drooped and twisted up the circular walls, a black coaxial cable stapled neatly above it. I clicked the deadbolt below the mortise lock shut.
“Do you have any idea what we are looking for?” Meryem whispered.
“We’ll know it when we see it,” I said.
“And if not?”
“Then we’ll look harder.”
I started up the tight, narrow stairwell, the light from the bulb below gradually fading as the bulb above slowly took over. I counted one hundred and twenty-six stairs before we hit the door at the first balcony. It was locked, but I didn’t bother with the pick because it was the upper balcony that interested me. As I continued climbing the twisting stairs, I noticed that the round interior walls had become soft at some spots. They were scaly with lime dust. Probably water damage. Forty-six steps later we reached a second low, arched doorway.
“Now we look,” Meryem said.
I didn’t need my pick this time. I simply turned the brass handle. The low door opened inward with a groaning scrape, its sill tight with the stone step below. I forced it all the way open, light flooding the stone staircase. As my pupils adjusted to the bright daylight, I saw the ornately decorated rail surrounding the round balcony. The rail wasn’t more than a couple feet high and beyond it was a panoramic view of the entire valley. Loudspeakers had been mounted at intervals around the circumference of the minaret, the satellite dish bolted slightly above the door. Meryem pulled up the satellite map on her phone, revealing the blacked-out area.
“This black spot is very large,” she said. “We could be looking for anything.”
“Or it could be simpler than that,” I said, careful to remain inside the shadow of the doorway.
“Simple how?” Meryem said.
I looked down at the tiled, domed roof of the mosque below us, and beyond it, the homes by the crossroads. They had flat concrete roofs, iron rebar sticking out of them, ready for the owners to build a new level once time and money would allow. Beyond that were green farm fields in every direction. Green except for the field adjacent to us. That field, the one with the disused gravel road running down the length of it, was brown. It obviously wasn’t under cultivation.
Overall, there wasn’t anything to indicate why the area should be blacked out on the map. There wasn’t a chain-link fence, or a radio tower, or anything resembling a sensitive military installation in sight. Not even a gateway or checkpoint that would certainly be required for an underground facility. All there was was a mosque, a few houses, and a store. Hardly a reason to redact the region.
My eyes drifted up to the speakers, and then to the satellite dish. The speakers were standard equipment. The satellite dish was a little stranger, but television was popular everywhere. What made less sense were four rusted, L-shaped metal brackets that had been secured to the wall of the minaret. They were bolted all the way through the brick and fastened with large nuts on the interior wall of the tower. I stared down at them for a long moment before redirecting my attention inside the stairwell.
And that’s when I saw it — what was out of place — the wire. The coaxial cable led out from the back of the satellite dish, over the top of the doorway, and down the side of doorframe where it snuck inside at the base of the door and followed the stairs down the wall of the tower. The speaker wires followed a similar path down the side of the doorframe. But they didn’t go inside the door. Instead, they went through a drilled hole in the brick wall. Then they disappeared. Interesting. I remembered the water-damaged walls I had seen climbing the tower.
Meryem moved aside as I shut the door behind us. She turned to me in the low light, her breath warm on my cheek.
“What is it?” Meryem asked. “Tell me what you see.”
“Wait a minute,” I replied.
“Why do you want me to wait?”
“So I can be sure I’m right.”
Chapter 26
I hurried down the steps two at a time, running my fingers along the rough plaster walls until I found the area of greatest water damage to the wall. It was an irregular splotch, about four feet wide by three high. I reached into the pockets of my cargo shorts, pulling out a flashlight and my Swiss Army knife. Flashlight between my teeth, I popped open the knife, inserting the flathead screwdriver deep into the moist plaster.