“Excuse me,” I said.
I shuffled forward and pulled on my shorts, reaching into my pocket to pull out a folded sheet of paper. Meryem recognized it immediately.
“How did you get that?” she asked.
“On the Fox. With Kate. She showed me this page from the journal. Then she asked me whether I needed anything else. I managed to tear it out while she pushed the triggers away from me.”
“So they do not have it. This page?”
“Not unless they made a scan. If we were lucky, they didn’t get around to it.”
I unfolded the wet page, brown ink running together in long rivulets.
“So what does it tell you?”
“Are you sure that’s the castle?”
Meryem looked at me like I was stupid.
“Yes, of course. There is no other castle here.”
“And are you sure the knights used it as a base, a stopover point to raiding the Holy Land?”
“What you call raiding, they called protecting, preserving in God’s name. But, yes, they used this place.”
“Then I don’t think there’s any question that Bayazidi was telling us something when he drew this.”
I displayed the page to Meryem. It was only a brown ink drawing, but the figure drawn there seemed almost alive. It was a figure of a man chained to a block wall, but Bayazidi had taken liberties. The man had lacerated skin and a torn ear, but most strikingly, he had the head of a wolf. Sharp incisors dripped saliva, the wolf-man staring directly at us with sad, pleading eyes, a collar around his neck and a manacle on each wrist. The worst part wasn’t the lupine head, or the manacles, it was the knife through the figure’s heart. Blood spurted in every which direction. Nobody could say Bayazidi didn’t have an imagination. The drawing was really creepy. There was a caption in Cyrillic below it.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“I think it is a Kurdish proverb,” Meryem said. “It says death.”
“What about death?”
“It says the wolf repents only in death.”
Chapter 45
We got off the boat, just past the castle, smack in the middle of Bodrum Harbor. The town was built along the waterfront with a pedestrian street set behind the first row of whitewashed buildings. It was very hot out, the midday sun high in the sky, and there were backpackers everywhere, strolling the narrow streets and lounging in the cafes. Bodrum was known for its party atmosphere and I could see why. Every second business was a nightclub. I even saw a giant catamaran called the Turk Club that cruised the harbor after closing to keep the booze flowing past dawn.
I saw no sign of the Turquoise Fox, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t in the other harbor. She had certainly had ample time to arrive. What it meant was that we needed to be cautious. Meryem and I were hungry, so we grabbed lamb kebabs and a couple Cokes in worn glass bottles. From the first bite of the tangy, grilled lamb, I couldn’t help but wonder why Kate had opted to butter me up with steak and potatoes when the local cuisine was so good. Some people were like that, I figured. Always looking so far ahead that they couldn’t see what was right in front of their faces.
While we finished our food, an Irish backpacker family complete with a freckled mom and dad and two little, freckled kids asked to have their picture taken. The kids, a redheaded boy and a girl not more than five or six years old, were decked out in those running shoes with flashing LED’s in their soles and their own tiny backpacks. I downed the rest of my Coke and took a few shots for them, the boy and girl posing happily in the street. Reflecting briefly on how carefree the children looked, I found that it only steeled my resolve. I had a job to do, a city to save. To that end, Meryem and I picked up some basic supplies with the money that I had left and headed back to the castle.
“You understand there are other dungeons,” Meryem said. “Simply because this man drew a wolf-man in chains, does not mean that the Device is there.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But it means we should look.”
We soon learned that the castle was now being used as a museum of underwater archeology. It was also closed. Fortunately, the wrought-iron perimeter fence ran through a secluded area behind the gift shop that allowed us to scale it unseen.
We then climbed a long stone staircase until we reached a wooden gate set in a high stone wall. As soon as we got through the gate, I could tell that the castle was set out more like a fort than a single structure. The space was largely outdoors with wide paths winding upward to what looked like the top of the hill on which it had been built. There were CCTV cameras as well, but they seemed more focused on protecting the outdoor exhibits of amphorae and sculpture than stopping intruders. Careful to avoid the cameras’ prying eyes, I grabbed a fire axe bolted to the inside corner of the rock wall and went looking for the dungeon.
“This way,” Meryem said pointing up the path.
“That path goes up,” I said. “Dungeons are underground.”
Meryem pointed at a metal plaque nearly concealed by the shrubbery of a courtyard garden. The plaque read Bodrum Kale at the top and indicated that the dungeon was up the stairs to the right.
“In my country what is down, is up.”
“Roger that,” I said.
Then I grabbed Meryem from behind and pushed her down behind a headless marble statue. A museum guard approached from the far corner of the structure. We weren’t as alone as we had thought.
The guard headed directly for us. Not to the display on his right or the path to his left, but to us, right in the middle of the sculpture garden. When he stopped, mere feet away, I could almost reach the sidearm he kept in his black leather holster. Meryem crouched beside me, her eyes locked with mine. The guard then pulled out a half-full pack of cigarettes and lit up, birds chirping in the olive trees above. He took a long drag and returned to his rounds, leaving us alone once again.
Meryem and I exhaled simultaneously and continued up the stairs to the second level, where we followed another sign across the courtyard to the castle wall. Once we reached the cannon embrasure, we were rewarded with a fantastic view of the sea coupled with an unfortunate sight. The Turquoise Fox had made port. She sat moored in the azure waters directly in front of the castle. I moved past the embrasure in the wall and continued up another set of narrow stairs.
We reached the top and continued along the rampart, and then back down another set of stairs into a huge, square upper courtyard. There was a high flagpole on the northwest corner flying a giant red Turkish flag with its sickle moon and stars. There was also a construction crane, a big one, maybe three-hundred feet high. Restoration work was clearly being performed on the castle. The crane’s central location gave it access to all corners of the structure, including the minaret that rose from the southwest corner.
Below the crane were generators and the necessary support equipment, but, more importantly, there was a stone tower on the northern castle wall. At its base was another metal plaque. If the previous plaque had been correct, we had located the entrance to the dungeon. Now, we needed to avoid the CCTV camera and go down. The camera, however, was more of a problem than I had initially suspected. It was mounted above the dungeon door to provide a wide pan of those entering the tower. It panned right, then left, patrolling exactly the area where we wanted to go.
“Stay close,” I said.
I waited for the camera to pan left and raced along, tight with the east wall. Meryem followed me, move for move, until we reached the inside corner. The camera had a wide angle, I figured, but not that wide. Surely not wide enough to catch us as we huddled in the corner. Meryem faced me, her body tight with mine.