She looked at me warily, her long, dark hair slightly mussed, well-defined arms straining against the weight of the weapon.
“I told you my brothers fought in the army and died. I told you my mother died of grief.”
“You told me that they were conscripted. That they died fighting the Kurds on the Iraqi border.”
“On this point, I was not so truthful, Michael. My brothers, like me, were Kurds. They died at the hands of the Turkish Army.”
I didn’t like what I heard. I realized that Meryem had been fundamentally wronged in her past. Whatever I said would not change that. I was dealing with a true-believer.
“I would have thought that was the kind of thing MIT would screen for in their applicants.”
“When my mother died and I left home, I had no paperwork, no identity. The Kurdish people, they helped me with this. They gave me new papers so I could join MIT. Do you know why they did this?”
“You were young and impressionable. Believe me, I know. I’ve been there.”
Meryem smiled.
“Yes, maybe so,” she said. “But this is not the reason.”
“Then what is the reason, Meryem? What’s the reason you’re holding me at gunpoint?”
“You know the man who wrote in Tesla’s journal? The man who hid the Device?”
“Bayazidi,” I said.
“This man, Bayazidi, was my grandfather.” Meryem said.
I thought about it. I knew how intelligence organizations worked. I worked for one. They loved to recruit based on need. And a woman in Meryem's position would have had need written all over her. Bayazidi being her grandfather, that was just the icing on the cake. These Kurdish terrorists must have thought they’d hit the lottery with Meryem. When they had recruited her she was a scared teenager. She had matured into the ultimate sleeper agent.
“The truck? Did you know it was hidden underground?”
“I knew I was looking for a vehicle, yes. I saw it in the shadows when they were moving their flashlights.”
“And the bones? The human remains? Did your grandfather hide those as well?”
“Those people gave their lives so no one among them but one would know the Device’s location. Sacrifices needed to be made.”
“So is that what I am, Meryem? Another sacrifice?”
The distant diesel clatter got louder. It was accompanied with a rhythmic squeaking.
“Please, Michael, do not test me. The current Turkish government is the enemy of the Kurds. But there is opposition. There are those who want the Turkish people to live in harmony with my people. But that government will not be allowed to be. Those in power will not allow it.”
“So you want to blow up a city to make a statement? How many innocent people are going to die?”
“I do not intend to blow up a city.”
Not what I was expected her to say, but I went with it.
“Then put the gun down.”
I stepped forward, but Meryem raised a hand. She wasn’t about to let me get any closer.
“Do you know who is on tour in the Mediterranean as we speak?” Meryem said.
“I don’t know, Lady Gaga?”
“Your United States warships,” Meryem said. “I do not intend to blow up a city, Michael. I intend to blow up the American Sixth Fleet.”
Chapter 52
I wasn’t sure that I had heard Meryem correctly. Blowing up the Sixth Fleet was crazier than blowing up New York. How was hitting the American Navy going to change anything? But then I began to see her logic. It might not change anything if the attack came from a terrorist group. But if the attack came from within the Turkish government itself, if she was somehow able to convince them that MIT or the army were responsible, for instance, then there was no way the Americans would let the current government stand. An unprovoked attack of that nature would be an act of war. Those in power would be out. Moderates would take over the Turkish Parliament. It was a plan that might just work. Except for one potential problem.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I said.
“What is that?”
“The Tesla Device is an old piece of experimental technology. Even if you could pinpoint the location of the Sixth Fleet, you don’t know whether the weapon will work.”
“It will work, Michael.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we will be silent no longer,” Meryem said.
Which was exactly what I didn’t want to hear. Because it didn’t sound like an answer. It sounded like extremism. And there was no way to argue with it. The distant diesel clatter had grown to a low rumble. It was loud enough that though I could see Meryem's lips move, I couldn’t hear her speak. I raised my hands farther above my head and moved another step toward her, even though it meant walking into the barrel of a gun. Then the wall behind me came crashing down in a billow of dust. It just slammed down in one piece, doors and all, as a huge orange excavator crawled in on its creaky metal tracks, its scratched silver bucket gleaming in the sunlight.
I dove to the side, but Meryem didn’t waver. She kept me covered from the front as the big excavator crawled toward us. A second gunman, hanging off the cab of the excavator, covered me from behind. Clearly, I was rapidly losing control of the situation. Whatever my previous assumptions regarding Meryem, it was now evident that she was a much bigger problem than I had anticipated.
My point about the Tesla Device not necessarily functioning as advertised was probably wishful thinking. If the CIA tech team feared it enough to produce that simulation of New York being flattened, I was a believer. So were the Green Dragons, MIT, and now, apparently, the Kurds. I kept my hands raised above my head as I considered my options. The problem was, I wasn’t seeing many.
Thy guy hanging off the excavator jumped down and herded me into the corner of the barn. It was the soldier with the chipped tooth from the yacht — the one I had made eat his shirt. He grinned at me, but I didn’t smile back. No need to encourage him. The entire barn now consisted of two walls, standing only because they were nailed to the buried doors leading into the tunnel. The excavator’s big shovel lowered with a hiss of its hydraulic boom and I saw that it was Faruk in the operator’s cage. Meryem pointed him to the pile of dirt in front of the barn doors and the mechanical shovel began to move the earth aside.
It took only one bucketful for me to realize that I was in even more trouble than I had previously thought. The big bucket picked up a quarter of the dirt in the pile in one scoop. Whatever their plan was, they’d be done quickly, which meant that they’d soon need to deal with me. Faruk dumped the dirt near the eastern wall and swung back for another load. I counted off the seconds in my head. The first shovelful had taken him roughly twenty seconds to move. At that rate, I had maybe a minute before I needed to act.
Meryem covered me from the front, the guard from behind, as I watched the big bucket swing back toward the dirt pile. Hydraulics buzzing, the excavator’s boom hummed toward its target smoothly and efficiently. But then it kept going. It swung past the pile and came to an abrupt stop two feet away from me, digging down and taking a big bite out of the earth. Within seconds there was a three-foot-deep hole beside me. You didn’t need to be a genius to see what he was doing.
Faruk was digging my grave.
Faruk dumped the earth from the bucket, and then came back for a second bite, the big shovel digging deep. Then he paused his shovel for a moment and shouted something in Turkish at Meryem. Meryem shouted back. I thought I recognized one of the words. A word I had heard before.
Kale.
The shovel started working again, but I had my opening. I looked Meryem in the eye. Her AK remained sternly leveled at me.