He dropped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. The car wasn’t any warmer, but at least he was out of the wind.
Jerry experimented with the VW’s dashboard controls while Chas got in the Mercedes truck and backed it out of their way. He put the car in gear and inched forward, then when Chas swung the gate open put the accelerator down. The tires spun on ice, then caught bare rock and hurled the car forward. The VW sped through the gate and began the long trip down the mountain.
The road had been plowed after the last storm, but the wind was ever present and there were new drifts everywhere. The road surface was stone or gravel plated with ice. There were no guardrails, and a mistake would send them over a cliff, or into a stand of pine where they’d hang suspended until they starved or someone came and rescued them.
The idiocy and danger of their situation drove Jerry into a fury. He attacked the mountain as if the Volkswagen were a tank rather than a reasonably priced coupe. Twice he skidded off the road and bounced the car off banks of snow piled up in corners by the snowplow. He smashed through drifts as if the car had a blade on the front. He cursed continually as he worked the stick shift, and in his terror and anger he forgot all about being cold.
“Jesus, Jer!” Denny said. “Are you sure you know how to drive on ice?”
“Better than you do, Florida Boy,” Jerry said.
Denny’s weird shrunken monkey face contorted with fear. “I went to MIT!” he said. “It snows in Massachusetts! Maybe I better drive!”
“You didn’t have a car when we were at MIT. You had a Schwinn. I remember.”
“Fuck!” Denny shrieked as the wheels spun uselessly on ice and the car began a sideways drift toward yawning, empty space… and then one wheel hit some gravel, gained purchase on the road, and the car lurched back onto the correct trajectory.
“Will you please take it easy?” Denny cried.
“Shut the fuck up.” The drive was taking too much of Jerry’s concentration for him to deal with anyone’s fear but his own.
The VW lurched and skidded its way down the mountain. Short of the T-intersections Jerry turned off the lights so that if the army was in the area, they wouldn’t see the VW turning off the road to the listening station.
“What the-” Denny began.
“Shut up.”
Jerry pulled up to the intersection, the darkened car skidding the last few meters, and then turned left and pulled onto clean, dry, two-lane asphalt. Denny gave a cry of relief.
“Look behind,” Jerry said. “See if they’re coming.”
Denny turned to peer through the rear window. It took a moment for the banks of snow on the side of the road to open and give Denny a view of the mountain behind them.
“Holy crap,” he said. “There they are!”
“How many?”
“Looks like four or five vehicles. Like a convoy. I can see their lights like a mile away.”
Jerry backed off the accelerator and downshifted. He didn’t want to have to brake and give their position away with a flash of the brake lights.
“Tell me what’s happening,” he said. The VW bounced over frost heaves.
Denny rocked back and forth to keep the vehicles in sight. “I–I can’t see them,” he said. “Trees in the way.”
“Keep looking.”
The tires drummed through potholes as Jerry took the VW through an S curve, and then he ended up on a broad curve of mountain that provided a perfect view of the road behind them.
“I see them!” Denny said. “They’re coming up to the intersection!”
Jerry slowed again to let Denny keep the vehicles in sight.
“They’re stopping! They’re turning! They’re heading up to the station!”
Relief gushed out of Jerry’s throat in a long sigh. He accelerated and shifted into third and let a curve carry him out of sight of the vehicles behind. When Denny assured him that they were out of sight of the other vehicles, Jerry snapped on the lights and accelerated to eighty kilometers per hour, which was as fast as he was willing to go on a strange mountain at night.
“That was close!” Denny said.
“I don’t want you complaining about my driving again,” Jerry said.
Denny took several long breaths, like a runner at the end of a sprint.
“Can I turn down the heater? It’s really warm in here.”
It wasn’t just warm now; it was hot. Jerry hadn’t noticed.
“Sure,” he said.
Jerry drove on another ten klicks and then saw the sign for the Monastery of Didymus Thomas. The monks, ethnic Kurds, were Assyrian Christians, a sect of which Jerry had been completely ignorant until he’d been driven past the monastery on his way up the mountain. The monastery was literally perched on a cliff face, the monks living in caves hollowed out of the mountainside. The only way out of the monastery was to be lowered to the ground in a huge basket.
At the moment, presumably, the monks were all in their eyrie, shivering in their beds.
Jerry downshifted and swung the car into the monks’ parking lot.
“What’s the matter?” Denny said. “You want to change drivers?”
“Get the laptop out of the trunk. I want to zero the hard drive.”
Denny looked at him doubtfully.
“We’re not supposed to do that,” he said.
“Look,” Jerry said. “We’re going down into the Kurdish part of the country. There’s got to be a big Turkish military presence there, and I don’t even know if there’s a curfew or not. We’re very likely to get stopped, and I don’t want to get stopped with a software bomb in the trunk. We look suspicious enough as it is.”
Denny thought about this for a moment and then nodded.
“On your head be it,” he said, and opened his door.
Thanks a lot, Jerry thought, and sprang the trunk latch.
When Denny returned, Jerry saw the case and knew that they were totally fucked.
Totally, he thought. Totally totally totally. Totally.
Denny saw Jerry’s stricken expression. He looked at Jerry with his strange monkey face.
“What’s the matter?”
Jerry pointed at the case.
“Dude,” he said. “That’s my Xbox.”
ACT 1
CHAPTER ONE
FROM: LadyDayFan
Hey! I have received word of a Facebook site featuring this coded message.
Not to give it away or anything, but it looks like James Bond needs our help!
FROM: Corporal Carrot
The blond or one of the others?
FROM: ReVerb
George Lazenby could really use us!
FROM: Vikram
Why us? Is Q on vacation or something?
FROM: LadyDayFan
I have started the usual series of topics under the title From Isfahan, with Love.
Newcomers to this forum should check out Tips for Beginners. I also recommend my latest guide on Netiquette, which might just stop some flamewars before they begin.
FROM: HexenHase
Excuse me, but I must have missed something. Why Isfahan?
FROM: Corporal Carrot
For the Isfahan thing, check out this link.
FROM: HexenHase
Oh. Sorry. Got it now.
FROM: LadyDayFan
If you’ll look here you’ll find a crossword puzzle, which seems to have been left behind by an enemy agent. Does anyone know a six-letter word for “Meleagris covers mostly Anatolia”?
FROM: Corporal Carrot
TURKEY! We’re off again!
CHAPTER TWO
Primary Turns Solid Dangerously
The explosion smelled of roses. The scent was strong enough to turn Dagmar’s stomach.
It was a conflation of memory, she knew. It was only after the explosion that she’d smelled the roses in her car. But here the two memories were mashed together.
It wasn’t one of the flashbacks, Dagmar thought. It was a dream. She knew it was a dream because she could take some measures to control it.