The police were walking towards them now, their debate apparently concluded.
Rob squeezed Sally’s hand, and Christine’s too. He whispered to them both. ‘OK. Let’s do it. Christine and I will fly to Sanliurfa immediately. We do it alone. And we dig up this secret.’
‘And we don’t tell the police,’ said Christine.
Rob turned to Sally. ‘Are you sure about this, Sally? I need your agreement.’
She stared at Rob. ‘I’m…going to trust you, Rob Luttrell.’ Her eyes filled with tears: she fought them back. ‘I’m going to trust you to bring back our daughter. So, yes. Please do it. Please, please, please. Just bring Lizzie back.’
Forrester was rubbing his hands as he approached them. ‘Getting a bit nippy, shall we head for the airport? Have to get the Home Office onto it. We’ll pile the pressure on, I promise.’
Rob nodded. Behind the DCI loomed the sombre grey elevations of Newman House. For a second Rob had an image of the house as it had been when Buck Egan and Buck Whaley had held their roistering parties in the guttering light of Georgian lamps; the tall young men laughing and roaring as they set fire to black cats soaked in whisky.
47
Christine and Rob flew to Turkey straight from London the same evening, after telling blatant lies to Forrester and Boijer.
They decided to take the Black Book with them: Christine was obliged to show her archaeological credentials at Heathrow and flash her most charming smile to get a strange and arguably human skull past London customs. In Turkey they had to be even more careful. They flew to Dyarbakir, via Istanbul, then made a long, dusty, six-hour cab-ride to Sanliurfa, through the night and the dawn. They didn’t want to announce their arrival to Kiribali by turning up at Sanliurfa Airport, conspicuous, Western and unwanted; indeed they didn’t want Kiribali to know they were anywhere near Turkey.
Just being here, in Kurdistan, was risky enough.
In the thrumming heart of broiling Urfa they headed for the Hotel Haran. Right outside the lobby Rob found his man-Radevan-sheltering from the hot morning sun, arguing noisily about football with the other cab drivers, and acting a little grouchy. But the grumpiness was due to Ramadan: everyone was grouchy, hungry and thirsty through the hours of daylight.
Rob went straight for it and asked Radevan if he could find some friends to help them dig the Valley of the Slaughter. He also quietly asked him to procure some guns, as well. Rob wanted to be ready for anything.
Initially, Radevan was moody and unsure: he went off to ‘consult’ with his numberless cousins. But an hour later he returned with seven friends and relatives, all smiling Kurdish lads. In the meantime Rob had bought some second-hand shovels and hired a couple of very old Land Rovers.
This was probably going to be the most makeshift archaeological dig of the last two hundred years, but they had no choice. They had only two days to unearth the final answer to all their questions, two days to unearth the Valley of the Slaughter, and lure Cloncurry into a position in which he would have to give up Lizzie. And Radevan had done his job with the guns: they were concealed in a shabby old sack: two shotguns and a German pistol. Radevan winked at Rob as they made the transaction. ‘You see I help you, Mr Robbie. I like Englishman, they help the Kurds.’ He grinned, luxuriously, as Rob handed over the wad of dollars.
As soon as everything was stowed in the cars, Rob jumped in the driver’s seat and keyed the engine. His impatience was almost unbearable. Just being in the same city as Lizzie, yet not knowing where she was or how she was suffering made him feel as if he was having a serious heart attack. He had pains shooting up his arm; palpitations of anguish. His jaw hurt. He thought of Lizzie, tied to a chair, as the last of Urfa’s suburbs became a haze of dust and greyness in the rearview mirror.
Christine was in the seat beside him. Three Kurdish men were in the back. Radevan was driving the second Land Rover, right behind. The guns were hidden in their sack, under Rob’s seat. The Black Box, in its worn leather box, was firmly wedged in the boot.
As they rattled along, the familiar talkativeness of the Kurds lapsed into whispers, and then into silence. Their silence was matched by the deadness of the landscape as they headed out into the vastness of the desert. The yellow and desolate wastes.
The heat was quite incredible: high summer on the edge of the Syriac wilderness. Rob sensed the nearness of Gobekli as they motored south. But this time they drove straight past the Gobekli turn off, and were waved through several army checkpoints further down the hot Damascus road. Christine had bought a detailed map: she reckoned she knew precisely where to find the valley.
‘Here’, she said, at one turning, very authoritatively. They took a right and barrelled for half an hour along unmetalled dirt tracks. And then at last they crested a rise. The two cars halted, and everyone climbed out: the Kurds looking dirty, sweaty and mildly mutinous. The shovels were unloaded, the trowels, ropes and backpacks were dumped on the sandy hilltop.
To their left was a bare and narrow valley.
‘That’s it,’ said Christine. ‘The Valley of the Slaughter. They still call it the Valley of Killing. It’s actually marked on the map.’
Rob gazed and listened. He could hear-nothing. Nothing but the mournful desert wind. The site-the entire region-was strangely hushed, even for the deserts near Gobekli.
‘Where is everyone?’ he said.
‘Gone. Evacuated. Moved by the government,’ replied Christine.
‘Huh?’
‘That’s why.’ She was pointing left where an expanse of silver flatness glistened in the distance. ’That’s the water from the Great Anatolian Project. The Euphrates. They are flooding the whole region, for irrigation. Several major archaeological sites have already flooded-it’s very controversial.’
‘Christ-it’s only a few klicks away!’
‘And it’s coming in our direction. But that levee will stop it. The earthbank over there.’ Christine pointed, and frowned. Her white shirt was freckled with yellow dust. ‘But we need to be carefuclass="underline" these inundations can be very quick. And unpredictable.’
‘We need to be quick anyway,‘ said Rob.
They turned and descended the hill into the valley. Within a few minutes Christine had got the Kurds digging. As they worked, the size of the task assailed Rob. The valley was a mile long, at least. In two days, their team would only be able to turn over a fraction of it. Maybe twenty per cent. Maybe thirty. And they wouldn’t be able to dig very deep.
So they were going to have to be lucky to find anything. The sombreness and fear that Rob had been feeling since they had returned to the Kurdish desert was joined by a rising surge of ennui. A great tide of pointlessness. Lizzie was going to die. She was going to die. And Rob felt useless: he felt he would drown in the futility of it all, be entombed like the thirsty lands around him, awaiting that vast silver coffinlid of water. The Great Anatolian Project.
But he knew he had to stay strong, to see this through and so he tried to improve his mood. He reminded himself what Breitner had said of Christine: that she was ‘one of the best archaeologists of her generation’. He reminded himself that the great Isobel Previn had taught Christine at Cambridge.