“You mean, another buyer?”
“That’s right. The men who hired him planned to be there when the Yalena raised the submarine. They were going to remove the cargo and just sink the U-boat again, so no one would know it had ever been raised. But Jasha, he got the idea to raise the old submarine a day early. He was going to take it back to Kaliningrad, remove the cargo, and then sell the U-boat to me for the steel. You know about pre-1945 steel?”
“Yes.” The man in the windbreaker was getting closer. He was taller than Lowenstein’s driver, and darker, but he had that same swooping handlebar mustache. “In other words,” said Jax, “Jasha was going to double-cross the men who hired him.”
“He planned to hide the U-boat at the shipyard, then go out with the men who’d hired him the next day and pretend to be as surprised as anyone when they discovered the sub already gone. He thought he was just dealing with thieves.” Erkan exhaled sharply through his nostrils. “Not killers.”
“What was the cargo?”
Erkan paused in front of one of the massive columns. He’d changed suits, Jax noticed. A fine lightweight gray wool rather than the navy he’d worn that afternoon. He fiddled with the jacket’s top button, buttoning and then unbuttoning it.
“What was the cargo?” Jax said again. “If it wasn’t gold, what was it?”
“You think-” Erkan began, just as the man in the windbreaker walked up to him, pulled a big Heckler and Koch from beneath his jacket, and shot Erkan point blank in the chest.
35
The Heckler and Koch was a massive model 23. The mustachioed man in the light blue windbreaker squeezed off three rounds, one after the other. The big hollow-point through-and-throughs tore through Erkan and blew out his back. Blood splattered the white marble column behind him as shattered shards of stone exploded into the air.
The man in the windbreaker shoved the H &K beneath his jacket again and kept walking.
For one suspended moment, Erkan wavered, still on his feet, his white shirt blooming a charred scarlet. He opened his mouth to speak and a torrent of blood spilled down his chin. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed.
He fell backward in an ungainly sprawl, arms flung out at his sides, his exquisitely tailored gray suit falling open to reveal a small Walther PPK in a holster clipped inside the waistband of his slacks. Jax snatched it up.
Walking quickly, the killer had almost reached the gate. Jax shoved Erkan’s Walther under his shirt and followed him, also at a walk. It was never a good idea to run away from a dead body. It tended to attract attention.
Other people were running-running toward Erkan. Jax kept walking. At the gate, the man in the pale blue windbreaker threw a quick glance over his shoulder. He saw Jax and began to run.
“Shit,” said Jax, and sprinted after him.
They pelted down a crooked lane between narrow whitewashed houses that loomed up to cast the worn paving stones into shadow. This was an old part of town, one of the few areas that had escaped the Great Fire of 1922. Jax dodged café tables, scarlet geraniums spilling out of clay pots, a sleeping gray cat.
The killer hung a quick left, into a shady, stone-paved passageway so steep it soon gave up and became steps. Jax tore after him, the soles of their shoes clattering on the broad ancient stairs, the scent of damp stone and ancient decay wafting up around him.
The steps emptied into a winding street filled with market stalls hung with baskets and brass pots that glinted like gold in a shaft of early-evening sunlight. The driver of a green van laid on his horn, its brakes screeching as the man in the blue windbreaker darted across in front of him.
Jax ducked around behind the van, his gaze on the dark mouth of an alley opening up on the far side of the street. The killer bolted down it, Jax twenty steps behind. The air here was cool and dank, the houses shuttered, silent, the only sounds the pounding of their feet and the rasp of their breath and the swish of traffic from the street ahead.
As he cleared the alley, the man seemed to come to some kind of a decision. He whirled, his hand reaching beneath his jacket to close on the handle of his gun. But the sidewalk here was narrow, his momentum so great that he took a step back off the curb into the street as he brought up the big H &K.
Jax heard a squeal of brakes, saw the man’s head turn, his eyes widen the instant before a battered white delivery truck slammed into him with a heavy, fatal thud.
36
Tucking Erkan’s Walther out of sight beneath his sweat-soaked shirt, Jax pushed his way through the excited, jabbering crowd of shoppers gathered around the front of the truck. Jax took one look at the man’s blood-smeared face, the wide and sightless eyes, and turned away.
A couple of blocks down the hill, he paused long enough to wipe down Erkan’s gun and drop it into a convenient trash receptacle. Then he turned his steps toward the blue waters of the bay below. From somewhere to his left came the low, melodic notes of the afternoon call to prayer. Allah Akbar…
One after the other, the muezzins of the city’s mosques joined in, until their voices rose up in a wave of sound that rolled across the bay. Allah Akbar. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illal-lah. God is Great. There is no God but God.
Captain Lowenstein was not going to be happy.
Jax called Matt from the shade of a plane tree overlooking the Gulf of Izmir. His truncated conversation with Erkan had raised some serious questions, and Jax had doubts about Langley’s ability-or maybe its willingness-to give him straight answers.
“Where are the German military archives from World War II kept?” Jax asked.
“The military archives?” There was a pause while Matt digested this. “I think they’re still in Freiburg im Breisgau. Why?”
“Then that’s where I’m going.”
“You know, we do have people in Freiberg. I could ask them to-”
“No. I want to find out for myself exactly what was on that damned sub.”
“Did something happen I need to know about?”
“Kemal Erkan is dead.”
“Shit. Listen, Jax. I’ve got a contact in Freiberg I can set you up with. A historian by the name of Walter Herbolt, at the university.”
Jax stared across the broad avenue, toward the water. From here he could see Tobie and Captain Lowenstein. Tobie was calmly sipping a bottle of Evian at a shady table overlooking Pasaport Quay. But Lowenstein was pacing up and down, his cell phone plastered to his ear with one hand, his other hand gesturing wildly through the air as he talked. Jax said, “Thanks, but I’m getting kinda tired of these station people.”
“Herbolt isn’t part of the Company. He’s a personal friend. I’ll tell him to expect you.” There was a pause. Matt said, “It doesn’t sound like that U-boat was carrying gold, does it?”
“No. No, it doesn’t.”
“You’re feeling pretty cocky, aren’t you?” Jax said to Lowenstein as the captain escorted them through Izmir’s crowded, gleaming airport toward their concourse.
So far, news of the shooting in the agora had yet to wend its way through Turkish police channels to the base, and from there to field personnel. Pausing at the sign that warned in four languages, TICKETED PASSENGERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, the Captain rocked back on his heels and grinned. “You may have given me the slip there for a while, but I think I made a pretty good recovery. And in another forty-five minutes, you’ll be gone.”
“And without a single international incident.” Jax slapped the big Air Force captain on the back and turned to leave. “You did a heckuva job, Lowie.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” whispered October as she put her carry-on bag on the conveyer belt at security. “Who did you kill?”
“Not here, October.” Jax kept a smile on his face as he glanced back at Lowenstein. As he watched, the Captain answered his cell phone, his expression changing ludicrously as he listened to the voice at the other end. Across the crowded security area, the two men’s gazes met. Jax brought one hand to his forehead in a wry salute and turned away.