The Eighth Day (23 page)

He saw them on the way out of the Laundromat, walking on the other side of the street. The Brow was leaning into his cell phone, talking hard, while his buddy—a squarely built man with long hair and sunglasses—marched at his side.

Danny didn’t know if they’d spotted him. He didn’t think so, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Falling in with a tourist posse en route to one of the city’s sights, he kept his head low and his eyes on the ground, desperate to disappear. This was not, he realized, a rational way to act. It was basically what an ostrich would do. But he had the gut feeling that if he kept the Italians in view—if he kept checking to see if they’d seen him—they would somehow feel the weight of his eyes. And then they’d know that he was near.

This was, of course, insane. He knew that. But it didn’t matter.

As it happened, the tourists’ destination was only twenty yards up the street from the café-Laundromat that Danny had just left. One of the yellow signs that mark tourist attractions in Istanbul identified this particular one as the Basilica Cistern. Danny saw the words in passing as he and the tour group filtered into a low and unimpressive building with a ticket office just inside the front door. A few feet away, a turnstile stood at the head of a dark and narrow staircase leading . . . down.

Danny’s pulse went into overdrive as he worked up the nerve to look behind him. Buying a ticket, he glanced over his shoulder and was relieved to see . . . no one in particular. Just tourists. Like him. Not Gaetano. Not the long-haired thug. And not the Brow.

Heaving a sigh of relief, he paid and went through the turnstile, trailing a troop of older Brits led by a red-haired woman. She held a walking stick topped with a droopy bouquet of fake flowers that she hoisted into the air from time to time. Danny thought this must be so that her charges could find her should they become separated, but they seemed to stay as close to her as a kindergarten class.

As nervous as he was, as worried as he was, he was curious as well. To his mind, a cistern was a holding tank for rainwater. That a hole in the ground should be a tourist attraction seemed unlikely. And then he looked up and saw where he was—in an underground cathedral that was half lagoon. There was nothing primitive or crude about this space. It was both grand and fantastic, at least three stories high, with a vaulted ceiling upheld by a forest of massive stone columns. The bases of the columns stood in a lake of black water that appeared to be one or two feet deep. The lake was as long and wide as a racetrack, its darkness pierced by floodlights, creating a chiaroscuro effect.

Classical music played.

“Here we are,” the redheaded woman said, standing on one of the wooden walkways that crisscrossed the underground lake. “Cool, isn’t it?” Murmurs of agreement rose up from the group. “You see, water came to Constantinople by way of an aqueduct from a source about seventeen kilometers away. And because the city had to endure
quite
long sieges, an extensive system of cisterns was built to store water. In this, as in the other cisterns, the water could have come all the way up to the roof, if necessary. Isn’t it something?”

“Oh, look,
fish
!” exclaimed a woman with tight gray curls. Everyone craned to see a flotilla of carp sliding between the columns.

“It’s believed to have been built by our old friend Constantine,” the guide continued. “And until it burned down in 425, a basilica stood above it, which is how this particular cistern came by its name. If you’ll follow me . . .”

They stopped at the Wishing Pool, where half the people in the crowd (including Danny) dutifully tossed some change at the water. Watching the coins sashay toward the bottom, he could see how they shrank in size. It was deeper than he thought—a few feet, maybe five. He wished . . . that he’d get out of here in one piece . . . and that Caleigh would forgive him.

“This way. . . .” The tour guide gave Danny a sidelong glance that seemed to say,
Don’t freeload.
But he didn’t have much choice. The walkways were narrow, and the tour was a one-way loop that led everyone to the same exit. Still, he let a gap develop between himself and the last of the Brits.

At the end of the lighted area, they reached a walkway that went around a pair of columns before heading off toward the exit. Danny could see a pair of marble heads splashed with light. The heads were massive and inverted, with each of them supporting a huge column. Beyond them was a black void. The tour guide explained that only a small part of the cistern was illuminated and accessible by walkway. Most of it lay in darkness.

“These are heads of Medusa,” the guide told them. Danny looked closer and saw that the curly heads of hair were, in fact, tangles of snakes. But the effect was subtle—not a writhing mass of serpents but a few curls that only upon inspection turned out to be reptiles. Nor were the Medusas monstrous. Rather, they were big, sightless, innocent-looking heads, with broad, cherubic features. “Justinian rebuilt and restored the cistern in 535,” the woman told them, “and it’s thought that these Medusas were taken from pagan temples in Lebanon—as, indeed, were many of the columns. Justinian was a great recycler!” This earned her a few appreciative chuckles. “Well,” she said crisply, “that’s it then. We’ll make our way up to the exit. Tiffins, everyone! Tiffins!”

An enthusiastic murmur rose up from the Brits as they shuffled toward the exit and the afternoon’s tea. Slowly they began to ascend the steep staircase. Danny didn’t want to crowd them, so he hung back until he found himself engulfed by a group of Spanish tourists. Then he began the long climb to daylight.

Halfway up, he heard the tour guide tell her charges to go “
straight
to the coach, if you don’t mind.”

As Danny climbed, the temperature did, too, until he reached the surface—when the heat of the day washed over him in a wave. After the cool, dripping darkness of the cistern, the Istanbul heat took his breath away even as the light rinsed the world of all its colors.

He stood for a moment, just outside the exit, rubbing his eyes. Then he waited, blinking, for his eyes to adjust and when they did he saw them. Or not really that. He didn’t actually
see
them—not in the usual sense, because the world before him had the look of an overexposed photograph, bleached of detail. It was more that he discerned them, the shape and bulk of them, lounging against the side of a parked car. One of them seemed to be eating a gyro, leaning forward so that the sauce wouldn’t drip on his lapels.

Danny reacted instinctively, turning on his heel. Before he’d actually thought about what he was doing, he was heading down the stairs, shoving his way past the ascending Spaniards. The stairs were only a few feet wide, and protests exploded all around him.

“Hey!”

“Que hace?”

“Por favor!”

Then he was at the bottom of the stairs, heading for the Medusas, still fighting the current of sightseers. Behind him, someone screamed, and he knew from the cascade of shouts and squeals that Zebek’s tag team was in pursuit—in fact, they were almost upon him.

His plan, such as it was, was to get to the other exit, but from the sound of things, his pursuers weren’t as gentle as he had been and they were gaining ground. When he reached the Medusas, instinct took over. He slid under the walkway’s railing, paused for a moment on the platform—and dove into the ice-cold water. It went through him like an electric shock. But the fear that he felt was even stronger and drove him through the water toward the darkest corner of the cistern.

For the first hundred feet or so, he could make out the columns. They were arranged in rows and he swam between them, making as little commotion as he could.
There’s no way out.
Every ten or twenty yards, he swam underwater as far as he could, surfacing for a breath of air. Eventually, he reached a point where he could no longer see where he was going and slowed. Finally, he stopped. His feet found the floor beneath him, and he realized that the water was only about four feet deep. Turning, he glanced in the direction of the illuminated area—which was eerie and spectacular, a sunken palace—and was surprised to see how far he’d come. He was a couple hundred yards from the Medusas, far beyond the reach of the lights. There was still a commotion where he’d gone into the water—a weird cacophony of shouts amplified by the acoustics of the stone surfaces and vaulted ceiling. His dive had disturbed the tranquil surface of the water and the light bounced off it, sloshing and shifting dizzily against the columns and the vaulted ceiling. Nor was he the only one in the water, he realized. He could hear someone slogging toward him, but off to the left.

His teeth chattered and he mashed his lips together. Flashlight beams began to play against the columns, fluttering across the water, then steadying to probe the darkness. A fish slid past, grazing his leg, and he almost screamed.

He couldn’t stay in the water much longer. It was just too cold. His jaw was trembling, and his body was quaking. Eventually, the cold would freeze out the tremors that he felt and, in the end, he’d turn to stone. There was a limit to how long he could stick it out.

But for now, he stayed put, watching and listening in the darkness. The ruckus around the Medusa stones was resolving itself into a semblance of guessable behavior. Some officials—guards, he supposed—had become involved, and now they were clearing the cavern of tourists. They were also searching for him in the water, moving along the gangways with their flashlights. Somehow, Danny understood that they feared that he’d drowned.

They’d find him sooner or later. He was sure of that. And then his fate would be in the hands of guards assigned to protect a cistern—a prospect that did not fill him with confidence. They’d probably put him in handcuffs and turn him over to the police—which was fine with Danny. Except that the handover would probably not go smoothly. His pursuers would not have gone away. They’d be standing outside, waiting for him to emerge. And when he did, they’d take him down—hard. Handcuffs would just make it easier.

So he began to swim toward the light.

With all its submerged spotlights, the Wishing Pool—halfway between the exit and the entrance—was the brightest spot in the cavern. When he came near it, Danny crouched in the water behind a pillar and took a look around. Guards still stood off to his left on the walkway in the vicinity of the Medusa heads. Two more were in a small rubber raft, paddling among the columns, probing the darkness with their flashlights.

Most of the crowd was gone. The remainder—maybe twenty people—were being herded up the exit steps by the guards. The steps leading down from the entrance, Danny saw, were empty.

He swam toward the broad platform at the base of the stairs, where tour groups stopped so that people’s eyes could adjust to the darkness. When he reached the platform, he clambered out, making more noise than he would have liked. Stiff and clumsy from the cold, his body began to loosen up as he charged the stairs, taking them two at a time.

Vaulting the turnstile at the top, he burst out into the street, where he stood for a moment—dripping, panting, dazzled by the sunlight. Then the Brow came into view, standing sideways about five yards to his left, talking animatedly into his cell phone. There were only two ways out of the cistern. Obviously the Brow was monitoring this one and his pal was at the exit. Turning, the big man had just enough time to register surprise as Danny slammed into him, driving him backward five or six steps.
Ass over teacups,
as Dad would have said.

It was a good hit—especially for a guy who didn’t weigh more than 160 pounds, soaking wet (which he was). He used the Brow’s mouth as a starting block and took off in a sprint. The last thing he wanted to do was get into a wrestling match with a guy who seemed to be equal parts gristle and bone.

He needed a crowd and he knew where to find one—at the foot of the Galata Bridge, where the ferryboats were. He turned into an alley, feet squishing as he ran, then into a side street, heading nowhere in particular except downhill. Occasionally he looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was behind him, but no—the Bulky Boys weren’t built for speed.

He remembered a map that he’d seen in the in-flight magazine for Turkish Airlines. It showed the routes of the ferryboats, with parabolic arcs from one side of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn to the other. From Eminönü you could get just about anywhere in Istanbul or sail all the way to the Black Sea. Like New York, Istanbul was defined by the waters that lapped its shores.

In the end, it only took him a couple of minutes to reach the docks, which were, as ever, choked with smoke and swarming. Wet enough to draw stares but no longer dripping, he got in line to buy a ticket to wherever the next boat was going.

Üsküdar. Slip Four. Two minutes.

He walked quickly to the ferry, turning once or twice as he went, looking to see if there was anyone on his heels. But there was no one—or no one he recognized, anyway. Just a swarm of lookalike Turks with short black hair and mustaches. Crossing the gangplank that linked the ferry to the shore, he climbed the stairs to the upper deck and sat down on a worn pine seat with his back to the bulkhead, invisible to anyone on the docks. A minute ticked by, the seconds dragging toward eternity. Finally, a horn sounded. The deck trembled. And the ferry slid away from the shore.

A sigh of relief fell from his lips, and the tension drained from his shoulders. He was safe for the moment, but only for the moment. Somehow, they kept finding him.
But how?

He hadn’t used his credit cards, just cash. So it wasn’t as if they were tracking him that way, even if they could. And they hadn’t found him just once or twice
but three times
. There was the Abruzze Hotel in Rome, which they probably got at by hacking the voice mail on Caleigh’s phone. Then they found him in Istanbul at the Asian Shore Guesthouse. But how? He’d only made a single call—to Remy Barzan—and (once bitten, twice stung) he hadn’t left a message on the guy’s phone. So how did they find him
that
time?