Blown Circuit (13 page)

“Is that so bad?” I replied.

“Maybe not. But the bright side, sometimes, is not so bright at all.”

Meryem smiled and slowly rose from the bed. As she did, I realized I wanted her to stay.

“I will see you in the morning. Goodnight, Mr. Raptor.”

“Goodnight.”

And she walked away, shutting the door softly behind her.
 

W
HEN
I
AWOKE
, it was just getting light. I had the early morning call to prayer followed by a pair of overzealous roosters to blame for the fact that I was awake, but I wasn’t complaining. An early start was exactly what I needed. I got dressed and went outside to the shared bathroom, happy that I’d be getting some time on my own to check things out and plan the day. But when I tried the bathroom door it was locked. Before I could release the handle, Meryem walked out. She looked good. Freshly showered and ready to take on the day.

“Today we meet Augustus,” she said.

“Friend of yours?” I asked.

“A politician. Octavian Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. I think the arm belongs to him.”

We packed up and walked downstairs. I could have done with a coffee, but nothing was open yet, so I tied down the arm and strapped my backpack to the rack, hopping on the bike.

“The ancient city is very near,” Meryem said. “Perhaps they have coffee there.”

I rode slowly, because the rising sun was in my eyes and I wanted to keep a low profile as we left town. We continued along a gently winding road for about five more minutes, before turning off at a gas station, the entrance to the ancient archeological site of Aphrodisias visible just down the road. Unfortunately, when we pulled up to the front gate we discovered that Aphrodisias was closed. The gate was locked, a sign on the guard shack indicating that the site wouldn’t be open until 10:00
AM
.
 

Meryem brought up a map of the ancient city on her phone.
 

“The monument of Augustus is here, in the center of the city.”

I glanced at the guard shack.

“You think a caretaker sleeps there?”

“Perhaps. No way to tell.”

“Sure there is,” I said.

“How?” Meryem asked.

“Like this.”
 

I popped the clutch and headed straight for the fence.

Chapter 23

I
HEADED
FOR
the fence because I saw what Meryem didn’t. Namely, that the fence blocked off access to the site from our direction, but the site wasn’t fenced in on all sides. Maybe it was a lack of money, maybe a crooked contractor, but looking into the distance, I could just make out where the fence ended. From that point, access was easy, the ancient city of Aphrodisias laid out like so much used marble on the bone-dry hillside.

I kept the bike in second gear as we bounced over the uneven ground before hitting a footpath. The map indicated that the first landmark was an amphitheater. Peering down on my left, I saw the ancient circular bowl built into the cliffside, marble, stadium-style seats perched on top of each other facing a stone stage. The red dirt path headed up before flattening out briefly and dipping back down the slope. I glanced back at the entrance to the site, but there was no activity. So far, we were flying under the radar.

I piloted the bike over what looked like chunks of broken marble columns as we trundled down the hill. I’d heard somewhere that it would take hundreds of years to excavate all the ancient ruins in Turkey and I believed it. There were remnants of the ancient city everywhere, marble columns lying beside grounded pediments. We traveled through the ancient marketplace and passed what looked like a swimming pool and some smaller amphitheaters that could have served as the seat of government. Some parts of the site were still being actively excavated, artifacts being dug from long, deep pits. Ahead I saw what I thought was a temple, white marble columns rising to hold the crumbling marble pediment above.

“Does that look right?” I said, pointing to the temple.

“Yes,” Meryem said.

I drove over the rough stones toward it, pulling over beside the rising columns. But I didn’t bother kicking the bike onto its stand because there was no sculpture there. Just a marble base where a sculpture might have once stood.
 

“Perhaps it was taken,” Meryem said. “Perhaps in the museum here. Perhaps somewhere else. Many sculptures from Turkey have been taken to other countries.”

She was probably right. I saw another structure ahead, but it was the same story. There was a marble base, but no sculpture. As we rode farther on, the scenario was repeated yet again. It was disheartening. The city’s sculptures were no longer there.

Then I looked behind me. To the west. Something was a little different in that direction. The trail changed into a genuine cobbled road. Not like the other roads, but a better preserved one, as though it had been restored. In fact, everything looked a little more put back together in that direction. It took me a moment, but I saw it.

“There.”

The monument. It wasn’t a ruined building like the others. It was a grand building that had been totally reconstructed, a perfect pediment sitting above it. And we were in luck. As we drove closer, I saw the sculpture in front of it. The statue had been broken at one time, but it had been painstakingly reassembled, probably with iron rods and epoxy and whatever else it took to attach the bits and pieces of marble back together. The sculpture was a larger-than-life Roman emperor in a flowing marble tunic. All that was missing was a head. And an arm.

I briefly wondered why this statue was still standing while the others were not. Maybe it was special in some way. Different. Meryem got off. She was wearing white again. A T-shirt and capri pants. With her thick black hair blowing in the breeze, it wasn’t hard to imagine her as Cleopatra standing amid the ruins of her failed empire.
 

I pulled the arm off the rack and carried it up to the statue. Octavian Augustus, the first emperor of Rome and patron to the city of Aphrodisias, stood on a marble base, so it was difficult for me to reach him, but I saw the general angle of the broken marble at his shoulder. If the arm was properly affixed, he would be pointing northeast. I couldn’t reach high enough, so I did the next best thing.

“Hop on my shoulders,” I said to Meryem.

She didn’t look thrilled, but she understood me. I hunched low and Meryem climbed onto my shoulders. Then I handed her the arm and stood up. I didn’t think Meryem weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds. But the arm must have been over fifty, so the two of them together weren’t light. I straightened up, feeling the pleasant muscle-burn in my legs, and watched directly above me as Meryem tried to affix the arm to the statue. I silently prayed that she didn’t drop it. That would hurt. What we needed to do was get an idea of where the arm was pointing. After all, why else had the sculpture been restored while everything around it lay in ruins?

Coincidence? Perhaps. But perhaps the sculpture had been reconstructed for a reason. Perhaps it had been dug out of the earth so many years ago and reassembled so that it could be pointed in a very specific direction. Perhaps the sculpture was a sign.

That said, I didn’t know where it was going to lead us. Probably further back down into the past. Down through the archeological layers. I expected that, like it or not, I was going to have to do some digging. I craned my neck upward as Meryem joined the two marble surfaces, holding Augustus’s arm to his shoulder at the approximate angle it was supposed to be. It wasn’t hard to do. The angle of the break at the shoulder meant there was really only one way to put it on.

“Look,” Meryem said.

I stared forward, squinting my eyes in the new rising sun. The marble columns of the ancient city rose all around us, but Augustus wasn’t pointing to them. He was pointing outward, far beyond the ancient city of Aphrodisias. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, was pointing to a gleaming silver mosque, a lone minaret rising in the distance.

Chapter 24

E
VEN
ACCOUNTING
FOR
a generous error in the angle, it had to be the mosque that the old Roman was pointing to. There was nothing else up in that direction. But I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it because our presence had been discovered. Two all-terrain vehicles drove our way, plumes of dust rising behind them. The vehicles were slightly bigger than golf carts but with truck beds in the back. The men in the back of the nearer ATV shouted and waved shovels. Clearly, they didn’t like strangers in their city.
 

I lowered Meryem off my shoulders. She pulled out her phone.
 

“You see that we have guests,” I said.

“Yes. This I can see.”

I tapped my fingers anxiously. It went without saying that it wasn’t the ideal time to be surfing the web. Meryem, however, didn't seem terribly bothered. She pulled up a satellite map on her phone, zooming in to Aphrodisias. I could see the stadium and the agora. I could even see the monument where we stood. But the strange part was that the entire area to which the statue was pointing had been blacked out. Redacted. Obviously a governmental request had been made to the map provider. I’d seen similarly blacked-out areas before: the HAARP site in Alaska, a clandestine research facility in Oregon and, for whatever reason, this part of Turkey had been blacked out as well.

“Government lab, military facility, what do you think?” I asked Meryem.

“I think there is nothing like that here.”

The ATVs were getting closer. A man standing in the back of the nearer vehicle screamed and made an obscene gesture. Whoever they were, they were angry.

“What do we do with the arm?” Meryem said.

“We keep it. We might still need it.”

“Are sure you do not want to give them part of it?”

“Which part?” I asked.

“Perhaps the finger?” Meryem said.

She grinned. It took me a moment to realize that she was being funny.
 

“We keep all of it then, the finger also,” Meryem replied.

I quickly strapped the arm back down to the rack and we roared away, the ATVs adjusting course to head us off. They went wide, one to the front of us and one to the rear. I popped the bike into third gear and hammered the throttle. Soon we were in the scrub, the main road we had come in on visible in the distance. The marble arm made the bike heavier than I would have liked, but we made good time. Then I saw a full marble column laid down across the tall grass like a fallen tree. It was a good three feet in diameter and I was too close to stop.

“Hang on.”

I hit the throttle and lifted the front of the bike lightly, allowing my body to shift back in the seat. The front wheel immediately lifted off the ground. I found the rear balance point and put my weight on the pegs as we climbed over the column with a rousing bump. We were over it in a second, but before I could settle back into the saddle, we were confronted with another column. I hit the throttle again, lifting the front wheel, and we rolled up and over the second column. It was like riding through history. I glanced up and to my right and saw that the men in the vehicle in front of us were still coming. It was no problem, though. We were almost at the road.

Then I had to recalibrate because I saw the fence. It was long and metal and rusted, and it separated us from the road. I jammed on the rear brake putting the bike into a fishtail and headed east, parallel with the fence.
 

“Do you want them to catch us?” Meryem said.

No, I didn’t want them to catch us. But I didn’t want to end up wrapped in chain-link either. The scrubby land rose and fell as I followed the fence line. If the ATV in front of us continued on its present vector, we’d probably run into each other in about half a minute. We’d probably hit the guys behind us in a similar amount of time if we turned back. It was a geometry problem. Except, then I heard the crack of a rifle.
 

I glanced behind us. The shot had gone high. The guy in the back of the ATV was using the roof of the cab to support his right arm as he aimed. It was a haphazard firing position, but he had the advantage of a long barrel. If he hit a flat stretch, he might just be able to make the shot. I focused my attention forward again. I couldn’t see the driver because of the low angle of the sun, but I did see a second rifleman and a third guy waving a shovel. It wasn’t the usual welcoming party for a couple museum crashers. It stood to reason that out pursuers had been tipped off.

“Go faster!” Meryem yelled.

But it wasn’t that easy. There was an open excavation pit ahead of us. It was maybe forty feet wide, but at least a hundred and fifty feet long. Another section of the city was being dug out, foundations and standing columns and sculptures slowly being unearthed from the hole in the ground. I had a decision to make. I could go around. But it would be a gift to the gunmen behind us. Or I could go over.

I gunned it toward the pit.

“What are you doing?” Meryem shouted.

“Getting us out of here.”

I steered toward what looked like an intact triangular pediment bridging the gap over the pit, intact columns supporting the underside of it. At one time it would have supported the roof of a temple, but from where I stood on the pegs of the bike, it looked more like a ramp. I hammered the bike forward and lifted the front wheel. We jumped the gap into the pit and landed on the marble pediment. The back tire bit in and we were soon cruising up the narrow pediment, the pit descending on either side of us. I kept a steady hand on the bars and piloted the bike all the way up and over the ancient marble pediment, keeping a straight, true line.
 

Halfway down the other side of the pediment, I goosed the throttle and lifted the front wheel again. We jumped the gap onto solid ground, the pit behind us, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. Another shot rang out from the rear. The men in front were now less than a hundred feet away.