C. Graham - The Solomon Effect

Jax wandered along the western stoa, his watchful gaze roving continually over the area. The message from the Turkish shipbreaker was welcome, but vaguely ominous. Men like Kemal Erkan didn’t frighten easily.

A fly buzzed Jax’s ear. Swatting it away, he turned to look out over the old Greek site. From here he had a clear view of the courtyard and its surrounding portico of fragmented marble columns standing up stark and white against the vivid blue sky. The ancient basilica lay beyond that, while over it all loomed the dark crenulated battlements of the fortress begun by Alexander the Great and expanded many times down through the centuries.

The agora was nearly deserted. The hordes of tourists from the cruise ships that docked in the port below tended to prefer day trips to better-known sites like Ephesus, to the south. Jax understood why Erkan had selected it as a meeting place.

The purr of an expensive engine drew Jax’s attention to the parking lot. A dark blue Mercedes SLK-Class Roadster pulled up outside the simple guard’s hut. Kemal Erkan got out of the driver’s side and walked through the gate with a nod to the attendant. That the shipbreaker had come alone, without either driver or bodyguard, was significant.

Jax stood at the edge of the ancient stoa and waited for the Turk to walk up to him. Erkan said, “I called Anna Baklanov.”

“And?”

“I got some old woman. She said Anna is dead. Someone broke her neck this morning.”

Jax thought of the little girl proudly presenting that bouquet of roses to Brezhnev, and felt a pain pull across his chest.

The Turk pursed his lips. “The old woman said Jasha is dead, too.”

“You didn’t believe me?”

Erkan raised one eyebrow. “Why should I?”

They turned to walk along the colonnade. After a moment, Erkan said, “Why is the American Government interested in the murder of a simple Russian ship’s captain?”

“We think he was involved with terrorists.”

“Terrorists.” Erkan huffed a soundless laugh. “You Americans. Always going on about terrorists. Which terrorists? The ones your government pays to blow up mosques and pipelines in Iran? Or maybe the ones you’ve been sending against Cuba for the last forty years?”

“Not those. The ones who don’t like us. I’m hoping something you can tell me will help us figure out which ones-and help us find the men who killed your friend.”

Erkan sneered. “You don’t care about Jasha.”

Jax didn’t deny it. “But you do. Our motives might be different, but our objective is the same. We both want the people who killed Jasha Baklanov…and his wife.”

Erkan stared off into the distance, to where the once grand stadium was now no more than a depression in the grass. His thick, dark eyebrows drew together in a frown. He hesitated, then said, “Jasha contacted me two, maybe three weeks ago. He said he had a contract to raise some Nazi sub that sank off the coast of Denmark at the end of the war.”

“Did he say who hired him?”

Erkan jerked his head up and back, his eyebrows lifting in that peculiarly Turkish way of saying no.

Jax said, “There was something on the sub they wanted?”

Erkan gave him a sideways glance. “You know the kinds of things the Nazis were sending out of Germany at the end of the war?”

“You mean gold?”

The Turk laughed. “That was my first assumption as well. But not Jasha’s. He thought the U-boat might have been carrying uranium or something equally as dangerous.”

Jax could feel the heat of the sun baking his shoulders and the top of his head. He said, “Yet he agreed to raise it anyway?”

“They showed him the submarine’s original manifest.”

“Not a copy?”

“No. The original.”

Jax studied the man’s fleshy, sweat-sheened face. “So what was the sub carrying?”

Erkan’s gaze slid away. The agora was virtually deserted, an open space of weed-grown paving stones and row after row of white marble columns. A Scandinavian couple were exploring the water channels and reservoirs of the western stoa. Two boys on the other side of the chain-link fence were playing a jumping game. Jax could hear the lilting sound of their laughter carrying on the breeze as a large man in a light blue windbreaker crossed the courtyard, his hands in his pockets.

“Jasha was a great one for running schemes,” Erkan was saying. “Once he learned what was on the U-boat, Jasha knew he could find a buyer for it.”

“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.

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.