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Trabzon, Turkey
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The ferry pulled into the port of Trabzon, on the northern Turkish coast, about an hour before sunset, and quickly offloaded most of the passengers.
Most, but not all.
The three who remained aboard were not technically passengers at all, but stowaways. They had sneaked aboard the vessel in Sochi, blending in with the catering crew, pushing large carts full of food up the supply gangplank, and had managed to keep out of sight during the four-hour crossing of the Black sea. They lingered in hiding a while longer, waiting until the decks were nearly clear, and then, posing as janitors packing out bags of refuse, made their way down the gangplank and melted into the flow of pedestrian traffic.
Although they were in the country illegally, Turkey was a NATO ally, and as such, Maddock could easily have contacted the embassy in Ankara and obtained official approval for their presence, but doing so would have meant hours, or possibly even days, spent waiting for all the diplomatic hurdles to be cleared. It also would have meant exposing their mission to government officials who did not have a need to know, and who might very well inadvertently compromise them. He didn’t know how far Telesh’s reach extended, and didn’t want to find out the hard way.
They meandered through the city for several blocks, avoiding contact with locals and occasionally doubling back to make sure they weren’t being followed. Eventually, they came to a busy street bazaar, where Maddock risked approaching an English-speaking tourist who informed him that they were near the town square or Meydan. After making small talk for a few minutes, Maddock casually asked for recommendations—food, lodging, a bank. He was only interested in the latter.
After rejoining the others, Maddock found a pay phone and dialed the operator. Thankfully, the person on the other end of the line spoke enough English to make sense of his request, and in a matter of just a few seconds, he heard a ringing sound over the scratchy connection, and then a familiar if guarded voice came on the line.
“This is Maxwell.”
“Collect call from Mr. Hunter,” the operator explained, a little hesitantly. “International long distance. Will you accept the charges?”
Maddock felt a twinge of grief upon hearing the stranger utter the alias he had provided. He’d chosen it because it had been the unit callsign he’d used in Bosnia, and knew that Maxie would immediately recognize it, and the need for discretion, but hearing it aloud made him think of his father.
There was only the briefest hesitation as Commander Hartford Maxwell processed this information. “Of course.”
“Thank you.” There was a faint crackle of static as the operator disconnected from the call, and then the background noise disappeared. Maddock spoke quickly. “Uncle Maxie! You’ll never guess where we are?”
There was a brief pause, which might have been transmission lag, and then Maxie replied. “I guess I won’t.”
“Turkey,” Maddock said. “A city called Trabzon. On the north coast.”
“How’s your vacation going? Your aunt and I were concerned when we didn’t hear from you after your flight.”
Maddock would have liked nothing more than to brief his superior on all that had happened to Leopov and himself, and he was burning with curiosity regarding the outcome of the mission to rescue Lia, but now was not the time for that conversation. “We’re doing great. I’m about to head out to pick up some souvenirs, but I’ll have to exchange some currency first. There’s a bank near the town square. I’ll probably go there.”
“Sounds like a plan. Pick me up something. And call again when you can.”
“Will do.” Maddock hung up without further comment and went back to where Leopov and Petrov were waiting. They continued idling in the bazaar for another fifteen minutes, setting aside a few items to purchase later—fresh clothes, food, and a cellular phone. Only then did Maddock circle back to the bank he had spotted earlier. Although it was past the end of the business day, he wasn’t at all surprised to find a man waiting by the door to meet him.
“You are Mr. Hunter?” the man said in halting English.
“I am. I believe you have something for me from Goliath.”
The man gave a satisfied nod upon hearing the prearranged codeword and admitted Maddock without delay. Five minutes later, he left with a fat roll of Turkish lira in his pocket.
He rejoined the others and, after paying for their various purchases, headed into the Meydan. While Leopov and Petrov voraciously tore into the repast they had purchased—none of them had eaten in well over twenty-four hours—Maddock used his newly acquired cellular phone to call Maxie.
“Took your sweet time,” grumbled the SEAL Team commander.
Maddock did not bother making excuses. “Did Bones and the others get out okay?”
“As far as I know, everything went according to plan. They reached Helsinki without any problems. Unfortunately, there was a change of management at the last minute. I haven’t heard a peep from him, which is strange. You know how he likes to talk.”
Although not encrypted, the wireless telephones were more secure than land lines, but there was always a chance that the call could be intercepted, particularly if Maddock was reading Maxie correctly. Change of management meant someone had co-opted their mission—almost certainly the CIA, but why had Bones gone radio silent?
Still, maybe it was for the best. “If you hear from him, let him know that we hit a few snags on our way out, but managed to slip away without too much trouble.” He paused a beat, then added, “Just like Luke and Leia escaping the Death Star.”
“O-kay,” Maxie replied, slowly, consternation audible in his tone. “I’ll pass that along. So what’s next on your itinerary?”
“We’re going to hop a bus to Ankara. We’ll need new travel docs so we can fly out of here.” He looked over at Petrov who seemed to be closely following the one-sided conversation. “There was one little wrinkle in our getaway. We’ve picked up a... a stray.” He gave a quick if vaguely worded summary of their capture and escape.
“I see,” Maxie said when he was done. “How do you want to handle that?”
Petrov evidently grasped that he had become the subject of the conversation. “I cannot return to Russia. Telesh would kill me.”
“If we can get you to the embassy,” Leopov said, “you can request asylum. But there are no guarantees.”
Petrov frowned. “Asylum? I had not considered anything quite so formal.”
Maddock raised a hand to silence them, then spoke into the phone again. “We’ll keep him with us for now. We’ll need some docs for him as well.”
“That may be a little trickier. The new management might have a thing or two to say about it but I’ll do what I can from this end.”
“Understood. I’ll call again when we get to Ankara.”
As Maddock hung up, Petrov asked. “What about Lia? Is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” Maddock assured him. It was probably the truth.
Petrov wasn’t satisfied. “Where is she? Are we going to join her?”
“Not just yet. There’s something I want to check out first, and I think your expertise may come in handy.”
“My expertise? I am historian.”
“Exactly. The ruins of Troy, where Schliemann found Priam’s Treasure. They’re here, aren’t they? In Turkey?”
“Da. Is on the coast, near the Dardanelles.”
Maddock nodded. “Telesh wants Helen’s Charm. If we’re going to stop him, or get him off your back for good, we need to know what it is. Maybe we can get some answers in the place where it was discovered.”
Troy, Petrov explained, was not, in fact, one city, but nine different settlements, built one atop another over the course of nearly five millennia. It was the second of these—inhabited until about 2250 BCE when it was destroyed by fire—that Heinrich Schliemann identified with the besieged city described in the Iliad, and excavated, uncovering not only a portion of the city’s foundations, but also a collection of royal artifacts—many of them wrought of gold and silver. In the century-plus that followed, as the discipline of archaeology matured and the site was more thoroughly and scientifically explored, Schliemann’s determination was judged to be off by about a thousand years. If there had actually been a Trojan War—and there was no consensus on its historicity—then the city described in the Homerian epic would have been the seventh incarnation of the city, which existed between about 1300-1250 BCE.
Regardless of whether or not the events of the Iliad had any basis in history, the site—officially known as the Hisarlik archaeological complex—and the nearby city of Çanakkale benefited tremendously from the legendary association. The site was more a theme park, replete with an enormous mock-up of the Trojan Horse and battle re-enactments by performers in bronze armor.
“So what are you hoping to find here?” Leopov asked as the battle recreation concluded to a smattering of applause.
Maddock shook his head uncertainly. “I’m not sure. Context, maybe?”
“How is that going?”
He managed a smile. “You know, despite all the touristy stuff, I’m still in awe of what this place represents. Five thousand years of history. Even if the Iliad is fiction, the people who inspired that story lived and fought and died here.” He paused a beat, then added almost wistfully. “I think my dad would have really loved to see this.” He shook his head again and turned to Petrov. “Let’s see if we can find someone to tell us more about the site.”
A helpful tour guide directed them to one of the resident archaeologists who introduced himself as Dr. Aslan.
“You want to know about Schliemann?” Aslan seemed a little irritated by the topic, but managed a diplomatic smile. “A controversial figure. His methods were amateurish at best. He was a treasure hunter, a looter. More interested in proving that he had found the city of Homeric legend than in advancing the cause of real knowledge.” He sighed. “And yet... Without him, would any of this exist? Who can say?”
“Where did he find Priam’s Treasure?” Maddock asked.
Aslan produced a map of the site which delineated each of the levels of the city in different colors, and pointed to a rectangular structure near the center of the illustration. “Here. It was in May of 1873. Schliemann wrote that he had been excavating the wall of what he believed to be the palace of King Priam, when he discovered a large copper artifact—probably a shield or cauldron. Realizing that such a find would have great value, and not trusting his own workmen, he dismissed the laborers for their afternoon meal, and continued the work on his own, removing the items in secret in order to smuggle them out of the country.”
“How did he manage that?”
“He claimed that his wife hid them under her shawl.”
“Must have been a pretty big shawl,” remarked Leopov, dubiously.
Aslan gave her a knowing smile. “The story is almost certainly a fabrication. In fact, Schliemann himself later admitted he had made it up. His wife, Sophie, was not even present for the discovery. At the time, she was in Athens, attending her father’s funeral. It is more likely that he had help from someone else. When Sophie Schliemann was photographed wearing the Jewels of Helen in Athens the following year, Amin Efendi, the official who had been tasked with monitoring Schliemann’s progress, was sent to prison, whether for simple incompetence or for taking a bribe to look the other way, who knows?”
“And the treasure ended up in Berlin?”
“Most of it. Schliemann sold a few items to raise funds, and later returned some of the gold to the Sultan in exchange for permission to return to the country for further archaeological investigations. Those pieces are on display at Topkapi Palace.”
“They let him come back?”
“Perhaps they believed he would eventually return the rest of the treasure. He had always claimed that his reason for removing it was to protect it from being stolen by corrupt government officials.
“You must understand, it was a very uncertain time in my country’s history,” Aslan went on, almost apologetically. “The Ottoman Empire, which had endured for nearly 700 years, was teetering on the edge of economic collapse. Perhaps the concession to Schliemann was an overture to the German government. The Sultan knew he would need to make alliances with European powers in order to hold the Empire together and resist Russian aggression.”
“A mistake as it turns out,” opined Petrov. “The alliance with the Central Powers put them on the wrong side of World War I. Things did not go so well for Ottoman Empire after that.”
“Politics do not interest me,” Aslan retorted with a shrug that did not entirely hide his displeasure. “My area of interest is the ancient world.”
“Getting back to Priam’s Treasure,” Maddock prompted. “You mentioned ‘the Jewels of Helen.’ I assume that Schliemann came up with the name?”
“A conceit on his part. The golden diadem was indeed fit for a queen, but it almost certainly was not worn by Helen of Sparta, if she ever existed at all.”
“Did he ascribe any other pieces to Helen?”
“None that I’m aware of but it would not surprise me. You might enquire at the Topkapi museum. In addition to the authentic artifacts, they have replicas of the entire collection. Of course, you...” He eyed Petrov with thinly disguised disdain, “could always visit the real collection at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.”
“You know, we just might at that,” Maddock said, taking Petrov’s elbow and steering him away before he could say anything else inflammatory.
When they were alone again, Leopov asked, “Well, did that give you the context you were looking for?”
Maddock did not answer the question directly, but instead posed one of his own. “Why do you think Schliemann changed his story?”
“What are you talking about?”
“First he said his wife helped him sneak the treasure out. Then he claimed she wasn’t even there.”
“Why does it matter?” pressed Leopov.
“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t. It just struck me as an odd detail. Why mention it at all?” He looked from Leopov to Petrov.
“Maybe someone caught him in the lie,” replied Leopov. “Maybe the story about his wife was meant to deflect suspicion from his real accomplices. But then someone figured out that she wasn’t there when it happened, so he had to admit the truth.”
Petrov had another idea. “Schliemann was German, but his wife, Sophia, was Greek. The Greeks and Turks have never gotten along. It is an enmity that goes back... well, at least as far back as the Trojan War. Perhaps the idea of a Greek woman helping steal the treasures which rightfully were the property of the Turkish people added insult to injury.”
Maddock pondered the competing explanations for a moment, then directed his attention to Petrov. “Just how many pieces are in the collection?”
“I don’t know an exact number, but several dozen.”
“And some of the pieces are big, right? Aslan mentioned a copper shield? And a cauldron?”
“Yes. There were also many cups and utensils of silver and copper. Some gold as well. Also blades of copper—lance heads, daggers, axes.”
“That’s a lot of metal to dig out of the ground during the workmen’s lunch break. Probably would have taken a few trips to get it all away from the excavation.”
“Which suggests the story about his wife sneaking it out under her shawl is probably the lie,” said Leopov.
“Maybe.”
Leopov did not miss his equivocation. “But you have another idea, don’t you?”
“We’re looking for Helen’s Charm, right? Something that allegedly has the power to...” He shrugged. “Bewitch people, I guess.”
“You think Schliemann used Helen’s Charm to hide what he was doing.” Leopov’s tone was not so much incredulous as accusatory. “You think it is real.”
“I’m just floating the idea. Let’s say the charm was something like a ring or necklace, something that he might have pocketed and given to his wife as a gift. And then later...” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess it does sound crazy.”
“Sergei Yukovitch does not think so,” Petrov said. “He thinks Helen used the Charm to make Paris fall in love with her, and to make Priam endure a decade of war to protect her. And he believes Hitler used it to deceive an entire nation into following his mad schemes. Using it to smuggle treasure seems like a very little thing by comparison.”
“Schliemann probably thought he was being clever by claiming his wife helped him, but it backfired on him,” added Leopov. “But that still doesn’t tell us what it is.”
Petrov cocked his head to the side thoughtfully. “Helen’s Charm went to Berlin with the rest of the collection, and that’s where Hitler got his hands on it. But it was not with the rest of the treasure that Red Army took to Moscow. If we could find a record of the treasure when it was acquired by museum in Germany, and then compare with what is in Pushkin Museum, we might be able to figure out what we are looking for.” Then, as if in afterthought, he added, “You should put Lia on the job. She’s very good at this sort of thing.”
“I’m not sure she’s available at the moment,” Maddock replied, “But you’re right. We need to go to Berlin.”