The Poison Secret Read online

  PRAISE FOR GREGG LOOMIS

  “Loomis blends ancient historical legend with contemporary medicine in his lively seventh thriller featuring ex-FBI agent and practicing attorney Lang Reilly (after 2014’s The Cathar Secret) . . . Loomis smoothly spins a tale of greed and shady political maneuvering while commenting without sermonizing on humankind’s capacity for compassion and cruelty.”

  —Publishers Weekly, for THE POISON SECRET

  “The international setting and fast-paced action grip, and fortunately, Loomis’s convincing protagonist possesses the intelligence and emotional depth to carry the reader . . . [Readers] looking to repeat The Da Vinci Code experience will be satisfied.”

  —Publishers Weekly, for THE PEGASUS SECRET

  “More intrigue and suspense than in The Da Vinci Code!”

  —Robert J. Randisi, author of Blood of Angels, for THE PEGASUS SECRET

  “An intelligent, fast-paced, riveting thriller with an explosive ending. A great debut novel.”

  —Fresh Fiction, for THE PEGASUS SECRET

  “Dan Brown’s fans will find THE JULIAN SECRET a delight.”

  —I LOVE A MYSTERY, for THE JULIAN SECRET

  “Another thrilling, action-packed adventure for Lang Reilly!”

  —Fresh Fiction, for THE SINAI SECRET

  “Thriller fans will appreciate Gregg Loomis as it is no secret that he provides breathtaking novels.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  THE POISON SECRET

  OTHER LANG REILLY THRILLERS BY GREGG LOOMIS

  The Pegasus Secret

  The Julian Secret

  The Sinai Secret

  The Coptic Secret

  The Bonaparte Secret

  The Cathar Secret

  THE POISON SECRET

  A LANG REILLY THRILLER

  GREGG LOOMIS

  TURNER

  Turner Publishing Company

  424 Church Street • Suite 2240

  Nashville, Tennessee 37219

  445 Park Avenue • 9th Floor

  New York, New York 10022

  www.turnerpublishing.com

  THE POISON SECRET

  Copyright © 2015 Gregg Loomis

  All rights reserved. This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design: Nellys Liang

  Book design: Kym Whitley

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014958498

  ISBN 978-1-63026-006-4 (paperback)

  Printed in the United States of America

  14 15 16 17 18 19 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is for Suzann

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  THE POISON SECRET

  PROLOGUE

  King of Pontus, Foe of Rome,

  Story of a Hellenistic Empire

  by Abiron Theradoplis, PhD

  National Museum of Archeology, Athens

  Translation by Chara Georopoulos

  University of Iowa Press

  (Excerpt)

  Pergamaman, Anatolla

  (Modern-day Western Turkey)

  Roman Province of Asia

  Spring, 88 B.C.

  The screams of the terrified, mixed with the moans of the dying and wounded, could easily be heard from the palace of the recently deceased Roman legate. To the ears of King Mithradates, the song of the lute or lyre could not have been sweeter. All over Anatolla, here in Pergamaman, in the ship-building port of Adramyttion, the commercial center of Ephesus, the hill-surrounded town of Tralles and its neighbor, Nysa, the slaughter of every Roman and Italian man, woman, and child was progressing as planned. Slaves who spoke a language beside Latin were to be spared as were those who revealed any Roman in hiding. Persons giving shelter would be dealt with harshly as would those removing the bodies from where they lay as a feast for the dogs and vultures. The massacre had been carefully and secretly planned for months to ensure it took place simultaneously and without warning.

  When the slaughter began at daylight here in Pergamaman, many terrified families of Roman merchants, tax collectors, slave dealers, and money lenders had fled out of the gates to the Temple of Asclepius. By ancient Greek custom, all temples were holy, protected against violence by the gods. Under the right of asylia, asylum, anyone, foreigner, citizen, slave, innocent or guilty, could find refuge inside. Pursuers usually dared not commit the sacrilege of violence before the gods. But today there was no mercy shown those huddled around the god of healing. The native-born citizens of the city burst into the sanctuary and shot their foreign neighbors: men, women, children, down with arrows. Those who had not died in the initial assault were hacked to death with swords and daggers.

  The Romans may have chosen this city as the capital for their newest province, but most of that province was allied with Mithradates, VI Eupator Dionysus, King of Pontus, victor over the Roman puppet Nicomedes VI and liberator of Anatolia, and ruler in fact of Colchis, western Armenia, Cappadocia, and Galacia. When the day was done, a figure estimated by the historian Appian of Alexandria at 80,000 would be dead, including the Roman Ambassador Marius Aquillius, whose palace the king now enjoyed. The ambassador had died a spectacular if hideous death a few days earlier, suffocated on the molten gold poured down his throat as a symbol of Roman greed.

  When the news reached Rome, Cicero, the great orator and statesman, was to observe, “The Roman name is held in loathing and Roman tributes, tithes, and taxes are instruments of death.”

  At the moment on this sunny spring morning, Mithradates cared little about these facts, only that his plan to free Anatolian soil of the hated Romans and their Italian lackeys seemed to be going well. Violence was common in the ancient world, particularly in the king’s experience. As a youth, he reme
mbered too well his father (also Mithradates) lying on the banquet room floor, his silver cup still in his hand. It had been a celebration of the king’s birthday at the royal palace in Sinope, capital of Pontus. A whole ox, camel, or donkey (the ensuing chaos had blurred Mithradates’s recollection) roasted inside a huge brick oven, Black Sea tuna, eel, and each course served with sweets and a great deal of wine. Magicians from Parthia, snake charmers from India, musicians and poets from Greece, it had all ended suddenly and badly.

  The verdict? Poison. Suspects? Laodice, a queen ambitious for her favorite son, a hundred disgruntled subjects, a general conveniently out of the country.

  One thing was certain to the young prince: he could well be next. He disappeared. For the next seven years he and his band of companions never once slept under a roof and survived by hunting and fishing.

  Yes, violence was on the king’s mind as the last shrieks of his Roman victims died on the still air of that spring morning.

  CHAPTER 1

  Uzum Sokak

  Trabzon, Turkey

  13:40 Local time

  May 2013

  This could well be the most important day of Fatima Aksoy’s professional life, and she was in a hurry.

  She was a graduate of Emory University School of Medicine, and had done her residency at the prestigious Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. For the last four years, she had been director of the Janet & Jeff Holt Foundation’s pediatric hospital here in Trabzon, the only institution specializing in children’s health care on Turkey’s Black Sea coast.

  None of that did her any good at the moment. She and her silver 150cc Dorado Arcon scooter were just as trapped in the traffic of the city’s busiest street as the other scooters, motorcycles, and cars. The big black Mercedes in front of her was honking its horn as if it expected the jam to part like the Red Sea at Moses’ command.

  With nothing else to do but mentally curse the delay, Fatima watched two women on foot pass on the sidewalk. Black hijabs covered their hair. Even here in the world’s only true Moslem democracy’s more rural areas, Islamic dress for women was losing popularity. Like most professional women, Fatima wore a pantsuit to work. At night, particularly if she and Aydin, her husband, were going to some especially expensive restaurant, the ones frequented more by Greek businessmen than natives, she would wear a dress, even a low-cut one that bared her arms. She had two dresses, both of which she had purchased before leaving California.

  Trabzon reminded her of California the way the Pontic Alps fell into the sea. But the mountains here were a lush green, not the dry hills that faced the pacific. She . . .

  She forgot the Golden State for the moment as traffic began to inch forward. She shot a glance down a cross street to Meyclan, the center town square, where an open-air market was drawing its usual crowd of bargain-shopping housewives, elderly men bored with the teahouses or otherwise idle, and small children holding onto their mothers’ hands or clothes. Then it was past, and she picked up speed. Whatever had caused the delay had inexplicably disappeared.

  Within minutes, she was passing through Limoinsuya Yaylasi, a section on the edge of the city with large open spaces between buildings and as many grazing horses as automobiles. She passed the modern five-story Trabzon Kardelen Hotel, a hideous stack of square concrete. As always, she wondered who would choose to stay in a place so ugly and distant from anything else.

  Well, almost anything else. The pediatric hospital was only two kilometers down the road. She supposed someone with a child admitted there might stay at the hotel, though the parents of most of her small patients could ill afford to pay for lodging, here or in the less expensive places in town.

  Which brought her back to Baris and the reason she was in such a hurry.

  Four-year-old Baris had been playing near his village among the ruins of one of the ancient temples that dotted the mountainsides in this part of Turkey. Fatima couldn’t remember if it was Greek or Persian, although it hardly mattered. Whatever nation or god or combination thereof, the present residents included what she guessed from the child’s description to be a horned viper. Although snakes were much more rare here on the Black Sea coast than, say, along the Iranian border, there was no denying the twin punctures on the back of the child’s hand and venom in his bloodstream.

  Those were the only things certain. The little boy’s parents, ignorant mountain peasants, had noted none of the acute distress, blood, nausea, vomiting, and swelling associated with serpent bites. So, they had ignored the matter for nearly a week, alarmed only when the bite marks refused to heal.

  But then what would you expect of a people who believed a pregnant woman’s diet determined the sex of the baby? Sweet food produced a boy, spicy meant a girl. Expectant women were not supposed to look at animals such as camels or monkeys but should spend time contemplating the moon. Or that Nazar Beads deflected the evil eye and eating a specially baked bun would make a young girl dream of her future husband.

  The venom of the horned viper, Fatima had learned, flowed through the lymphatic system, destroying the blood’s ability to coagulate. The snake’s smaller prey, mostly mice and rats, literally bled to death internally within minutes. Its larger victims, human or livestock, usually survived even untreated bites, although frequently with the loss of fingers or toes to necrosis from the venom. Fatima could only speculate at the devastation that an untreated bite might wreak on a child as small as Baris who was already little for his age.

  Fortunately, she thought, she apparently would never know. Other than the puncture wounds, he showed no ill effects whatsoever.

  A miracle?

  Perhaps, although as a scientist she tended to discount miracles, leaving them to the Christian tourists who flocked to Turkey’s early Biblical sites in ancient Galatia and Cappadocia.

  Miracle or not, the explanation defied medical science. At least as Fatima knew it.

  Within minutes of Baris’s arrival at the hospital early this morning, she had drawn blood, sending it to Emre down in the lab in the building’s basement. Because the little boy seemed otherwise asymptomatic, there had seemed to be no rush. Making sure he was resting comfortably and assuring his very nervous parents as best she could, she had made her daily rounds and then left to meet Avdin for lunch at a favorite fish restaurant, one with a hillside view of the Black Sea. She had hardly finished her pilaki, fish sautéed in olive oil with garlic, onions, carrots, and potatoes, when her cell phone rang.

  It was Emre and he was clearly agitated.

  “Fatima? Come right away!”

  “But, what . . .?’

  “It’s that little boy who came in this morning . . .”

  The thought of delayed reaction to the snakebite nearly made her choke. Unlikely, but how likely was it that the venom had had no ascertainable effect in the first place? “Baris? What about him? Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine.”

  Fatima felt her cheeks flush with anger. “You called me in a panic to tell me he’s fine?”

  “I’m not panicked,” Emre said defensively. “It’s the blood work. You’ll have to see it for yourself to believe it.”

  And so she would very shortly, Fatima thought as she eased the Dorado Arcon into a space in the physicians and staff otopark, turned the key in the ignition, and, purse slung over her shoulder, hurried inside. Her first stop was the room Baris shared with another boy.

  It had been a real battle to get Baris’s parents to agree to leave their seemingly healthy child in the hospital overnight for observation. Only the promise that there would be no charge made them relent. Fatima wasn’t sure how she would fulfill this promise. SSK, Turkey’s largest government health plan, excluded agricultural workers, which these people were. Bag-Kur, the catch-all program, was notoriously difficult to navigate.

  She shoved the question of the hospital bill to the back of her mind in much the same way she would have replaced a pair of shoes in her closet after deciding not to wear them today. Even before she
reached the open door, she heard the television, the unmistakable sounds of the eternal conflict between Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. Happily, the “beep-beep” needed no more translation from English than the sound effects of Coyote’s latest disaster. Once at the door, she saw both boys engrossed in the American cartoon, one she had enjoyed herself on the rare occasions she had time for diversion from her studies.

  Seeing no need to make her presence known, she turned and headed for the stairs. She reached the bottom, her nose twitching with the mixture of chemical smells. She pushed open a door and walked down a white corridor until she reached the lab.

  In his usual rumpled lab coat, Doktor Emre Yalmaz was peering at a centrifuge through dandruff-speckled glasses with the intensity of a gambler at the roulette table. At his elbow, a cigarette smoldered among a cemetery of its brothers. Fatima had given up on pointing out the bad example his habit might be for the hospital’s young patients.

  He must have heard her over the whine of the machine, for he turned and favored her with that shy smile she found so endearing. One of the youngest to graduate from Pamukkale University medical school in Denizli, he had chosen to specialize in hematology, Fatima suspected, because it involved minimal contact with patients. His shyness and the adoration he held for her were common subjects of jokes around the hospital. She routinely denied the latter while secretly flattered by it, even if she recognized puppy-like devotion for a woman ten years Emre’s senior.

  The centrifuge murmured, sputtered, and went silent.

  “You said I should come right away.”

  The young doctor blushed as he almost always did when she spoke to him. He reached behind him and removed several pieces of paper from a lab table. “Read this, Fatima.”

  She started to reach for the glasses that hung just inside her blouse. With increasing frequency they were becoming necessary to review documents. This time vanity stayed her hand.

  She took the sheaf of papers and held them up to the maximum light the room provided.

  Emre produced a magnifying glass. “Perhaps this would help?”

  She lowered the papers and glared at him. “What makes you think I need that?”