Blue Voyage
ALSO BY DIANA RENN
Tokyo Heist
Latitude Zero
VIKING
An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Diana Renn
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Renn, Diana.
Blue voyage / by Diana Renn.
pages cm
Summary: “Adrenaline junkie Zan finds herself in the crosshairs of an antiquities smuggling ring while on vacation with her mother. She must help them find the ancient treasure they seek in order to keep her family safe!” —Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-101-62979-6
[1. Smuggling—Fiction. 2. Turkey—Antiquities—Fiction. 3. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.R2895Bl 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2015013011
Version_1
For all my parents:
Jan and Max Stiefel,
John and Sally Renn
Contents
Also by Diana Renn
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE: The Turkish Riviera
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
PART TWO: Istanbul
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
PART THREE: Cappadocia
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
1
Looking up from the Lonely Planet guide at the rocky hills all around us, I spoke for the first time in seventeen hours. “You know that sign we saw back at the roadblock?”
“What about it?” Mom asked.
“I’m pretty sure it said ‘detour.’” When I pointed to the word in the “Useful Phrases” section of my guidebook, she tore her eyes off the desolate road to look. “We should have seen more of those signs if we were on the right track.”
Mom gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Well. That’s good to know, Zan.”
I snapped the book shut and pressed my lips together.
“Does this mean you’re officially breaking your vow of silence?” Mom asked.
I sunk low into the passenger seat, my arms folded across my chest. Until this moment, Mom and I hadn’t exchanged words for the entire flight from Boston, Massachusetts, to the coastal town of Bodrum, Turkey, including airport transfers in Munich and Istanbul. But now it was hard to sit back and say nothing. After veering off the main road to Marmaris, Mom had been looping through the landscape on bumpy roads for almost two hours. There was no sign of the harbor town where we were supposed to meet Aunt Jackie for our Blue Voyage cruise. Our map from the car rental agency had flown out the window miles ago. Asking directions at a village restaurant had resulted in only more confusion, with men pointing us in three different directions.
The little Fiat shuddered as Mom shifted gears. “We’ll get there,” she said. “Remember our family motto? ‘Things could always be worse.’”
Now that I’d started talking again, I couldn’t hold back. “I thought it was ‘Things are even worse than they seem.’” Though maybe Mom’s backwardly optimistic motto made sense. After all, things could be a lot worse for me. Instead of being in forced exile in the Turkish Riviera at the moment, I could be doing court-ordered community service. I could be in juvie.
A police car zoomed up behind us, lights flashing. Instinctively, I tensed and ducked farther down in my seat. Which was ridiculous, since we’d been in Turkey for only a few hours and I hadn’t broken any laws.
“That’s the third police car we’ve seen!” Mom exclaimed as it passed.
“A good sign, right?” I said. “There must be some kind of civilization ahead. I mean, they have to be going somewhere.”
“Maybe.” Mom sounded doubtful. Then she sighed and chewed her lip. “God, what was I thinking, renting a car in Turkey?”
“Adventure,” I reminded her. “Life experience. Fresh perspective.”
“Right.” Mom tucked a lock of her bobbed hair behind one ear. “Still, if we’d gone with that nice man at the airport transfer service, I wouldn’t have gotten mixed up at the roadblock.”
“What happened to doing stuff without men?” I asked. “Sisters are doing it for themselves. Standing on their own two feet. Remember?” I hummed a few bars of the song Mom had blasted over and over after Dad had moved out of the house last month.
She smiled and hummed along with me. So I stopped humming, since I’d only meant to remind her of her mission—I wasn’t staging some mother-daughter bonding moment. Sure, we used to sing together, and laugh together. But now we were miles away from all that.
Mom stopped mid-hum. “Zan! Hold on!” she cried out, throwing her right arm in front of me. She hit the brakes. Hard.
I grabbed the handle above the window and squeezed my eyes shut. I heard weirdly inhuman wails outside the car, sounds in no language I knew.
Mom took her safety-latch arm off me, and I slowly opened my eyes. A group of goats clopped by, baring their teeth and bleating at us as they crossed the road. Then they trotted up a hill bristling with pine trees.
Mom sighed, and I released my death grip on the door handle. Then, seeing a blue stripe in the distance, I sat up straight. “Hey. Isn’t that water? Could that be Marmaris down there?”
“I think so,” said Mom. When we saw a sign for Marmaris a moment later, she sped up as fast as the Fiat would let her. The road wound downhill, spiraling toward the harbor like a nautilus seashell.
I kept my eyes trained on that blue stripe of water, afraid that if I looked away we’d veer off course again. Whenever I’d thought of Turkey in the past, my images were based on things I’d heard from my expat aunt Jackie and her Turkish husband, Berk. The storybooks and presents they’d given me over the year
s had led me to imagine a land of soaring minarets and domed mosques, belly dancers and samovars, djinns and flying carpets. But on the road for the past couple of hours, my senses had felt dulled by the crumbling landscape—the dirt, the dust, the rocks, broken up only occasionally by an olive grove, a forest, or a village. Sometimes women working in fields—they were always women, for some reason—stared at our passing car.
Now, finally, we were heading toward color, toward something interesting. The blue stripe grew in size and intensity as we neared. It practically vibrated.
I switched on the car radio. After flipping through scratchy stations, I found some electronica that sounded vaguely Turkish: stringed instruments I didn’t recognize wailing against a pulsing dance beat. It was kind of cool. I cranked it up.
Mom switched off the radio.
I glared at her. “What? It’s not enough you took my phone, now I can’t even listen to music?”
“I need to focus. This is extremely stressful driving.” The road had widened, and traffic suddenly picked up, merging from unseen roads. Cars and huge trucks sped by, passing us on both sides, horns blaring. Mom sat rigid, eyes unblinking.
We rounded the next bend in the road, the white, crumbling hills and scrubby trees offering up a fresh view. I sucked in my breath sharply at the sight of masts of countless boats swaying in a crescent-shaped harbor. The sun danced across the turquoise water, making it shimmer. As we descended to the Port of Marmaris, I couldn’t stop staring at the glittering harbor, at the Mediterranean Sea, at that rich, impossible blue.
Up close, the harbor reminded me of a carousel. Only instead of horses it was filled with wooden yachts—called gulets, according to Lonely Planet—bobbing merrily up and down in their moorings. Most of them had blue, green, or red stripes painted across their gleaming wood hulls. The sails were rolled up and covered. Turkish flags flapped from the masts: red with a white crescent moon and a star.
With a pang, I realized my dad would have loved this view too. When I was little, my family had a small sailboat—The Whisper—that we kept moored in Hingham. Dad had sold it eventually, admitting that he wasn’t a very good sailor. Mom was never that into the boat and all the labor it involved. They used to argue about it: You just want the boat for show. You don’t want to do the actual work that having a boat requires, Mom had seethed at him once, on the dock, as she blasted a sail with a pressure-washer. Still, I had a few happy memories of helping Dad steer around Hingham harbor, and going to the Boston boat show with him. His eyes would always light up as he imagined taking the helm of a new boat.
But all that was ancient history now. I dropped those happy memories into a little stone well deep inside me and sealed them up tight.
After we returned the rental car, Mom and I ran along the harbor, up and down one long dock after another, looking for our boat. Our suitcase wheels thumped on the boards and scraped across the asphalt. Our bags bashed into each other like misbehaving dogs.
There was so much to see, I kept getting distracted. The late-afternoon sun was beginning to lower, casting our surroundings in gold. The narrow boardwalk was clogged with people: tourists, boat crews, and salespeople from travel agencies waving tickets and flyers. Men outside the restaurants and cafés across the street waved menus and called out to us. Girls and women strolled past, arm in arm, some of them dressed in head scarves and chic yet conservative outfits—blazers and long, tailored skirts. A group of British girls looked like an exotic school of fish in comparison, wearing bright tank tops and tight skirts, revealing so much skin. They brushed past me as if I were not there as they hurried across the street to a souvenir shop.
I instinctively reached into my pants pocket, thinking I’d snap a picture and share it with my friends. Then I remembered my phone wouldn’t work in Turkey. And then I remembered I had no phone. That buzzing I felt on my leg was like the presence of a phantom limb, the phone not in my pocket. I’d lost phone privileges in May, after what was now known in my family as the “Athleta incident.” And then I remembered that none of that even mattered anymore because I’d also lost my friends. Even if I could take pictures of my every move, who the hell would care?
So instead I just took mental snapshots of this mix of people. Which eventually wasn’t such a mix of people. Mostly what we saw as we continued along were men, seemingly appearing out of nowhere. Men leaped into our path and followed us at every turn.
“Ladies! Ladies! Let me show you my boat!”
“My cousin, he own carpet shop, not far. You have time to look for carpets, yes?”
“I have boat. I can get you good deal.”
“I have leather shop, not far. I have jackets, they look beautiful on you.”
It was kind of fun at first, getting all that attention. Usually Mom was the one who turned heads, not me. Her Pilates regimen kept her fit; with her monthly facials, crisp preppy outfits, and expensive highlights, she was prettier and younger-looking than most of my former friends’ moms. Then again, those moms didn’t have to look pretty for the cover of Boston magazine or TV interviews.
But now I was getting just as much attention, even though I wasn’t dressed to look twice at. I was wearing my usual long-sleeved running shirt and loose-fitting cargos. Most likely these men were staring at my mom because she was pretty, and at me because I was a freak. It was entirely possible I’d sweated off my foundation in that hot car ride.
At a kiosk where we paused to buy water and ask for help finding our boat, I glanced at my reflection. My long brown bangs were pulled forward so they covered most of my face in case of Catastrophic Makeup Failure, and the brim of my pink Red Sox cap was pulled down low over my eyes. I pulled my hair back and performed a quick inspection. I always wore heavy foundation on my left cheek, under my nose, and on my forehead, to cover up lost pigment caused by my viti-ligo. Without the makeup, the patches were really noticeable. Fortunately the makeup seemed intact; no white splotches showed through.
“Zan, let’s go!” Mom called, an edge to her voice, and I hurried to catch up.
The directions the kiosk salesclerk had given us to our boat didn’t make sense, nor did directions three other people gave us, pointing us in different directions. Once again, we were lost. As the shadows lengthened across the docks, some turned into more men, with more offers: boat rides, fresh fish, plastic-wrapped socks. The attention wasn’t fun anymore. It was exhausting.
“Ignore the hustlers,” Mom muttered when I opened my mouth to hurl back a retort at a guy who kept waving nightclub flyers in my face. “Avoid eye contact.”
“At least there are police here,” I said, noticing a couple of parked white cars with the now-familiar POLIS sign on them. “Maybe they can give us reliable directions.” Normally I steered clear of police. I always felt as if they could see right through me, even when I hadn’t done anything wrong. But right now I’d have taken help from anyone just to stop running around in the heat and the crowds.
“I don’t know,” said Mom, frowning. “They look a little preoccupied.”
I followed her gaze. Two officers wearing pale blue shirts and navy blue pants and caps walked briskly up and down the docks, speaking into walkie-talkies. Four others talked in a huddle, with serious faces. Mom tried approaching them anyway, holding out our boat reservation ticket, but they just looked annoyed and waved her aside.
Finally we found a female tour operator. She looked at our tickets and said we’d been misreading the dock number. She sent us to the correct dock, and we spotted our boat at last, our home for the next three nights: a gleaming brown yacht with the words “Gulet Yasemin” in white letters on the side. The boat had two masts, with the sails rolled up and covered in blue canvas. A blue awning stretched across the stern, providing shade on the deck. Another wide deck up at the bow offered more space, plastic chairs, and no shelter from the sun. That’s the part of the yacht I’d be avoiding.
&nb
sp; Then I spotted Aunt Jackie pacing on the dock beside it, her gauzy white tunic and blue palazzo pants fluttering in the breeze. I pointed her out to Mom, and we both broke into a run. My throat felt tight. I’d never been so glad to see her. How weird it was to think we had actual family here, in such a foreign place.
2
“Jackie! We made it! We’re here!” Mom called out, waving frantically.
Aunt Jackie turned toward us, beaming. She set down a large canvas tote bag she was carrying and hugged me first. I could feel her bones through her clothes. “Zanny! Or should I call you Alexandra now?” She pulled back and looked at me. “You’re all grown-up since the last time I saw you.”
“You can call me Zan,” I said. “I usually go by that.” I studied her face, noting the fine lines etched around her eyes and the dark shadows beneath them. She was sporting a new haircut, her once-long blonde hair now cut short and spiky. But instead of looking cheerful and hip, it looked limp. Actually, all of Aunt Jackie looked wilted.
Aunt Jackie and Mom hugged gingerly and briefly, more like strangers than sisters.
“So what’s with all the men here?” Mom asked. “It’s been such a trial, just getting around. Do I have a sign on my back that says ‘I’m a tourist, rip me off’?”
“Oh, not all the men here are like that,” said Aunt Jackie. “You know that Berk wasn’t. It’s just Marmaris. It’s a scene here, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m so glad you got here in time. I was getting worried. I kept calling your cell, but you didn’t pick up!”
“I thought I’d set it up for roaming charges, but it didn’t work. My phone’s dead,” said Mom.
“Well, I was desperate to reach you. I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to get through. The police around here are setting up roadblocks.”
Mom raised her eyebrows. “There’s more than one roadblock?”
“Lots. Police are working with Interpol to close in on a criminal network. There’s been a rash of robberies all along the coast.”
“So that’s why we keep seeing police!” I exclaimed.