I Am Pilgrim (44 page)

‘An empty library?’ Whisperer said.

‘That’s right,’ I replied. ‘The sort of world we’d live in if the fanatics had won.’

‘A good memorial,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘Better than some damn statue.’

I looked through the windshield. The tailback was starting to unknot.

‘After a couple of visits to the plaza,’ I continued, ‘I realized the empty library wasn’t the only interesting thing. An old city cleaner with watery eyes, a guy who was there every Sunday sweeping

up, was a fake.’

‘How’d you know?’ he asked, professional curiosity piqued.

‘His legend wasn’t quite right. He was too thorough in his work, the grey overalls were tailored a

bit too well.

‘Anyway, one day I asked him why he swept the square. He said he was seventy years old, it was

hard to find a job, a man had to earn an honest living – and then he saw the look on my face and didn’t bother lying any more.

‘He sat down, rolled up his sleeve and showed me seven faded numbers tattooed on his wrist. He

was Jewish, and he pointed at groups of old men of his generation, dressed in their Sunday suits, taking the sun on nearby seats.

‘He told me they were Germans – but like a lot of Germans they hadn’t changed, they’d just lost. In

their hearts, he said, they still sang the old songs.

‘He told me he swept the square so that they would see him and know: a Jew had survived, the race lived on, their people had endured. The square was his revenge.

‘As a child it had been his playground – he said he was there the night the Nazis came. I didn’t believe him – what would a seven-year-old Jewish kid be doing in that place?

‘Then he pointed at the old university and said his father was the librarian and the family had lived in an apartment behind his office.

‘A few years after the bonfire the mob came for him and his family. Like he said, it’s always the

same – they start out burning books and end up burning people. Out of his parents and five kids, he

was the only survivor.

‘He passed through three camps in five years, all of them death camps, including Auschwitz.

Because it was such a miracle he had survived, I asked him what he had learned.

‘He laughed and said nothing you’d call original. Death’s terrible, suffering’s worse; as usual the

assholes made up the majority – on both sides of the wire.

‘Then he thought for a moment. There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he’d

learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you –
just listen to them
.’

Whisperer turned and looked at me. ‘So that’s what you meant, huh? You’ve been listening to the

Muslim fundamentalists?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’ve heard bombs going off in our embassies, mobs screaming for blood, mullahs

issuing death decrees, so-called leaders yelling for jihad. They’ve been burning books, Dave – the temperature of hate in parts of the Islamic world has gone out to Pluto. And I’ve been listening to them.’

‘And you don’t think we have – the people in Washington?’ He said it without anger. I was at one

time a leading intelligence agent, and I think he genuinely wanted to know.

‘Maybe in your heads. Not in your gut.’

He turned and looked out of the window. It was starting to rain. He was quiet for a long time and I

began to wonder if his blood pressure had taken off again.

‘I think you’re right,’ he said at last. ‘I think, like the Jews, we believed in the fundamental goodness of men, we never thought it could really happen. But damn, they’ve got our attention now.’

We drove through a set of electric gates and stopped at a small guard booth. We hadn’t gone to Whisperer ’s office at all, we were at his house.

Chapter Six

THE CURTAINS WERE drawn in whisperer ’s study but after several hours, through a narrow gap, I saw the rain clear and a blood-red moon rise. It was a bad omen, I thought.

Normally, I was too much of a rationalist to give any weight to such things, but the vision of the old yacht on a foam-flecked sea had shaken me badly. It was as if a corner of the universe had been lifted and I saw the road ahead. Not a road exactly, I corrected myself – a dead end.

Thankfully, there was too much work to let me dwell on it. We had come to Whisperer ’s house because he knew that in any covert operation your own side was always the greatest danger. More agents were lost to gossip, speculation and inadvertent comments than to any other cause, so Whisperer made an end-run of his own – we never went near the office and its inevitable talk.

He had inherited the home from his father, a merchant banker turned senator, and it was a beautiful, sprawling place that had found its way on to the National Historic Register. As a result, we set up headquarters in the study of a house which had once been owned by a relative of Martha Washington’s.

Thanks to Whisperer ’s position in the government, its communications were almost as safe as the

White House: constantly monitored for bugs and other electronic intrusions and equipped with an Internet connection that was part of the government’s Highly Secure Network.

As soon as we entered the study Whisperer threw off his jacket, loaded up the coffee machine and

started a series of deep-breathing exercises. He said they were to help control his blood pressure, but I didn’t believe him: the old campaigner was shrugging off the rust of the past and getting ready to flex muscles which hadn’t been used in years. David James McKinley – failed husband, absentee father, Director of United States Intelligence, a man saddened not to have found a place in the pantheon –

might as well have been back in Berlin. He had gone operational.

He immediately called in secretaries, special assistants, executive aides and two phone operators –

a dozen people – and set them up in various parts of the house. He made it clear his study was off limits to everyone, and the beauty of it was that nobody even knew I was in the building.

With a back office in place, Whisperer and I set about trying to master a million details, the sort of things that might mean life or death when you were hunting terrorists in southern Turkey, a country

on the frontier of the badlands, less than a day’s drive from Iraq and Syria. Although we didn’t discuss it, we both knew what we were really doing: we were sending a spy out into the cold.

Every few minutes Whisperer headed out to the back office to pick up files and assign tasks.

Naturally, the staff were aware they were involved in something big, so their boss started to drop clever hints. The result was that when the news broke about the nuclear trigger the people closest to the investigation immediately assumed they were part of the search for the terrorist who was trying to buy it. Dave McKinley trusted nobody, and it was little wonder people said he was the best case officer of his generation.

In the wood-panelled study, I had already decided that the public phone boxes in the centre of Bodrum were the best place to start. Given what we had, they were about the only place to start. Of

course, Turkish Telco had no reliable map of them, so Whisperer and I decided I would have to cover

the five square miles on foot.

He called the head of the NSA and requested that a satellite photo of the town centre be emailed to

the house immediately. While we waited for it to arrive he went to the dining room, where the

executive assistants were headquartered. He asked one of them to call the CIA and tell them they had six hours to deliver a smartphone fitted with a specially enhanced digital camera. The camera, in turn, had to be married to the phone’s internal GPS system.

The idea was that I would take high-quality photographs of every phone box in Bodrum on my cellphone, posing as a visitor snapping street scenes in the Old Town. The photos would then be automatically downloaded on to the map, and I would have a complete record of the look and exact

position of every phone box in the target area.

Somewhere on that list would be the one we were looking for. We knew that a woman had entered it

on specific dates and, in the early evening on both occasions, had spoken to the man we had to catch.

There was traffic noise in the background so that ruled out any in pedestrianized areas. There was also music. What that was we had no idea – we were waiting for the NSA to try to isolate, enhance and identify it.

As an investigative plan, focusing on phone boxes wasn’t much, not much at all – if it was a patient, you would have to say it was on life support – but in one way it was enough. My journey had started.

With the first step of the investigation prepped, Whisperer and I began work on my legend. We had

come to the conclusion that, with precious little time to organize it, I would go into Turkey as an FBI special agent working on the murder at the Eastside Inn.

There were major problems with it – why was the FBI investigating a New York homicide, and why

had they taken so long to get involved? Nor could I go into Turkey uninvited – we would need permission from their government – and we were worried that even on a good day the link between

the murder and Bodrum, a few digits of a phone number, would look pretty tenuous.

Then we had a piece of luck – or at least that’s what it looked like. We should have known better, of course.

Chapter Seven

IN THE MIDST of trying to juice my shaky legend, whisperer got a phone call from the family room.

That was where his two special assistants – each with a security clearance high enough to have access to most government documents – were stationed.

Whisperer went out to see them and returned a few minutes later with a file that had just arrived from the State Department. It contained a ten-paragraph account – brief, sketchy, frustrating – of the death of an American citizen several days previously in Bodrum.

A young guy had died and, I have to admit, as grim as it was, it sounded like good news to us –

such a death might warrant the FBI’s legitimate interest.

Whisperer handed me the file and, while the victim’s full name was at the top, I didn’t take it in. It was one of the later paragraphs that caught my attention: it said he was known to his friends and acquaintances as Dodge.

‘Dodge? Why Dodge?’ I asked Whisperer.

‘Like the car,’ he replied. ‘The guy was twenty-eight years old and the heir to an automobile fortune – he was a billionaire. I guess his buddies could either call him Dodge or Lucky.’

‘Not that lucky,’ I said as I read on. According to the account, he and his wife were staying at one of Bodrum’s clifftop mansions – known as the French House – when he either slipped, jumped or was

pushed on to the rocks a hundred feet below. It took boats and divers over two hours to retrieve the body from the pounding sea.

‘I don’t think it’s going to be an open-casket funeral,’ Whisperer said when I had finished looking

at the attached photos and laid the file down.

There was no evidence, and maybe I was prone to looking for connections where none existed – I

admit I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person – but I couldn’t help wondering

about a link between a scrap of paper found in a drain at the Eastside Inn and the mangled body of a billionaire.

‘What’s your bet?’ I said as I turned. ‘Just chance, or are Dodge and the woman’s murder in Manhattan connected?’

Whisperer had read the files on the woman’s case when we were working on my legend and he was

as qualified as anyone to make a judgement.

‘Almost certainly – but I don’t care,’ he replied. ‘All that concerns me is that half an hour ago, as far as a legend was concerned, we were polishing brass and calling it gold. Now we’ve got a billionaire American who has died in questionable circumstances. A
well-connected
American—’

‘How do you know he’s well-connected?’

‘Show me a family with that much money that isn’t.’

‘There is no family – just the wife; the report says so,’ I argued, playing devil’s advocate.

‘So what? There’ll be aunts, godparents, lawyers, a trustee. I’ll get the back office to start checking, but with a billion dollars there’s gonna be somebody.’

He was right, of course – growing up with Bill and Grace, I knew that. ‘Okay, so a trustee or lawyer hears Dodge is dead. What then?’

‘I ask the State Department to call him. They say they have concerns about the death but they need

someone with authority to request the government’s help. The lawyer or trustee agrees—’

‘Yeah, I’d buy that part – he’s got a duty,’ I added.

‘The State Department suggests he call the White House and make a formal request,’ Whisperer said. ‘The chief-of-staff takes the call. He says he understands – the trustee wants a proper investigation. It’s a foreign country; anything could have happened. So what does the White House do?’

‘They tell the FBI to send a special agent to monitor the inquiry.’

‘Exactly,’ Whisperer said. ‘And here’s the best thing – Grosvenor can call the President of Turkey

personally to organize it. A billion dollars and the name of a great automobile family – it’s believable that he would do that.’

We both knew: as of that moment I was an FBI special agent. ‘What name do you want?’ Whisperer