I Am Pilgrim (68 page)

I looked down, saw a tear on the left calf of my chinos and figured that the piece of flying debris

from the exploding Cigarette had done more damage than I had realized. The blood had flowed down

on to the sole of my trainers and I had now traipsed it across the hotel foyer.

‘Damn,’ I said. ‘I crossed the main road down near the BP gas station. There’s a rusty railing they

use as a road divider. I guess I didn’t climb it as well as I thought.’

It wasn’t a great explanation, but it was the best I could do at short notice and the manager seemed to accept it without question.

‘Yes, I know this place,’ he said. ‘The traffic is of much madness. Here, let me be of helping.’

But I declined, insisting instead on making my way to my room, walking on the tip of my foot to

prevent leaving any more bloody smears on his floor. Once inside, with my door locked, I took off

my trousers and, utilizing a pair of travel tweezers, succeeded in pulling a jagged hunk of metal out of my calf. Once it was removed the wound started to bleed like a mother, but I had already torn a Tshirt into strips and I got it compressed and bandaged in a few seconds.

Only then did I open my shirt and turn my attention to the photo I had stolen from the wedding album. It showed Cumali and her then husband, smiling, arm in arm, leaving the reception for their

honeymoon. He was a handsome guy, in his late twenties, but there was something about him – the cut

of his linen pants, the aviator sunglasses dangling from his hand – that made me think he was a player.

There was no way I could imagine him being a stalwart of the local mosque and, once again, looking

at Cumali’s beautiful face, I encountered the same damn circle I couldn’t square.

I turned the photo over and saw that Turkish photographers were no different from their counterparts elsewhere: on the back was the name of the photographer, a serial code and a phone number in Istanbul to call for reprints.

It was too late to phone him so, with my calf throbbing hard, I opened my laptop to check for messages. I was surprised to see that there was no information from Bradley about Cumali’s background, and I was in the middle of cursing Whisperer and the researchers at the CIA when I saw a text message from Apple telling me how much I had been charged for my latest music download.

I opened iTunes and saw I was the proud owner of
Turkey’s Greatest Hits
, a compilation of the country’s recent entries in the Eurovision Song Contest. Oh, Jesus.

I had to endure two tracks and part of a third before I found, embedded in it, a series of text documents. Although it didn’t say so, it was clear that the researchers had hacked into the Turkish police database and found Cumali’s human resources file.

Their report said that she had studied two years of law, dropped out, applied to the National Police Academy, and undertaken a four-year degree course. In the top tier of her graduating class, she had

been streamed into criminal investigation and, after service in Ankara and Istanbul, her knowledge of English meant that she was posted to a tourist destination where it would be put to best use: Bodrum.

They found plenty of other stuff, commendations and promotions mainly – she was a good officer

by the look of it – but it was all standard career stuff and it was clear that even from her time at the academy, the Turkish police had known her as Cumali and nothing else.

The researchers at Langley had also wondered if that was her real surname, and they tried to find

an electronic back door to access marriage licences, birth certificates or passport applications, but they ran straight into a brick wall. Amazingly, Turkish public records couldn’t be hacked. It wasn’t because the government had adopted, like the Pentagon, some complex system of cybersecurity. The

answer was much simpler – none of the archives had been digitized. The official records existed only on paper – probably bundled up, tied with ribbon and stored in endless warehouses. According to Langley, the only way to access anything more than five years old was by a written application – a process which could take over a month.

I stared at the report in frustration – as was so often the case with the agency’s research, it was all tip, no iceberg. I figured that sooner or later they would resolve the question of her name but, as the lawyers say, time was of the essence. Pissed off with their work, I went to bed.

Thanks to Langley, the entire investigation now rested on a photographer in Istanbul I had never heard of and who might well have been retired or dead.

Chapter Fifty-eight

HE WAS NEITHER, although by the sound of his cough and the lighter firing up a constant stream of cigarettes, the dead part might have been closer than he wished.

I had woken before dawn, dragged my injured leg to the laptop, put the USB travel drive into a slot

and started to work through Cumali’s files. It would have been slow and grinding work, except that

most of it was in Turkish and I had no choice but to discount the vast majority of them. Even so, you get a sense of things, and I couldn’t claim that among the letters and work files I found anything that raised my suspicions: the mistake that most people make when they want to stop someone from seeing

material is to encrypt it, which means that a person like me knows exactly where to look.

As I had suspected when I was in her living room, nothing was coded and, if she had been smart

enough to hide any incriminating files in plain sight, I was damned if I could identify them. Nor was there anything in Arabic, even though we had good reason to suspect she knew the language.

Having drawn a blank with the files, I turned to her emails. Thankfully, many of them were in English, and I saw that she had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, many of them other mothers with Down’s syndrome children. Among the hundreds of messages I found only two that made me stop – they were both from a Palestinian charity associated with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’

Brigade, a group that frequently organized suicide bombings against Israelis. The emails

acknowledged donations to an orphanage in the Gaza Strip, and my first reaction was to ask why – if

Cumali really wanted to help kids – she didn’t give to Unicef. On the other hand, charity was one of the Five Pillars of Islam and, if it was a crime to donate money to organizations associated with radical groups, we would end up indicting half the Muslim world. More, probably.

I marked the two emails with a red flag then put the USB drive into an envelope and addressed it to

Bradley in New York. As soon as FedEx opened I would courier it to him to be on-passed to Whisperer for further analysis. I looked at the clock – it was 7 a.m. and, though it was early, I wanted to find out whether the photographer was dead or alive.

I called the number, waited for what seemed minutes, and was about to give up and try later when I

heard an irritable voice give a greeting in Turkish. I apologized for speaking English, talking slowly in the hope that he could follow me.

‘Can you speak a bit faster? I’m falling back asleep here,’ he said, in an accent that indicated he had watched a few too many Westerns.

Pleased that we could at least communicate, I asked him if he was a photographer and when he confirmed it I said that I was planning a special gift for the wedding anniversary of two friends. I wanted to put together a photo collage of their big day and needed to buy a number of reprints.

‘Have you got the code number?’ he asked, more polite now that there was money to be made.

‘Sure,’ I replied, and read off the number on the back of the stolen glossy.

He asked me to wait while he checked his files and, a minute or two later, he returned and told me

there was no difficulty, he had the file in front of him.

‘Just to make sure there’s no confusion,’ I said, ‘can you confirm the names of the bride and groom?’

‘No problemo, pardner. The groom is Ali-Reza Cumali—’ He went on to give an address, but I wasn’t interested: the moment I heard it I knew for sure that the cop hadn’t reverted to her previous surname.

‘And the bride?’ I asked, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. ‘Have you got a name for her?’

‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘Leyla al-Nassouri. Is that the couple?’

‘Yeah, that’s them, Sheriff.’ He laughed.

‘I’ve never been quite sure how to spell her unmarried name,’ I continued. ‘Can you give it to me?’

He did, I thanked him for his help, told him that I would be in touch as soon as I had a full list of the photos I needed and hung up. The name al-Nassouri wasn’t Turkish – it was straight out of Yemen or

Saudi or the Gulf States. Wherever it was, it was Arabic. And so was the man in the Hindu Kush.

I grabbed my passport, headed out the door and almost ran to the elevator.

Chapter Fifty-nine

THE DOORS SLID open and, although it was only seven twenty in the morning, I stepped out into what appeared to be some sort of celebration. The manager, the receptionist, the bellhop and other hotel staff were gathered at the front desk and had been joined by several of the carpenters and other friends of the manager who had helped me with the mirrors.

The conversation – all in Turkish – was highly animated, and coffee and pastries were being handed around. Despite the hour, somebody had produced a bottle of raki, and I wondered if they had

won the lottery or something.

The manager approached me, smiling even more widely than normal, waving a copy of that morning’s local newspaper. ‘We have news of the greatest happiness,’ he said. ‘You recall the SpongeBob, the man of the biggest corruption, a curse on all citizens of goodness?’

‘Yeah, I remember. Why?’

‘He is dead.’

‘Dead?’ I said, faking surprise and taking the copy of the newspaper and looking at an exterior photograph of the marina warehouse with cops everywhere. ‘It’s hard to believe,’ I said. ‘How?’

‘Squashed – flat like the cake of a pan,’ he explained.

‘Some man of idiot brain broke into a house belonging to a cop of the female.’

‘Broke into a cop’s house? Yeah – what an idiot brain.’

‘Probably a Greek people,’ he said, absolutely serious.

‘When did this happen?’ I asked, trying to act normal, just kicking it along. Everybody else was standing near the desk, and the manager and I were in our own private world.

‘Last of the evening, while you were having your relax with the dinner of the fine quality. Just before you walk in with your bloody …’

He paused as a thought occurred to him and, though he tried to haul the sentence back, he couldn’t.

‘They say the killer ran from the boat place with a trail of the blood injury,’ he said. He stopped and looked at me.

Our eyes met and held – there was no doubt he knew who the killer was. I could have denied it, but I didn’t think it would have been convincing; or perhaps I could have issued some dark threat, but I was certain he wasn’t easily intimidated. I didn’t like it but I figured I had to trust my intuition and take a chance on him and his friendship.

‘No, no,’ I said finally. ‘You’re of the wrongness quite substantial. My relax of the fine food wasn’t last night – that was the night before.’

He looked at me in confusion, about to argue, thinking I was genuinely mistaken, but I kept talking

so that he didn’t have a chance to blunder on.

‘Last night you and I were here – in the lounge,’ I said. ‘You remember? It was quiet, there was nobody else around.’

Suddenly his eyes sparked as understanding dawned. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Of course, that’s right – the dinner was of the night previous.’

‘Now you remember. Last night, you and I talked, you were explaining to me about the Greeks. It

was a long conversation.’

‘Oh yes, one of the longest. Those damn Greek peoples – nothing is simple with them.’

‘True. You had a lot of things, a lot of history, you had to tell me. It was well past 10 p.m. when I went to bed.’

‘Later, probably, 11 p.m. is more the time of my memory,’ he said, with great enthusiasm.

‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ I responded.

We looked at each other again and I knew my intuition about him had been right. The secret was

safe.

He indicated the passport in my hand and dropped his voice. ‘Are you leaving in the hurry not to

return?’ he asked.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘If anybody asks, I’ve gone to Bulgaria – I spoke about finding an important witness.’

I farewelled him and headed for the front door and my car. I opened the trunk, pulled out the rubber lining and found a way to access the right rear wheel arch. I removed the tracking transmitter held in place by strips of magnets and attached it low down on the pole of a parking sign.

With any luck, no pedestrian would see it and whoever was monitoring it at MIT would think my

car was still parked at the kerb.

I got behind the wheel and drove for the border.

Chapter Sixty

ALL DAY I hammered the fiat down endless stretches of highway – stopping only for gas, passing the

distant minarets of Istanbul in the afternoon and reaching the Bulgarian frontier in the early evening.

The hardscrabble corner of the world where Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria meet is one of the busiest road junctions in Europe and, once I had left Turkey and entered a sort of no man’s land, I was surrounded by long-haul semis crawling towards Bulgarian immigration and customs.