I Am Pilgrim (70 page)

Coming from Dave McKinley, it meant more than from anybody else in the world. ‘Thanks,’ I said.

After we hung up I sat for a long time in thought. There was one thing I still couldn’t fathom –

Leyla al-Nassouri-Cumali didn’t fit any profile that I could imagine.

Chapter Sixty-two

FOR THE TEENAGE boy in El-Mina, the run of good luck that had started with the unexpected gift of a cellphone continued unabated.

On a Wednesday afternoon, walking home from school, the phone rang and he spoke to the man

who had given it to him. The Saracen said that he was calling from Germany, where he had been lucky enough to find both a mosque that conducted itself in accordance with his strict beliefs and a job that offered great promise for the future.

The boy started to ask questions, probably with the thought that he might one day be able to join the father-figure who had been so generous to him, but the Saracen cut him short by telling him that, unfortunately, he was heading to work, time was short and he had to listen carefully.

‘Get a pen out – I’m going to give you an address.’

While the boy sat on a wall under the shade of a tree and rummaged through his backpack, the Saracen explained that he had already posted him a key that would open the garage at his old apartment. Inside were the boxes of medical supplies he had spoken to him about. Remember – the expired vaccines with their official dispatch dockets already attached? Once the boy had received the key, he was to open the garage and fill in the following address.

‘Mark them to my attention,’ the Saracen told him, ‘at Chyron Chemicals in Karlsruhe, Germany.

I’m going to spell it out, starting with the street address. Okay?’

Once he had finished, and had made the boy repeat it back to him, he said that he had already organized for the Beirut courier, with a refrigerated truck, to visit the garage on Saturday morning.

Could the boy be there to meet him and unlock the door? Of course he could.

With that done, there remained only one more task. He told the boy to call the company in Beirut

from which he had bought the industrial refrigerators and negotiate to sell them back.

‘Whatever money you get, you can keep,’ the Saracen said. ‘That should guarantee you’ll drive a

hard bargain,’ he added, laughing.

When the Saracen told him what he could expect to receive for the items, the boy could hardly believe it – it was almost six months’ salary for his mother, who worked in a local laundry. He tried to thank him, but the doctor cut him short, telling him that he had to run to get to work on time. The Saracen hung up and, though the boy didn’t know it, it was the last time they would ever speak.

The Saracen stepped out of a public phone box next to the Karlsruhe market square and sat for a

moment on a wooden bench. It was close now: in a few days the garage would be empty and the ten

thousand tiny bottles loaded on to a truck operated by a courier company which specialized in medical supplies.

The boxes that contained the precious vials would be displaying genuine dispatch dockets from a

Lebanese hospital, their destination well established as one of the largest producers of vaccines in the world, and all of them addressed to a man who was an authentic employee of the company’s warehouse department.

Chapter Sixty-three

THE BOXES ARRIVED five days later.

Their documentation showed that the courier had transported them to the port of Tripoli, where they had been loaded into a refrigerated container. A small Cedars-Line freighter had taken them across the Mediterranean and, several days later, they had encountered European customs in Naples,

Italy.

How do I put this nicely? Italy, even at the best of times, isn’t renowned for its thoroughness or bureaucratic efficiency. When the boxes arrived, it happened to be the worst of times. Continual budget cuts had taken a huge toll on the customs service, and its resources had been further depleted by a flood of containers carrying illegal immigrants risking the short journey from North Africa.

Even though the boxes secretly contained a Biosafety Level Four hot agent, none of them were opened for inspection, let alone analysis. The overworked officers believed what the documentation

and transit history attested to: they were expired vaccines being returned to the manufacturer in Germany.

In Naples, the boxes were loaded on to a truck, driven north without any further inspection, crossed the unpatrolled border into Austria and from there headed into Germany.

They arrived at the Chyron Chemicals security gate – just another shipment among the hundreds that went in and out every day – at 11.06 p.m., according to the guards’ computerized log. One of them saw the contact number on the documentation – a guy working in the warehouse – called him and said

a delivery was on its way.

The boom gate lifted, the driver was waved through and three minutes later the Saracen took possession of his ten thousand vials of liquid Holocaust. The journey that had started so long ago with once-classified information haemorrhaging online was almost at an end.

The Saracen immediately stored the boxes in a rarely visited area of the warehouse reserved for discarded packaging and attached a sign in Turkish and German on the front of them: DO NOT

MOVE. AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTION.

His original plan had been to sidetrack vials of a certain drug which was destined for the forty largest cities in the United States, empty them of their contents and replace with his own creation. It would have been a slow and dangerous process. On arrival at work on his first day, however, he had

realized it wasn’t necessary. The glass vials he had used in Lebanon were so close in appearance to

those used by Chyron that even an expert eye would have been hard pressed to tell the difference. All he needed to do was put labels on them.

Immediately, he had started experimenting with solvents which would lift the labels off the legitimate drugs without damaging them. He needed the labels intact, and he found what he was looking for in a large art-supply store – a common solution which neutralized most commercial glues.

Ten half-gallon containers of it were already stored in his locker and the only job that remained for him was to lift the labels off the genuine drugs and re-glue them to the tiny bottles of smallpox virus.

They would then be shipped to America in perfect disguise, distributed to the forty cities and, he was confident, the US healthcare system would do the rest.

He was aware that changing the labels would be a long and laborious process but, fortunately, he

worked alone on the graveyard shift and there was little real work to distract him. He had run it

through in his head so many times – even spending one night timing himself – that he knew he would hit his deadline.

There were nine days to go.

Chapter Sixty-four

AFTER DRIVING THE seven hundred miles back I arrived in Bodrum in the early afternoon, still trying to reconcile what I knew of Leyla Cumali’s life with her role in the imminent conflagration.

I had stopped twice on the way for gas and coffee and, each time, I had checked my phone and laptop, hoping for news from Battleboi. But there was nothing, and the only email was two spam messages which had been filtered and gone straight to the junk folder. I was getting increasingly frustrated and worried – maybe the Samurai hacker wasn’t going to be any better than the CIA – so

when I saw the manager hurrying across the foyer towards me, I figured another disaster must have

come down the pike.

It turned out I was so tired I had misread the cues: he was hurrying because he couldn’t believe I

was back. I quickly realized that he had thought my story about visiting Bulgaria was bullshit and that, having killed SpongeBob, I was gone for good.

‘You are a person of the many great surprises,’ he said, shaking my hand warmly. ‘Perhaps all of

the men of the FBI are just as you?’

‘Handsome and intelligent?’ I said. ‘No, just me.’

He clapped me on the back and spoke quietly. ‘There has been nobody of the visit for you. The newspaper say the man was of the robber type, probably for the drug using.’

Relieved at that break, I thanked him and went to my room. Immediately, I checked my laptop for

emails, but there was still nothing from Battleboi and I figured that, despite my fatigue, sleep would be impossible – every few minutes I would be looking to see if there was a message.

Instead, I pulled out the files on Dodge’s death that Cumali had given me and sat down at the desk.

While I was waiting, I would see if I could find a trace of an American woman, one with a Midwestern accent.

Chapter Sixty-five

I CAUGHT MY first glimpse of her after forty minutes. It was just a few words in a record of an interview, but it was enough.

Cumali and her team had asked Dodge and Cameron’s friends to recount how they knew the wealthy couple and to list the times they had spent together in Bodrum. It was standard stuff, the cops trying to build a picture of their lives, and, thankfully, most of the transcripts were in English.

Among them was one with a young guy called Nathanial Clunies-Ross, the scion of a hugely wealthy British banking dynasty who had known Dodge for years.

He and his girlfriend had come down from St Tropez to spend a week with Dodge and his new wife. There was nothing remarkable in that – apart from him being twenty-six and having a hundred-million-dollar boat to cruise around on – and I ploughed through half a dozen pages as he catalogued the bankrupt lives of some seriously wealthy people.

On the last page he gave a brief account of a vodka-fuelled night at a popular dance club called Club Zulu just along the coast. He said that six of them had flown in by chopper and, near the end of the evening, Cameron had run into a young woman called Ingrid – part of a larger party – who was a

casual acquaintance.

The two groups had ended up sitting together, and the most interesting thing, according to Clunies-

Ross, was that one of the guys in Ingrid’s party – he couldn’t recall his name, but he was pretty sure he was Italian and probably her boyfriend – had described his adventures with middle-aged vacationers. ‘He ran a massage service on the beach,’ Clunies-Ross had explained.

I started reading fast, the fatigue vanishing and my concentration roaring back. I sped through the

rest of his interview but could find no further mention of Gianfranco or, more importantly, of the woman called Ingrid.

I turned to the back of the file and found the documents supporting the interview, including screen-

grabs from CCTV cameras at Club Zulu – grainy and distorted. The last of them showed a group of

people, obviously pretty loaded, leaving the club. I saw Cameron and Dodge, a guy I figured was Clunies-Ross with his girlfriend – all cleavage and legs – and right at the back, almost obscured, Gianfranco.

He had his arm around an arresting woman – short-cropped hair, an even shorter skirt, tanned and

lithe, one of those young women who seem totally at ease in their own skin. By a quirk of circumstance, she was staring at the camera – she had large eyes, set a little deeper than you might have expected, and it gave the impression that she was looking straight through you. All my intuition, distilled and sharpened through countless hard missions and a thousand sleepless nights, told me it was Ingrid.

I turned and rummaged through the other files: somewhere, there was a master list, an index of all

the names that had arisen during the investigation. There were scores of them, but there was only one Ingrid.

Ingrid Kohl.

The index linked to the information the cops had assembled about her. I turned to Volume B, page

46, and saw that it was almost non-existent – she was such a no-account acquaintance, her interaction with Cameron and Dodge so minor, that the cops hadn’t even bothered talking to her. They did, however, take a copy of her passport.

I looked at the photo in the book. It was the woman with the short-cropped hair at Club Zulu –

Ingrid Kohl.

There was no interview, but some things were certain: she knew Cameron, she was a friend or something more intimate of Gianfranco’s and she was American. The passport said she came from Chicago, the heart of the Midwest.

Chapter Sixty-six

I WORKED THROUGH other files, hoping to find another mention of her or more photos, but there was

nothing – just the one reference by the visiting banker and a poor-quality image from the surveillance camera.

In the fading afternoon I kept returning to it and, even though I took a long march through the attic of my memory, I couldn’t recall anybody as attractive as Ms Kohl. On a professional level, I kept trying to match a voice to the image and thinking about gardenias …

When the computer beeped, telling me that I had mail, I figured it had to be Battleboi and I turned

fast to the laptop – only to be disappointed. It was more spam and it had also gone to the junk folder.

Where the hell was the Samurai? I asked myself in frustration, marking the crap messages for deletion. I saw they were for some prize-winning scam and hit the button to consign them to oblivion.