‘Who?’ I knew that I was pushing too hard, but I had to know if it would fly.
‘For shit’s sake – don’t ask me that,’ he replied.
‘Who?’
‘There are two deputy directors of MIT,’ he said finally. ‘One of ’em grew up Wal-Mart but prefers Gucci, okay?’
‘Shit … a deputy director?’ I said, taken aback. Despite my years in The Division, I could still be shocked at the scale of betrayal inside the secret world. ‘He’s not going to like doing this,’ I said.
‘He won’t have a choice – he’ll be scared I’ll turn him into his government. Maybe they still hang traitors in Turkey. What are the details?’ I heard the rustle of paper as he grabbed a pen to take notes.
When I had finished, he read the bullet points back to me, but he had done more than record them – he had improved and massaged them on the move and, once again, I thanked God for a great case officer.
‘What now?’ he asked. ‘Call him and get him to do it?’
‘Yeah, it’s warp-speed if we’re gonna have a chance.’
I rang off and, while Whisperer was dropping a bomb on a deputy director of MIT, I hammered on the cockpit door. I heard the voice of the ex-US Air Force pilot through the intercom.
‘What is it?’
‘Change of plan. Ditch Gaza, we’re going to Bodrum.’
The door flew open. ‘Where’s Bodrum?’
I yelled the answer, but I was already turning back to the closet. I had another urgent call to make.
Chapter Twelve
WHEN HIS PHONE rang, bradley was in a bar on the Lower East Side. It wasn’t some hipster joint with tapas and a ‘tasting menu’ but a real place with nicotine ingrained in the walls and drinks strong enough to curl your toes. A last vestige of old New York – a cops’ bar, in other words.
Ben was attending a farewell for some old warhorse and, thanks to the popularity of the retiree and the design of the speakeasy, the only place he could escape the crowd and noise was out in the street. As a result, he was holding a long-neck beer in drizzling rain when he got drafted into the front line of the secret world.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘In a CIA jet over Jordan,’ I said. There was no point in masking it, I needed him shaken, to hear the clarion call.
‘As soon as you hang up,’ I continued, ‘I want you to call the man you’ve been passing messages to. His name is David McKinley, he’s the director of United States intelligence.’
I heard Bradley’s intake of breath. ‘Shit, I thought—’
‘Forget whatever you thought. This is the real deal. Tell Dave I need a wingman fast. He’ll organize a chopper to take you to an airport and get you on a government jet.’
‘Where am I going?’ he asked.
‘Bodrum. McKinley will arrange the documentation – you’re an NYPD detective investigating the murder of Ingrid Kohl.’
‘Who’s Ingrid Kohl?’
‘It’s the name of the dead woman you found at the Eastside Inn.’
‘How do you—?’
‘Later,’ I said, as I thanked providence for Cameron and whoever Ingrid really was: their crimes had got me into Turkey and had at least given us a chance.
‘I’ll pick you up at the airport,’ I said. ‘And Ben – make sure you bring your side arm.’
Six miles high, turning hard for Bodrum, the turbulence finally abating, I figured he wouldn’t need it if everything went to plan. Then again, when had that ever happened?
Chapter Thirteen
DESPITE HIS VEHEMENT objections, the Deputy Director of the Turkish MIT made the phone call twenty minutes after I had spoken to Whisperer. It was to Leyla Cumali.
I never heard the conversation, of course, but some time later I read a transcript of it translated into English. Even from that document, devoid of all inflection and emotion, it was easy to tell that the MIT guy was a master of his craft. He had one of his assistants phone and schedule a time for Cumali to call him. She was given the number of MIT’s switchboard and, by the time she had made it through various assistants, she would have been in no doubt that she was talking to a very powerful man.
Very politely, he said that he needed her help in a highly confidential matter concerning a foreign visitor. God, the relief she must have felt when she realized he wasn’t investigating her.
‘How well do you know Brodie David Wilson?’ he asked.
The transcript records a pause – it would have been Cumali overcoming her surprise – but the spook encouraged her.
‘Just your impressions, Detective – you’re not giving evidence here,’ he said, with a laugh. Damn, he was good.
He listened quietly to her account of me, interrupting now and again to make her think that he cared.
‘Thank you, very good,’ he said, when she had trailed to a stop. ‘Have you felt at any time that perhaps he wasn’t a member of the FBI?’ he asked, starting to lay the pipe.
‘No … no,’ said Cumali, but then hesitated while she thought about it more deeply. ‘There was one thing: he was clever – I mean, outstandingly clever – at what he did. I remember wondering if all FBI agents were that good.’
‘Yes, that would make sense … him being very good,’ the deputy director said obscurely. ‘Tell me, did he ever make phone calls in your presence that led you to be suspicious or confused about their content?’
‘No … He had a strange habit, though – I never noticed it, but my secretary did. Except when he was making a call, he always had the battery removed from his cellphone.’
Well, I thought, despite the make-up and the stilettos, Hayrunnisa was smarter than I had given her credit for.
‘Why would he take the battery out?’ the spook asked.
‘I have no idea.’
‘Then let me help. If somebody has a cellphone in their pocket, it can be turned on remotely without them knowing.
‘Once it is powered up, the inbuilt microphone can be activated. Somebody who is tapping into the phone can then hear everything that is being said in a room. If the battery has been taken out, there is no risk.’
‘I had no idea,’ Cumali replied.
‘So you’re not aware that intelligence agents always do that?’
‘Intelligence agents? Can you tell me what this is about?’
Working to Whisperer’s instructions, that was exactly the question the deputy director wanted Cumali to ask. He played it like the expert he was.
‘You are a sworn officer of the law – a highly regarded one, I might add. All this is highly confidential.’
‘Of course.’
‘We have cameras at the Bulgarian border which record all crossings. We also know the licence tag of Brodie Wilson’s rent-a-car so, thanks to certain software we use, we learned that he entered Bulgaria. Do you know why?’
The licence-tag recognition system was bullshit – sure it existed, but Turkey wasn’t even close to using it. Cumali, however, had no way of knowing that.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Two of our men who operate over the border located him in a town called Svilengrad, where he bought a cheap cellphone, a SIM card and made one phone call. Have you ever heard him mention that town?’
‘Never.’
‘As a consequence of this, we became very interested in Agent Wilson. For reasons I can’t discuss, we now believe that may not be his real identity. We think his name is Michael John Spitz. Do you have any response to that name, Detective?’
‘None at all,’ Cumali replied.
‘Spitz is a member of an elite CIA group,’ the deputy director continued. ‘That would explain why you thought he was an outstanding investigator. Their job is to hunt terrorists.’
I could imagine the fear that must have struck Cumali’s heart, sitting in her whitewashed house at the old port, suddenly jolted into thinking about the coded calls between her and the Hindu Kush.
Their job is to hunt terrorists.
In the na
me of Allah, she must have thought, who were the CIA after – her? Her brother? She knew that he was a wanted man, but what the hell had he dragged her into?
‘We believe the homicide investigation is a cover,’ the deputy director said. ‘Something has brought him to Bodrum. Do you have any idea what he could be investigating?’
‘No,’ she lied. The transcript recorded that she said it ‘forcefully’.
‘Thank you, anyway, you’ve been very helpful,’ the spook said. ‘At the moment, we’re not going to do anything. We’ll listen to Spitz’s phone calls and wait and see. But I’ll give you a number, a direct line. If you hear anything, you are to call me immediately. Understood?’ he said, before recounting the number and hanging up.
Whisperer and I had broken all the rules: we had arranged for the target to learn the truth of the mission. But in doing so we had baited a trap – Cumali was a detective and I was gambling everything that her instinct would be to investigate. She would want to know more – fear would make sure of that – and I believed there was only one place she could look: in my hotel room.
She wouldn’t do it herself but, given her work, she would know plenty of criminals who could. It was now my job to make sure that everything was ready when they arrived.
Chapter Fourteen
FOR THE FIRST time in my professional life, I was out in the cold – I was on a mission without a legend or cover.
The small jet had crossed Jordan and landed at Milas late in the morning. I passed through Turkish immigration without delay, grabbed my car and, instead of driving to Bodrum, headed fast into Milas. Just behind City Hall, I found a camera store and watched as a young woman took my phone and printed out a hard copy of the photo I had taken of Cumali’s childhood home in Jeddah. The store also sold phone accessories and I bought another battery for the piece of junk I had purchased in Bulgaria.
I found a store catering to tradesmen nearby and picked up a hand drill, a small soldering iron, a bottle of all-purpose glue and half a dozen other items. I threw them in the car and drove hard to Bodrum. I arrived back at the hotel while it was still lunchtime, which meant the manager was out and I made it to my room without delay.
I pulled the battered Samsonite suitcase off the top of the wardrobe and carefully cut open the fabric lining that concealed the inside of the two locks. I drilled out the tiny keyhole of one of them then turned my attention to the Bulgarian phone. With the soldering iron I managed to connect the new battery in sequence – doubling the time the phone could operate – then opened up the menu. I spent a frustrating twenty minutes manipulating the software so that the camera would take a photo every two seconds.
I taped the jury-rigged phone inside the Samsonite so that its camera lens was hard against the drilled-out lock, giving it a clear view of the room. Before I went out, I only had to turn the phone on, glue the fabric back and return the suitcase to the top of the closet. I figured that the camera would be perfectly hidden, but the location had one other great advantage – people searching for something will look inside a box or suitcase but hardly ever examine the object itself.
I now had my own surveillance system, admittedly held together by wire and rope, but workable: I had to know for certain that the burglars had found what I was about to plant. Everything else depended on it.
I took the freshly printed photo of Cumali’s old home and added a computer disk which included a copy of her Bahrain driver’s licence, details of the scuba-diving blog and the precis of her college course in Istanbul. I put everything in a plastic file and placed it inside the in-room safe – a piece of crap with a battery-operated electronic keypad which any burglar worthy of the name would know how to power down, clear the code and open.
The photograph and documents were to convince Leyla Cumali that Michael Spitz was hunting her.
In addition, because they were genuine items, the so-called halo effect would wash over whatever else she found – I was counting on the scum-boys also to steal my laptop. Inside, Cumali would find two emails – totally fake – which I had drafted on the flight across Jordan. I was checking them, inserting them in my inbox at the appropriate dates, when the hotel phone rang.
A woman identified herself as being a secretary at the New York homicide bureau, but I figured it was bullshit – she was almost certainly one of Whisperer’s back-office staff.
‘The flight you are expecting is Turkish Airlines 349 from Rome, arriving at Milas International at 15.28,’ she said.
I wasn’t expecting any flight from Rome, but I guessed what had happened: Whisperer had figured a government jet would attract too many questions and had booked Bradley on a commercial flight.
I glanced at my watch: I had ten minutes if I was going to get to Milas in time. I finished checking the emails but didn’t delete any computer files – the material which was genuinely confidential was protected by unbreakable 128-bit encryption, and its presence would lend credibility to the subterfuge. The computer itself was password-protected and there was some low-level code, but I was confident – as Whisperer had told me when he first gave it to me – that it could be busted quickly if somebody wanted to.
I put the laptop in the safe alongside the other material, turned the Bulgarian phone on, re-glued the fabric and went out the door fast.
The bellhop, the young guy behind the reception desk and the woman at the switchboard watched as I exited the elevator. I slid the room key along the desk and called to the phone operator, loud enough for them all to hear. ‘I’m going to the airport. Any calls, I’ll be back at five thirty.’
I knew that if Cumali was going to have my room turned over, the first thing she would do was try to discover my movements. Hopefully, I had just saved her and the scum-boys some trouble.
As I ran for my car I figured that, by the time I returned, they would have entered the loading dock at the rear, gone up the service elevator, picked the lock on my door and – to make it look like a plain vanilla hotel robbery – my room would be in chaos.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Chapter Fifteen
I GOT TO the airport just in time: two minutes after I arrived, Bradley walked out of the customs zone.
I guided him past the men with massive urns on their backs selling apple tea, endless crowds of hustlers and beggars and an attractive Slavic couple who were almost certainly pickpockets and out towards the parking lot.
On the street, the wind was coming straight out of Asia, delivering a host of exotic scents, and loudspeakers were broadcasting a muezzin, telling Muslims that it was time for prayer. I saw Bradley looking at the chaotic traffic, the distant pine-clad hills, the minarets of a nearby mosque, and I knew it was setting him back on his heels.
‘We’re close to the borders of Iraq and Syria,’ I said. ‘A bit different from Paris, huh?’
He nodded.
‘People in my line of work get used to alien places,’ I continued, ‘but you never get used to the loneliness. It’s good to see you.’
‘You too,’ he replied. ‘You gonna tell me why we’re here?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I’ll tell you as much as necessary.’
We had arrived at the Fiat and, while I performed the usual deadly dance with the Turkish traffic, I asked Bradley to remove the batteries from both our cellphones. By the time I had explained why, we were on the freeway.
‘We – that means the US government – are hunting a man,’ I explained. ‘We’ve been hunting him for weeks—’
‘The guy everyone’s talking about?’ he asked. ‘The one with the nuclear trigger?’
‘There is no guy with a nuclear trigger,’ I replied. ‘That was a cover story.’
I saw the surprise on Bradley’s face, and I knew what he was thinking – he had seen the president talking about it numerous times on TV. I didn’t have time to explain the reason for that, and I kept going.
‘A couple of days ago we thought we had him nailed, but we were wrong. We don’t have
a name, a nationality or his whereabouts. The only link we have is his sister—’
‘Leyla Cumali,’ he said, his eyes flashing in a moment of realization.
‘Yes. In the last twelve hours she has been told that I am not here investigating a murder – that I am a CIA agent.’
‘Are you?’
‘No, I’m far beyond that. When we get to Bodrum, I believe we’ll find she has organized to have my hotel room robbed. The thieves will have taken a number of items, including my laptop.
‘It has several security features, but she will be able to access it without much trouble. Inside are two emails that she will find significant. The first will tell her that we intercepted coded phone calls between her and a man in the Hindu Kush—’
‘The where?’ Bradley asked.
‘Afghanistan. She will read that we don’t know the content of those calls – because they were in code – but given that she was born in Saudi Arabia, her father was publicly executed and her phone friend has been involved in the abduction of three missing foreigners, we think that she is part of a terrorist undertaking.’
‘Is she?’
‘I don’t believe so, but the document gives details of her impending rendition to Bright Light.’
‘What’s Bright Light?’
‘She’ll search the Web and find a number of newspaper articles which claim that it’s in Thailand, part of a system of CIA secret prisons.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happens at Bright Light?’
‘People are tortured.’
‘Our country does that to women?’
‘Our country does that to anybody.’
Ben had only been in-country for thirty minutes but already he was getting quite an education. I let him sit in sombre silence for a moment as I overtook a convoy of Turkish military heading to the Syrian border.
‘Cumali is the sole carer for a six-year-old boy,’ I went on, once the tank transporters were vanishing in my rear-view mirror. ‘Obviously, the child can’t be abandoned – so the document lays out the arrangements for his welfare.’