He returned a troubled man. He told me that a man and woman had arrived, claiming to be tourists on a road trip, and had made supposedly casual inquiries at both village cafés about whether any Americans had passed through recently.
I always knew that Whisperer and his legions would find me – people talk, Echelon listens, somebody would have gone into the archives and found the account of Mack’s death all those years ago. I didn’t fear the strangers, though, I knew they had been sent to help me in case I needed it – and yet I had no intention of talking to them. I was a ruin of a man, but I had done my duty, nobody could ask any more than that, and how I stumbled my way through the wreckage that remained was entirely my business.
I told the doctor nothing about the interlopers, but I noticed as the day wore on that he was becoming increasingly worried about what had turned up on his doorstep. That night, for the first time, I made my way slowly down to the kitchen and discovered that he was quite a cook. As he seasoned what he called his signature dish – lamb marinated in thyme and garlic – he asked me if I still sang the ‘Midnight Special’.
‘Do I think about Mack, you mean?’ I replied. ‘More times than I ever imagined.’
‘Me too,’ he said. ‘A terrible night. Just after you left I heard a chopper come in. They picked up his body, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where was he buried?’ He tried to make it sound casual, but it was a strange question and I knew where he was heading.
‘Arlington,’ I replied.
‘He was in the military?’
‘Sure – he just happened to be a fighter in a war that had never been declared.’
The doctor put his herbs down and turned – he had arrived at his point. ‘You too, Jacob? Is that what you do?’
‘Worried, Doctor?’
‘Of course I’m fucking worried! I’ve been worried since the night you arrived. As soon as you went to sleep I opened your backpack. There was a SIG covered in gunshot residue and enough ammunition to arm a small African country. Now two people turn up and I’m wondering when the shooting is going to start.’
He was a good man, he had done the right thing by me, and he deserved an honest answer. ‘Yeah, I’m a soldier too.’
‘Enlisted or mercenary?’
I smiled. ‘Drafted on this occasion.’
‘CIA, or something worse?’
‘I like to think better, but your mileage may vary.’
‘And the people in town?’
‘They’re ours. They’re here to check that I’m okay.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘They’re not killers, Doc. If they were, we’d already be dead. There’s nothing to worry about – I give you my word.’
I could see it reassured him, and I was glad I had done it. A few days later, just after dusk, there was a knock at the door. There was something about it – the loudness, the fact that the front gate hadn’t creaked on its hinge, the time of day – that worried me.
I nodded to the doctor to answer it and limped as fast as I could to the old bedroom, where a narrow window offered a decent view of the front door. A guy in his thirties was standing there – dressed like a tourist, but so hard-wired, so full of tension, that the clothes would have fooled only the most casual observer.
The doctor opened the door and the tourist told him that he wanted to speak to the man who had arrived at the house a few weeks previously. The doctor told him the only other occupant had been his brother, on a family visit, who had returned to Australia a couple of days earlier.
The agent just nodded. I figured he had been told to play it cool. ‘Well, if your brother comes back,’ he said, ‘and you happen to discover that he’s an American with a bullet wound in his shoulder, give him this, will you?’
He handed over a sealed package and left. Standing in the kitchen a few minutes later, the doctor watched me break the seal and spill out a clutch of letters. His eyes widened as he saw that the first envelope was embossed with the seal of the President of the United States.
He was even more surprised when I ignored it and looked at the others. I recognized the handwriting on one – it was from Whisperer – and I put it next to the president’s.
Two letters remained. One was in an NYPD envelope with Bradley’s details on the back and the other – written in a strange scrawl – was addressed to the Oval Office with a note to ‘Please pass it on to the man who sometimes uses the name Jude Garrett.’ I knew who it was from.
I picked those two up, limped across the kitchen and went up to my room.
Chapter Forty-eight
I READ BRADLEY’S first. He said that as soon as he had left the nanny’s house she had phoned the local cops and told them what had happened.
Because she worked for Cumali, she had no difficulty convincing them that the story was true, despite its extraordinary nature. A black American wasn’t exactly hard to locate and, alerted by an all-points bulletin, a prowl car picked him up before he had even reached the hotel. They slammed him over the hood, disarmed him and took him down to the precinct house. He was fearing the worst – some Turkish form of enhanced interrogation – but by then all hell was breaking loose at the Theatre of Death.
American choppers from the Mediterranean Fleet had already been dispatched at the president’s order – not to pick me up but to secure the Saracen and collect evidence. Grosvenor phoned the president of Turkey, alerted him to their approach and told him that they had located the man attempting to buy the nuclear trigger. As a result, MIT operatives and the Turkish military all converged on the ruins. With two Turkish Navy destroyers standing offshore, half a dozen US helicopters on the beach and two hundred military personnel and intelligence agents in the ruins, the order went out to put Bradley on ice until the situation became clearer.
After five days in a cell – and following a direct request from Grosvenor to his Turkish counterpart – Bradley was released and had his passport returned. He went back to the hotel and had a tearful telephone reunion with Marcie, who, once she had recovered, asked him when he would be home.
‘A few days,’ he said.
‘What?!’ she cried.
A cop to the very end, he wasn’t leaving without organizing the extradition of Cameron and Ingrid for the murder of Dodge and the woman at the Eastside Inn. The next morning, less than twelve hours after his release, he returned to the precinct house and went to Cumali’s office. Hayrunnisa told him in hushed tones that her boss was still being ‘debriefed’ – and sticking steadfastly to the story that I had recommended to her, it seemed – so he asked to see whoever was in charge of the murder investigation. After a flurry of phone calls, the kid in the shiny boots escorted him to the luxurious office of the Bodrum police chief.
I recalled the man – I had seen him when half of his force were pursuing me through the boat-repair facility, the night that I pancaked SpongeBob. The chief was in his fifties, big and florid with pampered skin and a neat moustache, the gold buttons of his impressive uniform threatening to burst at any moment. Despite the eau de Cologne he was wearing, he had a smell about him, and I couldn’t say I was surprised by what Ben reported.
He wrote that the chief said he had received extensive legal submissions from lawyers acting on behalf of both Cameron and Ingrid: as I had anticipated, the moment the two women had left their interview with me they had immediately gone and lawyered up. The chief said that the submissions led him personally to review all the evidence.
‘Naturally, I had to discount everything supposedly discovered by the man calling himself Brodie David Wilson. He wasn’t even a member of the FBI and had entered the country under false pretences. As we know, he had his own agenda in complicating and prolonging the case.
‘My own review showed that the work of the Turkish detectives was outstanding, as usual. It was clear that their initial finding was correct – Mr Dodge had died by misadventure. His fall was a tragic accident.’
Ben stared at him in
disbelief, but the big Turk didn’t seem to notice. He smiled, lit another cigarette and spread his hands wide.
‘Of course, I didn’t want to make that judgement on my own, so I presented the evidence and the legal submissions to one of our most esteemed local judges. He too could see no reason for holding the two women and the other material witnesses in Bodrum any longer.
‘He suggested – and I agreed – that we return the passports and release them on bond, pending any further inquiries.’
‘Release them?!’ Ben asked, taking it hard, again acting as the champion of the dead. ‘How much was the bond?’
The Turkish cop tried to blow him off. ‘There were ten of them … I’m not sure … There’s a file, I’d have to—’
‘How much?’ Ben insisted, not bothering to hide his anger.
The chief dropped all pretence of civility. ‘Two hundred thousand dollars each,’ he snarled.
Ten people – two million dollars! It was a fortune – but not to Cameron. Ben didn’t need to ask what she had done – of course, she would have paid the bribe and bought their way out.
‘When did they leave?’ he asked in despair.
‘Three days ago. They got on board the huge cruiser and an hour later were sailing out.’
‘What if your “further inquiries” turn up something?’ Ben asked bitterly. ‘What do you do then?’
‘We write and ask them to come back. But, as I told you, I’m sure that won’t be necessary.’ Ben said the guy was almost smiling.
As I mentioned, I wasn’t surprised. With the FBI out of the picture, armed with all of the work which I had done, the Bodrum police chief and a corrupt judge had seen that they had Cameron cornered and did what generations of their Ottoman predecessors had done. They put their hand out.
Ben wrote that there was little he could do – the two perps had left Bodrum, and Cameron’s payment had guaranteed that all the material witnesses had scattered too. He thought perhaps he could pick the case up in New York, but he was realistic enough to know that, with limited resources, and one killer officially listed among the dead at the World Trade Center, unless the two women returned to America, he had little hope. With that much money, they certainly didn’t need to go back – they could travel the world for the rest of their lives.
I sat in silence for a few minutes, thinking about the two women and their crimes, but even then I didn’t recall it. No, the comment Ingrid had made to me about not understanding the half of it never even entered my head.
Chapter Forty-nine
THE SECOND LETTER, the one addressed to Jude Garrett via the Oval Office, was from Battleboi.
It was better written than I could have imagined and, knowing the big guy, I was certain that he must have sweated over it for hours.
‘I was in handcuffs and shackles,’ he said, ‘one of ten prisoners inside a bus with barred windows. We were heading across the runway at La Guardia to take a Con Air flight to the Big House down in Kansas when two black SUVs with their sirens going made us stop.
‘I figured that whoever the guys inside were, they must have had a really high security clearance to drive across an airport but, apart from that, I wasn’t interested.
‘That morning, I had written to Rachel telling her not to wait for me and I was trying to work out how I would deal with fifteen years in Leavenworth.’
He told me that the two US marshals on board the bus – guys who hadn’t stopped sneering at him because of his size and eccentricity – got out and met the men in suits who were scrambling out of the SUVs.
The most senior of the suits – who turned out to be a high-ranking executive in the Department of Justice – showed his ID and started barking orders. As the convicts watched through the barred windows, the two marshals immediately got back on board and made their way through the prisoners.
‘They stopped next to me, unlocked the chain securing me to the seat and led me towards the door. I asked them what the hell was happening, but they didn’t answer. They probably didn’t know themselves.
‘On the runway, the executive officer handed me a letter. I ripped open the envelope and saw that it was from the Oval Office, but I didn’t know what it meant – for once in my life, I couldn’t compute.
‘By the time I finished reading it I was pretty close to crying. It was a presidential pardon. “For services in defence of your country,” it said.
‘God knows who you are, but you said you would do everything possible to help me, and you did.’
He wrote that, after the formalities were completed, he made his way back to Old Japan, ran through the apartment without even taking off his shoes and found Rachel in a corner of their bedroom, distraught. She looked up, saw him and thought for a moment it was a dream. Then the dream smiled, reached out his arms to her and, being the son of devout Catholic parents, told her in wonder, ‘It’s the Gospel of St Mark, babe – chapter sixteen, verse six.’
She had no idea what he was talking about and didn’t care – she let him fold her into his huge embrace, kissed him and, after they had stood for a long time in silent gratitude, he sat down and wrote the letter to me.
‘You gave me a second chance – a chance for life, a chance for love, a chance for kids. How do you thank somebody for that?’ he said.
‘I suspect that we’ll never see each other again, but always remember, on this date every year we will set a place at our dinner table for you and wait for your knock on the door.
‘Travel safe and may God, by whatever name you know Him, protect you.’
Chapter Fifty
THE FOLLOWING DAY, after my normal routine of exercise and physiotherapy, I took stock of my health. While it was clear my foot was healing, I had to admit that if I ever wanted to regain the complete use of it I had to increase dramatically the amount of work I was doing.
I discussed it with the doctor and, that night – after dinner, with the village in darkness – I ventured out for the first time. Slowly, forsaking my makeshift crutch for a walking stick, I made my way down the narrow streets and along the waterfront, dragging my foot in a strange limp as I became increasingly tired, but forcing it to function.
It was slow and excruciating and, after two hours, I finally made it back through the front gate and collapsed in the living room. The doctor was already in bed, and after I recovered I took the opportunity to search through his groaning bookshelves. At the back, covered in dust, I found a copy of the Bible, presented to him on graduating in medicine by his father.
I looked up the Gospel of St Mark, chapter sixteen, verse six. It was the King James’s version and, even if you are not a believer, the words are still very beautiful. I sat for a long time, thinking about Battleboi and Rachel, and, though I can’t say that I prayed, I was thankful that at least one good thing had come out of the whole terrible enterprise.
The following night, despite the pain and fatigue, I walked the unforgiving streets again. And the night after that, and the night after that. I never saw anybody, I never spoke to anyone – I was a shadow in the darkness, but a shadow growing stronger.
A month later, having ventured further and further afield, I felt confident enough to put my foot to an extreme test – a ten-mile walk along a coastal path and down into a rarely visited fishing village which the doctor said was one of the most beautiful on the coast.
‘Make sure you visit the boatyard,’ he said. ‘They still use the old crafts; it’s the last one working in wood.’
Setting off early on a cold and sharp-edged morning, I hiked through the empty hills of southern Turkey, the smell of pine and the restless sea my only companions and, to my surprise, I did it relatively easily. I was still limping, and I had to rest from time to time – but there was no more of the vicious, debilitating pain, and I knew that my time at the doctor’s was coming to an end.
The coastal path eventually wound down into the village – untouched by tourism, an authentic jumble of cottages and boat-sheds, home to men and wo
men whose lives had changed little in hundreds of years.
After a lunch of fresh seafood in a sleepy café, I made my way to the boatyard at one end of the small cove and found that the doctor was right – it was a lovely thing to see the old kilns aglow, smoke hanging in the air and the artisans bending and shaping lengths of timber as they repaired the squat fishing boats for the next season. Nobody paid me any attention, and I wandered past the stacks of drying wood, thinking about how many great skills the world had lost, how many things of value had passed without any of us even noticing. The old men with their chisels and hand saws were once the most highly paid members of their community, and what had we put in their place? Financial engineers and young currency traders.
I turned a corner – and stopped. At the back of the yard, under a sagging canvas roof, perched high on wooden chocks, was a timber-hulled ketch. She was about seventy feet long, probably half a century old, and even though she was unpainted and her masts hadn’t been stepped, it was clear that she would once have been a thing of beauty.
Whoever owned her had used the almost lost skills of the yard to start restoring her but, by the look of the dust on her transom, they appeared to have run out either of cash or interest. I walked closer and dragged aside part of the canvas roof so that the light fell more evenly on her. I had always thought that there was nothing quite so sad as an abandoned boat, but the work that had been done on the ketch was outstanding, and it gave her a dignity that belied her distressed circumstances.
Thanks to Bill’s lessons on Long Island Sound, I had learned a lot about boats and I knew just by looking at her that she was a craft that could weather almost anything.
‘She’s for sale,’ a man’s voice said from behind, his English excellent for such a sleepy part of the world.
I turned and guessed it was the owner of the yard. He was in his thirties, with a ready smile, a man probably trying to make something out of the business and keep his village alive.