‘No, no. Anybody would—’
I was getting annoyed, pissed off at having been dragged into a life I really didn’t want to have any part of.
‘I wasn’t surprised,’ I said sharply, ‘because, unlike all the so-called Washington experts, I’ve been listening.’
‘To what?’ he responded.
I glanced ahead and saw we were slowing for a long tailback.
‘Ever been to Berlin, Dave?’
‘Berlin? What’s Berlin got to do with it?’
Chapter Five
WHISPERER DIDN’T KNOW where I was going but he decided to roll with it. ‘Yeah, I was in Berlin in the eighties, just before the Wall came down,’ he said.
I should have remembered, of course – he was with the CIA back then, the station chief in the hottest spot of the Cold War, what was then the capital city of espionage.
‘You recall the Bebelplatz – the big public square in front of the cathedral?’
‘No, that was over in East Berlin. Guys in my job didn’t climb the Wall much.’ He smiled, and I got the feeling he liked remembering the old days, when the enemy was the Soviets and everybody knew what the rules were.
‘When I was first starting out,’ I continued, ‘I was posted to The Division’s Berlin office. It was from there I went to Moscow and had my meeting with the then Rider of the Blue.’
He looked at me for a long moment, realizing that we had never spoken about it. ‘That was a helluva thing,’ he said. ‘In the middle of Moscow, too. I always thought it took a truckful of courage.’
‘Thanks,’ I said quietly. I meant it too – that was really something coming from a man with his résumé.
‘Before any of that,’ I said, ‘on a Sunday I would often walk to the Bebelplatz. It wasn’t the grand architecture that took me there – it was the evil of the place.’
‘What evil?’ he said.
‘One night in May 1933 the Nazis led a torch-lit mob into the square and looted the library of the adjoining Friedrich-Wilhelm University. Forty thousand people cheered as they burnt over twenty thousand books by Jewish authors.
‘Many years later a panel of glass was set into the ground to mark the spot where the fire had been. It’s a window and, by leaning over, you can look into a room below. The room is white, lined from floor to ceiling with plain shelves—’
‘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 pa
ntheon – 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 asked.
‘Brodie Wilson,’ I answered.
‘Who’s he?’ Whisperer said. He knew the drill – he wanted to make sure that if sometime very soon the questioning got really tough, I wouldn’t get confused about my name.
‘A dead guy. He was my stepfather’s sailing partner. Bill said he was the best spinnaker man he ever saw.’ Suddenly – I couldn’t explain why – I felt a great wave of sadness roll over me.
Whisperer didn’t notice; he was too busy be
ing a case officer. ‘Okay, you were born on Long Island, sailed every weekend, birth-date is the same as yours, next of kin is your widowed mother – okay?’
I nodded, committing it to memory. The information was for the passport – a dog-eared version with plenty of stamps which would have to be produced by the CIA within the next few hours. Whisperer was already picking up the phone – conferencing in the family room, kitchen and dining room – to start organizing it and a host of other details that would transform a fake name into a real identity.
I took the opportunity to think: on the ground in Turkey I would need a conduit, some way of communicating with Whisperer. I couldn’t call him directly – an FBI agent would be of interest to the Turkish version of Echelon, and they would almost certainly be listening to every call. But if I was investigating the link between Dodge’s death and the murder at the Eastside Inn, I could legitimately speak to the New York homicide detective in charge of the case.
My idea was that Ben Bradley could act as our mail box – taking cryptic messages and relaying them between the two of us. As soon as Whisperer was finished on the phone, I explained it to him. He wasn’t sure.
‘What was this guy’s name again?’ he asked.
‘Bradley. Ben Bradley,’ I said.
‘He’s trustworthy?’
Whisperer was somewhere far beyond exhaustion but even his face came alive when I told him about the Twin Towers and what Bradley had done for the guy in the wheelchair. ‘He’s a patriot,’ I said.
‘Sixty-seven floors?’ Whisperer replied. ‘He’s not a patriot, he’s a fucking athlete.’ He picked up the phone and made arrangements for the FBI to go and collect him.
Chapter Eight
BRADLEY WAS ASLEEP when the phone went. Twice he let it go to the answering machine, but when the apartment’s entry intercom shrilled he felt he had no choice but to answer that. An unknown voice at the front door of the building asked him to pick up his goddamn phone immediately.