With Marcie at his side, Bradley lifted the handset and was told there was a car waiting outside. He was needed downtown at the FBI’s headquarters now. He tried to find out what it was about, but the guy on the other end of the line refused to say.
After pulling on his Industries and a sweatshirt – it was 2 a.m. – he was taken to the same nondescript building I had visited some months before and escorted to the eleventh floor. A night-duty agent showed him into a soundproofed room, empty except for a secure phone line and a chair, and then left, locking the door behind him. The phone rang, Bradley picked it up and heard my voice at the other end.
I told him there wasn’t much time, so he had to listen hard. ‘My name’s Brodie Wilson, I’m a special agent with the FBI. Got it?’ I’ll give Ben his due – he took it in his stride.
I said that in a few hours I was heading to Bodrum and gave him a brief rundown on Dodge’s death. He immediately started asking about a connection to the woman at the Eastside Inn, but I cut him off – that investigation wasn’t our primary concern. I told him I would be calling him from Turkey and his job was to listen carefully and to relay what I said to a ten-digit number I was about to give him.
‘You must never try to record what I say – not under any circumstances. It’s memory and notes alone,’ I said, more harshly than was necessary, but I was worried. The Turkish version of Echelon would know if he was using a recording device and that would send up a forest of red flags.
‘You may be asked to send messages back to me. Same deal, okay? Here’s the ten-digit number—’
I was partway through it when he stopped me. ‘That’s wrong,’ he said.
‘No it’s not,’ I replied testily. I was dog-tired too.
‘It can’t be right, Scott – I mean, Brodie – there’s no such area code.’
‘Yes there is.’
‘No, I’m telling you—’ He tried to argue, but I stopped it. ‘It’s an area code, Ben! People just don’t know about it, okay? Nobody does.’
‘Oh,’ he said, and I finished giving the number to him. I didn’t tell him, but he now had the number of the Director of US Intelligence’s high-security cellphone – something known to only five other people, one of whom was the president.
Without knowing it, Ben had joined the big time.
Chapter Nine
WHISPERER HAD BEEN on the phone too. By the time I had finished with Ben he had organized a myriad other details – everything from an airline ticket and credit cards to the junk that would be found in Brodie Wilson’s pockets.
Foremost among the material that would turn my name into a believable legend was a four-year-old laptop with plenty of miles under the hood. It would include an email program with hundreds of old messages, both business and private, as well as documents and downloaded files about past cases.
‘You’re going to have to go through it on the plane and try and familiarize yourself with the crap,’ said Whisperer.
‘Concentrate on the file with your family photos. You’re divorced but you’ve got either two or three kids – I can’t remember exactly what I told them. You can fudge stuff about past investigations, but of course you can’t do that with your family. I said you were devoted to them.’
‘Any of it encrypted?’ I asked.
‘Password-protected and some low-level code but they could bust it pretty quick. If we armour-plated it, I figure that would raise too many weird questions.
‘They’ll also be loading in iTunes and you’ll get an MP3 player. But I’m warning you – the geeks at the agency have God-awful taste in music.’
‘Thanks – I’ll probably have to become a rap fan,’ I replied. I heard cars crunch along the gravel driveway and I guessed it was the back-office staff heading out, their work done. ‘When will everything be ready?’ I asked.
‘Six a.m. Your clothes, passport and laptop will be dropped at the security post, and the guard will put it in the kitchen for you.’
We had already organized for me to use his guest bedroom, so it meant I’d get two hours’ sleep before I had to be on the move again. Thank God for adrenaline, I thought.
‘The taxi’s due just before 7 a.m.,’ he continued. ‘I’ve arranged one meeting for you before you get on the plane. The details will be with your stuff.’
His face looked like death, and we both knew there was no way he would be awake before I left. The only thing remaining was to say goodbye.
He took all our notepads and USB drives, threw them in the fireplace and put a match to it. I’m sure it wasn’t in the manual, in the section about the proper destruction of classified material, but at least the fire gave the room a homey feel and took the chill off our feelings about what lay ahead.
‘I wish I could be there to have your back,’ he said sincerely. ‘Especially when your back’s against the wall. But I won’t be.’
‘Nobody will,’ I replied.
‘You’re right about that – you’re on your own.’
Our eyes met and I expected him to put out his hand to shake and wish me luck, but he didn’t.
‘You’re not like me; you’re not like any agent I’ve ever known, Scott. Your weight is your heart,’ he said.
I thought about that for a moment. My weight was my heart? Nobody had ever said that before, but there seemed a truth to it.
‘You feel things maybe more than you should,’ he said. ‘There are circumstances in which that could make things very difficult for you.’
He turned and poked the fire. It wasn’t comfortable to hear, but he had a right to say it – he was my case officer.
‘If for some reason it all goes to hell and you’re certain they’re going to work on you, don’t wait too long – hit the eject button.’
‘Take myself out, you mean?’
He didn’t answer, not directly. ‘Ever get to Afghanistan?’ he wanted to know.
‘No, I didn’t,’ I said.
‘Lucky you. I did a few years in Kabul – twice. The Brits were there a hundred years before us, but things weren’t much different. They used to have a song they’d sing:
‘When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your god like a soldier.’
He sort of shrugged, trying not to make too much of it. ‘So yeah, like the English soldiers said – “roll to your rifle”. There’s no point in suffering, Scott – no point in dragging it out.’
I knew it then, I knew without a doubt, that he had gone down into the archives and read my file.
Chapter Ten
YOU COULDN’T REALLY call it sleep – after a restless few hours lying on the covers in Whisperer’s guest room, I got up with the first light. I had heard the back door of the house open earlier, so I wasn’t surprised to find the fiction of my new life sitting on the kitchen bench.
I opened the battered suitcase – the Samsonite I had supposedly used for years on both family vacations and work assignments – put the rest of the material inside and went back to the bedroom.
After showering, I looked through the clothes that had been supplied and was pleased to see that most of them had tags from stores in New York. Somebody knew what they were doing. I selected an outfit that an FBI special agent would wear when travelling to an exotic place. In other words, I dressed like I was going to the office but left off the tie. I checked the leather wallet with its credit cards, slipped it into my jacket and looked at the passport.
At some stage during the previous night Whisperer and I had taken a photograph of myself against a white wall and he had emailed it to the CIA over in Langley. I looked at the photo now, pasted into the well-used book, and I had to say the techs had done a good job with their nuclear-powered version of Photoshop. The hair was a different style and there were fewer lines around my eyes. It was me, just five years younger.
I checked my posse
ssions one last time, packed the clothes and toiletries into the Samsonite and turned to the carry-on they had provided. Inside I put my travel documents, passport, laptop and a partly read copy of a book they had given me for the plane. I looked at its cover and smiled.
I guess somebody had thought hard about what an FBI special agent would use to entertain himself on a long-haul flight and decided that a serious work dealing with the science of investigation would be ideal. It was my book. I have to say I was pleased – not out of vanity, but because it meant I wouldn’t have to wade through a novel on the off chance that some border guard questioned me about it.
On top of the book I placed the Beretta 9-mil pistol in its holster – standard issue FBI – and the box of ammunition they had provided. It would have to come out first and be shown to airport security, along with the document in my wallet that gave me authority to carry it ‘in all and every circumstance’.
I closed the door quietly and, wearing another man’s clothes, left the house in the shallow light between dawn and morning. I passed the guard in his security box but he didn’t do anything more than glance in my direction then turn away. The taxi was waiting on the other side of the electronic gates, and I threw my suitcase and carry-on into the back seat and climbed in.
Whisperer had organized for it to take me to my meeting, but I had already decided to change the arrangements. I told the driver to head to Union Station and drop me at the car-rental offices. I wanted to try out the passport, driver’s licence, credit cards and anything else I could think of in Brodie Wilson’s wallet. It was better to find out that somebody had screwed up whilst I was in DC than under surveillance at Istanbul airport.
Everything went through, and after a few minutes I had entered the address of my meeting into the vehicle’s navigation system and was heading into the morning rush.
Forty minutes later I pulled through the gates of a Virginia horse farm, drove down a long drive and stopped in front of a beautiful farmhouse. Almost immediately a man came out to meet me. In his early eighties and lonely in his rolling acres – his wife dead for ten years past and the horses long since gone – he was only too happy to spend a couple of hours talking to me about his life’s work.
A Nobel prizewinner, he had once been the world’s leading virologist, part of the team that had long ago planned the eradication of smallpox. He had been told I was an FBI researcher conducting a threat analysis into biological weapons. The truth was that Whisperer wanted me to have as much knowledge as possible in the hope that some tiny detail, a fragment of information, would prove to be the key at some later date. It was either a very good idea or an index of his desperation – take your pick.
From his library the old guy produced bound volumes of scientific journals and faded notebooks containing his research notes. While I read through the information he fed me I asked him if anyone had ever come close to finding a cure for any version of smallpox.
He laughed – that dry, rasping laugh some old people have when there’s not much life left. ‘After the virus was eradicated, science lost interest – all the money and research went into AIDS, that’s where the glory was.
‘There were no prizes awarded because there was no pressing need, and no cure because there was no research,’ he said.
‘So all we need is half a dozen suicide infectees and we’ve got a full-on catastrophe,’ I replied.
He looked at me like I was crazy. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Human vectors?’ he said. ‘Is that what you’re saying? And tell me, how will these suicide infectees get here – in carts with stone wheels?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Four thousand years ago the Hittites sent people infected with plague into the cities of their enemies. As far as I know, that was the last time anyone used human vectors in biological warfare.’
He might have won a Nobel Prize, but his history didn’t sound right to me. ‘No, all the government studies have been based on people being sent into the country—’
His skull-like head started wagging in anger. ‘That’s because governments don’t know shit,’ he said. ‘Even British soldiers – who weren’t exactly scientific geniuses – came up with the idea of using contaminated goods to wipe out Native Americans.’
‘Blankets you mean—?’
‘Of course I mean blankets – fresh from their smallpox ward. That was almost three hundred years ago, and things have come a long way since then. You read the news? Every week there’s some story about poisonous pet food from China being recalled, adulterated toothpaste turning up on the docks, imported baby food contaminated with melamine. And these are accidents. Imagine how easy it would be to do it deliberately.’
He looked up to see if I was following him. I got the feeling he had been beating the drum for years but nobody had started marching.
‘Go on,’ I said.
His voice was quieter, but it wasn’t due to fatigue or old age: it was resignation. ‘You know, we’ve outsourced everything in this country. Do we actually make anything any more? When you rely on imports for so much, there’s no security. Not real security. Who the hell would bother with vectors?
‘I’m not an alarmist, I’m a scientist, and I’m saying you can forget them. It’s contamination that is the risk. Find something ordinary and send your pathogen in from overseas – the new version of the blanket. That’s how a modern, intelligent enemy would do it.’
He ran his hand through where his hair once would have been. ‘I’m old and I’m tired, but it will happen, and it’ll happen in the way I’ve explained. A writer called Robert Louis Stevenson once said that “sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences”.
‘He was right – so I say pull up a chair and pick up your fork, the time is coming when we’ll all be chowing down.’
Chapter Eleven
WHEN I ARRIVED at the horse farm, I had faith. I believed in rock ’n’ roll, the Western dream and the equality of man. But most of all I believed in a worldwide dragnet for an Arab fugitive and that temperature checks at every border would keep the pin in the grenade.
By the time I left, I still had faith in rock ’n’ roll, but little else. The old man with the translucent skin and impatient manner had convinced me that what he termed a ‘modern, intelligent enemy’ would never be caught by rounding up the usual suspects. Nor would there be any suicide vectors.
As I left his tree-lined drive and headed towards National airport, I realized that we were chasing a new kind of terrorist. I saw the future and I knew that the day of the fundamentalist and fanatic had passed. In their wake, a new generation was emerging and the man with the smallpox – highly educated and adept with technology – was probably the first. The cave-dwellers with their bomb belts and passenger planes converted into missiles looked like dial-up. This man was broadband. And say he was flying solo? If he had done it by himself, then that was an even more astonishing achievement.
Nobody likes to think they might have met their match, especially not an intelligence agent selected and trained to be the best on the battlefield, but that was my deeply held fear as I arrived at the airport. And I have to say, as the Saracen and I circled closer to one another in the weeks which lay ahead, I saw nothing to put that feeling back in its box. He would have been brilliant in any area he had chosen to pursue.
So it was in a sombre frame of mind that I dropped the rent-a-car, headed through security and boarded the plane to La Guardia in New York. From there I took a cab to JFK – I was a live agent now, arriving exactly like any genuine Manhattan-based federal agent – and made the flight to Istanbul with barely twenty minutes to spare.
For the next six hours I buried my head in the emails, photographs and case notes that formed the skeleton of Brodie Wilson’s life. Only when I had put flesh on the bone – giving names to my kids, assigning them birth dates which I would remember even under duress, listening to the God-awful music loaded on the MP3 player – did I c
lose the computer and tilt the seat back.
I wasn’t going to sleep. I wanted to think about the one other thing which had been on my mind: what was in my file.
Chapter Twelve
I HAVE SEEN men so scared they defecate themselves. I have seen men who are about to die get an erection. But I have only ever seen one man so terrified that he did both at the same time.
He was a prisoner at Khun Yuam, the CIA black prison hidden in the lawless jungle along the Thai–Burma border. As I mentioned, I went there as a young man because one of the guards had died in questionable circumstances and, given the nature of the dark arts that were practised within its walls and the high value of its prisoners, any unusual death had to be investigated. That was my job, as raw and inexperienced as I was.
The military guard who died – an American of Latvian descent known as Smokey Joe – was an unpleasant piece of work, the sort of guy who would break your arm then knock you down for not saluting. He had been found floating in a back eddy of a roaring river and, while somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make it appear that he had fallen from a dilapidated rope footbridge, I wasn’t convinced.
I chose a CIA interrogator from the prison’s staff because he was about the same size as Smokey Joe and, without telling him why, asked him to accompany me to the bridge. A dozen of his colleagues and an even larger number of guards walked with us, everybody expecting me to explain my theory of exactly what might have happened. Instead, I had a long length of elasticized rope. Too worried about losing face in front of his colleagues, the CIA guy barely objected when I tied the rope around his ankle, secured the other end to a thick wooden beam and told him to jump.
Five times he either made the leap or we simulated someone pushing him, and we quickly established two things: it would have been impossible under those conditions for Smokey Joe to have left a smear of blood I had found on a boulder halfway down and – second – the interrogator didn’t have much stomach for makeshift bungee jumping.