I was looking forward to hearing what Grosvenor would have to say but, just as the press corps rose to their feet and a camera grabbed a shot of Grosvenor approaching the lectern, they made the final call for my flight.
I returned the remote, walked down the skybridge, found my seat and, fifty minutes later, caught a glimpse of the turquoise waters of the Aegean Sea – probably the most beautiful stretch of water in the world – as we circled wide and came in to land at Milas airport. It was twenty-five miles inland from Bodrum and after I had gone through the ritual of retrieving the Samsonite yet again – there was no MIT to provide unseen assistance this time – I found my way to the car-rental desk.
It took an age. Computers didn’t appear to have reached the Turkish frontier – all the paperwork had to be completed by hand and copies distributed to various desks. A Fiat four-door was finally brought round to the front and, after myself and two of the office staff had succeeded in converting the navigation to English, I headed out of the airport and hit the road for Bodrum. Thanks to the traffic, I didn’t make much progress and when I finally crested a rise I saw why – up ahead was a convoy of garishly painted eighteen-wheelers and flatbeds. The circus was in town – literally.
This was no cheap sideshow – it was the Turkish State Circus complete with, according to a billboard on the side of one of the semis, ‘one hundred tumblers, eighty hi-wire artists and four snake charmers’. Thankfully, on the outskirts of Milas they pulled into an exhibition ground where they were setting up the big top, the bottleneck cleared and I hit the gas.
Five miles on, I rolled down the window and let the hot breeze wash over me, surrounding me with the scent of pine forests and the promise of another deadly mission. Yes, I was long retired and scared; yes, I was alone and living an elaborate lie. But there was part of me that was so alive it was almost intoxicating.
Chapter Fifteen
THE MILES FELL by the wayside quickly. I drove past olive groves and tiny villages of white Cubist houses, on distant hills I saw derelict windmills which peasants had once used to grind flour, but I was damned if I could see the one thing I needed.
I was looking for somewhere to stop that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, the sort of place a newly arrived FBI agent might pause to enjoy the sunshine and check his phone messages. Several miles past a larger village with a small mosque and a thriving farmers’ market – unchanged in centuries by the look of it – I swept round a curve and saw a café with a panoramic view coming up on my right. I had reached the coast.
I pulled into the café’s car park, stopped well away from its open-air terraces and ignored the view. I got out of the car, opened my cellphone and, as I looked at the screen, ostensibly to check my messages, I restlessly wandered around the Fiat. The whole thing was a sham, a performance enacted for the benefit of the occupants of any vehicle who might have been following me. I knew there would be no messages – what I was doing was running a program that the techs at Langley had implanted in the phone’s software. Near the back of the vehicle the phone started beeping and, as I moved closer, it got louder. Somewhere inside the right rear wheel arch – and accessed through the trunk, I guessed – was a tracking transmitter which had been installed, no doubt, by my buddies at MIT. They wanted to know where I was – there was no surprise in that – but I was quietly pleased about the way they had done it. As any experienced agent would tell you, it was a lot easier to dump a car than a tail.
Satisfied that I was travelling solo, I turned my phone off, removed its battery, slipped both parts into my pocket and turned to the view. No wonder the café was crowded: the rugged hills tumbled down to the waters of the Aegean and the whole of Bodrum was laid out in front of me. It was late in the afternoon, the sunlight washing across the marinas and the two bays that hugged the town, highlighting the walls of a magnificent fifteenth-century castle built by the Crusaders which stood on the headland between them. The Castle of St Peter was its name, I recalled.
It was over ten years since I had last seen the town and it had grown and changed, but that didn’t stop the memories crowding in. For a moment I was a young agent again, watching as the lights from exclusive hotels danced on the water, listening to music from a myriad nightclubs fill the night air. How could a mission which had started with so much promise end in such disaster?
I tried to shrug the memory off and walked to one of several large pairs of binoculars that were fixed to tripods for the benefit of tourists with a few lire to spare. I slipped the coins in and saw in stunning detail expensive villas clinging to the cliffs and a host of remarkable yachts, all of them far too big for any marina in the Mediterranean or Aegean, riding at anchor offshore. I swept past them and tilted up until I found a mansion which stood alone in acres of gardens on a headland.
Built over fifty years ago and with tall colonnades, vine-covered loggias and cascading terraces, it had a faintly Roman air. Its shutters were closed and, with the headland losing the afternoon light, it seemed to sit in brooding shadow. As impressive as it was, I didn’t like the house: even at that distance there seemed something sinister about it. I had no particular knowledge of it, but I was certain it was the French House and that it was from the end of its sweeping lawn that Dodge had plunged to his death.
I returned to my car and drove down into Bodrum, heading back into my past.
Chapter Sixteen
THE HOTEL I was booked into wasn’t what anyone would call fashionable – I mean, people weren’t drilling holes in the walls to get inside. Those sorts of places were down on the waterfront with 24-hour champagne bars, open-air dance clubs, and Ukrainian models doing lingerie shows on private beaches.
Mine was in a backstreet with a car-repair shop at one end and a used-furniture shop at the other. Built out of cement block which had been painted a pale blue, ‘tired’ was about the kindest word that could be applied to it. When I drew up outside I was forced to admit that the staff in Whisperer’s makeshift back office had done an outstanding job – it was exactly the sort of place you would expect an FBI agent travelling on his country’s dime to stay.
Even as I walked up the front steps I knew what I would find inside: faded curtains, a limp buffet for breakfast and a pair of potted palms clinging to life. The man standing behind the reception desk, like the hotel itself, had seen better days. Over the years all his features appeared to have been battered every which way but loose. I learned later that he had once been one of Turkey’s most successful amateur middleweights. If that was the look of a winner, I certainly didn’t want to see the loser. Yet, when he smiled – and he smiled in expansive greeting as I walked through the door – his face was so full of vitality and goodwill it was impossible not to like him. Pumping my hand, he introduced himself as the manager and owner, pulled out an index card on which I was required to write my name, passport details and home address, and took imprints from three credit cards. ‘Just to be on the side of the safe,’ he confided happily.
Let’s just say his English was idiosyncratic.
‘It’s a great pity of the shame you weren’t here on the Saturday night, Mr Brodie David Wilson,’ he continued. For some reason he had decided that all English speakers had to be referred to by the full name given in their passports.
‘The fireworks were of a nature rarely by anyone to be seen.’
‘Fireworks?’ I asked.
‘Zafer Bayrami,’ he replied.
I had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe it was some kind of blessing. ‘Zafer Bayrami?’ I said.
‘The Day of Victory. All peoples of the world know of this date – the nation of great Turkey wrung the heads of enemies that were mainly of the Greeks.’
‘Ah,’ I replied. ‘No wonder there were fireworks.’ The Turks and the Greeks had been at it for centuries.
‘I went up for the watching on the roof. A huge bomb of the phosphorus exploded over the headland of the south. The Greece peoples probably thought we were attacking again.’ He thought
this was a fine joke and laughed loudly.
‘The southern headland,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that where the French House is?’
A shadow passed over his face. ‘Yes.’
‘And somebody died there on Saturday night, didn’t they?’
‘A misfortune of the first rank, a man of very few years. Terrible,’ he said, shaking his head in sadness. I think he had such a love of life that he found the death of just about anyone upsetting. Well, maybe not if they were Greek.
‘Is that why you have come to us – for the investigate, Mr Brodie David Wilson?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Who told you that?’
‘The police,’ he replied, as if it were perfectly normal. ‘They were here of this morning, two of them. The woman one left you a message.’
He handed me an envelope and called for the bellhop.
Chapter Seventeen
MY ROOM WAS pretty much what I had expected, even down to the faded curtains and a small pile of magazines with coffee stains on the covers.
No sooner were we inside than the bellhop, an Albanian drifter in his late twenties, started opening and closing closet doors in the age-old belief that the greater the activity, the bigger the tip. I didn’t pay much attention: my interest was catching up on the nuclear trigger and seeing what the president had said to calm the nation.
I found the remote and switched on the TV in the corner. I got Al Jazeera, which was leading with the story but had managed to find their own angle – they were telling their mainly Arab audience that the developments over the last twelve hours would mean an explosion of racial profiling at airports and travel terminals throughout the world. For once – even though they didn’t realize why – they had got it absolutely right.
I started to channel surf and got two local news stations, a women’s talk show, several strange soap operas which were so brightly lit they hurt your eyes, and then I was back at Al Jazeera. That couldn’t be right – where was the BBC, CNN and all the others? – and I started hitting buttons. I was okay with guns but remotes weren’t my strong point.
I explained to the bellhop – half in mime, half in Turkglish – that I wanted to watch the English cable news channels. I even wrote out the names for him to make sure he understood.
‘No, no – not here,’ he kept repeating, pointing at Al Jazeera, making it clear that, if you wanted English news, that was your only option. He was so adamant that I was forced to accept it – as far as Bodrum was concerned, none of the English-language channels were available.
After he left I slumped into a chair. The situation was serious for one simple reason: the messages from the woman in Bodrum to the man in the Hindu Kush were entirely composed of fragments from English-speaking news channels.
We knew from the CIA analysis of the recordings that the audio quality of the news programmes was too good to have been taken from a computer: they were recorded up close to a TV’s speakers, and I had been harbouring a mental image of the woman carefully recording and editing the material.
But if you couldn’t get the stations in that part of Turkey then she must have recorded the material elsewhere and driven to the phone box in Bodrum to send the messages. It meant she could have come from hundreds of miles away – from Iraq or Lebanon or anywhere, for God’s sake.
I ran my hand through my hair. By that time I had been in Bodrum for ten minutes and already the potential background of the woman had expanded exponentially. Dog-tired, I decided to put the problem aside and stick to my original plan. That had been to shower, grab my cellphone and – using the map of central Bodrum I had committed to memory – start locating and photographing phone boxes. It didn’t quite work out that way.
It was 3 a.m. when I woke up, still in the armchair, and I figured somebody walking the streets and taking photos at that time – even if parts of Bodrum were still partying – would draw exactly the sort of attention I wanted to avoid.
With no alternative and deciding to have at least one good night’s sleep, I was getting ready for bed when I saw the envelope from the Bodrum cops. That contained even worse news.
In a few brief lines – thankfully, in good English – it said they had tried to contact me before I left America in order to save me the journey. They said that the evidence in Dodge’s death was clear and overwhelming: it was a tragic accident and, as a result, the investigation was being terminated.
Chapter Eighteen
WITHOUT AN INVESTIGATION, there was no need for Agent Brodie Wilson in Bodrum.
Take it slow, we’re not finished yet, I told myself as I arrived at police headquarters right on nine the following morning.
That was the time the cop who had signed the letter had suggested that I should call by and meet her.
‘You’ll have no problem in making the afternoon flight out of Bodrum,’ she had written. ‘It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to bring you up to date.’
Once inside, I was handed over to a young cop in a beautifully pressed uniform and the shiniest boots I’ve seen outside of a Marine honour guard. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He led me out the back, up a flight of stairs and into a warren of offices occupied by the detectives. At the end of a corridor we entered a room with two desks and a view into the courtyard of an adjoining house. The whitewashed home was falling down, plaster crumbling from its walls, broken tiles scattered across the roof, but it didn’t matter. It was rendered beautiful by virtue of two old frangipani trees in its courtyard.
Only one of the desks was occupied. A young woman with a tumble of dark hair – obviously a secretary – was behind it, with a phone to her ear and typing on a computer which was so old it had probably arrived pre-loaded with Pong.
The secretary was one of those women where everything about her was extravagant – her gestures, her boobs straining against a tight blouse, her make-up, her ass in a pencil skirt. The moods, too, one suspected. As I waited for her to finish, it occurred to me that, in many ways, she represented the contradictions of modern Turkey – she was young in a culture wedded to the past, unabashedly female in a society dominated by men, irreligious and Western-looking in a country where one face was always turned east towards Islam.
And, of course – for a deeply conservative nation – there was one last contradiction, the biggest of them all. Drugs. Turkey had become the critical link in the most lucrative trafficking route in the world, a modern Silk Road which transported opium, semi-refined heroin and fine-grade hash from Pakistan and Afghanistan into Western Europe, over the border to Lebanon or across the Caucasus mountains into Russia. If drugs were just another modern commodity – like oil, pumped down transnational pipelines – Turkey had become the biggest interchange in the world.
I knew about it because of Christos Nikolaides, the Greek drug dealer whose death I had ordered in Santorini. In pursuing him I had learned from the DEA that Patros Nikolaides and six other major cartels were wound tight into Turkey – especially this part of Turkey – and despite valiant efforts by some fine Turkish officers, corruption had blossomed and profits had become ever more spectacular.
The secretary showed no sign of finishing the call so I pulled up a chair and fell to thinking about Patros and his Albanian enforcers. Once I had returned to the safety of America, the man had slipped from my mind but I had to admit it was ironic how, under the pressure of the crisis we were facing, I had been drawn back into a corner of the world he knew so well. I wondered where he was – still behind his twelve-foot walls in Thessaloniki, tending to his lavender plants and mourning the loss of his son, I hoped.
I was wrong not to have thought harder about it – spectacularly wrong – but the woman finally hung up, turned her appropriately extravagant smile on me, straightened her blouse in case I hadn’t yet noticed what she considered her two best assets and asked if I was Brodie Wilson.
I nodded, and she told me that her boss was running fifteen minutes late. ‘She takes the little dude to a corner park every morning
. Her car, it just got up and died. It’s Italian – the car, I’m talking about – which explains why it’s a piece of shit.’
I deduced from this that she must have had a boyfriend who was Italian. It also seemed that most of her English had been gleaned from modern American music, summer blockbusters and chatting on the Internet.
‘“The little dude”?’ I asked.
‘Her son.’
‘Is her husband a cop too? That’s the way it usually works in this business.’ I didn’t care much, I was just making conversation – you know, shooting the breeze.
‘No, she’s divorced.’
‘How old’s her son?’
‘The little dude’s six.’ She obviously liked the expression; I guess it made her think she was just as hip as any visiting American.
‘That’s hard, being a single mom with a boy that age.’
She shrugged – I doubt she had ever thought about it. Out of nowhere, disaster arrived and tried to shake hands with me. ‘You have children, Mr Wilson?’
‘No, no little dudes,’ I said, not concentrating and inadvertently telling the truth – at least the truth about myself but in direct contradiction to my legend. I immediately realized the mistake, thought of trying to bite the words back but dispensed with that stupid idea. Somehow I managed to keep my cool.
‘Not that live with me,’ I continued with a smile. ‘I’m divorced, that’s why I know how difficult it is – my former wife keeps telling me.’
She laughed, not noticing anything untoward. Good recovery, I thought, but my palms were damp and I gave myself a metaphorical slap across the head to wake me up. ‘Is that your boss?’ I asked, trying to change the subject, pointing at a photo on the other desk.