Thanks to Langley, the entire investigation now rested on a photographer in Istanbul I had never heard of and who might well have been retired or dead.
Chapter Fifty-eight
HE WAS NEITHER, although by the sound of his cough and the lighter firing up a constant stream of cigarettes, the dead part might have been closer than he wished.
I had woken before dawn, dragged my injured leg to the laptop, put the USB travel drive into a slot and started to work through Cumali’s files. It would have been slow and grinding work, except that most of it was in Turkish and I had no choice but to discount the vast majority of them. Even so, you get a sense of things, and I couldn’t claim that among the letters and work files I found anything that raised my suspicions: the mistake that most people make when they want to stop someone from seeing material is to encrypt it, which means that a person like me knows exactly where to look.
As I had suspected when I was in her living room, nothing was coded and, if she had been smart enough to hide any incriminating files in plain sight, I was damned if I could identify them. Nor was there anything in Arabic, even though we had good reason to suspect she knew the language.
Having drawn a blank with the files, I turned to her emails. Thankfully, many of them were in English, and I saw that she had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, many of them other mothers with Down’s syndrome children. Among the hundreds of messages I found only two that made me stop – they were both from a Palestinian charity associated with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a group that frequently organized suicide bombings against Israelis. The emails acknowledged donations to an orphanage in the Gaza Strip, and my first reaction was to ask why – if Cumali really wanted to help kids – she didn’t give to Unicef. On the other hand, charity was one of the Five Pillars of Islam and, if it was a crime to donate money to organizations associated with radical groups, we would end up indicting half the Muslim world. More, probably.
I marked the two emails with a red flag then put the USB drive into an envelope and addressed it to Bradley in New York. As soon as FedEx opened I would courier it to him to be on-passed to Whisperer for further analysis. I looked at the clock – it was 7 a.m. and, though it was early, I wanted to find out whether the photographer was dead or alive.
I called the number, waited for what seemed minutes, and was about to give up and try later when I heard an irritable voice give a greeting in Turkish. I apologized for speaking English, talking slowly in the hope that he could follow me.
‘Can you speak a bit faster? I’m falling back asleep here,’ he said, in an accent that indicated he had watched a few too many Westerns.
Pleased that we could at least communicate, I asked him if he was a photographer and when he confirmed it I said that I was planning a special gift for the wedding anniversary of two friends. I wanted to put together a photo collage of their big day and needed to buy a number of reprints.
‘Have you got the code number?’ he asked, more polite now that there was money to be made.
‘Sure,’ I replied, and read off the number on the back of the stolen glossy.
He asked me to wait while he checked his files and, a minute or two later, he returned and told me there was no difficulty, he had the file in front of him.
‘Just to make sure there’s no confusion,’ I said, ‘can you confirm the names of the bride and groom?’
‘No problemo, pardner. The groom is Ali-Reza Cumali—’ He went on to give an address, but I wasn’t interested: the moment I heard it I knew for sure that the cop hadn’t reverted to her previous surname.
‘And the bride?’ I asked, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. ‘Have you got a name for her?’
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘Leyla al-Nassouri. Is that the couple?’
‘Yeah, that’s them, Sheriff.’ He laughed.
‘I’ve never been quite sure how to spell her unmarried name,’ I continued. ‘Can you give it to me?’
He did, I thanked him for his help, told him that I would be in touch as soon as I had a full list of the photos I needed and hung up. The name al-Nassouri wasn’t Turkish – it was straight out of Yemen or Saudi or the Gulf States. Wherever it was, it was Arabic. And so was the man in the Hindu Kush.
I grabbed my passport, headed out the door and almost ran to the elevator.
Chapter Fifty-nine
THE DOORS SLID open and, although it was only seven twenty in the morning, I stepped out into what appeared to be some sort of celebration. The manager, the receptionist, the bellhop and other hotel staff were gathered at the front desk and had been joined by several of the carpenters and other friends of the manager who had helped me with the mirrors.
The conversation – all in Turkish – was highly animated, and coffee and pastries were being handed around. Despite the hour, somebody had produced a bottle of raki, and I wondered if they had won the lottery or something.
The manager approached me, smiling even more widely than normal, waving a copy of that morning’s local newspaper. ‘We have news of the greatest happiness,’ he said. ‘You recall the SpongeBob, the man of the biggest corruption, a curse on all citizens of goodness?’
‘Yeah, I remember. Why?’
‘He is dead.’
‘Dead?’ I said, faking surprise and taking the copy of the newspaper and looking at an exterior photograph of the marina warehouse with cops everywhere. ‘It’s hard to believe,’ I said. ‘How?’
‘Squashed – flat like the cake of a pan,’ he explained.
‘Some man of idiot brain broke into a house belonging to a cop of the female.’
‘Broke into a cop’s house? Yeah – what an idiot brain.’
‘Probably a Greek people,’ he said, absolutely serious.
‘When did this happen?’ I asked, trying to act normal, just kicking it along. Everybody else was standing near the desk, and the manager and I were in our own private world.
‘Last of the evening, while you were having your relax with the dinner of the fine quality. Just before you walk in with your bloody …’
He paused as a thought occurred to him and, though he tried to haul the sentence back, he couldn’t.
‘They say the killer ran from the boat place with a trail of the blood injury,’ he said. He stopped and looked at me.
Our eyes met and held – there was no doubt he knew who the killer was. I could have denied it, but I didn’t think it would have been convincing; or perhaps I could have issued some dark threat, but I was certain he wasn’t easily intimidated. I didn’t like it but I figured I had to trust my intuition and take a chance on him and his friendship.
‘No, no,’ I said finally. ‘You’re of the wrongness quite substantial. My relax of the fine food wasn’t last night – that was the night before.’
He looked at me in confusion, about to argue, thinking I was genuinely mistaken, but I kept talking so that he didn’t have a chance to blunder on.
‘Last night you and I were here – in the lounge,’ I said. ‘You remember? It was quiet, there was nobody else around.’
Suddenly his eyes sparked as understanding dawned. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Of course, that’s right – the dinner was of the night previous.’
‘Now you remember. Last night, you and I talked, you were explaining to me about the Greeks. It was a long conversation.’
‘Oh yes, one of the longest. Those damn Greek peoples – nothing is simple with them.’
‘True. You had a lot of things, a lot of history, you had to tell me. It was well past 10 p.m. when I went to bed.’
‘Later, probably, 11 p.m. is more the time of my memory,’ he said, with great enthusiasm.
‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ I responded.
We looked at each other again and I knew my intuition about him had been right. The secret was safe.
He indicated the passport in my hand and dropped his voice. ‘Are you leaving in the hurry not to return?’ he asked.
‘No, no,?
?? I said. ‘If anybody asks, I’ve gone to Bulgaria – I spoke about finding an important witness.’
I farewelled him and headed for the front door and my car. I opened the trunk, pulled out the rubber lining and found a way to access the right rear wheel arch. I removed the tracking transmitter held in place by strips of magnets and attached it low down on the pole of a parking sign.
With any luck, no pedestrian would see it and whoever was monitoring it at MIT would think my car was still parked at the kerb.
I got behind the wheel and drove for the border.
Chapter Sixty
ALL DAY I hammered the fiat down endless stretches of highway – stopping only for gas, passing the distant minarets of Istanbul in the afternoon and reaching the Bulgarian frontier in the early evening.
The hardscrabble corner of the world where Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria meet is one of the busiest road junctions in Europe and, once I had left Turkey and entered a sort of no man’s land, I was surrounded by long-haul semis crawling towards Bulgarian immigration and customs.
After forty minutes and about a hundred yards’ progress I called out to the driver of a Danish freighter stopped on the side of the road and asked him how long he figured it would take to clear the frontier.
‘About eight hours from here,’ he replied. ‘Depends on how many illegal immigrants they find and have to process.’
Bulgaria had somehow managed to become part of the European Union and had quickly established itself as the organization’s most vulnerable border, acting as a magnet for anyone who wanted to enter the Union illegally and travel on to other, richer, pastures like Germany and France. By the look of the trucks and people-movers, there was no shortage of chancers and people smugglers.
I thought about trying to get to the front and showing my shield, but rejected it: there was always a chance I’d meet some thickhead who was only too happy to show the FBI who was boss. Instead I undertook some brief preparations, pulled on to the shoulder and drove up the inside of the endless queue. I passed under two overhead structures with cameras and signs and figured that pretty soon the border patrol would come and find me.
Two minutes later, silhouetted against the twilight, I saw blue flashing lights as a car approached fast down the dirt shoulder towards me. It stopped about ten yards in front, blocking my path, and the guy riding shotgun – probably the more senior of the two – lumbered out and walked towards me. He was about my age, overweight, and his uniform looked as if an even bigger man had been sleeping in it. You could tell he was ready to start yelling and order me back to the end of the queue.
I had about ten words of Bulgarian, gleaned from a visit years ago, and luckily they included ‘I am sorry.’ I got it out fast, before he could launch, and I saw that the phrase at least drew some of the venom from his snarling face. I couldn’t tell from his eyes, because, despite the hour, he was wearing shades.
I kept talking, switching to English, throwing in the Bulgarian apology a few more times. I told him that I had been in his fine country before and had always been overwhelmed by the friendliness of the people. I was hoping that would be the case again now that I needed assistance. I was running late and was desperately trying to catch a flight out of Sofia, the Bulgarian capital.
He grunted and looked as if he was about to tell me he didn’t give a shit – like I said, they were a friendly people – when he saw that I was handing him my passport. He looked at me quizzically; I met his gaze and he took the book. He opened it at the details page and found the five hundred Lev in banknotes – about three hundred US, a month’s wages that far east – that I had put in there.
I had arrived at what was always the most dangerous part of any such transaction – paying off an official was a serious offence in any jurisdiction, and it was at that stage the guy in uniform could really shake you down if he wanted to. Five hundred to go to the front of the queue? Try twenty thousand – and your watch and camera, please – not to charge you with attempted bribery.
He asked for my driver’s licence and, with that and the passport, he returned to his squad car. Vehicles that I had overtaken on the inside were now crawling past, hitting their horns in celebration of excellent Bulgarian justice and giving a thumbs-up to the two officers. I wasn’t angry – in their position I probably would have felt the same.
The man returned and told me to open the driver’s door. It looked like the real shakedown was on the way, and I was bracing myself, about to reach for my shield, when he climbed on to the door sill so that he was standing up next to me, holding the door half closed.
‘Drive,’ he said, ‘and hit the horn.’ I did as I was told, and he started signalling to several of the big semis to stop immediately, opening up a gap.
‘Go between them,’ he ordered and, to the accompaniment of huge air brakes hissing, I squeezed into a lane in the middle of the road which half a dozen languages said was for official use only.
‘Faster,’ the officer ordered. I needed no further encouragement, and floored it.
Followed by the squad car with its lights flashing and the officer still hanging on to the open door, we flew past the miles of semis and coaches until we reached a row of glass booths topped by various crests and a huge Bulgarian flag.
The guy clinging to the door took my passport, stepped into one of the booths, borrowed a seal from his colleague and stamped my passport. He returned, handed me the book and – I figured – was about to tell me his colleague also needed a contribution, but I was already hitting the gas and heading into the night before he opened his mouth.
I travelled fast, headlights stabbing into the darkness, revealing acres of forest and – as if life in the new EU wasn’t surreal enough – clutches of women in micro-mini skirts and skyscraper heels standing on the roadside in the middle of nowhere. Major trucking routes in other countries had endless billboards; in Eastern Europe they featured prostitutes, and no country more so than Bulgaria.
I passed hundreds of them – Gypsy girls, mostly – waif-like figures in lingerie and fake fur, hard-eyed kids whose lives revolved around the cabin of a semi or the back seat of a car. If they were pregnant their services sold for a premium, and you didn’t have to be a genius to work out that orphans were one of the country’s only growth industries.
Porrajmos, I said to myself as I drove on, recalling the Romani word that Bill had told me so many years ago: I was looking at just another form of the Devouring.
At last, the young women gave way to gas stations and fast-food outlets and I entered the town of Svilengrad, an outpost of about twenty thousand people which had virtually nothing to recommend it except a pedestrianized main street and a wide range of shops that stayed open until well past midnight to cater to the endless stream of truckers.
I parked the car far away and found four of the stores I was looking for clustered together. I chose the most down at heel of them, the one that – as far as I could tell – had no video recording equipment or surveillance cameras. Inside, I bought the two items that had led me to drive seven hundred miles in twelve hours and had taken me from the edge of Asia into the old Soviet bloc: a piece-of-junk cellphone and a prepaid, anonymous SIM card.
I returned to my car and under a single street lamp in a dark corner of a Bulgarian town nobody had ever heard of, surrounded by farmland and young Gypsy hookers, I made a call to a number with an area code which didn’t exist.
Chapter Sixty-one
USING AN UNTRACEABLE cellphone routed through the Bulgarian phone system, and fairly confident that MIT would not be listening, I waited to talk to Whisperer directly.
I had to tell him Leyla Cumali’s real name, I had to report that she was an Arab and I had to reveal that she was the woman in the phone box. That was the first imperative of any agent who was still ‘live’ and far from home – to pass on what they had learned. It was the only insurance against apprehension or death, and they taught you from the earliest days that information didn’t exist until it
had been safely transmitted. But, more than that, I had to discuss with him the problem of rendition and torture.
The phone rang five times before I heard Whisperer’s voice. ‘Who is it?’ he asked. It was early afternoon in Washington, and I was shocked at how weary he sounded.
‘Dave, it’s me,’ I replied, deliberately using his little-known first name, just in case somebody was listening, keeping the tone light and unhurried despite my excitement and a thrumming anxiety concerning my surroundings.
Although he must have been surprised to hear my voice, he picked up the tenor of the conversation immediately. ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ he said, just as casually, and I was reminded once again how good a case officer he really was.
‘You know the woman we were talking about, Leyla Cumali?’
‘The cop?’
‘Yeah. Well, her real name is Leyla al-Nassouri.’
‘Sounds Arabic.’
‘You’re right. It was her in the phone box.’
There was dead silence at the other end. Despite Whisperer’s studied indifference, despite his years of experience and enormous talent, I had shocked the quiet voice out of him.
I didn’t know it then, but the effect of my words was amplified by the rolling failure of all our other efforts. The hundred thousand agents working for a host of intelligence agencies, everyone supposedly looking for a man trying to build a dirty bomb, were delivering a lot of heat but absolutely no light. Deep down, Whisperer figured we were dealing with a cleanskin and that the chances of catching him in time were diminishing by the hour.
‘Oh yeah – in the phone box, huh?’ he said, recovering his voice and making it sound as if it didn’t mean much at all. ‘You sure about that?’
‘No doubt. I met a guy who played an instrument – I won’t try to pronounce it – made from the wing bone of an eagle. He showed me some footage.’