Chapter Fifty

WHISPERER DIDN’T SHOWER, didn’t eat, didn’t rest. He called ahead from his car to have every current government file on southern Turkey downloaded and on his office computer by the time he got there. He wanted to know as much about the area before he even thought about which agency – let alone which operative – he was going to tap as the Pathfinder.

Hence, immediately after arriving from the White House, he spent the morning shut inside his large office with the blinds drawn and the door closed, hunched over his screen.

He had just finished a State Department analysis of Turkey’s current political situation – another ten pages of fellatio, he thought to himself – and picked up a thin file which had been sent to the US Embassy in Ankara, the country’s capital.

It was from a homicide detective in the NYPD, and it was asking for help in discovering the names of all female US citizens who had applied for Turkish visas in the last six months. Whisperer didn’t know it, but Ben Bradley had come up with the idea – a good idea too – that somebody who had a Turkish phone number and an expensive calendar featuring spectacular Roman ruins might be thinking of going there.

Whisperer saw that it concerned some murder at a hotel called the Eastside Inn – not the sort of place he would be staying anytime soon to judge by the grainy photos attached to the police crime report – and was about to lay it aside.

Then he stopped. The eye for detail that he had developed as a young man when analysing spy photos of Soviet military installations had never left him. By habit, he always looked deep into the background of any shot, and now he was looking at a man barely visible in the shadows of a murder scene.

Whisperer knew him. Even in the photo he seemed to be a man apart, just watching – as he had probably spent half his life doing.

Whisperer stared at the image of me for a long time, thinking, then pressed a button on his desk, summoning his special assistant. A man in his late twenties, well tailored and ambitious, entered almost immediately.

‘I want you to find a man, ’ Whisperer told him. ‘I don’t know what name he uses now, but for a long time he called himself Scott Murdoch. ’

The special assistant looked at the photo Whisperer pushed across the desk, the face in the background carefully circled. ‘Who is he? ’ he asked.

‘Years back he was known as the Rider of the Blue. He was probably the best intelligence agent there’s ever been. ’

The special assistant smiled. ‘I thought that was you. ’

‘So did I, ’ Whisperer replied, ‘until I met him. ’