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.