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.