Chapter Thirty

I HAD FINALLY located a cab, when I heard the bad news.

Having finished the phone call with Cumali, I had seen a vacant cab and dashed into the traffic to grab it. It was a miracle that any pedestrian could survive a horde of Italian drivers but somehow I scrambled inside, and asked the driver to take me to the airport.

I was returning to Bodrum as fast as possible and as soon as I had tightened my seatbelt – wishing it was a full racing harness given the way the guy was driving – I made the second phone call. It was to Ben Bradley.

When he picked up, I told him I was in Florence. ‘We’re back in business, ’ I said, elated. ‘It’s a murder – let the other parties know. ’

‘I’ve been trying to call you for two hours, ’ he said.

‘Sorry, ’ I replied. ‘I had the battery out of my phone. ’ There was only one reason he would have been calling – a message from Whisperer – and I knew that couldn’t be good.

He rattled on about the murder at the Eastside Inn – but that was just camouflage – then mentioned that some colleagues of ours had run a series of tests, computer modelling, in fact, that I needed to know about.

Ben didn’t understand what he was saying – he was relaying a message – so there was no point in asking him questions. All I could do was listen with a sinking heart.

He said that the guys had come up with an interesting date – they were saying 30 September.

‘But you know what computer geeks are like, ’ he continued, and I got the feeling he was reading from a script. ‘It’s hard to tie ’em down; they say you have to allow a two-week contingency for any unforeseen problems – so they’re saying the second week of October. ’

I hung up and sat very still, lost in thought for a long time. I knew from Ben’s message that Whisperer had ordered a team to model – probably under the auspices of some war-game – how long it would take a civilian to churn out a significant amount of smallpox virus using publicly available equipment. Working from that, they had calculated that it could be done by the end of September and then added a couple of weeks leeway.

We had a date now – all time, all events, all hope, was running to one point in time. Call it 12 October, I told myself – Columbus Day. The anniversary of my mother’s death.