Chapter Thirty-two

I LANDED BACK in Bodrum just at dawn. I had no luggage and, with a freshly issued visa in my passport, combined with my FBI shield, I passed through Turkish immigration without delay. I walked out of the terminal, located my car in the parking area, and headed on to what is known as the D330 to Bodrum.

Everything was fine for fifteen minutes but, despite the early hour, I then ran into a long tailback of eighteen-wheelers, tourist coaches and countless Turks blasting their horns in frustration. I pulled off at the first opportunity and headed south-west, in the general direction of the sea, figuring that sooner or later I would either hit Bodrum or hook back on to the highway.

It didn’t work out that way: I ended up in a lonely area scarred by landslips and jumbled rocks, deep cracks and jagged rifts. It was dangerous ground and even the trees were stunted in the crumbling soil, as if they knew they had taken root on a fault line. Turkey was in a seismic hot zone and there were long stretches of the southern coast that stood on shifting, unstable land.

I came upon an intersection, made a left, accelerated round a curve and knew I had been in that uninhabited corner of the world before. Even as a psychologist I couldn’t say whether it was an accident or if a subconscious hand had guided my decisions – all I knew was that, just down the road, I would see the ocean and, half a click beyond it, I’d find, figuratively speaking, the site of the shipwreck.

As anticipated, I reached the sea – a turbulent mess of currents dashing against the rocks – and drove along the clifftop. Ahead I saw the small bluff where, as a young agent, I had parked the car so long ago.

I stopped near an abandoned kiosk, got out and walked closer to the cliff edge. Safety – of a sort – was provided by a broken-down security fence. Signs were attached to it, displaying a message in four languages: DANGER OF DEATH.

Although nobody visited the place any more, it had once – long ago – been hugely popular with both sightseers and archaeologists. The constant earthquakes and landslides, however, had eventually become too much, the kiosk had fallen into disuse and the tourists had found plenty of other ruins equally as attractive and a damn sight safer. It was a pity, because it was a spectacular site.

I paused near the fence and looked along the cliffs. Stone steps and fragments of ancient houses descended eerily into the surging sea. Marble columns, parts of porticos and the remnants of a Roman road clung to the cliff side. Kelp and driftwood were scattered among the ruins and the wind-borne spray of centuries had crusted everything with salt, giving it a ghostly sheen.

Further out to sea, the outline of a large piazza was clearly visible under fathoms of water, a classic portico stood on a rocky outcrop with sunlight streaming through it – known as the Door to Nowhere – and the restless sea flooded back and forth across a wide marble platform, probably the floor of some grand public building.

It had been a major city of antiquity, a trading port long before the birth of Christ, but a huge earthquake had torn away the coast and lifted up the cliff. The sea poured in and drowned nearly everyone who had survived the initial jolt.

I walked along the fence, dirt spilling down and hitting the rocks two hundred feet below, until I turned the corner of the bluff. The wind was much stronger, the vegetation more stunted and the landscape even more unstable and I was forced to grab hold of a steel warning sign to steady myself. I looked down: jutting out into the water was an old wooden jetty, much diminished since I had last seen it.

It had been built decades ago by a group of enterprising fishermen who had realized that ferrying tourists and archaeologists into the ruins by boat was a far better way to earn a lira than hauling in nets and lobster pots. The main attraction back then hadn’t been the shattered townscape or the Door to Nowhere but a long tunnel which had led to what was reputed to be the finest Roman amphitheatre outside the Colosseum. Renowned in the ancient world for the brutality of its gladiatorial contests, it was known as the Theatre of Death.

I had never seen it – nobody except for a few brave archaeologists had been in it for thirty years. The tunnel, the only way in and out, was barred and gated after a giant landslide had opened up huge cracks in its ceiling and even the tour operators were muted in their objections – nobody wanted to be caught inside that if the whole lot came down.

But it wasn’t a Roman slaughterhouse or the other ruins that had taken me to the edge of the cliff. It was the old jetty that had brought back a flood of painful memories.