Chapter Thirty-six

I COULDN’T BREATHE for a moment. I was still standing on the bluff above the ruins, remembering the past, but the thought of looking at the TV in the doctor’s old cottage had stolen the air from my lungs.

If Dr Sydney could get the English-language news channels in a far more remote area, how come they weren’t available in Bodrum?

I ran for the Fiat.

It was still early, there was little traffic and the drive into Bodrum was almost as fast as when I had had Mack lying in the seat beside me. I parked on the sidewalk outside the hotel, sprinted up the steps and saw the manager coming out of the dining room.

‘Ahh, ’ he said, smiling. ‘Was the trip of the mirrors with the largeness of glass a success? ’

‘I’m sorry, ’ I replied, ‘I don’t have time. I need to know about the TV service. ’

He looked at me, confused – why the hell would I want to know about that?

‘The bellboy said you can’t get the English-speaking news channels in Bodrum. Is that right? ’

‘That is the truth very much, ’ he replied. ‘The company of great thievery called DigiTurk which gives us the channels of crap has no such service. ’

‘There must be a way – I’ve seen the BBC, MSNBC and several others, ’ I said.

He thought for a moment, turned and made a phone call. He spoke in Turkish, listened to the response then cupped his hand over the mouthpiece as he reported to me. He said that his wife thought that some people bought digital boxes and accessed a European satellite which broadcast the news channels I was asking about.

‘What’s the name of the service – the satellite? Does she know? ’ I asked.

The manager put the question to her, then turned to me and gave the answer. ‘Sky, ’ he said.

Sky was a British satellite broadcaster and I knew from living in London it was a pay service. That meant there were subscribers and, if people were buying decoder boxes, somebody in the organization would have a list of them.

I went up to my room fast and called the company in England. I got passed through eight or nine different phone extensions before I ended up with a helpful guy from the north country whose accent was so thick you could have served a Yorkshire pudding with it.

He was in charge of European subscriptions, and he told me that all the channels I was interested in were carried on Sky’s premium Astra satellite.

‘It’s got a big footprint, that one – it was designed to cover Western Europe and reach as far as Greece.

‘Then quite a few years ago, the satellite’s software was upgraded, the signal got stronger and suddenly you could pick it up in Turkey with a three-foot dish. Of course, you still need the decoder box and an access card, but it means a lot more people have taken it up. ’

‘How many subscribers, Mr Howell? ’

‘In Turkey? We’ve got expats, of course – they take their boxes and cards with ’em when they move. Then there’s the English-themed pubs and clubs – the tourists want their football. Finally, we have the locals who like the programming. All up, there’s probably about ten thousand. ’

‘Can you break it down by area? ’

‘Of course. ’

‘How many people in the vicinity of Bodrum – say, a province called Muğ la? ’ I asked, desperately trying not to let my hopes get too far ahead of me.

‘Give me a second, ’ he said, and I could hear him tapping at a computer. ‘It’s a murder investigation, you said? ’ He was making conversation while he worked to get the data.

‘Yeah, young American guy. He loved sports and TV, ’ I lied. ‘I’m just trying to tie a few things up. ’

‘I got it, ’ he said. ‘About eleven hundred subscribers. ’

My spirits soared. It meant people in Bodrum could receive the television stations I needed. I looked out of the window and imagined the woman I was looking for sitting cross-legged in one of the white Cubist houses, watching a TV with a Sky box on top, grabbing soundbites from a host of different news programmes and working for hours to edit and code them. Eleven hundred boxes – it had narrowed the search for her dramatically – and I wasn’t done yet.

‘If you discount the expatriates and the bars, how many subscribers do you think there are? ’ I asked.

‘Households? Most likely six or seven hundred, ’ he replied.

I was close! Six or seven hundred households was a lot of work, a lot of shoe leather to track down each one of them, but it meant the potential suspects were now ring-fenced. Somewhere among that group was the woman I was looking for.

‘Is that a good number? ’ Howell asked.

‘Very good, ’ I told him, unable to keep the smile out of my voice. ‘Can you give me a list of the subscribers? ’

‘Sure, but I’d have to get authorization. No offence, but we’d need to know for certain it’s the FBI who’s asking. ’

‘I can get you an official letter in a couple of hours. After that, how long would it take? ’

‘It’s just a download and printing it out. A few minutes. ’

It was better than I could have imagined: very soon I would have a list of six hundred addresses, and the woman’s would be one of them. We were on our way.

‘Thanks, ’ I said. ‘I can’t tell you how helpful this is. ’

‘No problem. Of course, you’re lucky it’s only the authorized ones you want. ’

It stopped me in mid-celebration. ‘What do you mean? ’

‘Well, a lot of people tuning in these days—’

I started to feel sick.

‘Use pirated boxes, ’ he continued. ‘Chinese, mostly – if it’s not Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton handbags, they’re counterfeiting boxes and our access cards. They sell ’em through small electronic shops and internet café s – places like that. It’s big business. Once you’ve bought the box and card, the service is free. You there? ’

‘In somewhere like Muğ la, ’ I said quietly, ‘how many pirated boxes do you think there would be? ’

‘A place that size? Ten thousand – maybe more. There’s no way of tracking who has ’em, it’s totally underground. Next year, we think we’ll have the technology to trace—’

I wasn’t listening: next year we could all be dead. Ten thousand boxes and no subscriber list made it an impossible task. I thanked him for his help and hung up.

I stood motionless, the silence crowding in and the black dog of despair biting at my heels. To have had my hopes raised and then so comprehensively dashed was a hard break. For the first time since I had been press-ganged into the war, just for a few moments I thought I had a real way into the problem. Now that it had turned to dust, I was in the mood to be brutal with myself.

What did I really have? I asked. I had compiled a list of phone boxes; by a stroke of good fortune and the work of a team of Italian experts I had stayed in the game – and apart from that? Anyone who didn’t need a white cane could see that I had very little.

I was angry too. I was angry at the fucking Chinese for not controlling the wholesale piracy of other people’s ideas and products, I was angry at Bradley and Whisperer and all the rest who weren’t there to help me, and I was angry at Arabs who thought that the bigger the body count, the greater the victory. But mostly I was angry at the woman, and the man in the Hindu Kush for staying ahead of me.

I walked to the window and tried to find a pocket of calm. The exercise with Sky hadn’t been a complete bust: it had taught me that the woman almost certainly lived in the area, and that was real progress. I looked across the rooftops – she was out there somewhere. All I had to do was find her.

I tried to see in my mind which of the phone boxes she had been standing in, waiting for the phone to ring, but I had no data, and all I could draw was a blank. Yet I could hear the traffic going past and I listened to the muzak – the radio station, or whatever it damn well was – playing faintly in the background.

Come to that, I thought, where was the update on the music? What were Whisperer and those guys doing back home? Wasn’t the NSA supposed to be trying to isolate, enhance and identify it?

I was in just the mood to vent my frustration so, even though it was late in New York, I didn’t care. I picked up the phone.