Chapter Forty-six

SHORTLY AFTER 9/11, when the US Air Force started bombing sites in Afghanistan to try to kill the leadership of al-Qaeda, a woman living in a remote village became a legend in the mosques where Islamic fundamentalism flourishes.

The air force dropped several laser-guided bombs on a nondescript house but, unfortunately, the US intelligence community had got it wrong again. A man by the name of Ayman al-Zawahiri wasn’t in the building – just his wife and a group of his children.

Out of nowhere, in the middle of a freezing night, the huge explosions levelled the house and killed most of the kids. Their mother, however – badly injured – survived. Almost immediately, men from the surrounding houses fell upon the ruins and, cursing the Americans and swearing eternal vengeance, tore at the masonry and rubble with their bare hands to get to the woman.

She was conscious, unable to move, but she knew that in the chaos of the attack she had not had the opportunity to put on her veil. She heard the rescuers digging closer and, once they got within earshot – frantic – she ordered them to stop. As the wife of an Islamic fundamentalist and a devout Muslim, she would not allow any man who was not a direct relation to see her unveiled face. She said she would rather die than be a party to it, and it was no idle threat. Despite the pleas of the rescuers and several of their womenfolk, she could not be persuaded otherwise and, several hours later, still unveiled, she succumbed to the effects of her wounds and died.

I had read about the incident shortly after it had happened, and I was thinking again about such a level of religious devotion or madness – choose the definition which suits you best – as I walked through the streets of Bodrum. In the back of my mind, it had been exactly that sort of woman I had expected to find using a preconfigured message on a cellphone to communicate with the world’s most wanted terrorist. Instead I got Cumali – a modern working woman by most standards, driving up alone in her black Italian car, and I just couldn’t square that circle.

Certainly the guy in the Hindu Kush was the first of a new breed of Islamic fanatic – intelligent, well educated, technologically accomplished – the sort of man who made the 9/11 hijackers look like the thugs and ruffians they were. At last the West had encountered an enemy worthy of our fear, and my private belief was that he was the face of the future – pretty soon, we would all be longing for the good old days of suicide bombers and hijackers. But however sophisticated he might have been, he was still a cast-iron disciple of Islam, and yet his only collaborator, as far as we knew, appeared to be anything but a fundamentalist. Yes, she dressed modestly in accordance with her religion, but Leyla Cumali didn’t appear to be al-Zawahiri’s wife by any stretch of the imagination.

I stopped outside a bar near the waterfront popular with Bodrum’s large contingent of backpackers, and declined a raucous invitation from three young German women to join them. I glanced around and, further down the road, saw what I needed – a quiet bench deep in shadow – and sat down and called Bradley.

I interrupted him eating a sandwich at his desk and gave him a quick update concerning the history of the French House and told him about the real estate agent’s phone number. I then broached the real purpose of the call. I said that the only other significant news was that the woman in charge of the investigation appeared to be very competent.

‘Her name’s Leyla Cumali, ’ I told him. ‘Remember it, Ben – I think we’ll be dealing with her a lot. She’s in her mid-thirties, divorced, but apart from the fact she’s only been here a few years, I don’t know anything else about her. ’

It sounded natural enough, but I hoped that I had hit just the right note to indicate to Bradley that he had to call our friend and get his people to find out as much about her as possible. Bradley didn’t disappoint me.

‘Cumali, you said? Wanna spell it for me? ’

I gave him the spelling, but I made no attempt to inform Whisperer that she was the woman in the phone box. As big a revelation as it was, I was worried. I didn’t know enough about her yet, she didn’t fit any profile I had imagined and I was scared that somebody in government – maybe even the president himself – would order that she be secretly picked up, undergo rendition to some Third World country and be subjected to whatever torture it took to discover the identity and location of the Saracen. In my view, that would almost certainly be a disaster.

From the beginning I had believed that the woman involved had a way of contacting him, and nothing had changed my mind that the most likely method was an innocuous message on an Internet forum – something like a dating site or buried within the personal ads of a myriad different electronic publications. Such a message, unremarkable to anyone else, would have meant volumes to the Saracen.

And yes, as smart as the system was, it had one other great advantage: it could be booby-trapped. One tiny alteration – changing the spelling of a word, for instance – would tell the Saracen that she was acting under duress and he had to vanish. Once he was warned that we were on his trail, I didn’t believe we would ever catch him.

For that reason I wanted to warn Whisperer directly that rendition would probably be a catastrophe. I also wanted to be able to tell him more details about the relationship between a modern Turkish cop and a fervent Arab terrorist.

Once darkness fell, I knew I had a perfect opportunity to research Leyla Cumali’s life in far greater depth.