Chapter Seventy-two

I WAS WALKING along the marina, footsore and hungry, but too anxious to eat or to rest. It had been three hours since I had slipped the battery back into my phone and left Cumali’s office and already I had covered the beach, the Old Town and now the waterfront.

Twice I had started to dial Bradley, desperate to hear the results of the DNA tests, but I stopped myself in time. I had stressed to him on the phone how urgent it was and I knew that he and Whisperer would have made arrangements to speed them through the lab. He would call the moment he had them, but it didn’t make it any easier. Come on, I kept saying to myself. Come on.

I was halfway between a group of seafood stands and several rowdy nautical bars when the phone rang. I answered it without even looking at the caller ID. ‘Ben? ’ I said.

‘We got the results, ’ he replied. ‘No details yet, just a phone summary, but I figured you’d want them as soon as possible. ’

‘Go ahead, ’ I replied, trying to keep my voice neutral.

‘The little guy is definitely not the woman’s son. ’

My response was to exhale – I was so wired I hadn’t even realized I was holding my breath. Why the hell was Cumali raising him as her own then? I asked myself.

‘But the two individuals are closely related, ’ Bradley continued. ‘There’s a 99. 8 per cent probability that she is the boy’s aunt. ’

‘His aunt? ’ I said, and repeated it to myself. His aunt?

‘What about the father? Can they tell us anything about that? ’ I asked.

‘Yes – the father of the child is the woman’s brother. ’

So, I thought, Leyla Cumali was bringing up her brother’s son. I felt a rising tide of excitement – of sudden clarity – but I didn’t say anything.

‘That’s all I can tell you at the moment, ’ Bradley said.

‘Okay, ’ I said coolly, and hung up.

I stood still, blocking out the sound of the drinkers in the bars. Leyla Cumali’s brother had a little boy and she was raising him – in complete secrecy – as her own child.

Again, I asked myself, why? Why lie about it? What was there to be ashamed of in taking care of your nephew?

I thought of the morning when I had met her at the corner park – of the anger that had greeted my intrusion and the furtive way in which she had gathered up the little guy. I recalled thinking then that I had walked into a secret. It wasn’t normal; none of those things made any sense.

Unless, of course, the father was an outlaw – a soldier in a secret war, for instance. A man always on the move, a man wanted for jihad or terrorism or something worse …

Maybe such a person would have handed his son over to his sister to raise.

In those circumstances, Leyla Cumali-al-Nassouri would have reacted with alarm when an American, an investigator, showed up and discovered the boy’s existence.

But what about the little guy’s mother? Where was she? Dead, probably – bombed or shot in any one of the dozen countries where Muslim women are cut down on a daily basis.

I found a bench, sat down and stared at the ground. After a long time I looked up and, from that moment forward, with an overwhelming sense that I had reached a watershed, I no longer believed that Leyla al-Nassouri had been speaking on the phone to a terrorist. I believed she had been talking to her brother.

At last I had squared my circle – I understood the real connection between an Arab fanatic and a moderate Turkish cop. They hadn’t been discussing the mechanics of a deadly plot or the kill-rate of smallpox. We had assumed they were and had gone charging through the door marked ‘terrorism’, but the truth was far more human: they were family.

Yes, she probably knew he was an outlaw, but I doubted she had any idea of the magnitude of the attack in which he was involved. There were countless Arab men who were Islamic fundamentalists and believed in jihad – twenty thousand on the US no-fly list alone – all of whom had some sort of price on their head and were trying to make sure that Echelon or its offspring couldn’t find them. To her mind, he was probably one of them – a garden-variety fanatic. There was no evidence to show that she knew he was plotting murder on an industrial scale or that she was even aware he was in the Hindu Kush.

I started to walk fast, weaving through knots of vacationers, dodging traffic and heading towards the hotel. But what of the two phone calls? Why, at that critical time, had the Saracen risked everything to speak to her?

Like I said, I was finding clarity. In the filing cabinet in Cumali’s bedroom I had found the bill from the regional hospital – the one that showed that the little guy had been admitted with meningococcal meningitis. I couldn’t remember the exact date of his admission, but I didn’t need to – I was certain it coincided with the two phone calls between Leyla Cumali and her brother.

Once she learned how gravely ill he was, she would have posted the coded note on the internet message board, telling the Saracen to phone her urgently. In her distress, she would have reasoned that a father had a right to know and, given her brother’s religious devotion, he would have wanted to pray for his son.

Most sites that offer dating and personal ads automatically alert other users to posts that might interest them. The Saracen would have received a text message telling him that a fellow-devotee of an obscure poet – or something similar – had posted an item. Knowing it had to be bad news, he would have phoned her at the designated phone box and listened to her prerecorded coded message.

What a time that must have been for him. On a desolate mountaintop in Afghanistan, trying to test half a lifetime’s work, three people dying of sledgehammer smallpox in a sealed hut, he aware that, if he was discovered, it would probably mean instant death, and then to be told that his son was critically – perhaps fatally – ill.

Desperate, he would have arranged to get an update from Cumali, and that was the second call he made. She would have told him that the drugs had worked, the crisis was past and his son was safe – that was why there were no more calls.

But there was one other thing I realized, and I couldn’t avoid it – the Saracen must have loved the little guy with all his heart to have risked everything for a phone call. I didn’t like it, I didn’t like it at all – I knew from shooting the Rider of the Blue that if you’re going to kill a man, far better it’s a monster than a loving father.

I flew up the steps of the hotel, burst into my room, threw a change of clothes into a bag and grabbed my passport. I knew the Saracen’s surname now, the same as his sister’s – al-Nassouri – and I knew where the family came from.

I was going to Saudi Arabia.

Part Four