Chapter Thirteen

DESPITE HIS VEHEMENT objections, the Deputy Director of the Turkish MIT made the phone call twenty minutes after I had spoken to Whisperer. It was to Leyla Cumali.

I never heard the conversation, of course, but some time later I read a transcript of it translated into English. Even from that document, devoid of all inflection and emotion, it was easy to tell that the MIT guy was a master of his craft. He had one of his assistants phone and schedule a time for Cumali to call him. She was given the number of MIT’s switchboard and, by the time she had made it through various assistants, she would have been in no doubt that she was talking to a very powerful man.

Very politely, he said that he needed her help in a highly confidential matter concerning a foreign visitor. God, the relief she must have felt when she realized he wasn’t investigating her.

‘How well do you know Brodie David Wilson? ’ he asked.

The transcript records a pause – it would have been Cumali overcoming her surprise – but the spook encouraged her.

‘Just your impressions, Detective – you’re not giving evidence here, ’ he said, with a laugh. Damn, he was good.

He listened quietly to her account of me, interrupting now and again to make her think that he cared.

‘Thank you, very good, ’ he said, when she had trailed to a stop. ‘Have you felt at any time that perhaps he wasn’t a member of the FBI? ’ he asked, starting to lay the pipe.

‘No … no, ’ said Cumali, but then hesitated while she thought about it more deeply. ‘There was one thing: he was clever – I mean, outstandingly clever – at what he did. I remember wondering if all FBI agents were that good. ’

‘Yes, that would make sense … him being very good, ’ the deputy director said obscurely. ‘Tell me, did he ever make phone calls in your presence that led you to be suspicious or confused about their content? ’

‘No … He had a strange habit, though – I never noticed it, but my secretary did. Except when he was making a call, he always had the battery removed from his cellphone. ’

Well, I thought, despite the make-up and the stilettos, Hayrunnisa was smarter than I had given her credit for.

‘Why would he take the battery out? ’ the spook asked.

‘I have no idea. ’

‘Then let me help. If somebody has a cellphone in their pocket, it can be turned on remotely without them knowing.

‘Once it is powered up, the inbuilt microphone can be activated. Somebody who is tapping into the phone can then hear everything that is being said in a room. If the battery has been taken out, there is no risk. ’

‘I had no idea, ’ Cumali replied.

‘So you’re not aware that intelligence agents always do that? ’

‘Intelligence agents? Can you tell me what this is about? ’

Working to Whisperer’s instructions, that was exactly the question the deputy director wanted Cumali to ask. He played it like the expert he was.

‘You are a sworn officer of the law – a highly regarded one, I might add. All this is highly confidential. ’

‘Of course. ’

‘We have cameras at the Bulgarian border which record all crossings. We also know the licence tag of Brodie Wilson’s rent-a-car so, thanks to certain software we use, we learned that he entered Bulgaria. Do you know why? ’

The licence-tag recognition system was bullshit – sure it existed, but Turkey wasn’t even close to using it. Cumali, however, had no way of knowing that.

‘No, ’ she said.

‘Two of our men who operate over the border located him in a town called Svilengrad, where he bought a cheap cellphone, a SIM card and made one phone call. Have you ever heard him mention that town? ’

‘Never. ’

‘As a consequence of this, we became very interested in Agent Wilson. For reasons I can’t discuss, we now believe that may not be his real identity. We think his name is Michael John Spitz. Do you have any response to that name, Detective? ’

‘None at all, ’ Cumali replied.

‘Spitz is a member of an elite CIA group, ’ the deputy director continued. ‘That would explain why you thought he was an outstanding investigator. Their job is to hunt terrorists. ’

I could imagine the fear that must have struck Cumali’s heart, sitting in her whitewashed house at the old port, suddenly jolted into thinking about the coded calls between her and the Hindu Kush.

Their job is to hunt terrorists.

In the name of Allah, she must have thought, who were the CIA after – her? Her brother? She knew that he was a wanted man, but what the hell had he dragged her into?

‘We believe the homicide investigation is a cover, ’ the deputy director said. ‘Something has brought him to Bodrum. Do you have any idea what he could be investigating? ’

‘No, ’ she lied. The transcript recorded that she said it ‘forcefully’.

‘Thank you, anyway, you’ve been very helpful, ’ the spook said. ‘At the moment, we’re not going to do anything. We’ll listen to Spitz’s phone calls and wait and see. But I’ll give you a number, a direct line. If you hear anything, you are to call me immediately. Understood? ’ he said, before recounting the number and hanging up.

Whisperer and I had broken all the rules: we had arranged for the target to learn the truth of the mission. But in doing so we had baited a trap – Cumali was a detective and I was gambling everything that her instinct would be to investigate. She would want to know more – fear would make sure of that – and I believed there was only one place she could look: in my hotel room.

She wouldn’t do it herself but, given her work, she would know plenty of criminals who could. It was now my job to make sure that everything was ready when they arrived.