Chapter Fourteen

FOR THE FIRST time in my professional life, I was out in the cold – I was on a mission without a legend or cover.

The small jet had crossed Jordan and landed at Milas late in the morning. I passed through Turkish immigration without delay, grabbed my car and, instead of driving to Bodrum, headed fast into Milas. Just behind City Hall, I found a camera store and watched as a young woman took my phone and printed out a hard copy of the photo I had taken of Cumali’s childhood home in Jeddah. The store also sold phone accessories and I bought another battery for the piece of junk I had purchased in Bulgaria.

I found a store catering to tradesmen nearby and picked up a hand drill, a small soldering iron, a bottle of all-purpose glue and half a dozen other items. I threw them in the car and drove hard to Bodrum. I arrived back at the hotel while it was still lunchtime, which meant the manager was out and I made it to my room without delay.

I pulled the battered Samsonite suitcase off the top of the wardrobe and carefully cut open the fabric lining that concealed the inside of the two locks. I drilled out the tiny keyhole of one of them then turned my attention to the Bulgarian phone. With the soldering iron I managed to connect the new battery in sequence – doubling the time the phone could operate – then opened up the menu. I spent a frustrating twenty minutes manipulating the software so that the camera would take a photo every two seconds.

I taped the jury-rigged phone inside the Samsonite so that its camera lens was hard against the drilled-out lock, giving it a clear view of the room. Before I went out, I only had to turn the phone on, glue the fabric back and return the suitcase to the top of the closet. I figured that the camera would be perfectly hidden, but the location had one other great advantage – people searching for something will look inside a box or suitcase but hardly ever examine the object itself.

I now had my own surveillance system, admittedly held together by wire and rope, but workable: I had to know for certain that the burglars had found what I was about to plant. Everything else depended on it.

I took the freshly printed photo of Cumali’s old home and added a computer disk which included a copy of her Bahrain driver’s licence, details of the scuba-diving blog and the precis of her college course in Istanbul. I put everything in a plastic file and placed it inside the in-room safe – a piece of crap with a battery-operated electronic keypad which any burglar worthy of the name would know how to power down, clear the code and open.

The photograph and documents were to convince Leyla Cumali that Michael Spitz was hunting her.

In addition, because they were genuine items, the so-called halo effect would wash over whatever else she found – I was counting on the scum-boys also to steal my laptop. Inside, Cumali would find two emails – totally fake – which I had drafted on the flight across Jordan. I was checking them, inserting them in my inbox at the appropriate dates, when the hotel phone rang.

A woman identified herself as being a secretary at the New York homicide bureau, but I figured it was bullshit – she was almost certainly one of Whisperer’s back-office staff.

‘The flight you are expecting is Turkish Airlines 349 from Rome, arriving at Milas International at 15. 28, ’ she said.

I wasn’t expecting any flight from Rome, but I guessed what had happened: Whisperer had figured a government jet would attract too many questions and had booked Bradley on a commercial flight.

I glanced at my watch: I had ten minutes if I was going to get to Milas in time. I finished checking the emails but didn’t delete any computer files – the material which was genuinely confidential was protected by unbreakable 128-bit encryption, and its presence would lend credibility to the subterfuge. The computer itself was password-protected and there was some low-level code, but I was confident – as Whisperer had told me when he first gave it to me – that it could be busted quickly if somebody wanted to.

I put the laptop in the safe alongside the other material, turned the Bulgarian phone on, re-glued the fabric and went out the door fast.

The bellhop, the young guy behind the reception desk and the woman at the switchboard watched as I exited the elevator. I slid the room key along the desk and called to the phone operator, loud enough for them all to hear. ‘I’m going to the airport. Any calls, I’ll be back at five thirty. ’

I knew that if Cumali was going to have my room turned over, the first thing she would do was try to discover my movements. Hopefully, I had just saved her and the scum-boys some trouble.

As I ran for my car I figured that, by the time I returned, they would have entered the loading dock at the rear, gone up the service elevator, picked the lock on my door and – to make it look like a plain vanilla hotel robbery – my room would be in chaos.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.