Chapter Eighteen. Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Eighteen

WE WOUND OUR way down into bodrum in silence. Ben never called Marcie – faced with a choice between two evils, and unable to come up with an alternative to my plan for finding out the truth from the Saracen, he chose the lesser of them.

‘Take me through the arrangements again, ’ he had said, once he had overcome his shock – and fear – on hearing about the unfolding catastrophe.

When I had finished explaining the plan again and answered a host of questions – even down to the length of rope and how tight to make the noose – I put the car into gear, swept past the terrace and hit the road.

I concentrated on the driving, slowing only when we hit Bodrum and started to weave through the backstreets. Once I got close to the house I was looking for, I pulled to the kerb and parked a good fifty yards away. I pointed it out to Ben, made him name ten significant features and then repeat them. It was a standard way of imprinting a memory, and most studies showed that, even under extreme stress, a subject would remember six of them. Satisfied that, even in the pounding whirl of a live mission, Bradley would find the correct house, I pulled out and drove to the hotel.

While Ben went to the reception desk, I headed for my room, anxious to see how much damage Cumali’s scum-boys had done. As I stepped into the elevator I saw the manager smile and take Ben’s passport.

‘Ahh, Mr Benjamin Michael Bradley, ’ he said. ‘I will need of the credit cards three from you to put me on the side of the safe. ’

‘Say again? ’ said Ben.

Chapter Nineteen

THERE WAS NOTHING. i was standing just inside my hotel room, and not a thing had been touched.

I closed the door behind me and moved to the closet, keyed in the code to the safe and opened it. The laptop and the plastic file were exactly where I had left them.

I swept my eyes around the room. Where the hell had I gone wrong? How had Cumali seen through it? Had the Turkish MIT guy tipped her off, either deliberately or inadvertently? I didn’t think so – he had far too much at risk to blow it for one phone call to a lowly cop. So why hadn’t she taken the bait? With my mind jumping from theory to theory, I walked around the room. I passed the unmade bed – I had put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door when I left so that the scum-boys wouldn’t be disturbed – and stepped into the bathroom.

Everything was how I had left it. Unthinking, I bent to pick up a towel I had left on a stool and saw that the tube of toothpaste was sitting on the shelf where I had put it. Ever since I was a kid, I’d had a strange habit though– I had always laid my toothbrush along the top of the tube. Now it was sitting next to it. Somebody had moved them to open the bathroom cabinet.

I wheeled around, entered the bedroom and hauled the suitcase off the top of the closet. I was relieved to see that, even if an intruder had looked inside, they hadn’t found the Bulgarian phone – it was still hidden inside the lining. I pulled it free of its tape, clicked on an icon, and opened the photos, which had been taken at two-second intervals.

I quickly saw that the scum-boys had come all right – they were just way better than I had anticipated.

The time code showed that two men had entered my room thirty-two minutes after I had departed. One photo showed them face on in perfect focus: a pair of hard-eyed hipsters in their early thirties wearing expensive leather jackets and carrying backpacks. Their quick, efficient movements and the minimum of conversation told me that they were professionals. I had turned the phone’s microphone on, and that gave me a barely audible recording of their muffled voices. While I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I recognized the language: they were Albanians. In retrospect, that should have set alarm bells ringing.

Their nationality also explained the ease with which they had entered the room. Standing in the background of one frame, I saw the bellhop – their countryman and fellow sleaze – being handed a wad of cash. I figured that, after they paid him, he returned to slouching in an alcove in the foyer, acting as their lookout in case I returned early.

There were thousands of photos – thank God the two batteries had held out – but by flicking through them and knowing exactly how professionals worked, I managed to build a picture of exactly what they had done.

The photos showed the leader – the one giving the orders – shrugging off his leather jacket and getting down to work. Underneath, he was wearing a skin-tight black T-shirt – chosen, I was sure, because it accentuated how ripped he was. A lot of steroids, I thought.

He pulled a digital camera out of one of the backpacks and, before they searched the clutter on the small desk, he photographed it so that they could replace everything in exactly the same position. I figured they followed the same procedure as they worked fast through everything else. No wonder, apart from the slightly misplaced toothbrush, I hadn’t thought anyone had been inside.

They turned their attention to the safe and, though the photos weren’t very clear, I could tell it offered no resistance. Muscleman would have turned its cheap circular keypad counter-clockwise and popped it out, revealing the power supply and circuitry. That allowed him to remove the batteries, clearing the code, and plug in his own keypad. A bracket of ten photos showed that he had the door open in under twenty seconds.

They took out the plastic folder and photographed the shot of Cumali’s childhood home before Muscleman produced his own laptop, slipped the disk into it and copied its contents. As soon as it was finished, they turned their attention to my computer. I didn’t need to wade through all the surveillance photos to know what they did …

They used a tiny screwdriver to remove my hard drive and then inserted it into their own computer, bypassing most of my laptop’s security features. With the help of code-generating software, they would have broken through the remainder of the defences and been able to access all my documents and emails within minutes.

From there, it was a simple matter to copy everything on to USB portable drives, return my hard drive to the laptop and put everything back in the safe. I flew through the rest of the covert photos and saw that the men had searched the other parts of the room, entered the bathroom and were out of the door, carrying everything they needed, twenty-six minutes after they had arrived.

I sat on the bed and looked at a photo of them leaving. My hand was trembling with relief: it had been successful; the first stage was over. Cumali had believed the phone call from our man at MIT and acted exactly as we had hoped.

There was no doubt that she would be able to read the stolen data, and that meant the next steps were now entirely in her hands. Would she believe what she saw in the emails? In my fatigue and anxiety, had I made some small but fatal error? Would she be sufficiently panicked – terrified of Bright Light for herself and a Bulgarian orphanage for the child – to code up a message and contact her brother?

Perhaps if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with those questions, I would have paid more attention to the photo I was holding. I knew that there were seven major drug cartels operating in the area and that one of them, run by a lavender farmer out of Thessaloniki in Greece, had a heartfelt interest in the activities of American intelligence agents. Had I been more attentive, I would have thought about who was the most likely person Cumali would find to do her dirty work or maybe even recognized something about one of the men whose image I had captured. But I didn’t, and there was a knock on the door.

I looked through the peephole and saw it was Bradley.

‘Did the burglars come? ’ he asked.

‘Yeah, ’ I replied.

He slumped down in a chair. ‘What about that manager, huh? ’

‘The professor? What about him? ’

He turned and looked. ‘The professor! Professor of what? ’

‘English, ’ I said.

Bradley almost smiled – much to my relief. It meant he was overcoming the disgust he had felt at the role he had been given. In the event that everything went ahead, I needed him calm and totally committed: my life would depend on it.