I Am Pilgrim(111)

‘So … we go to Turkey,’ he said in conclusion. ‘How?’

Of course, the secretaries of defense, homeland and state – the Gang of Three was what Whisperer had started calling them in his head – were all for sending in the Fifth Army and the Mediterranean Fleet and storming the beaches. A hundred thousand agents wouldn’t be enough for what they had in mind. The president calmed them down.

‘We’ve caught a glimpse of somebody,’ he said. ‘If we charge in, if we flood the zone, she’ll take fright and head for Syria, Saudi, Yemen – you name it – some hole we might never be able to dig her out of.’

He had read about the mistake George Bush had made when they were chasing Osama bin Laden and he had flooded the zone in Tora Bora. The number of people on the ground and the depth of agency infighting ended up undermining the operation completely. Eventually, they got him by good old-fashioned intelligence work. ‘What do you say, Whisperer?’

‘On the money. The effectiveness of any operation is in inverse proportion to the number of people used,’ he said, ready to go to war with the Gang of Three if he had to. ‘It’s the type of work covert agents do, the best of ’em anyway. We send in a Pathfinder and, if he’s good enough, and our luck comes back, he’ll find out enough to light the way for the rest of us.’

The Gang of Three said nothing, probably still dreaming of massive bombing runs and the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. ‘Who do we send?’ the president asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Whisperer replied, and that was why the president respected him so much: he was one of the few people in Washington willing to admit he didn’t know something. ‘I’ll come back to you.’

The same thought ran through all their heads. One man, that was all, a Pathfinder alone in a strange country. Not a job for a man afraid of cracking, for someone who had never learned to dance.

The six people in the Oval Office decided there was little more they could do while they waited for Whisperer. The man himself stood up and deftly scooped up the copy of the Echelon report the chief-of-staff had put on the coffee table – he didn’t want that left lying around. As the keepers of the great secret headed for the door, one last thought occurred to the president and he called out to Whisperer: ‘Where exactly in Turkey are we talking about?’

Whisperer leafed through the pages of Echelon’s report. ‘A province called Muğla,’ he replied. ‘The name of the town is Bodrum.’





Chapter Fifty


WHISPERER DIDN’T SHOWER, didn’t eat, didn’t rest. He called ahead from his car to have every current government file on southern Turkey downloaded and on his office computer by the time he got there. He wanted to know as much about the area before he even thought about which agency – let alone which operative – he was going to tap as the Pathfinder.

Hence, immediately after arriving from the White House, he spent the morning shut inside his large office with the blinds drawn and the door closed, hunched over his screen.

He had just finished a State Department analysis of Turkey’s current political situation – another ten pages of fellatio, he thought to himself – and picked up a thin file which had been sent to the US Embassy in Ankara, the country’s capital.

It was from a homicide detective in the NYPD, and it was asking for help in discovering the names of all female US citizens who had applied for Turkish visas in the last six months. Whisperer didn’t know it, but Ben Bradley had come up with the idea – a good idea too – that somebody who had a Turkish phone number and an expensive calendar featuring spectacular Roman ruins might be thinking of going there.

Whisperer saw that it concerned some murder at a hotel called the Eastside Inn – not the sort of place he would be staying anytime soon to judge by the grainy photos attached to the police crime report – and was about to lay it aside.

Then he stopped. The eye for detail that he had developed as a young man when analysing spy photos of Soviet military installations had never left him. By habit, he always looked deep into the background of any shot, and now he was looking at a man barely visible in the shadows of a murder scene.

Whisperer knew him. Even in the photo he seemed to be a man apart, just watching – as he had probably spent half his life doing.

Whisperer stared at the image of me for a long time, thinking, then pressed a button on his desk, summoning his special assistant. A man in his late twenties, well tailored and ambitious, entered almost immediately.

‘I want you to find a man,’ Whisperer told him. ‘I don’t know what name he uses now, but for a long time he called himself Scott Murdoch.’