I Am Pilgrim(119)

‘And you don’t think we have – the people in Washington?’ He said it without anger. I was at one time a leading intelligence agent, and I think he genuinely wanted to know.

‘Maybe in your heads. Not in your gut.’

He turned and looked out of the window. It was starting to rain. He was quiet for a long time and I began to wonder if his blood pressure had taken off again.

‘I think you’re right,’ he said at last. ‘I think, like the Jews, we believed in the fundamental goodness of men, we never thought it could really happen. But damn, they’ve got our attention now.’

We drove through a set of electric gates and stopped at a small guard booth. We hadn’t gone to Whisperer’s office at all, we were at his house.





Chapter Six


THE CURTAINS WERE drawn in whisperer’s study but after several hours, through a narrow gap, I saw the rain clear and a blood-red moon rise. It was a bad omen, I thought.

Normally, I was too much of a rationalist to give any weight to such things, but the vision of the old yacht on a foam-flecked sea had shaken me badly. It was as if a corner of the universe had been lifted and I saw the road ahead. Not a road exactly, I corrected myself – a dead end.

Thankfully, there was too much work to let me dwell on it. We had come to Whisperer’s house because he knew that in any covert operation your own side was always the greatest danger. More agents were lost to gossip, speculation and inadvertent comments than to any other cause, so Whisperer made an end-run of his own – we never went near the office and its inevitable talk.

He had inherited the home from his father, a merchant banker turned senator, and it was a beautiful, sprawling place that had found its way on to the National Historic Register. As a result, we set up headquarters in the study of a house which had once been owned by a relative of Martha Washington’s.

Thanks to Whisperer’s position in the government, its communications were almost as safe as the White House: constantly monitored for bugs and other electronic intrusions and equipped with an Internet connection that was part of the government’s Highly Secure Network.

As soon as we entered the study Whisperer threw off his jacket, loaded up the coffee machine and started a series of deep-breathing exercises. He said they were to help control his blood pressure, but I didn’t believe him: the old campaigner was shrugging off the rust of the past and getting ready to flex muscles which hadn’t been used in years. David James McKinley – failed husband, absentee father, Director of United States Intelligence, a man saddened not to have found a place in the pantheon – might as well have been back in Berlin. He had gone operational.

He immediately called in secretaries, special assistants, executive aides and two phone operators – a dozen people – and set them up in various parts of the house. He made it clear his study was off limits to everyone, and the beauty of it was that nobody even knew I was in the building.

With a back office in place, Whisperer and I set about trying to master a million details, the sort of things that might mean life or death when you were hunting terrorists in southern Turkey, a country on the frontier of the badlands, less than a day’s drive from Iraq and Syria. Although we didn’t discuss it, we both knew what we were really doing: we were sending a spy out into the cold.

Every few minutes Whisperer headed out to the back office to pick up files and assign tasks. Naturally, the staff were aware they were involved in something big, so their boss started to drop clever hints. The result was that when the news broke about the nuclear trigger the people closest to the investigation immediately assumed they were part of the search for the terrorist who was trying to buy it. Dave McKinley trusted nobody, and it was little wonder people said he was the best case officer of his generation.

In the wood-panelled study, I had already decided that the public phone boxes in the centre of Bodrum were the best place to start. Given what we had, they were about the only place to start. Of course, Turkish Telco had no reliable map of them, so Whisperer and I decided I would have to cover the five square miles on foot.

He called the head of the NSA and requested that a satellite photo of the town centre be emailed to the house immediately. While we waited for it to arrive he went to the dining room, where the executive assistants were headquartered. He asked one of them to call the CIA and tell them they had six hours to deliver a smartphone fitted with a specially enhanced digital camera. The camera, in turn, had to be married to the phone’s internal GPS system.

The idea was that I would take high-quality photographs of every phone box in Bodrum on my cellphone, posing as a visitor snapping street scenes in the Old Town. The photos would then be automatically downloaded on to the map, and I would have a complete record of the look and exact position of every phone box in the target area.