I Am Pilgrim(120)

Somewhere on that list would be the one we were looking for. We knew that a woman had entered it on specific dates and, in the early evening on both occasions, had spoken to the man we had to catch. There was traffic noise in the background so that ruled out any in pedestrianized areas. There was also music. What that was we had no idea – we were waiting for the NSA to try to isolate, enhance and identify it.

As an investigative plan, focusing on phone boxes wasn’t much, not much at all – if it was a patient, you would have to say it was on life support – but in one way it was enough. My journey had started.

With the first step of the investigation prepped, Whisperer and I began work on my legend. We had come to the conclusion that, with precious little time to organize it, I would go into Turkey as an FBI special agent working on the murder at the Eastside Inn.

There were major problems with it – why was the FBI investigating a New York homicide, and why had they taken so long to get involved? Nor could I go into Turkey uninvited – we would need permission from their government – and we were worried that even on a good day the link between the murder and Bodrum, a few digits of a phone number, would look pretty tenuous.

Then we had a piece of luck – or at least that’s what it looked like. We should have known better, of course.





Chapter Seven


IN THE MIDST of trying to juice my shaky legend, whisperer got a phone call from the family room. That was where his two special assistants – each with a security clearance high enough to have access to most government documents – were stationed.

Whisperer went out to see them and returned a few minutes later with a file that had just arrived from the State Department. It contained a ten-paragraph account – brief, sketchy, frustrating – of the death of an American citizen several days previously in Bodrum.

A young guy had died and, I have to admit, as grim as it was, it sounded like good news to us – such a death might warrant the FBI’s legitimate interest.

Whisperer handed me the file and, while the victim’s full name was at the top, I didn’t take it in. It was one of the later paragraphs that caught my attention: it said he was known to his friends and acquaintances as Dodge.

‘Dodge? Why Dodge?’ I asked Whisperer.

‘Like the car,’ he replied. ‘The guy was twenty-eight years old and the heir to an automobile fortune – he was a billionaire. I guess his buddies could either call him Dodge or Lucky.’

‘Not that lucky,’ I said as I read on. According to the account, he and his wife were staying at one of Bodrum’s clifftop mansions – known as the French House – when he either slipped, jumped or was pushed on to the rocks a hundred feet below. It took boats and divers over two hours to retrieve the body from the pounding sea.

‘I don’t think it’s going to be an open-casket funeral,’ Whisperer said when I had finished looking at the attached photos and laid the file down.

There was no evidence, and maybe I was prone to looking for connections where none existed – I admit I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person – but I couldn’t help wondering about a link between a scrap of paper found in a drain at the Eastside Inn and the mangled body of a billionaire.

‘What’s your bet?’ I said as I turned. ‘Just chance, or are Dodge and the woman’s murder in Manhattan connected?’

Whisperer had read the files on the woman’s case when we were working on my legend and he was as qualified as anyone to make a judgement.

‘Almost certainly – but I don’t care,’ he replied. ‘All that concerns me is that half an hour ago, as far as a legend was concerned, we were polishing brass and calling it gold. Now we’ve got a billionaire American who has died in questionable circumstances. A well-connected American—’

‘How do you know he’s well-connected?’

‘Show me a family with that much money that isn’t.’

‘There is no family – just the wife; the report says so,’ I argued, playing devil’s advocate.

‘So what? There’ll be aunts, godparents, lawyers, a trustee. I’ll get the back office to start checking, but with a billion dollars there’s gonna be somebody.’

He was right, of course – growing up with Bill and Grace, I knew that. ‘Okay, so a trustee or lawyer hears Dodge is dead. What then?’

‘I ask the State Department to call him. They say they have concerns about the death but they need someone with authority to request the government’s help. The lawyer or trustee agrees—’

‘Yeah, I’d buy that part – he’s got a duty,’ I added.