I Am Pilgrim(121)

‘The State Department suggests he call the White House and make a formal request,’ Whisperer said. ‘The chief-of-staff takes the call. He says he understands – the trustee wants a proper investigation. It’s a foreign country; anything could have happened. So what does the White House do?’

‘They tell the FBI to send a special agent to monitor the inquiry.’

‘Exactly,’ Whisperer said. ‘And here’s the best thing – Grosvenor can call the President of Turkey personally to organize it. A billion dollars and the name of a great automobile family – it’s believable that he would do that.’

We both knew: as of that moment I was an FBI special agent. ‘What name do you want?’ Whisperer asked.

‘Brodie Wilson,’ I answered.

‘Who’s he?’ Whisperer said. He knew the drill – he wanted to make sure that if sometime very soon the questioning got really tough, I wouldn’t get confused about my name.

‘A dead guy. He was my stepfather’s sailing partner. Bill said he was the best spinnaker man he ever saw.’ Suddenly – I couldn’t explain why – I felt a great wave of sadness roll over me.

Whisperer didn’t notice; he was too busy being a case officer. ‘Okay, you were born on Long Island, sailed every weekend, birth-date is the same as yours, next of kin is your widowed mother – okay?’

I nodded, committing it to memory. The information was for the passport – a dog-eared version with plenty of stamps which would have to be produced by the CIA within the next few hours. Whisperer was already picking up the phone – conferencing in the family room, kitchen and dining room – to start organizing it and a host of other details that would transform a fake name into a real identity.

I took the opportunity to think: on the ground in Turkey I would need a conduit, some way of communicating with Whisperer. I couldn’t call him directly – an FBI agent would be of interest to the Turkish version of Echelon, and they would almost certainly be listening to every call. But if I was investigating the link between Dodge’s death and the murder at the Eastside Inn, I could legitimately speak to the New York homicide detective in charge of the case.

My idea was that Ben Bradley could act as our mail box – taking cryptic messages and relaying them between the two of us. As soon as Whisperer was finished on the phone, I explained it to him. He wasn’t sure.

‘What was this guy’s name again?’ he asked.

‘Bradley. Ben Bradley,’ I said.

‘He’s trustworthy?’

Whisperer was somewhere far beyond exhaustion but even his face came alive when I told him about the Twin Towers and what Bradley had done for the guy in the wheelchair. ‘He’s a patriot,’ I said.

‘Sixty-seven floors?’ Whisperer replied. ‘He’s not a patriot, he’s a fucking athlete.’ He picked up the phone and made arrangements for the FBI to go and collect him.





Chapter Eight


BRADLEY WAS ASLEEP when the phone went. Twice he let it go to the answering machine, but when the apartment’s entry intercom shrilled he felt he had no choice but to answer that. An unknown voice at the front door of the building asked him to pick up his goddamn phone immediately.

With Marcie at his side, Bradley lifted the handset and was told there was a car waiting outside. He was needed downtown at the FBI’s headquarters now. He tried to find out what it was about, but the guy on the other end of the line refused to say.

After pulling on his Industries and a sweatshirt – it was 2 a.m. – he was taken to the same nondescript building I had visited some months before and escorted to the eleventh floor. A night-duty agent showed him into a soundproofed room, empty except for a secure phone line and a chair, and then left, locking the door behind him. The phone rang, Bradley picked it up and heard my voice at the other end.

I told him there wasn’t much time, so he had to listen hard. ‘My name’s Brodie Wilson, I’m a special agent with the FBI. Got it?’ I’ll give Ben his due – he took it in his stride.

I said that in a few hours I was heading to Bodrum and gave him a brief rundown on Dodge’s death. He immediately started asking about a connection to the woman at the Eastside Inn, but I cut him off – that investigation wasn’t our primary concern. I told him I would be calling him from Turkey and his job was to listen carefully and to relay what I said to a ten-digit number I was about to give him.

‘You must never try to record what I say – not under any circumstances. It’s memory and notes alone,’ I said, more harshly than was necessary, but I was worried. The Turkish version of Echelon would know if he was using a recording device and that would send up a forest of red flags.