I Am Pilgrim(128)

The Saracen walked away without looking back. He had already spoken to the Beirut courier – twice weekly, his refrigerated truck arrived at the hospital to pick up or deliver blood and drugs. The Saracen told him there were boxes of medical supplies in his garage which would need to be sent to him and asked him to be on standby for a call.

With his arrangements almost complete, the Saracen arrived back at his apartment and went into the garage. The gene-sequencing machines, bio-safety suits and other equipment were already gone, smashed and burnt into an unrecognizable pulp and taken out to the local garbage dump in the boot of his car. He boxed up the vials of sealed virus, attached the hospital’s official dispatch dockets and, in the appropriate field, marked them as ‘expired vaccine’. The exact address they were being sent to would have to wait – he didn’t know it yet – but he could rely on the boy with the cellphone to fill it in when the time came.

He put the boxes in the refrigerator, locked the garage and went upstairs to his living quarters. Sweating, he packed the only other things that he really cared about – photos, keepsakes and small mementos of his wife and son – into a crate which would go into a storage locker he had rented in Beirut. He was almost finished when three men from a local charity arrived in a pick-up truck to collect his single bed, desk and other household goods. Once the items were loaded, he stood alone in his empty apartment.

He looked around at the two rooms one last time – they had been good years, productive years. Lonely years, too. There were times he missed his wife and boy so much that the pain was almost physical but, looking back, maybe the way things had turned out had been for the best. No, it was definitely for the best. It was Allah’s will.

Known only to himself, he had set a date for the soft kill of America, a day that would live in history long after he was gone. The date was 12 October, which he knew was Columbus Day, the day when America was discovered by Europeans and all the world’s real troubles had begun.

How appropriate, he thought to himself with pleasure, that future generations would mark that same date as the beginning of the far enemy’s decline.

He had worked hard but, if he was going to meet his deadline, there was still no time to waste. He walked out of the door, turned the key in the lock and headed for Germany.





Chapter Fourteen


I PASSED THROUGH turkish immigration without difficulty and by the time I reached the baggage claim my Samsonite was on the carousel. As I walked to get it, I saw that no other luggage from my flight had arrived yet and I knew what had happened – mine had been unloaded first and sent to the on-site office of MIT, the Turkish intelligence agency, to be inspected and photographed.

I wasn’t offended: I was supposedly a sworn officer of a foreign power and it was understandable that they would take an interest in me, but – for God’s sake – couldn’t they at least have done it professionally and sent it on to the carousel with the rest of the bags from my flight? I looked around the customs hall but I couldn’t see anyone who appeared to have me targeted. They were probably in a room above, checking me out on one of their closed-circuit cameras.

I walked through customs unchallenged, plunged into a sea of taxi touts and found the shuttle to take me to the domestic terminal. It made the international version seem deserted – there were men with large brass urns on their backs selling cups of apple tea, makeshift stalls with sugar-laden pastries and guys roasting nuts over coal braziers. Forget that it was close to a hundred degrees, the heat hit you like a wall, and the Fire Department would have taken a week to get through the traffic.

I joined a queue at a Turkish Airlines check-in desk and finally inched my way forward until I faced a young woman with heavy gold jewellery, far too much make-up and a crisp headscarf covering her hair – according to Islam, a woman’s crowning glory. She took my suitcase, swapped my ticket for a boarding pass and pointed me in the direction of my gate.

The line at security stretched for more than a block, but I managed to circumvent it by approaching one of the supervisors and telling him, in English and the few words of Turkish I had at my command, that I was carrying a gun. I was quickly escorted into a windowless office where five men, all in suits and smoking heavily, examined my passport, agency shield and other documents, including a copy of a letter from the White House to the President of Turkey thanking him for assisting the FBI ‘in this sad and unfortunate matter’.

That was the document which did the trick, and two of them summoned a golf cart and had me driven down to the Milas–Bodrum gate. I was the first passenger to arrive and, with well over an hour to spare before we were due to depart, my plan had been to open the laptop and continue studying my past cases. It didn’t happen.