No sooner had I sat down than I glanced up at a television screen suspended from the ceiling. It was tuned to a Turkish news channel and they were showing stock footage of some mountains in Afghanistan. I thought it was just another story about the endless war and was about to turn away when they cut to a diagram of a suitcase and the elements that were needed to make a dirty bomb.
I knew then that Whisperer had leaked the story about the Saracen trying to buy the Polonium-210 and, while I had no direct evidence, I was certain he had done it to coincide with my arrival in Turkey. No wonder the MIT agents over at international arrivals had been so sloppy with my suitcase – they would have been distracted by the breaking news of the biggest story in international terrorism for years. I smiled in quiet admiration: that was the definition of a good case officer – to orchestrate a perfect diversion to take the heat off his joe.
I stood up and asked a woman at the desk if I could borrow the remote for the TV. For the next hour, as the waiting area filled with my fellow passengers, I surfed the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, SkyNews, Bloomberg and half a dozen other English-speaking news channels to follow the story of the nuclear trigger. As usual, it was mostly the same small amount of information endlessly recycled, but every now and again a new morsel was added for the anchors and the experts to chew over: more than two thousand intelligence agents were to be dispatched to Afghanistan and Pakistan; the governments of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Yemen had pledged their cooperation; the White House announced that the president would address the nation.
I was looking forward to hearing what Grosvenor would have to say but, just as the press corps rose to their feet and a camera grabbed a shot of Grosvenor approaching the lectern, they made the final call for my flight.
I returned the remote, walked down the skybridge, found my seat and, fifty minutes later, caught a glimpse of the turquoise waters of the Aegean Sea – probably the most beautiful stretch of water in the world – as we circled wide and came in to land at Milas airport. It was twenty-five miles inland from Bodrum and after I had gone through the ritual of retrieving the Samsonite yet again – there was no MIT to provide unseen assistance this time – I found my way to the car-rental desk.
It took an age. Computers didn’t appear to have reached the Turkish frontier – all the paperwork had to be completed by hand and copies distributed to various desks. A Fiat four-door was finally brought round to the front and, after myself and two of the office staff had succeeded in converting the navigation to English, I headed out of the airport and hit the road for Bodrum. Thanks to the traffic, I didn’t make much progress and when I finally crested a rise I saw why – up ahead was a convoy of garishly painted eighteen-wheelers and flatbeds. The circus was in town – literally.
This was no cheap sideshow – it was the Turkish State Circus complete with, according to a billboard on the side of one of the semis, ‘one hundred tumblers, eighty hi-wire artists and four snake charmers’. Thankfully, on the outskirts of Milas they pulled into an exhibition ground where they were setting up the big top, the bottleneck cleared and I hit the gas.
Five miles on, I rolled down the window and let the hot breeze wash over me, surrounding me with the scent of pine forests and the promise of another deadly mission. Yes, I was long retired and scared; yes, I was alone and living an elaborate lie. But there was part of me that was so alive it was almost intoxicating.
Chapter Fifteen
THE MILES FELL by the wayside quickly. I drove past olive groves and tiny villages of white Cubist houses, on distant hills I saw derelict windmills which peasants had once used to grind flour, but I was damned if I could see the one thing I needed.
I was looking for somewhere to stop that wouldn’t arouse suspicion, the sort of place a newly arrived FBI agent might pause to enjoy the sunshine and check his phone messages. Several miles past a larger village with a small mosque and a thriving farmers’ market – unchanged in centuries by the look of it – I swept round a curve and saw a café with a panoramic view coming up on my right. I had reached the coast.
I pulled into the café’s car park, stopped well away from its open-air terraces and ignored the view. I got out of the car, opened my cellphone and, as I looked at the screen, ostensibly to check my messages, I restlessly wandered around the Fiat. The whole thing was a sham, a performance enacted for the benefit of the occupants of any vehicle who might have been following me. I knew there would be no messages – what I was doing was running a program that the techs at Langley had implanted in the phone’s software. Near the back of the vehicle the phone started beeping and, as I moved closer, it got louder. Somewhere inside the right rear wheel arch – and accessed through the trunk, I guessed – was a tracking transmitter which had been installed, no doubt, by my buddies at MIT. They wanted to know where I was – there was no surprise in that – but I was quietly pleased about the way they had done it. As any experienced agent would tell you, it was a lot easier to dump a car than a tail.