When the CIA finally realized that one of its former assets was selling them out and called The Division in, Finlay was a wealthy man with a mansion behind twenty-foot walls in Barvikha, Moscow’s most desirable suburb and, while he wasn’t as rich as some of his neighbours, he was wealthy enough to have also purchased a luxury penthouse in Monaco.
He had changed his name half a dozen times and altered his appearance, thanks to an excellent plastic surgeon, but the rat-catchers at The Division tracked him down. We could have killed him in Moscow or Monaco – you could kill a man anywhere – but the real measure of a successful execution wasn’t in the obituary but in the escape. Moscow presented the problem of getting in and out of the country, and the less than square mile which constituted the principality of Monaco – with over four thousand CCTV cameras – was the most closely monitored postage stamp on earth.
Finlay’s penthouse, however, did offer us one advantage. Its picture windows and the French doors opening on to a terrace gave us the opportunity, by using a special microphone, to eavesdrop on what was said inside. The system wasn’t perfect, it missed a lot, but one of the fragments it captured concerned a boat. We knew he didn’t own one, so a quick scout around the marina, where all the luxury cruisers were moored, soon turned up the fact that Finlay and a small party were travelling to what was almost certainly the strangest party on earth.
Every year, for six hours before the tide changed, it was held in Bodrum.
Chapter Thirty-four
NOT LONG AFTER our eight agents had stepped on to the jetty, the revellers started to arrive in force. It was one party you didn’t want to be late for.
The vast majority of them parked near the bluff and used specially installed ropes and ladders to climb down to the ruins. The chicks had their handbags and cells slung around their necks, skirts hoisted halfway up their asses, doing their best to maintain their grip and dignity. Of course, there was already a guy stationed below with a spotlight, picking out the most sensational underwear for the entertainment of those who had already arrived. Judging by the frequent bursts of wild cheering, a surprising number of women went out clubbing wearing no panties at all.
Every few minutes some young guy would dispense with the slow climb, grab a rope and launch himself into space. I figured that most of the amateur abseilers were smokehounds. In my experience, they were usually the ones too stoned to care much about personal safety. At least half a dozen times I saw them brush the cliff, land hard on the rocks, then high-five each other before firing up another blunt. And they say drugs don’t cause brain damage.
The idea for the Rave at Bodrum – and the huge profits it generated – belonged to a German backpacker. He had washed up in Bodrum and, hearing about the ruins, had driven a scooter out at night to photograph the moon through the Door to Nowhere. Somewhere in his chaotic past, though, he had spent two years studying oceanography in America before dropping out, and he remembered enough to realize that a couple of times a year the ruins would be far less spectacular – a king high tide would submerge most of them.
But that meant there would also be a king low tide and far more of the old city would be revealed. For a start, the wide marble platform would be out of the water. He stared at it and thought: what a great dance floor that would make.
Two months later, after he had examined the tide charts and used a scuba set to dive and check his measurements, he and several buddies parked generator trucks on the bluff, ran cables for a light show down the cliff and moored barges with half-stacks of speakers just offshore. They cut holes through the fence, anchored ladders and ropes to concrete tripods so that the customers could get down and stationed a gorilla at every one to collect the door charge.
People were happy to pay. Where else in the world could you party in the middle of the ocean by starlight, get high surrounded by classic ruins and dance on the grave of twenty thousand people? Partygoers said it was the best dance party they had ever known.
The night I saw it, the annual Bodrum rave was huge and even more extraordinary. By then, there were ten barges with speakers anchored inside an arc of rocks, protected from the swell. On the largest of them, standing on a scaffold platform like the ringmaster at some futuristic circus, was a DJ known far and wide as Chemical Ali. Guys in the rocks used smoke machines to send what looked like a supernatural fog out across the water – the Door to Nowhere appeared to float on a cloud. Only then did they launch the banks of lasers and strobes.
In the middle of this maelstrom, a group of security guys grabbed a steel walkway and ran it out from the base of the cliff to the newly emerged marble platform with its four broken pillars. As the music grew in a crescendo, so loud you could almost touch it, the first of the partygoers, led by a dozen tall fashionistas, crossed the walkway and stepped on to an area nobody had walked on for two thousand years. Or at least not since the previous year’s event.