I turned the photo over and saw that Turkish photographers were no different from their counterparts elsewhere: on the back was the name of the photographer, a serial code and a phone number in Istanbul to call for reprints.
It was too late to phone him so, with my calf throbbing hard, I opened my laptop to check for messages. I was surprised to see that there was no information from Bradley about Cumali’s background, and I was in the middle of cursing Whisperer and the researchers at the CIA when I saw a text message from Apple telling me how much I had been charged for my latest music download.
I opened iTunes and saw I was the proud owner of Turkey’s Greatest Hits, a compilation of the country’s recent entries in the Eurovision Song Contest. Oh, Jesus.
I had to endure two tracks and part of a third before I found, embedded in it, a series of text documents. Although it didn’t say so, it was clear that the researchers had hacked into the Turkish police database and found Cumali’s human resources file.
Their report said that she had studied two years of law, dropped out, applied to the National Police Academy, and undertaken a four-year degree course. In the top tier of her graduating class, she had been streamed into criminal investigation and, after service in Ankara and Istanbul, her knowledge of English meant that she was posted to a tourist destination where it would be put to best use: Bodrum.
They found plenty of other stuff, commendations and promotions mainly – she was a good officer by the look of it – but it was all standard career stuff and it was clear that even from her time at the academy, the Turkish police had known her as Cumali and nothing else.
The researchers at Langley had also wondered if that was her real surname, and they tried to find an electronic back door to access marriage licences, birth certificates or passport applications, but they ran straight into a brick wall. Amazingly, Turkish public records couldn’t be hacked. It wasn’t because the government had adopted, like the Pentagon, some complex system of cybersecurity. The answer was much simpler – none of the archives had been digitized. The official records existed only on paper – probably bundled up, tied with ribbon and stored in endless warehouses. According to Langley, the only way to access anything more than five years old was by a written application – a process which could take over a month.
I stared at the report in frustration – as was so often the case with the agency’s research, it was all tip, no iceberg. I figured that sooner or later they would resolve the question of her name but, as the lawyers say, time was of the essence. Pissed off with their work, I went to bed.
Thanks to Langley, the entire investigation now rested on a photographer in Istanbul I had never heard of and who might well have been retired or dead.
Chapter Fifty-eight
HE WAS NEITHER, although by the sound of his cough and the lighter firing up a constant stream of cigarettes, the dead part might have been closer than he wished.
I had woken before dawn, dragged my injured leg to the laptop, put the USB travel drive into a slot and started to work through Cumali’s files. It would have been slow and grinding work, except that most of it was in Turkish and I had no choice but to discount the vast majority of them. Even so, you get a sense of things, and I couldn’t claim that among the letters and work files I found anything that raised my suspicions: the mistake that most people make when they want to stop someone from seeing material is to encrypt it, which means that a person like me knows exactly where to look.
As I had suspected when I was in her living room, nothing was coded and, if she had been smart enough to hide any incriminating files in plain sight, I was damned if I could identify them. Nor was there anything in Arabic, even though we had good reason to suspect she knew the language.
Having drawn a blank with the files, I turned to her emails. Thankfully, many of them were in English, and I saw that she had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, many of them other mothers with Down’s syndrome children. Among the hundreds of messages I found only two that made me stop – they were both from a Palestinian charity associated with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a group that frequently organized suicide bombings against Israelis. The emails acknowledged donations to an orphanage in the Gaza Strip, and my first reaction was to ask why – if Cumali really wanted to help kids – she didn’t give to Unicef. On the other hand, charity was one of the Five Pillars of Islam and, if it was a crime to donate money to organizations associated with radical groups, we would end up indicting half the Muslim world. More, probably.
I marked the two emails with a red flag then put the USB drive into an envelope and addressed it to Bradley in New York. As soon as FedEx opened I would courier it to him to be on-passed to Whisperer for further analysis. I looked at the clock – it was 7 a.m. and, though it was early, I wanted to find out whether the photographer was dead or alive.