‘Last night you and I were here – in the lounge,’ I said. ‘You remember? It was quiet, there was nobody else around.’
Suddenly his eyes sparked as understanding dawned. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Of course, that’s right – the dinner was of the night previous.’
‘Now you remember. Last night, you and I talked, you were explaining to me about the Greeks. It was a long conversation.’
‘Oh yes, one of the longest. Those damn Greek peoples – nothing is simple with them.’
‘True. You had a lot of things, a lot of history, you had to tell me. It was well past 10 p.m. when I went to bed.’
‘Later, probably, 11 p.m. is more the time of my memory,’ he said, with great enthusiasm.
‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ I responded.
We looked at each other again and I knew my intuition about him had been right. The secret was safe.
He indicated the passport in my hand and dropped his voice. ‘Are you leaving in the hurry not to return?’ he asked.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘If anybody asks, I’ve gone to Bulgaria – I spoke about finding an important witness.’
I farewelled him and headed for the front door and my car. I opened the trunk, pulled out the rubber lining and found a way to access the right rear wheel arch. I removed the tracking transmitter held in place by strips of magnets and attached it low down on the pole of a parking sign.
With any luck, no pedestrian would see it and whoever was monitoring it at MIT would think my car was still parked at the kerb.
I got behind the wheel and drove for the border.
Chapter Sixty
ALL DAY I hammered the fiat down endless stretches of highway – stopping only for gas, passing the distant minarets of Istanbul in the afternoon and reaching the Bulgarian frontier in the early evening.
The hardscrabble corner of the world where Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria meet is one of the busiest road junctions in Europe and, once I had left Turkey and entered a sort of no man’s land, I was surrounded by long-haul semis crawling towards Bulgarian immigration and customs.
After forty minutes and about a hundred yards’ progress I called out to the driver of a Danish freighter stopped on the side of the road and asked him how long he figured it would take to clear the frontier.
‘About eight hours from here,’ he replied. ‘Depends on how many illegal immigrants they find and have to process.’
Bulgaria had somehow managed to become part of the European union and had quickly established itself as the organization’s most vulnerable border, acting as a magnet for anyone who wanted to enter the union illegally and travel on to other, richer, pastures like Germany and France. By the look of the trucks and people-movers, there was no shortage of chancers and people smugglers.
I thought about trying to get to the front and showing my shield, but rejected it: there was always a chance I’d meet some thickhead who was only too happy to show the FBI who was boss. Instead I undertook some brief preparations, pulled on to the shoulder and drove up the inside of the endless queue. I passed under two overhead structures with cameras and signs and figured that pretty soon the border patrol would come and find me.
Two minutes later, silhouetted against the twilight, I saw blue flashing lights as a car approached fast down the dirt shoulder towards me. It stopped about ten yards in front, blocking my path, and the guy riding shotgun – probably the more senior of the two – lumbered out and walked towards me. He was about my age, overweight, and his uniform looked as if an even bigger man had been sleeping in it. You could tell he was ready to start yelling and order me back to the end of the queue.
I had about ten words of Bulgarian, gleaned from a visit years ago, and luckily they included ‘I am sorry.’ I got it out fast, before he could launch, and I saw that the phrase at least drew some of the venom from his snarling face. I couldn’t tell from his eyes, because, despite the hour, he was wearing shades.
I kept talking, switching to English, throwing in the Bulgarian apology a few more times. I told him that I had been in his fine country before and had always been overwhelmed by the friendliness of the people. I was hoping that would be the case again now that I needed assistance. I was running late and was desperately trying to catch a flight out of Sofia, the Bulgarian capital.
He grunted and looked as if he was about to tell me he didn’t give a shit – like I said, they were a friendly people – when he saw that I was handing him my passport. He looked at me quizzically; I met his gaze and he took the book. He opened it at the details page and found the five hundred Lev in banknotes – about three hundred US, a month’s wages that far east – that I had put in there.