I had arrived at what was always the most dangerous part of any such transaction – paying off an official was a serious offence in any jurisdiction, and it was at that stage the guy in uniform could really shake you down if he wanted to. Five hundred to go to the front of the queue? Try twenty thousand – and your watch and camera, please – not to charge you with attempted bribery.
He asked for my driver’s licence and, with that and the passport, he returned to his squad car. Vehicles that I had overtaken on the inside were now crawling past, hitting their horns in celebration of excellent Bulgarian justice and giving a thumbs-up to the two officers. I wasn’t angry – in their position I probably would have felt the same.
The man returned and told me to open the driver’s door. It looked like the real shakedown was on the way, and I was bracing myself, about to reach for my shield, when he climbed on to the door sill so that he was standing up next to me, holding the door half closed.
‘Drive,’ he said, ‘and hit the horn.’ I did as I was told, and he started signalling to several of the big semis to stop immediately, opening up a gap.
‘Go between them,’ he ordered and, to the accompaniment of huge air brakes hissing, I squeezed into a lane in the middle of the road which half a dozen languages said was for official use only.
‘Faster,’ the officer ordered. I needed no further encouragement, and floored it.
Followed by the squad car with its lights flashing and the officer still hanging on to the open door, we flew past the miles of semis and coaches until we reached a row of glass booths topped by various crests and a huge Bulgarian flag.
The guy clinging to the door took my passport, stepped into one of the booths, borrowed a seal from his colleague and stamped my passport. He returned, handed me the book and – I figured – was about to tell me his colleague also needed a contribution, but I was already hitting the gas and heading into the night before he opened his mouth.
I travelled fast, headlights stabbing into the darkness, revealing acres of forest and – as if life in the new EU wasn’t surreal enough – clutches of women in micro-mini skirts and skyscraper heels standing on the roadside in the middle of nowhere. Major trucking routes in other countries had endless billboards; in Eastern Europe they featured prostitutes, and no country more so than Bulgaria.
I passed hundreds of them – Gypsy girls, mostly – waif-like figures in lingerie and fake fur, hard-eyed kids whose lives revolved around the cabin of a semi or the back seat of a car. If they were pregnant their services sold for a premium, and you didn’t have to be a genius to work out that orphans were one of the country’s only growth industries.
Porrajmos, I said to myself as I drove on, recalling the Romani word that Bill had told me so many years ago: I was looking at just another form of the Devouring.
At last, the young women gave way to gas stations and fast-food outlets and I entered the town of Svilengrad, an outpost of about twenty thousand people which had virtually nothing to recommend it except a pedestrianized main street and a wide range of shops that stayed open until well past midnight to cater to the endless stream of truckers.
I parked the car far away and found four of the stores I was looking for clustered together. I chose the most down at heel of them, the one that – as far as I could tell – had no video recording equipment or surveillance cameras. Inside, I bought the two items that had led me to drive seven hundred miles in twelve hours and had taken me from the edge of Asia into the old Soviet bloc: a piece-of-junk cellphone and a prepaid, anonymous SIM card.
I returned to my car and under a single street lamp in a dark corner of a Bulgarian town nobody had ever heard of, surrounded by farmland and young Gypsy hookers, I made a call to a number with an area code which didn’t exist.
Chapter Sixty-one
USING AN UNTRACEABLE cellphone routed through the Bulgarian phone system, and fairly confident that MIT would not be listening, I waited to talk to Whisperer directly.
I had to tell him Leyla Cumali’s real name, I had to report that she was an Arab and I had to reveal that she was the woman in the phone box. That was the first imperative of any agent who was still ‘live’ and far from home – to pass on what they had learned. It was the only insurance against apprehension or death, and they taught you from the earliest days that information didn’t exist until it had been safely transmitted. But, more than that, I had to discuss with him the problem of rendition and torture.
The phone rang five times before I heard Whisperer’s voice. ‘Who is it?’ he asked. It was early afternoon in Washington, and I was shocked at how weary he sounded.