‘Thank you, anyway, you’ve been very helpful,’ the spook said. ‘At the moment, we’re not going to do anything. We’ll listen to Spitz’s phone calls and wait and see. But I’ll give you a number, a direct line. If you hear anything, you are to call me immediately. Understood?’ he said, before recounting the number and hanging up.
Whisperer and I had broken all the rules: we had arranged for the target to learn the truth of the mission. But in doing so we had baited a trap – Cumali was a detective and I was gambling everything that her instinct would be to investigate. She would want to know more – fear would make sure of that – and I believed there was only one place she could look: in my hotel room.
She wouldn’t do it herself but, given her work, she would know plenty of criminals who could. It was now my job to make sure that everything was ready when they arrived.
Chapter Fourteen
FOR THE FIRST time in my professional life, I was out in the cold – I was on a mission without a legend or cover.
The small jet had crossed Jordan and landed at Milas late in the morning. I passed through Turkish immigration without delay, grabbed my car and, instead of driving to Bodrum, headed fast into Milas. Just behind City Hall, I found a camera store and watched as a young woman took my phone and printed out a hard copy of the photo I had taken of Cumali’s childhood home in Jeddah. The store also sold phone accessories and I bought another battery for the piece of junk I had purchased in Bulgaria.
I found a store catering to tradesmen nearby and picked up a hand drill, a small soldering iron, a bottle of all-purpose glue and half a dozen other items. I threw them in the car and drove hard to Bodrum. I arrived back at the hotel while it was still lunchtime, which meant the manager was out and I made it to my room without delay.
I pulled the battered Samsonite suitcase off the top of the wardrobe and carefully cut open the fabric lining that concealed the inside of the two locks. I drilled out the tiny keyhole of one of them then turned my attention to the Bulgarian phone. With the soldering iron I managed to connect the new battery in sequence – doubling the time the phone could operate – then opened up the menu. I spent a frustrating twenty minutes manipulating the software so that the camera would take a photo every two seconds.
I taped the jury-rigged phone inside the Samsonite so that its camera lens was hard against the drilled-out lock, giving it a clear view of the room. Before I went out, I only had to turn the phone on, glue the fabric back and return the suitcase to the top of the closet. I figured that the camera would be perfectly hidden, but the location had one other great advantage – people searching for something will look inside a box or suitcase but hardly ever examine the object itself.
I now had my own surveillance system, admittedly held together by wire and rope, but workable: I had to know for certain that the burglars had found what I was about to plant. Everything else depended on it.
I took the freshly printed photo of Cumali’s old home and added a computer disk which included a copy of her Bahrain driver’s licence, details of the scuba-diving blog and the precis of her college course in Istanbul. I put everything in a plastic file and placed it inside the in-room safe – a piece of crap with a battery-operated electronic keypad which any burglar worthy of the name would know how to power down, clear the code and open.
The photograph and documents were to convince Leyla Cumali that Michael Spitz was hunting her.
In addition, because they were genuine items, the so-called halo effect would wash over whatever else she found – I was counting on the scum-boys also to steal my laptop. Inside, Cumali would find two emails – totally fake – which I had drafted on the flight across Jordan. I was checking them, inserting them in my inbox at the appropriate dates, when the hotel phone rang.
A woman identified herself as being a secretary at the New York homicide bureau, but I figured it was bullshit – she was almost certainly one of Whisperer’s back-office staff.
‘The flight you are expecting is Turkish Airlines 349 from Rome, arriving at Milas International at 15.28,’ she said.
I wasn’t expecting any flight from Rome, but I guessed what had happened: Whisperer had figured a government jet would attract too many questions and had booked Bradley on a commercial flight.
I glanced at my watch: I had ten minutes if I was going to get to Milas in time. I finished checking the emails but didn’t delete any computer files – the material which was genuinely confidential was protected by unbreakable 128-bit encryption, and its presence would lend credibility to the subterfuge. The computer itself was password-protected and there was some low-level code, but I was confident – as Whisperer had told me when he first gave it to me – that it could be busted quickly if somebody wanted to.