I Am Pilgrim(224)

They took out the plastic folder and photographed the shot of Cumali’s childhood home before Muscleman produced his own laptop, slipped the disk into it and copied its contents. As soon as it was finished, they turned their attention to my computer. I didn’t need to wade through all the surveillance photos to know what they did …

They used a tiny screwdriver to remove my hard drive and then inserted it into their own computer, bypassing most of my laptop’s security features. With the help of code-generating software, they would have broken through the remainder of the defences and been able to access all my documents and emails within minutes.

From there, it was a simple matter to copy everything on to USB portable drives, return my hard drive to the laptop and put everything back in the safe. I flew through the rest of the covert photos and saw that the men had searched the other parts of the room, entered the bathroom and were out of the door, carrying everything they needed, twenty-six minutes after they had arrived.

I sat on the bed and looked at a photo of them leaving. My hand was trembling with relief: it had been successful; the first stage was over. Cumali had believed the phone call from our man at MIT and acted exactly as we had hoped.

There was no doubt that she would be able to read the stolen data, and that meant the next steps were now entirely in her hands. Would she believe what she saw in the emails? In my fatigue and anxiety, had I made some small but fatal error? Would she be sufficiently panicked – terrified of Bright Light for herself and a Bulgarian orphanage for the child – to code up a message and contact her brother?

Perhaps if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with those questions, I would have paid more attention to the photo I was holding. I knew that there were seven major drug cartels operating in the area and that one of them, run by a lavender farmer out of Thessaloniki in Greece, had a heartfelt interest in the activities of American intelligence agents. Had I been more attentive, I would have thought about who was the most likely person Cumali would find to do her dirty work or maybe even recognized something about one of the men whose image I had captured. But I didn’t, and there was a knock on the door.

I looked through the peephole and saw it was Bradley.

‘Did the burglars come?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ I replied.

He slumped down in a chair. ‘What about that manager, huh?’

‘The professor? What about him?’

He turned and looked. ‘The professor! Professor of what?’

‘English,’ I said.

Bradley almost smiled – much to my relief. It meant he was overcoming the disgust he had felt at the role he had been given. In the event that everything went ahead, I needed him calm and totally committed: my life would depend on it.





Chapter Twenty


‘WHAT HAPPENS NOW?’ Bradley asked.

He had left my room, returned to his own, uupacked and showered. Looking less haggard and seemingly more relaxed, he was sitting with me in the hotel’s dining area. It was 9 p.m. and we were picking at plates of meze, neither of us with much appetite, the anxiety bearing down. We were alone: the season was dying fast and the hotel’s few other guests had already headed out to beachside bars and restaurants.

‘The next step is that Cumali reads the fake emails. Then we hope she contacts her brother,’ I replied.

‘How will we know if she does?’

‘Echelon,’ I said.

‘What’s Echelon?’

‘Something that doesn’t exist. But, if it did, it would be listening to cellphones, fixed lines, emails, every communication in this part of Turkey. In particular, it would be monitoring one phone box four miles from here.’

‘And if Cumali does contact him, when do you think she’ll do it?’

The same question had been occupying my thoughts. ‘She should have received the stolen information by now,’ I replied. ‘The way the Albanians took it means she won’t have to spend time trying to unlock it – the passwords are already broken.

‘Assuming she believes everything she reads, it’ll scare her badly. She’ll keep rereading it, trying to find other stuff on the hard drive, wasting time. Finally, the worst of the shock, maybe even a bout of nausea, will have passed.

‘She’ll sit at her computer in her old fisherman’s house and post a message on an Internet forum or dating site.

‘Almost immediately, the Saracen will receive a text message from the same site saying that someone who shares his interests has just posted an entry.

‘He’ll know what it means – he has to contact her urgently, probably at some prearranged time.

‘Meanwhile, Cumali has to record grabs from English-language news programmes and code up a message. The anxiety will slow her down and then she’s got to drive to the phone box and wait for him to call.