I Am Pilgrim(256)

The agent just nodded. I figured he had been told to play it cool. ‘Well, if your brother comes back,’ he said, ‘and you happen to discover that he’s an American with a bullet wound in his shoulder, give him this, will you?’

He handed over a sealed package and left. Standing in the kitchen a few minutes later, the doctor watched me break the seal and spill out a clutch of letters. His eyes widened as he saw that the first envelope was embossed with the seal of the President of the United States.

He was even more surprised when I ignored it and looked at the others. I recognized the handwriting on one – it was from Whisperer – and I put it next to the president’s.

Two letters remained. One was in an NYPD envelope with Bradley’s details on the back and the other – written in a strange scrawl – was addressed to the Oval Office with a note to ‘Please pass it on to the man who sometimes uses the name Jude Garrett.’ I knew who it was from.

I picked those two up, limped across the kitchen and went up to my room.





Chapter Forty-eight


I READ BRADLEY’S first. He said that as soon as he had left the nanny’s house she had phoned the local cops and told them what had happened.

Because she worked for Cumali, she had no difficulty convincing them that the story was true, despite its extraordinary nature. A black American wasn’t exactly hard to locate and, alerted by an all-points bulletin, a prowl car picked him up before he had even reached the hotel. They slammed him over the hood, disarmed him and took him down to the precinct house. He was fearing the worst – some Turkish form of enhanced interrogation – but by then all hell was breaking loose at the Theatre of Death.

American choppers from the Mediterranean Fleet had already been dispatched at the president’s order – not to pick me up but to secure the Saracen and collect evidence. Grosvenor phoned the president of Turkey, alerted him to their approach and told him that they had located the man attempting to buy the nuclear trigger. As a result, MIT operatives and the Turkish military all converged on the ruins. With two Turkish Navy destroyers standing offshore, half a dozen US helicopters on the beach and two hundred military personnel and intelligence agents in the ruins, the order went out to put Bradley on ice until the situation became clearer.

After five days in a cell – and following a direct request from Grosvenor to his Turkish counterpart – Bradley was released and had his passport returned. He went back to the hotel and had a tearful telephone reunion   with Marcie, who, once she had recovered, asked him when he would be home.

‘A few days,’ he said.

‘What?!’ she cried.

A cop to the very end, he wasn’t leaving without organizing the extradition of Cameron and Ingrid for the murder of Dodge and the woman at the Eastside Inn. The next morning, less than twelve hours after his release, he returned to the precinct house and went to Cumali’s office. Hayrunnisa told him in hushed tones that her boss was still being ‘debriefed’ – and sticking steadfastly to the story that I had recommended to her, it seemed – so he asked to see whoever was in charge of the murder investigation. After a flurry of phone calls, the kid in the shiny boots escorted him to the luxurious office of the Bodrum police chief.

I recalled the man – I had seen him when half of his force were pursuing me through the boat-repair facility, the night that I pancaked SpongeBob. The chief was in his fifties, big and florid with pampered skin and a neat moustache, the gold buttons of his impressive uniform threatening to burst at any moment. Despite the eau de Cologne he was wearing, he had a smell about him, and I couldn’t say I was surprised by what Ben reported.

He wrote that the chief said he had received extensive legal submissions from lawyers acting on behalf of both Cameron and Ingrid: as I had anticipated, the moment the two women had left their interview with me they had immediately gone and lawyered up. The chief said that the submissions led him personally to review all the evidence.

‘Naturally, I had to discount everything supposedly discovered by the man calling himself Brodie David Wilson. He wasn’t even a member of the FBI and had entered the country under false pretences. As we know, he had his own agenda in complicating and prolonging the case.

‘My own review showed that the work of the Turkish detectives was outstanding, as usual. It was clear that their initial finding was correct – Mr Dodge had died by misadventure. His fall was a tragic accident.’

Ben stared at him in disbelief, but the big Turk didn’t seem to notice. He smiled, lit another cigarette and spread his hands wide.