I Am Pilgrim(257)

‘Of course, I didn’t want to make that judgement on my own, so I presented the evidence and the legal submissions to one of our most esteemed local judges. He too could see no reason for holding the two women and the other material witnesses in Bodrum any longer.

‘He suggested – and I agreed – that we return the passports and release them on bond, pending any further inquiries.’

‘Release them?!’ Ben asked, taking it hard, again acting as the champion of the dead. ‘How much was the bond?’

The Turkish cop tried to blow him off. ‘There were ten of them … I’m not sure … There’s a file, I’d have to—’

‘How much?’ Ben insisted, not bothering to hide his anger.

The chief dropped all pretence of civility. ‘Two hundred thousand dollars each,’ he snarled.

Ten people – two million dollars! It was a fortune – but not to Cameron. Ben didn’t need to ask what she had done – of course, she would have paid the bribe and bought their way out.

‘When did they leave?’ he asked in despair.

‘Three days ago. They got on board the huge cruiser and an hour later were sailing out.’

‘What if your “further inquiries” turn up something?’ Ben asked bitterly. ‘What do you do then?’

‘We write and ask them to come back. But, as I told you, I’m sure that won’t be necessary.’ Ben said the guy was almost smiling.

As I mentioned, I wasn’t surprised. With the FBI out of the picture, armed with all of the work which I had done, the Bodrum police chief and a corrupt judge had seen that they had Cameron cornered and did what generations of their Ottoman predecessors had done. They put their hand out.

Ben wrote that there was little he could do – the two perps had left Bodrum, and Cameron’s payment had guaranteed that all the material witnesses had scattered too. He thought perhaps he could pick the case up in New York, but he was realistic enough to know that, with limited resources, and one killer officially listed among the dead at the World Trade Center, unless the two women returned to America, he had little hope. With that much money, they certainly didn’t need to go back – they could travel the world for the rest of their lives.

I sat in silence for a few minutes, thinking about the two women and their crimes, but even then I didn’t recall it. No, the comment Ingrid had made to me about not understanding the half of it never even entered my head.





Chapter Forty-nine


THE SECOND LETTER, the one addressed to Jude Garrett via the Oval Office, was from Battleboi.

It was better written than I could have imagined and, knowing the big guy, I was certain that he must have sweated over it for hours.

‘I was in handcuffs and shackles,’ he said, ‘one of ten prisoners inside a bus with barred windows. We were heading across the runway at La Guardia to take a Con Air flight to the Big House down in Kansas when two black SUVs with their sirens going made us stop.

‘I figured that whoever the guys inside were, they must have had a really high security clearance to drive across an airport but, apart from that, I wasn’t interested.

‘That morning, I had written to Rachel telling her not to wait for me and I was trying to work out how I would deal with fifteen years in Leavenworth.’

He told me that the two US marshals on board the bus – guys who hadn’t stopped sneering at him because of his size and eccentricity – got out and met the men in suits who were scrambling out of the SUVs.

The most senior of the suits – who turned out to be a high-ranking executive in the Department of Justice – showed his ID and started barking orders. As the convicts watched through the barred windows, the two marshals immediately got back on board and made their way through the prisoners.

‘They stopped next to me, unlocked the chain securing me to the seat and led me towards the door. I asked them what the hell was happening, but they didn’t answer. They probably didn’t know themselves.

‘On the runway, the executive officer handed me a letter. I ripped open the envelope and saw that it was from the Oval Office, but I didn’t know what it meant – for once in my life, I couldn’t compute.

‘By the time I finished reading it I was pretty close to crying. It was a presidential pardon. “For services in defence of your country,” it said.

‘God knows who you are, but you said you would do everything possible to help me, and you did.’

He wrote that, after the formalities were completed, he made his way back to Old Japan, ran through the apartment without even taking off his shoes and found Rachel in a corner of their bedroom, distraught. She looked up, saw him and thought for a moment it was a dream. Then the dream smiled, reached out his arms to her and, being the son of devout Catholic parents, told her in wonder, ‘It’s the Gospel of St Mark, babe – chapter sixteen, verse six.’