‘You’ve been there?’ Bradley asks. I shake my head – there are some things the government won’t let me talk about.
‘No,’ I lie. ‘Why would she be calling someone in Bodrum?’ I wonder aloud, changing the subject.
Bradley shrugs, unwilling to speculate, preoccupied. ‘The big guy’s done some good work too,’ he reports, pointing at Petersen on the other side of the room. ‘It wasn’t a student ID Alvarez found in the manager’s file – fake name, of course – it was a New York library card.’
‘Oh good,’ I say, without much interest. ‘An intellectual.’
‘Not really,’ he replies. ‘According to their database, she only borrowed one book in a year.’ He pauses, looks at me hard. ‘Yours.’
I stare back at him, robbed of words. No wonder he was preoccupied. ‘She read my book?’ I manage to say finally.
‘Not just read it – studied it, I’d say,’ he answers. ‘Like you said – you hadn’t seen many as professional as this. Now we know why: the missing teeth, the antiseptic spray – it’s all in your book, isn’t it?’
My head tilts back as the full weight of it hits me. ‘She took stuff from different cases, used it as a manual – how to kill someone, how to cover it up.’
‘Exactly,’ Ben Bradley says, and, for one of the few times ever, he smiles. ‘I just want to say thanks – now I’ve got to chase you-by-proxy, the best in the world.’
Chapter Five
IF YOU WANT to know the truth, my book about investigative technique was pretty obscure – the sort of thing, as far as I could tell, that defied all publishing theory: once most people put it down, they couldn’t pick it up again.
Yet, among the small cadre of professionals at whom it was aimed, it caused a seismic shock. The material went out on the edge of technology, of science, of credibility even. But on closer examination, not even the most hardened sceptics could maintain their doubts – every case I cited included those tiny details, that strange patina of circumstance and motivation that allows good investigators to separate the genuine from the fake.
A day after the book’s release a flurry of questions began ricocheting around the closed world of top-flight investigators. How the hell was it that nobody had heard of any of these cases? They were like communiqués from another planet, only the names changed to protect the guilty. And, even more importantly, who the hell had written it?
I had no intention of ever letting anyone find out. Due to my former work, I had more enemies than I cared to think about and I didn’t want to start my car engine one morning and end up as a handful of cosmic dust running rings around the moon. If any reader of the book was to inquire about the background of the so-called author, all they would find was a man who had died recently in Chicago. One thing was certain, I didn’t write it for fame or money.
I told myself I did it because I had solved crimes committed by people working at the outer limits of human ingenuity and I thought other investigators might find some of the techniques I had pioneered useful. And that was true – up to a point. On a deeper level, I’m still young – hopefully, with another, real, life in front of me – and I think the book was a summing-up, a way of bidding a final farewell to my former existence.
For almost a decade I was a member of our country’s most secret intelligence organization, which worked so deep in shadow that only a handful of people even knew of our existence. The agency’s task was to police our country’s intelligence community, to act as the covert world’s internal affairs department. To that extent, you might say, we were a throwback to the Middle Ages. We were the rat-catchers.
Although the number of people employed by the twenty-six publicly acknowledged – and eight unnamed – US intelligence organizations is classified, it is reasonable to say that over one hundred thousand people came within our orbit. A population of that size meant the crimes we investigated ran the gamut – from treason to corruption, murder to rape, drug dealing to theft. The only difference was that some of the perpetrators were the best and brightest in the world.
The group entrusted with this elite and highly classified mission was established by Jack Kennedy in the early months of his administration. After a particularly lurid scandal at the CIA – the details of which still remain secret – he apparently decided members of the intelligence community were as subject to human frailty as the population in general. More so, probably.
In normal circumstances, the FBI would have acted as the shadow world’s investigator-at-large. Under the perfumed fist of J. Edgar Hoover, however, that agency was anything but normal. Giving him the power to investigate the spooks would have been – well, you might as well have let Saddam loose in the arms factory. For this reason, Kennedy and his brother created an agency that was given, by virtue of its responsibilities, unprecedented power. Established by an executive order, it also became one of only three agencies to report directly to the president without congressional oversight. Don’t bother asking about the other two – both of them are also forbidden by law from being named.