I Am Pilgrim (57 page)

out of five hundred factories had been inspected. And that country was China, the nation with the worst history of product safety in the world. He knew then that nothing from Chyron – a subsidiary of a US corporation based in a First World country – would ever be inspected.

At 10 p.m. on the night following the celebratory meal he walked along a deserted Wilhelmstrasse, presented himself at Chyron’s security gates, was issued an employee pass and given directions to the distribution warehouse. There he met the Turkish supervisor, who, escorting him past endless pallets of drugs awaiting shipment to cities across the United States, explained his duties to him. None of the pallets were guarded, nothing was locked and sealed – they never had been; nobody had ever thought

it necessary. Then again, nobody had ever thought it necessary to lock the cockpit doors on passenger jets either.

After the supervisor had left for home and the Saracen was alone in the cavernous warehouse, he

took out his prayer mat, pointed it towards Mecca and said a prayer. A child who had been introduced to misery in Saudi Arabia, a teenager who went to wage jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a deeply devout Muslim who had graduated with honours in medicine, a man who had fed a stranger to

wild dogs in Damascus, a zealot who had dosed three foreigners with smallpox and watched them die

in agony, gave thanks to Allah for the blessings which had been bestowed upon him.

Before he finished, he rendered one final thanks to God – for the woman in Turkey who had done

so much for him.

Chapter Thirty-two

I LANDED BACK in Bodrum just at dawn. I had no luggage and, with a freshly issued visa in my passport, combined with my FBI shield, I passed through Turkish immigration without delay. I walked

out of the terminal, located my car in the parking area, and headed on to what is known as the D330 to Bodrum.

Everything was fine for fifteen minutes but, despite the early hour, I then ran into a long tailback of eighteen-wheelers, tourist coaches and countless Turks blasting their horns in frustration. I pulled off at the first opportunity and headed south-west, in the general direction of the sea, figuring that sooner or later I would either hit Bodrum or hook back on to the highway.

It didn’t work out that way: I ended up in a lonely area scarred by landslips and jumbled rocks, deep cracks and jagged rifts. It was dangerous ground and even the trees were stunted in the crumbling soil, as if they knew they had taken root on a fault line. Turkey was in a seismic hot zone and there were long stretches of the southern coast that stood on shifting, unstable land.

I came upon an intersection, made a left, accelerated round a curve and knew I had been in that uninhabited corner of the world before. Even as a psychologist I couldn’t say whether it was an accident or if a subconscious hand had guided my decisions – all I knew was that, just down the road, I would see the ocean and, half a click beyond it, I’d find, figuratively speaking, the site of the shipwreck.

As anticipated, I reached the sea – a turbulent mess of currents dashing against the rocks – and drove along the clifftop. Ahead I saw the small bluff where, as a young agent, I had parked the car so long ago.

I stopped near an abandoned kiosk, got out and walked closer to the cliff edge. Safety – of a sort –

was provided by a broken-down security fence. Signs were attached to it, displaying a message in four languages: DANGER OF DEATH.

Although nobody visited the place any more, it had once – long ago – been hugely popular with both sightseers and archaeologists. The constant earthquakes and landslides, however, had eventually become too much, the kiosk had fallen into disuse and the tourists had found plenty of other ruins equally as attractive and a damn sight safer. It was a pity, because it was a spectacular site.

I paused near the fence and looked along the cliffs. Stone steps and fragments of ancient houses descended eerily into the surging sea. Marble columns, parts of porticos and the remnants of a Roman road clung to the cliff side. Kelp and driftwood were scattered among the ruins and the wind-borne

spray of centuries had crusted everything with salt, giving it a ghostly sheen.

Further out to sea, the outline of a large piazza was clearly visible under fathoms of water, a classic portico stood on a rocky outcrop with sunlight streaming through it – known as the Door to Nowhere

– and the restless sea flooded back and forth across a wide marble platform, probably the floor of some grand public building.

It had been a major city of antiquity, a trading port long before the birth of Christ, but a huge earthquake had torn away the coast and lifted up the cliff. The sea poured in and drowned nearly everyone who had survived the initial jolt.

I walked along the fence, dirt spilling down and hitting the rocks two hundred feet below, until I turned the corner of the bluff. The wind was much stronger, the vegetation more stunted and the landscape even more unstable and I was forced to grab hold of a steel warning sign to steady myself. I

looked down: jutting out into the water was an old wooden jetty, much diminished since I had last seen it.

It had been built decades ago by a group of enterprising fishermen who had realized that ferrying

tourists and archaeologists into the ruins by boat was a far better way to earn a lira than hauling in nets and lobster pots. The main attraction back then hadn’t been the shattered townscape or the Door to Nowhere but a long tunnel which had led to what was reputed to be the finest Roman amphitheatre

outside the Colosseum. Renowned in the ancient world for the brutality of its gladiatorial contests, it was known as the Theatre of Death.

I had never seen it – nobody except for a few brave archaeologists had been in it for thirty years.

The tunnel, the only way in and out, was barred and gated after a giant landslide had opened up huge cracks in its ceiling and even the tour operators were muted in their objections – nobody wanted to be caught inside that if the whole lot came down.

But it wasn’t a Roman slaughterhouse or the other ruins that had taken me to the edge of the cliff. It was the old jetty that had brought back a flood of painful memories.

Chapter Thirty-three

ALL THOSE YEARS ago, the division had arrived at the jetty in force. Just after sunset, eight operatives, casually dressed, a few with backpacks, had come down the coast on a decent little cruiser.

They looked like a group of youngish guys out for a good time. I wasn’t among them: as the junior

member of the team, my job had been to arrive separately, take charge of a specially purchased van,

drive to the small bluff and park as close as possible to the abandoned kiosk. In the event that something went wrong, I was to evacuate whoever needed it to another boat waiting at a Bodrum marina. In the worst-case scenario, I was then to drive the wounded to a doctor who was on standby

for just such an emergency.

I was inexperienced, and I remembered that I had a lot of fear on me that night: we had come to the

furthest reaches of Turkey to kill a man.

His name was Finlay Robert Finlay – that wasn’t his real name, his real name was Russian, but that

was what we knew him by – an overweight guy in his late forties who had a big appetite for everything, including treachery. He had been a young consular official working in the Russians’

Cairo Embassy when the CIA managed to turn him. Apart from paying him a handsome monthly retainer, the agency did nothing with him: he was a sleeper, and they let him go happily about his life and whoring, content to watch him climb the ladder. He was a bright man, so it was no surprise that, after a number of years, he became the KGB station chief in Tehran, working under deep diplomatic

cover.

It was then that the agency decided it wanted a return on its investment. They were sensible and they only took from him the highest-quality intelligence and insisted that he didn’t take any unreasonable risks. They had lavished too much of their love and gold on him to jeopardize it by being greedy. He quickly became one of the agency’s prime assets, and they stayed by his side through half a dozen diplomatic posts, until he returned to Moscow and moved into the inner circle of Russian intelligence.

But a life like Finlay Finlay’s leaves in its wake tiny clues that sooner or later come to the attention of counter-intelligence. Finlay understood that danger, and one afternoon in his summer dacha outside Moscow he reviewed his career and came to the inescapable conclusion that, pretty soon, all

those fragments would hit critical mass. Once they did, it would be
vyshaya mera
to him too.

He arranged to visit family just outside St Petersburg and went sailing in a little one-hander dinghy on a beautiful summer Sunday. Then he put a waterproof pack with his clothes in around his waist, slipped overboard and swam ashore in Finland. The distance wasn’t far, but it was no small achievement given his size.

He made his way to the US Embassy, declared himself to the shocked duty officer and fell into the

warm embrace of his CIA handlers. After being debriefed, he reviewed his bank accounts and realized

that, between his retainer and the bonuses he had received for every piece of high-level intelligence he had delivered, he was an affluent man. The agency gave him a new identity, settled him in Arizona, kept watch on him and then, satisfied that he had adapted to his new life, let him slip from their consciousness.

The one thing that nobody could have anticipated, however, was that Russia would descend into the

hands of outlaws masquerading as politicians. Fortunes were being made as the country’s assets were

sold off to those with the right connections, many of whom were former KGB operatives. Finlay

watched it from his home in Scottsdale – nothing too elaborate, a nice three-bedder – and became increasingly frustrated. He liked the money, our friend Finlay.

He had been around the secret world long enough to have hidden away a safety-deposit box with

several alternative identities and to know the value of what he still had in his head. He drove to Chula Vista, south of San Diego, one morning and walked through the turnstiles at the crossing into Mexico.

According to the fake passport he was carrying, he was a Canadian with US residency. Travelling under the assumed name, he flew to Europe, made contact with his former buddies in Moscow and met them in a café at Zurich airport.

Finlay, or whatever name he was using at that stage, gave them a taste – a gourmet sampler, if you

will – of everything he knew about the personnel and double agents employed by his former best friends in McLean, Virginia. It was so good that the Russians booked themselves in for the full dinner and another spy had come in from the cold.

Finlay was no fool – he held back the best of his material, dealing it out sparingly, all the time manoeuvring himself closer to those with the right connections. By the time he’d wound himself in

tight, he was able to swap his best secrets for a gas-exploration licence here, an industrial complex at a knock-down price there.

When the CIA finally realized that one of its former assets was selling them out and called The Division in, Finlay was a wealthy man with a mansion behind twenty-foot walls in Barvikha, Moscow’s most desirable suburb and, while he wasn’t as rich as some of his neighbours, he was wealthy enough to have also purchased a luxury penthouse in Monaco.

He had changed his name half a dozen times and altered his appearance, thanks to an excellent plastic surgeon, but the rat-catchers at The Division tracked him down. We could have killed him in

Moscow or Monaco – you could kill a man anywhere – but the real measure of a successful execution

wasn’t in the obituary but in the escape. Moscow presented the problem of getting in and out of the

country, and the less than square mile which constituted the principality of Monaco – with over four thousand CCTV cameras – was the most closely monitored postage stamp on earth.

Finlay’s penthouse, however, did offer us one advantage. Its picture windows and the French doors

opening on to a terrace gave us the opportunity, by using a special microphone, to eavesdrop on what was said inside. The system wasn’t perfect, it missed a lot, but one of the fragments it captured concerned a boat. We knew he didn’t own one, so a quick scout around the marina, where all the luxury cruisers were moored, soon turned up the fact that Finlay and a small party were travelling to what was almost certainly the strangest party on earth.

Every year, for six hours before the tide changed, it was held in Bodrum.

Chapter Thirty-four

NOT LONG AFTER our eight agents had stepped on to the jetty, the revellers started to arrive in force. It was one party you didn’t want to be late for.

The vast majority of them parked near the bluff and used specially installed ropes and ladders to

climb down to the ruins. The chicks had their handbags and cells slung around their necks, skirts hoisted halfway up their asses, doing their best to maintain their grip and dignity. Of course, there was already a guy stationed below with a spotlight, picking out the most sensational underwear for the entertainment of those who had already arrived. Judging by the frequent bursts of wild cheering, a surprising number of women went out clubbing wearing no panties at all.