I Am Pilgrim (82 page)

He nodded. ‘Sure. You’re the one investigator I wouldn’t argue with.’

‘My intuition is that the two women had grown up together; I think they were lovers before Dodge

entered the frame,’ I went on. ‘Anyway, let’s call Cameron’s friend Marilyn – I don’t know her real

name.

I stole a glance at my watch – only twenty minutes gone. I didn’t know it, but apparently time passed slowly when you were waiting for the end of the world.

‘They had left Turkey Scratch, or wherever they grew up, and moved to Manhattan, full of dreams,

I suppose.

‘Cameron got a job at Prada and Marilyn wanted to be an actress. In other words, she took a job in

an office.’

‘Then Cameron met the billionaire,’ said Ben.

‘Yeah, it was a whirlwind, but Cameron must have known it was her one chance at a fortune –

lightning never strikes twice.

‘Maybe she sat down and discussed it with Marilyn, perhaps it was all very civilized, but in my experience life’s a lot messier than that – my guess is she dumped her lifelong friend. Whatever happened, she married him.

‘One thing I’m certain of: Dodge never met Marilyn or even saw her – that was important for what

happened later.’

‘Okay,’ Ben said. ‘So Dodge and Cameron get married, but it doesn’t work out.’

‘It didn’t take long. Even though I believe that Marilyn felt betrayed, Cameron re-established contact. She wanted to be rid of Dodge, but she had a problem—’

‘The pre-nup.’

‘Right. But the women saw a way round it – they could have each other
and
the money. Kill him.’

‘What was their plan?’ Ben asked.

‘They didn’t know. Then, one morning, a group of terrorists helped them out: 9/11.

‘The office where Marilyn worked was located in one of the towers, but she was running late. She

saw the planes hit and realized that, as far as the world was aware, she was dead. For a would-be murderer, there was no better alibi.’

I looked up, and saw three fellow guests come through the front door and head for the elevator. As

usual, the tradecraft was running in the back of my mind, and I knew that all the residents were now in for the night. In the next ten minutes the young duty manager would lock the front door, check that the loading bay and service elevator were secure and dim the house lights. I looked at a clock on the mantel – its hands were barely moving. Where was Cumali? Where in hell was Echelon?

‘But Marilyn had to stay dead,’ said Ben, dragging me back to New York and 9/11.

‘That’s right, so she walked through the smoke and body parts and found the perfect place to live

off the grid. The Eastside Inn.

‘She was an actress, and she used her craft to make sure nobody could recognize or describe her.

Every day she played a different role.’

Ben nodded. ‘Yeah – I never did get a photofit. She must have started planning right away. That took her to the New York library and your book.’

‘Right. An appendix at the back deals with the clear-up rate of homicides in different countries. A

few minutes’ reading would have told her that there were a lot better places to kill someone than America.

‘Turkey was perfect – there was little use of forensics, and investigators were overworked.

Cameron would have had no trouble convincing Dodge to cruise the Aegean, but that created a big

problem for Marilyn.’

‘Dead people can’t get passports,’ Bradley said.

I nodded. The lights throughout the hotel started to dim, the cat stretched, Bradley and I looked at the clock on the mantel. A hundred and twenty-five minutes to go.

I took a break, walked over and poured myself a coffee. My hands were shaking.

Chapter Twenty-two

THEY WERE WATCHING the clock in washington, too. It was mid-afternoon on the East Coast, and Whisperer had made his own estimate of when Echelon would hear a coded message from Cumali. It

was even earlier than mine.

If it was going to happen, he calculated, it would be no later than 11 p.m. Bodrum time. He was either more of a pessimist – or a realist – than me.

When there was sixty minutes left by his count, he closed the door of his office, stopped all phone

calls and gave strict orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed. If the president needed him, there was a direct, secure line on his desk and, in the event of good news, the NSA would flash the details to him on a dedicated Internet channel.

In his heart, he didn’t think it was likely. Experience had taught him that wishing didn’t count for anything, and he had seen too much madness, too much fanaticism, to expect any terrorist plan ever to end well. On his first tour in Afghanistan, as a young analyst, he had been seriously wounded by a pregnant woman wearing a bomb belt and, as station chief years later, he had seen kids clutching grenades run towards GIs while asking for candy.

No, he was certain: very soon the president would order the closing of the borders, the panic would

start, the queues for vaccine would stretch for miles, troops would be in the streets and the terrible search for suicide infectees would start. As soon as the president had finished addressing the nation, Whisperer would hand him the document which he was now starting to write. It was his resignation.

He wrote with his usual brutal honesty but with a sadness that weighed so heavily he thought it might crush him. A sadness for his country, for the citizens he had failed, for his kids who he barely knew, for a career that had started thirty years ago with such huge promise and was now ending in historic failure.

The clock on his desk ran down – the Internet channel was open, his screen alight – until it hit nothing. Time was up, there was no word from Echelon and, for once in his life, it brought him only

misery to be proven right.

He opened his drawer and had the cuff around his arm to check his blood pressure when the secure

phone flashed its bubble light. He picked it up.

‘Nothing?’ asked the president, not even trying to mask his anxiety.

‘No,’ replied Whisperer. ‘Cumali obviously didn’t swallow it – some small but critical mistake, I

guess. Pilgrim calculates the drop-dead time differently – he says another fifty-seven minutes – but it won’t change anything. What do you want to do – go to the people now?’

There was silence for a long moment as Grosvenor tried to bring order to his tumultuous thoughts.

‘No,’ he said finally. ‘I gave him thirty-six hours. We play it out. He deserves that.’

Grosvenor hung up, devastated for the nation and its people, aware that the public and history would be merciless in their judgement.

An hour earlier, like Whisperer, he had also cleared his agenda and stopped his calls, so he now sat alone in the afternoon’s swelling silence. He leaned his head into his hands and wished that Anne was still alive, he wished that they had had children, he wished that there was a family in whose arms he could find comfort and meaning.

But there was nothing, just a gale of fear blowing down the lonely corridors of his mind.

Chapter Twenty-three

BRADLEY AND I were in a different corridor: we were heading through the gloomy silence of the hotel

towards my room.

With less than thirty minutes left before the deadline, I had wanted to walk off some of the crushing anxiety, and I had suggested to Bradley that I give him the Turkish police files concerning Dodge’s

death. Knowing that they would be crucial to a future prosecution, he agreed, and we said goodnight

to the lazy cat and headed across the deserted foyer. We were about to step into the elevator when I stopped – I had a strong sense we were being watched.

There was nobody around, not even the duty manager, but there was a CCTV camera mounted on a

wall, trained on the reception desk and its safe, and I wondered who might be in some office nearby

observing us.

Quietly, I told Ben to take the elevator while I used the stairs – a group of assailants, Albanians for instance, would find it very difficult to deal with a target which suddenly split apart. The cop looked a question at me.

‘I need the exercise,’ I said.

He knew I was bullshitting, and I jagged left as he stepped into the elevator car. I took the stairs two at a time and met him without incident just as the steel doors opened. He stared at me and raised his eyebrows – I had the Beretta 9-mil out and cocked. ‘Handweight?’ he asked, deadpan.

I lowered it, and together we headed towards my room. I still had the feeling we were being observed, but the corridor wasn’t equipped with cameras and, though I turned fast and looked behind

us into the gloom, I saw nothing.

I unlocked the door and a thought occurred to me: the bellhop could still be in the building, ordered by whoever had recruited him to keep an eye on me. I closed the door behind us, bolted it and put the pistol on the coffee table, within easy reach.

‘We were in Manhattan,’ Bradley reminded me. ‘Cameron and Marilyn had decided to kill Dodge in

Turkey, but there was a problem.’

‘Yeah, Marilyn needed a passport,’ I said. ‘So they started searching. They were looking for a woman in her twenties, a loner, new in town maybe, definitely somebody who wouldn’t be missed.’

‘Did they find her?’

‘Sure.’

‘Where?’

‘A gay bar, Craig’s List, Washington Square on a Sunday afternoon – I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. But Marilyn took her out on a date. Later in the evening she invited her back to the Eastside Inn with the promise of drugs and sex. Instead, she killed her.’

We looked at one another. ‘She killed her for her identity, Ben,’ I said.

Bradley said nothing, thinking about it, like any good cop trying to work out how to blow holes in

it.

‘You recall a woman at your seminar?’ I continued. ‘Turquoise shirt, very intelligent, sitting at the front?’

‘Sure, I don’t think she was intelligent, though. You told her women found you sexually attractive,

and she agreed.’

I laughed. ‘She said that the murder might have had something to do with identity theft, but I wasn’t concentrating. Remember, those guys arrived and sat at the back? I should have listened, though – she got it right.’

‘And you say the name of the dead woman was Ingrid Kohl?’ Bradley said. ‘That was the woman

we found in the acid?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Marilyn was dead. She had no identity, so she had to destroy Ingrid’s face, her fingerprints and pull her teeth. She couldn’t allow the body to be identified – she was going to steal her name and become her.

‘Once the real Ingrid was dead, she had her wallet, her handbag and apartment keys. She cleaned

out Room 89, sprayed it with industrial antiseptic, took one final pass, burnt anything else she found and headed out.’

‘You think she moved into Ingrid’s apartment?’

‘I don’t know. She chose a loner, so it was possible. Whatever happened, Marilyn would have immediately gone through Ingrid’s possessions.

‘In a few hours, she would have had a social security number and everything else she needed to get

a birth certificate.’

‘And with a birth certificate you can get a passport,’ Bradley said.

‘That’s right,’ I replied, and started to assemble the files relating to Dodge’s murder.

I glanced at the digital clock on the night stand – fifteen minutes to go – and tried not to think of failure. There was still time – just one phone call and a short message was all we needed.

‘So she’s now Ingrid Kohl and has a legitimate passport with her own picture in it to prove it,’

Bradley said.

‘She flew to Europe,’ I explained, ‘established a history as a young backpacker and arrived in Turkey four months ahead of Cameron and Dodge.’

‘What was the plan? How were she and Cameron going to kill him?’

‘I’m not sure they knew, I think they were going to figure it out here – an accidental fall off the back of the boat one night, a hot shot of bad drugs, wait till he was loaded and drown him in the bath.

‘But Ingrid got lucky – she met a hustler who used the name Gianfranco, a guy who knew more about the house where Dodge was staying than anyone.

‘I think he had a scam going on – if there was nobody in residence he’d take young women through

a secret tunnel and have sex with them in the locked mansion.’

‘A secret way into the house?’ Ben said. ‘That must have been all Ingrid needed.’

‘Yeah,’ I replied, handing him the stack of files. Ten minutes left.

‘Dodge and Cameron sailed into Bodrum on their boat and met Ingrid around the clubs – just casual, nothing special. Dodge had never seen Cameron’s lover, so he had no reason to suspect Ingrid was anything more than she appeared.

‘The two women waited till they knew he was alone on the estate – the night of a big fireworks display – and Ingrid made her way into the boathouse and along the tunnel. Dodge was in the library

on a massive drug binge when a woman he had met burst into the room – of course, he assumed she

had been let in by security.

‘My theory is that – seemingly out of breath – she told him that a helicopter with Cameron on board had just gone down in the bay.’

‘Shit,’ said Ben, shocked at the ruthless ingenuity of it.

‘Naturally, Dodge believed her,’ I said. ‘Not that he was in much of a state for rational thought – he was completely loaded, full of self-loathing and disgust too.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He had a series of cuts on the palms of his hands. The cops thought it was because he’d grabbed a