Authors: Terry Hayes
I hit the door hard, throwing it back on its hinges and bursting inside – just like they had taught me.
The noise and suddenness of movement was designed to unnerve even the most seasoned
professional. I swept the room with the muzzle of the Beretta and saw the eyes first – green – looking straight at me. Their owner was sitting on the bed.
Licking its paws.
It was the tabby cat that I had seen scratching itself inside the kitchen window. Dammit – I should
have remembered she had a pet. Getting slack, I told myself.
Angry, I turned, went down the stairs and found myself in the living room. The curtains were drawn, the room made up of pools of shadow, but the first thing I saw was a TV in the corner and a
Sky decoder box on top of it. I stared at it and thought of her sitting cross-legged on the floor, her son asleep upstairs, as she worked through the night composing and copying her messages.
To be so close to the heart of it galvanized me and I moved fast to the windows, made sure the curtains were closed tight, and turned on a lamp. The single worst thing to do when you have broken
into a home is to use a flashlight – light leaks out, and nothing alerts a neighbour or passer-by faster than a beam of light sweeping around inside a house. The soft glow of a lamp, on the other hand, seems normal.
In a corner of the room was Cumali’s chaotic desk, stacked with files and bills, only the computer
monitor and its keyboard sitting in a clear space. I moved the mouse and the screen came alive –
thankfully, like most people, she had left the computer on and I didn’t have to worry about trying to unlock the password or removing the hard drive. I reached into my pocket and took out the two USB
travel drives I had bought at the mobile-phone shop. I put one into the computer – the other was a spare, just in case – and I knew my way around Windows well enough to be able to ignore that it was
in Turkish and get it to perform a full back-up.
With all her files and emails being copied on to the tiny drive, I set about searching her desk. I split it into four sections and did it methodically, examining everything and refusing to let myself be hurried. I used the camera on my cellphone to photograph anything of interest, but I knew in my heart I was just going through the motions – there was nothing that appeared to signify some sinister plot.
Among a pile of bills that were waiting to be paid was a file containing all Cumali’s home and mobile-phone accounts, and I took several minutes to look through them. All the numbers she had called seemed straightforward – certainly there were none to Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or any of the other hot zones of Islamic fundamentalism. Nor did I see any billing codes that
indicated they were relay numbers used to connect to a foreign phone number. They seemed to be Turkish calls – that was all – but I photographed them anyway.
Then the lamp went out.
I felt a spike of fear and, instinctively, I grabbed my gun. I listened closely but heard nothing, not even the tabby cat. I stood up from the desk and moved silently to the window, wanting to see what was happening outside. I pulled a corner of the curtain aside and looked into the street: the storm had become steadily worse and the whole area was in darkness. It was a power failure.
I should have asked myself, of course, if it was just Bodrum that was blacked out or if it extended
further afield. Unfortunately, I didn’t.
Chapter Fifty-three
FORCED TO RELY on my flashlight, I returned to the desktop, finished with it and started on the drawers.
They were even more barren.
On a scrap of paper – a half-completed crossword torn from a London newspaper – I found that
someone had written the word ‘clownfish’ in the margin. Maybe they had been trying to work out a
clue. Maybe not. It was scrawled, written quickly, and I couldn’t tell if it was Cumali’s handwriting or not, so I photographed it too.
A few minutes later, leafing through the pages of an old day-runner diary, I found a handwritten list of sea-life – all in English – which featured the same word. Again, it meant nothing to me – perhaps she had been trying to teach her son something – and I moved on.
Thanks to the power failure, I had far less hesitation in using the flashlight – everybody in Bodrum would be doing it – and I swept the room, searching the limestone walls and uneven floorboards, looking for a hidden safe. There was nothing, so I took the USB drive out of the computer –
thankfully, it had finished copying the files before the power failed – went back up the stairs and made my way to the next most likely place to yield results: Cumali’s bedroom.
I was about to start on the cop’s bureau when the beam from the flashlight gave me a glimpse of a
tall filing cabinet in her walk-in closet. I tried one of the drawers and – strange, I thought – found that the cabinet was locked.
I opened my wallet and took out a small set of picks and, though it had been years since I had learned the technique, the lock was so simple it took me less than a minute to throw the bolt. The first drawer was full of police case files – including several dealing with the death of Dodge – but behind them, in a gap at the back, I discovered the reason why Cumali kept it locked. She didn’t want her son getting hold of the Walther P99 pistol I found there.
There was nothing remarkable about its presence – a lot of cops kept a stand-by side arm at home –
but I located the serial number etched into its barrel and entered it into my cellphone for later checking. Who could tell? Sometime, somewhere, it might have been used or registered to somebody,
and that could give me a vital clue.
The next drawer was almost empty – just bills that were stamped ‘paid’ and a file containing an itemized account from the regional hospital. Although most of it was in Turkish, the names of the drugs that had been ordered were in English, and I knew from my medical training what they were used for. I looked at the first page of the file, saw the name of the patient and the date and realized that, several weeks earlier, Cumali’s son had been admitted with meningococcal meningitis.
It was an extremely dangerous infection – especially for kids – and notoriously difficult to diagnose fast enough. A lot of doctors, even those in emergency rooms, often misread it as the flu and, by the time the mistake was discovered, it was often too late. Cumali must have been fortunate enough to encounter an ER doctor who was sufficiently knowledgeable – and strong-minded enough
– not to wait for the results of the pathology tests but had immediately put the boy on the massive doses of intravenous antibiotics, which had undoubtedly saved his life.
I kept going through the file, feeling good about what had happened – at last the little guy had caught a break. I got to the final page and glanced at Leyla Cumali’s signature on the bill. I was about to put the file back when I paused. Perhaps it was because I had never really looked at her name written down before, but I realized something: I didn’t know her surname at all. Not for certain.
The strict practice in Turkey was for a divorced woman to return to her pre-marriage name, but I remembered reading once that a court could grant dispensations. Say, against the odds, Cumali was
her married name – it meant that there might be a clue in an earlier life, in a previous surname.
In everything I had searched I hadn’t found a birth certificate, marriage licence, passport – anything at all – to show what name she had been born with. It was possible that the documents were kept in a secure location – a safe in her office at the station house, for example – but I couldn’t be sure and worked faster, going through every drawer of the filing cabinet to see if I could find them.
The curtains behind me were closed tight and the wind was drowning out every other sound, so I
had no idea that a car had come down the street and pulled into Cumali’s driveway.
Chapter Fifty-four
IT WASN’T UNTIL later I discovered that the blackout had extended far beyond Bodrum. To Milas, for example – which meant that the evening performance of the circus had been called off, the tickets transferred to the following week, and the audience had left hours early to make their way home.
I figure that the little guy fell asleep on the drive back, so Cumali stopped outside her garage, as close as possible to her back door. She picked him up, pushed the Fiat’s door closed and carried him across an apron of concrete.
She slipped the key in the back door, opened it one-handed, and the blast of storm-driven wind entering through the missing four terracotta tiles on the roof would have told her instantly that something was wrong. If she had any doubts they would have been dispelled by the sound of my footsteps on the bare boards of the floor above.
She turned with her son in her arms, got back in the car and used her cellphone to call Emergency. I have no doubt that she gave the operator the confidential code – a feature of all police forces – which said that an officer was in trouble and needed urgent help. There was no other explanation for the speed and strength of the response.
Strangely enough, it was that urgency which gave me a chance – not much of a one, admittedly, but
a chance all the same. In some situations you take what you’re given and make no complaint.
The first squad car to arrive came down the road fast – no siren or bubble-lights flashing, in the
hope of surprising the intruder – but drew up to the kerb a little too fast. The sound of gravel being thrown up, almost buried in the wind, was the first indication I had that something was badly wrong.
An agent without as many miles on the clock as I had might have gone to the window to look, but I
froze and listened. I heard the metallic sound of a car door opening and, when the door didn’t slam, it told me eloquently that the occupants didn’t want to be heard and were coming for me.
Even though I was certain that the cops were outside I continued to sweep through the filing cabinet, unwilling to surrender the only opportunity I would ever get, continuing to look for a document – any document – that would tell me Cumali’s birth name. I figured the visitors were waiting for back-up,
which meant one thing was for sure: they wouldn’t be entering the house in numbers small enough for me to handle. I decided to stay until I heard the next car arrive and then get the hell out.
I kept searching, attuned to every sound, cancelling out the howl of the wind. Less than a minute later I heard at least one more car pull to a stop. Perhaps two. Despite my earlier plan – call me stupid, if you want – I pressed on. In the bottom drawer, under a stack of old law-enforcement magazines, I
found a large leather book, the type of thing which I had seen many times before – a wedding album.
It wasn’t what I was hoping for but, under the circumstances, it was my best chance. I just hoped Turkish photographers were as business-minded as their counterparts in America. I opened the album
at random, pulled out one of the photos and slammed the book back where I had found it, confident
that one photo taken years ago wouldn’t be missed.
I jammed the photograph inside my shirt, scattered some of the contents of the filing cabinet across the floor and upended two drawers from the bureau to make it look like an amateur burglary. I picked up the Walther P99 and cocked it – at least, in that regard, luck was being a lady. I had no hope of using my own gun, in case suspicion fell on me – any ballistic tests on the bullets could end up nailing me with certainty – but the Walther was completely unconnected to me. I headed for the bedroom door, ready to use the gun.
Lights in the house came on – the power to the area had been restored. Maybe luck wasn’t such a lady after all. I wheeled right and headed for the stairs that led up into the attic – I had left them down and hadn’t replaced the roof tiles, just in case I needed a fast retreat.
I heard footsteps – pairs of boots, actually – coming up the front steps, and I knew the cops were
only moments away. Clambering up the stairs, I heard the key turn in the lock.
I made it into the attic just as the front door was thrown open, accompanied by a man’s voice yelling in Turkish. I figured he was telling whoever was inside to throw down any weapons and show
themselves with their hands up.
I hauled the ladder up, threw myself at the part of the attic where I had removed the tiles and crawled through on to the pitched roof. Sticking to the shadows, I elbowed my way forward and did a
fast reconnoitre of the area. I noted Cumali’s car in the driveway and clearly saw her sitting inside holding her son, while a group of her colleagues moved towards the garage and through the backyard. They had the place surrounded.
There was only one way out: a sprint over the tiles and a flying leap across the eighteen-foot-wide
driveway to the roof of Gul’s adjoining warehouse. No sweat – eighteen feet was no problem for me.
Sure. I hadn’t jumped anything like eighteen feet through thin air since training and, even then, I was more wooden spoon than gold medal.
Chapter Fifty-five
I CONTINUED TO lie in the shadows, trying to think of a better plan, when I heard a door thrown open below and, a second later, the shattering sound of a stun grenade exploding. Turkish cops didn’t muck around. I figured they had made their way into Cumali’s bedroom and any minute they would turn their attention to the attic space.