I Am Pilgrim (59 page)

We laughed, but we both knew he didn’t have a chance if we didn’t get him medical help soon. I swung behind the wheel and hit the gas, fishtailing through the parking lot, sending revellers scattering, while the spotter directly behind me was already on his cell, speaking to Control on what we all hoped was a sufficiently secure line.

As I turned hard on to the blacktop, the spotter hung up and told me I was to drop him and his buddy at the marina in Bodrum, as planned. They had to get out before everything went into lockdown: Turkey was a proud country and the Turks wouldn’t react well to people being executed

under their noses. The spotters would take Greenburg’s body on board with them while I got Mack to

the doctor who was on standby. Hopefully, he would stabilize the wounds and buy time for a stealth

chopper from the US Mediterranean Fleet to come in low over the coast and extract us both. The chopper, with a doctor and two medical specialists on board, was already being scrambled and, once

it had picked us up, it would head for the fleet’s aircraft carrier, where there were operating theatres and a full surgical team.

Mack had a chance, and I drove even faster. It was a wild ride, and I don’t think anyone in a mini-van shaped like a brick had ever covered the distance any quicker. We arrived at the marina and, in a stroke of good fortune, found it virtually deserted – it was Saturday night, and all the boats were either partying at the ruins or moored near Bodrum’s scores of beach-front restaurants.

I backed along the dock, helped the spotters transfer Greenburg’s body on board and then got back

behind the wheel. We had a bad road in front of us and a world of trouble behind.

Chapter Thirty-five

WE SANG. MACK and I sang ‘midnight special’ and all the old Delta blues standards as we barrelled south through the deepening night, down roads I had only travelled once before in my life, terrified that I would miss a turn or take the wrong fork and finally cost him his life just as certainly as I had cast it into the balance up on the clifftop.

We sang to keep Mack’s creeping unconsciousness at bay, we sang to thumb our nose at death, our

unseen passenger, and we sang to say that we were alive and we loved life and that nobody in that vehicle was going to be taken easy or without a fight. It started to rain.

We had driven south, moving fast into an increasingly remote area with only the scattered lights of

small farms to tell us where the land ended and the sea began. At last I saw the turn-off I was looking for, took it in a shower of gravel and started a long descent towards a secluded fishing village. We came round the tip of a headland, met the rain full on and saw lights huddled together at the water ’s edge. I reached the village and found a narrow street which looked familiar.

Mack had slipped into a kind of half-world, my jacket was soaked with his blood – and I drove one-

handed, constantly trying to keep him awake and fighting.

Hoping to hell I hadn’t made a mistake in my navigation, I turned a corner and saw a communal

water fountain surrounded by dead flowers and with an old bucket tied to a rope and knew that I was

close. I drew to a stop in the darkness, grabbed my flashlight from my key chain and shone it on the front gate – I didn’t want to have a half-dead man over my shoulder and knock at the wrong door.

The beam of the flashlight picked out a brass plaque on the gate. Unpolished and faded, written in

English, it gave the occupant’s name and the details of his degrees – in medicine and surgery – from Sydney University. In light of the nature of the guy practising there, it probably wasn’t the best advertisement for that august institution.

I opened the passenger door, lifted Mack on to my shoulder, kicked open the gate and headed towards the front door of the rundown cottage. It opened before I got there – the doctor had heard the car stop outside and had come to investigate. He stood on the threshold peering out – a face like an unmade bed, skinny legs in a pair of baggy shorts and a T-shirt so faded that the stripper bar it advertised had probably closed years ago. He was in his early forties but, given his love of the bottle, if he made fifty it would be a surprise. I didn’t know what his real name was – thanks to the plaque on the gate, all the Turks in the area knew him simply as Dr Sydney – and that seemed to suit him fine.

I had met him a week earlier when, after Control had made the arrangements, I was sent to test the

route. He had been told I was a tour guide escorting a group of Americans through the area who might need, in the unlikely event of an emergency, his assistance. I don’t think he believed a word of it but, by all accounts, he didn’t like the Turkish authorities very much and our substantial cash advance encouraged him not to ask any questions.

‘Hello, Mr Jacobs,’ he said. Jacobs was the name I was using in Turkey. He looked at Mack draped

over my shoulder and saw the blood-soaked jacket tied around his waist. ‘Quite a tour you must be

running there – remind me not to take it.’ In my experience, most Australians aren’t easily rattled and I was deeply grateful for that.

Together we carried Mack into the kitchen and, though the doctor ’s breath reeked of booze, there

was something in the way he straightened his back and cut away Mack’s clothes and damaged tissue

that told me he had once been a surgeon of discipline and skill.

I used whatever of my medical training I could remember to act as his theatre nurse and, with the hot water running, the kitchen bench swept clear to provide a table, the reading lamps from his study and bedroom pressed into service to illuminate the wound, we tried desperately to stabilize the shattered body and keep Mack alive until the chopper with its specialists and bags of plasma arrived.

Not once through that harrowing time did the doctor ’s hand shake or his commitment falter – he

extemporized and cursed and dragged out from beneath the layers of booze and wasted years every

idea and strategy he had ever learned.

It didn’t work. Mack faded, and we fought harder, we got him back, then he faded again. With the

chopper barely eighteen minutes away, the bluesman seemed to sigh. He lifted one hand up as if to touch our faces in silent thanks, and flew away. We fought even harder, but there was no calling him back that time, and we both fell still and quiet at last.

Dr Sydney hung his head, and it was impossible from where I was standing to see whether his body

was trembling from fatigue or something far more human. After a moment he looked up at me and I

saw in his eyes the despair – the anguish – it caused him to have someone die in his hands.

‘I used to operate on injured children,’ he said quietly, as if in explanation for the drink, the rundown cottage, the life in exile and the acres of pain he carried with him. I nodded, finding at least some understanding of what it must have been like to lose a young kid under the knife.

‘He was a friend of yours?’ he asked.

I nodded and, with a decency that no longer surprised me, he made an excuse and found something

to do in another part of the house. I drew the sheet over Mack’s face – I wanted him to have all the dignity I could give him – and said a few words. You couldn’t call it praying but, out of respect, in the hope that his spirit was somewhere close at hand, I said what I needed to about friendship, courage, and hopeless regret for breaking the rules up on the cliff-top.

The doctor returned and started to clean up, and I walked out into his living room. It was fourteen

minutes until the chopper arrived, and a message on my cellphone told me they had identified a garbage dump behind town where they could land without being seen. Keeping the tremor out of my

voice, I called and said they could stand the medics down: it wasn’t a patient they would be evacuating, it was a body.

I got rid of the vehicle by giving it to Dr Sydney – it was small recompense for the effort he had

made to save Mack – and my remaining concern was the Turkish cops. Trying to discover what they

were doing, I turned to the TV playing softly in the corner of the living room.

It was showing a Turkish news programme, but there was nothing about the killings at the rave or

of a police operation heading my way. I used the remote to surf through the local channels – soap operas, Hollywood movies dubbed in Turkish and two more news programmes – but nothing to cause

alarm.

Nor was there anything on the BBC, CNN, Bloomberg or MSNBC …

Chapter Thirty-six

I COULDN’T BREATHE for a moment. I was still standing on the bluff above the ruins, remembering the

past, but the thought of looking at the TV in the doctor ’s old cottage had stolen the air from my lungs.

If Dr Sydney could get the English-language news channels in a far more remote area, how come

they weren’t available in Bodrum?

I ran for the Fiat.

It was still early, there was little traffic and the drive into Bodrum was almost as fast as when I had had Mack lying in the seat beside me. I parked on the sidewalk outside the hotel, sprinted up the steps and saw the manager coming out of the dining room.

‘Ahh,’ he said, smiling. ‘Was the trip of the mirrors with the largeness of glass a success?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, ‘I don’t have time. I need to know about the TV service.’

He looked at me, confused – why the hell would I want to know about that?

‘The bellboy said you can’t get the English-speaking news channels in Bodrum. Is that right?’

‘That is the truth very much,’ he replied. ‘The company of great thievery called DigiTurk which gives us the channels of crap has no such service.’

‘There must be a way – I’ve seen the BBC, MSNBC and several others,’ I said.

He thought for a moment, turned and made a phone call. He spoke in Turkish, listened to the response then cupped his hand over the mouthpiece as he reported to me. He said that his wife thought that some people bought digital boxes and accessed a European satellite which broadcast the news channels I was asking about.

‘What’s the name of the service – the satellite? Does she know?’ I asked.

The manager put the question to her, then turned to me and gave the answer. ‘Sky,’ he said.

Sky was a British satellite broadcaster and I knew from living in London it was a pay service. That

meant there were subscribers and, if people were buying decoder boxes, somebody in the

organization would have a list of them.

I went up to my room fast and called the company in England. I got passed through eight or nine

different phone extensions before I ended up with a helpful guy from the north country whose accent

was so thick you could have served a Yorkshire pudding with it.

He was in charge of European subscriptions, and he told me that all the channels I was interested in were carried on Sky’s premium Astra satellite.

‘It’s got a big footprint, that one – it was designed to cover Western Europe and reach as far as Greece.

‘Then quite a few years ago, the satellite’s software was upgraded, the signal got stronger and suddenly you could pick it up in Turkey with a three-foot dish. Of course, you still need the decoder box and an access card, but it means a lot more people have taken it up.’

‘How many subscribers, Mr Howell?’

‘In Turkey? We’ve got expats, of course – they take their boxes and cards with ’em when they move. Then there’s the English-themed pubs and clubs – the tourists want their football. Finally, we have the locals who like the programming. All up, there’s probably about ten thousand.’

‘Can you break it down by area?’

‘Of course.’

‘How many people in the vicinity of Bodrum – say, a province called Muğla?’ I asked, desperately trying not to let my hopes get too far ahead of me.

‘Give me a second,’ he said, and I could hear him tapping at a computer. ‘It’s a murder investigation, you said?’ He was making conversation while he worked to get the data.

‘Yeah, young American guy. He loved sports and TV,’ I lied. ‘I’m just trying to tie a few things up.’

‘I got it,’ he said. ‘About eleven hundred subscribers.’

My spirits soared. It meant people in Bodrum could receive the television stations I needed. I looked out of the window and imagined the woman I was looking for sitting cross-legged in one of

the white Cubist houses, watching a TV with a Sky box on top, grabbing soundbites from a host of

different news programmes and working for hours to edit and code them. Eleven hundred boxes – it

had narrowed the search for her dramatically – and I wasn’t done yet.

‘If you discount the expatriates and the bars, how many subscribers do you think there are?’ I asked.

‘Households? Most likely six or seven hundred,’ he replied.

I was close! Six or seven hundred households was a lot of work, a lot of shoe leather to track down

each one of them, but it meant the potential suspects were now ring-fenced. Somewhere among that

group was the woman I was looking for.

‘Is that a good number?’ Howell asked.

‘Very good,’ I told him, unable to keep the smile out of my voice. ‘Can you give me a list of the

subscribers?’

‘Sure, but I’d have to get authorization. No offence, but we’d need to know for certain it’s the FBI who’s asking.’

‘I can get you an official letter in a couple of hours. After that, how long would it take?’

‘It’s just a download and printing it out. A few minutes.’

It was better than I could have imagined: very soon I would have a list of six hundred addresses, and the woman’s would be one of them. We were on our way.