I Am Pilgrim (60 page)

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell you how helpful this is.’

‘No problem. Of course, you’re lucky it’s only the authorized ones you want.’

It stopped me in mid-celebration. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, a lot of people tuning in these days—’

I started to feel sick.

‘Use pirated boxes,’ he continued. ‘Chinese, mostly – if it’s not Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton handbags, they’re counterfeiting boxes and our access cards. They sell ’em through small electronic

shops and internet cafés – places like that. It’s big business. Once you’ve bought the box and card, the service is free. You there?’

‘In somewhere like Muğla,’ I said quietly, ‘how many pirated boxes do you think there would be?’

‘A place that size? Ten thousand – maybe more. There’s no way of tracking who has ’em, it’s totally underground. Next year, we think we’ll have the technology to trace—’

I wasn’t listening: next year we could all be dead. Ten thousand boxes and no subscriber list made it an impossible task. I thanked him for his help and hung up.

I stood motionless, the silence crowding in and the black dog of despair biting at my heels. To have had my hopes raised and then so comprehensively dashed was a hard break. For the first time since I

had been press-ganged into the war, just for a few moments I thought I had a real way into the problem. Now that it had turned to dust, I was in the mood to be brutal with myself.

What did I really have? I asked. I had compiled a list of phone boxes; by a stroke of good fortune

and the work of a team of Italian experts I had stayed in the game – and apart from that? Anyone who

didn’t need a white cane could see that I had very little.

I was angry too. I was angry at the fucking Chinese for not controlling the wholesale piracy of other people’s ideas and products, I was angry at Bradley and Whisperer and all the rest who weren’t there to help me, and I was angry at Arabs who thought that the bigger the body count, the greater the victory. But mostly I was angry at the woman, and the man in the Hindu Kush for staying ahead of me.

I walked to the window and tried to find a pocket of calm. The exercise with Sky hadn’t been a complete bust: it had taught me that the woman almost certainly lived in the area, and that was real progress. I looked across the rooftops – she was out there somewhere. All I had to do was find her.

I tried to see in my mind which of the phone boxes she had been standing in, waiting for the phone

to ring, but I had no data, and all I could draw was a blank. Yet I could hear the traffic going past and I listened to the muzak – the radio station, or whatever it damn well was – playing faintly in the background.

Come to that, I thought, where was the update on the music? What were Whisperer and those guys

doing back home? Wasn’t the NSA supposed to be trying to isolate, enhance and identify it?

I was in just the mood to vent my frustration so, even though it was late in New York, I didn’t care. I picked up the phone.

Chapter Thirty-seven

BRADLEY ANSWERED AND told me he wasn’t in bed, but, from the sound of his voice, he was clearly exhausted. Well, so was I. He started to ask about Dodge’s death, just to maintain the cover, but I cut him short.

‘Remember the music we spoke about?’ I said. Of course he didn’t, he had no idea what I was talking about. ‘There was the sound of traffic, it was playing in the background—’

‘Oh yeah, I remember,’ he said, getting with the programme.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Somebody was supposed to be drilling down, trying to identify it.’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t heard.’

‘Get on to it, will you? Make some calls.’

‘Sure,’ Bradley replied, offended by my tone, immediately getting as irritable as I was. ‘When do

you need it by?’

‘Now,’ I replied. ‘A few hours ago would have been better.’

Hungry as hell, I was on my third stale candy bar from the mini-bar, and sitting in the chair, staring out at the town and thinking about the woman, when the phone rang. It was Bradley, and he said that

the music was pretty much a bust.

‘They’ve filtered out the noise of the New York traffic,’ he said. The reference to New York was

meaningless packaging. ‘And they’ve enhanced the music. It’s Turkish, of course. It seems it’s being played on a kaval—’

‘A what?’ I asked.

‘A kaval. A wind instrument, like a flute apparently – seven holes on top and one underneath; they’re the melody keys. It’s a folk thing. The story is that shepherds would use it to lead their flock.’

‘Great – we’re looking for a shepherd driving his sheep through rush-hour traffic,’ I said.

‘Not exactly,’ replied Bradley. ‘It’s pretty common – they say it’s very popular with folk-music groups.’

‘A kaval, huh? What was it playing on? A CD? Live? On the radio?’

‘After they took out the background noise and enhanced it, they lost what they call the signatures –

they can’t tell.’

‘Christ! They don’t make it easy, do they?’

I looked across the rooftops and asked myself again: where had she been standing? Some place where you could hear traffic and music being played on a Turkish folk instrument called a kaval.

Where?

‘Here’s another problem,’ Bradley continued. ‘They can’t identify the tune either. The sample’s not

very big, but nobody seems to have heard it.’

‘That’s strange,’ I said. ‘You’d think if it was a folk tune, and with all their experts—’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

We were silent for a moment and, when it became clear there was nothing more to discuss, I broached another subject. ‘I’m sorry, Ben,’ I said.

‘For what?’

‘Being a dick.’

‘But you’ve always been a dick,’ he said, deadpan as always. ‘Anyway, I told our friends you were

feeling the stress and starting to crack up.’

‘Oh good, that should further my career,’ I replied.

‘Glad to help,’ he said. He didn’t laugh – it was Ben Bradley, after all – but I could tell from his voice that I had put things right with him, and I was thankful for that.

‘One more thing,’ I said.

‘Sure.’

‘Ask ’em to work out a way to send the recording, will you? Just the music, not the traffic.’ I didn’t know why but I wanted to hear it.

Chapter Thirty-eight

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, after I had finished showering, I walked out of the bathroom and found a new

email on my laptop. It was from Apple, telling me that twenty-seven dollars had been charged to my

credit card for music downloads.

I hadn’t bought any music and my fear was that some jerk at the CIA had thought it might be useful

to add to Brodie Wilson’s already extensive collection of fucked-up music. I went to iTunes, saw a group of new tracks had arrived and realized that most of them were just packing – there was only

one that mattered, and I knew it was from Whisperer.

On the night before I flew to Turkey – when we were working in his study – I saw on the wall an

autographed copy of the Rolling Stones’
Exile on Main Street
, which, despite our fatigue, had led to a spirited discussion about whether it really was their greatest album. Who would have guessed that the country’s Director of National Intelligence was a closet Stones expert? In scanning the new tracks, I saw that Bradley hadn’t been joking when he said he had told our friend I was cracking up. Whisperer had sent me the Stones’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’.

I put my cursor on it, hit play and listened for thirty seconds before it morphed. Planted in the middle, stripped of traffic noise and the woman’s strange message, was the kaval music. Twice I played it through – it lasted for a little more than two minutes – then downloaded it on to my MP3

player. I thought it might give me inspiration as I headed out again to locate phone box after phone box.

It didn’t; it gave me a headache.

By the time I had photographed the fourth one and decided to ask groups of neighbourhood women

if they recalled seeing a woman waiting for a phone call and drawn nothing except confused looks or

a wary shake of the head, I knew it was going to be a very long day. What was that Turkish expression? Digging a well with a needle?

Still, if you wanted to drink, sometimes that’s what you had to do. I was walking down a narrow street, listening to the kaval and wondering again why none of the experts could identify it, when I stopped: something had just occurred to me. I was following the map on my phone, looking for the

next phone box, and it meant I had to make a right. Instead I wheeled left and headed towards the centre of town.

Up ahead, I saw the purple fronds of the jacaranda tree I was looking for and, moments later, I caught sight of the guy from the record store, opening up the shutters that covered the glass windows.

When he saw me, he smiled.

‘I thought you’d probably come back,’ he said, and indicated one of the classic guitars in the window. ‘You look like a Stratocaster kind of guy to me.’

‘I’d love to buy a Strat, but not today – I need some help.’

‘Sure,’ he replied. I helped him raise the rest of the shutters and then he led me through the front door and into the dark cavern of the music store. It was even better than

I had thought: at the back there was a cabinet full of restored turntables for those who still believed in needles and valves, a better range of modern guitars than most stores in New York and enough vinyl pressings from the seventies to have made Whisperer weep.

I indicated his collection of Turkish folk instruments and told him I had a piece of music played on a kaval that I was hoping he could identify.

‘A lot of other people have tried,’ I said, ‘but nobody seems to be able to nail it.’

‘I wish my father was alive,’ he said. ‘He was an expert on the traditional stuff, but I’ll give it a shot.’

I cued up the MP3 player and watched as he listened. He played it four, maybe five, times. Then he

put the player into a docking station and played it through the store’s sound system. Three tourists who had wandered in listened.

‘Not exactly foot-tapping,’ one of them, a New Zealander, said. He was right – the music was haunting, more like a cry on the wind.

The owner played it again, his dreamy eyes focused. Then he shook his head, and I wasn’t surprised: it had always been a long shot. I started to thank him, but he interrupted.

‘It’s not a kaval,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘That’s why you’re having difficulty identifying the tune – it wasn’t written for a kaval. Almost anybody would have made the mistake, but I’m pretty sure it’s a far older instrument. Listen …’

He played it again. ‘A kaval has seven melody stops on top and one underneath. This is hard –

you’ve really got to listen – but the instrument that’s playing here has only got six stops on top and one below. There’s no seventh stop.’

I listened one more time but, honestly, I couldn’t tell – I had no idea how many stops it had. ‘You’re sure?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ he replied.

‘What is it then?’

‘I can’t tell you anything about the tune,’ he said. ‘But I think we’re listening to a çigirtma. It’s virtually forgotten – I only know about it because my father loved the old stuff. I heard the instrument once when I was a kid.’

‘Why are they forgotten, though – they died out?’

‘Not exactly – the birds did. For a kaval you need the wood of a plum tree, but a çigirtma is made

from the wing bone of a mountain eagle. The birds have been endangered for years, so the instrument

faded away – and so did the music written for it. That’s why you can’t find the tune.’

He removed the MP3 player from the docking station and handed it to me. ‘You know the Hotel Ducasse?’ he asked. ‘You might get some help there.’

Chapter Thirty-nine

THE HOTEL DUCASSE was one of the places I mentioned earlier – SO fashionable, people were drilling

holes in the wall to get inside. It was on the waterfront, with a private beach, cabanas you could rent for the summer for a small fortune and a dozen flat-bottomed boats that ferried waiters, food and drinks out to moored cruisers. That was the low end of the establishment.

The exclusive section, up on the roof, was called the Skybar. I had come straight from the music

store, and I passed through the hotel’s art deco front doors, crossed several acres of Cuban mahogany flooring and skirted extravagant settings of Philippe Starck furniture before I found the Skybar ’s dedicated elevator. As I approached, I saw the guy operating it – dressed in designer black pyjamas –

note my cheap FBI-style clothes and ready himself to say it was reservation only. But I have a pretty good death stare when I need it, so I set it to Defcon 1 and saw him decide that keeping me out wasn’t worth dying for.

He zoomed me to the top and I stepped into a zoo. The Skybar ’s centrepiece was a pure white, vanishing-edge pool with a glass bottom and a huge view across the bay to the Crusader castle and –

fittingly enough – the French House.

Facing the pool were a handful of ultra-luxurious cabanas which seemed to be occupied by several

of Eastern Europe’s leading kleptocrats and their families. Slightly elevated, they commanded the best view of the pool and its huge expanse of flesh and silicon: scantily clad women of all ages with bee-stung lips and bolt-on boobs, and young, hard-bodied guys in swimsuits so brief they were generally