I Am Pilgrim (92 page)

While the booze had probably continued to play havoc with every other organ, his mind – and his

memory – were holding up remarkably well. There was something in my face that he recognized, and

I watched him dredging through the past to find a name. ‘Jacob, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Near enough,’ I replied.

I saw him take in my bandaged shoulder and foot, the ragged clothes and my haggard expression.

‘You’re looking well, Jacob,’ he said, deadpan.

I nodded. ‘You too, Doctor. Nicely turned out, as always.’

He roared with laughter. ‘Come in. We can keep lying to each other while I see if we can save that

foot.’

He led me inside and I realized what a strange thing memory was – the rooms seemed much smaller, the distances far shorter, than the night we had carried Mack along the same route. In the kitchen, the Australian got three lamps into position, laid me on the kitchen bench, stripped off the bandages, took one look at my foot and hit me with a massive dose of IV antibiotics and an even larger amount of painkillers. Thankfully, when it came to medicine, subtlety wasn’t his strong suit.

He decided that, despite the swelling and purple bruises, neither my ribs nor my kneecap were broken. Fractured, maybe, but there was no way of telling without an X-ray.

‘Feel like a drive to the hospital in Milas?’ he asked.

He saw the look on my face and smiled – ‘I didn’t think that was an option’ – and told me he would

splint and bandage them as best he could.

After that, he injected a local anaesthetic, cleaned and sutured the gunshot wound and told me I was a lucky man.

‘I don’t feel like it,’ I replied.

‘Half an inch difference and it wouldn’t have been a hospital for you, even a makeshift one. It would have been the morgue.’

With the rest of the wounds taken care of, he turned his attention to the havoc wrought by the hammer blows. He had been a pediatric surgeon, highly experienced with victims of car wrecks, so I

believed him when he told me that the bruising and swelling would eventually take care of themselves.

‘There’s little I can do about the small bones that have been broken without scans, X-rays and an

operating theatre,’ he said, smiling. ‘A steady hand would help too.’

He decided to manipulate the bones individually into the best position then set and bandage it, hopefully holding everything in place.

‘You’re going to have to do intensive exercise to keep the ankle mobile and prevent the muscles of your lower leg from atrophying. Maybe it’ll work.’

I nodded, and he adjusted the lamps in order to start. ‘This is going to hurt.’

He got that part right. Sometime after midnight, the work was done and he called a halt – I was slipping in and out of consciousness, and I think he doubted whether I could take much more. Holding me under the arms, he got me off the bench and we crossed the kitchen, entered the living room and

headed for a stairway leading to a disused bedroom.

Halfway there, I heard voices coming from a corner of the room and saw the old TV again, tuned

to CNN. It was the evening news and the network’s Washington correspondent was reporting on the

frantic efforts since early in the morning to locate and seize ten thousand doses of flu vaccine that had been accidentally contaminated with potentially lethal traces of engine oil.

I didn’t want the doctor to know I had any interest in the event, so I told him that I needed to rest a moment. Holding on to the back of a chair, I looked at the screen.

‘The alarm was first announced by the president in a 6 a.m. press conference,’ the correspondent

reported.

‘Simultaneously, the FBI and local police agencies across the country started locating and securing

all flu vaccines manufactured at a plant in Karlsruhe, Germany, operated by Chyron Chemicals.

‘The president delivered high praise to the staff of the Food and Drug Administration who uncovered the problem and alerted the White House in a 4 a.m. phone call—’

‘Ready?’ The doctor asked, and I nodded, letting him help me up the stairs. I wasn’t surprised by the story Washington was relating. What was it somebody once said? In war, the first casualty is truth.

I reached the bed and lowered myself down. My head hit the pillow, the doctor turned out the light

and I drifted into a strange unconsciousness.

Chapter Forty-seven

THE FEVER ROCKETED during the confusion of days and nights that followed and the doctor barely had a chance to leave the small room. He told me later that he had sat at my side, sipping on a bottomless glass of Jack and listening to me roam across a remarkable dreamscape.

He heard tell of a man tied to a plank drowning in an endless ocean, a father beheaded in the blistering sun, a city littered with people bleeding out from an incurable virus, a child with Down’s syndrome hanged by the neck. He said, smiling, that the mind was a strange thing – how, under the onslaught of a fever and high doses of medication, it could invent such terrible fantasies.

If only he had known.

Worried that the horrors were growing worse, and convinced that it was a bad reaction to the drugs, he decided to wind them right back. Maybe it was the adjustment to the medication, or perhaps nature just ran its course, but the fever peaked and the nightmare memories diminished. When I finally managed to take some solid food he decided to venture into the village to pick up some groceries and other supplies. I figured he had probably run out of Jack.

He returned a troubled man. He told me that a man and woman had arrived, claiming to be tourists

on a road trip, and had made supposedly casual inquiries at both village cafés about whether any Americans had passed through recently.

I always knew that Whisperer and his legions would find me – people talk, Echelon listens, somebody would have gone into the archives and found the account of Mack’s death all those years

ago. I didn’t fear the strangers, though, I knew they had been sent to help me in case I needed it – and yet I had no intention of talking to them. I was a ruin of a man, but I had done my duty, nobody could ask any more than that, and how I stumbled my way through the wreckage that remained was entirely

my business.

I told the doctor nothing about the interlopers, but I noticed as the day wore on that he was becoming increasingly worried about what had turned up on his doorstep. That night, for the first time, I made my way slowly down to the kitchen and discovered that he was quite a cook. As he seasoned what he called his signature dish – lamb marinated in thyme and garlic – he asked me if I

still sang the ‘Midnight Special’.

‘Do I think about Mack, you mean?’ I replied. ‘More times than I ever imagined.’

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘A terrible night. Just after you left I heard a chopper come in. They picked up his body, huh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where was he buried?’ He tried to make it sound casual, but it was a strange question and I knew

where he was heading.

‘Arlington,’ I replied.

‘He was in the military?’

‘Sure – he just happened to be a fighter in a war that had never been declared.’

The doctor put his herbs down and turned – he had arrived at his point. ‘You too, Jacob? Is that what you do?’

‘Worried, Doctor?’

‘Of course I’m fucking worried! I’ve been worried since the night you arrived. As soon as you went to sleep I opened your backpack. There was a SIG covered in gunshot residue and enough

ammunition to arm a small African country. Now two people turn up and I’m wondering when the shooting is going to start.’

He was a good man, he had done the right thing by me, and he deserved an honest answer. ‘Yeah,

I’m a soldier too.’

‘Enlisted or mercenary?’

I smiled. ‘Drafted on this occasion.’

‘CIA, or something worse?’

‘I like to think better, but your mileage may vary.’

‘And the people in town?’

‘They’re ours. They’re here to check that I’m okay.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘They’re not killers, Doc. If they were, we’d already be dead. There’s nothing to worry about – I

give you my word.’

I could see it reassured him, and I was glad I had done it. A few days later, just after dusk, there was a knock at the door. There was something about it – the loudness, the fact that the front gate hadn’t creaked on its hinge, the time of day – that worried me.

I nodded to the doctor to answer it and limped as fast as I could to the old bedroom, where a narrow window offered a decent view of the front door. A guy in his thirties was standing there –

dressed like a tourist, but so hard-wired, so full of tension, that the clothes would have fooled only the most casual observer.

The doctor opened the door and the tourist told him that he wanted to speak to the man who had arrived at the house a few weeks previously. The doctor told him the only other occupant had been his brother, on a family visit, who had returned to Australia a couple of days earlier.

The agent just nodded. I figured he had been told to play it cool. ‘Well, if your brother comes back,’ he said, ‘and you happen to discover that he’s an American with a bullet wound in his shoulder, give him this, will you?’

He handed over a sealed package and left. Standing in the kitchen a few minutes later, the doctor watched me break the seal and spill out a clutch of letters. His eyes widened as he saw that the first envelope was embossed with the seal of the President of the United States.

He was even more surprised when I ignored it and looked at the others. I recognized the handwriting on one – it was from Whisperer – and I put it next to the president’s.

Two letters remained. One was in an NYPD envelope with Bradley’s details on the back and the other – written in a strange scrawl – was addressed to the Oval Office with a note to ‘Please pass it on to the man who sometimes uses the name Jude Garrett.’ I knew who it was from.

I picked those two up, limped across the kitchen and went up to my room.

Chapter Forty-eight

I READ BRADLEY’S first. He said that as soon as he had left the nanny’s house she had phoned the local cops and told them what had happened.

Because she worked for Cumali, she had no difficulty convincing them that the story was true, despite its extraordinary nature. A black American wasn’t exactly hard to locate and, alerted by an all-points bulletin, a prowl car picked him up before he had even reached the hotel. They slammed him

over the hood, disarmed him and took him down to the precinct house. He was fearing the worst –

some Turkish form of enhanced interrogation – but by then all hell was breaking loose at the Theatre of Death.

American choppers from the Mediterranean Fleet had already been dispatched at the president’s order – not to pick me up but to secure the Saracen and collect evidence. Grosvenor phoned the president of Turkey, alerted him to their approach and told him that they had located the man attempting to buy the nuclear trigger. As a result, MIT operatives and the Turkish military all converged on the ruins. With two Turkish Navy destroyers standing offshore, half a dozen US

helicopters on the beach and two hundred military personnel and intelligence agents in the ruins, the order went out to put Bradley on ice until the situation became clearer.

After five days in a cell – and following a direct request from Grosvenor to his Turkish counterpart – Bradley was released and had his passport returned. He went back to the hotel and had a tearful telephone reunion with Marcie, who, once she had recovered, asked him when he would be home.

‘A few days,’ he said.

‘What?!’ she cried.

A cop to the very end, he wasn’t leaving without organizing the extradition of Cameron and Ingrid

for the murder of Dodge and the woman at the Eastside Inn. The next morning, less than twelve hours

after his release, he returned to the precinct house and went to Cumali’s office. Hayrunnisa told him in hushed tones that her boss was still being ‘debriefed’ – and sticking steadfastly to the story that I had recommended to her, it seemed – so he asked to see whoever was in charge of the murder investigation. After a flurry of phone calls, the kid in the shiny boots escorted him to the luxurious office of the Bodrum police chief.

I recalled the man – I had seen him when half of his force were pursuing me through the boat-repair facility, the night that I pancaked SpongeBob. The chief was in his fifties, big and florid with pampered skin and a neat moustache, the gold buttons of his impressive uniform threatening to burst

at any moment. Despite the eau de Cologne he was wearing, he had a smell about him, and I couldn’t

say I was surprised by what Ben reported.

He wrote that the chief said he had received extensive legal submissions from lawyers acting on behalf of both Cameron and Ingrid: as I had anticipated, the moment the two women had left their interview with me they had immediately gone and lawyered up. The chief said that the submissions led him personally to review all the evidence.

‘Naturally, I had to discount everything supposedly discovered by the man calling himself Brodie

David Wilson. He wasn’t even a member of the FBI and had entered the country under false pretences.

As we know, he had his own agenda in complicating and prolonging the case.