I Am Pilgrim (10 page)

Sitting alone with the storm rolling towards me, I looked back over the years and found, if not an

answer, at least a way forward. Rising out of the past to meet me was a remote village called Khun

Yuam, just on the Thai side of the Burma border. Looking back, I think the memory of it had waited

for years in darkness, knowing its time would come.

It is wild, lawless country up there – not far from the Golden Triangle – and when I was first starting out in this business – I had only been in Berlin for a month – I found myself washed up on its shore. Nothing distinguished Khun Yuam from the other hill-tribe villages, except that five clicks out in the jungle stood a series of grim cinder-block buildings surrounded by guard towers and an electric fence.

Officially a relay post for the Global Positioning System, it was in fact a CIA black prison, part of a vehemently denied but real American gulag: remote facilities used to house prisoners who couldn’t

be legally tortured back home.

One of the guards had died in-house and, while the Tokyo office normally would have handled it,

they were so overwhelmed by yet another Chinese spy scandal that I found myself leaving Europe and

flying into a place called Mae Hong Son – the City of Three Mists – on an old turbo-prop.

Most of the time it was a short chopper ride out to the GPS station, but this was the monsoon season and they didn’t call it the City of Three Mists for nothing. I rented a Toyota four-wheel drive from a guy who I guessed was a local opium baron and headed for Khun Yuam and its CIA prison.

Passing through spectacular mountains, I came to an ancient cable ferry. It was the only way to cross a roaring river – swollen by the monsoon – a tributary of the mighty Mekong, the scene of so

many secret operations and so much US misery during the Vietnam War.

I got out of the car, gaunt and hollow-eyed; I had been travelling non-stop for thirty-two hours, fuelled by nothing more than ambition and anxiety about the mission. As I waited among a clutch of

food vendors and villagers, watching a rusty cable drag the flat-bottomed ferry towards us in plumes of spray, a Buddhist monk in saffron robes asked if I wanted a cup of Masala-chai, the local tea. He

spoke good English and, with nothing else on offer except the deadly Thai elephant beer, I gratefully accepted.

The monk was heading upcountry too and – given I was supposed to be a WHO expert surveying

endemic diseases – it was pretty hard to refuse his request for a ride. We crossed the river in the Toyota, the barge plunging and barely afloat, water blasting over the gunwales and two inches of rusted cable the only thing between us and one of the country’s highest waterfalls, half a click downstream. The worst white-knuckle ride of my life.

As we drove out of the gorge, the jungle forming a canopy over our heads, the monk looked at me

a little too long and asked about my work. Thanks to my medical training, I gave an excellent account of breakbone fever, but it soon became clear he didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. Maybe he knew about the cinder-block camp at Khun Yuam.

He had lived at an ashram not far from New York, so he had more knowledge than you would expect about American life and he spoke intelligently about recreational drugs and the pressures of

modern life. I started to get the feeling it wasn’t a casual conversation. ‘You look hunted,’ he said finally, in that Buddhist way, more in sorrow than in judgement.

Hunted? I laughed and told him it was the first time I had ever heard that: people usually put me on the other side of the food chain.

‘There is no other side of the food chain,’ he said quietly. ‘Only the West believes that. Without grace, everyone is running from something.’

Our eyes met. Smiling, I asked if he’d ever considered pursuing a religious life. He laughed right

back and wanted to know if I had heard how villagers caught monkeys.

I told him I knew a few things about life, but that wasn’t one of them. ‘We didn’t eat much monkey

at Harvard – generally only at Thanksgiving and Christmas,’ I said.

So he told me how the villagers chain a ewer – a vase with a narrow neck and a bulbous bottom –

to the base of a tree.

‘They fill the bottom with nuts and whatever else monkeys like to eat. In the night, a monkey climbs out of the trees and slips his hand down the long neck. He grabs the sweets and his hand makes a fist.

That means it’s too big to get back up the narrow neck, and he’s trapped. In the morning the villagers come round and hit him on the head.’

He looked at me for a moment. ‘It’s a Zen story of course,’ he said, smiling again. ‘The point is: if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.’

Yes, I understood that much, I told him. It was a good story, but it didn’t mean anything to me, not now, anyway.

‘I suppose not,’ he replied, ‘but perhaps I was put on the road to tell it to you. You’re young, Doctor

– maybe the time will come when it will mean something.’

And he was right, of course, the time did come, and in a different way from anything I could have

imagined: it was sitting in the Geneva night waiting for a storm, thinking about mass murder in New

York and women in short skirts recruiting even brighter young graduates for a new era.

I was thirty-one years old and I realized, through no fault of my own, I had been trained for tank

warfare in Europe, only to find the battle was with guerillas in Afghanistan. Like it or not, history had passed me by.

On another level, far deeper, I knew that sooner or later I wanted to find something – something it’s hard for me to put a name to … a thing most people call love, I suppose. I wanted to walk along a beach with someone and not think about how far a sniper rifle can fire. I wanted to forget that you feel

the bullet long before you hear the shot. I wanted to find somebody who could tell me what safe harbour really meant.

I knew with all my heart that, if I didn’t leave the secret world now, I never would. To turn your back on everything you know is hard, among the most difficult things you’ll ever do, but I kept telling myself one thing.

If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.

Chapter Fourteen

I WROTE OUT my resignation late that night in the hotel du Rhône, dispatched it by diplomatic courier the next morning and immediately flew to London.

I spent the next three weeks wrapping up my outstanding cases and giving the files to the FBI: in the first of many huge changes to the US intelligence community, The Division had been closed down and its responsibilities assumed – after four decades of trying – by the Feds.

Ironically, my last day on the job was in Berlin, the city where everything had really started for me.

I locked the office for the final time and accompanied the staff out to Tempelhof for the flight home. I shook hands with them and, an agent to the end, said I was booked on a later plane.

Instead I walked out of the front doors and, carrying a totally new identity, got a taxi to a car dealership, where I took delivery of a Cayenne turbo. With five hundred horsepower, I figured I was

more or less ready for the autobahn.

I threw my bags in the back, was past Frankfurt by evening and crossed the border in the early hours of the morning. Fall had come late that year and even by moonlight I don’t think I had ever seen the French countryside looking more beautiful. I flew past villages with romantic names and found the péage – a tollway – I was looking for.

If you come into Paris from the south, there’s a remarkable point – between the towering high-rises

in which the French warehouse their immigrants – where the first sight of the city is almost completely hidden from you. The only thing you see is the Eiffel Tower standing on the horizon.

It was early in the morning, a chill in the air lending a sparkling clarity to everything. I had seen the view many times before but, even so, it took my breath away. The sense of release that had been growing in me through the night finally broke its banks, and I pulled to the side of the road: to be in Paris when you’re young and free – well, there’s not much on earth better than that.

I rented an apartment in the part of the 8th arrondissement Parisians call the golden triangle, just off the beautiful rue François 1er. Day after day, and late into the night, I wrote the book that few people would read – except for one young woman in New York I would desperately wish hadn’t.

After six months, it was done – hundreds of thousands of words, all annotated and checked. I felt

the washing out of my earlier life was complete – I had written the final chapter on that era and sent it downstream like a funeral barge into the past. I was proud of the book: call it a public service, call it naive if you want, but I thought if my expertise could help defeat just one man like Christos Nikolaides, then it was a candle worth the burning.

After careful vetting by a team of analysts working for the Director of Intelligence, the book was

published by a small house that specialized in harrowing memoirs about escapes from Castro’s Cuba

and female honour killings among Arabs. In other words, it was a secret subsidiary of the CIA.

Such a publisher was obviously accustomed to authors whose identities had to be concealed but, even so, my case was complicated: when I gave up my badge it was decided I knew enough about national security that nobody could ever know who I was or what job I had done. Without meaning to,

the secret world took my identity and my history from me.

When the book finally appeared, not only was Jude Garrett given as the author ’s name, but an entire identity had been created for him. Anybody who made inquiries received the following biography:

Jude Garrett, a graduate of the University of Michigan, spent over fourteen years in law enforcement, first with the Sheriff’s department in Miami and then as a special investigator with the FBI. He died while on assignment in Chicago. The manuscript of this book, which he had researched extensively, was found in his study shortly after his death and represents the last testament of one of the world’s finest investigators.

And it was true – some of it, anyway. There had been an FBI agent called Jude Garrett, and he was

dead – a car wreck on his way home from work. Unmarried, a loner with few interests outside work,

the publishers simply appropriated his identity and gave him a literary accomplishment in death he had never found in life.

I have to admit I liked his biography and I liked the fact he was dead. I mean, who would go looking for a dead man?

Well, somebody did.

With the book finally published, the funeral barge almost lost to view, I had started for the first time in my adult life to live in a world without secrets. I looked at all the laughing women, hips swinging, sashaying down the wide boulevards of Paris, and as spring became summer I started to believe anything was possible.

The problem with the spy business, though, is that while you can resign you can never leave. I suppose I didn’t want to acknowledge it then, but too much wreckage floats in the wake of a life like mine – people you’ve hurt don’t forget. And at the back of your mind is the one lesson they drummed

into you when you were young and your whole career was ahead of you: in this business, you can’t

learn by your mistakes. You don’t get a chance. Make one, and you’re dead.

The only thing that will save you is your intuition and your tradecraft. Burn them into your soul. I suppose I must have listened because, still only nine months into my retirement, I noted a cab with a passenger circling the block. Nobody does that in Paris. Given the chaotic traffic, it could take hours.

It was just after eight, a busy Friday night, and I was at a sidewalk café on the place de la Madeleine waiting for an ageing doctor. He was a gourmand whose young Russian dates usually cost more for

the night than the dinners he lavished on them, so he was always short of cash. To my mind, genteel

poverty was a great advantage in a medical practitioner. It meant that when he was giving a diagnosis and writing a prescription he was prepared to listen to a patient’s own suggestions, if you catch my drift.

I didn’t mark the white taxi the first time it passed – not consciously anyway – but somewhere in all my tradecraft the ever-changing tangle of traffic must have been registering. The second time it went by I knew it had been there before.

Heart spiking hard, I didn’t react – that was the training kicking in. I just let my eyes follow it as casually as I could, cursing that a combination of headlights and traffic prevented me from seeing clearly who was in the back. It didn’t matter, I suppose – I just think it’s nice to know the identity of the people who’ve come to kill you.

The tide of vehicles carried the taxi away, and I knew I didn’t have long: the first pass they locate you, the second they plan the angles, the third they fire. I dropped ten euro on the table and moved fast on to the sidewalk.

I heard a voice behind, yelling – it was the doctor, but I didn’t have time to tell him we couldn’t help feed each other ’s habits tonight. I jagged left into Hédiard, the city’s best food store, and moved quickly past pyramids of perfect fruit and into the crowded wine section.

Everything was unfolding in a rush – like it always does in such situations – and while I didn’t have any evidence, my instinct was screaming that it was the Greeks. The old man not only had the financial clout but also the deep emotional motive to search for revenge – the sort of incentive every