I Am Pilgrim (20 page)

and safest method would be to assume the identity and job of a minor government employee – a junior trade analyst, a commercial attaché or something similar.

Because Bradley’s father had worked in Washington, he knew all such appointments were recorded

in a variety of obscure government publications. The announcements usually included information like education, age, professional history, zip codes, birth dates and other seemingly unimportant details.

Lying awake one night, he tried to imagine what it would be like to keep assuming new identities,

under stress at every border, struggling to keep an endless list of lies straight in your head with never time to think, just to answer.

He knew if it was him, even to have a chance, he would have to populate the fake identities with easily remembered facts – a phone number from childhood, a genuine birth date with the year changed, the real first names of parents.

‘You get the drift,’ he said as we sipped our coffee, a universe away from the razor-wire at a checkpoint on the Bulgarian border, being questioned by some thug in a uniform, his breath reeking

of cigarettes and last night’s dinner, turning your documents over in his hand, throwing questions at you out of left field, alert for any hesitation, only too happy to make a hero of himself and call out to the unshaven Vopos that he didn’t believe this American or Briton or Canadian or whatever you happened to be masquerading as at that time in that place on that day.

Yeah, I got his drift, but I was too shaken to reply. Armed only with his intelligence, Bradley had

divined exactly how covert agents entered a country and how they controlled the endless detail on

which their lives might depend. In all honesty, I was finding it hard to remain angry with someone I was coming to admire so much.

Bradley said he discussed his theory with Marcie and they decided to experiment. From all the information they had compiled on Scott Murdoch’s early life, they assembled a list of twenty minor

facts. While she went to work, he spent the day at his computer downloading the last ten years’

editions of one of the publications which recorded government appointments – the weekly Federal Register.

One evening, he and Marcie entered the facts into a search robot and, hoping to find a match for

any of them, turned it loose on the register ’s huge number of announcements.

Thirty-six hours later they had three hits. One was the zip code of Greenwich, Connecticut – used

by a man appointed as a US delegate to the International Arts Council in Florence – and which may or may not have meant something. Another concerned a trade attaché who had played squash at Harvard,

just like Scott Murdoch, and looked very promising – until they realized they were reading his obituary. The third was someone called Richard Gibson, a US observer at a meeting of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. His mini-biography included a birth date the same as Scott

Murdoch’s and a summary of his education. His high school was given as Caulfield Academy.

‘We searched the alumni records, but nobody called Richard Gibson had ever been at Caulfield,’

Bradley said quietly.

It was a remarkable achievement. He and Marcie, starting with nothing more than the name of a tree

in Connecticut, had found Richard Gibson, the cover I had used to enter Geneva for my chat with Markus Bucher at Richeloud & Cie.

The name Gibson was the proof of principle – now they were certain that the method worked, they

went at it full tilt. Three weeks later the system identified a minor official working at the US Treasury who had gone to Romania for a conference. The name the man was using was Peter Campbell.

‘I called the Romanian Finance Department and found a guy who had helped organize the event. He

had a copy of Peter Campbell’s entry visa, including his passport details. A buddy at Homeland Security ran a check and found the same passport had been used to enter France.

‘The French government said Campbell hadn’t just entered the country, he had applied for residency in Paris. On his application, he said he was the manager of a hedge fund, so Marcie called the Securities and Exchange Commission. Nobody named Peter Campbell had ever held a securities

trading licence and the hedge fund didn’t exist.’

I watched in silence as Bradley reached into his jacket, took out two pieces of paper and laid them

on the table.

The first was a page from an old high-school yearbook showing a photo of the four members of

the Caulfield Academy squash team. One teenager stood apart – as if he played with the team but wasn’t part of it. His face and name were circled: Scott Murdoch.

The second piece of paper was a passport photograph attached to the French residency application

in the name of Peter Campbell. There was no doubt that the two photos were of the same person. Me. I didn’t say anything.

‘So this is how I figure it,’ Bradley said. ‘Scott Murdoch went to Caulfield Academy, studied at Harvard and joined a government black programme. He became a covert agent, used a hundred different names, and one of them was Campbell—’

I kept staring down at the yearbook photo, trying to recall the members of the squash team. One guy was called Dexter Corcoran – a big creep; everybody hated him, I remembered that. The others –

even bigger assholes – I couldn’t even remember who they were. Deliberate suppression, a psychologist would have called it.

‘Maybe Dr Murdoch was thrown out of the secret world or his soul just got tired of it – I don’t know,’ Bradley was saying. ‘But he entered France on Campbell’s passport, wrote a book to pass on

what he knew and published it under the name of Jude Garrett, a dead FBI agent.’

When I still didn’t respond, he shrugged. ‘And so the two of us end up here.’

Yes, and there was no doubt about it: it was a brilliant piece of work by Bradley and his wife but –

like I said – it was their discovery today, somebody else’s tomorrow.

There was only one thing left for me to do, so I stood up. It was time to start running.

Chapter Ten

BRADLEY CAUGHT UP with me at the doors leading from the hotel’s beautiful courtyard into the grand

gallery, moving surprisingly fast, given his limp.

I had said a curt goodbye and headed out, but he managed to grab my arm before I knew he was

following. ‘I have a favour to ask,’ he said. ‘That’s why Marcie and I came to Paris.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said.

‘Listen – please …’ He took a breath, struggling with what he was about to say. But I didn’t give

him a chance. I pushed his hand away and started to leave.

‘No,’ he said, in that authoritative voice. I looked around and saw that people at the nearby tables were watching us. I didn’t want to create a scene and it gave him a moment.

‘Go down deep enough into darkness and nothing’s ever the same,’ he said quietly. ‘Being injured

made me think differently – about life, my relationship with Marcie and my work. Especially my work. If there was one positive—’

I’d had enough. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘the injury must have been terrible and I’m glad you came through okay, but there are things I’ve got to arrange.’ I didn’t have time for a sob story or to hear reflections on life from a man I would never see again. I was getting out of Paris, running for cover and maybe my life, and I didn’t have time to waste.

‘Just one minute – one more,’ he said.

After a beat I sighed and nodded – I suppose I owed him some small courtesy for telling me how

my former life could be laid bare so effectively. But I didn’t bother moving, and everything about my body language told him the Wailing Wall was in Jerusalem and to just get it over with.

‘You never asked about how I got my injuries – and I want to thank you. Professionals usually don’t, of course. Most of us have been in bad situations so there’s not much point in talking about it.’

Yeah, yeah – enough about correct professional conduct. What do you want to ask me? I thought.

‘I told you I was trapped in a building. It was a little more than that – I was in the North Tower of the World Trade Center when it went down.’

Chapter Eleven

BRADLEY KEPT TALKING but, to this day, I have no idea what he said. Somehow we returned to our table, but I was too preoccupied with cursing my stupidity to listen. No wonder he had post-traumatic stress disorder, no wonder he had weeks in intensive care, no wonder he was suffering from survivor guilt,

no wonder he needed an impossible investigative project to bring him back from the dead.

Bradley had said he was holding some guy in the dark, listening to him die. Meanwhile, outside their concrete tomb, Lower Manhattan was on fire. And yet I was so smart I had worked out it was a

gunshot wound to the hip and another one that took out his lung. If that was the best I could do, it was probably a good thing that I had retired.

I was shaken from my harsh self-appraisal by his voice – he’d taken his cellphone out and was asking me something. ‘Mind if I make a call? I want to check in with Marcie.’

I nodded. He waited for her to answer, turned away, and said a few brief words I couldn’t hear. As

he hung up, he motioned for more coffee and pastries. I hoped he had a credit card with no limit.

‘I only mentioned September eleventh,’ he said, ‘because it’s the basis for what I want to ask you.’

‘Go on,’ I said softly, trying to make up for even thinking the poor mother should have gone to the

Wailing Wall.

‘As part of my recovery, I finally went back to Ground Zero, to the spot where the North Tower

had stood,’ he said. ‘I looked at it for a long time – God, it was cold – and I finally realized that I was so damned angry I had no hope of ever making a full recovery.

‘But I wasn’t angry at the hijackers – they were already dead. And it wasn’t because of the injuries I had received – c’mon, I was
alive
.

‘I was angry about injustice – about the uncaring way the world works. I knew a lot of ordinary people had died that day not because of fire or falling masonry but because of their
compassion
. It was their desperate attempts to save other human beings – often total strangers – that had ended up costing them their own lives.’

He took a sip of coffee, but I knew he didn’t want it. He was buying time, trying to work out how

best to go on. I just waited. To my mind, he’d earned the right to take as long as he needed.

‘Ever think about how many disabled people were working in the Twin Towers that day?’ he asked

finally.

‘No, it never crossed my mind either,’ he continued, ‘not until just after the planes hit. Of course, if you were in a wheelchair your problems were far worse than anyone’s – it wasn’t as if you could try

to get out by elevator. That’s one thing we all know, isn’t it? Those signs are always warning us to use the stairs. But say you can’t walk? If I ever get trapped in a burning building, Mr Campbell, all I ask is that I can use my legs. Just an even chance to run or die. That’s not asking much, is it? An even chance.

‘There was a guy – he was working for a financial-services company – who had listened to all the

fire drills and knew where his evacuation chair was. Ever seen one of those? It’s like an aluminium

dining chair with long handles that stick out front and back so people can lift and carry you.

‘He was a paraplegic, and I suppose he was proud he’d overcome his disability and had a job.

Might have had a wife and kids too, you never know.

‘September eleventh was the first day of school, and a lot of people were late. It meant he was alone in his corner of the North Tower when the American Airlines plane hit.

‘The impact jumped his wheelchair halfway across the room. Through the window, he saw a blast of flame arcing into the sky and he knew he had to move fast or he was dead.

‘He found his evacuation chair, balanced it on his lap and headed for the emergency stairs. On the

way he got drenched – the sprinklers came on and with it the lights gave out.

‘He got out into the elevator lobby, but there were no windows so it was dark. It was the building-

maintenance guys who gave him a chance. A few years back, they had used glow-in-the-dark paint on

the emergency doors so that in a disaster people could still find them. God knows how many lives the decision saved that day.

‘He propped open the door into Stairway A with his wheelchair and positioned his evacuation chair

inside. He wasn’t a strong guy, but he transferred himself across.

‘Immobilized now, he sits in an emergency stairway inside a burning building and does the only thing he can. He waits.

‘There are three emergency staircases in the North Tower. Two are forty-four inches wide, the other is fifty-six inches. It’s a big difference – in the wide one two people can pass each other and it’s not as tight on the turns. Those turns would be critical for anyone trying to carry what is really a stretcher with a seat. As you can imagine, fate being a bitch, the paraplegic guy is on one of the narrow staircases.

‘All through the building people are deciding which way to run – towards the ground or up to the

roof for a helicopter rescue. Those that go up die – the door on to the roof is locked to prevent suicides.

‘Stairway A is full of dust, smoke, people and water. Like a fast-running stream, it pours down the