I Am Pilgrim (39 page)

of Soviet military installations taken by U2 overflights, and had then moved into covert operations with the CIA. Thanks to his dark history of targeted killings in that section and the fact that he was the most softly spoken person ever to work in Washington, he was given a nickname, which had followed

him throughout his storied career. Whispering Death was what they called him.

He phoned the president, asleep in his bedroom in the family quarters on the second floor of the

White House, and waited a moment while the commander-in-chief shook the sleep out of his brain and moved into the study next door. It was past 11 p.m. by then.

The president had been widowed for the past seven years and he didn’t move into the adjoining room for fear of waking anyone; he had lived a monastic life since his wife had passed and he slept

alone. No, he wanted to buy himself a little time to grab a robe from the back of the door. He could tell from the time of the call and the tone of Whispering Death’s voice that something huge had happened, and he didn’t want the damned
New York Times
reporting that he was lying in bed in his underpants when he heard.

Sitting at his desk, the president listened as Whisperer told him that a sample of live smallpox had been recovered from an abandoned village in Afghanistan, that it wasn’t just ordinary smallpox, it appeared to have been engineered to crash through the vaccine, that the genetic analysis indicated it had been made from individual components that were readily available throughout the world, that the

virus appeared to have undergone a dry-gulch clinical trial in the Hindu Kush mountains, that three

innocent people were dead, and the only suspect, a person who nobody knew anything about, had escaped and undoubtedly vanished into one of the nearby Arab nations, which had a combined population of about four hundred million people. In short, they were facing a potential catastrophe.

It was in those circumstances that the president – who was very pleased he had put on his robe –

became the fifth person to know the secret.

Neither he nor the Director of Intelligence had any doubt – not then or in any of the weeks that followed – that America was the target. With a sinking heart and growing anger, the president asked

the director how long he thought they had before an attack was launched.

‘I don’t know,’ Whispering Death replied. ‘All I can tell you is that somebody – or some group –

appears to have synthesized it and now has good reason to believe that it works. Why would they delay?’

‘I understand,’ the president said coldly, ‘but you’re the Director of National Intelligence, I need some sort of time frame – a best guess, anything.’

‘How would I know? Damn soon, that’s all I can say.’ It was a small blessing that the White House recording system extended to the president’s private study – it meant that there was now a historical record of the only time Whispering Death had ever been known to raise his voice.

He told the president he was about to call for a car and would be at the White House in twenty minutes. He rang off and sat in contemplation for a moment. In the long silence of his fear, he couldn’t help thinking that Fort Detrick had once again lived up to its nickname – Fort Doom.

Chapter Forty-five

AS THE GOVERNMENT car sped through the deserted streets towards the White House, Whispering Death sat in the secure cocoon at the back, the thick glass privacy screen raised and made a series of phone calls. The first one was to order the immediate arrest of Walter Drax. Even the most cursory

glance at the guy’s human-resources file showed he was a man with too much anger, a loose cannon

who could never be trusted not to talk or boast.

A few minutes later, six men in three black SUVs gained access to the institute’s campus, were met

by several of the on-site security guards and walked into Drax’s lab. With pistols clearly visible under their jackets, they told the institute’s director to return to his office, flashed Drax some IDs which may or may not have been genuine FBI shields and told him he was under arrest on suspicion of espionage. Drax, looking completely flustered, told them he had no idea what they were talking about

– he was a loyal American, had been all his life. They ignored him, read him his rights and, when he asked to see a lawyer, told him that would be arranged once he had been formally charged. Of course

they had no intention of doing that – instead they took him to an airfield just the other side of Frederick where a waiting government jet flew them to a private airstrip in the Black Hills of South Dakota. From there, more government SUVs transported him to a remote ranch house and the bleak

rooms it contained.

Ironically, in one of those strange coincidences that life sometimes throws up, it was the same house that I had been taken to after I had killed the Rider of the Blue – appropriated and put to a similar use by other members of the intelligence community after The Division was disbanded. Like

myself so many years before, Drax and his secret were now lost to the world.

The second phone call Whisperer made – well, actually it was three phone calls – was to the ambassadors of Italy, Japan and Holland. He told them with deep regret that he had just learned that their nationals were dead, killed by their kidnappers when they realized troops were closing in. ‘They made a hurried attempt to bury the bodies and we are exhuming the site now,’ he said. ‘Obviously, forensic tests and formal identification will take some time.’ He told them that, for operational reasons, the information had to be kept secret and, while he didn’t say so explicitly, he gave the impression that a hot pursuit was still in progress.

His last call was to the head of the CIA. Offering no explanation, which wasn’t uncommon in the

shadow world, he told him to organize to have the men in the NBC suits at the Overlook hotel informed that all tests had come back negative. Because they were no longer needed, they were to return to base immediately. Only after they had left were the CIA’s own operatives to move in, seal the pit and secure the site completely.

By the time he had finished the phone calls – plugging the most obvious means by which the secret

might escape – he had entered the gates of the White House.

Chapter Forty-six

THE SURPRISING THING about James Grosvenor was that he was highly intelligent, personable and modest – in other words, a man far removed from the typical politician. Nobody had intended, least

of all himself, that he would ever become the President of the United States.

He had been a businessman for nearly all his working life, the major part of it spent taking over

distressed manufacturing companies and turning them around. Call him old-fashioned, but he believed in American industry, the skill of American workers and that hardworking men and women

deserved a living wage and decent health care. One thing he didn’t believe in was unions – if capital conducted itself properly, there was no need for them. Needless to say, his employees repaid him with their loyalty, and their productivity rates were always among the highest in the country.

The success – and the wealth – that followed his approach allowed him to take over ever larger enterprises and gave him a media profile as a man committed to saving the nation’s industrial base.

Phoenix Rising was the name given to the segment about him on
60 Minutes
. Shortly after it appeared he was offered the job of Secretary of Commerce and, having enough money and happy to take on a

new challenge, he accepted. For a self-made man, government administration and its endless bureaucracy was a revelation, but he was not a man for turning and he made such a success of it that when the Secretary of Health was swept aside in a corruption scandal he moved to that department.

His wife had died from breast cancer and he brought to the department a fierce commitment that hadn’t been seen for years in the musty building on Independence Avenue. He was widely seen as championing the rights of ordinary citizens – much to the anger of the powerful health-care lobby –

and that only served to raise his public profile even higher. Two years later he was asked to take the second slot on a presidential ticket. The candidate was a woman – the first ever to stand for the highest office on behalf of a major party – and Grosvenor knew that he had been selected to balance the ticket with a strong male presence.

None of his friends expected him to accept, but he and Anne had never had any kids and he found it

harder and harder to fill the hole left by her passing. His answer was to work harder and find even

greater challenges. Beneath the energetic exterior, he was a sad man – a decent one too.

After two days’ careful thought he accepted but, in the private counsels of his own mind, he didn’t

give himself or the candidate much chance of prevailing. Nor did the polls. The country had already

elected a black president, but accepting a woman as commander-in-chief just seemed a bridge too far

at that stage of the country’s evolution.

Then, while speaking at a rally in Iowa ten weeks before the election the candidate suffered a brain aneurysm. If the images of her crumpling to the stage and suffering a grand seizure weren’t bad enough, the next four days as she lingered on life support while her family kept a bedside vigil were even worse.

Throughout it all, Grosvenor maintained not only his own schedule but undertook the majority of

her engagements too, virtually single-handedly keeping the campaign alive. At every opportunity he

spoke of how he had handled his own wife’s illness and reminded the audience of what was really important in all their lives – good health, long life, the love of others. For once in a political campaign, it sounded genuine.

He had always been witty, a kind of twinkly, handsome man, and the polls tightened. But the real turning point came on the night the family decided to take the candidate off life support. Grosvenor

was at the hospital and, after it was all over, he stepped outside a side door to get some air. Moments later, the candidate’s husband joined him, both of them thinking they were completely unobserved.

But somebody was watching – a hospital worker, probably – and whoever it was captured the scene

on a cellphone camera. Grainy, recorded at a substantial distance, it was an indistinct video but certainly clear enough to see the candidate’s husband break down and start to cry. After a pause, when it was clear the man couldn’t master his emotions, Grosvenor reached out, put his arms around the

man and held him close for several minutes.

Two men, neither of them young, standing outside a hospital, one of them a candidate for vice-president and supporting the other in his time of anguish, was such a human, unscripted moment that, minutes after the anonymous camera-person uploaded it on to the Internet, it went viral. For the duration of the film clip, the electorate saw behind the curtain of image and spin, and what they recognized in the man who stepped to the front of the ticket was, I believe, a person not too different from themselves.

On the first Tuesday in November it wasn’t a landslide, but Grosvenor – perhaps the most unlikely

candidate in modern American politics – won enough to get him over the line. ‘I’m Lyndon Johnson –

without the assassination,’ he told friends just before the inauguration.

But the one question nobody could answer – the one completely hammered by his opponent during

the campaign – was whether James Balthazar Grosvenor had the steel necessary to handle a full-on

crisis.

All of us – the nation, the world, the man himself – were about to find out.

Chapter Forty-seven

WHISPERING DEATH ENTERED the oval office to find that the secretaries of state, defense and homeland security had been summoned and were already seated in front of the Lincoln desk. President Grosvenor ’s chief-of-staff was taking notes and using a small MP3 player to record what was said –

whether it was for posterity, his autobiography or to boost his memory, nobody seemed quite sure.

The bare bones of the situation had already been explained to the three secretaries by the president, and that now made nine people privy to the secret. With the core of the government assembled, Grosvenor told them that there would be no greater act of treason than for any of them to divulge the threat that now confronted the nation – that meant to their wives, their children, their mistresses, page boys or anybody else they damn well cared to name.

They nodded their heads gravely, and Grosvenor just hoped it was genuine. He was about to launch

into a hastily handwritten agenda when the Secretary of Defense interrupted. ‘In light of what we know, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we started with a reading from scripture or a short prayer?’

Grosvenor saw Whispering Death and the Secretary of State raise their eyes to heaven and realized

that he had at least two atheists in the kitchen Cabinet.

‘It’s a fine idea, Hal,’ he replied evenly to the Defense Secretary, ‘and I’m sure all of us will ask privately for whatever spiritual help we need as the night wears on. For the moment, let’s keep going, shall we?’

It was a good, diplomatic answer and it seemed to satisfy both Hal Enderby, the Secretary of Defense, and the atheists sitting behind him.