I Am Pilgrim (4 page)

‘A close call,’ I tell him, picturing the harbour packed with extravagant yachts, the elegant villas, a tiny mosque nestled in the hills, cafés with names like Mezzaluna and Oxygen, awash with hormones

and ten-dollar cappuccinos.

‘You’ve been there?’ Bradley asks. I shake my head – there are some things the government won’t

let me talk about.

‘No,’ I lie. ‘Why would she be calling someone in Bodrum?’ I wonder aloud, changing the subject.

Bradley shrugs, unwilling to speculate, preoccupied. ‘The big guy’s done some good work too,’ he

reports, pointing at Petersen on the other side of the room. ‘It wasn’t a student ID Alvarez found in the manager ’s file – fake name, of course – it was a New York library card.’

‘Oh good,’ I say, without much interest. ‘An intellectual.’

‘Not really,’ he replies. ‘According to their database, she only borrowed one book in a year.’ He

pauses, looks at me hard. ‘Yours.’

I stare back at him, robbed of words. No wonder he was preoccupied. ‘She read my book?’ I manage to say finally.

‘Not just read it – studied it, I’d say,’ he answers. ‘Like you said – you hadn’t seen many as professional as this. Now we know why: the missing teeth, the antiseptic spray – it’s all in your book, isn’t it?’

My head tilts back as the full weight of it hits me. ‘She took stuff from different cases, used it as a manual – how to kill someone, how to cover it up.’

‘Exactly,’ Ben Bradley says, and, for one of the few times ever, he smiles. ‘I just want to say thanks

– now I’ve got to chase you-by-proxy, the best in the world.’

Chapter Five

IF YOU WANT to know the truth, my book about investigative technique was pretty obscure – the sort of thing, as far as I could tell, that defied all publishing theory: once most people put it down, they couldn’t pick it up again.

Yet, among the small cadre of professionals at whom it was aimed, it caused a seismic shock. The

material went out on the edge of technology, of science, of
credibility
even. But on closer examination, not even the most hardened sceptics could maintain their doubts – every case I cited included those tiny details, that strange patina of circumstance and motivation that allows good investigators to separate the genuine from the fake.

A day after the book’s release a flurry of questions began ricocheting around the closed world of

top-flight investigators. How the hell was it that nobody had heard of any of these cases? They were like communiqués from another planet, only the names changed to protect the guilty. And, even more

importantly, who the hell had written it?

I had no intention of ever letting anyone find out. Due to my former work, I had more enemies than

I cared to think about and I didn’t want to start my car engine one morning and end up as a handful of cosmic dust running rings around the moon. If any reader of the book was to inquire about the background of the so-called author, all they would find was a man who had died recently in Chicago.

One thing was certain, I didn’t write it for fame or money.

I told myself I did it because I had solved crimes committed by people working at the outer limits

of human ingenuity and I thought other investigators might find some of the techniques I had pioneered useful. And that was true – up to a point. On a deeper level, I’m still young – hopefully, with another, real, life in front of me – and I think the book was a summing-up, a way of bidding a

final farewell to my former existence.

For almost a decade I was a member of our country’s most secret intelligence organization, which

worked so deep in shadow that only a handful of people even knew of our existence. The agency’s task was to police our country’s intelligence community, to act as the covert world’s internal affairs department. To that extent, you might say, we were a throwback to the Middle Ages. We were the rat-catchers.

Although the number of people employed by the twenty-six publicly acknowledged – and eight unnamed – US intelligence organizations is classified, it is reasonable to say that over one hundred thousand people came within our orbit. A population of that size meant the crimes we investigated ran the gamut – from treason to corruption, murder to rape, drug dealing to theft. The only difference was that some of the perpetrators were the best and brightest in the world.

The group entrusted with this elite and highly classified mission was established by Jack Kennedy

in the early months of his administration. After a particularly lurid scandal at the CIA – the details of which still remain secret – he apparently decided members of the intelligence community were as subject to human frailty as the population in general. More so, probably.

In normal circumstances, the FBI would have acted as the shadow world’s investigator-at-large.

Under the perfumed fist of J. Edgar Hoover, however, that agency was anything but normal. Giving

him the power to investigate the spooks would have been – well, you might as well have let Saddam

loose in the arms factory. For this reason, Kennedy and his brother created an agency that was given, by virtue of its responsibilities, unprecedented power. Established by an executive order, it also

became one of only three agencies to report directly to the president without congressional oversight.

Don’t bother asking about the other two – both of them are also forbidden by law from being named.

In the rarefied atmosphere where those with the highest security clearances reside, people at first

disparaged the new agency and its hard-charging mission. Delighted by their cleverness, they started calling it the ‘11th Airborne Division’ – the cavalry, in other words. Few of them expected it to be successful but, as the agency’s impressive reputation grew, they didn’t find it quite so funny.

As if by common agreement, one part of the name gradually faded, until the entire intelligence community referred to it – in a tone of reverence – simply as ‘The Division’. It’s not vanity when I say that many of those who worked for it were brilliant. They had to be – some of The Division’s targets were the most highly skilled covert operators the shadow world has ever seen. Years of training had taught these men and women how to lie and deflect, to say goodbye and leave not a trace behind, to have their hand in anything and their fingerprints on nothing. The result was that those who hunted them had to have even greater skills. The pressure for the catchers to keep one step ahead of the prey was enormous, almost unbearable at times, and it was no wonder that The Division had the

highest suicide rate of any government agency outside of the Post Office.

It was during my last year at Harvard that I was recruited into its elite ranks without even realizing it. One of the agency’s outriders – a pleasant woman with nice legs and a surprisingly short skirt who said she was a vice-president with the Rand Corporation – came to Harvard and talked to promising

young graduates.

I had studied medicine for three years, majoring in the pharmacology of drugs – and I mean majoring. By day I learned about them in theory; on weekends I took a far more hands-on approach. It was while visiting a doctor in Boston, having read up on the symptoms of fibromyalgia and convincing him to write me a prescription for Vicodin, that I had an epiphany.

Say it was real, say right now it was me behind that desk dealing with the ailments – real and imagined – of the patients I had been quietly observing in the waiting room.

I realized it wasn’t what afflicted people that interested me, it was what motivated them. I dropped out of medicine, enrolled in psychology, graduated
magna cum laude
and was close to completing my doctorate.

As soon as it was finished, the lady in the short skirt was offering twice the starting salary of any other employer and what appeared to be almost limitless opportunities for research and advancement.

As a result, I spent six months writing reports that would never be read, designing questionnaires never to be answered, before I discovered I wasn’t really working for Rand at all. I was being observed, auditioned, assessed and checked. Suddenly, Short Skirt wasn’t anywhere to be found.

Instead, two men – hard men – I had never seen before, or since, took me to a secure room in a nondescript building on an industrial estate just north of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. They made me sign a series of forms forbidding any kind of disclosure before telling me that I was being

considered for a position in a clandestine intelligence service which they refused to name.

I stared at them, asking myself why they would have thought of me. But if I was honest, I knew the

answer. I was a perfect candidate for the secret world. I was smart, I had always been a loner and I was damaged deep in my soul.

My father walked out before I was born and was never seen again. Several years later, my mother

was murdered in her bedroom in our apartment just off 8-Mile Road in Detroit. Like I said, there are some places I will remember all my life.

An only child, I finally washed up with adoptive parents in Greenwich, Connecticut – twenty acres

of manicured lawns, the best schools money could buy, the quietest house you’ve ever known. Their

family seemingly complete, I guess Bill and Grace Murdoch tried their best, but I could never be the son they wanted.

A child without parents learns to survive; they work out early to mask what they feel and, if the pain proves beyond bearing, to dig a cave in their head and hide inside. To the world at large I tried to be what I thought Bill and Grace wanted, and ended up being a stranger to them both.

Sitting in that room outside Langley, I realized that taking on another identity, masking so much of who you are and what you feel, was ideal training for the secret world.

In the years that followed – the ones I spent secretly travelling the world under a score of different names – I have to say the best spooks I ever met had learned to live a double life long before they joined any agency.

They included closeted men in a homophobic world, secret adulterers with wives in the suburbs, gamblers and addicts, alcoholics and perverts. Whatever their burden, they were all long-practised at making the world believe in an illusion of themselves. It was only a small step to put on another disguise and serve their government.

I guess the two hard men sensed something of that in me. Finally they got to the part of their questioning that dealt with illegality. ‘Tell us about drugs,’ they said.

I remembered what somebody once said about Bill Clinton – he never met a woman he didn’t like. I

figured it wouldn’t be helpful to tell them I felt the same way about drugs. I denied even a passing knowledge, thankful I had never adopted the reckless lifestyle that usually accompanies their use. I’d made it a secret life and kept it hidden by following my own rules – I only ever got fucked up alone, I didn’t try and score at bars or clubs, I figured party drugs were for amateurs, and the idea of driving around an open-air drug market sounded like a recipe to get shot.

It worked – I had never been arrested or questioned about it – and so, having already successfully

lived one secret life, it now gave me the confidence to embrace another. When they stood up and wanted to know how long I would need to consider their offer, I simply asked for a pen.

So that was the way of it – I signed their Memorandum of Engagement in a windowless room on a

bleak industrial estate and joined the secret world. If I gave any thought to the cost it would exact, the ordinary things I would never experience or share, I certainly don’t recall it.

Chapter Six

AFTER FOUR YEARS of training – of learning to read tiny signs others might miss, to live in situations where others would die – I rose quickly through the ranks. My initial overseas posting was to Berlin and, within six months of my arrival, I had killed a man for the first time.

Ever since The Division was established, its operations in Europe had been under the command of

one of its most senior agents, based in London. The first person to hold the post had been a high-ranking navy officer, a man steeped in the history of naval warfare. As a result, he took to calling himself the Admiral of the Blue, the person who had once been third in command of the fleet: his exact position within The Division. The name stuck but over the decades it got changed and corrupted, until finally he became known as the Rider of the Blue.

By the time I arrived in Europe, the then-occupant of the office was running a highly regarded operation and there seemed little doubt he would one day return to Washington and assume The Division’s top post. Those who did well in his eyes would inevitably be swept higher in the slipstream, and there was intense competition to win his approval.

It was against this background that the Berlin office sent me to Moscow early one August – the worst of months in that hot and desperate city – to investigate claims of financial fraud in a US

clandestine service operating there. Sure the money was missing, but as I dug deeper what I uncovered was far worse – a senior US intelligence officer had travelled especially to Moscow and

was about to sell the names of our most valuable Russian informers back to the FSB, the successor

both in function and brutality to the KGB.