I Am Pilgrim (43 page)

‘It appears that an Arab—’ Whisperer continued.

‘We don’t know he’s an Arab,’ the president interrupted.

‘The president’s right,’ Whisperer acknowledged. ‘That could be an attempt at disinformation. Let’s

say a man in Afghanistan who spoke some Arabic has synthesized the virus. In the last few days he’s

run a test on humans – his version of a clinical trial.’

Again they looked at me to see my response. I shrugged – I figured if you’d gone to the trouble of

creating it, you would probably want to test it. ‘Did it work?’ I asked.

‘Of course it fucking worked! We’re not here because it failed,’ Whisperer said, irritated by my apparent equanimity. For a minute I thought he was going to raise his voice, but then he didn’t.

‘Further, it appears that the virus has been engineered to crash through the vaccine,’ he added.

The president hadn’t taken his eyes off me. After more silence from me, he shook his head and sort of smiled. ‘I’ll say one thing for you – you don’t scare easy.’

I thanked him and met his gaze. It was hard not to like him. As I said, he was far removed from a

normal politician.

‘What else have you got?’ I asked.

Whisperer reached into a document case and gave me a copy of the Echelon report. As I started reading it, I saw that nothing had been blacked out or excised – I had been given raw, unsanitized intelligence, and it made me realize how panicked they were. Looking back, I think as the afternoon

wore into night, they truly believed that the whole country was going over the falls together.

‘Two phone calls,’ Whisperer said as I laid the report down. ‘Three days apart.’

‘Yeah,’ I replied, thinking about them. ‘The guy in Afghanistan makes the first call. He phoned a public phone box in Turkey and a woman was waiting for him. She had spent hours coding up a message, so she was well aware he was going to call. How did she know that?’

‘Prearranged,’ Whisperer responded. ‘You know the drill. On a certain day, at a certain time, he would call—’

‘From the middle of the Hindu Kush? While he’s testing a remarkable bio-terror weapon? I don’t

think so; he wouldn’t risk it. I think it’s more likely some event had happened and she needed to speak to him urgently.

‘That means,’ I continued, ‘she has some way of letting him know that he has to call her.’

The president and Whisperer sat quietly, considering it.

‘Okay,’ the president said. ‘She contacted him. Why didn’t Echelon hear it?’

‘A lot of possibilities,’ I said. ‘Outside the search area, a message sent days before to an unknown cellphone, a hand-delivered note. It could be anything. My guess would be a bland message on an obscure Internet forum.’

‘It’d make sense,’ Whisperer said. ‘The man would get an automated text alert telling him so-and-

so had posted a new profile or whatever.’

‘Yeah, and as soon as he saw the alert he would know what it really meant – to call her. So he does

it the first chance he gets, from a totally different phone.

‘He listens to her coded message and it gives him certain information. It also tells him to call back in three days. He does, and that’s the second call.’

‘Two phone calls and some sort of alert or message we can’t identify,’ the president said. ‘It’s not much, but it’s about all we’ve got.’

He looked straight at me. ‘Whisperer says you’re the best man to go into Turkey and find the woman.’

‘Alone?’ I asked, completely non-committal.

‘Yes,’ said Whisperer.

That figured, I thought. I would have used a Pathfinder too: someone to go in under deep cover, a

person who could feel their way along the walls of a dark alley, a man who would be parachuted in to light the way for the assault troops to follow. I also knew that most Pathfinders didn’t enjoy what intelligence experts called ‘longevity’.

‘What about Turkish intelligence?’ I asked. ‘Will they be there to help?’

‘Help themselves maybe,’ Whisperer said. ‘Any information they get, I’d give it an hour before they’re leaking it – or more likely selling it – to half the world.’

When Whisperer said he wanted somebody to go in ‘alone’, he meant alone. I sat in silence, thinking about Turkey and a host of other things.

‘You don’t seem very enthusiastic,’ the president said at last, looking at the anxiety on my face.

‘What do you say?’

The phone rang, and I figured, given the scale of what we were discussing, it had to be important –

probably North Korea had just launched a nuclear attack to round out an otherwise perfect day.

As the president answered – and turned his back to give himself some privacy – Whisperer opened

his cell to check his messages. I looked out of the window – it wasn’t every day you got the chance to admire the view from the Oval Office – but, the truth was, I didn’t see a thing.

I was thinking about failed dreams, about reaching for normal and an attractive woman in New York whose phone number I would never know. I was thinking about the fourth of July, days on the

beach and all the things that so easily get lost in the fire. But mostly I was thinking about how the secret world never leaves you – it’s always waiting in the darkness, ready to gather its children back again.

Then a bad feeling about what lay ahead took hold of me, and I saw something, I saw it as clear as

if it was on the other side of the glass. I was sailing an old yacht with patched sails, the wind driving me hard across a foreign sea, only the stars above to guide me in the darkness. There was nothing but silence, a silence so loud it screamed, and I saw the boat and myself grow ever smaller. Watching myself vanish on the black and endless water, I was scared, scared in a pit-of-the-stomach, end-of-days way.

In all my years of terrible danger, it was the first time I had ever imagined or felt such a thing. You don’t need a doctorate in psychology from Harvard to know that it was a vision of death.

Badly shaken, I heard the president hang up and I turned to face him. ‘You were about to tell us,’ he said. ‘Are you going to Turkey?’

‘When do I leave?’ I answered. There was no point in arguing, no point in complaining. Dark omens or not, life has a way of cornering us. A person either stands up or he doesn’t.

‘In the morning,’ Whisperer said. ‘You’ll go in under deep cover. Only the three of us will know

who you are and what your mission is.’

‘We’ll need a name, something to know you by,’ the president added. ‘Any preference?’

The yacht and the ocean must have been still raw in my mind because a word rose unbidden to my

lips. ‘Pilgrim,’ I replied quietly.

Whisperer and the president exchanged a glance to see if there was any objection. ‘Fine by me,’

Whisperer said.

‘Yeah, it seems to fit,’ the president replied. ‘That’s it then – Pilgrim.’

Chapter Four

BY THE TIME I left the white house it was late enough for the evening traffic to have thinned. Whisperer and I were in the back of his government car, heading across town. The director looked terrible; every hour without rest was taking its toll and, after twenty-two hours of being drowned by the crisis, his face was as grey as a tombstone.

Even worse, the night was nowhere near done yet.

As there were only the three of us who knew the real purpose of my assignment – and nobody had

any intention of expanding that number voluntarily – Whisperer had already offered to be my case officer. I would be the agent on the ground and he would have the job of ‘running’ me. As with any

joe and his case guy, there were a million details we had to work through, and I assumed we were heading to his office to get started. The plan was for me to be on a commercial flight to Turkey in

less than twelve hours.

Earlier, after the president had shaken hands and offered me a choice of souvenirs, either a framed

photograph of himself or a set of White House golf balls – I have to say, in the circumstances, he had a pretty good sense of humour – Whisperer had stayed behind for a private discussion. I was quarantined in an empty office by the silver fox and, after five minutes, the director had reappeared and escorted me down to the White House garage. To minimize the number of people who saw me,

we took the stairs and had barely gone a dozen steps before Whisperer started to wheeze. He was carrying too much weight and it was obvious he and exercise were barely on nodding terms.

I had hoped we would be able to spend the time in the car working on my legend but, once he had

murmured instructions to the driver and raised the glass privacy screen, he checked his phone again

for messages and pulled a battery-operated blood pressure monitor out of his briefcase.

He rolled up his shirtsleeve, slipped the cuff over his upper arm and pumped it up. As it deflated, he looked at the digital reading on the tiny screen. So did I.

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘One-six-five over ninety – you’re gonna die.’

‘No, no – it’s not too bad,’ he replied. ‘Imagine how high it’d be if I talked like a regular person.’

Whisperer wasn’t known for his jokes, and I appreciated the effort. He put the monitor away and

slumped deeper in his seat. I figured he needed a few moments to roll back the fatigue, so I was surprised when he looked out of the window and started to speak.

‘It’s my anniversary, you know – thirty years tomorrow since I joined the agency. Thirty years, and

not a day of peace. That’s the way in our business, isn’t it? Always at war with fucking somebody.’

I could see his face reflected in the glass. He looked far older than his years and, despite the bravado, I think he was worried about the blood pressure and how much more abuse his body could

take.

‘Three marriages, four kids I barely know,’ he continued. ‘Still, it’s been a rewarding life compared to a lot of men’s. But you’d be a fool not to think: Has anything I’ve done really made a

difference?

‘You won’t have that problem, will you?’ he said, turning to look at me. ‘Pull this off and, fifty years from now, they’ll still be talking about Pilgrim.’

Maybe I’m lacking in something, but things like that don’t matter much to me. They never have. So

I just shrugged.

He turned back to the window. ‘It’s genuine, isn’t it? You really don’t give a shit, do you? But I envy you – I wish I were twenty years younger. I would have liked just one chance to make it all count.’

‘You can have this one, Dave,’ I said softly. ‘I’ll give it to you for free.’ Dave was his name, but hardly anyone remembered it any more. ‘It scares the crap out of me.’

He gave a small laugh. ‘Then you hide it damn well. I stayed behind with the president to find out

what he thought of you.’

‘I figured as much.’

‘He was impressed, said you were the coolest sonofabitch he’d ever met.’

‘Then he needs to get out more,’ I said.

‘No,’ Whisperer replied. ‘I was looking at your face when I told you about the smallpox. Maybe this is the apocalypse – the four horsemen are saddled up and on their way – and you showed no emotion, no panic, no surprise even.’

‘That’s true – the bit about surprise, anyway. I wasn’t.’

‘No,
no
. Anybody would—’

I was getting annoyed, pissed off at having been dragged into a life I really didn’t want to have any part of.

‘I wasn’t surprised,’ I said sharply, ‘because, unlike all the so-called Washington experts, I’ve been listening.’

‘To what?’ he responded.

I glanced ahead and saw we were slowing for a long tailback.

‘Ever been to Berlin, Dave?’

‘Berlin? What’s Berlin got to do with it?’

Chapter Five

WHISPERER DIDN’T KNOW where I was going but he decided to roll with it. ‘Yeah, I was in Berlin in the eighties, just before the Wall came down,’ he said.

I should have remembered, of course – he was with the CIA back then, the station chief in the hottest spot of the Cold War, what was then the capital city of espionage.

‘You recall the Bebelplatz – the big public square in front of the cathedral?’

‘No, that was over in East Berlin. Guys in my job didn’t climb the Wall much.’ He smiled, and I got

the feeling he liked remembering the old days, when the enemy was the Soviets and everybody knew

what the rules were.

‘When I was first starting out,’ I continued, ‘I was posted to The Division’s Berlin office. It was from there I went to Moscow and had my meeting with the then Rider of the Blue.’

He looked at me for a long moment, realizing that we had never spoken about it. ‘That was a helluva thing,’ he said. ‘In the middle of Moscow, too. I always thought it took a truckful of courage.’

‘Thanks,’ I said quietly. I meant it too – that was really something coming from a man with his résumé.

‘Before any of that,’ I said, ‘on a Sunday I would often walk to the Bebelplatz. It wasn’t the grand architecture that took me there – it was the evil of the place.’

‘What evil?’ he said.

‘One night in May 1933 the Nazis led a torch-lit mob into the square and looted the library of the

adjoining Friedrich-Wilhelm University. Forty thousand people cheered as they burnt over twenty thousand books by Jewish authors.

‘Many years later a panel of glass was set into the ground to mark the spot where the fire had been.

It’s a window and, by leaning over, you can look into a room below. The room is white, lined from

floor to ceiling with plain shelves—’