I Am Pilgrim (46 page)

had ever come close to finding a cure for any version of smallpox.

He laughed – that dry, rasping laugh some old people have when there’s not much life left. ‘After

the virus was eradicated, science lost interest – all the money and research went into AIDS, that’s where the glory was.

‘There were no prizes awarded because there was no pressing need, and no cure because there was

no research,’ he said.

‘So all we need is half a dozen suicide infectees and we’ve got a full-on catastrophe,’ I replied.

He looked at me like I was crazy. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Human vectors?’ he said. ‘Is that what you’re saying? And tell me, how will these suicide infectees get here – in carts with stone wheels?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Four thousand years ago the Hittites sent people infected with plague into the cities of their enemies. As far as I know, that was the last time anyone used human vectors in biological warfare.’

He might have won a Nobel Prize, but his history didn’t sound right to me. ‘No, all the government

studies have been based on people being sent into the country—’

His skull-like head started wagging in anger. ‘That’s because governments don’t know shit,’ he said. ‘Even British soldiers – who weren’t exactly scientific geniuses – came up with the idea of using contaminated goods to wipe out Native Americans.’

‘Blankets you mean—?’

‘Of course I mean blankets – fresh from their smallpox ward. That was almost three hundred years

ago, and things have come a long way since then. You read the news? Every week there’s some story

about poisonous pet food from China being recalled, adulterated toothpaste turning up on the docks,

imported baby food contaminated with melamine. And these are accidents. Imagine how easy it would

be to do it deliberately.’

He looked up to see if I was following him. I got the feeling he had been beating the drum for years but nobody had started marching.

‘Go on,’ I said.

His voice was quieter, but it wasn’t due to fatigue or old age: it was resignation. ‘You know, we’ve outsourced everything in this country. Do we actually make anything any more? When you rely on imports for so much, there’s no security. Not real security. Who the hell would bother with vectors?

‘I’m not an alarmist, I’m a scientist, and I’m saying you can forget them. It’s contamination that is the risk. Find something ordinary and send your pathogen in from overseas – the new version of the

blanket. That’s how a modern, intelligent enemy would do it.’

He ran his hand through where his hair once would have been. ‘I’m old and I’m tired, but it will

happen, and it’ll happen in the way I’ve explained. A writer called Robert Louis Stevenson once said

that “sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences”.

‘He was right – so I say pull up a chair and pick up your fork, the time is coming when we’ll all be chowing down.’

Chapter Eleven

WHEN I ARRIVED at the horse farm, I had faith. I believed in rock ’n’ roll, the Western dream and the equality of man. But most of all I believed in a worldwide dragnet for an Arab fugitive and that temperature checks at every border would keep the pin in the grenade.

By the time I left, I still had faith in rock ’n’ roll, but little else. The old man with the translucent skin and impatient manner had convinced me that what he termed a ‘modern, intelligent enemy’ would

never be caught by rounding up the usual suspects. Nor would there be any suicide vectors.

As I left his tree-lined drive and headed towards National airport, I realized that we were chasing a new kind of terrorist. I saw the future and I knew that the day of the fundamentalist and fanatic had passed. In their wake, a new generation was emerging and the man with the smallpox – highly educated and adept with technology – was probably the first. The cave-dwellers with their bomb belts and passenger planes converted into missiles looked like dial-up. This man was broadband. And say

he was flying solo? If he had done it by himself, then that was an even more astonishing achievement.

Nobody likes to think they might have met their match, especially not an intelligence agent selected and trained to be the best on the battlefield, but that was my deeply held fear as I arrived at the airport.

And I have to say, as the Saracen and I circled closer to one another in the weeks which lay ahead, I saw nothing to put that feeling back in its box. He would have been brilliant in any area he had chosen to pursue.

So it was in a sombre frame of mind that I dropped the rent-a-car, headed through security and boarded the plane to La Guardia in New York. From there I took a cab to JFK – I was a live agent now, arriving exactly like any genuine Manhattan-based federal agent – and made the flight to Istanbul with barely twenty minutes to spare.

For the next six hours I buried my head in the emails, photographs and case notes that formed the

skeleton of Brodie Wilson’s life. Only when I had put flesh on the bone – giving names to my kids,

assigning them birth dates which I would remember even under duress, listening to the God-awful music loaded on the MP3 player – did I close the computer and tilt the seat back.

I wasn’t going to sleep. I wanted to think about the one other thing which had been on my mind: what was in my file.

Chapter Twelve

I HAVE SEEN men so scared they defecate themselves. I have seen men who are about to die get an erection. But I have only ever seen one man so terrified that he did both at the same time.

He was a prisoner at Khun Yuam, the CIA black prison hidden in the lawless jungle along the Thai–

Burma border. As I mentioned, I went there as a young man because one of the guards had died in questionable circumstances and, given the nature of the dark arts that were practised within its walls and the high value of its prisoners, any unusual death had to be investigated. That was my job, as raw and inexperienced as I was.

The military guard who died – an American of Latvian descent known as Smokey Joe – was an unpleasant piece of work, the sort of guy who would break your arm then knock you down for not

saluting. He had been found floating in a back eddy of a roaring river and, while somebody had gone

to a lot of trouble to make it appear that he had fallen from a dilapidated rope footbridge, I wasn’t convinced.

I chose a CIA interrogator from the prison’s staff because he was about the same size as Smokey

Joe and, without telling him why, asked him to accompany me to the bridge. A dozen of his colleagues and an even larger number of guards walked with us, everybody expecting me to explain

my theory of exactly what might have happened. Instead, I had a long length of elasticized rope. Too worried about losing face in front of his colleagues, the CIA guy barely objected when I tied the rope around his ankle, secured the other end to a thick wooden beam and told him to jump.

Five times he either made the leap or we simulated someone pushing him, and we quickly established two things: it would have been impossible under those conditions for Smokey Joe to have

left a smear of blood I had found on a boulder halfway down and – second – the interrogator didn’t

have much stomach for makeshift bungee jumping.

The splash of blood meant that the guard would have had to be hurled off the footbridge like a javelin and, on account of his size, it would have taken two men. It wasn’t hard to narrow down the

suspects – the bridge was only used by prison guards going to buy cheap booze at a smugglers’ camp

on the nearby border or opium couriers avoiding military patrols on the highway. I opted for the opium couriers.

For several days I camped under a rocky overhang near the bridge with six Special Forces soldiers

attached to the CIA. It was just before dusk on the fourth day when we heard someone coming – a tough guy with a fair bit of Montagnard tribesman in him by the look of his face. He was barefoot and shirtless, a long scar from what was probably a machete running across his ribs. Over his shoulder he had an old M16 assault rifle and a filthy Mickey Mouse backpack. Inside it, undoubtedly, were bricks of No. 2 opium wrapped in rags, starting their long journey on to the streets of America and Europe.

He was whistling an Elton John number through stained teeth when the Special Forces guys jumped

him. ‘Crocodile Rock’ died in his throat, the M16 fell, he didn’t have time to get out his long-bladed machete and he stared at me with a mix of defiance and hatred. Two minutes of listening to his glib

story about only rarely using the trail and being in Chiang Mai a week ago and I knew he was lying.

I decided to take him back to the cinder-block prison, where I thought a few days in the crushing

heat of one of the solitary-confinement cells might make him more cooperative. The CIA guys, most

of whom liked Smokey Joe because of his willingness to hit prisoners without being asked twice, had

other ideas. They didn’t feel like wasting time by interviewing him or asking a young guy from The Division if they could take over the interrogation.

Deciding to use what their manuals coyly called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, they filled a

large concrete bathtub in a corner of the prison hospital. Only when the water was almost at the top did a couple of guards drag in the courier – blindfolded, shackled hand and foot.

Almost immediately I wished I had told the agency guys it was my case and to get the hell back to

their cages. Sure, you can convince yourself the rules of life are different when you’re working in the national interest, but this wasn’t even remotely connected to that. When I look back I think I was overawed or I just wanted to be part of the team – the psychology of the small group, as the experts call it. Whatever it was, to my shame, I said nothing.

Stripped to his threadbare underpants, eyes covered, the courier had no idea where he was or what

was happening, so he was already close to panic as they lashed him face up to a long length of board and lifted it off the floor.

Four of them – obviously well-practised in the technique – carried it over the bathtub and tilted it backwards so that his head, all except his mouth and nose, were in the water. He tried to fight – to no avail – and it was clear from his gasping breath he thought that, any moment, he was going to be lowered another couple of inches and drowned.

Two more of the interrogators took up a position on either side of his struggling body. One slapped a towel over the prisoner ’s mouth and nose and, once it was firmly in place, the other swamped it with water from a large bucket.

The water took a moment to soak through the fabric then went straight down the courier ’s inclined

throat. The water in his windpipe combined with the sensation of a wave hitting his face convinced him he had been plunged underwater and was drowning. The gag reflex, uncontrollable, kicked in as

he fought to stop the water entering his lungs …

The water kept coming. The sense of drowning erupted into even greater terror and the gagging became a rolling sequence of spasms. They went on and on until he got an erection, clearly visible

through his underpants, and then defecated in the water.

Men laughed, but I stared at him – I felt ashamed and dishonoured, experiencing every spasm as if

it were me that was strapped helpless to the board. Some people say that compassion is the purest form of love because it neither expects nor demands anything in return. I don’t know if what I felt that day for a Thai drug runner was compassion, but I can say for certain I had never seen terror like it.

All I could think of was that he was probably a better man than most – my parched mouth, panicking

heartbeat and sweat-drenched body told me I couldn’t have stood it for half as long as he had. I felt sick.

The agents stopped. They took the towel off his face, left him blindfolded and asked if he wanted to talk. Too distraught to form any words, fighting for every breath, his spastic hands trying to tear at the restraints, he said nothing. The senior CIA guy told his men to put the towel back on and keep going.

That’s when I found my voice.

‘Stop now, or you’ll all be on a charge,’ I said, trying to make it sound as cold and ruthless as possible. They looked at me, eyeing me up. I had no choice then – I either had to win or be emasculated for whatever remained of my career.

‘I can make it a Critical Incident Investigation if you like. You wanna try explaining what this guy has got to do with national security? Kramer, you want to go first?’

After a moment that seemed to last a year the senior guy – Kramer – told them to put the towel away and take off the blindfold. The drug courier looked up at me, this tough guy with machete scars who probably thought he had no problem handling pain, and it was pathetic to see how thankful he was. ‘You ready to tell us what happened?’ I asked him.

He nodded, but he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking – they had broken him, that was for sure.

Years later, when the CIA water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – al-Qaeda’s military commander

– he set a new world record by withstanding it for two and a half minutes. The courier had lasted twenty-nine seconds, which was about average.

Once he had been released from the board and was slumped on the floor, he told us he had been on

the bridge with two brothers. They ran the high-country opium lab where the drugs originated and were the ones who had decided to turn Smokey Joe into a human javelin. The courier said he had never laid a hand on the man, and I had the feeling he was telling the truth.