I Am Pilgrim (47 page)

He explained that the guard had developed a nice little earner shaking down the drug couriers as

they crossed the river gorge: he’d turned the dilapidated footbridge into Thailand’s first toll road.

Initially he had been satisfied to unwrap the raw No. 2 and take a line of shavings off the brick –

clipping the ticket, so to speak. He would then trade the shavings with the smugglers for booze, which he would sell at the prison. Of course, he got greedy and the shavings became massive offcuts – so

large that the two brothers finally decided that a toll road wasn’t in northern Thailand’s best economic interest.

We had found our answer and, while there would be no Critical Incident Report, we all had to submit our own version of the case to our superiors. I’m sure the CIA’s account said they had only

used reasonable force, while mine, of course, said the opposite. That would have been an end to it –

who in the intelligence community would have cared about a Thai drug courier? – except there would

have been one section of the CIA’s report I couldn’t dispute.

Kramer would have recounted that he saw fear on my face, that it appeared I had felt so much for

the man being interrogated that my body was rigid and drenched in sweat. He might even have questioned my courage and whether I was suitable for front-line service. In his own way, he was probably saying that my weight was my heart.

It was that report which Whisperer would have read when he called up my file from the archives. I

have had many years to consider my own weaknesses, and I have to say that what Whisperer told me

as I was leaving was probably right – for me, there was no point in suffering. End it quick.

I looked out of the window and saw the broad sweep of the Bosporus and the domes of Istanbul’s

magnificent mosques. The wheels hit and held on the runway. I was in Turkey.

Chapter Thirteen

OLD PASSENGER JETS thundered down the asphalt at another airport – this one was in Islamabad. The Saracen had followed the Trans-Afghan Highway down to Kabul and found himself in an outer ring

of hell – the Afghan city was overwhelmed by US and Coalition forces and haunted by the constant

threat of suicide bombers.

After a day of prayer and uneasy rest, he had travelled the well-trodden invasion route down to the

Pakistan border, crossed the frontier among a tide of other travellers and made his way through Peshawar and on to Islamabad.

The flight to Beirut was late – every flight out of Pakistan was late – but he didn’t care. He was safe.

If the Americans or Australians or whoever they were who had almost captured him up at the ruined

village had somehow managed to discover his identity he would have been grabbed the moment he

handed over his passport at check-in.

Instead, it was just the normal situation – the perfunctory look at the passport, a glance at the ticket and then the obligatory small talk while the counter clerk waited for his ‘tip’ to make sure that the checked suitcase was sent to Beirut and not to Moscow. He paid the bribe and headed towards the gate.

Heavily armed men in uniform were everywhere but there was nothing you could call genuine security: as usual, too many guns, not enough brains.

He boarded the flight, flew to Beirut, returned to his bleak apartment in El-Mina and immediately

went to work. He had resigned from the local hospital months earlier, but before he left he had raided its chaotic storeroom and taken with him two white biohazard suits and their air regulators, boxes containing ten thousand small glass vials which he had ordered especially for his purposes and a book of the hospital’s official dispatch dockets.

All of these things he had stored in his garage. Wearing one of the suits and an oxygen tank, he set about producing as much of his super-virus as possible. Perhaps it was because of the spectacular results he had seen in the Hindu Kush or maybe it was thanks to his growing expertise, but the process went much faster than he had expected.

Day after day, working with large pharmaceutical tanks he had rigged into a sort of makeshift bio-

reactor, he transferred the deadly virus into the glass vials, sealed their rubber tops with a special machine he had acquired for the purpose and stored them in industrial refrigerators he had purchased second-hand in Beirut.

As he approached the end of his production run, he took a day off, travelled to Beirut and stood in a queue for two hours to buy a newly released cellphone, the one featured in a Hollywood movie that

all the young kids seemed to want. He paid cash for it and then walked several miles and bought a prepaid SIM card which would give it a year ’s cellular service. The only thing that remained was to gift-wrap it.

The following Friday after prayers, he gave the present to another member of the congregation – a

teenager with whom he had become friendly shortly after arriving in town. The boy reminded the Saracen a lot of himself at the same age – fatherless, deeply religious and full of fiery dreams about the irresistible rise of Islam.

The kid was so poor that when he pulled off the wrapping paper and saw the gift his eyes widened

and he was barely able to believe it was his. The Saracen explained he was leaving El-Mina to find

work and a new life in one of the fast-growing Muslim communities in Europe. The phone was a gift to remember him by, and all he asked in return was that the young man do a simple favour for him.

‘When I have found somewhere to live, I will call on the new phone, make arrangements to send a

key and ask you to open my garage for a Beirut courier who will pick up some boxes. Do you understand?’

The boy nodded and repeated the instructions perfectly. Men – even young men – in the Muslim world take the obligations of friendship far more seriously than their counterparts in the West, and the Saracen had no doubt that the teenager would fulfil his request to the letter. With tears in his eyes and no inkling of the plot in which he was now a participant, the teenager reached out and embraced the

Saracen, a man he had often wished had been his real father.

The Saracen walked away without looking back. He had already spoken to the Beirut courier –

twice weekly, his refrigerated truck arrived at the hospital to pick up or deliver blood and drugs. The Saracen told him there were boxes of medical supplies in his garage which would need to be sent to

him and asked him to be on standby for a call.

With his arrangements almost complete, the Saracen arrived back at his apartment and went into the

garage. The gene-sequencing machines, bio-safety suits and other equipment were already gone, smashed and burnt into an unrecognizable pulp and taken out to the local garbage dump in the boot of his car. He boxed up the vials of sealed virus, attached the hospital’s official dispatch dockets and, in the appropriate field, marked them as ‘expired vaccine’. The exact address they were being sent to would have to wait – he didn’t know it yet – but he could rely on the boy with the cellphone to fill it in when the time came.

He put the boxes in the refrigerator, locked the garage and went upstairs to his living quarters.

Sweating, he packed the only other things that he really cared about – photos, keepsakes and small mementos of his wife and son – into a crate which would go into a storage locker he had rented in

Beirut. He was almost finished when three men from a local charity arrived in a pick-up truck to collect his single bed, desk and other household goods. Once the items were loaded, he stood alone in his empty apartment.

He looked around at the two rooms one last time – they had been good years, productive years.

Lonely years, too. There were times he missed his wife and boy so much that the pain was almost physical but, looking back, maybe the way things had turned out had been for the best. No, it was definitely for the best. It was Allah’s will.

Known only to himself, he had set a date for the soft kill of America, a day that would live in history long after he was gone. The date was 12 October, which he knew was Columbus Day, the day

when America was discovered by Europeans and all the world’s real troubles had begun.

How appropriate, he thought to himself with pleasure, that future generations would mark that same

date as the beginning of the far enemy’s decline.

He had worked hard but, if he was going to meet his deadline, there was still no time to waste. He

walked out of the door, turned the key in the lock and headed for Germany.

Chapter Fourteen

I PASSED THROUGH turkish immigration without difficulty and by the time I reached the baggage claim

my Samsonite was on the carousel. As I walked to get it, I saw that no other luggage from my flight

had arrived yet and I knew what had happened – mine had been unloaded first and sent to the on-site

office of MIT, the Turkish intelligence agency, to be inspected and photographed.

I wasn’t offended: I was supposedly a sworn officer of a foreign power and it was understandable

that they would take an interest in me, but – for God’s sake – couldn’t they at least have done it professionally and sent it on to the carousel with the rest of the bags from my flight? I looked around the customs hall but I couldn’t see anyone who appeared to have me targeted. They were probably in a room above, checking me out on one of their closed-circuit cameras.

I walked through customs unchallenged, plunged into a sea of taxi touts and found the shuttle to take me to the domestic terminal. It made the international version seem deserted – there were men with large brass urns on their backs selling cups of apple tea, makeshift stalls with sugar-laden pastries and guys roasting nuts over coal braziers. Forget that it was close to a hundred degrees, the heat hit you like a wall, and the Fire Department would have taken a week to get through the traffic.

I joined a queue at a Turkish Airlines check-in desk and finally inched my way forward until I faced a young woman with heavy gold jewellery, far too much make-up and a crisp headscarf covering her

hair – according to Islam, a woman’s crowning glory. She took my suitcase, swapped my ticket for a

boarding pass and pointed me in the direction of my gate.

The line at security stretched for more than a block, but I managed to circumvent it by approaching

one of the supervisors and telling him, in English and the few words of Turkish I had at my command, that I was carrying a gun. I was quickly escorted into a windowless office where five men,

all in suits and smoking heavily, examined my passport, agency shield and other documents, including a copy of a letter from the White House to the President of Turkey thanking him for assisting the FBI ‘in this sad and unfortunate matter ’.

That was the document which did the trick, and two of them summoned a golf cart and had me driven down to the Milas–Bodrum gate. I was the first passenger to arrive and, with well over an hour to spare before we were due to depart, my plan had been to open the laptop and continue studying my

past cases. It didn’t happen.

No sooner had I sat down than I glanced up at a television screen suspended from the ceiling. It was tuned to a Turkish news channel and they were showing stock footage of some mountains in Afghanistan. I thought it was just another story about the endless war and was about to turn away when they cut to a diagram of a suitcase and the elements that were needed to make a dirty bomb.

I knew then that Whisperer had leaked the story about the Saracen trying to buy the Polonium-210

and, while I had no direct evidence, I was certain he had done it to coincide with my arrival in Turkey.

No wonder the MIT agents over at international arrivals had been so sloppy with my suitcase – they

would have been distracted by the breaking news of the biggest story in international terrorism for years. I smiled in quiet admiration: that was the definition of a good case officer – to orchestrate a perfect diversion to take the heat off his joe.

I stood up and asked a woman at the desk if I could borrow the remote for the TV. For the next hour, as the waiting area filled with my fellow passengers, I surfed the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, SkyNews, Bloomberg and half a dozen other English-speaking news channels to follow the

story of the nuclear trigger. As usual, it was mostly the same small amount of information endlessly recycled, but every now and again a new morsel was added for the anchors and the experts to chew

over: more than two thousand intelligence agents were to be dispatched to Afghanistan and Pakistan;

the governments of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Yemen had pledged their cooperation; the White House announced that the president would address the nation.

I was looking forward to hearing what Grosvenor would have to say but, just as the press corps rose to their feet and a camera grabbed a shot of Grosvenor approaching the lectern, they made the

final call for my flight.

I returned the remote, walked down the skybridge, found my seat and, fifty minutes later, caught a

glimpse of the turquoise waters of the Aegean Sea – probably the most beautiful stretch of water in

the world – as we circled wide and came in to land at Milas airport. It was twenty-five miles inland from Bodrum and after I had gone through the ritual of retrieving the Samsonite yet again – there was no MIT to provide unseen assistance this time – I found my way to the car-rental desk.