I Am Pilgrim (94 page)

spinnaker, but it wasn’t worth worrying about: it was so late in the year and winter was coming on so strong that the only other craft I saw were always well off on the horizon.

As I grew in confidence and my seamanship returned, I found that Nomad still had a stunning turn

of speed, and after three weeks I was beating fast towards the boot of Italy with the idea of heading up the Adriatic Sea towards Split in Croatia.

I pulled into a tiny outpost on the western shore of Greece – no more than a general store and a decrepit jetty – to top up my fuel and buy supplies. The elderly owner fuelled the boat’s diesel, put the fruit and milk I had purchased into cartons and threw in a pile of
International Herald Tribunes
that had gone unsold over the previous months.

‘You might as well have them; I’m just going to burn ’em.’

Two days later, sipping coffee in the late-afternoon sun, making my way along a deserted coast, I

was down to the last few papers when I encountered an item at the back of one of them, almost lost

next to the finance pages. It was nothing much, the sort of thing you might read all the time, simply a report that Greek police had found no suspicious circumstances concerning the death of a young American woman who fell from her luxury cruiser off the coast of the party island of Mykonos.

‘The woman, the former wife of wealthy auto heir, Dodge—’

I sat forward and scanned the paragraphs fast until I found the name: Cameron was dead. According

to the police, she fell from the back of her cruiser while intoxicated – the story said that the local medical examiner had found a cocktail of recreational drugs and alcohol in her system.

In the middle of the text was a photo of Cameron and Ingrid arm in arm, posing with Ingrid’s stray

mutt outside an impressive baroque building. With an increasing sense of dread, I flew through the story to find out what it meant.

A few paragraphs down, I got the answer. It said Cameron had only just remarried, tying the knot

with Ingrid Kohl, a woman she had recently met in the town of Bodrum, Turkey.

‘The two women were among the first to take advantage of new German legislation allowing same-sex marriages,’ the report said.

‘They had flown to Berlin and were wed at the City Hall four hours after the law came into effect, a ceremony witnessed by two strangers whom they had recruited off the street and their dog, Giancarlo.

‘The couple then began their honeymoon by returning to their boat moored near—’

I got to my feet and walked to the starboard rail, trying to breathe. The sun was melting into the sea, but I barely saw it. Ingrid had been right: I didn’t understand the half of it. But I was certain that I did now.

All my experience – all my intuition – told me that the moment they had left Berlin as a married

couple, Cameron’s life was effectively over. Though I couldn’t prove it, I was convinced that the masterful plan Ingrid had developed in the maelstrom of 9/11 had one secret codicil which Cameron

had known nothing about – Ingrid was going to make sure that she was the one who inherited Dodge’s

fortune. But didn’t Ingrid love Cameron? I asked myself, always the investigator. But I already knew

the answer – she had been betrayed and abandoned by her long-time lover. She didn’t love Cameron, she
hated
Cameron.

Of course, working to my belief, she would have had no difficulty in concealing her true feelings:

she was an actress, and she would have played the part right up to the end. Once they were married,

she knew that she didn’t even have to get Cameron to write a will – as the legal spouse, she would inherit everything, even if Cameron died without making one.

The rest must have been easy – a long night of partying, a walk to the stern, a last kiss in the moonlight, a slender hand that tipped Cameron over the rail as the big cruiser powered on.

In the dying light I hung my head, angry with myself that I hadn’t foreseen it, even though – God

knows – I had been warned. I left the railing and went back to look at the date on the newspaper.

It was months old, too much time had passed – the boat would have been sold and the rest of the

money transferred through a maze of untraceable offshore companies until it finally ended up in a bank like Richeloud’s.

Somebody as smart as Ingrid Kohl – or whatever her name was – would have had a new identity

and a new life waiting, and I knew that she would have disappeared already into the anonymity of the world, protected by her boundless intelligence and ingenuity.

She was the best I had ever encountered and yet … and yet … I had a strong feeling that somewhere

… on some strange shore … in a street of some foreign city … in Tallinn or Riga … in Dubrovnik or

Krakow … I would see a face in the crowd …

Chapter Fifty-two

I SAT ON the deck until long after night had fallen, thinking about the two women and the events which had drawn us into each other ’s lives.

As a covert agent, darkness had always been my friend but, since my visit to the Theatre of Death, I had a fear of it which I suspected would outlast everything else in my life. I got up to switch on the running lights and check my course. Halfway along the deck, I stopped.

It seemed that my course was already set. I stared at the arrangement of the stars, the position of the moon and the pitch of the sea. When I listened, I heard a silence so loud it screamed.

I had been there before.

It was the vision of the future that I had seen the night I looked out of the window of the Oval Office. Just as I had glimpsed back then, I was alone on an old yacht, the sails patched and faded, the wind driving me into darkness, the boat and I growing ever smaller on a limitless sea.

Now this was the night and this was the moment, and I waited alone, barely willing to breathe, as the sea rolled towards me.
Nomad
heeled over and white water foamed at her bow as the wind backed a little and rapidly grew stronger. We were travelling faster and I stepped to the railing to work the winch. The rigging started to sing under the strain and, though there was not a soul on the dark-painted ocean, I was no longer alone.

Bill Murdoch was on the other winch, his wide shoulders pumping, yelling and laughing at me once again to get her damned head up into the wind.

Up for ’ard, a woman scrambled to set the running lights. Because my mother had died when I was

so young I remembered very little of her and it was a source of secret pain to me that with each passing year I could picture less and less of her face. Tonight, lit by the navigation lamps, I saw her clearly, every detail.

Voices, speaking in Polish, came from behind me. The woman whose photo I had seen as she held

her children tight and walked them towards the gas chamber was on board with me now. She was sitting in the cockpit, grown old and happy, with her adult kids and grandchildren all around her.

Yes, things were dying, and it had certainly been a vision of death that I had seen, but it wasn’t mine

– it was another kind of death. I was bidding all the ghosts of my past goodbye. Just like the Buddhist priest had told me on the road to Khun Yuam all those years ago: if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.

And under that vaulting sky, sailing on the wine-dark sea, I realized that I was born to the secret world, I was meant to be an agent. I didn’t choose it, I had never really wanted it, but that was what had been dealt to me. I had started on the journey thinking it was a burden, and that night I saw that it was a gift.

And I knew that not this year, but maybe next, I would return to New York. On a certain day, at an

appointed hour, I would go to a building near Canal Street, ring the buzzer and walk up the stairs to Old Japan.

The apartment door would open and, inside, I would see a table set for three, because I knew that

the man who lived there would always keep his word.

As Rachel watched, Battleboi would laugh and reach out his huge arms towards me. After a moment we would look at each other and he would ask me why I had come.

I would smile and say nothing, but in my heart I would know the answer, I would know exactly what I had put behind me: it was what was written in the Gospel of St Mark, chapter sixteen, verse six.

That was the part of the epic story about coming back from the dead, being restored to life. ‘He is

risen,’ it says.

He is risen
.

Acknowledgements

I think it was John Irving, the winner of both the National Book Award for a novel and the Oscar for a screenplay, who said that writing a movie is like swimming in a bath and writing a novel is like swimming in the ocean.

I had read that comment long before I embarked on
Pilgrim
but even then I wasn’t prepared for just how big the ocean was and how much effort it would take to cross it. I could never have done it without a host of people on the support boats calling out encouragement and occasionally yelling

‘Shark!’ if it looked like I was flagging. It would indeed be churlish of me not to acknowledge them and give them my heartfelt thanks.

First to Doug Mitchell, a truly great film producer and an even better friend for more years than I

care to remember. He not only gave me wise counsel, but supported and believed in me when those

things were sorely needed. To George Miller – a film director and an Academy Award winner himself – who once walked into an office where I was working and asked if I would be interested in

working with him on a screenplay. That started a journey, an inquiry, into story-telling that has never stopped and will probably continue until – as we said in
Road Warrior/Mad Max2
– ‘my life fades and the vision dims’.

I must thank the entire team at Secoma Group in Europe, especially Tony Field, Louise Knapp and

Carolina Scavini – all highly accomplished in the business world – for their friendship, unstinting loyalty and great practical help. They have looked after so many things, and helped in so many unheralded ways, I know that I will never be able to adequately express it. I am aware that for a writer that is not a good thing to admit, but that is the truth of it.

To François Micheloud and Clément Bucher, friends of long-standing and business associates, who

have guided me through the intricacies of life in Switzerland and have made our lives far more enjoyable and interesting for it. It was their suggestion that I accompany them on a visit to the concentration camp at Natzweiler-Struthof – a grim and terrible place where I stood alone for a long time looking at a photo of a woman with her children on their way to the gas chamber and the germ

of an idea was born.

Bill Scott-Kerr is the publisher of Transworld, of which Bantam Press is an imprint. His unbridled

enthusiasm, intelligent notes, incisive editing, brilliant marketing, unflinching support and profound knowledge of the arcane workings of the publishing world – a topic worthy of a Dan Brown novel, in

my view – have surpassed anything I ever expected. Or probably deserved. I just hope that I get the

opportunity to keep travelling down the road with him and the rest of the outstanding team at both Transworld and Random House.

The same sentiment applies to Steven Maat, my publisher in the Netherlands, who was the first person to buy the manuscript – at that stage, only one-third finished and from a debut novelist into the bargain. I have always thought that the Dutch were a courageous and intelligent people and now I know for sure! Thank you, Steven.

Jay Mandel in New York and Cathryn Summerhayes in London have represented the book – and fielded countless crazed emails from me – always in a gracious, very smart and suitably ruthless way.

They are both literary agents at WME and they have done a truly outstanding job. Long may they prosper.

I must also thank Danny Greenberg in Los Angeles, who has been a friend as well as my motion-picture agent for more years than either of us would probably like to contemplate. The fate of the film rights for the novel rest with him and I know they couldn’t be in better or more accomplished hands.

Don Steele is in grave danger of giving lawyers a good name. An entertainment attorney at Hansen,

Jacobson in Los Angeles, he is one of the truly good guys – and a fine lawyer to boot – in a town that has far too few of either. It is not surprising that he works at the firm where he does – Tom Hansen has great taste and intelligence and gathers like-minded people around him. Thanks to both of them.

I must offer a special mention to Brian and Sandra Maki for all the support and faith they have shown – both to me and to the project – over so many years. Brian, a voracious reader, waded through every draft of the novel and always came back with a host of useful suggestions and a wealth of grammatical corrections. We may not always agree on correct English usage but that doesn’t diminish for one moment his enormous contribution! Great thanks to both of them.

Jennifer Winchester helped in ways which only my family and I will ever fully appreciate. Patient

and unflappable, she was always there and never lost her temper or got irritable – even when I seemed to be permanently doing both. Thank you to her and also, especially, to Marinka Bjelosovic, who has

worked so hard on our behalf for the last eight years. I am sure, to her, it must seem like an awful lot longer.

To my children – Alexandra, Stephanie-Marie, Connor and Dylan – thank you so much for the boundless support and unquestioning belief. You make it all worthwhile. I have to make special mention of Dylan. Every morning he would come into my office, look at the pages I had done overnight and nod his head. ‘You’re doing well, Dad,’ he would say each time. He was four years old, couldn’t yet read – and I have no doubt it will remain the most heart-warming review I ever receive.