He had put the filthy clothes that had helped create his Palestinian legend into a plastic bag and, as he walked to the rattletrap bus, he threw it in a large charity bin. The only other stop he made was to drop the trash from a meal he had bought of pitta bread, fruit and tea into a garbage bucket and, though it would have seemed entirely innocuous to any onlooker, it was significant.
Shortly after 4 a.m. he took his seat at the back of the bus – almost exactly an hour before Tlass’s two sons, long delayed by having to search in ever-widening circles but attracted by the sound of wild dogs fighting, found the body of their father.
Despite the ungodly hour and the fact that it was one of Islam’s most important holidays, their membership of the secret police meant they knew exactly who to call. The news was conveyed to the highest circles of government and very soon the airwaves were full of phone conversations and text messages on supposedly secure communications networks.
Echelon sucked them all up.
Echelon never tires, never sleeps. It patrols the vast emptiness of space without needing air or food or comfort, it works as a silent thief at the world’s fibre-optic hubs and it commands countless radomes – the clusters of giant golf balls – on military bases across the globe. In total, it listens to every electronic communication on earth, a vast satellite and computer network so secret that its existence has never been acknowledged by the five English-speaking nations which established it during the Cold War.
The billions of bytes of data it collects every nanosecond are downloaded to a collection of super-computers at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, where highly classified software utilizes key words, patterns of phrases and even – by several secret accounts – speech recognition, to pull out any fragment worthy of further investigation.
And there were plenty of fragments in Damascus that night. Echelon listened as one of Tlass’s sons, grief-stricken, phoned his sister and told her there would be the mother-of-all crackdowns on the dissidents and enemies-of-the-state likely to have been responsible. ‘Allah help them and their families,’ he said.
The US intelligence analysts, assessing the intercepts, came to a similar conclusion – Tlass was a man with such a reputation for cruelty there must have been a long line of people only too happy to have fed him to the dogs. A revenge killing in a failed Arab state is of little interest to US security, so the event was quickly dismissed.
That was a terrible mistake – and so was the fact that Syrian state security, contending with the early hour and the holiday weekend, didn’t close the border immediately.
Chapter Twenty-three
THE OLD BUS sputtered and belched through the night, crawling through the extensive roadworks on Syria Route One and – having negotiated them – was forced to stop only for fajr, the dawn prayer.
When it finally reached the border, surly immigration and customs officers examined the Saracen’s documents, looked him up and down and only treated him with anything approaching respect when they realized he was a doctor. Had they bothered to search him, though, they certainly would not have found four of the glass vials – their contents were hidden in a place far beyond their reach. They were in his bloodstream.
The last thing he had done before leaving the wash cubicle in Damascus was to take a special two-pronged needle from his medical bag, dip it into the contents of the vials and prick and scratch the solution into the skin of his upper arm until it was bleeding freely. He knew the dose was four times greater than normal, but he intended to do everything to give himself as wide a margin of safety as possible. He bandaged his arm, put his shirt on and crushed the empty vials beyond recognition. That was what he had dropped in the garbage bucket along with the rubbish from his meal.
As he was being processed at the border, he was already, as he had anticipated, coming down with a fever, prickling sweats and a searing headache. He just hoped he could make it to a cheap hotel in Beirut before it got too bad. The symptoms he was feeling were almost identical to those experienced by a young boy in the English village two hundred years ago, the first person to undergo a procedure thought up by a local doctor called Edward Jenner. He was the scientist who pioneered vaccination.
For that is exactly what the Saracen had done – he had risked his life, broken into a weapons lab and killed a man he had never met in order to steal a vaccine. And here was the truly strange thing – in the washroom he had vaccinated himself against a disease which no longer existed, that presented a threat to no one, which had been totally eradicated from the planet just over thirty years ago.
Prior to that, however, it was the most catastrophic disease known to man, responsible for more human death than any other cause including war, killing over two million people annually as late as the 1960s – the equivalent of a new Holocaust every three years. The disease was known to science as Variola vera and to everyone else as smallpox.
The complete eradication of the virus was one of the reasons why so few places on earth even had the vaccine – apart from research facilities and secret weapons labs, it was no longer needed. Not unless – of course – like the Saracen, you were planning to synthesize the virus and were worried that one tiny mistake in that almost-impossible process would infect and kill you. For that reason he had sought out a state-of-the-art vaccine, one which no doubt had been thoroughly tested and proven effective, and which would now allow him to make as many errors as he needed.
Not all vaccinations ‘take’, and not all vaccinations work the same way in different people. In order to try to compensate for that and – as I said – offer himself as much protection as humanly possible, he had quadrupled the dose. No wonder he was feeling sick but, for the Saracen, the fever was good news: it meant that his body was being challenged and his immune system was mobilizing to fight the invader. The vaccine had ‘taken’.
While an immigration officer was waiting for the computer screen in front of him to assess the Saracen’s passport, a phone in the nearby office started ringing. By the time someone had answered it and relayed the order to close the border, the officer had waved the Saracen through and into Lebanon – a man with a false name, a real passport and a growing immunity against the world’s most deadly pathogen.
Chapter Twenty-four
I CAN’T DENY that the feeling had been growing on me for days. I am not in the bag for fate or destiny, but not long after I had left Battleboi and was walking home through Manhattan’s darkened streets, I had an overwhelming sense that some force of nature was coming to meet me.
I entered my small loft with its chronic undertow of loneliness and began to search through the bags that I had brought from Paris. No sooner had I said goodbye to Battleboi than I decided that the only way to deal with the hundreds of government announcements that were threatening my life was to ask Ben and Marcie to hand over what they had found. Frankly, I didn’t think that either the hacker or myself would have the time or the skill to duplicate their work. At last I found what I was looking for: the jacket I had been wearing at the Plaza Athénée the night I met them. Inside the pocket was the business card Marcie had given me and which I had taken with such reluctance.
It was too late to phone them that night but early the following evening I put a call through. It was Marcie who picked up.
‘This is Peter Campbell,’ I said quietly. ‘We met in Paris.’
‘It didn’t take you long to call,’ she said, overcoming her surprise. ‘Nice to hear from you. Where are you?’
‘In New York for a while,’ I told her, cautious as ever. ‘I was wondering if you and your husband might be willing to let me have the research material on Scott Murdoch that he told me about.’
‘Ben’s not at home … but sure, I don’t see why not.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, relieved. ‘Can I come and get it?’
‘Not tonight – I’m meeting him for a movie, and tomorrow we have dinner with friends. What about Friday, around seven?’
A delay of two days
was a lot longer than I wanted, but I wasn’t in a position to object. I thanked her, made a note of the address and hung up. Being a highly experienced professional, a man skilled in the tradecraft of the clandestine world, a person who – as I think I mentioned – had been trained to survive in situations where others might die, it would be reasonable to assume that I would see an ambush coming. But not me – the high-school teacher raised in Queens played me off a break and I didn’t even suspect it until I stepped into the apartment.
The lights were low, ‘Hey Jude’ was playing on the stereo, the room was filled with the smell of home cooking and a table was set for three: I had been invited for dinner. I guessed the whole evening would be devoted to pressuring me to change my mind about Bradley’s seminar, but there was no way out, not when people have spent months compiling a dossier on your life and you’re a beggar for their files.
‘You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,’ I said, doing my best imitation of a smile.
‘The least we could do,’ Marcie replied, ‘considering all the trouble we have caused you.’
Bradley appeared, hand extended, asking me what I’d like to drink. As it happened, I was in one of my periodic ‘cease and desist’ phases: I had decided New York would be a fresh start, a perfect opportunity to try to get clean, and it wouldn’t be just lip service this time – I’d even got the schedule of the local Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Being an addictive personality, however, I couldn’t do anything in moderation – not even sobriety – so I had also sworn off all alcohol. This was going to be a long evening.
Bradley returned with my Evian. While Marcie went to check on dinner, Bradley took a shot of his liquor and guided me towards the white room at the end of the universe. Except it wasn’t that any more – the kilim was on the floor, the drapes rehung and the only evidence of the desperate drama that had played out within its walls was the physiotherapy equipment in the corner.
Dozens of file boxes were standing next to it. Bradley pointed and smiled. ‘This is your life, Mr Murdoch.’
As I bent and glanced through them, I was shocked at the extent of their research – the boxes were filled with computer print-outs, data-storage disks and copies of everything from Caulfield Academy yearbooks to the annual reports of UN agencies. I took a folder at random – it was their master list of the aliases I had used – and the names brought a rush of memories.
Bradley watched as I turned the pages. ‘Marcie and I have been talking,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if we call you Scott?’
‘What’s wrong with Peter Campbell?’ I asked.
‘I just thought … at least between ourselves, it’d be easier to use your real name. That’s how we’ve always thought of you.’
I looked at him. ‘Trouble is, Ben, Scott Murdoch’s not my real name either.’
Bradley stared, trying to compute it. Was I lying, trying one last gambit to throw them off the track they had followed so assiduously, or was this my poor attempt at humour?
I indicated the list of aliases. ‘It’s like all the rest. Just another false identity – a different time, a different place, a different name.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s been my life.’
‘But … you were Scott Murdoch at school … just a kid … That was years before the secret world,’ he said, even more perplexed.
‘I know. Nobody would have chosen what happened – but that’s the way it turned out.’
I watched the investigator’s mind race – the child’s name that was no real name at all, my absence from either of the funerals, the fact I didn’t seem to have inherited any of the Murdochs’ wealth. He looked at me and realized: I was adopted, I wasn’t Bill and Grace’s natural child at all.
I smiled at him, one of those smiles that has no humour in at all. ‘I’m glad you didn’t try to go back any further than Scott Murdoch. Everything before Greenwich is mine, Ben – it’s not for anyone else to see.’
There was no doubt he understood it was a warning. The three rooms on the wrong side of 8-Mile, the woman’s features which had faded in my memory with every year, the real name she gave me – they were the very core of me, the only things I owned that were indisputably mine.
‘Who cares about a name?’ Bradley said at last, smiling. ‘Pete’s fine.’
Marcie called out, and the evening headed down a track I would never have expected. For a start, she was a superb cook, and if excellent food doesn’t put you in a good mood you’ve probably been supersized one time too many. In addition, they didn’t mention the seminar and I had to admit that signing me up didn’t appear to be on their minds. I started to relax, and the idea occurred to me that they knew so much about my background that, for them at least, it was like having dinner with an old friend.
Bradley had scores of questions about the book and the cases it dealt with and Marcie took obvious delight in watching her clever husband try to pin me down on details I was forbidden to talk about. During one particularly torrid session she laughed and said she had never seen him so pissed off in her life. I looked at her and couldn’t resist joining in.
When someone makes you laugh, when they’ve invited you into their home and tried their hardest to make you welcome, when they’ve given you boxes of material that just might save your life, when they’ve hauled them down into the street and helped you load them into a cab, when you’re standing under a street light in Manhattan and all that’s waiting for you is an apartment so cold you call it Camp NoHo, when you’re lost in your own country and the world’s promises haven’t amounted to very much, when you have the inescapable sense you are waiting for some future which might not be very pleasant, when they smile and shake your hand and thank you for coming and say they have no way of contacting you, you’ve got a hard choice to make.
I paused, all my tradecraft and experience telling me to write down a fake phone number and drive away with their research. What did I need them for now? But I thought of the warmth with which they had greeted me, Bradley’s joy in the music he had chosen for the evening and, I’m sorry, I couldn’t do it. I took out my cellphone, pulled its number up on the screen and watched Marcie write it down.
In the weeks that followed they would call, and we would catch a movie or go to a club and listen to the old blues-men that Bradley loved, jam the night away – always just the three of us. Thank God they never tried to set me up on a date or went off piste and mentioned Bradley’s seminar.
During that time Bradley underwent a battery of physical and psychological tests and, much to his relief, was passed fit to return to work. He still limped a little and, because of that, he was on lighter duties than normal but sometimes, usually late at night, he would get hold of me and ask if I wanted to drop by a crime scene where he thought there was some element which might interest me. On one particular evening he left a message while I was attending one of my regular twelve-step meetings. By this stage, I had switched my patronage to AA – as Tolstoy might have said, drug addicts are all alike, whereas every alcoholic is crazy in his own way. This led to far more interesting meetings, and I had decided that, if you were going to spend your life on the wagon, you might as well be entertained.
The meeting – held in a decaying church hall on the Upper West Side – came to an end, and I left my fellow outcasts milling about the foyer. I walked east, enjoying the unseasonably warm evening, and it wasn’t until I saw the Gothic towers of the Dakota that I thought to check my phone for messages. I saw Bradley’s number and figured he must have turned up another one of his rock ’n’ roll ghosts, so I was surprised when I clicked play and heard him, for the first time since we had met, ask for help.
‘I’ve got a murder case that’s very strange,’ he said on the message. Explaining nothing more than the fact that it concerned a young woman, he then gave me the address of a sleazy hotel where he wanted me to meet him.
It was called the Eastside Inn.
Chapter Twenty-five
THE WOMAN RESPONSIBLE for the killing in room 8
9 had used my knowledge, my experience, my brain to commit the murder, and that made me – at least by my count – an accessory to the crime.
I wasn’t going to let something like that ride, so once the coroner’s assistants had zipped up the bag containing Eleanor’s body I walked out of the room – angrier than I had been for a long time – and headed down the stairs.
I found what I was looking for – the door to the manager’s office – in a small alcove near the reception desk. Alvarez, or one of the other young cops, had locked it when they left, so I stepped back and smashed the sole of my shoe hard into the wood just below the handle.
The sound of splintering wood brought a uniformed cop. ‘I’m with Bradley,’ I said, with an air of complete authority. He shrugged, I finished kicking and stepped into the scumbag’s lair – rank with the smell of body odour and cigarettes.
Amid the squalor, a tall metal filing cabinet had been pivoted aside, revealing a hidden space in the floor. Set into the cavity was a heavy-duty safe. The burglar, being an expert, must have known exactly where to look and had already worked the combination and opened the safe door.
Among the cash and documents were computer print-outs of the hotel’s accounts, a couple of cheap handguns and scores of tiny colour-coded sachets. I bent down and held a couple of them up to the light: the green ones contained coke; crack rocks were in black; tina – appropriately, I suppose – was in ice-blue. Other colours meant other product – just like in any good warehouse. The scumbag had missed his calling – he should have been running Wal-Mart.