I promise you, if you had never seen a spider before – if you didn’t know an arachnid from a hole in the ground – the moment you saw a funnel web you would know you were looking at something deadly. There are men – and a few women – like that in the secret world. You sense immediately that they haven’t been touched by the humanity that inhabits most people. It is one of the reasons I was pleased to leave their environment and chance my hand in the sunlight.
It was three of them who were waiting at the back of the auditorium for the session of the forum to end. As soon as the delegates had filed out for lunch, leaving just myself and Bradley at the front and the two Bosnians sleeping it off near the sound console, they made their way towards us.
Bradley had seen them earlier. ‘You know them?’
‘In a way,’ I replied.
‘Who are they?’
‘Better not to ask, Ben.’
The cop recognized the danger in them, and he certainly didn’t like the way they were rolling, but I put my hand on his arm. ‘You’d better go,’ I said quietly.
He wasn’t convinced. I was his colleague and, if there was going to be trouble, he wanted to be there for me. But I knew why men like that had been given the job – somebody was sending me a message: there won’t be any negotiation, just do what they tell you. ‘Go, Ben,’ I repeated.
Reluctantly, glancing over his shoulder, he headed for the door. The spiders stopped in front of me.
‘Scott Murdoch?’ the tallest of them, and obviously the team leader, asked.
Scott Murdoch, I thought to myself – so, it was that far in the past. ‘Yeah, that’s as good as any,’ I replied.
‘Are you ready, Dr Murdoch?’
I bent and picked up my fine leather briefcase – a gift to myself when I had first arrived in New York and mistakenly thought it was possible to leave my other life behind.
There was no point in asking the men where we were going – I knew they wouldn’t tell me the truth and I wasn’t ready yet for all the lies. I thought I deserved just a few more moments of sunshine.
Chapter Two
THEY DROVE ME to the east river first. At the heliport a chopper was waiting, and we flew to an airport in Jersey, where a business jet took off the moment we were on board.
An hour before sunset, I saw the monuments of Washington silhouetted against the darkening sky. We landed at Andrews Air Force Base and three SUVs driven by guys in suits were waiting for us. I guessed they were FBI or Secret Service, but I was wrong – it was far above that.
The guy in the lead vehicle hit his bubblegum lights and we made good time through the choking traffic. We turned into 17th Street, reached the Old Executive Office Building, passed through a security checkpoint and headed down a ramp into a parking area.
That was as far as the spiders were going – they handed me off to four guys in suits who took me through a reception area, along a windowless corridor and into an elevator. It only went down. We stepped out into an underground area manned by armed guards. There was no need to empty my pockets – I was put into a backscatter X-ray and it saw everything, both metal and biological, in intimate detail.
Screened and passed, we got on to a golf cart and drove down a series of broad passages. As disorienting as it was, that wasn’t the strangest thing: I got the sense nobody was looking at me, as if they had all been told to glance away.
We reached another elevator – this one ascended for what felt like six floors – and the four guys in suits handed me over to an older man, better dressed, with greying hair. ‘Follow me please, Mr Jackson,’ he said.
My name wasn’t Jackson, I had never heard of Jackson, my many aliases had never included Jackson. I realized then that I was a ghost, a shadow without a presence or name. If I didn’t know before how serious it was, I did then.
The silver fox led me through a windowless area of work stations but, again, nobody looked in my direction. We went through a small kitchen and into a much more expansive office. At last there were some windows, but the gloom outside and the distortion caused by what I supposed was bulletproof glass made it impossible to get any sense of where we were.
The silver fox spoke quietly into his lapel mic, waited for an answer, then opened a door. He motioned me forward and I stepped inside.
Chapter Three
THE FIRST THING that strikes you about the oval office is that it’s much smaller than it appears on TV. The president, on the other hand, seemed much bigger.
Six-two, his jacket off, heavy bags under his eyes, he rose from behind his desk, shook hands and indicated we should move to the couches in the corner. As I turned towards them I saw that we weren’t alone: a man was sitting in the gloom. I should have guessed of course – he was the person who had dispatched the spiders, the one who wanted to make sure I understood that the summons was non-negotiable.
‘Hello, Scott,’ he said.
‘Hello, Whisperer,’ I replied.
Back in the day, we had met a number of times. Twenty years older than me, he was already elbowing his way to the top of the intelligence heap while I was a fast-rising star at The Division. Then the Twin Towers fell and I took a different path. People say that on that afternoon – and late into the evening of September eleventh – he wrote a long and stunning deconstruction of the entire US intelligence community and its comprehensive failings.
Although nobody I knew had ever read it, apparently it was so vicious in its appraisal of individuals – including himself – and so unsparing in its critique of the FBI and CIA that there was no hope for his career once he had given it to the president and the four congressional leaders. Being an intelligent man, he must have known what the result would be: he was committing professional suicide.
Instead, as the full scale of the disaster became apparent, the then-president decided he was the only person who appeared hell-bent on honesty rather than covering their ass. Whatever the Latin is for ‘Out of Anger, Victory’ should be Whisperer’s motto; within a year he had been appointed Director of National Intelligence.
I can’t say that during our professional encounters we liked each other much, but there was always a wary admiration, as if a Great White had come face to face with a salt-water croc. ‘We’ve got a small problem,’ he said as we sat down. ‘It concerns smallpox.’
I was now the tenth person to know.
The president was sitting to my right and I sensed him watching me, trying to gauge my reaction. Whisperer, too. But I had none – no reaction, at least not in the conventional sense. Yes, I felt despair, but not surprise. My only real thought was about a man I had met once in Berlin, but it wasn’t exactly the situation in which to mention it, so I just nodded. ‘Go on,’ I said.
‘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 docume
nt 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.’