I took off the Rider’s jacket and put it on his lap to hide the reddening hole. I called to the mothers again, telling them I was leaving him momentarily while I went for a cab.
They nodded, more interested in their kids on the carousel than in what I was doing. I doubt any of them even realized I was carrying his briefcase – let alone his wallet – as I hurried towards the taxis on Kremlevskiy Prospekt.
I was already entering my hotel room several miles away before anyone noticed the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth and called the cops. I hadn’t had the chance to empty all his pockets, so I knew it wouldn’t be long before they identified him.
On visits to London I’d had dinner at his home and played with his kids – two girls who were in their early years at school – many times, and I counted down the minutes to when I guessed the phone would ring at his house in Hampstead and they’d get the news their father was dead. Thanks to my own childhood, I had a better idea than most how that event would unfold for a child – the wave of disbelief, the struggle to understand the finality of death, the flood of panic, the yawning chasm of abandonment. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop the scene from playing out in my head – the visuals were of them, but I’m afraid the emotion was mine.
At last I sat on the bed and broke the lock on his briefcase. The only thing of interest I found was a music DVD with Shania Twain on the cover. I put it in the drive of my laptop and ran it through an algorithm program. Hidden in the digitized music were the names and classified files of nineteen Russians who were passing secrets to us. Vyshaya mera to them if the Rider had made the drop.
As I worked through the files, looking at the personal data in the nineteen files, I started to keep a tally of the names of all the Russian kids I encountered. I hadn’t meant to, but I realized I was drawing up a sort of profit-and-loss account. By the end there were fourteen Russian children in one column, the Rider’s two daughters in the other. You could say it had been a good exchange by any reckoning. But it wasn’t enough: the names of the Russians were too abstract and the Rider’s children far too real.
I picked up my coat, swung my overnight bag on to my shoulder, pocketed the PSM 5.45 and headed to a playground near Gorky Park. I knew from the files that some of the wives of our Russian assets often took their kids there in the afternoon. I sat on a bench and, from the descriptions I had read, I identified nine of the women for sure, their children building sandcastles on a make-believe beach.
I walked forward and stared at them – I doubt they even noticed the stranger with a burn hole in his jacket looking through the railing – these smiling kids whose summers I hoped would now last longer than mine ever did. And while I had managed to make them real, I couldn’t help thinking that, in the measure of what I had given to them, by equal measure I had lost part of myself. Call it my innocence.
Feeling older but somehow calmer, I walked towards a row of taxis. Several hours earlier – as I had hurried towards my hotel room after killing the Rider – I had made an encrypted call to Washington, and I knew that a CIA plane, flying undercover as a General Motors executive jet, was en route to the city’s Sheremetyevo airport to extract me.
Worried that the Russian cops had already identified me as the killer, the ride to the airport was one of the longest journeys of my life, and it was with overwhelming relief that I stepped on board the jet. My elation lasted about twelve seconds. Inside were four armed men who declined to reveal who they were but had the look of some Special Forces unit.
They handed me a legal document and I learned I was now the subject of the intelligence community’s highest inquiry – a Critical Incident Investigation – into the killing. The leader of the group told me we were flying to America.
He then read me my rights and placed me under arrest.
Chapter Seven
MY BEST GUESS was Montana. As I looked out the window of the jet there was something in the cut of the hills that made me almost certain we were in the north-west. There was nothing else to distinguish the place – just an airstrip so secret it consisted of a huddle of unmarked bunkers, a dozen underground hangars and miles of electrified fence.
We had flown through the night, and by the time we landed – just after dawn – I was in a bad frame of mind. I’d had plenty of opportunity to turn things over in my head and the doubts had grown with each passing mile. What if the Shania Twain DVD was a fake, or somebody had planted it on the Rider? Maybe he was running a sting operation I didn’t know about – or another agency was using him to give the enemy a raft of disinformation. And what about this? Perhaps the investigators would claim it was my DVD and the Rider had unmasked me as the traitor. That explained why I had to shoot him dead with no consultation.
I was slipping even further into the labyrinth of doubt as the Special Ops guys bustled me off the plane and into an SUV with blackened windows. The doors locked automatically and I saw the handles inside had been removed. It had been five years since I had first joined the secret world and now, after three frantic days in Moscow, everything was on the line.
For two hours we drove without leaving the confines of the electrified fence, coming to a stop at last at a lonely ranch house surrounded by a parched lawn.
Restricted to two small rooms and forbidden any contact except with my interrogators, I knew that in another wing of the house a dozen forensic teams would be going through my life with a fine-toothed comb – the Rider’s too – trying to find the footprints of the truth. I also knew how they’d interview me – but no amount of practice sessions during training can prepare you for the reality of being worked over by hostile interrogators.
Four teams worked in shifts, and I say it without editorial comment, purely as a matter of record: the women were the worst – or the best – depending on your point of view. The shapeliest of them appeared to think that by leaving the top of her shirt undone and leaning forward she would somehow get closer to the truth. Wonderbra, I called her. It would be the same sort of method used, years later, with great effect on the Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
I understood the theory – it was a reminder of the world you hungered for, the world of pleasure, far removed from the place of constant anxiety. All you had to do was cooperate. And let me just say, it works. Hammered about details night and day as they search for any discrepancy, you’re tired – weary to the bone. Two weeks of it and you’re longing for another world – any world.
Late one night, after twelve hours without pause, I asked Wonderbra: ‘You figure I planned it all – and I shot him on the edge of Red Square? Red Square? Why would I do that?’
‘Stupid, I guess,’ she said evenly.
‘Where did they recruit you – Hooters?!’ I yelled. For the first time, I’d raised my voice: it was a mistake; now the team of analysts and psychologists watching via the hidden cameras would know they were getting to me.
Instantly I hoped she would return service, but she was a professional – she kept her voice calm, just leaned even further forward, the few buttons on her shirt straining: ‘They’re natural and it’s no credit to the bra in case you’re wondering. What song was the carousel playing?’
I forced the anger to walk away. ‘I’ve already told you.’
‘Tell us again.’
‘“Smells Like Teen Spirit”. I’m serious, this is modern Russia; nothing makes sense.’
‘You’d heard it before?’ she said.
‘Of course I’d heard it before, it’s Nirvana.’
‘In the square, I mean, when you scouted locations—?’
‘There was no scouting, because there was no plan,’ I told her quietly, a headache starting in my left temple.
When they finally let me go to bed, I felt she was winning. No matter how innocent you are, that’s a bad thing to think when you’re in an isolated house, clinging to your freedom, as good as lost to the world.
Early the next morning – Wednesday by my figuring, but in fact a Satu
rday, that’s how disoriented I’d become – the door to my sleeping area was unlocked and the handler hung a clean set of clothes on the back of it. He spoke for the first time and offered me a shower instead of the normal body wash in a basin in the corner. I knew this technique too – make me think they were starting to believe me, encourage me to trust them – but by this stage I was pretty well past caring about the psychology of it all. Like Freud might have said: sometimes a shower’s still a shower.
The handler unlocked a door into an adjoining bathroom and left. It was a white room, clinical, ring bolts in the ceiling and walls that hinted at a far darker purpose, but I didn’t care. I shaved, undressed and let the water flood down. As I was getting dry, I caught sight of myself naked in a full-length mirror and stopped – it was strange, I hadn’t really looked at myself for a long time.
I’d lost about twenty pounds in the three weeks or whatever it was I had been at the ranch and I couldn’t remember ever seeing my face look more haggard. It made me appear a lot older, and I stared at it for a time, as if it were a window into the future. I wasn’t ugly: I was tall and my hair was salted with blond thanks to the European summer.
With the extra pounds stripped off my waist and butt thanks to the investigation, I was in good shape – not with the six-pack-ab vanity of a movie star but with the fitness that came from practising forty minutes of Krav Maga every day. An Israeli system of self-defence it is, according to people who know, the most highly regarded form of unarmed combat among New York drug dealers north of 140th Street. I always figured if it was good enough for the professionals, it was good enough for me. One day, several years in the future – alone and desperate – it would save my life.
As I stood close to the mirror, taking inventory of the man I saw before me, wondering if I really liked him that much, it occurred to me I might not be the only one watching. Wonderbra and her friends were probably on the other side of the glass, conducting their own appraisal. I may not be on top of anyone’s list for male lead in Deep Throat II, but I didn’t have anything to be ashamed of. No, it wasn’t that which made me angry – it was the intrusion into every part of my life, the endless search for evidence that did not exist, the soul-destroying conviction that nobody could do something simply because they thought it was right.
Krav Maga instructors will tell you that the mistake most people make when they fight is to punch someone’s head really hard. The first thing you break is your knuckles. For that reason, a real professional clenches his or her fist and uses the side of it like a hammer hitting an anvil.
A blow like that from a reasonably fit person will deliver – according to the instructors – over four newtons of force at the point of impact. You can imagine what that does to someone’s face. Or to a mirror. It split into pieces and shattered on the floor. The most surprising thing was the wall behind – it was bare. No two-way glass, nothing. I stared at it, wondering if I was the one that was cracking.
Showered and shaved, I returned to the bedroom and, dressed in the clean clothes, I sat on the bed and waited. Nobody came. I went to bang on the door and found that it was unlocked. Oh, this was cute, I thought – the trust quotient was going suborbital now. Either that or, in this particular episode of The Twilight Zone, I would find the house was empty and hadn’t been lived in for years.
I made my way to the living room. I had never been in it before but that’s where I found the whole team, about forty of them, smiling at me. For an awful moment I thought they were going to clap. The team leader, a guy with a face made out of spare parts, said something I barely understood. Then Wonderbra was putting out her hand, saying it was just work, hoping there were no hard feelings.
I was about to suggest she come upstairs, where I’d visit on her acts of violence, some of them increasingly sexual in nature, but what the team leader said now made me stop – I decided such thoughts were unworthy of someone who had received a handwritten letter from the President of the United States. It was lying on a table and I sat down to read it. Under the impressive blue-and-gold seal, it said that a complete and thorough investigation had cleared me of all wrongdoing. The president thanked me for what he called great courage ‘above and beyond the call of duty’.
‘In hostile territory, far removed from help or safety, and facing the need for immediate action, you did not hesitate or give any thought to your personal welfare,’ he wrote.
He said that while it was impossible for the public ever to know of my actions, both he personally and the country at large were deeply grateful for the service I had performed. Somewhere in it he also used the word ‘hero’.
I walked to the door. I felt the assembled eyes on me, but I hardly noticed. I went out and stood on the lawn, looking across the bleak landscape. ‘Cleared of all wrongdoing,’ the letter had said, and as I thought on that and the other word he had used, it unchained a host of emotions in me. I wondered what Bill and Grace would have thought: would they have found the pride in me I had so long denied them?
I heard a car’s tyres crunch up the long gravel drive and stop at the front of the house, but I ignored it. And what of the dead woman in Detroit, the one with the same startling blue eyes as mine? She had loved me, I was sure of that, but it was strange given that I hardly knew her. What would my mother feel if I could have told her?
I kept standing there, shoulders hunched against the wind and the emotional debris swirling around me, until I heard a door open. I turned – the team leader and Wonderbra were standing on the porch. With them was an elderly man, just arrived in the car, whom I had known for a long time. It doesn’t matter what his name was – by design, nobody has ever heard of him. He was the director of The Division.
Slowly he came down the steps and stood with me. ‘You read the letter?’ he asked. I nodded. He put his hand on my arm and exerted a tiny pressure – his way of saying thank you. I guess he knew that any words of his would have little hope of competing with that blue-and-gold seal.
He followed my gaze across the bleak landscape and spoke of the man I had killed. ‘If you take the final betrayal out of it,’ he said, ‘he was a fine agent – one of the best.’
I stared at him. ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I replied. ‘If you take the bomb out of it, 6 August was probably a nice day in Hiroshima.’
‘Jesus, Eddy! I’m doing my best here, I’m trying to find something positive – he was a friend of mine.’
‘Mine too, Director,’ I said flatly.
‘I know, I know, Eddy,’ he replied, restraining himself – amazing what a letter from the president can do. ‘I’ve said a dozen times I’m glad it was you, not me. Even when I was younger, I don’t know if I could have done it.’
I didn’t say anything: from what I had heard he would have taken a machine gun to Disneyland if he had thought it would have advanced his career.
He turned his collar up against the wind and told me he wanted me to return to London. ‘I’ve checked with everyone who has to sign off. The decision was unanimous – I’m appointing you the new Rider of the Blue.’
I said nothing, just stared across the blighted fields for a long time, saddened beyond telling by the circumstances and those two little girls. I was twenty-nine years old and the youngest Rider of the Blue there had ever been.
Chapter Eight
LONDON HAD NEVER looked more beautiful than the night I flew in – St Paul’s Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament and all the other old citadels of power and grandeur standing like sculptures against a red and darkening sky.
It was less than twenty hours since my promotion, and I had travelled without rest. I was wrong about the location of the ranch house – it was in the Black Hills of South Dakota, even more remote than I had imagined. From there it was a two-hour drive to the nearest public airport, where a private jet had flown me to New York to connect with a British Airways transatlantic flight.
A Ford SUV, three years old and splashed with dirt to make it look unremarkable,
picked me up at Heathrow and took me into Mayfair. It was a Sunday night and there was little traffic, but even so progress was slow – the vehicle was armour-plated and the extra weight made it a bitch to drive.
The guy wrestling the wheel finally turned into a cul-de-sac near South Audley Street and the garage door of an elegant town house swung up. We drove into the underground garage of a building which, according to the brass plaque on the front door, was the European headquarters of the Balearic Islands Investment Trust.
A sign underneath told the public that appointments could be made only by telephone. No number was given and, if anyone ever checked, London directory assistance had no listing for it. Needless to say, nobody ever called.
I took the elevator from the basement to the top floor and entered what had always been the Rider of the Blue’s office – a large expanse of polished wood floors and white sofas, but no windows or natural light.
The building itself had a concrete core, and it was from this cell within a cell that I began trying to unravel my predecessor’s web of deceit. Late into that first night, I called secret phone numbers which telephone companies didn’t even know they hosted, assembling a special team of cryptographers, analysts, archivists and field agents.
Despite what governments might claim, not all wars are fought with embedded reporters or in the glare of 24-hour news cameras. The following day, the new Rider and his small group of partizans launched their own campaign across Europe, doing battle with what turned out to be the most serious penetration of the US intelligence community since the Cold War.
We had some major successes but, even though, as time passed, enemy bodies started piling up like cord wood, I still couldn’t sleep. One night, chasing down a stale lead in Prague, I walked for hours through the old city and forced myself to take stock of where we were. By my own standards, shorn of all complications, I had failed – after twenty months’ unremitting work I still hadn’t discovered the method by which the Russians were paying the agents of ours – the traitors, in other words – they had corrupted.