I have to admit I liked his biography and I liked the fact he was dead. I mean, who would go looking for a dead man?
Well, somebody did.
With the book finally published, the funeral barge almost lost to view, I had started for the first time in my adult life to live in a world without secrets. I looked at all the laughing women, hips swinging, sashaying down the wide boulevards of Paris, and as spring became summer I started to believe anything was possible.
The problem with the spy business, though, is that while you can resign you can never leave. I suppose I didn’t want to acknowledge it then, but too much wreckage floats in the wake of a life like mine – people you’ve hurt don’t forget. And at the back of your mind is the one lesson they drummed into you when you were young and your whole career was ahead of you: in this business, you can’t learn by your mistakes. You don’t get a chance. Make one, and you’re dead.
The only thing that will save you is your intuition and your tradecraft. Burn them into your soul. I suppose I must have listened because, still only nine months into my retirement, I noted a cab with a passenger circling the block. Nobody does that in Paris. Given the chaotic traffic, it could take hours.
It was just after eight, a busy Friday night, and I was at a sidewalk café on the place de la Madeleine waiting for an ageing doctor. He was a gourmand whose young Russian dates usually cost more for the night than the dinners he lavished on them, so he was always short of cash. To my mind, genteel poverty was a great advantage in a medical practitioner. It meant that when he was giving a diagnosis and writing a prescription he was prepared to listen to a patient’s own suggestions, if you catch my drift.
I didn’t mark the white taxi the first time it passed – not consciously anyway – but somewhere in all my tradecraft the ever-changing tangle of traffic must have been registering. The second time it went by I knew it had been there before.
Heart spiking hard, I didn’t react – that was the training kicking in. I just let my eyes follow it as casually as I could, cursing that a combination of headlights and traffic prevented me from seeing clearly who was in the back. It didn’t matter, I suppose – I just think it’s nice to know the identity of the people who’ve come to kill you.
The tide of vehicles carried the taxi away, and I knew I didn’t have long: the first pass they locate you, the second they plan the angles, the third they fire. I dropped ten euro on the table and moved fast on to the sidewalk.
I heard a voice behind, yelling – it was the doctor, but I didn’t have time to tell him we couldn’t help feed each other’s habits tonight. I jagged left into Hédiard, the city’s best food store, and moved quickly past pyramids of perfect fruit and into the crowded wine section.
Everything was unfolding in a rush – like it always does in such situations – and while I didn’t have any evidence, my instinct was screaming that it was the Greeks. The old man not only had the financial clout but also the deep emotional motive to search for revenge – the sort of incentive every missed Christmas and birthday would only have made stronger. He also had easy access to the personnel: crime intelligence reports from any police force in Europe would tell you that half of Albania was involved in the murder-for-hire business.
From Hédiard’s wine department, a door accessed a side street and I went through it without pause, turning left. It was a one-way street and I walked fast towards the oncoming traffic, the only strategy in the circumstances. At least you can see the shooter coming.
Scanning the road ahead, I realized I was acting to a well-organized plan. I didn’t know it until then but, wherever I went, part of me was always thinking about the best way out, an unseen escape programme constantly running in the background of my mind. My biggest regret was about my gun.
A cup of coffee, a quick meeting with the doctor and a cab home – half an hour maximum, I had figured. That meant the gun was in a safe back at the apartment. I had grown sloppy, I guess. Even if I saw them coming, there was little I could do now.
Home was exactly where I was heading – first thing, to open the damn safe and get myself weaponed up. I turned right, walked fast for a block, turned left and met the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré exactly where I wanted – just down the road from the Élysée Palace. Whichever Greek or Albanian was in the taxi would know it was the safest street in Paris – snipers on the rooftops, the whole length under constant anti-terrorist surveillance. Only now did I feel comfortable enough to grab a cab.
I got the driver to stop hard against my building’s service entrance. By cracking open the door of the cab and staying low I could unlock the steel door and get inside without anybody seeing me. The driver thought I was crazy – but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even.
Slamming the door behind me, I ran through the underground garages. The limestone building had once been a magnificent town house, built in the 1840s by the Comte du Crissier, but had fallen into ruin. The previous year it had been restored and turned into apartments, and I had rented one on the first floor. Even though it was small, normally someone in my situation would never have been able to afford it, but my material circumstances had changed – Bill Murdoch had died three years ago while I was on a brief assignment in Italy.
I wasn’t invited to the funeral, and that hurt – I just got a note from Grace telling me he had died suddenly and had already been buried. That was my adoptive mother for you – jealous to the end. A few months later I got a letter from a lawyer saying Bill’s matrix of companies – controlled by an offshore trust – had been left to Grace. It wasn’t unexpected – they had been married for forty years. The letter said that, while there was no provision for me, Grace had decided to set aside enough money to provide me with an income of eighty thousand dollars a year for life. It didn’t spell it out but the tone was clear: she believed it discharged all her responsibilities towards me.
Two years after the arrangement – almost to the day – Grace herself died. I felt her earlier behaviour relieved me of any obligation and I didn’t go back for the huge society funeral at Greenwich’s old Episcopalian church.
Again, and not for the first time, I was alone in the world, but I couldn’t help smiling at what a difference two years can make: had the order of their deaths been reversed, I knew Bill would have made a substantial bequest to me. As it was, Grace left everything to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to rebuild the Old Masters gallery in her name.
This information was conveyed in a letter from the same lawyer who also mentioned that there was a small matter concerning Bill’s estate that needed to be finalized. I told him I’d see him at his office in New York when I was home next – and then let it pretty much slip from my mind. The cheques from Grace’s bequest arrived regularly and it meant I could live a life far more comfortable than anything the government had ever envisaged with their pension.
The most tangible benefit was the apartment in Paris, and I found myself racing through what had once been the mansion’s kitchen – converted to a plant room – and flying up a set of fire stairs towards my home. I opened a concealed door next to the elevator and burst into the small foyer.
A woman was standing there. It was Mme Danuta Furer, my seventy-year-old neighbour, who lived in the mansion’s grandest apartment. The perfectly groomed widow of some aristocratic industrialist, she had the uncanny ability to make everyone else feel like a member of the Third World.
She saw my tongue moistening my dry lips, shirt hanging out. ‘Something wrong, Mr Campbell?’ she asked in her inscrutable upper-class French.
She knew me as Peter Campbell, on sabbatical from my job as a hedge-fund manager – the only job I knew of which would enable somebody my age to afford to live in the apartment and not work.
‘Fine, Madame – just worried I left the oven on,’ I lied.
The elevator arrived, she got in and I unlocked the steel-core door into my apartment. Bolting it, not turnin
g on any lights, I sprinted through the living room with its beautiful bay windows and small but growing collection of contemporary art. Bill would have liked that.
In the gloom I ripped open a closet in the dressing room and keyed a code into a small floor safe. Inside was a large amount of cash, a pile of papers, eight passports in different names and three handguns. I pulled out a 9mm Glock fitted with an extended barrel – the most accurate of them all – checked the action and grabbed a spare clip.
As I slipped it into my waistband, I dwelt on something that had been ricocheting round my head all the way home: if it was the Greeks, how the hell had they found me?
One theory I could come up with was that the Russians had stumbled across something and passed it on to their former partners, just for old times’ sake, you know – and a bucketload of untraceable cash.
Or had I made some tiny mistake at Richeloud’s that Markus Bucher had passed on to his clients and which had allowed them eventually to discover who I was? But, in either case, what had led the Greeks to Paris? For God’s sake, I was living under a completely different identity.
The knock on the door was firm and definite.
I didn’t react. I had always known that a hostile would have little difficulty getting into the building – François, the middle-aged, snivelling concierge, was always leaving the front doors open as he plumbed new depths of servitude. No sooner would he have heard Mme Furer coming down in the elevator than he was probably out in the street alerting the limo driver and fussing around to make sure he was registering ever more clearly on her Christmas gift list.
Without hesitation I did exactly what the training says – I moved fast, silently, into the back of the apartment. One strategy experienced assassins use is to attach a couple of ounces of Semtex – a plastic explosive with the consistency of clay – to the frame of a door before ringing the bell.
The perpetrator takes cover – in this case it would be in the elevator car – and detonates it with a call from a cellphone. Eight ounces of Semtex brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, so you can imagine what half that would do to a steel door and anybody looking through a peephole.
I backed through the dining room, grabbed a jacket to cover the Glock and headed for the spare bedroom. When the building had been the Comte du Crissier’s mansion his staff had used a hand-cranked elevator to send meals up from the kitchen to the dining room. This dumb waiter had terminated in a butler’s pantry – which was now my spare bedroom.
During the renovation the shaft had been converted to carry electrical wiring and, under the guise of installing high-speed computer cable to monitor the activities of my non-existent hedge fund, I got permission for a contractor who had installed surveillance equipment on The Division’s behalf to access the shaft. Having him fit a ladder inside, giving a route to the basement, I figured made the place almost worth the sky-high rent. Right now it was priceless.
I opened a closet door, pulled off an access panel and in less than a minute was heading into a narrow lane at the back of the building. Any moment I expected to hear the nineteenth-century facade and the heritage-listed bay windows heading towards a messy landing on the Champs-Élysées.
Nothing. What was stopping them? I guessed that, having lost me down at the place de la Madeleine, they had returned immediately to my apartment. Uncertain if I had arrived back yet, the knock on the door was an attempt to find out.
Just as well I hadn’t answered. I was almost certain there were two of them – that’s how many I would have used – and they were hiding right now near the elevator, waiting for me to return. That gave me a chance – if I entered by the front doors and took the stairs, I was pretty sure I could surprise them. I was never the best shot in my graduating class, but I was good enough to take them both out.
I slowed to a walk as I emerged from the lane, and ran a professional eye over the pedestrians, just to be certain that the guys inside didn’t have help on the street. I saw women on their way home from shopping at the luxury stores on avenue Montaigne, couples walking their dogs, a guy in a Mets cap with his back to me – a tourist by the look of it – window-shopping at the patisserie next to my building, but I didn’t see anyone who fitted the profile I had in mind. I turned to the vehicles and, equally, there was no white cab or shooters sitting in parked cars that I could see.
I moved up close behind a fifty-year-old woman in high heels and her boyfriend, twenty years her junior. They wouldn’t completely shield me from a sniper on a roof but they would certainly make the job more difficult. Under cover of them, I steadily closed down the distance to my building: eighty yards, forty, twenty …
As I passed the patisserie, the guy in the Mets cap spoke to my back: ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier just to open the fucking door, Mr Campbell?’
My heart stopped, every fear I had collapsing into the void that was once my stomach. In the next moment two distinct and contradictory thoughts fought for primacy. The first was: so this is how it ends? The retired agent outsmarted on a street in Paris, shot through the head, probably by somebody standing inside the patisserie. Vyshaya mera to me, I guess, bleeding out on the sidewalk, a man I don’t even know pocketing the gun as he and the guy in the Mets cap walk away to be picked up by – what else? – a white taxi.
The other thought was – there’s no way they’re killing me. Even if there was a shooter on a building or in a room at the Plaza Athenée hotel, the guy in the cap would have signalled silently and the marksman would have done his job. They don’t talk to you in the real world: only in movies do the bad guys have this pathological need to tell you their life story before they pull the trigger. Out here, there’s too much danger and your mind’s way too revved not to just get it over with. Look at Santorini.
Nevertheless, there was always a first time – so I still wasn’t sure whether to piss myself from fear or from relief. I looked at the man: he was a black guy in his fifties with a lean body and a handsome face, worn around the edges. More Reject China than fine Limoges, I told myself. This assessment was confirmed as he stepped a little closer and I realized he was limping badly on his right leg.
‘I think you called me Mr Campbell. You’re mistaken,’ I said in French, filling every syllable with my best imitation of Parisian disdain. ‘My name isn’t Campbell.’ I was buying time, trying to work out what was going on.
‘I guess that’s one thing we agree on,’ he said in English, ‘given that no Peter Campbell holds a Wall Street trading licence, and the hedge fund he manages doesn’t exist.’
How the hell did he know that? I shifted casually, putting him more squarely between me and the patisserie window.
‘So if you’re not Campbell, who are you?’ he went on. ‘Jude Garrett, FBI agent and author? Well, that’s difficult too – him being dead. Here’s another weird thing about Garrett,’ he said calmly. ‘I spoke to his cousin down in New Orleans. She was pretty amazed about his literary achievement – she doubted he ever read a book, let alone wrote one.’
He knew all this stuff about me, but I was still alive! That was the important point and he seemed to be missing it. I scanned the rooftops, trying to see if there was a sniper.
He watched my eyes, knowing what I was doing, but it didn’t affect his swing: ‘This is what I figure, Mr Campbell-or-whoever-you-are, you live under a fake identity but you wrote the book using a dead man’s name, just to be safe.
‘I think you worked for the government and only a handful of people know your real name. Maybe not even that many.
‘To me, that says it’s probably not wise to ask what kind of work you did but, the truth is, I don’t care. Your book is the best work on investigative technique I have ever read. I just want to talk about it.’
I stared at him. Finally, I got it out, speaking in English: ‘You wanna talk about a book?! I was gonna kill you!’
‘Not exactly,’ he said before lowering his voice. ‘Do I call you Mr Garrett?’
‘Campbe
ll,’ I shot back through clenched teeth. ‘Campbell.’
‘Not exactly, Mr Campbell. I think if anyone was gonna do the killing, it was actually me.’
He was right of course, and – as you’d expect – that made me even more pissed. He put out his hand, unsmiling. I’d learn in time he was a man who hardly ever smiled.
‘Ben Bradley,’ he said calmly. ‘Homicide Lieutenant, NYPD.’
Unsure what else to do, I gripped his hand and we shook – a cop who was learning to walk again and a pensioned-off covert agent.
I know that, on that night, encountering each other for the first time, we both thought that our race was run, our professional lives had ended, but here’s the strange thing: that meeting was of huge significance.
It mattered – my God, did it matter. All of it turned out to be important, all of it turned out to be connected in some strange way: the murder at the Eastside Inn, Christos Nikolaides gunned down in a bar in Santorini, the failed covert operation in Bodrum, my friendship with Ben Bradley, and even a Buddhist monk travelling down a road in Thailand. If I believed in fate, I would have to say there was some hand guiding it all.
Very soon I would learn that one great task still lay ahead of me, one thing which – more than any other – would define my life. Late one afternoon, a short time hence, I would be dragged back into the secret world, and any hope I had of reaching for normal would be gone, probably for ever. Like people say – if you want to make God laugh, tell Him you’ve got plans.
With precious little information and even less time, I was given the task of finding the one thing which every intelligence agency fears most: a man with no radical affiliations, no entry in any database and no criminal history. A cleanskin, a ghost.