I Am Pilgrim (19 page)

Saturday, and when Marcie brought his breakfast in he asked her about it. ‘What’s it for?’

‘I thought you might find it interesting – look at it if you want,’ she said, trying not to put any pressure on him.

He didn’t glance at it, turning instead towards his food. Throughout the day, every time she came in to check on him, her disappointment grew. The book hadn’t been touched.

She didn’t know, but Bradley had been in a turmoil of his own since the moment he woke, coming

down off the drugs, a jack-hammer of a headache splitting his skull as his body adjusted, a kaleidoscope of thoughts all let loose, making him remember when he didn’t even want to think.

By the time she was fixing dinner, Marcie had given up hope. With no sign of interest in the book

from her husband she found the forms from the Wellness Foundation and started rehearsing how she

was going to tell him it would be best if he went back to hospital. She couldn’t come up with any way of spinning it so that it didn’t sound like a defeat, and she knew it might shatter him. But she had run out of mental highway and, close to tears, she opened the door into the bedroom and braced herself

for the imminent wreck.

He was sitting up in bed, thirty pages into my book, sweating hard, face etched with pain. God knows what effort it had taken for him to get that far, but he knew it was important to Marcie. Every time she came in, she couldn’t stop her eyes sliding to the book.

Marcie stared, frightened she was going to drop the tray, but decided that by even acknowledging

the event she might scare him back into the cell, so she just continued normally.

‘It’s bullshit,’ he said. Oh God. Her soaring spirits nosedived, ready for another one of his episodes of wild anger.

‘I’m sorry, the man in the shop told me—’ she replied.

‘No, not the book – the book’s fantastic,’ he said irritably. ‘I mean the author. Call it intuition, call it what you like, he’s not FBI. I know those guys – they don’t work the frontier. This guy is something special.’

He motioned her closer, indicating where he’d marked things he had found arresting. And she never remembered seeing any of it, stealing glances at her husband, wondering if his spark of engagement would light a fire or whether – as with people she had read about who emerged from comas – it would die quickly and he would sink back into the void.

He took the dinner napkin off the tray and used it to wipe the sweat from his face. It gave Marcie a chance to leaf back to the beginning of the book. She stopped at the few lines of biography, but a picture of the author was conspicuous by its absence. ‘Who is he, then?’ she asked. ‘Who do you think Jude Garrett really is?’

‘No idea. I’m hoping he’ll make a mistake and tell us by accident,’ he said.

All through the weekend, to Marcie’s relief, the fire kept blazing. She sat on the bed as he ploughed through the pages – reading out slabs to her, arguing ideas back and forth. And as he went deeper, continually thinking about the science of investigation, he was forced to consider the one crime he had tried so hard to forget. Fragments of what had happened in the building kept floating to the surface of his mind, dragging the breath and the sweat out of him.

On Sunday night, seemingly out of nowhere, the words overtopped the dam and he told her that at

one point he was trapped in what felt like a concrete tomb and that it had been so dark he hadn’t been able to see the face of the dying man he was with. He started to cry as he said that all he had been able to do was to try to catch his last words – a message for his wife and two young kids – and for the first time, as her husband cried in her arms, Marcie thought everything might be okay.

Slowly, he went back to reading, and Marcie stayed with him every word of the way. Hours later,

Bradley said he thought the author was too smart – he wasn’t accidentally going to reveal his identity.

Jokingly, he told her the test of any great investigator would be to discover who the guy really was.

They turned and looked at one another.

Without a word, Marcie went into the next room and got her laptop. From that moment on, discovering my identity became their project, their rehabilitation, the renewal of their love story.

And for me? It was a disaster.

Chapter Nine

NINETEEN WORDS. SITTING in the plaza Athénée, not admitting to anything, I’d asked Bradley what had

made him think the author was in Paris, and that’s what he told me. Out of a total of three hundred and twenty thousand words in the book, nineteen fucking words had given my secret away.

Seven of them, he said, were an attempt by the author to describe the different colours of decaying

blood. I remembered the passage exactly: I had compared the shades to a particular type of tree I had seen change from bright red to brown every fall of my childhood. So what? Checking every detail,

Bradley said he called a professor of botany and asked him about the tree. Apparently, they were unique to the Eastern Seaboard and I had unwittingly identified at least the general area where I grew up.

The other twelve words, two hundred pages later, concerned a murder weapon: the stick used to play lacrosse, something which I said I recognized because I had seen students at my high school with them. Bradley told me that if you call the US Lacrosse Association you will learn there are one hundred and twenty-four high schools on the Eastern Seaboard which offer it as a sport. They were

getting closer.

By then Marcie had located Garrett’s cousin living in New Orleans and learned that the guy’s reading extended to four letters: ESPN. The cousin said that Garrett had graduated high school in 1986, and Bradley guessed, from two references in the book, that the real author was from the same

era.

He called the one hundred and twenty-four high schools which played lacrosse and, as an NYPD

detective, requested the names of all male students who had graduated between 1982 and 1990 –

expanding the search, just to be on the safe side. Very soon, he had a long list of names – but one which he felt sure included the identity of the real author.

Working through it would have been overwhelming – except they were mostly private schools and

they were always looking for donations to increase their endowment. The best source of money was

former students, and there were not many databases better than an alumni association with its hand out. They had extensive records of all their former pupils, and Bradley combed through pages of lawyers and Wall Street bankers, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

He had nothing to show for his trouble until, one night, in the names from a school called Caulfield Academy, he and Marcie came across a person called Scott Murdoch.

‘He had graduated high school in ’87,’ Bradley told me, biting into the world’s most expensive eclair. ‘He was accepted to Harvard, studied medicine and got a doctorate in psychology. A great career lay ahead of him, but then – nothing. The alumni association had no address, no work history, no news. From the minute he graduated they knew less about him than anyone else. He had simply disappeared. Of everyone we looked at, he was the only one like that.’

He glanced up to see what I was thinking. I didn’t speak, I was too preoccupied – it was strange hearing the name Scott Murdoch after so many years. Sometimes – in the worst moments of the secret

life, when I was both judge and executioner – I wondered what had happened to that person.

After a long silence, Bradley soldiered on. ‘Following weeks of research, Harvard told me that Dr

Murdoch took a job at Rand – they knew because he was recruited on campus and they found a record

of it. But here was the strange part: Rand was certain it had never heard of him.

‘So were the professional associations, licensing boards and all the other organizations we contacted.

‘As far as we could tell, when Dr Scott Murdoch left Harvard, he walked off the face of the earth.

Where did he go? we asked ourselves.’

A chill which had started at the base of my spine was spreading fast. They had unearthed Scott Murdoch and they knew that he had vanished. That was a fine piece of work, but not half as good, I

suspected, as what was coming.

‘We had an address for Scott Murdoch from his years at high school,’ Bradley continued. ‘So we

headed out to Greenwich, Connecticut. I spoke to somebody through an intercom, told ’em it was the

NYPD, and the gates swung open.’

I looked up at him – wondering what he and Marcie, a couple struggling to get by in Manhattan, must have felt when they drove up the endless drive of my childhood home, past the ornamental lake

and the stables, and stopped at what has been described as one of the ten most beautiful houses in the country. Coincidentally, Bradley answered my question. ‘We never knew houses like that existed in America,’ he said quietly.

The current owner, a well-known corporate raider, told them that both the elderly Murdochs were

dead. ‘“I heard they only had one kid,” he said. “No, I have no idea what became of him. Must be loaded, that’s all I can say.”’

The next day, the two investigators searched the registry of deaths and found the entries for Bill and Grace. ‘We even spoke to a few people who’d been at both funerals,’ Bradley said. ‘They all told us

Scott wasn’t at either one of ’em.’

It was obvious from his tone he thought that was the strangest part of all, but I had no intention of telling him that I would have done everything possible to attend Bill’s funeral – if only I had known about it.

I think Bradley knew he had hit a nerve, but I figured he was a decent man because he didn’t pursue

it. Instead he told me that, by then, they were confident Scott Murdoch was their man. ‘Two days later, we knew for sure.’

Apparently, he and Marcie had sent my social security number – or at least the one I had at Caulfield Academy and Harvard – to Washington for extensive checking. They wanted to know where

it was issued, had it ever been replaced and a list of other details which might give a clue to Dr Murdoch’s whereabouts. When the answer came back it was alarmingly brief: no such number had ever been issued.

I sat in silence. Some back-office idiot in The Division had screwed up monumentally. I knew instantly what had happened. Years ago when I took on a new identity, ready to go into the field for the first time, a special team had eliminated my old name and history. They closed bank accounts, cancelled credit cards and expunged passports – sanitizing anything that would tie a covert agent back into his former identity. The agent was supposed to have drifted off overseas, like many young people do, and disappeared.

One of the clean-up team – either overzealous or poorly supervised – must have decided it would

be even more effective to eliminate my former social security number. They could have told social

security I had died, they could have let the number lie fallow, they could have done a hundred different things, but the one thing they should never have done was ask for it to be
eliminated
.

That mistake led to the situation I was now facing – a kid in Connecticut had an identifying number

that, according to the government now, had never been issued. You didn’t have to be Bradley to work

out something strange was going on.

‘I figured to have a social security number vanish into a black hole, it had to be done by the CIA or something like that,’ the cop said. It confirmed what he had started to suspect: although many details were altered in the book, the cases it dealt with were from the secret world.

An evening which had started out as a pleasant rendezvous with a pliant doctor had turned into a disaster and was rapidly getting worse – the book had led Bradley to Scott Murdoch and convinced

him that he was the same person as Jude Garrett. Now he knew what sort of work I did.

But how bad was it really? I asked myself. Very bad, the agent in me replied. I figured this might be my last night in Paris.

With no time to waste, I spoke to him with a quiet ruthlessness. ‘Time’s short, Lieutenant. Answer

me this. So you think Garrett is a spy – but the man could have been anywhere in the world. What made you look in Europe?’

‘The school,’ he said.

The school?
How the hell would Caulfield Academy know I had been stationed in Europe?

‘When we visited the campus, some of the faculty remembered him. Weird kid, they said, refused to

speak in class but brilliant with languages – especially French and German. If he was working for some black government agency, I figured they wouldn’t send him to South America, would they?’

‘Maybe not,’ I answered, ‘but there are 740 million people in Europe and you end up in Paris?

Come on – someone told you where to find him, didn’t they?’

That was every agent’s real nightmare. Betrayal, either accidental or deliberate, was what killed most of us. The cop stared, disgusted anyone would think that his abilities were so limited. ‘It was a damn lot harder than a tip-off.’

He said that after months of searching for Scott Murdoch, and convinced that the guy was working

for an intelligence agency, he realized he had to look for him under a different name. If Murdoch was a US covert agent, how would somebody like that enter a foreign country? He guessed that the best