I Am Pilgrim (9 page)

The flesh wound was the only collateral damage – no small achievement given the number of people in the restaurant and the unpredictable nature of any assassination.

The agents pocketed their weapons, burst out of the front door amid the exploding panic and yelled

for someone to call the cops. At a prearranged location – a tiny cobblestone square – they regrouped and boarded four Vespa scooters, permitted for residents only but secured earlier in the day by a large payment to a local repair shop. The team sped into the town’s narrow alleys and the leader used his cellphone to call in two fast boats waiting in the next bay.

In three minutes, the assassins reached a scenic cable car that offers an alternative – and far quicker

– descent than the donkeys. It takes less than two minutes to take the 1,200-foot drop, and already the boats were pulling into the wharf. The team was halfway to the next island, hurtling across the sparkling blue water in a plume of white spray, by the time the first cops arrived at Rastoni.

To the Greek cops’ ribald amusement, they quickly learned that Christos, the first-born and best-loved son of Patros Nikolaides, had been gunned down by two ladies in capri pants and Chanel sunglasses. And that was my mistake – not the killing of him, the women. I genuinely hadn’t given it a thought, I just sent the best people for the job, but, as I have to keep relearning, it’s the unquestioned assumptions that get you every time.

In the villages of northern Greece, where decisions are taken only in the councils of men, that somebody had assigned women to do the killing was worse in a way than the death itself. It was an

insult
. For the old man, it was as if the killers were telling him that Christos was such a no-account castrato he wasn’t even worth a matador.

Maybe Patros, the ruthless enforcer and father, would have ridden out of his compound for vengeance anyway, but when he learned the circumstances, for his dignity as a man, for his honour –

forget that, given his past, he had none of these things – he believed he had no choice.

The woman agent was wrong about the other casualty too: despite the spandex, she wasn’t rented

ass at all. She was Christos’s younger sister. As I would learn later, for one of the few times in her adult life she was relatively clean and sober in Rastoni. While the other patrons raced for the exits, she scrambled across the shattered glass, bending over her brother, trying to talk him into not dying.

Realizing it was failing, she grabbed her cellphone and made a call. Despite all her years of relentless sex, it was to the only real man in her life – her father. As a result, Patros and his phalanx of Albanians heard before I did exactly what my people had wrought that afternoon.

I hadn’t moved from my corner near the Old Town when I got a call ten minutes after he did. It was

a text message giving me the price of a
Léon
DVD on Amazon – it meant Christos was dead, the team was safe on board the boats, there was no sign of pursuit. I put the phone away and looked at my watch. Eighteen minutes had passed since I had made the call initiating the whole event.

In the interim, I’d phoned through orders deploying smaller teams to arrest the other six named collaborators, and now the events that started several years ago in Red Square were finally drawing to a close. I suppose I could have taken a moment for quiet congratulation, allowed myself some small

feeling of triumph, but I’m prone to self-doubt – always doubting, I’m afraid.

As I adjusted my briefcase – an anonymous young businessman stepping out of the shadows and into the faceless foreign crowd – it was a dead British orator and writer who was on my mind.

Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for – justice, decency, humanity – and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them.

Lost in thought, I headed for the small bridge that crossed the river. It is eight hundred paces from the edge of the Old Town to the hotel in which I was staying. Eight hundred paces, about four minutes

– in terms of history, not even the blink of an eye, really – and yet in that moment all our souls were turning in a few madmen’s hands.

Chapter Thirteen

THE HOTEL DU Rhône was deserted when I walked in. the doormen had gone, the concierge wasn’t at his post and the front desk was unattended. More disturbing was the silence. I called out, and when nobody answered I made my way to the bar at one side of the lobby.

The staff were all there, standing with the patrons, watching a TV screen. It was a few minutes before 3 p.m. in Geneva, 9 a.m. in New York. The date was September the eleventh.

The first plane had just hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, and already the footage was

being replayed over and over again. A couple of news anchors started speculating that it might be anti-US terrorists, and this theory was met with cheering from several Swiss idiots at the bar. They were speaking French, but my summers in Paris meant I was fluent enough to understand they were

praising the courage and ingenuity of whoever was responsible.

I thought of the people at home in New York watching the same footage as us, knowing that their

loved ones were somewhere in the burning building and desperately praying that, somehow, they would make it out. Maybe there are worse things than watching your family die on live television, but if there were I couldn’t think of any at that moment.

I had a gun in my pocket – all ceramic and plastic, designed to beat metal detectors like the ones at Bucher ’s office – and I was angry enough to consider using it.

As I fought back my emotions, United Airlines flight 175 out of Boston hit the south tower. It sent

everyone in the room, even the idiots, reeling. My memory is that after an initial scream the bar was silent, but that may not be true – all I know is I had a terrible sense of worlds colliding, of the Great Republic shifting on its axis.

Alone, far from home, I feared nothing would ever be the same again: for the first time in history,

some unidentified enemy had taken lives on the continental United States. Not only that, they had destroyed an icon which in a way represented the nation itself – ambitious, modern, always reaching

higher.

Nobody could say how deep the damage would run, but in the bar life was fractured into disjointed

moments – a phone ringing unanswered, a cigar burning to ash, the TV jumping between the immediate past and the terrifying present.

And still people weren’t talking. Maybe even the idiots were wondering, like me, if there was more

to come. Where would it end – the White House, Three Mile Island?

I left the gun in my pocket, pushed through the crowd that had gathered unnoticed behind me and

went up in an empty elevator to my room. I put a call through to Washington, first on a conventional landline connected out of London and then via the Pine Gap satellite, but all communications on the

East Coast of the United States were collapsing under the weight of traffic.

Finally, I called an NSA relay station in Peru, gave them the Rider of the Blue’s priority code and

got through to The Division on an emergency satellite network. I spoke to the Director on a connection so hollow it sounded like we were having a conversation in a toilet bowl and asked him to send a plane so I could get back, wanting to know how I could help.

He said there was nothing I could do and, anyway, he’d just heard from the National Security Council: all flights in and out of the country were about to be halted. I should sit tight; nobody knew where this damn thing was going. It wasn’t so much what he said that scared me, it was the edge of

panic in his voice. He said he had to go – his building was being evacuated, and so was the White House.

I put the phone down and turned on the TV. Anybody who was alive that terrible day knows what

happened: people leaping hand in hand from God knows what height, the collapse of the two towers,

the dust and apocalyptic scenes in Lower Manhattan. In houses, offices and war rooms across the world, people were seeing things they would never forget. Sorrow floats.

And though I wouldn’t discover it for a long time, watching the cops and firefighters rushing into

what would become their concrete tomb, there was one person who saw – in that whirlwind of chaos –

the opportunity of a lifetime. She was one of the smartest people I have ever encountered and, despite my many affairs with other substances, intelligence has always been my real drug. For that reason alone, I will never forget her. Whatever people may think of the morality, there was no doubt it took a kind of genius to start planning the perfect murder in the maelstrom of September the eleventh and

then carry it out a long time later in a scummy little hotel called the Eastside Inn.

While she was laying her dark plans, I spent the evening watching people jump until, by 10 p.m. in

Geneva, the crisis itself was winding down. The president was flying back to Washington from a bunker at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, the fire at the Pentagon was under control and the first bridges into Manhattan were being reopened.

At about the same time I got a call from an aide at the National Security Council who told me the

government had intelligence pointing to a Saudi national, Osama bin Laden, and that attacks against

his bases in Afghanistan, carried out under the guise of a group of rebels called the Northern Alliance, were already under way. Twenty minutes later I saw news reports of explosions in the Afghan capital of Kabul and I knew that the so-called ‘war on terror ’ had begun.

Claustrophobic, depressed, I went for a walk. The war on terror sounded about as generic as the war on drugs, and I knew from personal experience how successful that had been. The streets of Geneva were deserted, the bars silent, the electric trams empty. I heard later it was the same in cities from Sydney to London, as if for a time the lights had dimmed in the Western world in sympathy with

America.

I made my way through what are called the English Gardens, skirted the clutch of Moroccan drug

dealers lamenting among themselves the lack of business, thought for a moment of putting a bullet through them just for the hell of it, and walked along the lakeside promenade. Straight ahead lay the exclusive village of Cologny, where Fahd, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, the Aga Khan and half the crooks of the world had their homes. I sat on a bench at the edge of the lake and looked across the

water at the United Nations on the other side – brilliantly floodlit, totally useless.

Below it, almost on the lake’s edge, rose the grey bulk of the President Wilson hotel, commanding

a perfect view of Lake Geneva’s most popular beach. Every summer, Saudis and other rich Arabs would pay a huge premium for rooms at the front so that they could watch women sunbathing topless

on the grass. With well-stocked mini-bars, it was like an Arab version of an upmarket strip club –

without the inconvenience of tipping.

Although it was late, the lights were on in most of the rooms now. I guessed they had realized what

sort of shit was about to come down and were packing their binoculars and bags, getting ready for the first flight home.

But no matter what Western revenge would be exacted on Osama bin Laden and Arabs in general,

one thing was certain – the events of the last twelve hours were an intelligence failure of historic proportions. The overriding mission of the hugely expensive United States intelligence community

was to protect the homeland, and not since Pearl Harbor had these all-powerful organizations screwed up with such spectacular and public results.

As I sat in the cool Geneva night I wasn’t pointing the finger at others – none of us was without blame. We all carried the blue badges, we all bore the responsibility.

But so did the president and congressmen whom we served, those who established our budgets and

priorities. Unlike us, at least they could speak out publicly, but I figured it would be a long wait before the American people got an apology from any of them – the next millennium maybe.

The wind was rising, sweeping out of the Alps and bringing with it the smell of rain. It was a long

walk back to my hotel and I should have started then, but I didn’t move.

I was certain, even if nobody else was thinking it yet, that pretty soon Lower Manhattan wouldn’t be the only thing in ruins – the nation’s entire intelligence structure would be torn apart. It had to be if it was going to be rebuilt. Nothing in the secret world would ever be the same again, not least for The Division: people in government would no longer have any interest in secretly policing the covert world; they would only be interested in secretly policing the Islamic world.

I had got up in the morning and, by the time I was ready for bed, it was a different planet: the world doesn’t change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.

I knew I had none of the language or operational skills necessary for the brave new intelligence world which was about to be born, so I found myself – like Markus Bucher – suddenly at a fork in the road. Unsure what future lay ahead of me, not necessarily seeking happiness, but fulfilment wouldn’t be bad, I was lost. I had to ask myself what life I really wanted.