I Am Pilgrim (6 page)

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.

The money trail remained as mysterious as ever and, unless we could track it successfully, we would never know how far the plumes of infection had spread. As a result, I resolved to throw everything we had at the problem but, in the end, none of that mattered: it was a shy forensic accountant and a dose of serendipity that came to our rescue.

Ploughing one last time through the mountain of material seized from my predecessor ’s London

home before it vanished into The Division’s archives, the accountant found a handwritten grocery list stuck in the back of a chequebook. About to throw it away, he turned it over and saw it was written on

the back of a blank FedEx consignment docket – strange because none of our investigations had shown any evidence of a FedEx account. Intrigued, he called the company and discovered a list of pick-ups from the address, all of which had been paid for in cash.

Only one turned out to be of interest – a box of expensive Cuban cigars sent to the luxurious Burj

Al Arab hotel in Dubai. It quickly transpired that the name of the recipient on the FedEx docket was fake, and that would have been an end to the matter – except for the moment of serendipity. A woman

working with the accountant had once been a travel agent and she knew that all hotels in the United

Arab Emirates are required to take a copy of every guest’s passport.

I called the hotel under the guise of an FBI special agent attached to Interpol and convinced the manager to examine their files and give me the passport details of the guest who had been staying in suite 1608 on the relevant date.

It turned out to be a person called Christos Nikolaides. It was an elegant name. Shame about the man.

Chapter Nine

EVERYONE AGREED ON one thing – Christos would have been handsome if it weren’t for his height. The

olive skin, wave of unruly dark hair and good teeth couldn’t overcome legs that were far too short

for his body. But money probably helped, especially with the women he liked to run with, and Christos Nikolaides certainly had plenty of that.

A flurry of police database searches showed that he was the real deal: a genuine low-life with no

convictions but a significant involvement in three murders and a host of other crimes of violence.

Thirty-one years old and a Greek national, he was the eldest son of uneducated parents who lived outside Thessaloniki, in the north of the country. It’s important to stress ‘uneducated’ here, as opposed to stupid – which they most certainly were not.

In the following weeks, as we delved deeper into his life, the family became increasingly interesting. A close-knit clan of brothers, uncles and cousins, the family was headed by Christos’s sixty-year-old father, Patros – the family’s ruthless enforcer. As they say in Athens, he had a thick jacket – a long criminal record – but this had been accompanied by great material success. An adjustment to the orbit of a US satellite monitoring the Balkans provided photos showing the family’s compound in stunning detail.

Set amid rolling acres of lavender, the complex of seven luxurious homes, swimming pools and lavish stables was surrounded by a twelve-foot wall patrolled by what we believed to be Albanians armed with Skorpion machine pistols. This was strange, given that the family was in the wholesale floristry business. Maybe flower theft was a bigger problem in northern Greece than most people realized.

We theorized that, like Colombia’s Medellín cartel before them, they had adapted the complex high-

speed air and road network needed to transport a perishable product like flowers to include a far more profitable commodity.

But what did a family of Greek drug dealers have to do with my predecessor, and why would he be

sending the eldest son a box of cigars at a seven-star hotel in the Middle East? It was possible the former Rider had had a drug habit and Christos was his dealer, but it didn’t make much sense: the Greeks were definitely on the wholesale side of the business.

I was about to dismiss the whole investigation as another dead end – maybe Christos and my predecessor were nothing more than friendly scumbags – when, by good luck, I could not get to sleep

on a grim London night. I looked across the rooftops from my apartment in Belgravia, thinking of

how the two men probably ate together at one of the area’s Michelin-starred restaurants, when I realized that the answer to our most difficult problem might be staring me in the face.

What if the Russians weren’t responsible for paying our rogue agents at all? Say Christos Nikolaides and his family were responsible for making the payments. Why? Because they were running drugs into Moscow and that was the contribution they had to make to the cash-strapped Russians for the licence to do so. Call it a business tax.

It meant the Greeks would be using their black cash and money-laundering skills to transfer funds

from their own accounts into ones in the names of our traitors – and the Russian intelligence agencies wouldn’t show up anywhere near the process. Under such a scenario, somebody who had received a

large payment – the Rider of the Blue – might send an expensive box of cigars to the man who had

just paid him: Christos Nikolaides, on vacation in Dubai.