Chapter Six

AFTER FOUR YEARS of training – of learning to read tiny signs others might miss, to live in situations where others would die – I rose quickly through the ranks. My initial overseas posting was to Berlin and, within six months of my arrival, I had killed a man for the first time.

Ever since The Division was established, its operations in Europe had been under the command of one of its most senior agents, based in London. The first person to hold the post had been a high-ranking navy officer, a man steeped in the history of naval warfare. As a result, he took to calling himself the Admiral of the Blue, the person who had once been third in command of the fleet: his exact position within The Division. The name stuck but over the decades it got changed and corrupted, until finally he became known as the Rider of the Blue.

By the time I arrived in Europe, the then-occupant of the office was running a highly regarded operation and there seemed little doubt he would one day return to Washington and assume The Division’s top post. Those who did well in his eyes would inevitably be swept higher in the slipstream, and there was intense competition to win his approval.

It was against this background that the Berlin office sent me to Moscow early one August – the worst of months in that hot and desperate city – to investigate claims of financial fraud in a US clandestine service operating there. Sure the money was missing, but as I dug deeper what I uncovered was far worse – a senior US intelligence officer had travelled especially to Moscow and was about to sell the names of our most valuable Russian informers back to the FSB, the successor both in function and brutality to the KGB.

As I’d come very late to this particular party, I had to make an instant decision – no time to seek advice, no second guessing. I caught up with our officer when he was on his way to meet his Russian contact. And yes, that was the first man I ever killed.

I shot him – I shot the Rider of the Blue dead in Red Square, a vicious wind howling out of the steppes, hot, carrying with it the smell of Asia and the stench of betrayal. I don’t know if this is anything to be proud of but, even though I was young and inexperienced, I killed my boss like a professional.

I shadowed him to the southern edge of the square, where a children’s carousel was turning. I figured the blaring sound of its recorded music would help mask the flat retort of a pistol shot. I came in at him from an angle – this man I knew well, and he saw me only at the last moment.

A look of puzzlement crossed his face, almost instantly giving way to fear. ‘Eddy—’ he said. My real name wasn’t Eddy but, like everybody else in the agency, I had changed my identity when I first went out into the field. I think it made it easier, as if it weren’t really me who was doing it.

‘Something wrong – what are you doing here? ’ He was from the south, and I’d always liked his accent.

I just shook my head. ‘Vyshaya mera, ’ I said. It was an old KGB expression we both knew that literally meant ‘the highest level of punishment’ – a euphemism for putting a large-calibre bullet through the back of someone’s head.

I already had my hand on the gun in my hip pocket – a slimline PSM 5. 45; ironically, a Soviet design, especially made to be little thicker than a cigarette lighter. It meant you could carry it with barely a wrinkle in the jacket of a well-cut suit. I saw his panicky eyes slide to the kids riding the carousel, probably thinking about his own two little ones, wondering how it ever got this crazy.

Without taking the gun out of my pocket, I pulled the trigger – firing a steel-core bullet able to penetrate the thirty layers of Kevlar and half an inch of titanium plate in the bulletproof vest I assumed he was wearing.

Nobody heard a sound above the racket of the carousel.

The bullet plunged into his chest, the muzzle velocity so high it immediately sent his heart into shock, killing him instantly – just like it was designed to do. I put my arm out, catching him as he fell, using my hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, acting as if my companion had just passed out from the heat.

I half carried him to a plastic seat under a flapping, unused sunshade, speaking in halting Russian to the clutch of mothers waiting ten yards away for their children, pointing at the sky, complaining about the weather.

They smiled, secretly pleased to have it confirmed once again that the Slavs were strong and the Americans weak: ‘Ah, the heat – terrible, yes, ’ they said sympathetically.

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.