Chapter Thirteen

THE HOTEL DU Rhô ne 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.

Sitting alone with the storm rolling towards me, I looked back over the years and found, if not an answer, at least a way forward. Rising out of the past to meet me was a remote village called Khun Yuam, just on the Thai side of the Burma border. Looking back, I think the memory of it had waited for years in darkness, knowing its time would come.

It is wild, lawless country up there – not far from the Golden Triangle – and when I was first starting out in this business – I had only been in Berlin for a month – I found myself washed up on its shore. Nothing distinguished Khun Yuam from the other hill-tribe villages, except that five clicks out in the jungle stood a series of grim cinder-block buildings surrounded by guard towers and an electric fence.

Officially a relay post for the Global Positioning System, it was in fact a CIA black prison, part of a vehemently denied but real American gulag: remote facilities used to house prisoners who couldn’t be legally tortured back home.

One of the guards had died in-house and, while the Tokyo office normally would have handled it, they were so overwhelmed by yet another Chinese spy scandal that I found myself leaving Europe and flying into a place called Mae Hong Son – the City of Three Mists – on an old turbo-prop.

Most of the time it was a short chopper ride out to the GPS station, but this was the monsoon season and they didn’t call it the City of Three Mists for nothing. I rented a Toyota four-wheel drive from a guy who I guessed was a local opium baron and headed for Khun Yuam and its CIA prison.

Passing through spectacular mountains, I came to an ancient cable ferry. It was the only way to cross a roaring river – swollen by the monsoon – a tributary of the mighty Mekong, the scene of so many secret operations and so much US misery during the Vietnam War.

I got out of the car, gaunt and hollow-eyed; I had been travelling non-stop for thirty-two hours, fuelled by nothing more than ambition and anxiety about the mission. As I waited among a clutch of food vendors and villagers, watching a rusty cable drag the flat-bottomed ferry towards us in plumes of spray, a Buddhist monk in saffron robes asked if I wanted a cup of Masala-chai, the local tea. He spoke good English and, with nothing else on offer except the deadly Thai elephant beer, I gratefully accepted.

The monk was heading upcountry too and – given I was supposed to be a WHO expert surveying endemic diseases – it was pretty hard to refuse his request for a ride. We crossed the river in the Toyota, the barge plunging and barely afloat, water blasting over the gunwales and two inches of rusted cable the only thing between us and one of the country’s highest waterfalls, half a click downstream. The worst white-knuckle ride of my life.

As we drove out of the gorge, the jungle forming a canopy over our heads, the monk looked at me a little too long and asked about my work. Thanks to my medical training, I gave an excellent account of breakbone fever, but it soon became clear he didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. Maybe he knew about the cinder-block camp at Khun Yuam.

He had lived at an ashram not far from New York, so he had more knowledge than you would expect about American life and he spoke intelligently about recreational drugs and the pressures of modern life. I started to get the feeling it wasn’t a casual conversation. ‘You look hunted, ’ he said finally, in that Buddhist way, more in sorrow than in judgement.

Hunted? I laughed and told him it was the first time I had ever heard that: people usually put me on the other side of the food chain.

‘There is no other side of the food chain, ’ he said quietly. ‘Only the West believes that. Without grace, everyone is running from something. ’

Our eyes met. Smiling, I asked if he’d ever considered pursuing a religious life. He laughed right back and wanted to know if I had heard how villagers caught monkeys.

I told him I knew a few things about life, but that wasn’t one of them. ‘We didn’t eat much monkey at Harvard – generally only at Thanksgiving and Christmas, ’ I said.

So he told me how the villagers chain a ewer – a vase with a narrow neck and a bulbous bottom – to the base of a tree.

‘They fill the bottom with nuts and whatever else monkeys like to eat. In the night, a monkey climbs out of the trees and slips his hand down the long neck. He grabs the sweets and his hand makes a fist. That means it’s too big to get back up the narrow neck, and he’s trapped. In the morning the villagers come round and hit him on the head. ’

He looked at me for a moment. ‘It’s a Zen story of course, ’ he said, smiling again. ‘The point is: if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go. ’

Yes, I understood that much, I told him. It was a good story, but it didn’t mean anything to me, not now, anyway.

‘I suppose not, ’ he replied, ‘but perhaps I was put on the road to tell it to you. You’re young, Doctor – maybe the time will come when it will mean something. ’

And he was right, of course, the time did come, and in a different way from anything I could have imagined: it was sitting in the Geneva night waiting for a storm, thinking about mass murder in New York and women in short skirts recruiting even brighter young graduates for a new era.

I was thirty-one years old and I realized, through no fault of my own, I had been trained for tank warfare in Europe, only to find the battle was with guerillas in Afghanistan. Like it or not, history had passed me by.

On another level, far deeper, I knew that sooner or later I wanted to find something – something it’s hard for me to put a name to … a thing most people call love, I suppose. I wanted to walk along a beach with someone and not think about how far a sniper rifle can fire. I wanted to forget that you feel the bullet long before you hear the shot. I wanted to find somebody who could tell me what safe harbour really meant.

I knew with all my heart that, if I didn’t leave the secret world now, I never would. To turn your back on everything you know is hard, among the most difficult things you’ll ever do, but I kept telling myself one thing.

If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.