Chapter Nine

NINETEEN WORDS. SITTING in the plaza Athé né e, 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 and safest method would be to assume the identity and job of a minor government employee – a junior trade analyst, a commercial attaché or something similar.

Because Bradley’s father had worked in Washington, he knew all such appointments were recorded in a variety of obscure government publications. The announcements usually included information like education, age, professional history, zip codes, birth dates and other seemingly unimportant details.

Lying awake one night, he tried to imagine what it would be like to keep assuming new identities, under stress at every border, struggling to keep an endless list of lies straight in your head with never time to think, just to answer.

He knew if it was him, even to have a chance, he would have to populate the fake identities with easily remembered facts – a phone number from childhood, a genuine birth date with the year changed, the real first names of parents.

‘You get the drift, ’ he said as we sipped our coffee, a universe away from the razor-wire at a checkpoint on the Bulgarian border, being questioned by some thug in a uniform, his breath reeking of cigarettes and last night’s dinner, turning your documents over in his hand, throwing questions at you out of left field, alert for any hesitation, only too happy to make a hero of himself and call out to the unshaven Vopos that he didn’t believe this American or Briton or Canadian or whatever you happened to be masquerading as at that time in that place on that day.

Yeah, I got his drift, but I was too shaken to reply. Armed only with his intelligence, Bradley had divined exactly how covert agents entered a country and how they controlled the endless detail on which their lives might depend. In all honesty, I was finding it hard to remain angry with someone I was coming to admire so much.

Bradley said he discussed his theory with Marcie and they decided to experiment. From all the information they had compiled on Scott Murdoch’s early life, they assembled a list of twenty minor facts. While she went to work, he spent the day at his computer downloading the last ten years’ editions of one of the publications which recorded government appointments – the weekly Federal Register.

One evening, he and Marcie entered the facts into a search robot and, hoping to find a match for any of them, turned it loose on the register’s huge number of announcements.

Thirty-six hours later they had three hits. One was the zip code of Greenwich, Connecticut – used by a man appointed as a US delegate to the International Arts Council in Florence – and which may or may not have meant something. Another concerned a trade attaché who had played squash at Harvard, just like Scott Murdoch, and looked very promising – until they realized they were reading his obituary. The third was someone called Richard Gibson, a US observer at a meeting of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. His mini-biography included a birth date the same as Scott Murdoch’s and a summary of his education. His high school was given as Caulfield Academy.

‘We searched the alumni records, but nobody called Richard Gibson had ever been at Caulfield, ’ Bradley said quietly.

It was a remarkable achievement. He and Marcie, starting with nothing more than the name of a tree in Connecticut, had found Richard Gibson, the cover I had used to enter Geneva for my chat with Markus Bucher at Richeloud & Cie.

The name Gibson was the proof of principle – now they were certain that the method worked, they went at it full tilt. Three weeks later the system identified a minor official working at the US Treasury who had gone to Romania for a conference. The name the man was using was Peter Campbell.

‘I called the Romanian Finance Department and found a guy who had helped organize the event. He had a copy of Peter Campbell’s entry visa, including his passport details. A buddy at Homeland Security ran a check and found the same passport had been used to enter France.

‘The French government said Campbell hadn’t just entered the country, he had applied for residency in Paris. On his application, he said he was the manager of a hedge fund, so Marcie called the Securities and Exchange Commission. Nobody named Peter Campbell had ever held a securities trading licence and the hedge fund didn’t exist. ’

I watched in silence as Bradley reached into his jacket, took out two pieces of paper and laid them on the table.

The first was a page from an old high-school yearbook showing a photo of the four members of the Caulfield Academy squash team. One teenager stood apart – as if he played with the team but wasn’t part of it. His face and name were circled: Scott Murdoch.

The second piece of paper was a passport photograph attached to the French residency application in the name of Peter Campbell. There was no doubt that the two photos were of the same person. Me. I didn’t say anything.

‘So this is how I figure it, ’ Bradley said. ‘Scott Murdoch went to Caulfield Academy, studied at Harvard and joined a government black programme. He became a covert agent, used a hundred different names, and one of them was Campbell—’

I kept staring down at the yearbook photo, trying to recall the members of the squash team. One guy was called Dexter Corcoran – a big creep; everybody hated him, I remembered that. The others – even bigger assholes – I couldn’t even remember who they were. Deliberate suppression, a psychologist would have called it.

‘Maybe Dr Murdoch was thrown out of the secret world or his soul just got tired of it – I don’t know, ’ Bradley was saying. ‘But he entered France on Campbell’s passport, wrote a book to pass on what he knew and published it under the name of Jude Garrett, a dead FBI agent. ’

When I still didn’t respond, he shrugged. ‘And so the two of us end up here. ’

Yes, and there was no doubt about it: it was a brilliant piece of work by Bradley and his wife but – like I said – it was their discovery today, somebody else’s tomorrow.

There was only one thing left for me to do, so I stood up. It was time to start running.