Chapter Three

THE FIRST THING that strikes you about the oval office is that it’s much smaller than it appears on TV. The president, on the other hand, seemed much bigger.

Six-two, his jacket off, heavy bags under his eyes, he rose from behind his desk, shook hands and indicated we should move to the couches in the corner. As I turned towards them I saw that we weren’t alone: a man was sitting in the gloom. I should have guessed of course – he was the person who had dispatched the spiders, the one who wanted to make sure I understood that the summons was non-negotiable.

‘Hello, Scott, ’ he said.

‘Hello, Whisperer, ’ I replied.

Back in the day, we had met a number of times. Twenty years older than me, he was already elbowing his way to the top of the intelligence heap while I was a fast-rising star at The Division. Then the Twin Towers fell and I took a different path. People say that on that afternoon – and late into the evening of September eleventh – he wrote a long and stunning deconstruction of the entire US intelligence community and its comprehensive failings.

Although nobody I knew had ever read it, apparently it was so vicious in its appraisal of individuals – including himself – and so unsparing in its critique of the FBI and CIA that there was no hope for his career once he had given it to the president and the four congressional leaders. Being an intelligent man, he must have known what the result would be: he was committing professional suicide.

Instead, as the full scale of the disaster became apparent, the then-president decided he was the only person who appeared hell-bent on honesty rather than covering their ass. Whatever the Latin is for ‘Out of Anger, Victory’ should be Whisperer’s motto; within a year he had been appointed Director of National Intelligence.

I can’t say that during our professional encounters we liked each other much, but there was always a wary admiration, as if a Great White had come face to face with a salt-water croc. ‘We’ve got a small problem, ’ he said as we sat down. ‘It concerns smallpox. ’

I was now the tenth person to know.

The president was sitting to my right and I sensed him watching me, trying to gauge my reaction. Whisperer, too. But I had none – no reaction, at least not in the conventional sense. Yes, I felt despair, but not surprise. My only real thought was about a man I had met once in Berlin, but it wasn’t exactly the situation in which to mention it, so I just nodded. ‘Go on, ’ I said.

‘It appears that an Arab—’ Whisperer continued.

‘We don’t know he’s an Arab, ’ the president interrupted.

‘The president’s right, ’ Whisperer acknowledged. ‘That could be an attempt at disinformation. Let’s say a man in Afghanistan who spoke some Arabic has synthesized the virus. In the last few days he’s run a test on humans – his version of a clinical trial. ’

Again they looked at me to see my response. I shrugged – I figured if you’d gone to the trouble of creating it, you would probably want to test it. ‘Did it work? ’ I asked.

‘Of course it fucking worked! We’re not here because it failed, ’ Whisperer said, irritated by my apparent equanimity. For a minute I thought he was going to raise his voice, but then he didn’t.

‘Further, it appears that the virus has been engineered to crash through the vaccine, ’ he added.

The president hadn’t taken his eyes off me. After more silence from me, he shook his head and sort of smiled. ‘I’ll say one thing for you – you don’t scare easy. ’

I thanked him and met his gaze. It was hard not to like him. As I said, he was far removed from a normal politician.

‘What else have you got? ’ I asked.

Whisperer reached into a document case and gave me a copy of the Echelon report. As I started reading it, I saw that nothing had been blacked out or excised – I had been given raw, unsanitized intelligence, and it made me realize how panicked they were. Looking back, I think as the afternoon wore into night, they truly believed that the whole country was going over the falls together.

‘Two phone calls, ’ Whisperer said as I laid the report down. ‘Three days apart. ’

‘Yeah, ’ I replied, thinking about them. ‘The guy in Afghanistan makes the first call. He phoned a public phone box in Turkey and a woman was waiting for him. She had spent hours coding up a message, so she was well aware he was going to call. How did she know that? ’

‘Prearranged, ’ Whisperer responded. ‘You know the drill. On a certain day, at a certain time, he would call—’

‘From the middle of the Hindu Kush? While he’s testing a remarkable bio-terror weapon? I don’t think so; he wouldn’t risk it. I think it’s more likely some event had happened and she needed to speak to him urgently.

‘That means, ’ I continued, ‘she has some way of letting him know that he has to call her. ’

The president and Whisperer sat quietly, considering it.

‘Okay, ’ the president said. ‘She contacted him. Why didn’t Echelon hear it? ’

‘A lot of possibilities, ’ I said. ‘Outside the search area, a message sent days before to an unknown cellphone, a hand-delivered note. It could be anything. My guess would be a bland message on an obscure Internet forum. ’

‘It’d make sense, ’ Whisperer said. ‘The man would get an automated text alert telling him so-and-so had posted a new profile or whatever. ’

‘Yeah, and as soon as he saw the alert he would know what it really meant – to call her. So he does it the first chance he gets, from a totally different phone.

‘He listens to her coded message and it gives him certain information. It also tells him to call back in three days. He does, and that’s the second call. ’

‘Two phone calls and some sort of alert or message we can’t identify, ’ the president said. ‘It’s not much, but it’s about all we’ve got. ’

He looked straight at me. ‘Whisperer says you’re the best man to go into Turkey and find the woman. ’

‘Alone? ’ I asked, completely non-committal.

‘Yes, ’ said Whisperer.

That figured, I thought. I would have used a Pathfinder too: someone to go in under deep cover, a person who could feel their way along the walls of a dark alley, a man who would be parachuted in to light the way for the assault troops to follow. I also knew that most Pathfinders didn’t enjoy what intelligence experts called ‘longevity’.

‘What about Turkish intelligence? ’ I asked. ‘Will they be there to help? ’

‘Help themselves maybe, ’ Whisperer said. ‘Any information they get, I’d give it an hour before they’re leaking it – or more likely selling it – to half the world. ’

When Whisperer said he wanted somebody to go in ‘alone’, he meant alone. I sat in silence, thinking about Turkey and a host of other things.

‘You don’t seem very enthusiastic, ’ the president said at last, looking at the anxiety on my face. ‘What do you say? ’

The phone rang, and I figured, given the scale of what we were discussing, it had to be important – probably North Korea had just launched a nuclear attack to round out an otherwise perfect day.

As the president answered – and turned his back to give himself some privacy – Whisperer opened his cell to check his messages. I looked out of the window – it wasn’t every day you got the chance to admire the view from the Oval Office – but, the truth was, I didn’t see a thing.

I was thinking about failed dreams, about reaching for normal and an attractive woman in New York whose phone number I would never know. I was thinking about the fourth of July, days on the beach and all the things that so easily get lost in the fire. But mostly I was thinking about how the secret world never leaves you – it’s always waiting in the darkness, ready to gather its children back again.

Then a bad feeling about what lay ahead took hold of me, and I saw something, I saw it as clear as if it was on the other side of the glass. I was sailing an old yacht with patched sails, the wind driving me hard across a foreign sea, only the stars above to guide me in the darkness. There was nothing but silence, a silence so loud it screamed, and I saw the boat and myself grow ever smaller. Watching myself vanish on the black and endless water, I was scared, scared in a pit-of-the-stomach, end-of-days way.

In all my years of terrible danger, it was the first time I had ever imagined or felt such a thing. You don’t need a doctorate in psychology from Harvard to know that it was a vision of death.

Badly shaken, I heard the president hang up and I turned to face him. ‘You were about to tell us, ’ he said. ‘Are you going to Turkey? ’

‘When do I leave? ’ I answered. There was no point in arguing, no point in complaining. Dark omens or not, life has a way of cornering us. A person either stands up or he doesn’t.

‘In the morning, ’ Whisperer said. ‘You’ll go in under deep cover. Only the three of us will know who you are and what your mission is. ’

‘We’ll need a name, something to know you by, ’ the president added. ‘Any preference? ’

The yacht and the ocean must have been still raw in my mind because a word rose unbidden to my lips. ‘Pilgrim, ’ I replied quietly.

Whisperer and the president exchanged a glance to see if there was any objection. ‘Fine by me, ’ Whisperer said.

‘Yeah, it seems to fit, ’ the president replied. ‘That’s it then – Pilgrim. ’