I Am Pilgrim(10)

I guess the two hard men sensed something of that in me. Finally they got to the part of their questioning that dealt with illegality. ‘Tell us about drugs,’ they said.

I remembered what somebody once said about Bill Clinton – he never met a woman he didn’t like. I figured it wouldn’t be helpful to tell them I felt the same way about drugs. I denied even a passing knowledge, thankful I had never adopted the reckless lifestyle that usually accompanies their use. I’d made it a secret life and kept it hidden by following my own rules – I only ever got fucked up alone, I didn’t try and score at bars or clubs, I figured party drugs were for amateurs, and the idea of driving around an open-air drug market sounded like a recipe to get shot.

It worked – I had never been arrested or questioned about it – and so, having already successfully lived one secret life, it now gave me the confidence to embrace another. When they stood up and wanted to know how long I would need to consider their offer, I simply asked for a pen.

So that was the way of it – I signed their Memorandum of Engagement in a windowless room on a bleak industrial estate and joined the secret world. If I gave any thought to the cost it would exact, the ordinary things I would never experience or share, I certainly don’t recall it.





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.