I Am Pilgrim(105)

A few minutes later, six men in three black SUVs gained access to the institute’s campus, were met by several of the on-site security guards and walked into Drax’s lab. With pistols clearly visible under their jackets, they told the institute’s director to return to his office, flashed Drax some IDs which may or may not have been genuine FBI shields and told him he was under arrest on suspicion of espionage. Drax, looking completely flustered, told them he had no idea what they were talking about – he was a loyal American, had been all his life. They ignored him, read him his rights and, when he asked to see a lawyer, told him that would be arranged once he had been formally charged. Of course they had no intention of doing that – instead they took him to an airfield just the other side of Frederick where a waiting government jet flew them to a private airstrip in the Black Hills of South Dakota. From there, more government SUVs transported him to a remote ranch house and the bleak rooms it contained.

Ironically, in one of those strange coincidences that life sometimes throws up, it was the same house that I had been taken to after I had killed the Rider of the Blue – appropriated and put to a similar use by other members of the intelligence community after The Division was disbanded. Like myself so many years before, Drax and his secret were now lost to the world.

The second phone call Whisperer made – well, actually it was three phone calls – was to the ambassadors of Italy, Japan and Holland. He told them with deep regret that he had just learned that their nationals were dead, killed by their kidnappers when they realized troops were closing in. ‘They made a hurried attempt to bury the bodies and we are exhuming the site now,’ he said. ‘Obviously, forensic tests and formal identification will take some time.’ He told them that, for operational reasons, the information had to be kept secret and, while he didn’t say so explicitly, he gave the impression that a hot pursuit was still in progress.

His last call was to the head of the CIA. Offering no explanation, which wasn’t uncommon in the shadow world, he told him to organize to have the men in the NBC suits at the Overlook hotel informed that all tests had come back negative. Because they were no longer needed, they were to return to base immediately. Only after they had left were the CIA’s own operatives to move in, seal the pit and secure the site completely.

By the time he had finished the phone calls – plugging the most obvious means by which the secret might escape – he had entered the gates of the White House.





Chapter Forty-six


THE SURPRISING THING about James Grosvenor was that he was highly intelligent, personable and modest – in other words, a man far removed from the typical politician. Nobody had intended, least of all himself, that he would ever become the President of the United States.

He had been a businessman for nearly all his working life, the major part of it spent taking over distressed manufacturing companies and turning them around. Call him old-fashioned, but he believed in American industry, the skill of American workers and that hardworking men and women deserved a living wage and decent health care. One thing he didn’t believe in was union  s – if capital conducted itself properly, there was no need for them. Needless to say, his employees repaid him with their loyalty, and their productivity rates were always among the highest in the country.

The success – and the wealth – that followed his approach allowed him to take over ever larger enterprises and gave him a media profile as a man committed to saving the nation’s industrial base. Phoenix Rising was the name given to the segment about him on 60 Minutes. Shortly after it appeared he was offered the job of Secretary of Commerce and, having enough money and happy to take on a new challenge, he accepted. For a self-made man, government administration and its endless bureaucracy was a revelation, but he was not a man for turning and he made such a success of it that when the Secretary of Health was swept aside in a corruption scandal he moved to that department.

His wife had died from breast cancer and he brought to the department a fierce commitment that hadn’t been seen for years in the musty building on Independence Avenue. He was widely seen as championing the rights of ordinary citizens – much to the anger of the powerful health-care lobby – and that only served to raise his public profile even higher. Two years later he was asked to take the second slot on a presidential ticket. The candidate was a woman – the first ever to stand for the highest office on behalf of a major party – and Grosvenor knew that he had been selected to balance the ticket with a strong male presence.