I Am Pilgrim(11)

Without taking the gun out of my pocket, I pulled the trigger – firing a steel-core bullet able to penetrate the thirty layers of Kevlar and half an inch of titanium plate in the bulletproof vest I assumed he was wearing.

Nobody heard a sound above the racket of the carousel.

The bullet plunged into his chest, the muzzle velocity so high it immediately sent his heart into shock, killing him instantly – just like it was designed to do. I put my arm out, catching him as he fell, using my hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, acting as if my companion had just passed out from the heat.

I half carried him to a plastic seat under a flapping, unused sunshade, speaking in halting Russian to the clutch of mothers waiting ten yards away for their children, pointing at the sky, complaining about the weather.

They smiled, secretly pleased to have it confirmed once again that the Slavs were strong and the Americans weak: ‘Ah, the heat – terrible, yes,’ they said sympathetically.

I took off the Rider’s jacket and put it on his lap to hide the reddening hole. I called to the mothers again, telling them I was leaving him momentarily while I went for a cab.

They nodded, more interested in their kids on the carousel than in what I was doing. I doubt any of them even realized I was carrying his briefcase – let alone his wallet – as I hurried towards the taxis on Kremlevskiy Prospekt.

I was already entering my hotel room several miles away before anyone noticed the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth and called the cops. I hadn’t had the chance to empty all his pockets, so I knew it wouldn’t be long before they identified him.

On visits to London I’d had dinner at his home and played with his kids – two girls who were in their early years at school – many times, and I counted down the minutes to when I guessed the phone would ring at his house in Hampstead and they’d get the news their father was dead. Thanks to my own childhood, I had a better idea than most how that event would unfold for a child – the wave of disbelief, the struggle to understand the finality of death, the flood of panic, the yawning chasm of abandonment. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop the scene from playing out in my head – the visuals were of them, but I’m afraid the emotion was mine.

At last I sat on the bed and broke the lock on his briefcase. The only thing of interest I found was a music DVD with Shania Twain on the cover. I put it in the drive of my laptop and ran it through an algorithm program. Hidden in the digitized music were the names and classified files of nineteen Russians who were passing secrets to us. Vyshaya mera to them if the Rider had made the drop.

As I worked through the files, looking at the personal data in the nineteen files, I started to keep a tally of the names of all the Russian kids I encountered. I hadn’t meant to, but I realized I was drawing up a sort of profit-and-loss account. By the end there were fourteen Russian children in one column, the Rider’s two daughters in the other. You could say it had been a good exchange by any reckoning. But it wasn’t enough: the names of the Russians were too abstract and the Rider’s children far too real.

I picked up my coat, swung my overnight bag on to my shoulder, pocketed the PSM 5.45 and headed to a playground near Gorky Park. I knew from the files that some of the wives of our Russian assets often took their kids there in the afternoon. I sat on a bench and, from the descriptions I had read, I identified nine of the women for sure, their children building sandcastles on a make-believe beach.

I walked forward and stared at them – I doubt they even noticed the stranger with a burn hole in his jacket looking through the railing – these smiling kids whose summers I hoped would now last longer than mine ever did. And while I had managed to make them real, I couldn’t help thinking that, in the measure of what I had given to them, by equal measure I had lost part of myself. Call it my innocence.

Feeling older but somehow calmer, I walked towards a row of taxis. Several hours earlier – as I had hurried towards my hotel room after killing the Rider – I had made an encrypted call to Washington, and I knew that a CIA plane, flying undercover as a General Motors executive jet, was en route to the city’s Sheremetyevo airport to extract me.

Worried that the Russian cops had already identified me as the killer, the ride to the airport was one of the longest journeys of my life, and it was with overwhelming relief that I stepped on board the jet. My elation lasted about twelve seconds. Inside were four armed men who declined to reveal who they were but had the look of some Special Forces unit.

They handed me a legal document and I learned I was now the subject of the intelligence community’s highest inquiry – a Critical Incident Investigation – into the killing. The leader of the group told me we were flying to America.