I Am Pilgrim(115)

‘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.’