‘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.’
Chapter Four
BY THE TIME I left the white house it was late enough for the evening traffic to have thinned. Whisperer and I were in the back of his government car, heading across town. The director looked terrible; every hour without rest was taking its toll and, after twenty-two hours of being drowned by the crisis, his face was as grey as a tombstone.
Even worse, the night was nowhere near done yet.