I Am Pilgrim(12)

He then read me my rights and placed me under arrest.





Chapter Seven


MY BEST GUESS was Montana. As I looked out the window of the jet there was something in the cut of the hills that made me almost certain we were in the north-west. There was nothing else to distinguish the place – just an airstrip so secret it consisted of a huddle of unmarked bunkers, a dozen underground hangars and miles of electrified fence.

We had flown through the night, and by the time we landed – just after dawn – I was in a bad frame of mind. I’d had plenty of opportunity to turn things over in my head and the doubts had grown with each passing mile. What if the Shania Twain DVD was a fake, or somebody had planted it on the Rider? Maybe he was running a sting operation I didn’t know about – or another agency was using him to give the enemy a raft of disinformation. And what about this? Perhaps the investigators would claim it was my DVD and the Rider had unmasked me as the traitor. That explained why I had to shoot him dead with no consultation.

I was slipping even further into the labyrinth of doubt as the Special Ops guys bustled me off the plane and into an SUV with blackened windows. The doors locked automatically and I saw the handles inside had been removed. It had been five years since I had first joined the secret world and now, after three frantic days in Moscow, everything was on the line.

For two hours we drove without leaving the confines of the electrified fence, coming to a stop at last at a lonely ranch house surrounded by a parched lawn.

Restricted to two small rooms and forbidden any contact except with my interrogators, I knew that in another wing of the house a dozen forensic teams would be going through my life with a fine-toothed comb – the Rider’s too – trying to find the footprints of the truth. I also knew how they’d interview me – but no amount of practice sessions during training can prepare you for the reality of being worked over by hostile interrogators.

Four teams worked in shifts, and I say it without editorial comment, purely as a matter of record: the women were the worst – or the best – depending on your point of view. The shapeliest of them appeared to think that by leaving the top of her shirt undone and leaning forward she would somehow get closer to the truth. Wonderbra, I called her. It would be the same sort of method used, years later, with great effect on the Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

I understood the theory – it was a reminder of the world you hungered for, the world of pleasure, far removed from the place of constant anxiety. All you had to do was cooperate. And let me just say, it works. Hammered about details night and day as they search for any discrepancy, you’re tired – weary to the bone. Two weeks of it and you’re longing for another world – any world.

Late one night, after twelve hours without pause, I asked Wonderbra: ‘You figure I planned it all – and I shot him on the edge of Red Square? Red Square? Why would I do that?’

‘Stupid, I guess,’ she said evenly.

‘Where did they recruit you – Hooters?!’ I yelled. For the first time, I’d raised my voice: it was a mistake; now the team of analysts and psychologists watching via the hidden cameras would know they were getting to me.

Instantly I hoped she would return service, but she was a professional – she kept her voice calm, just leaned even further forward, the few buttons on her shirt straining: ‘They’re natural and it’s no credit to the bra in case you’re wondering. What song was the carousel playing?’

I forced the anger to walk away. ‘I’ve already told you.’

‘Tell us again.’

‘“Smells Like Teen Spirit”. I’m serious, this is modern Russia; nothing makes sense.’

‘You’d heard it before?’ she said.

‘Of course I’d heard it before, it’s Nirvana.’

‘In the square, I mean, when you scouted locations—?’

‘There was no scouting, because there was no plan,’ I told her quietly, a headache starting in my left temple.

When they finally let me go to bed, I felt she was winning. No matter how innocent you are, that’s a bad thing to think when you’re in an isolated house, clinging to your freedom, as good as lost to the world.

Early the next morning – Wednesday by my figuring, but in fact a Saturday, that’s how disoriented I’d become – the door to my sleeping area was unlocked and the handler hung a clean set of clothes on the back of it. He spoke for the first time and offered me a shower instead of the normal body wash in a basin in the corner. I knew this technique too – make me think they were starting to believe me, encourage me to trust them – but by this stage I was pretty well past caring about the psychology of it all. Like Freud might have said: sometimes a shower’s still a shower.