I heard a car’s tyres crunch up the long gravel drive and stop at the front of the house, but I ignored it. And what of the dead woman in Detroit, the one with the same startling blue eyes as mine? She had loved me, I was sure of that, but it was strange given that I hardly knew her. What would my mother feel if I could have told her?
I kept standing there, shoulders hunched against the wind and the emotional debris swirling around me, until I heard a door open. I turned – the team leader and Wonderbra were standing on the porch. With them was an elderly man, just arrived in the car, whom I had known for a long time. It doesn’t matter what his name was – by design, nobody has ever heard of him. He was the director of The Division.
Slowly he came down the steps and stood with me. ‘You read the letter?’ he asked. I nodded. He put his hand on my arm and exerted a tiny pressure – his way of saying thank you. I guess he knew that any words of his would have little hope of competing with that blue-and-gold seal.
He followed my gaze across the bleak landscape and spoke of the man I had killed. ‘If you take the final betrayal out of it,’ he said, ‘he was a fine agent – one of the best.’
I stared at him. ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ I replied. ‘If you take the bomb out of it, 6 August was probably a nice day in Hiroshima.’
‘Jesus, Eddy! I’m doing my best here, I’m trying to find something positive – he was a friend of mine.’
‘Mine too, Director,’ I said flatly.
‘I know, I know, Eddy,’ he replied, restraining himself – amazing what a letter from the president can do. ‘I’ve said a dozen times I’m glad it was you, not me. Even when I was younger, I don’t know if I could have done it.’
I didn’t say anything: from what I had heard he would have taken a machine gun to Disneyland if he had thought it would have advanced his career.
He turned his collar up against the wind and told me he wanted me to return to London. ‘I’ve checked with everyone who has to sign off. The decision was unanimous – I’m appointing you the new Rider of the Blue.’
I said nothing, just stared across the blighted fields for a long time, saddened beyond telling by the circumstances and those two little girls. I was twenty-nine years old and the youngest Rider of the Blue there had ever been.
Chapter Eight
LONDON HAD NEVER looked more beautiful than the night I flew in – St Paul’s Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament and all the other old citadels of power and grandeur standing like sculptures against a red and darkening sky.
It was less than twenty hours since my promotion, and I had travelled without rest. I was wrong about the location of the ranch house – it was in the Black Hills of South Dakota, even more remote than I had imagined. From there it was a two-hour drive to the nearest public airport, where a private jet had flown me to New York to connect with a British Airways transatlantic flight.
A Ford SUV, three years old and splashed with dirt to make it look unremarkable, picked me up at Heathrow and took me into Mayfair. It was a Sunday night and there was little traffic, but even so progress was slow – the vehicle was armour-plated and the extra weight made it a bitch to drive.
The guy wrestling the wheel finally turned into a cul-de-sac near South Audley Street and the garage door of an elegant town house swung up. We drove into the underground garage of a building which, according to the brass plaque on the front door, was the European headquarters of the Balearic Islands Investment Trust.
A sign underneath told the public that appointments could be made only by telephone. No number was given and, if anyone ever checked, London directory assistance had no listing for it. Needless to say, nobody ever called.
I took the elevator from the basement to the top floor and entered what had always been the Rider of the Blue’s office – a large expanse of polished wood floors and white sofas, but no windows or natural light.
The building itself had a concrete core, and it was from this cell within a cell that I began trying to unravel my predecessor’s web of deceit. Late into that first night, I called secret phone numbers which telephone companies didn’t even know they hosted, assembling a special team of cryptographers, analysts, archivists and field agents.
Despite what governments might claim, not all wars are fought with embedded reporters or in the glare of 24-hour news cameras. The following day, the new Rider and his small group of partizans launched their own campaign across Europe, doing battle with what turned out to be the most serious penetration of the US intelligence community since the Cold War.