I Am Pilgrim(22)

In the villages of northern Greece, where decisions are taken only in the councils of men, that somebody had assigned women to do the killing was worse in a way than the death itself. It was an insult. For the old man, it was as if the killers were telling him that Christos was such a no-account castrato he wasn’t even worth a matador.

Maybe Patros, the ruthless enforcer and father, would have ridden out of his compound for vengeance anyway, but when he learned the circumstances, for his dignity as a man, for his honour – forget that, given his past, he had none of these things – he believed he had no choice.

The woman agent was wrong about the other casualty too: despite the spandex, she wasn’t rented ass at all. She was Christos’s younger sister. As I would learn later, for one of the few times in her adult life she was relatively clean and sober in Rastoni. While the other patrons raced for the exits, she scrambled across the shattered glass, bending over her brother, trying to talk him into not dying.

Realizing it was failing, she grabbed her cellphone and made a call. Despite all her years of relentless sex, it was to the only real man in her life – her father. As a result, Patros and his phalanx of Albanians heard before I did exactly what my people had wrought that afternoon.

I hadn’t moved from my corner near the Old Town when I got a call ten minutes after he did. It was a text message giving me the price of a Léon DVD on Amazon – it meant Christos was dead, the team was safe on board the boats, there was no sign of pursuit. I put the phone away and looked at my watch. Eighteen minutes had passed since I had made the call initiating the whole event.

In the interim, I’d phoned through orders deploying smaller teams to arrest the other six named collaborators, and now the events that started several years ago in Red Square were finally drawing to a close. I suppose I could have taken a moment for quiet congratulation, allowed myself some small feeling of triumph, but I’m prone to self-doubt – always doubting, I’m afraid.

As I adjusted my briefcase – an anonymous young businessman stepping out of the shadows and into the faceless foreign crowd – it was a dead British orator and writer who was on my mind. Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for – justice, decency, humanity – and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them.

Lost in thought, I headed for the small bridge that crossed the river. It is eight hundred paces from the edge of the Old Town to the hotel in which I was staying. Eight hundred paces, about four minutes – in terms of history, not even the blink of an eye, really – and yet in that moment all our souls were turning in a few madmen’s hands.





Chapter Thirteen


THE HOTEL DU Rhône was deserted when I walked in. the doormen had gone, the concierge wasn’t at his post and the front desk was unattended. More disturbing was the silence. I called out, and when nobody answered I made my way to the bar at one side of the lobby.

The staff were all there, standing with the patrons, watching a TV screen. It was a few minutes before 3 p.m. in Geneva, 9 a.m. in New York. The date was September the eleventh.

The first plane had just hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, and already the footage was being replayed over and over again. A couple of news anchors started speculating that it might be anti-US terrorists, and this theory was met with cheering from several Swiss idiots at the bar. They were speaking French, but my summers in Paris meant I was fluent enough to understand they were praising the courage and ingenuity of whoever was responsible.

I thought of the people at home in New York watching the same footage as us, knowing that their loved ones were somewhere in the burning building and desperately praying that, somehow, they would make it out. Maybe there are worse things than watching your family die on live television, but if there were I couldn’t think of any at that moment.

I had a gun in my pocket – all ceramic and plastic, designed to beat metal detectors like the ones at Bucher’s office – and I was angry enough to consider using it.

As I fought back my emotions, United Airlines flight 175 out of Boston hit the south tower. It sent everyone in the room, even the idiots, reeling. My memory is that after an initial scream the bar was silent, but that may not be true – all I know is I had a terrible sense of worlds colliding, of the Great Republic shifting on its axis.

Alone, far from home, I feared nothing would ever be the same again: for the first time in history, some unidentified enemy had taken lives on the continental United States. Not only that, they had destroyed an icon which in a way represented the nation itself – ambitious, modern, always reaching higher.