I Am Pilgrim(23)

Nobody could say how deep the damage would run, but in the bar life was fractured into disjointed moments – a phone ringing unanswered, a cigar burning to ash, the TV jumping between the immediate past and the terrifying present.

And still people weren’t talking. Maybe even the idiots were wondering, like me, if there was more to come. Where would it end – the White House, Three Mile Island?

I left the gun in my pocket, pushed through the crowd that had gathered unnoticed behind me and went up in an empty elevator to my room. I put a call through to Washington, first on a conventional landline connected out of London and then via the Pine Gap satellite, but all communications on the East Coast of the United States were collapsing under the weight of traffic.

Finally, I called an NSA relay station in Peru, gave them the Rider of the Blue’s priority code and got through to The Division on an emergency satellite network. I spoke to the Director on a connection so hollow it sounded like we were having a conversation in a toilet bowl and asked him to send a plane so I could get back, wanting to know how I could help.

He said there was nothing I could do and, anyway, he’d just heard from the National Security Council: all flights in and out of the country were about to be halted. I should sit tight; nobody knew where this damn thing was going. It wasn’t so much what he said that scared me, it was the edge of panic in his voice. He said he had to go – his building was being evacuated, and so was the White House.

I put the phone down and turned on the TV. Anybody who was alive that terrible day knows what happened: people leaping hand in hand from God knows what height, the collapse of the two towers, the dust and apocalyptic scenes in Lower Manhattan. In houses, offices and war rooms across the world, people were seeing things they would never forget. Sorrow floats.

And though I wouldn’t discover it for a long time, watching the cops and firefighters rushing into what would become their concrete tomb, there was one person who saw – in that whirlwind of chaos – the opportunity of a lifetime. She was one of the smartest people I have ever encountered and, despite my many affairs with other substances, intelligence has always been my real drug. For that reason alone, I will never forget her. Whatever people may think of the morality, there was no doubt it took a kind of genius to start planning the perfect murder in the maelstrom of September the eleventh and then carry it out a long time later in a scummy little hotel called the Eastside Inn.

While she was laying her dark plans, I spent the evening watching people jump until, by 10 p.m. in Geneva, the crisis itself was winding down. The president was flying back to Washington from a bunker at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, the fire at the Pentagon was under control and the first bridges into Manhattan were being reopened.

At about the same time I got a call from an aide at the National Security Council who told me the government had intelligence pointing to a Saudi national, Osama bin Laden, and that attacks against his bases in Afghanistan, carried out under the guise of a group of rebels called the Northern Alliance, were already under way. Twenty minutes later I saw news reports of explosions in the Afghan capital of Kabul and I knew that the so-called ‘war on terror’ had begun.

Claustrophobic, depressed, I went for a walk. The war on terror sounded about as generic as the war on drugs, and I knew from personal experience how successful that had been. The streets of Geneva were deserted, the bars silent, the electric trams empty. I heard later it was the same in cities from Sydney to London, as if for a time the lights had dimmed in the Western world in sympathy with America.

I made my way through what are called the English Gardens, skirted the clutch of Moroccan drug dealers lamenting among themselves the lack of business, thought for a moment of putting a bullet through them just for the hell of it, and walked along the lakeside promenade. Straight ahead lay the exclusive village of Cologny, where Fahd, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, the Aga Khan and half the crooks of the world had their homes. I sat on a bench at the edge of the lake and looked across the water at the United Nations on the other side – brilliantly floodlit, totally useless.

Below it, almost on the lake’s edge, rose the grey bulk of the President Wilson hotel, commanding a perfect view of Lake Geneva’s most popular beach. Every summer, Saudis and other rich Arabs would pay a huge premium for rooms at the front so that they could watch women sunbathing topless on the grass. With well-stocked mini-bars, it was like an Arab version of an upmarket strip club – without the inconvenience of tipping.

Although it was late, the lights were on in most of the rooms now. I guessed they had realized what sort of shit was about to come down and were packing their binoculars and bags, getting ready for the first flight home.