I Am Pilgrim(24)

But no matter what Western revenge would be exacted on Osama bin Laden and Arabs in general, one thing was certain – the events of the last twelve hours were an intelligence failure of historic proportions. The overriding mission of the hugely expensive United States intelligence community was to protect the homeland, and not since Pearl Harbor had these all-powerful organizations screwed up with such spectacular and public results.

As I sat in the cool Geneva night I wasn’t pointing the finger at others – none of us was without blame. We all carried the blue badges, we all bore the responsibility.

But so did the president and congressmen whom we served, those who established our budgets and priorities. Unlike us, at least they could speak out publicly, but I figured it would be a long wait before the American people got an apology from any of them – the next millennium maybe.

The wind was rising, sweeping out of the Alps and bringing with it the smell of rain. It was a long walk back to my hotel and I should have started then, but I didn’t move.

I was certain, even if nobody else was thinking it yet, that pretty soon Lower Manhattan wouldn’t be the only thing in ruins – the nation’s entire intelligence structure would be torn apart. It had to be if it was going to be rebuilt. Nothing in the secret world would ever be the same again, not least for The Division: people in government would no longer have any interest in secretly policing the covert world; they would only be interested in secretly policing the Islamic world.

I had got up in the morning and, by the time I was ready for bed, it was a different planet: the world doesn’t change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.

I knew I had none of the language or operational skills necessary for the brave new intelligence world which was about to be born, so I found myself – like Markus Bucher – suddenly at a fork in the road. Unsure what future lay ahead of me, not necessarily seeking happiness, but fulfilment wouldn’t be bad, I was lost. I had to ask myself what life I really wanted.

Sitting alone with the storm rolling towards me, I looked back over the years and found, if not an answer, at least a way forward. Rising out of the past to meet me was a remote village called Khun Yuam, just on the Thai side of the Burma border. Looking back, I think the memory of it had waited for years in darkness, knowing its time would come.

It is wild, lawless country up there – not far from the Golden Triangle – and when I was first starting out in this business – I had only been in Berlin for a month – I found myself washed up on its shore. Nothing distinguished Khun Yuam from the other hill-tribe villages, except that five clicks out in the jungle stood a series of grim cinder-block buildings surrounded by guard towers and an electric fence.

Officially a relay post for the Global Positioning System, it was in fact a CIA black prison, part of a vehemently denied but real American gulag: remote facilities used to house prisoners who couldn’t be legally tortured back home.

One of the guards had died in-house and, while the Tokyo office normally would have handled it, they were so overwhelmed by yet another Chinese spy scandal that I found myself leaving Europe and flying into a place called Mae Hong Son – the City of Three Mists – on an old turbo-prop.

Most of the time it was a short chopper ride out to the GPS station, but this was the monsoon season and they didn’t call it the City of Three Mists for nothing. I rented a Toyota four-wheel drive from a guy who I guessed was a local opium baron and headed for Khun Yuam and its CIA prison.

Passing through spectacular mountains, I came to an ancient cable ferry. It was the only way to cross a roaring river – swollen by the monsoon – a tributary of the mighty Mekong, the scene of so many secret operations and so much US misery during the Vietnam War.

I got out of the car, gaunt and hollow-eyed; I had been travelling non-stop for thirty-two hours, fuelled by nothing more than ambition and anxiety about the mission. As I waited among a clutch of food vendors and villagers, watching a rusty cable drag the flat-bottomed ferry towards us in plumes of spray, a Buddhist monk in saffron robes asked if I wanted a cup of Masala-chai, the local tea. He spoke good English and, with nothing else on offer except the deadly Thai elephant beer, I gratefully accepted.

The monk was heading upcountry too and – given I was supposed to be a WHO expert surveying endemic diseases – it was pretty hard to refuse his request for a ride. We crossed the river in the Toyota, the barge plunging and barely afloat, water blasting over the gunwales and two inches of rusted cable the only thing between us and one of the country’s highest waterfalls, half a click downstream. The worst white-knuckle ride of my life.