As we drove out of the gorge, the jungle forming a canopy over our heads, the monk looked at me a little too long and asked about my work. Thanks to my medical training, I gave an excellent account of breakbone fever, but it soon became clear he didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. Maybe he knew about the cinder-block camp at Khun Yuam.
He had lived at an ashram not far from New York, so he had more knowledge than you would expect about American life and he spoke intelligently about recreational drugs and the pressures of modern life. I started to get the feeling it wasn’t a casual conversation. ‘You look hunted,’ he said finally, in that Buddhist way, more in sorrow than in judgement.
Hunted? I laughed and told him it was the first time I had ever heard that: people usually put me on the other side of the food chain.
‘There is no other side of the food chain,’ he said quietly. ‘Only the West believes that. Without grace, everyone is running from something.’
Our eyes met. Smiling, I asked if he’d ever considered pursuing a religious life. He laughed right back and wanted to know if I had heard how villagers caught monkeys.
I told him I knew a few things about life, but that wasn’t one of them. ‘We didn’t eat much monkey at Harvard – generally only at Thanksgiving and Christmas,’ I said.
So he told me how the villagers chain a ewer – a vase with a narrow neck and a bulbous bottom – to the base of a tree.
‘They fill the bottom with nuts and whatever else monkeys like to eat. In the night, a monkey climbs out of the trees and slips his hand down the long neck. He grabs the sweets and his hand makes a fist. That means it’s too big to get back up the narrow neck, and he’s trapped. In the morning the villagers come round and hit him on the head.’
He looked at me for a moment. ‘It’s a Zen story of course,’ he said, smiling again. ‘The point is: if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.’
Yes, I understood that much, I told him. It was a good story, but it didn’t mean anything to me, not now, anyway.
‘I suppose not,’ he replied, ‘but perhaps I was put on the road to tell it to you. You’re young, Doctor – maybe the time will come when it will mean something.’
And he was right, of course, the time did come, and in a different way from anything I could have imagined: it was sitting in the Geneva night waiting for a storm, thinking about mass murder in New York and women in short skirts recruiting even brighter young graduates for a new era.
I was thirty-one years old and I realized, through no fault of my own, I had been trained for tank warfare in Europe, only to find the battle was with guerillas in Afghanistan. Like it or not, history had passed me by.
On another level, far deeper, I knew that sooner or later I wanted to find something – something it’s hard for me to put a name to … a thing most people call love, I suppose. I wanted to walk along a beach with someone and not think about how far a sniper rifle can fire. I wanted to forget that you feel the bullet long before you hear the shot. I wanted to find somebody who could tell me what safe harbour really meant.
I knew with all my heart that, if I didn’t leave the secret world now, I never would. To turn your back on everything you know is hard, among the most difficult things you’ll ever do, but I kept telling myself one thing.
If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.
Chapter Fourteen
I WROTE OUT my resignation late that night in the hotel du Rhône, dispatched it by diplomatic courier the next morning and immediately flew to London.
I spent the next three weeks wrapping up my outstanding cases and giving the files to the FBI: in the first of many huge changes to the US intelligence community, The Division had been closed down and its responsibilities assumed – after four decades of trying – by the Feds.
Ironically, my last day on the job was in Berlin, the city where everything had really started for me. I locked the office for the final time and accompanied the staff out to Tempelhof for the flight home. I shook hands with them and, an agent to the end, said I was booked on a later plane.
Instead I walked out of the front doors and, carrying a totally new identity, got a taxi to a car dealership, where I took delivery of a Cayenne turbo. With five hundred horsepower, I figured I was more or less ready for the autobahn.
I threw my bags in the back, was past Frankfurt by evening and crossed the border in the early hours of the morning. Fall had come late that year and even by moonlight I don’t think I had ever seen the French countryside looking more beautiful. I flew past villages with romantic names and found the péage – a tollway – I was looking for.