I Am Pilgrim(250)

‘Cuff him,’ I said, indicating the Saracen.

He had dragged himself out of the rubble and was supporting himself by leaning against the water trough, deep in the canyons of despair, wondering why his god would have forsaken him at the final hour.

‘Hands behind his back,’ I told her.

As she fitted the cuffs I saw that hordes of flies were already settling on the corpses, and I knew it was nothing compared with the feeding frenzy when the intelligence services of half a dozen countries descended on him.

He raised his lowered head and looked at me. I had the SIG in one hand, still trained on him, and with the other I was starting to rip strips off my shirt to combat-bandage my shoulder and stop the bleeding. Our eyes met, and we both knew that whatever was left of his life, he would never get another chance to complete his volume of dark history.

‘I love him,’ he said simply. He meant his son.

‘I know that,’ I replied. ‘It was the only weapon I had.’

Cumali handed me the key to the cuffs and I put it in my pocket with the ammunition. I pulled the bandage tight with my teeth, tied it off and, with the pumping blood slowed to a trickle, I took Cumali’s phone out of my pocket: the three minutes were almost up.

‘Still there?’ I rasped.

‘Christ,’ he replied. ‘How many dead?’ He had heard the gunfire through the mic.

‘Three. It’s over – you can let them go.’

A moment later he told me that the nanny was collapsing to her knees and he had cut the little guy down. I turned and looked at the Saracen and his sister and let them read it on my face – the woman and the child were safe.

The Saracen, sitting in the dirt next to the trough, hands cuffed tight behind his back, bowed his head, and I knew he was praying. Cumali shuddered, surrendered herself to a tidal wave of relief and started to cry.

I was about to hang up – I knew I had to make another, critical phone call – but the fever was coming on hard and my head was spinning. In the whirling confusion, there was something I had to know.

‘Would you have shot the nanny?’ I asked Ben. He didn’t reply, and I knew that was answer enough.

‘Would you?’ he countered after a moment.

‘That’s the difference between us, Ben,’ I said softly. ‘It’s why I was made for this business and you weren’t. Of course I would have.’

Shaking, and not just from fever, I hung up and motioned Cumali over. I couldn’t walk – God, I was so drained and hurt I could barely stand – and I needed her to lean on. She supported me under one arm, letting me take the weight off my mangled foot, and I turned to look at the Saracen.

‘Try to come after me,’ I said, ‘and I’ll shoot you both.’

He nodded, and we looked at each other one last time, both our lives changed for ever. I remembered what a group of British soldiers had said after the Argentine war: it was only their enemies who knew what it was really like on the front line.

I said nothing to him – what was there to say? – and I motioned Cumali to start moving out, leaving him handcuffed in the dirt. The only key was in my pocket, the weapons rendered useless, and I knew for certain that there was only one way out of the ruins – by boat – and I was taking the only one of those with me. Confident he was trapped, I knew that, probably less than twenty minutes after I made the next call, scores of men from dozens of different agencies would arrive. Not that they would have much to do other than arrest him – there was no plot to unravel, no network to roll up, no coconspirators to track down. The soft kill of America was almost over.

Hurrying now, I started to dial the second call, my fingers swollen and shaking, trying to remember the number I had been given but which was stored on my smashed cellphone.

Dragging one foot, helped by Cumali, I headed back down the crumbling passage, deeper into the gloom. There was one thing, however, that I had overlooked, and for the rest of my life I would wonder about the mistake I made.





Chapter Forty-three


CUMALI LED ME through the barred gate and, as I stepped among the rocks, the dazzling sunlight hit me hard.

The short distance from the water trough had been the most painful journey of my life, every step like one more blow. The water-boarding, the loss of blood and the escalating fever were turning into a flood and taking a critical toll on whatever strength I had left. I felt the past and the present melding into one.

I leaned against a boulder and ordered Cumali to get the cruiser from its hiding place and bring it up to the old jetty. As she headed off to a tiny cove behind a jumble of rocks, I hit the last digit of the number and heard the phone beep as it made the international connection. It was answered immediately.