I Am Pilgrim(26)

If you come into Paris from the south, there’s a remarkable point – between the towering high-rises in which the French warehouse their immigrants – where the first sight of the city is almost completely hidden from you. The only thing you see is the Eiffel Tower standing on the horizon.

It was early in the morning, a chill in the air lending a sparkling clarity to everything. I had seen the view many times before but, even so, it took my breath away. The sense of release that had been growing in me through the night finally broke its banks, and I pulled to the side of the road: to be in Paris when you’re young and free – well, there’s not much on earth better than that.

I rented an apartment in the part of the 8th arrondissement Parisians call the golden triangle, just off the beautiful rue François 1er. Day after day, and late into the night, I wrote the book that few people would read – except for one young woman in New York I would desperately wish hadn’t.

After six months, it was done – hundreds of thousands of words, all annotated and checked. I felt the washing out of my earlier life was complete – I had written the final chapter on that era and sent it downstream like a funeral barge into the past. I was proud of the book: call it a public service, call it naive if you want, but I thought if my expertise could help defeat just one man like Christos Nikolaides, then it was a candle worth the burning.

After careful vetting by a team of analysts working for the Director of Intelligence, the book was published by a small house that specialized in harrowing memoirs about escapes from Castro’s Cuba and female honour killings among Arabs. In other words, it was a secret subsidiary of the CIA.

Such a publisher was obviously accustomed to authors whose identities had to be concealed but, even so, my case was complicated: when I gave up my badge it was decided I knew enough about national security that nobody could ever know who I was or what job I had done. Without meaning to, the secret world took my identity and my history from me.

When the book finally appeared, not only was Jude Garrett given as the author’s name, but an entire identity had been created for him. Anybody who made inquiries received the following biography:

Jude Garrett, a graduate of the University of Michigan, spent over fourteen years in law enforcement, first with the Sheriff’s department in Miami and then as a special investigator with the FBI. He died while on assignment in Chicago. The manuscript of this book, which he had researched extensively, was found in his study shortly after his death and represents the last testament of one of the world’s finest investigators.

And it was true – some of it, anyway. There had been an FBI agent called Jude Garrett, and he was dead – a car wreck on his way home from work. Unmarried, a loner with few interests outside work, the publishers simply appropriated his identity and gave him a literary accomplishment in death he had never found in life.

I have to admit I liked his biography and I liked the fact he was dead. I mean, who would go looking for a dead man?

Well, somebody did.

With the book finally published, the funeral barge almost lost to view, I had started for the first time in my adult life to live in a world without secrets. I looked at all the laughing women, hips swinging, sashaying down the wide boulevards of Paris, and as spring became summer I started to believe anything was possible.

The problem with the spy business, though, is that while you can resign you can never leave. I suppose I didn’t want to acknowledge it then, but too much wreckage floats in the wake of a life like mine – people you’ve hurt don’t forget. And at the back of your mind is the one lesson they drummed into you when you were young and your whole career was ahead of you: in this business, you can’t learn by your mistakes. You don’t get a chance. Make one, and you’re dead.

The only thing that will save you is your intuition and your tradecraft. Burn them into your soul. I suppose I must have listened because, still only nine months into my retirement, I noted a cab with a passenger circling the block. Nobody does that in Paris. Given the chaotic traffic, it could take hours.

It was just after eight, a busy Friday night, and I was at a sidewalk café on the place de la Madeleine waiting for an ageing doctor. He was a gourmand whose young Russian dates usually cost more for the night than the dinners he lavished on them, so he was always short of cash. To my mind, genteel poverty was a great advantage in a medical practitioner. It meant that when he was giving a diagnosis and writing a prescription he was prepared to listen to a patient’s own suggestions, if you catch my drift.

I didn’t mark the white taxi the first time it passed – not consciously anyway – but somewhere in all my tradecraft the ever-changing tangle of traffic must have been registering. The second time it went by I knew it had been there before.