I Am Pilgrim(30)

I stared at him. Finally, I got it out, speaking in English: ‘You wanna talk about a book?! I was gonna kill you!’

‘Not exactly,’ he said before lowering his voice. ‘Do I call you Mr Garrett?’

‘Campbell,’ I shot back through clenched teeth. ‘Campbell.’

‘Not exactly, Mr Campbell. I think if anyone was gonna do the killing, it was actually me.’

He was right of course, and – as you’d expect – that made me even more pissed. He put out his hand, unsmiling. I’d learn in time he was a man who hardly ever smiled.

‘Ben Bradley,’ he said calmly. ‘Homicide Lieutenant, NYPD.’

Unsure what else to do, I gripped his hand and we shook – a cop who was learning to walk again and a pensioned-off covert agent.

I know that, on that night, encountering each other for the first time, we both thought that our race was run, our professional lives had ended, but here’s the strange thing: that meeting was of huge significance.

It mattered – my God, did it matter. All of it turned out to be important, all of it turned out to be connected in some strange way: the murder at the Eastside Inn, Christos Nikolaides gunned down in a bar in Santorini, the failed covert operation in Bodrum, my friendship with Ben Bradley, and even a Buddhist monk travelling down a road in Thailand. If I believed in fate, I would have to say there was some hand guiding it all.

Very soon I would learn that one great task still lay ahead of me, one thing which – more than any other – would define my life. Late one afternoon, a short time hence, I would be dragged back into the secret world, and any hope I had of reaching for normal would be gone, probably for ever. Like people say – if you want to make God laugh, tell Him you’ve got plans.

With precious little information and even less time, I was given the task of finding the one thing which every intelligence agency fears most: a man with no radical affiliations, no entry in any database and no criminal history. A cleanskin, a ghost.

I’m afraid that what follows isn’t pleasant. If you want to sleep easy in your bed, if you want to look at your kids and think there is a chance they will live in a world better than the one we leave behind, it might be better not to meet him.





Part Two





Chapter One


NO MATTER HOW many years may pass, even if I should be lucky and grow old in the sun, he will always be the Saracen to me. That was the code name I gave him in the beginning and I spent so long trying to discover his real identity it is hard to think of him as anything else.

Saracen means Arab or – in a much older use of the word – a Muslim who fought against the Christians. Go back even further and you find that it once meant a nomad. All of those things fitted him perfectly.

Even today, much of what we know about him is fragmentary. That’s not surprising – he spent most of his life running between shadows, deliberately covering his tracks, like a Bedouin in the desert.

But every life leaves a trace, every ship a wake, and even though it was often just a glimmer of phosphorescence in the dark, we chased them all. It took me through half the souks and mosques of the world, into the secret archives of Arab states and across the desk from dozens of people who might have known him. Later – even after the events of that terrible summer were over – teams of analysts interrogated his mother and sisters for weeks on end and, while I might be accused of putting words into his mouth or thoughts into his head, I make no apology. I ended up knowing more about the Saracen and his family than any man on earth.

One thing beyond dispute is that when he was very young he was swept up in a public beheading. That was in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city and, by popular agreement, its most sophisticated. Believe me, that’s not saying much.

Jeddah lies on the shore of the Red Sea and, by the time the Saracen was fourteen, he was living with his parents and two younger sisters in a modest villa on its outskirts, close enough to the water to smell the salt. We know this because many years later I stood outside the old house and photographed it.

Like most Saudis, the boy’s father, a zoologist, despised the United States and what the Arab newspaper called its ‘paid-up whore’: Israel. His hatred, however, wasn’t based on propaganda, the plight of the Palestinians or even religious bigotry – no, it ran much deeper than that.

Over the years, he had listened to both Washington and Tel Aviv and, unlike most Westerners, he believed what our political leaders told him – their objective was to bring democracy to the Middle East. As a deeply devout Muslim, such a prospect filled him with anger. Being well educated, at least by local standards, he knew that one of the foundations of democracy was the separation between religion and the state. Yet, to many Muslims, the religion is the state. The last thing they want is to separate it.