I Am Pilgrim(51)

I looked up at him – wondering what he and Marcie, a couple struggling to get by in Manhattan, must have felt when they drove up the endless drive of my childhood home, past the ornamental lake and the stables, and stopped at what has been described as one of the ten most beautiful houses in the country. Coincidentally, Bradley answered my question. ‘We never knew houses like that existed in America,’ he said quietly.

The current owner, a well-known corporate raider, told them that both the elderly Murdochs were dead. ‘“I heard they only had one kid,” he said. “No, I have no idea what became of him. Must be loaded, that’s all I can say.”’

The next day, the two investigators searched the registry of deaths and found the entries for Bill and Grace. ‘We even spoke to a few people who’d been at both funerals,’ Bradley said. ‘They all told us Scott wasn’t at either one of ’em.’

It was obvious from his tone he thought that was the strangest part of all, but I had no intention of telling him that I would have done everything possible to attend Bill’s funeral – if only I had known about it.

I think Bradley knew he had hit a nerve, but I figured he was a decent man because he didn’t pursue it. Instead he told me that, by then, they were confident Scott Murdoch was their man. ‘Two days later, we knew for sure.’

Apparently, he and Marcie had sent my social security number – or at least the one I had at Caulfield Academy and Harvard – to Washington for extensive checking. They wanted to know where it was issued, had it ever been replaced and a list of other details which might give a clue to Dr Murdoch’s whereabouts. When the answer came back it was alarmingly brief: no such number had ever been issued.

I sat in silence. Some back-office idiot in The Division had screwed up monumentally. I knew instantly what had happened. Years ago when I took on a new identity, ready to go into the field for the first time, a special team had eliminated my old name and history. They closed bank accounts, cancelled credit cards and expunged passports – sanitizing anything that would tie a covert agent back into his former identity. The agent was supposed to have drifted off overseas, like many young people do, and disappeared.

One of the clean-up team – either overzealous or poorly supervised – must have decided it would be even more effective to eliminate my former social security number. They could have told social security I had died, they could have let the number lie fallow, they could have done a hundred different things, but the one thing they should never have done was ask for it to be eliminated.

That mistake led to the situation I was now facing – a kid in Connecticut had an identifying number that, according to the government now, had never been issued. You didn’t have to be Bradley to work out something strange was going on.

‘I figured to have a social security number vanish into a black hole, it had to be done by the CIA or something like that,’ the cop said. It confirmed what he had started to suspect: although many details were altered in the book, the cases it dealt with were from the secret world.

An evening which had started out as a pleasant rendezvous with a pliant doctor had turned into a disaster and was rapidly getting worse – the book had led Bradley to Scott Murdoch and convinced him that he was the same person as Jude Garrett. Now he knew what sort of work I did.

But how bad was it really? I asked myself. Very bad, the agent in me replied. I figured this might be my last night in Paris.

With no time to waste, I spoke to him with a quiet ruthlessness. ‘Time’s short, Lieutenant. Answer me this. So you think Garrett is a spy – but the man could have been anywhere in the world. What made you look in Europe?’

‘The school,’ he said.

The school? How the hell would Caulfield Academy know I had been stationed in Europe?

‘When we visited the campus, some of the faculty remembered him. Weird kid, they said, refused to speak in class but brilliant with languages – especially French and German. If he was working for some black government agency, I figured they wouldn’t send him to South America, would they?’

‘Maybe not,’ I answered, ‘but there are 740 million people in Europe and you end up in Paris? Come on – someone told you where to find him, didn’t they?’

That was every agent’s real nightmare. Betrayal, either accidental or deliberate, was what killed most of us. The cop stared, disgusted anyone would think that his abilities were so limited. ‘It was a damn lot harder than a tip-off.’

He said that after months of searching for Scott Murdoch, and convinced that the guy was working for an intelligence agency, he realized he had to look for him under a different name. If Murdoch was a US covert agent, how would somebody like that enter a foreign country? He guessed that the best and safest method would be to assume the identity and job of a minor government employee – a junior trade analyst, a commercial attaché or something similar.