I Am Pilgrim(9)

In the rarefied atmosphere where those with the highest security clearances reside, people at first disparaged the new agency and its hard-charging mission. Delighted by their cleverness, they started calling it the ‘11th Airborne Division’ – the cavalry, in other words. Few of them expected it to be successful but, as the agency’s impressive reputation grew, they didn’t find it quite so funny.

As if by common agreement, one part of the name gradually faded, until the entire intelligence community referred to it – in a tone of reverence – simply as ‘The Division’. It’s not vanity when I say that many of those who worked for it were brilliant. They had to be – some of The Division’s targets were the most highly skilled covert operators the shadow world has ever seen. Years of training had taught these men and women how to lie and deflect, to say goodbye and leave not a trace behind, to have their hand in anything and their fingerprints on nothing. The result was that those who hunted them had to have even greater skills. The pressure for the catchers to keep one step ahead of the prey was enormous, almost unbearable at times, and it was no wonder that The Division had the highest suicide rate of any government agency outside of the Post Office.

It was during my last year at Harvard that I was recruited into its elite ranks without even realizing it. One of the agency’s outriders – a pleasant woman with nice legs and a surprisingly short skirt who said she was a vice-president with the Rand Corporation – came to Harvard and talked to promising young graduates.

I had studied medicine for three years, majoring in the pharmacology of drugs – and I mean majoring. By day I learned about them in theory; on weekends I took a far more hands-on approach. It was while visiting a doctor in Boston, having read up on the symptoms of fibromyalgia and convincing him to write me a prescription for Vicodin, that I had an epiphany.

Say it was real, say right now it was me behind that desk dealing with the ailments – real and imagined – of the patients I had been quietly observing in the waiting room.

I realized it wasn’t what afflicted people that interested me, it was what motivated them. I dropped out of medicine, enrolled in psychology, graduated magna cum laude and was close to completing my doctorate.

As soon as it was finished, the lady in the short skirt was offering twice the starting salary of any other employer and what appeared to be almost limitless opportunities for research and advancement. As a result, I spent six months writing reports that would never be read, designing questionnaires never to be answered, before I discovered I wasn’t really working for Rand at all. I was being observed, auditioned, assessed and checked. Suddenly, Short Skirt wasn’t anywhere to be found.

Instead, two men – hard men – I had never seen before, or since, took me to a secure room in a nondescript building on an industrial estate just north of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. They made me sign a series of forms forbidding any kind of disclosure before telling me that I was being considered for a position in a clandestine intelligence service which they refused to name.

I stared at them, asking myself why they would have thought of me. But if I was honest, I knew the answer. I was a perfect candidate for the secret world. I was smart, I had always been a loner and I was damaged deep in my soul.

My father walked out before I was born and was never seen again. Several years later, my mother was murdered in her bedroom in our apartment just off 8-Mile Road in Detroit. Like I said, there are some places I will remember all my life.

An only child, I finally washed up with adoptive parents in Greenwich, Connecticut – twenty acres of manicured lawns, the best schools money could buy, the quietest house you’ve ever known. Their family seemingly complete, I guess Bill and Grace Murdoch tried their best, but I could never be the son they wanted.

A child without parents learns to survive; they work out early to mask what they feel and, if the pain proves beyond bearing, to dig a cave in their head and hide inside. To the world at large I tried to be what I thought Bill and Grace wanted, and ended up being a stranger to them both.

Sitting in that room outside Langley, I realized that taking on another identity, masking so much of who you are and what you feel, was ideal training for the secret world.

In the years that followed – the ones I spent secretly travelling the world under a score of different names – I have to say the best spooks I ever met had learned to live a double life long before they joined any agency.

They included closeted men in a homophobic world, secret adulterers with wives in the suburbs, gamblers and addicts, alcoholics and perverts. Whatever their burden, they were all long-practised at making the world believe in an illusion of themselves. It was only a small step to put on another disguise and serve their government.