‘Are you there?! Please hold, sir. Please hold, Pilgrim!’
He entered a series of rapid commands on his keyboard, calling up a list of officials who had to be told immediately – Pilgrim is live; Pilgrim is in contact; Pilgrim has come in from the cold.
The first person on the list was the National Security duty officer, seated at his desk in a small office in the White House. It was very late – just after 4 a.m. on the East Coast – when he picked up his phone and heard an anonymous voice: ‘For the President. Pilgrim.’
Even though the duty officer was certain the commander-in-chief would be asleep, his instructions were clear, and he immediately rang the phone in the president’s bedroom.
Grosvenor was a long way from sleep, though: more than twelve hours earlier Whisperer had called and told him about the hopeful message from Bradley. He was sitting in an armchair looking out at the lights of Washington, not seeing any of them, when the phone rang. He grabbed it, shocking the duty officer, who had expected a delay. Grosvenor listened as the man stumbled over the message.
‘What was that?’ the president barked, anxiety getting the better of him.
‘It’s Pilgrim,’ the duty officer said at last. He heard Grosvenor murmur something that sounded like ‘Dear God’, but he couldn’t be sure. Why would the president be praying?
‘Are you there, Pilgrim?’ I heard Grosvenor’s unmistakable voice even though the line sounded hollow and alien. Somewhere in my fractured mind I understood that they were encrypting it in Colorado.
‘Ten thousand doses,’ I whispered.
‘Ten thousand?!’ the president repeated in disbelief.
‘Already there,’ I said. ‘He’s using our own doctors – probably starts in a few hours.’
At some stage, after leaving the water trough, my training must have kicked in and, without realizing it, I had rehearsed what I needed to say. My throat was burning up and I desperately wanted a drink, but the moment I thought of it I forced the idea aside, frightened that the gag reflex would kick in. I tried to stay focused.
‘From Chyron,’ I said, my voice fading.
‘Repeat that,’ the president said.
‘It’s a drug company … Karlsruhe … in Germany.’
Another voice came on the line. It was Whisperer, and I knew they must have patched him in and he had been listening. ‘Can you spell it?’ he said.
I tried several times, but I couldn’t get past the first few letters; my mind was struggling.
‘Karlsruhe?’ Dave said, trying to confirm it.
I had never heard his voice so gentle, and I wondered why. I hoped he was okay.
‘There’s a hotel there. The Deutsche König,’ I managed to say, before my voice trailed off again.
‘Great, that’s great,’ Whisperer said.
The president probably wondered if I was dying, but, despite the stakes and urgency, he didn’t try to force me on – I think he knew that somehow I was getting there.
‘Keep going,’ was all he said. ‘You’re a damned hero. Keep going.’
‘I should have asked for batch numbers,’ I rambled, weaker than ever. ‘I forgot things … The Saracen hurt me, you see … There was a child—’
‘Yes, we know,’ Whisperer said.
‘We shouldn’t have done that … It was … I just didn’t know any other way—’
‘Of course you didn’t,’ Whisperer replied. ‘It’s over now.’
From somewhere I found a burst of energy, and it helped bring some clarity. ‘It’s a vaccine,’ I said. ‘It’s in vaccine bottles.’
‘What vaccine?’ Whisperer asked, still in that strange, gentle voice.
‘Flu shots,’ I said. ‘He put it in flu shots. The season is here, immunization starts tomorrow.’
There was silence at the other end – I think they realized that I had done it. Two phone calls from the Hindu Kush had somehow led to doctors’ offices throughout America. Then Whisperer confirmed it, telling the president they had it all: the day, the manufacturer and the method. I thought they were about to hang up – there must have been a million things to organize – but instead Grosvenor spoke to me.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
I didn’t reply. It was done. And I was squinting at the sun, thinking about the long journey that lay ahead of me.
‘He’s on the coast,’ Whisperer said. ‘Nineteen miles north of Bodrum. Is that right?’
I still said nothing. I was gathering my strength, marshalling whatever resources I had left – I was going to have to crab my way across the sand to the old jetty.
‘Can you hold on, Scott?’ Grosvenor asked, increasingly alarmed. ‘I’m sending choppers from the Mediterranean Fleet for you now. Can you hold on?’
‘We’ll have to tell the Turkish government,’ Whisperer interrupted.
‘Fuck the Turkish government,’ Grosvenor told him.
‘No, don’t! Don’t send anybody,’ I said. ‘I won’t be here.’
Grosvenor started to contradict me, wanting to know what I meant, but Whisperer stopped him.
‘It’s okay, Scott – I understand. It’s okay.’
‘Damned if I do,’ Grosvenor said. ‘I’m telling you, the choppers are coming.’
‘He’s injured, Mr President … They hurt him—’
It was time to go, and I suddenly started worrying that I had forgotten something. ‘Did you hear?’ I told them. ‘Ten thousand doses … Chyron … flu shots.’
‘Yes, we heard,’ the president replied gently. ‘I want to say on behalf of the—’
I hung up. It was done. All of it was done. To endure – wasn’t that what I had said I had to do? To endure.
Chapter Forty-four
THE TIDE HAD been surging higher and, entirely by accident, it helped me. I limped and staggered across the sun-baked sand, heading for the wooden jetty, and had no choice but to pass through the encroaching water.
When I was ankle deep, the sudden coldness of it calmed the pain in both my foot and mind. I stood for a long minute, allowing it to cool the fever and letting the salt sting and cleanse the open wounds.
With a clearer mind, I reached the jetty, grabbed a handrail and made my way to where Cumali was waiting. She had brought the little cruiser in stern first and had the motor idling. I hadn’t told her – we hadn’t talked about anything – but her journey was at an end. I was heading off alone, and I knew that what lay ahead of me was hard enough, especially in my condition, and I was anxious to start.
That was when we heard the gunshot.
We turned, looked at the Theatre of Death and I realized what I had overlooked, the mistake that I would wonder about for the rest of my life. Did I do it deliberately?
Certainly when I left the ruins I was exhausted, I could barely walk and I had to make the urgent call to Washington. Of course I had taken every precaution by unloading the weapons and keeping the clips. But that was all in my conscious mind. In a far deeper place, did I know that there was another weapon? One that was fully loaded – my own Beretta, the gun which the Albanians had taken from me at the fall of masonry and discarded next to my smashed cellphone? Did I leave it there for the Saracen to use on himself – and, if so, why?
Obviously, he had remembered it, and the moment I heard the gunshot I knew what he had done: with his hands cuffed behind his back, he had stumbled or crawled deeper into the passage and sat down next to the weapon. He had worked his hands down over his buttocks, picked up the pistol, manoeuvred it between his thighs, lowered his face so that the barrel was almost in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He probably knew the old song too:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains And go to your god like a soldier.
Cumali realized as soon as I did what the gunshot meant, and she started to run for the ruins. I grabbed her, but I was so weak she shrugged
it off. It was only the urgency of my voice that made her stop.
‘Listen!’ I yelled. ‘When they come, tell them that you knew nothing. Say that in the end you saved my life, tell them about the man you shot. Say that you set me free, that you betrayed your brother. Tell them anything! I’m the only one who knows – and I won’t be here.’
She looked at me, confused. ‘Why are you doing it?’ she demanded. ‘Why would you do this for a Muslim woman?’
‘I’m not doing it for you!’ I replied. ‘I’m doing it for the boy – he deserves a mother.’
I grabbed the roof of the boat’s cabin and started to haul myself aboard. Cumali ran for the tunnel, but I knew it was a forlorn mission. Her brother was a muj, he had brought down three Soviet Hind gunships: he wouldn’t have missed.
Chapter Forty-five
CLUTCHING THE CAPTAIN’S chair, fighting the fever and pain, I edged the small craft away from the jetty and headed into open water. I swung south, hugging the shore, and ran with the throttle wide open, travelling fast.
The wind had veered round, blowing hard against the tide, and the bow ploughed through the steep swell, sending up sheets of spray and making the old engine howl. The journey might have finished me, but I forced myself to close the pain out and used my one good shoulder to keep the wheel on a course that was straight and true. Finally, I came round a headland, entered a long stretch of water sheltered from the wind and felt confident enough to lash the wheel off and let the boat take care of itself.
I went below and started to search. In a for’ard closet I found an old backpack and used it to hold the SIG and the ammunition still in my pockets. Next to it, wrapped in a sailbag, I found a heavy waterproof shroud already fitted with lead weights. There was no logic to it, but I was in a distressed state and I didn’t feel like travelling with my own burial sheet. I opened the window, threw it out and watched it bob and sink in the foaming wake.
Under a rear bench seat, I found what I was looking for: the vessel’s first-aid kit. It was probably twenty years old, but it had never been opened and it was surprisingly well equipped.
I took it back to the wheelhouse and used swabs to clean my smashed foot and a pair of scissors to remove the burnt flesh from where the bullet had entered my shoulder. I opened a bottle of antiseptic, eighteen years past its use-by date, and poured it on the wounds. It still worked – shit, did it work – I howled in pain and remained just conscious enough to be thankful that nobody could hear me.
So it was, with my wounds bound with yellowing bandages, reeking of antiseptic and equipped with a crutch adapted from an oar, that I finally saw the section of coast I was looking for. On the last breath of day, a long way south and a storm rolling in, I turned the wheel and passed between the clashing rocks that sheltered a secluded fishing village. The first squalls of rain meant that the jetty was deserted, and I drew up next to it unobserved.
I brought the small craft in by her stern, kept the motor running and tied her off tight to a bollard. I jammed the other oar through the spokes of the wheel to lock it in position and threw the backpack and makeshift crutch on to the jetty. With the engine straining to take the boat back to sea, the mooring line was pulled tight, and I used it for support as I crawled up next to the crutch. Armed with a knife I had found on board, I slashed the mooring line and watched the boat launch itself towards the darkness of the clashing rocks. Even if it managed to make it through the channel, the surrounding coast was so rugged I knew it would be thrown ashore and smashed to pieces before dawn.
I slung the backpack over my shoulder and settled myself on to my crutch. Looking like a soldier returning from some distant war, I made my way past two shuttered cafés and into the backstreets of a tiny town I barely remembered.
Chapter Forty-six
THE CURTAINS WERE drawn in the mean houses and the street lights were few and far between. In the gathering darkness, I made my way down a narrow street and – just when I was worrying that I had made a wrong turn – I saw a communal water fountain.
The old bucket was still tied to the rope and the flowers surrounding it were as dead as they had always been. With my body almost spent, I limped past it and reached the old cottage, the lettering on its brass plaque almost illegible now. I knocked hard on the door and, after what seemed an age, it opened and I saw Dr Sydney standing on the threshold – unshaven, his baggy shorts swapped for a pair of frayed chinos and teamed with an old Oktoberfest ’92 T-shirt – but otherwise little changed in the intervening years.
While the booze had probably continued to play havoc with every other organ, his mind – and his memory – were holding up remarkably well. There was something in my face that he recognized, and I watched him dredging through the past to find a name. ‘Jacob, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Near enough,’ I replied.
I saw him take in my bandaged shoulder and foot, the ragged clothes and my haggard expression. ‘You’re looking well, Jacob,’ he said, deadpan.
I nodded. ‘You too, Doctor. Nicely turned out, as always.’
He roared with laughter. ‘Come in. We can keep lying to each other while I see if we can save that foot.’
He led me inside and I realized what a strange thing memory was – the rooms seemed much smaller, the distances far shorter, than the night we had carried Mack along the same route. In the kitchen, the Australian got three lamps into position, laid me on the kitchen bench, stripped off the bandages, took one look at my foot and hit me with a massive dose of IV antibiotics and an even larger amount of painkillers. Thankfully, when it came to medicine, subtlety wasn’t his strong suit.
He decided that, despite the swelling and purple bruises, neither my ribs nor my kneecap were broken. Fractured, maybe, but there was no way of telling without an X-ray.
‘Feel like a drive to the hospital in Milas?’ he asked.
He saw the look on my face and smiled – ‘I didn’t think that was an option’ – and told me he would splint and bandage them as best he could.
After that, he injected a local anaesthetic, cleaned and sutured the gunshot wound and told me I was a lucky man.
‘I don’t feel like it,’ I replied.
‘Half an inch difference and it wouldn’t have been a hospital for you, even a makeshift one. It would have been the morgue.’
With the rest of the wounds taken care of, he turned his attention to the havoc wrought by the hammer blows. He had been a pediatric surgeon, highly experienced with victims of car wrecks, so I believed him when he told me that the bruising and swelling would eventually take care of themselves.
‘There’s little I can do about the small bones that have been broken without scans, X-rays and an operating theatre,’ he said, smiling. ‘A steady hand would help too.’
He decided to manipulate the bones individually into the best position then set and bandage it, hopefully holding everything in place.
‘You’re going to have to do intensive exercise to keep the ankle mobile and prevent the muscles of your lower leg from atrophying. Maybe it’ll work.’
I nodded, and he adjusted the lamps in order to start. ‘This is going to hurt.’
He got that part right. Sometime after midnight, the work was done and he called a halt – I was slipping in and out of consciousness, and I think he doubted whether I could take much more. Holding me under the arms, he got me off the bench and we crossed the kitchen, entered the living room and headed for a stairway leading to a disused bedroom.
Halfway there, I heard voices coming from a corner of the room and saw the old TV again, tuned to CNN. It was the evening news and the network’s Washington correspondent was reporting on the frantic efforts since early in the morning to locate and seize ten thousand doses of flu vaccine that had been accidentally contaminated with potentially lethal traces of engine oil.
I didn’t want the doctor to know I had any interest in the event, so I told him that I needed to rest a moment. Holding on to the back of a chair, I looked a
t the screen.
‘The alarm was first announced by the president in a 6 a.m. press conference,’ the correspondent reported.
‘Simultaneously, the FBI and local police agencies across the country started locating and securing all flu vaccines manufactured at a plant in Karlsruhe, Germany, operated by Chyron Chemicals.
‘The president delivered high praise to the staff of the Food and Drug Administration who uncovered the problem and alerted the White House in a 4 a.m. phone call—’
‘Ready?’ The doctor asked, and I nodded, letting him help me up the stairs. I wasn’t surprised by the story Washington was relating. What was it somebody once said? In war, the first casualty is truth.
I reached the bed and lowered myself down. My head hit the pillow, the doctor turned out the light and I drifted into a strange unconsciousness.
Chapter Forty-seven
THE FEVER ROCKETED during the confusion of days and nights that followed and the doctor barely had a chance to leave the small room. He told me later that he had sat at my side, sipping on a bottomless glass of Jack and listening to me roam across a remarkable dreamscape.
He heard tell of a man tied to a plank drowning in an endless ocean, a father beheaded in the blistering sun, a city littered with people bleeding out from an incurable virus, a child with Down’s syndrome hanged by the neck. He said, smiling, that the mind was a strange thing – how, under the onslaught of a fever and high doses of medication, it could invent such terrible fantasies.
If only he had known.
Worried that the horrors were growing worse, and convinced that it was a bad reaction to the drugs, he decided to wind them right back. Maybe it was the adjustment to the medication, or perhaps nature just ran its course, but the fever peaked and the nightmare memories diminished. When I finally managed to take some solid food he decided to venture into the village to pick up some groceries and other supplies. I figured he had probably run out of Jack.