I Am Pilgrim

Murdoch continues to reflect on his start as an intelligence officer investigating internal corruption. Murdoch begins his new role with a sweeping search for all lingering corruption and links to his predecessor’s operation. This includes uncovering how compromised agents were paid and leads him to a member of a Greek crime family named Christos Nikolaides.

Murdoch’s investigation takes him to Geneva and the world of Swiss banks, famous for their privacy laws that facilitate a variety of corrupt transactions. He orchestrates the kidnapping of a banker’s daughter in exchange for bank data that will confirm Nikolaides is the link to the corrupt agents. This leads Murdoch to reflect, “And of every kind of love […] the love that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all” (39). He anticipates convincing the banker, Bucher, to reveal Nikolaides’s identity using his daughter as collateral.

Murdoch explains that his cold-blooded behavior was made possible by a significant childhood trip with his foster father, Bill Murdoch. Bill took a younger Murdoch to a former Nazi concentration camp called Natzweiler-Struthof. The horrors depicted included a photograph that changed him forever, showing a young mother lovingly leading her children toward a gas chamber. This memory explains Murdoch’s revulsion for the Swiss banker, as he understands Swiss financial institutions helped conceal Nazi wealth.

Murdoch oversees the assassination team’s elimination of Nikolaides, unaware that his agency has just earned the eternal enmity of the family patriarch by employing female assassins to kill his son. Murdoch is forced to recall this inadvertent insult to the family’s patriarchal values when the Eastside Inn case brings him back into the family’s orbit.

Not long after his encounter with Bucher, Murdoch observes the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the collapse of the World Trade Center. From the vantage point of the present, he recalls that the preternaturally talented killer at the Eastside Inn also plotted her perfect murder that day.

Murdoch learns from colleagues that Saudi national Osama bin Laden was likely the architect of the attacks, and he cynically reflects that the turn toward antiterrorism operations in the Middle East is likely to make his agency obsolete. He therefore decides to reevaluate his entire life. He is partly inspired by a previous meeting with a Buddhist monk, who told him, “If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go” (56). Murdoch returns to the episode often in the years ahead.

Murdoch makes his new home in Paris and writes his book on crime and forensics Bradley mentions in this novel’s opening. Murdoch’s former bosses decide that the work must be written under an elaborate cover identity to protect his history. They use the identity of a recently deceased FBI agent, Jude Garrett, as the work’s author.

The book’s publication also disrupts Murdoch’s plans for a peaceful civilian life. One day he notices a car following him, suspecting the Nikolaides family. As he plots his escape route through his luxury apartment and secures his gun, Murdoch is full of panic about which previous enemy has found him.

On the street, a man greets him by his pseudonym, Jude Garrett. He takes in his interlocutor, a “Black man with a lean body and a handsome face” (65). The man introduces himself as Ben Bradley, explaining he is desperate to discuss the book.

This ends Murdoch’s reflection on the confluence of events that led to the book’s opening moment in the hotel with Bradley, in which he concludes that all of it shaped the fate of his final operation. He warns the reader that the remainder of his account is likely to be unsettling.