I Am Pilgrim

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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Part 3, Chapters 1-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3, Chapters 1-12 Summary

Assuring Bradley he has no choice but to leave, Murdoch confirms his identity and goes with the two men, soon boarding a flight to Washington. He eventually arrives at the Oval Office for a meeting with Grosvenor and Whisperer. He reflects that their personal relationship had always been one of “wary admiration, as if a Great White had come face-to-face with a saltwater croc” (266). Murdoch is unsurprised to hear that they have summoned him due to the near certainty of a smallpox bioterrorism attack.

Murdoch reviews the case details and realizes that the satellite calls were likely a personal emergency—indicating that the woman and her interlocutor had a prearranged communication protocol. Murdoch is equally unsurprised to hear that Whisperer and the president want him to go to Turkey to identify the woman. When a phone call interrupts, Murdoch has a vision of himself on a boat, which he recognizes as a “vision of death” (269). He accepts, putting his terror aside, and tells Whisperer that he chooses the code name “Pilgrim” (269).

Whisperer will be personally handling every detail of Murdoch’s mission and stresses that he will become a legend if he succeeds. Whisperer notices that Murdoch is almost calm during the description of the current threat, as if he anticipated it. Murdoch tells him that he did, after a Holocaust survivor once told him about the dangers of fanaticism within a large group.

Murdoch emphasizes that while they focus on logistical and practical details of operating in Turkey, “we both knew what we were really doing. We were sending a spy out into the cold” (276). To protect the mission, Whisperer drops hints to his assistants about the anticipated nuclear threat. Thus, his own personnel will confirm the false story of a nuclear plot.

They decide Murdoch’s investigation will focus on finding the phone booth the unidentified woman uses. Murdoch also needs a cover identity as an investigator and needs a case. They decide on a suspicious death in Bodrum, involving an American billionaire known only as Dodge. The billionaire heir to an automotive fortune, he fell to his death onto seaside cliffs. While Murdoch wonders if the death is connected to the Eastside Inn case, the key is that Dodge’s prominence means it will be easy for the president to connect with his family and suggest an FBI agent monitor the Turkish investigation.

He and Whisperer design a cover identity, an FBI agent named Brodie Wilson. Murdoch requests that Ben Bradley serve as his liaison to pass messages back and forth, since the possible connection to the Eastside Inn case will provide useful cover. Whisperer gives Murdoch his final advice, telling him to choose death over capture and torture.

Murdoch drives to one last meeting, with a retired virologist, hoping to learn more about smallpox and bioterrorism. He informs Murdoch that all the government planning scenarios are wrong—the virus will come from a contaminated consumer good or other supply chain, because that is the most efficient transmission route. The search for a single infected person, the standard intelligence plan Whisperer and the president are relying on, will prove futile. Murdoch admits this gives him a new respect for his adversary.

Murdoch boards his first flight to Turkey, haunted by thoughts of Whisperer’s warning to die by suicide. He explains Whisperer clearly knew about a trip to Thailand where he witnessed a man being waterboarded. It was at this time he met the monk who suggested he could “let go” to avoid feeling burdened and doomed by his life of secrecy.

Part 3, Chapters 1-12 Analysis

Murdoch’s return to the world of espionage combines philosophical and logistical issues, deepening the themes of Morality and Contingency and Loyalty and Family. Murdoch, presented as an isolated genius, is immediately sympathetic to President Grosvenor, underlining that he admires humane kindness and principles in others. His relationship with Whisperer introduces another father figure, in addition to the deceased Bill Murdoch. Whisperer’s confidence in Murdoch’s skills, and even his envy of them, underlines that he is a fitting opponent for al-Nassouri. As in his youth, Murdoch is drawn to the history of the Holocaust as his guide to morality. His account of the meeting with the janitor in Berlin, a parable about the dangers of fanaticism, sets him up as wiser than his mentor.

The final mission preparations underline Murdoch’s sense of loyalty and Hayes’s attachment to the conventions of his genre. The scene of a spy, whether jaded or junior, preparing for a dangerous mission, is a cornerstone of the genre. It is no coincidence that Murdoch says Whisperer is preparing to send him “into the cold”—as a deep-cover assignment from which he may not return. The phrase is taken from a famous espionage novel by John le Carré, in which a cynical burned-out spy named Alec Leamas is given one last mission, a cover as a likely traitor, to infiltrate Communist East Berlin. Like Leamas, Murdoch had hoped for a quiet life in retirement, only to find himself faced with a final opportunity to make a difference.

Leamas too confronts a morally gray world, where he is forced to protect a former Nazi by sacrificing a moral Communist. Leamas does die by suicide, choosing death over a possible return to West Germany. Murdoch’s distaste for torture, together with this allusion, establishes him as a man seeking morality in a world with little room for it. The reader now has full context for his conversation with the Buddhist monk in Thailand: At that time Murdoch was confronting his own complicity with the worst of the world of espionage. The monk’s suggestion that he seek another life is, in effect, what he is attempting during the novel’s opening scenes. That he will remain connected to Bradley, then, is a symbolic sign that he will be connected to the best of himself, a man of conscience who is morally uncompromised. Murdoch’s choice of code name evokes his loneliness, but also a religious or moral quest—to set out on pilgrimage was to search for meaning and holiness. The first British colonists in North America were known as the Pilgrims, and Murdoch is on a rescue mission to preserve not merely the country’s past but its future.

His failure to escape, unlike Leamas’s, may provide real salvation for his country, and humanity, though he soon realizes he is operating with a significant structural disadvantage. The search for a single victim will prove fruitless, as a testament to al-Nassouri’s greater ingenuity. Murdoch’s discomfort with torture also contrasts him with his narrative foil, as al-Nassouri is largely comfortable with the suffering of others in the name of his cause. Murdoch’s preoccupation with his past will continue throughout his time in Turkey, offering him insights into human nature that will prove key to his search for al-Nassouri. Though Whisperer presents Murdoch’s emotional side as a potential liability, Hayes suggests that the salvation of the world, and perhaps Murdoch’s conscience, depends on its preservation.