His real name, needless to say, was not Peter Marlowe. It was Christopher Keller, which was intriguing in its own right, for as far as Her Majesty’s Government was concerned, Keller had been dead for some twenty-five years. Consequently, he was thought to be the first decedent to serve in any department of British intelligence since Glyndwr Michael, the homeless Welshman whose corpse had been used by the great wartime deceivers to feed false documents to Nazi Germany as part of Operation Mincemeat.
The Directing Staff of the Fort, however, did not know any of this about their new recruit. In fact, they knew almost nothing at all. They did not know, for example, that he was a veteran of the elite Special Air Service, that he still held the record for the regiment’s forty-mile endurance trek across the rugged Brecon Beacons of South Wales, or that he had achieved the highest score ever in the Killing House, the SAS’s infamous training facility where members honed their close-quarters combat skills. A further examination of his records—all of which had been sealed by order of the prime minister himself—would have revealed that in the late 1980s, during a particularly violent period of the war in Northern Ireland, he had been inserted into West Belfast, where he lived among the city’s Roman Catholics and ran agents of penetration into the Irish Republican Army. Those same records would have mentioned, in rather vague terms, an incident at a farmhouse in South Armagh where Keller, his cover blown, had been taken for interrogation and execution. The exact circumstances surrounding his escape were murky, though it involved the death of four hardened IRA men, two of whom had been virtually cut to pieces.
After his hasty evacuation from Northern Ireland, Keller returned to SAS headquarters at Hereford for what he thought would be a long rest and a stint as an instructor. But after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, he was assigned to a Sabre desert warfare squadron and dispatched to western Iraq, where he searched for Saddam Hussein’s lethal arsenal of Scud missiles. On the night of January 28, 1991, Keller and his team located a launcher about one hundred miles northwest of Baghdad and radioed the coordinates to their commanders in Saudi Arabia. Ninety minutes later a formation of coalition fighter-bombers streaked low over the desert. But in a disastrous case of friendly fire, the aircraft attacked the SAS squadron instead of the Scud site. British officials concluded the entire unit was lost, including Keller.
In truth, he had survived the incident without a scratch, which was his knack. His first instinct was to radio his base and request extraction. Instead, enraged by the incompetence of his superiors, he started walking. Concealed beneath the robe and headdress of a desert Arab, and highly trained in the art of clandestine movement, he made his way through the coalition forces and slipped undetected into Syria. From there, he hiked westward across Turkey, Greece, and Italy until finally he washed ashore on the rugged island of Corsica, where he fell into the waiting arms of Don Anton Orsati, a crime figure whose ancient family of Corsican bandits specialized in murder for hire.
The don gave Keller a villa and a woman to heal his wounds. Then, when Keller was rested, he gave him work. With his northern European looks and SAS training, Keller was able to fulfill contracts that were beyond the capabilities of Orsati’s Corsican-born assassins, the taddunaghiu. Posing as an executive for Orsati’s small olive oil company, Keller roamed Western Europe for the better part of twenty-five years, killing at the don’s behest. They accepted him as one of their own, the Corsicans, and he repaid their generosity by adopting their ways. He dressed as a Corsican, ate and drank as a Corsican, and viewed the rest of the world with a Corsican’s fatalistic disdain. He even wore a Corsican talisman around his neck—a lump of red coral in the shape of a hand—to ward off the evil eye. Now, at long last, he had come home, to an ancient fortress of gray stone overlooking a cold granite sea. They were going to teach him to be a proper British spy. But first he would have to learn how to be an Englishman again.
The other members of Keller’s intake were more in keeping with MI6’s traditional tastes—white, male, and members of the middle or privileged classes. Moreover, all were recent graduates of either Oxford or Cambridge. All but Thomas Finch, who had attended the London School of Economics and worked as an investment banker in the City before finally submitting to MI6’s repeated advances. Finch spoke Chinese fluently and thought himself especially clever. During their first session he had complained, only partially in jest, that he was taking a substantial cut in pay for the honor of serving his country. Keller could have made the same boast, but had the good sense not to. He told his fellow recruits he had worked in the retail food business and that in his spare time he enjoyed mountaineering, both of which happened to be true. As for his age—he was by far the oldest of the lot, perhaps the oldest recruit ever—he claimed to be something of a late bloomer, which was not at all the case.
The course was known formally as the IONEC, the Intelligence Officers New Entry Course. Its purpose was to prepare a recruit for an entry-level job at Vauxhall Cross, though additional training would be necessary before he would be ready to operate in the field, lest he do irreparable harm to his country’s interests or his own career. There were two primary instructors—Andy Mayhew, big, ginger, garrulous, and Tony Quill, a whippet-thin former agent-runner who, it was said, could charm the habit off a nun and steal her rosary when she wasn’t looking. Vauxhall Cross had scoured the records of both men to determine whether, in their previous lives, they might have encountered an SAS operative named Christopher Keller. They had not. Mayhew was largely a headquarters man. Quill was Iron Curtain and Middle East. Neither had ever set foot in Northern Ireland.