Bloodmoney

8

Sophie Marx worked through most of the night, sleeping a few hours in the women’s locker room of The Hit Parade’s fitness club. She took a walk early the next morning. Her windowless office was claustrophobic, and she needed to breathe. More than that, she needed to think. She had showered and washed her hair, but she still felt groggy. It was as if she were staring into a fogged-up window and couldn’t see the face inside. She wanted to do a good job for Gertz, but she needed a starting point.

Out on Ventura Boulevard it was already hot. The Mystic Eye Bookshop had a few early morning customers, and so did the tattoo parlor next door. Sophie wanted breakfast. She passed a Starbucks and a McDonald’s until she came to a diner called Hank’s. She ordered the “Hank Special”-scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns, toast. Her father used to make her breakfasts like that when she was a girl back in Florida, when he wasn’t too hung over to cook.

Her parents were living in Tortola last she heard, running a restaurant. They had taught her how to keep secrets; maybe that was the only virtue of the crazy, stoned-out life they led: Their daughter learned how to cover the family’s tracks as they moved, until the art of concealment became second nature. Oddly, the CIA was the one place she didn’t have to pretend. She had confessed it all, her whole crazy childhood, during the first interview. She felt safe. This was a family of weirdos and liars and manipulators, whose only rule was that they weren’t supposed to lie to each other.

As she ate her breakfast, Marx thought about Howard Egan, trying to imagine what could have happened to him in those last hours before the meeting in north Karachi. She ordered a second cup of coffee and drew herself a timeline on the back of a napkin. Egan had come to Karachi, checked into his hotel, called the access agent, done a first surveillance detection run, seen the access agent, done a second SDR, and then, disaster. There were many ways this story could have gone wrong, but there was only one place to start. She paid her check and walked back east on Ventura to the big, boxy building with the THE HIT PARADE sign out front.

Marx went first to see Steve Rossetti, hoping to clear a potential obstacle. The operations chief regarded Marx as an interloper. He had wanted to run the investigation of the Egan case himself.

“I need to talk to Hamid Akbar,” she said.

“Good luck, kid. Akbar is terrified. He thinks he’s next.”

“Have you debriefed him?”

“We tried to. I called him, but he didn’t want to talk. I told you, he’s frightened. He says that if he we try to contact him again, he’ll walk.”

Marx studied the operations chief. His face was smooth, well shaven. He smelled of Old Spice. He was a man who would rather do too little, tidily, than too much and risk making a mistake.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Akbar works for us. Who’s he to say he doesn’t want to be debriefed?”

“Take it to Gertz,” said Rossetti, shrugging his shoulders.

“I will,” she said, turning back toward her cubicle. “And Akbar is dirty. Wait and see.”

Marx called the Office of Security and requested the polygraph record for Hamid Akbar. She had been puzzling over his role since the previous day, when she was digging into the operational files. The Pakistani businessman was the last person known to have seen Howard Egan alive. Why had he moved up the time of the meeting with his uncle? Why had he proposed an insecure location? Where had he gone in the hours immediately after Egan’s disappearance?

It took an hour to pry loose the polygraph record from the registry. When the thin file was finally delivered to Marx, it deepened her concern. Akbar hadn’t been polygraphed since his initial recruitment in the United States. When he had been re-recruited, Gertz had waived a new test. It was too difficult to bring a polygraph operator on site, according to the file. The result was a counterintelligence officer’s nightmare-an agent whose reliability was unproven, in witting contact with a deep-cover officer. Howard Egan had trusted him, but now Egan was gone.

Marx knocked on Gertz’s door. This morning he looked like an over-the-hill Chicago sideman. There were circles of fatigue under his eyes, and his skin had a waxy pallor replacing the buff tan. He was wearing a cashmere blazer that was so loosely constructed it looked almost like a cardigan sweater.

“I don’t like Akbar,” said Marx.

“Me neither. What have you got?”

You couldn’t be sure with Gertz whether he had been thinking that all along, or had just considered the possibility when she mentioned it.

“It turns out he hasn’t been polygraphed in ten years. Why did you waive a poly on him when you went after him again?”

“It was too cumbersome getting a technician out in the field. And I needed to get to his uncle. The family came well recommended. So I went ahead.”

“Who recommended them?”

Gertz shook his head. “Sorry, I can’t tell you that. Too sensitive.”

She nodded. She knew there were secrets that didn’t get shared. That was part of the job.

“Okay, but I have a bad feeling about Akbar. I think he may have set Egan up.”

“Maybe. But he has an alibi.”

“I missed that. What alibi?”

“He delivered his uncle. The man was at the meeting place, just where he was supposed to be. If it was a setup, why would the uncle have gone to the meet? That’s where your theory gets squishy.”

“Maybe the uncle wasn’t witting. Or maybe the uncle showed up so they would have a cover story when Howard disappeared. I’m not sure, but I need to know more about him.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for starters, Egan called Akbar before he went to see him. That call was logged on his BlackBerry. So the NSA should have an audio file of the conversation. I need it. And don’t tell me I don’t have the right clearances, because you already promised me I could have anything I wanted.”

She crossed her arms stubbornly.

“You’re jamming me,” he said.

“Yes, I am. That’s part my job, isn’t it?”

Gertz looked at her with an extra measure of admiration. He liked troublemakers, so long as they were on his team.

“How long have you worked for The Hit Parade?” he asked.

“Nearly a year. Ten months, to be exact.”

“Do you know where we got the name ‘The Hit Parade’?

“No. I always wondered about that.”

“It’s from an old-time radio and TV show called Your Hit Parade. It started back in the 1930s, lasted for nearly forty years. They played a weekly list of top records, right, which they said was based on an ‘authentic tabulation.’ But that was all crap. They just made it up. Played what they wanted. Got payola from the record companies, for all I know.”

“That’s what you liked about it?” asked Marx, raising her eyebrows. “That it was a big con?”

“Yeah, that. Plus I like the idea of hitting people.”

She was shaking her head now, but Gertz gave her a playful punch on the shoulder, as if to say, Just kidding.

Gertz got Sophie Marx what she needed. He called Cyril Hoffman, who called the NSA, who called someone in the cryptographic agency’s South Asia Division. In an hour the requisite audio file was sitting in Marx’s computer queue. She listened to the brief conversation a half dozen times. What struck her was the stress in the Pakistani man’s voice-the coughs and pauses, the apology that the planned meeting time wasn’t “convenient.”

“Can we do the business tonight?” Egan had asked. The Pakistani had made a phone call before he answered. Was he calling his uncle, or someone else? And when he came back on the line, there was that cough-that knot of anxiety.

One of Marx’s tradecraft instructors, a decade ago, had told her that “behavior always leaks.” He had been talking about how to sense when someone is lying without using a polygraph. There are always clues, he had said-the extra words and phrases wrapped around a simple yes or no, the twitch of a leg, the flutter of an eyebrow, the clutch in the throat, the cough, the pause. Behavior always leaks.

She looked at the photograph of Akbar they’d dug out of the files. He looked smooth, Westernized and insincere. She was convinced that he was rotten. He had sent Howard Egan-a neurotic middle-aged NOC, a man trying to serve out his time until he was pensioned off-into a trap. She was going to squeeze Akbar until the truth popped out.

Marx went back to see Gertz. The door was closed, and the officious Pat Waters made her wait outside until the boss had finished his business. When the door opened, she swooped in and made her request.

“I want to go interview Hamid Akbar, right away. Give him a stress poly. Push him. I listened to the NSA audio file of his call with Egan and I am telling you, Jeffrey, that man is where our trouble started.”

“You can’t go to Pakistan. It’s too insecure. Sorry. Even you can’t sweet-talk me on that one.”

“Then yank him out. Pull his chain. Have you contacted him?”

“Yes, by phone. Rossetti made the call, and I listened. He’s scared shitless. He thinks he’s a target, too. Wants to go to ground, break off contact.”

“Well, he ought to be scared. He’s a bad man.”

“Excuse me? Aren’t you getting a little overwrought here?”

“That’s sexist, calling me ‘overwrought.’ I could file a complaint with HR, and I’d win, but I’m prepared to compromise. Just let me interview Akbar. Make it happen. Please. Order him to meet me in a third country. Tell him that if he doesn’t agree, he really is a dead man. Tell him that you’ll bust his balls, expose him to the ISI. Come on. This is the door. We have to walk through it.”

Gertz smiled, and the tired eyes sparkled for a moment. It wasn’t just the tough-girl bit. She wanted so much to succeed.

“Where do you want to meet Mr. Akbar? Assuming that I can get him out?”

“I don’t care. Dubai is probably the easiest for him. Tell him Dubai in thirty-six hours. If he won’t come out, I’m going in after him.”

“I thought you wanted to go to London.”

“I do. But not until I have found the man who set up Howard Egan.”

Gertz, fatigued as he was, rose from his desk and walked toward her. He put his big hand on her shoulder and began to give her a hug, but thought better of it and shook her hand. He sent her off to Support to scrub her documents and book the next flight to Dubai.

Gertz locked his door. He had to make a call that he had been dreading for the past twenty-four hours. It was to the only person he considered his boss, other than the president himself, and that was the White House chief of staff, Ted Yazdi. He sent a BlackBerry message to costy@who. eop. gov. Hardly an unbreakable code: Chief of Staff Ted Yazdi. The message was just a subject line: Need to talk. The answer came back five minutes later. Call me now.

Gertz went to the STU-5, the latest model of the Secure Telephone Unit, and dialed Yazdi’s secure number at the White House. He answered it personally.

“What the fuck is going on?” asked Yazdi. He had the coarse, corrosive manner of a former Wall Street trader.

“We lost one of our boys in Pakistan.”

“So I hear. Is he dead?”

“I hope so, for his sake. But they may have gotten something out of him. That’s what I wanted to warn you about.”

“Shit. What do we do then? What if it’s all over the Internet?”

“Nothing. With respect, sir, don’t do anything. If these people issue a statement, have the State Department deny it. The agency will tell you that you have to brief Congress. My humble advice is that you should ignore them. This program is covered under the National Security Act. You have a legal opinion that says so. The congressional leadership has signed off on it. End of story.”

“Did the Paks screw us? Is this their hit?”

“Don’t know yet, but it’s quite possible. This is what they do.”

“The president is nervous. He asked me a few hours ago in the Oval if this Karachi thing was going to blow up. I said no, sir. Hunker down. It will go away. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Totally right. It’s contained.”

“These crazy fuckers still want to kill us, don’t they? These Pakistanis and Waziris and whatever the hell else. Why do they hate us so much? We’re trying to give them money, for god’s sake. We’re trying to make them happy. What the hell is wrong with them?”

“I don’t know, sir. I keep asking my sources that. They keep giving me new names to contact. Eventually we’ll get it right. Money talks.”

Yazdi couldn’t disagree with the efficacy of cash. It was one of his life rules. But still, he wanted to understand why this mission had gone off the rails.

“How did the bad guys make your man? I thought he was super-deep cover and all that.”

“It was a lucky shot, probably. If there’s a hole, we’ll plug it, don’t worry. I’ve put someone reliable on it.”

“Not a SWAT team, for Christ’s sake. That’s all we need is a bunch of people snooping around.”

“Not a team, a discreet investigator. But you will have to turn off the CIA director, if he comes knocking. Because he’ll want to tell Congress, and then it’s out for sure, and we’re all screwed.”

“What else? I gotta go.”

“That’s it. Just keeping you informed. Not to worry. Tell the president we have it under control.”

“Reassurance from you guys, that will scare the shit out of him. You need to come back here and see me soon, and remind me what the fuck you’re doing. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir. I can come in the next week. I will send you a date and you tell me if it works.”

“One more thing, just so I don’t have nightmares. There’s no USG money here. Nothing that could bite us. It’s all clean.”

“Yes, sir. It’s self-contained financially, no government funds in or out. No paper trail, here or in D.C., all offshore.”

“Well, that’s something, at least. No more fuckups, please.”

“HUA, sir,” said Gertz. It was military-speak for “heard, understood, acknowledged.” But he was talking to himself. The chief of staff had scurried off to other business.