Bloodmoney

17

Jeffrey Gertz was watching Morning Joe in the bathroom, trimming his beard and wondering what jacket to wear, when he heard the news bulletin that an American businessman had been shot in Moscow. They didn’t give a name, and it didn’t occur to him that the victim might be one of his own people. Gertz had just returned to Los Angeles from Washington the night before, and was thinking mainly about whether to go to Las Vegas that weekend. As he was dressing, the phone rang. It was Albert, the new watch officer in Studio City. There was a hitch in his throat, and he had to cough before he could speak.

“Sorry to bother you at home, Mr. Director.” He had only been in the job a few days and addressed Gertz as if he were a cabinet secretary.

“What is it, Albert? I’m getting dressed.”

“An American has been shot in Moscow. It’s on the wires. Mr. Rossetti thinks he may be one of ours. He said you would want to be informed.”

“I just saw that story on television. That’s our guy? What the hell?”

Gertz was unsteady for a moment, and sat down on the leather bench in his dressing room. He had a towel wrapped around his waist, but it fell away. He muttered, more to himself than to the watch officer.

“Christ, it must be Frankel.”

“Roger that, sir. The embassy has someone at the morgue. The Russians have ID’d the victim as Alan Frankel, birthplace Denver, date of birth May twenty-sixth, 1980. His business cards say he runs an ad agency in Amsterdam named Kiosks Unlimited. Headquarters called Mr. Rossetti a few minutes ago, and he called me. I checked. All that information matches our operational files. What should I do?”

“Nothing. Wait for me. Don’t talk to Headquarters until I’m there. And don’t talk to Mr. Rossetti, either. He’s not your boss, damn it.”

There was a pause on the other end. The watch officer wasn’t sure what he was allowed to say.

“People are kind of upset here, Director. We’ve gotten two messages from the field already, asking what’s up. What should I tell them?”

“Tell them I’m on my way in. Tell everyone to chill out for a few minutes. This may not be what we think it is. No messages to anyone until I get there.”

“Yes, Director.”

Gertz felt better giving an order, even if it was just to shut up and sit tight. He thought a moment. The story was moving so fast, he needed to backstop the cover right away.

“One more thing,” said Gertz. “Call Tommy Arden in Support and tell him to make sure someone in Europe is answering the Kiosks Unlimited phone in Amsterdam. This person should confirm Frankel’s cover biography, but that’s it. Express shock, grief, ‘How could anyone have done this to Mr. Frankel,’ et cetera. Do that now, and tell people to stay cool. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

Gertz finished dressing, a plain blue blazer instead of the summer-weight plaid he’d been planning, and a tie, too. He stood for a moment staring out the window, trying to collect his thoughts.

His apartment was on the top floor of a building on the eastern edge of Beverly Hills, almost to West Hollywood. One bank of windows looked across Doheny Drive toward the leafy suburbs and the hills. Another looked down Santa Monica Boulevard toward the sprawl of downtown, half hidden by the smoky mist of the morning. He took a Red Bull out of the refrigerator, and then popped one of the energy pills his homeopathic counselor had recommended.

Gertz threw his briefcase in the Corvette. Though it was a sunny day, he left the top up. He turned on the local NPR station and listened until they mentioned the Moscow shooting. Then he turned the radio off. He didn’t want to hear.

Gertz knew how to take a punch. That was part of why he had risen so quickly in the agency. He had been ready to take risks when other people were worrying about whether their legal insurance was paid up. When people had decided the CIA was so messed up it was time to start over, Gertz had been there, the resilient one, ready to take the enterprise deep underground.

This was a combination punch: Two members of his organization had been targeted in two weeks, and he didn’t know why. He felt bad about the people, in a generalized sort of way, but he barely knew them. He felt worse for himself. If he didn’t draw a tight circle now and control information, the structure he had created would begin to wobble. People would ask questions, secretly at first, but that would lead to other questions. The garment would begin to fray along the seams, and then-if people really began to pull-it would come apart.

It was the same as with any flap, Gertz told himself. The best solution was to hunker down and wait for it to go away.

When Gertz arrived at the office block on Ventura Boulevard, the facade was bleached white in the morning sun. Inside, there was a hum of anxiety: People had been waiting for the boss to arrive, and now they wanted him to give orders. There was a low-level panic. The news had spread rapidly; how could it be otherwise? People worried that their invisible organization had somehow come under a spotlight, and that they all were vulnerable.

Gertz did the one thing nobody would have expected, which was to act normal. He said hello to the secretaries by name, and then went into his office to read the message traffic. He summoned Arden for a report: The calls to Kiosks Unlimited in Amsterdam were being answered by the reports officer who worked with Frankel as his secretary; she was quoted in the latest news reports expressing shock and sorrow. The dam was holding, at least for the moment.

Gertz placed a call to Cyril Hoffman at Headquarters. Hoffman didn’t know much, either, but he agreed that in a situation of uncertainty, the best thing to do was for everyone to keep their mouths shut. The best damage control policy, in this case, was to do nothing.

“What was your man working on in Moscow, anyway?” asked Hoffman. “Odd spot to visit.”

“Pakistan. He was meeting a diplomat.”

“Do I know about this?”

“Of course you do. You know about everything. If you want details, check the White House.”

“Why was he killed? This sounds like another Karachi problem. He’s dead, by the way, your man Egan. Confirmed. Roger that. I think this second one was a mafia hit.”

“You’re joking, surely,” said Hoffman.

“That’s what they’re saying on television. Chechen mobsters.”

“But surely that’s untrue.”

“Maybe. But it’s convenient. Don’t rock our boat, Mr. Hoffman. That’s my advice. I am trying to keep a lid on. I hope you are, too.”

“Be careful about Pakistan. My sources say people there are rather upset with us. They don’t like being vaporized from ten thousand feet. And they don’t like having money thrown at them by the CIA, even in the benign and invisible form you like to imagine that you have created.”

“My sources tell me that when people are shooting at you, you buy up their guns.”

“Does that refer to us or the Pakistanis, I wonder?”

“Both, sir.”

“Bold words: I will send you a soapbox.”

“Hey, Mr. Hoffman, if you’re unhappy with me, just say so.”

“Heavens, no. Following your adventures is one of my few pleasures. But perhaps a little more contact with the home office. The personal touch. What say?”

They talked for several more minutes before the associate deputy director said, “Cheerio!” in his usual, incongruously upbeat voice, and rang off.

When Gertz finished his conversation with Hoffman, he called Steve Rossetti and said he wanted to hold a senior staff meeting in the secure conference room.

The group gathered on the third floor. People dropped their cell phones in the locker outside the room and trundled in. There were about twenty people, the heads of all the main operational departments and their deputies, plus a few other key staff members. They nodded stiffly at Gertz as they entered. They had liked being part of his great experiment, but most of them didn’t know him very well.

Sophie Marx entered the room and took a chair at the far end. She was wearing a black suit, well tailored but somber. She was tired, with the sallow look that agency officers sometimes described as a “safe house tan.” After the quick trip to Dubai she had labored for many hours in the Colonel’s files. She needed to talk with Gertz. She had sent him a brief memo about her polygraph of Hamid Akbar and asking for a meeting to discuss her plans, but he hadn’t answered.

Marx was settled in her chair, wishing she had worn more makeup to hide her fatigue, when Gertz walked toward her. He passed all the way around the conference table to her place. She had wanted to talk to him, but not now, with the senior staff listening.

“How was Dubai?” he queried, shaking her hand. “Good trip?”

“Yes and no,” she answered. “It demolished one of my theories. Now I have to start over.”

“We all do,” said Gertz. “Come see me later today, when this Moscow business is sorted out. We’ll decide what to do next.”

Everyone in the room heard the exchange. People moved in their chairs, or cleared their throats, or otherwise signaled their unease. They could see, if they hadn’t known already, that Sophie Marx had a special role in this crisis, and that whatever Gertz was doing to contain it, she was his partner.

Gertz waited until everyone had arrived, and gave them a little more time after that, until there were no more coughs and whispers.

“I want to confirm what most of you have already heard,” he began. “Today in Moscow, one of our officers was killed. He was shot downtown, near the Kremlin, three times at close range. I am told that he died on the scene.”

There were groans around the room. For all the bravura of people in the intelligence business, things like this didn’t happen to them. They weren’t soldiers, and they certainly didn’t expect that their colleagues would be gunned down, Mafia-style.

“Let me say a few words about our colleague Mr. Frankel. He was operating under very deep cover, unknown even to some of the people in this room, and he was an unusually capable young officer. He epitomized what our new organization is about-secrecy, speed, daring. He was one of the best. Unfortunately, the world will never, ever know that. He took his cover with him to the grave. He would want us to keep it there. I trust we are all clear on that.”

In the silence, Steve Rossetti spoke up. He was wearing his blazer with the American flag pin on the lapel. He was known to be close to Headquarters, so people listened to him with special attention.

“Can we still maintain that cover?” Rossetti asked. “I mean, won’t the NSC want to look at this? And the inspector general at Langley? And the congressional committees, won’t they have some issues here?”

“No, no, and no,” answered Gertz. “We are not going to open our doors for anyone. There’s nothing to disclose. This is a personal tragedy, and there are some operational issues we have to address. But that’s our business and nobody else’s.”

“So what do we do?” asked the operations chief.

“We maintain radio silence. And we do nothing-I repeat, nothing-that would suggest any link between Mr. Frankel and this organization or its parent in Langley. Remember, we do not exist. We have been given a license to operate as a true clandestine service. That is very precious, and we have to guard it, especially now.”

Rossetti pressed ahead, even though it was obvious to all that his intervention was not welcomed.

“But we’ve lost two officers now, sir. I’m worried about the safety of our people. Around this building, people are asking what’s going on.”

Gertz could sense the uneasiness in the room-the fear that can turn into revolt, and disorderly retreat, and failure. He had to give them something.

“Thank you, Steve, for raising that. I want to address it directly. The case of Howard Egan worried us all. He was taken by people who evidently knew that he had a secret role separate from his business cover. We believe he’s dead, which is perhaps a blessing. As you may know, I have asked our chief of counterintelligence, Sophie Marx, to conduct an aggressive internal investigation to figure out what happened. The case of Alan Frankel is quite different. I have talked with Headquarters, and we think this is unrelated to the other attack.”

“What is it, then? Who hit Frankel?”

“From what we’ve seen so far, this looks like a Russian mob hit. It was not the sort of thing that terrorist operatives do, much less intelligence services. Too bloody, too much out in the open. I’m guessing at this point, but I think Chechen businessmen ordered the hit. They were worried that our young man was pushing into their territory.”

“Why would they think that?” asked Sophie Marx from the back of the room. “So far as anyone knew, he was just a kid selling ads, right?” It was the first time she had spoken in a big staff meeting. Her tone was hardly deferential.

“Within this room only, let me explain why local mobsters might have been upset: Mr. Frankel met in Moscow with representatives of a publishing company owned by one of the Kremlin’s pals. That may have been his mistake. My guess is that somebody thought he was muscling in on their territory. Or maybe the Kremlin got nervous. But the point is, there’s no reason to think that his cover was blown.”

“Except that he’s dead,” said Sophie. She was pushing him, in a way that even Rossetti wouldn’t have dared. That was the advantage of being the boss’s pet.

“Listen, folks, I am trying to level with you. I know this is hard on all of us. But this looks to me like a mafia hit. That’s what the initial reporting on Moscow television is saying. And that’s what I told Headquarters a few minutes ago.”

“What does Cyril Hoffman think?” asked Rossetti. He was skeptical that the associate deputy director would buy into this explanation quite so quickly.

“Hoffman thinks it’s our case,” answered Gertz. “He trusts our judgment.”

The meeting broke up, with the members of The Hit Parade’s leadership team a bit calmer than they had been an hour before, but still not sure they understood what was going on.

Gertz had left out only one thing in his valedictory mention of Cyril Hoffman. Although the associate deputy director had deferred to Gertz’s handling of the Moscow case, he had also asked him to come back to Washington promptly for a visit to talk things over, one on one. The personal touch.

That afternoon, before he left for LAX to catch the red-eye to Washington, Gertz stopped by Marx’s cubicle. He looked gray, worn out by a day of treading water.

“Let’s take a walk,” he said. “Get an ice-cream cone.”

“Sure, but I don’t eat ice cream.”

She went to the ladies’ room and put a little more masking cream under her weary eyes and joined him at the elevator.

Studio City looked particularly seedy that afternoon. There was a low sticky heat, not the usual dry desert feel of the Valley but something more like the humid Atlantic Coast. Gertz took off his tie and threw his blazer over his shoulder. The cars were whizzing by on Ventura Avenue, providing the only bit of breeze on the hot day.

“Were you really as confident as you sounded in there?” asked Marx.

“No,” he answered. “I needed to buy some time…for you. So you can investigate this, quietly.”

“Do you believe that line to the staff about how the Moscow killing was a mafia hit?”

He looked at her blankly. His eyes were so hard to read.

“Maybe it’s true. I don’t know what to believe. That’s why I have you. You’re going to figure it out and tell me.”

“So this is my problem now?”

“And mine. But you’re the person who’s going to figure it out.” He put his arm around her shoulder. She pulled away, but gently.

“I thought Alan Frankel went to Moscow to meet with a Pakistani diplomat,” she said. “This wasn’t about Chechens.”

That shot hit its mark. Gertz took a step back, as if to regain his balance.

“How on earth do you know that? I didn’t say anything about what he was working on.”

“I went to the files. That’s what you told me to do. So I did it. I checked all our Pakistani cases. Alan Frankel was running one of them. He was meeting someone from one of the big political families.”

Gertz narrowed his eyes for a moment, then his face went back into neutral.

“You’re sharp,” he said. “That’s why I wanted you for this job. Yes, he was working on Pakistan. So are some other people. We are moving mountains there, or trying to. But be careful. There are things involved here that nobody-no- body -knows about back at the Death Star.”

She was puzzled.

“Who knows about it, if Headquarters doesn’t? I don’t get that.”

“It was approved by the man we work for, the president of the United States.”

She stood on the sidewalk of Ventura Boulevard while the cars revved their engines a few yards away.

“Is that why there’s no record of Pakistan disbursements in the file? And no finding or mission directive?”

Gertz’s eyes flashed again, then he laughed.

“What a little snoop you are. Well, knock it off. If there’s something I think you need to know, I’ll tell you.”

“How do you plan these missions, Jeff? How do you know what doors to knock on?”

Gertz shook his head. This time he wasn’t smiling.

“You are asking too many questions. This is out of your lane. Don’t outsmart yourself.”

They walked on for another fifty yards in silence, until they neared a traffic light. Gertz had said his piece, and Marx waited for the tension to pass. She needed as much information as he was willing to give her. She was operating outside the wire.

“Did you read my cable from Dubai?” she asked.

“I skimmed it. I gather that Akbar passed his polygraph.”

Marx nodded. “It wasn’t just that. He could have finessed the poly. It was more the feel of the guy. The more we talked, the less likely it seemed to me that he was working with the bad guys. He’s a chump, a scared rich boy who went to study in America. I was barking up the wrong tree.”

“So how was Egan blown, if it wasn’t Akbar?”

“I don’t know. I worry that we have a bigger problem, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Well, I hope you figure it out before another of our people gets waxed.”

“So you don’t believe that fairy tale about the mafia in Moscow.”

“Hey, lighten up. For general consumption, I believe it. Between us, I am agnostic.”

She stopped walking and studied him. His face was hard, with that bristle of goatee giving him a look that, for a moment, reminded her of a poster of D. H. Lawrence. What was real, in all his tough talk and secretiveness?

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure. Good luck.”

“What are we doing in Pakistan? Help me out. I mean, what was Egan trying to set up when he got kidnapped? I don’t think Hamid Akbar had a clue. But what is it?”

“Sorry, but you are pushing me where I cannot be pushed.”

His face had gone to stone.

“Was it intelligence-gathering, or Special Activities? I found a receipt in Egan’s operational file for gold bars that he took from the depository for one of his earlier operations. It was over fifty pounds, nearly a million dollars. What was that for? We don’t pay any agent that much.”

He took her wrist and held it, not a gentle touch, but a hard squeeze.

“These are questions I can’t answer, and you shouldn’t ask. We do things that are very secret, and this is one of them. Don’t ask me again, because you’ll get the same answer.”

“I’m trying to do my job.

“You’re pushing too hard. You’ll rupture a disk. Like I said, lighten up.”

A Baskin-Robbins was just ahead: pink, gaudy, an incongruous relic.

“You want an ice-cream cone?”

“Ugh.” She shook her head. “You can get me something else, though, if you’re in a generous mood.”

“What is it? I’m always in a generous mood with you.”

“A ticket to London. I want to meet Egan’s boss, the guy who runs the hedge fund. I want to understand how they do business, how many people there knew about Egan’s travels. The bad guys must have pumped poor Howard about where he worked. They know more than I do.”

“Thomas Perkins.” He spoke softly, enunciating each syllable. There was on his face an odd look of suspended animation. He had been caught off guard.

“Right, Perkins. Alphabet Capital. You told him that I might be coming to visit. Well, I want to do it, as soon as I can.”

“This is a complicated relationship. There’s a lot of baggage, not all if it ours. Maybe it’s better to leave this one to me.”

“Hey, Jeff, if I can’t do this, I might as well leave the whole thing to you. What’s the point? Maybe you should have someone else do your investigation.”

She was threatening him, subtly. He had little choice but to accede. She was his best hope for keeping the lid on.

“You have to be careful. Do not go turning over rocks when you don’t know what’s underneath. Remember, madam: You are a snake handler, not a snake charmer.”

“Don’t worry.” She put her arm through his, a feminine version of his arm around the shoulder. “I’m always careful.”