Bloodmoney

25

Everyone loved Meredith Rockwell. She was Istanbul’s answer to the Junior League. She was a pretty girl, with flowing blond hair, so flamboyant and social that nobody wondered when she went jetting off to Dubai or Casablanca for the weekend. She had quickly become a fixture in the American community in Istanbul, organizing lunches and dinners, seances with local artists and boat trips up the Bosporus. She was a widow, she told everyone, children going to boarding schools back home; a big trust fund from her late husband to help her travel and entertain. Colorful stories about her had spread in the year she had taken residence in her fancy apartment in Besiktas. She was having an affair with a French count; no, it was a Saudi prince, or, in a third version, a Russian oligarch. All the while, she kept partying with her friends and traveling to exotic places, coyly refusing to explain where and why.

She was found dead on a street in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, where she had gone for one of her famous trips. She had taken a suite at the new Dushanbe Hyatt Regency, the fanciest hotel in Central Asia. The staff recognized her; she had been there before. Her luggage was still in the room, two Louis Vuitton bags, one of them still unpacked. The local authorities let the embassy tidy things up.

The police report said she had gone to find a bank on Rudaki Avenue and then taken a walk in the city park near the hotel. She had met a man there; she seemed to know him, witnesses said. She brought him back to the hotel and up to her room, and then he left. The hotel staff members were not scandalized. They expected that sort of behavior from Western women. The man was Tajik, witnesses said, or perhaps Uzbek or Pakistani. Nobody got a very good description. The doormen and porters looked away politely when the couple arrived.

Next she had taken a taxi, north along the Varzob River and then right on Somoni Avenue. She got out near the presidential palace but walked the other way, away from the crowded boulevards and the traffic and down a quiet street. It was a Russified neighborhood, still bearing the remnants of Soviet days: wood frame buildings painted salmon pink; signage of twinkling lights that formed Cyrillic script; high-cheeked Tajiks strolling in their summer T-shirts and jeans. Through this cityscape passed the American woman. She seemed to be going somewhere, from her deliberate pace, but there was no evidence that she had planned a meeting.

The assassination was a professional job. A car with darkened windows pulled alongside Rockwell as she was making her way down a lane a half mile from the city center. The assassin opened the door and fired two shots with a silencer. People didn’t realize they were gunshots at first; nobody would have paid attention at all, if she hadn’t screamed so loudly in English as she fell. The police tried to talk to her in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, but she wouldn’t answer their questions. They thought she was in shock. She died in the emergency room as a Tajik doctor tried to stop the bleeding.

Jeffrey Gertz was awake when the call came in the early morning. He flinched when the watch officer gave him the news. He’d had an affair with Meredith Rockwell. She was a party girl in true name, as well as alias. He went back to the office, driving way too fast through the canyon, not caring about anyone or anything except keeping a lid on his little organization.

Steve Rossetti was already at the office when he arrived. The operations chief lived in Encino, a few minutes closer. He looked relieved to see the boss. He didn’t want this to be his problem.

Gertz took him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye.

“We are at war, and we don’t even know who with. We are not going to give this enemy any more targets. That’s order number one. I want everybody to get in a hole and pucker up until we understand what’s coming at us.”

Gertz told Rossetti to work out the details and report back in an hour. That wasn’t much time to organize the message traffic and the operational changes, but Rossetti got it done. He was efficient, when he was told what to do.

They went to ground, no halfway measures this time. Gertz issued an immediate stand-down order to everyone, every officer in every clandestine platform around the world. Nobody was to move; no operational travel; no agent meetings; no movement at all outside home unless absolutely necessary. People were allowed to come home, but that was it.

Gertz called his sources abroad, to see what they knew. He got much commiseration, but no facts. This network of consultants and friends, which he had assembled over the years, was his privy cabinet. They provided the tips and suggestions that shaped Gertz’s operations. He had one special informant in the shooting gallery of South Asia who usually knew something, but this time he was dry as dust. Whoever it was had left no tracks, the informant said.

Rossetti ventured that maybe the media would miss the story in faraway Dushanbe, but Gertz knew that was impossible. This was the kind of news that was made for cable television and gossip magazines: American socialite gunned down without explanation in one of the armpits of the world, leaving her millionaire wardrobe back at the presidential suite.

The media lit up in a way they hadn’t with the two previous deaths. Meredith’s friends from Istanbul were on camera within that first news cycle, talking about her charity balls and society dinners and shadowy love life. It was irresistible. Who was the blond mystery woman? What on earth had taken her to Dushanbe? Why had she been murdered there so brutally, in a manner that could not be blamed on purse snatchers?

Gertz had his people call reporters with tips that Meredith Rockwell had been leading a double life-that she was a coke-head who had gotten involved with international drug cartels. Several news organizations assigned reporters to cover that angle the first day. It was an axiom of journalism that you could not libel the dead.

The few people in the U.S. government who knew the truth were frightened. Cyril Hoffman called; the White House chief of staff called. They wanted to know what the government should say. Gertz gave them all the same answer as always: Don’t say anything. Don’t acknowledge or even hint at any U.S. government connection. This was a senseless attack on an American citizen. It had no connection with any other event. The victim obviously had a complicated personal life. Shit happens.

The cover story, threadbare as it was, might well have held up in the same way it had for the previous two deaths. But people had other ideas this time. They wanted credit.

Late in the afternoon on which Meredith Rockwell was murdered, a telephone call was received at the Associated Press bureau in Islamabad. The caller was known to the bureau chief as a member of the Islamic underground. He said that a statement would be posted in one minute on a jihadist website, sent by the Muslim group that called itself Al-Tawhid. He said that the statement was legitimate, and that the Associated Press should disseminate it immediately.

The message appeared moments later on the Internet, as the caller said it would. It was in English, and it read as follows: In the name of the Prophet Mohammed, peace and blessings be upon him: Today, the Brotherhood of Al-Tawhid, which celebrates the oneness of God, announces that it has executed an agent of the American CIA in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. This agent was delivering a bribe to a leader of the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan, to bring him into the camp of capitulation and shame, but this plot failed. For this crime, the agent received justice. The Brotherhood also announces today that it was responsible for two previous operations against American agents. The agent Howard Egan was seized in Karachi, Pakistan, where he was seeking to bribe a tribal leader. The agent Alan Frankel was seized in Moscow, where he was seeking to bribe a Pakistani diplomat. For these crimes, they were executed. The Brotherhood delayed its campaign in the hope that these actions against Pakistan would stop, but they have continued. We make this declaration of war. There are other secret American agents and they will be killed, one by one, until the United States withdraws from Pakistan and all Muslim lands. We will choose the time and place of our attacks. The American people should ask: Who are these agents who bribe and kill Muslim people far from home? Why do they seek to destroy Pakistan and other free and democratic Muslim nations? We affirm the oneness of God. God is Great. -Ikwan Al-Tawhid

Despite frantic requests from the news media, the White House waited two hours before authorizing a response. So few people knew the details of the case that it was difficult to assemble the proper team for discussions. In the end, a secure videoconference was held that included just four people: the president, his chief of staff, the associate deputy director of the CIA, and a CIA officer in Los Angeles who was called “John Doe,” even in this confidential meeting. After this session ended, the chief of staff instructed the State Department spokesman to issue this statement: The allegation by the group that calls itself Ikwan Al-Tawhid is an absurd and baseless attempt to claim credit for the tragic deaths of three Americans abroad in recent weeks. Contrary to the claims of Al-Tawhid, the three individuals were not employees or agents of the United States government. Detailed public information confirms that one was a businessman in the financial sector, one was an advertising salesman, and one was involved in international philanthropic work. The statement by Al-Tawhid is a cynical attempt by a previously unknown group to use these deaths to gain publicity. The United States condemns this action. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies are working with the governments of Pakistan, Russia and Tajikistan to identify the real killers of these three Americans and bring them to justice.

The State Department spokesman repeated this line when asked about the Al-Tawhid statement at the press briefing later that day. He told reporters in the off-the-record “gaggle” that followed the formal briefing that the FBI was pursuing evidence that the death of Meredith Rockwell may have been drug-related. It was possible, the spokesman said, that the other two deaths also had involved international criminal gangs, and that the “absurd” Al-Tawhid statement might have been an attempt by the mafia network to conceal its role.

The CIA public affairs chief, meanwhile, contacted the reporters who regularly covered the intelligence beat. He assured them in the strongest terms, speaking as a “U.S. official,” that the three people who had been killed had no connection whatsoever with the CIA. Weirdly, such denials had more credibility when they were not for attribution, and in this case it could be argued that the spokesman was telling the truth. Certainly it was true as far as he knew. The head of the National Clandestine Service personally called the reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post and told them that the three dead Americans were not on the agency payroll. He could vouch for it personally.

The denials made it through the first news cycle intact, and the story held up over the next few days. There were some breathless expose stories in the Pakistani press, but they were always making wild claims about American intelligence activities, so nobody paid much attention. The ISI press cell in Islamabad was unusually silent, and the reporters there assumed that was because the ISI itself must have links with Al-Tawhid. That was true enough, though even the ISI knew less than it would have liked. The reason for silence was more complicated. The director general of the service, Lieutenant General Mohammed Malik, was trying to decide what to do.

Jeff Gertz responded in character: He toughed it out. He maintained his composure and confidence, and looked for ways to project it to others. He held a “town hall meeting” with his staff in Studio City late that first day and reassured them that their security was his primary concern. He arranged protection details and armored vehicles; he provided counseling to help employees deal with stress; he hosed The Hit Parade and its global staff with money and perks.

Gertz called Sophie Marx in London and told her that she was running out of time. Unless she came up with something in a few days to explain to the White House why America’s most secret warriors were being killed, he would bring her home and send someone else. He needed the frame of a story, quickly; they could fill in the details later, when they had more time.