Bloodmoney

3

In the early glow of the next morning, on the approach to Jinnah International Airport, Howard Egan had a momentary sense of vertigo. The horizon seemed to vanish for an instant, indistinguishable between the blue wash of the Arabian Sea and the white haze of the sky. He stared out the window, looking for the line of separation. This was supposed to be his space, this nowhere land that was like disappearing into a vapor cloud. But today it spooked him. It was too bright outside. The other passengers were looking at him, wondering who he was. And he hadn’t hit passport control yet.

Egan had told his handlers in Los Angeles that he didn’t want to do the Karachi run again. On his last trip, he had been so sure he was being followed that he had aborted two meetings. Jeffrey Gertz had told him that maybe he should come home, but he didn’t mean it. Later, he had sent Egan a message: There is one thing about winners. They win. That meant that he should go to Karachi or leave the service.

Egan knew the mantra of invisibility: He did not exist. He had a passport, but it was false. He had distinct features, hair and eyes, but they had been altered. He had a job and business cards and mailing addresses, but they were all imaginary. His cell phones were all clean. He was part of a government organization that could not be found on any chart or budget in Washington. For him, there was only the lie. There was no truth for anyone to find.

And that was how it was supposed to work that spring morning in Karachi: The truth about Howard Egan should have been hidden from anyone outside a tiny circle. The only person at Alphabet Capital who knew his real identity was his nominal boss there, Thomas Perkins.

Egan made his way through the slow chicane of passport control and customs. He didn’t look at the customs officers, and he didn’t look away, either. There was a momentary commotion off to his left, as an inspector pulled aside an ink-black traveler from Sri Lanka. Egan kept walking, and in a moment he was past the glass and into the snarl of hotel barkers and family greeters who lay on the other side of customs.

In the white concrete atrium of the terminal it was hot and stuffy, with too many watchers and too many opportunities for surveillance. Egan wanted to get to his hotel. He looked for his driver in the host of eager faces and eventually found a man with a sign that misspelled his name: organ. That brought a smile, even on this day of dread. The driver took Egan’s bag and wheeled it toward the parking lot with the dignified air of a man who, for a few moments, had a purpose in life.

Egan was a compact man in his late thirties, struggling to keep trim as he moved from hotel to hotel. His appearance changed with his assignments, but the constant feature was his soft mouth, almost a Gerber baby mouth, with lips that turned upward slightly at the corners. The softness should have been worn away, now that Egan had been traveling for more than a year for the new outfit. But he was still raw skin. The more runs he made, the more he was an army of one.

Egan arrived at the Sheraton on Club Road. He had considered staying at the Pearl, a Pakistani hotel that was less obvious. But the Sheraton had a spa and a good Italian restaurant and room service that allowed him to order booze. So Egan had booked his reservation, using his personal expense code. He had stayed at the Sheraton once before, under the same name. That would be a protection, unless they had made him the last time.

At the front desk, he didn’t recognize any of the clerks, but eventually a man in a natty blazer came out from the back office and offered a limp handshake and said, “Welcome back, Mr. Egan.”

He went to his room and unpacked, hanging up his extra suit and putting his other clothes in the drawers. He was fussy that way, maintaining the same routine in every city. He unpacked his life as if he could control it, drawer by drawer: T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks, all in the right place.

Egan removed the laptop from his briefcase and plugged in the Ethernet cable. He scrolled the news, and then opened the VPN connection to check his email from The Hit Parade in Los Angeles. They had mastered the art of digital camouflage. In the new service, your covert life existed in the cloud of the Internet, to be accessed whenever needed but never downloaded into the here and now.

Sophie Marx didn’t have anything new for him. The meeting was still set for fourteen hundred the next afternoon. No change in the ops plan, no change in the security status, no change in the authorities or rules of engagement. Egan logged off and tried not to think about tomorrow. That meeting was in another space, beyond the vertiginous horizon.

Howard Egan had come to Karachi to meet Hamid Akbar, a Pakistani banker who was a nominal client of Alphabet Capital. Anyone who read the emails they had been exchanging would see that Egan was there to promote a new Alphabet fund that invested in distressed real estate assets in North America and Europe. If anyone had asked questions, Egan would have referred them to Mr. Perkins, the chief executive officer of Alphabet Capital.

The real story of Hamid Akbar was more complicated. Twelve years before, he had been recruited as an “asset” by the Central Intelligence Agency. He was spotted when he was an engineering student at the University of Baltimore, and formally pitched a year later, before he went home to Pakistan. He was a Pashtun, which caught the CIA’s interest, even back then.

But Akbar had broken off contact with the agency soon after his return. He said that the relationship was insecure. The Pakistani security authorities would easily discover his covert connection, and they would imprison him. His CIA handler was sympathetic: He suggested that the agency might be in touch later, when he had cooled off, but for nearly a decade they had left the Pakistani alone.

Then one day, roughly a year ago, Hamid Akbar had received a visit from an American who had initially introduced himself as an investment adviser, Howard Egan. Egan had proposed a different sort of relationship, with an American entity that had no name or formal existence. It was an offer so lucrative that the Pakistani could not refuse-dared not refuse-and so he had returned to the secret fold.

Where did Akbar’s name come from? Gertz had him on a list of prospects; he never said how it was assembled. Gertz gave Egan a Pashtun proverb to share with Akbar at the first meeting: Awal zaan resto jahan. First yourself, then the universe. Gertz didn’t say where he got that gem, either.

Akbar’s value as an asset lay in his family contacts. His uncle was a leader of one of the Darwesh Khel clans that ruled the western border. Like many tribal chiefs, this uncle had become a bit soft and citified, coasting along on rents and levies. The political officer of the South Waziristan agency took him for granted, and so did the Interior Ministry, the Frontier Corps and Inter-Services Intelligence. That made him an ideal target: He was an influential man whose value had been overlooked by others.

“Uncle Azim” was the name Akbar used for his well-connected relative, or sometimes the honorific “Azim Khan.” At Egan’s request, the two Pakistanis had traveled to Abu Dhabi for a get-acquainted meeting. The American had outlined the financial benefits of a relationship; what Gertz told Egan to request in return was help in pacifying the border areas. Uncle Azim asked for several months to think about it.

And now it was time. Akbar was to arrange a rendezvous spot. Gifts would be exchanged.

Jeff Gertz loved the operation. It was a demonstration of what his new organization could do. Some of the old-timers who had joined The Hit Parade worried that the plan was half-baked, but Gertz insisted that it was solid. Somebody just needed to deliver the loot. He told his colleagues the same bromide he had offered to Egan: The thing about winners is that they know how to win.

Gertz was a winner, for sure. Egan was afraid of him, but he did as he had been instructed.

Egan called Hamid Akbar’s office to confirm the next day’s meeting. There was a delay as the Pakistani came on the line.

He coughed before he said a word. “I am sorry,” said the Pakistani. “There is a problem tomorrow. It is not convenient.”

Egan’s palm was damp as he held the phone, waiting.

The Pakistani came back, cheerier.

“Could you come to see me tonight at Habib Bank Plaza? It will be cooler.” He sounded a bit flustered, or tired, or perhaps it was just Egan’s imagination.

“Can we do the business tonight?” pressed Egan. “It can’t wait.”

“Yes, I think so.” Akbar coughed again, a dry cough as if something were caught in his throat. “Wait one moment. I will check.”

The Pakistani made a call on another phone.

Egan didn’t like it. He wanted to stop, right there. Check out of the Sheraton and catch a flight to anywhere. He hated any changes in the agreed routine.

Akbar came back on the line. His voice was thin, stretched. “This evening is fine,” he said. “Come to my office at seven o’clock.”

Egan deliberated what to do, but only for a moment. He couldn’t just break it off. What possible excuse could he give to his superiors in Los Angeles? Even Sophie Marx would think he had panicked.

“I’ll be there, and then, you know…” Egan let the words trail off so that the silence encompassed the rest of the plan.

When the call was over, he sent a BlackBerry message to the operations room, telling the duty officer that the timetable had been moved up. It was the middle of the night in Los Angeles. Would anyone at The Hit Parade even care?

Egan took a fitful nap and then went to the hotel gym. He spent nearly an hour on the elliptical trainer, watching a cricket match on the little television to take his mind off what was ahead. It was a one-day international against South Africa. The star batsman for Pakistan looked like a mullah, with a woolly beard and no mustache. He was bowled out, leg before wicket, just shy of his half-century.

Egan went over to the free weights. A fleshy Turk was using the bench, but he went away when Egan picked up the barbells.

His mind wandered as he lay on the bench between repetitions. He was supposed to go to the Lake District the next weekend with his girlfriend. He had booked a room at an expensive inn. Had he spent too much? Should he buy London property before the markets took off again? Was his hair thinning in the back? How many more reps should he do with the barbells to be tired enough to sleep that night?

When Egan returned to his room, he saw that it had been tossed. The hard drive of the computer had been drilled. That, at least, was predictable; they hit the laptops of most Western travelers. Egan showered and lay on the bed in his boxers for a while, watching more cricket. The South Africans were batting now. It was a soothing game, normally, all that green grass and so little action, but today he had the butterflies. His bowels were soft, and he hadn’t eaten anything in Pakistan yet.