Bloodmoney

15

Sophie Marx was numb from fatigue when she returned from Dubai. She hadn’t slept well on the outward leg because of worries about the meeting ahead. She had hoped to collapse into her seat on the way home, but she slept only fitfully: Her body was too heavy for slumber, and her mind was too hot. She had taken on responsibility, on behalf of Gertz and the whole team, for investigating the disappearance of a colleague. But she was coming home empty-handed. Her theory had been wrong. She was still baffled about how Howard Egan’s cover had been broken, and she didn’t know who else in her organization might be vulnerable. It was an oppressive sense of failing in an assignment where she had badly wanted to do well.

She tossed back and forth on the couchette of the Emirates jet, trying to get comfortable. But sleep didn’t come, and she thought about ways she could answer her questions. Part of her problem, she concluded after many hours, was that she didn’t understand the context for these events: Why was Egan in Pakistan in the first place? Why was he paying money to tribal emirs? What was the mission for which Gertz had risked this man’s life?

Marx went to the office, tired as she was, after a brief stop at home to shower and change. She wanted to begin querying the files to see if she could answer these questions. Jeff Gertz was away on one of his mystery trips, which made it easier. She figured that she didn’t have to ask his permission to pull the operational files, because he had already granted it.

The Hit Parade’s most sensitive information was not in the computer system, but kept in hard copy only, in a large room called “the Vault” on the ninth floor. The keeper of this archaic library was a retired military officer who had formerly worked for the National Security Agency’s military cryptology branch, known as the Central Security Service. He was a fussy man who had helped protect some of the country’s biggest secrets for several decades. He was always called “the Colonel,” even though he had retired from active duty ten years before.

Marx took the elevator to the ninth floor and walked to the colonel’s lair. The door was closed and he didn’t answer at first, perhaps hoping that the visitor would go away. She knocked again, harder, and this time the door opened and out stepped the Colonel. He was a short, balding man, little taller than Marx herself, with a florid face and a bulbous nose. His actual name was Samuel Sinkler, but people rarely used it; he preferred rank only.

“Sorry to disturb you, Colonel, but I need to look at the Pakistan operations files.”

She showed him her badge.

“Nope,” he answered. “Sorry, you can’t have them.”

“But Mr. Gertz personally authorized me to look at all files I needed to investigate the Howard Egan case.”

“He didn’t tell me that.” The Colonel had a thin smile. He liked saying no.

Marx shook her head. She was tired and didn’t like being jerked around.

“I need those files, Colonel. I can’t do my work without them.”

“That’s not my problem, miss. You could get Mr. Gertz, but he isn’t here.” He smiled again.

She pondered what to do. He obviously expected her to give up if he said no often enough.

“I’m not leaving until I see those files. Will you give me access if Steve Rossetti says it’s okay?”

“That’s a hypothetical,” said the Colonel.

She picked up a phone on the nearest desk and dialed Rossetti’s extension.

“Steve, it’s Sophie. I’m back from Dubai and I have an emergency. I need access to some files on the ninth floor and Colonel Sinkler says he needs someone’s permission. Can you come up now?”

There was a pause, while Rossetti temporized on the other end. He didn’t like making decisions.

“I really need help now, Steve,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll have to call Jeff. He won’t be pleased, but I have no choice.”

That did it. Rossetti arrived five minutes later and personally signed the necessary piece of paper for the Colonel. Neither man was happy.

“Thanks, gents,” she said breezily. The Colonel marched her back to the Vault and unlocked the steel door, while Rossetti retreated to his office.

It was cold in the stacks. The Colonel was one of those men who believed that people worked more efficiently at lower temperatures. Marx was wearing a long-sleeved blouse, but she was shivering after thirty minutes. She descended to her office and returned with a cardigan sweater, which she buttoned to the neck. It was dark among the racks and cabinets, so she asked the Colonel for a flashlight, which he grudgingly provided. He seemed to think that darkness, too, was part of good security.

Marx started with the paper records of Egan’s travels. These were more detailed than the computer records she had consulted before. They showed a total of five trips to Pakistan over the previous thirteen months. Two of those journeys had been to Karachi, two to Lahore and one to Islamabad. To see what Egan had been doing on those trips, Marx had to consult two other sets of files. The first was his personal 201 file, which recorded the active cases he had been managing, but using cryptonyms to conceal the true names of his contacts. At the time of his disappearance, he was the case officer for four agents, all of whom had the digraph “AC,” which was The Hit Parade’s notation for Pakistan, borrowed from an old CIA cryptonym.

To learn the real identities behind those code names, Marx had to consult a separate registry inside the Vault, which was locked and guarded by video surveillance. Here again, the Colonel initially said no. Marx summoned Rossetti back, and he signed another piece of paper that allowed her access.

“I hope you find something,” said Rossetti. “If this turns out to be a wild goose chase, Gertz will be pissed off.”

“I’ll worry about Jeff,” she answered. “Not your problem.”

Rossetti walked back to elevator, muttering as he went, “Get some sleep.”

The Colonel told her to turn her back while he punched the proper code into the cyber-lock. The door clicked open. She fumbled for the light switch and set to work.

Marx began matching crypts with true identities. She first found the name of the man she had interrogated in Dubai, Hamid Akbar. She knew he would be one of the four. Egan had met him four times over the thirteen months, twice in Karachi, once in Istanbul and once in Abu Dhabi. The second name was Azim Mohammed al-Darwesh, whom she assumed must be Akbar’s uncle. Egan had met him just once, four months before the kidnapping, in Abu Dhabi, on the same date as the meeting with his nephew, Akbar, who evidently had accompanied him to an initial get-acquainted meeting outside the country. This much was simply confirmation of what she already assumed.

Then came the surprises.

The third name listed was Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Chaudhary. He appeared to be a serving officer in the Pakistani military. Egan had met him three times: once in London, once in Beirut and once in Lahore. Marx ran traces on Chaudhary’s name and discovered that he served in the office of the chief of Combat Development, which was the branch of the Pakistani military that had overseen its nuclear weapons program. He was from a prominent Punjabi family, and he was the third generation to have served in the military.

The fourth name was Professor Aziz Mukhtar. He was the rector of Mohiuddin Islamic University in Azad Kashmir. Traces on the professor showed that he was a leading activist for the liberation of Kashmir from Indian control. Egan had met with him twice, both times in Dubai.

It was an unlikely mix: A banker, a tribal leader, a military officer from a great aristocratic family and a Muslim activist. Marx was confused. These might be foreign-intelligence operations, designed to gather information about Pakistan’s plans and intentions. But Marx doubted that. FI collection was still the province of the old CIA structure. This looked like something different.

Marx knocked on the Colonel’s door. He assumed she was finished for the day, and extended his hand to receive the flashlight. But she had come with a new question.

“If you please, Colonel, I would like to look at the disbursements register,” she said. “I need to see what we’ve been paying the agents whose names I’ve been pulling.”

“You can’t,” answered the security officer. The blank, unhelpful look on his face shaded toward a smile. It gave him pleasure, once more, to say those words of refusal.

“Let’s not go through this again. I can go back downstairs and get Steve Rossetti a third time, and he can come up and tell you the same thing as before. But, honestly, Colonel, that’s a waste of time. Why don’t you just say yes?”

“I can’t. It’s not possible to see those records.”

“Why the hell not?” It was a relief to be able to swear at this cranky old man, but she wasn’t expecting his answer.

“Because those records aren’t here, that’s why not. And watch your language.”

“Where are they, if they aren’t here?”

“Mr. Gertz has them. I don’t know where he keeps them. And I know for certain that nobody has ever accessed them, because if they had, they would have asked me first, just like you did. But it’s a waste of time. The disbursements are off-line. When I have questions about money, I ask Mr. Gertz. So should you.”

Sophie Marx returned to the Vault, more confused now than before. She still wanted to answer the basic question: What were The Hit Parade’s objectives in Pakistan? But she wondered now if she might have been misjudging the program’s scope. She had assumed that Howard Egan was the only officer handling Pakistani cases, but that might be wrong. She took up her flashlight again and went prowling in the main personnel and travel files. Because the data wasn’t computerized, there was no easy way to do a search and cross-tab for anyone who had visited Pakistan or handled a Pakistani agent. It all had to be done by hand.

Marx went back to the registry of cryptonyms and looked for all the cases with the AC digraph, which marked the agents as Pakistani. It took her the rest of the afternoon to pull together the information, but it was worth the trouble. She realized that she had been looking at a piece of a larger Pakistan operation.

There were fully nineteen cases, including the four that had been handled by Howard Egan. The others had been run by case officers who were based in Paris, Beirut, New Delhi, Cairo and Amsterdam.

Armed with the agents’ code names, she went back to the inner file of true names and began to assemble the picture. The Hit Parade had recruited senior officials from all three major Pakistani political parties; it was paying money to the leaders of four more tribes in the frontier areas, two in North Waziristan, one in Orakzai and one in Malakand. It had two more agents from Kashmir on the payroll, and three prominent Pakistani clerics.

A new operation was scheduled soon, according to the files. A young case officer based in Amsterdam was about to meet for the first time with a new prospect, a young Pakistani diplomat from a well-known family who was serving in the Pakistan Embassy in Moscow. The name of The Hit Parade officer from Amsterdam stuck in her mind. It was Alan Frankel: He was the guy with red hair who was writing a blog as part of his cover. She had met him six months ago, when he was getting some new tradecraft training. She had thought at the time that he was cute, and had half hoped he would ask her out, but he hadn’t.

What Sophie Marx had found looked like a broad network, of the sort that back at Headquarters might have been handled by the Special Activities Division. In theory, all such covert operations were supposed to be driven by a strategic plan, which was reviewed and updated periodically. But there was no trace of such strategic guidance for Pakistan operations. Where did these projects come from? How were they tasked? Who suggested the names?

She went to the Colonel one last time before turning in her flashlight for good.

“I’d like to see the Special Activities finding for Pakistan,” she said. “And don’t just say, ‘You can’t.’”

“You can’t.”

“Oh, please! Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t exist. Not on paper at least, not that I’ve seen.”

“Well, where is it? There has to be a plan. We don’t just send people all over the world willy-nilly. There’s a directive, a finding.”

“It’s in Mr. Gertz’s head. He’s the boss. Maybe he writes it down, and maybe he doesn’t, I wouldn’t know about that. I’m sure he reviews it with somebody, but I wouldn’t know about that, either. So what you’re going to have to do, Miss Marx, is wait to see Mr. Gertz when he gets back.”

For once, the Colonel had it completely right. There was no choice now but to wait for the boss to return.

Marx stopped by Rossetti’s office on her way out, to thank him for his intervention. He was still there, gazing at his computer screen, when Marx stuck her head in the door. Rossetti looked nervous at first, thinking she had come to ask him for something else, and he was relieved when she said she was packing it in for the night.

“You don’t give up, do you?” he said. “Are you always like this?”

The question caught her off guard. She was so tired, all she could do was answer honestly.

“I’m persistent. At least, I used to be, when I was in the field. I got lazy when I was back at Headquarters. It’s all in my file, if you want the details.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve been reading. I got curious.”

“So you know I got in trouble in Addis Ababa?”

“Yeah, but why? That wasn’t clear. They always leave the good stuff out of a 201.”

“I got burned, that’s what happened. I was covered as a UNESCO officer in Paris, which gave me a reason to visit U.N. offices in Lebanon and Ethiopia regularly. I was working developmentals mostly, going in and out of Beirut, working out of the UNESCO office in Mar Elias. I nailed a recruitment there that got us inside the Hezbollah communications net. I was thinking I was pretty cool. But then it got nasty.”

“What happened?”

“They made me on my next trip to Ethiopia. It was bad.”

“Tell me the story. I was in Addis for a few months in the nineties.”

“Okay, so I picked up surveillance my first day. I thought I saw a chase car following my taxi to U.N. headquarters. I didn’t worry too much, and I didn’t report it. Addis wasn’t a high-threat assignment, and there were friendlies all over, and I didn’t want to scratch the trip. So I went out a second day, this time in a UNESCO staff car, a nice big Mercedes to visit a demonstration project in Debre Zeit.”

“That was a mistake, I take it.”

“Big time. Two vehicles shadowed us as soon as we left the international zone. We kept going until we got to a Muslim district called Saris, where the Somali refugees lived. The road narrowed. No friendlies around. Bad scene. Ambush zone.”

“What saved you?”

“Luck, frankly. I screamed at my driver as the cutoff car was coming toward us. I told him to floor it, and that if he slowed down, I would shoot him. It turned out that he driven a taxicab in America. That was our salvation, the fact that this Ethiopian knew how to drive like a crazy man. He gunned the car onto the shoulder. The chase cars tried to follow, but he was driving a Mercedes that could do over a hundred, no problem, and their cars were crap. So we outran them, basically.”

“No shit.” Rossetti was shaking his head. He was impressed, despite himself.

“I called the emergency number at the embassy, and the police showed up a few minutes later, and that was that.”

“And nobody got hurt?”

“Not physically. My cover was gone. Even I knew that. I put in my resignation papers at UNESCO, gave up my super-gorgeous Paris apartment and came home to Headquarters, where I was vegging out until Gertz rescued me.”

“How did the bad guys make you?” asked Rossetti “Did CI ever figure it out?”

“Nothing official. But I think it was a technical hit, some kind of data mining, back in Lebanon.”

“Come on!” Rossetti shook his head. Insurgents weren’t smart enough to do data mining.

“I’m serious. It was my cell phone calls. The Lebanese government, meaning Hezbollah, had accessed my call records. When they matched up the call data with calls made by other people they were watching, I was busted. They passed the information to their friends in Addis.”

“You really think they’re that smart?”

“They don’t have to be smart, Steve. They just need to have the same stuff we do: data-mining software; pattern analysis, link analysis; watch lists. They could be stupid as mules, but they could still nail the old CIA. That’s why The Hit Parade exists, right? To go places where they can’t find us.”

“I hope that still works,” said Rossetti.

Marx was going to say something upbeat in response, but it wasn’t in her.

Jeff Gertz’s mystery trip was to Washington, D.C., perhaps the least mysterious city in the world. He went there to meet with the president’s chief of staff, Ted Yazdi. It was an unusual encounter nonetheless. It took place in a private home in Bethesda that belonged to one of Yazdi’s assistants, who had vacated the house at the boss’s request. It was like an agent meeting in that respect, though it was hard to say who had recruited whom.

The safe house was a big suburban estate up on a hill. It looked like the clubhouse of a country club, with a big portico and a facade of brick and stone, and well-mowed grass on all sides. The floodlights were on, and a man in a bulky suit was standing in the driveway, scanning the street.

Yazdi was waiting in the living room when Gertz knocked on the door. He was wearing dark glasses, even though the curtains were drawn, and was chewing on a piece of gum. He sat on the edge of the couch, anxious for the meeting to begin. There are civilians who are easily seduced by secrets, who chortle over the details the briefers throw in about foreign leaders’ sex lives or health problems, and Yazdi was one of them. He was eager to enter an otherwise forbidden world.

Yazdi had asked for an update on The Hit Parade’s operations. Nothing on paper, for obvious reasons. The president was preoccupied with his legislative agenda, and the chief of staff didn’t want to bother him, so he was holding it in his head. It was hard for him to keep it all straight.

“I get paid to be nervous,” he began. “That’s what I do for a living. So I need to know all your shit. It’s on me if anything goes wrong. I’m holding the bag.”

“Nobody’s holding the bag, sir, because there is no bag. As I told you when we agreed to set up our capability, we don’t exist. We are self-funding, and self-liquidating.”

Yazdi took off his sunglasses. He had a narrow face and a mouth that was always parted slightly at the lips, as if ready to bite.

“I don’t believe you. How is that possible? I worked for an investment bank. Money has to come from somewhere.”

“Don’t ask me, Mr. Yazdi, please. You don’t want to know. We have a system. It works. We have more than enough money.”

“Okay.” Yazdi nodded. He hated not having every last secret. “Tell me the list.”

Gertz ran through the list of countries where they had operations. It had all the names you would expect: Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan. And it had a few names that you wouldn’t expect, such as China and Russia and France.

“Pakistan’s the biggest, right?” asked Yazdi. “That’s the hardest one, isn’t it? They’ve got two hundred million pissed-off people, plus nuclear weapons. Scary shit.”

“The Paks are our main target right now, sir. That’s where we have put the most effort, in people and money.”

“Is it working?” asked Yazdi. “That crazy shit in Karachi when your guy vanished scared me.”

“It will take time. But money does wonders when you spread it around. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to be rich. Even in Pakistan.”

“How do you get your names? I mean, how do you know who to bribe?”

“People tell us things. Old friends, new friends, throw in some secret ingredients. Put them all together, cook it in the oven and, voila, it’s a souffle.”

“I hope so, buddy. This is ‘Project Pax.’ That’s what I told the president. We’ve spent enough time fighting our enemies. Now we are going to buy them off. It’s time for ‘global green,’ meaning money. We are going to have a leveraged buyout of all the people who have been trying to fuck us over. That’s my line to the boss, just so you know. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s the strategy.”

Gertz nodded. Strategy was not something that interested him. He was an operator; he usually left the big-think stuff to others, though in this case there wasn’t really anyone to leave it to, other than the gum-chewing White House chief of staff, who had only the vaguest notion of what they were doing.

Gertz didn’t worry about it. His job was to serve the president, and if the president wanted to hose the war zone with money so people would stop killing Americans and he could get reelected, that was fine. Gertz wanted to get the job done. He found the right people, assembled lists of names, developed capabilities and covers. And soon the activity had taken on a life of its own; it had been set in motion and now it was hard to stop.

“Project Pax,” said Gertz, nodding his head. “That’s great. I like that. The president will get a Nobel Peace Prize, and you and I will be the only people who will understand how it happened.”