“No, indeed, I do not. Or even the quarter of it. And I am sorry for it, whatever it may be. But I hope that you will take care of yourself in these treacherous times. You are a guest in our house. You are precious to us.”
“Appreciate it.” Barkin’s eyes were flat and his demeanor was impassive. He was not a man who was easily flattered or cajoled. “What’s up, General?”
“Let me put it to you, sir: We have had many successes together in recent years, have we not? You could almost say that we are partners. Am I right? And so we like to think that there is a bit of trust between us, even though we are a poor and weak country compared to the United States. We have our pride, you see.”
“I never forget that, Mohammed, not for one day.”
“Well, then, I have a question for you. Normally, I would not trouble you in the late afternoon with such a detail, but this one is rather important. I hope you will forgive the imposition, and apologize to Mrs. Barkin for delaying your return home this evening.”
“Mrs. Barkin lives in Washington, General. I don’t know if I can give you an answer, but I won’t tell you a lie.”
General Malik smiled. Americans did not like lying to others. It made them uncomfortable. Their specialty was lying to themselves.
“Well, now, sir. Here it is: Are you running operations in Pakistan outside of your normal organization? Forgive me for being so blunt, but that is what I must ask.”
Barkin cocked his head, as if he had ear trouble and wanted to make sure he’d heard it right. He might be old, but he wasn’t stupid.
“Sorry, I didn’t quite hear that, General. What do you mean?”
The Pakistani sat back in his chair. He put his hands together and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he spoke again, louder this time.
“Let me state the question as clearly as I can, sir: Is the United States sending intelligence officers into Pakistan outside the normal CIA cover channels? Is your agency doing it? Or is some other agency doing it? That is what I want to know: Are you running a new game against us? You see, we think that we know you well, but we hear rumblings of something that we do not know. And let us be honest: No ones likes to be surprised.”
Barkin’s mouth puckered as if he had just eaten something bad.
“Shit, Mohammed. You know I can’t answer a question like that. I mean, hell, we run all sorts of operations, declared and undeclared, just like you do. We have agency employees at the embassy who conduct liaison with your service, and you know their names. But if I told you that we had no other presence in Pakistan, and no nonofficial officers, you know I’d be lying. But that’s business, right? We don’t look up your skirt, and we don’t expect you to start looking up ours.”
The American gave him a wink, as if they were two old poker players who knew the casino rules. But the Pakistani was not in a mood for professional courtesy.
“I am talking about something different, Homer. I know all about your NOCs. I could name a dozen for you. I know all about your ‘forward-deployed military assets.’ Perhaps I even know the names of your contractors, including the ones who work for other agencies, which you, my dear friend, are not supposed to know about. But this is different.”
“Hey, Mohammed, I’m just a farm boy from Pennsylvania. I’m not getting it. You better tell me what you mean, straight up.”
The Pakistani general sighed. He did not like to be so direct. It was awkward. But he had no choice.
“We have picked up signs of a new capability, Homer, with new missions. I cannot be more specific. But we see something coming toward us that we do not like. And I want you to know that. For, you know, we must protect ourselves.”
Barkin shook his head again. He moistened his lips, as if to prepare the way for what he was about to say.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. We don’t have any new capabilities. Not that I know about. Hell, we can’t even manage the old ones we’ve got. You’re barking up the wrong tree here, pal.”
“I could call Cyril Hoffman at Headquarters and complain that you are an obstructionist and should come home. He would not be amused.”
“Call whoever you like, Mohammed. I am telling you the truth.”
General Malik studied his visitor, trying to decide whether he was believable. A ruined man is harder to read than a fresh, eager one. His lies could be tucked into the bags under his eyes, or hidden in the folds of flesh below his chin. It was hard to know, but if the general had been forced to make a wager, he would have bet that the American was telling the truth. Whatever was going on, he probably didn’t know about it.
The Pakistani changed the subject. The ISI had gathered new evidence of Indian funding for the nationalist movement in Baluchistan. This was a most serious matter. General Malik would be sending a report, for transmittal to Langley. And he was very sorry, the new American requests for visas could not be approved at present. The two men talked for thirty minutes about such details, never returning to the subject that had vexed General Malik.
When the meeting was done, Homer Barkin shook the ISI chief’s hand, not quite so heartily as before, and lumbered away. He was at the door when the general put his hand on the station chief’s shoulder. Malik spoke quietly in parting, without his usual bob and weave.
“Be careful, my friend,” said the Pakistani. “If you stick your fingers in new places, they may get cut off.”
“Too late for that, Mohammed,” said Barkin. “Whatever this is about, it’s already done and gone. And it’s not going to be my problem, anyway. It belongs to you, and somebody back home I don’t even know.”
The general had a walled garden next to his office, with a few square feet of well-tended grass, as green as a cricket pitch, and an honor guard of rosebushes that were soft pastels in the last light of the afternoon. When General Malik had a puzzle to solve, he liked to sit here alone, in a wooden Adirondack chair that he had bought years ago in the United States.
Malik entered his garden now, and installed himself in what he liked to call his thinking chair. He lit up a cigarette, one of the few indulgences he permitted himself. A steward emerged, clad in white gloves and military livery, and asked if he wanted anything to eat or drink, but the general shooed him away.
What were the Americans doing? It was hardly the first time General Malik had asked himself that question over the years, and there were other puzzles marked USA that he was trying to work out. But this time it had a special edge: The Americans were changing the rules of the game. They must think they were being clever in Washington, but they were walking into terrain where nobody could help them—not the general, not his agents, not their clandestine contacts. The Americans would blame Pakistan for their troubles, and in particular the general’s own service, but they were the mischief-makers. They would get caught, and it would be their fault.
The general had a rule in life: Do not interrupt someone when he is making a mistake. Let others make their moves first, so that you can react and turn them to advantage. The general had his contacts; he would watch and wait. To say that the Pakistani was playing a double game did not do him justice; his strategy was far more complicated than that.
2
STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA
Sophie Marx was up before dawn. She had a phone date with one of her officers in London, a skittish man named Howard Egan who was heading for Karachi and wasn’t happy about it. Marx was one of those people who had a knack for waking up just before the alarm sounded, even if it was five a.m., as if her eyelids were wired to a celestial timer. She rolled the width of the mattress to disarm the clock. Her big bed was empty, as usual. She was picky. She was still in her thirties, still in middle school in the secret world, but one of her discoveries as she had grown older was that most things in life didn’t measure up to their promise. Many women teach themselves to lie to get along, but Marx wasn’t one of them.
She went for a quick run in her neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, striding past th
e stunted palm trees and the half-green lawns, and then showered and dressed for work. She had a face and body that were easy to take care of: long, jet-black hair that framed a face that was the soft, thin color of skim milk. She had just wisps of eyebrows that arched naturally in a way that looked mischievous, even when she was serious. When she wore her shirts unbuttoned a notch, she looked like a tomboy rather than a tease.
She pulled from her closet a simple pair of jeans and a tailored black-leather jacket from Yves Saint Laurent in Paris that had cost her nearly two thousand euros. She added a pair of black boots; they made her look tall and leggy, even though she was just five-foot-four. She buzzed open the garage next to her small house and climbed into her big car. It was a black Cadillac Escalade with smoked windows, which she called, with relish, the “pimpmobile.”
Driving down Ventura Boulevard in the gray light before sunrise, Marx made a mental checklist of what she had to do that day. There was Egan. He didn’t like going to Pakistan, but nobody did anymore. She needed to remind him, straight up. This was why the operation in Los Angeles had come into existence: to allow deep-cover officers to go where they couldn’t go, and do what they couldn’t do. Of course Egan was nervous; that would keep him safe. She rehearsed the speech in her mind.
The light was turning yellow at Woodman Avenue. There was nobody around, but Marx slowed to a stop anyway. She was still thinking about Egan. She would have to hand him off soon to another case officer. He would be upset about that, too, probably. She would wait until he returned from Pakistan to tell him about her promotion. She had been named “chief of counterintelligence,” though it wasn’t clear what that meant in her little shop. There was no organization chart. Her boss, Jeffrey Gertz, was making it up as he went along. That was what Marx liked about the Los Angeles experiment. It was fresh. They got to make new mistakes.
The light was turning green. In the next lane was a red pickup on struts, with two stoners in the cab who had obviously been up all night drinking. The driver of the truck, an hombre in a turned-around Dodgers cap, was leering at her. Marx gunned the Escalade off the line and didn’t look back until she’d made it to Coldwater Canyon.
Marx parked her car in the basement and took the elevator up to the third floor, where she badged in with the overnight security guard. He gazed at her with heavy-lidded eyes; he still had a half hour left before his shift ended, but he looked cooked.
“Wake up, Chuck,” she said. “The sun’s coming up.”
She went to her small office and turned on the lights. On the wall was a framed poster from the movie Thelma and Louise, which showed Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in their convertible, being chased by police cars as they were about to drive off a cliff. Above the image were the words: “Somebody said get a life…so they did.” On her shelf was a doll wearing sunglasses and a trench coat, with a tag that said “CIA Barbie,” which a friend had given her years before when she graduated from the Career Trainee class.
Marx used a Skype connection to call Howard Egan at the hedge fund in London that provided his cover. The name of the firm was Alphabet Capital, and it managed many billions of dollars, but Marx had never understood just how it worked: how much of it was real, and how much was a cover for intelligence operations. She had asked Egan once, and he had said not to worry: The only person who really knew was the owner of Alphabet Capital, a man named Thomas Perkins, and he wouldn’t talk if his pants were on fire.
Marx tried to sound enthusiastic as she went through her list of bullet points with Egan. He answered grumpily, giving brief responses to each. When she finished her script, there was a pause.
“I hate this trip,” Egan said. “It’s insecure.”
“It will be fine,” Marx answered. “Stop worrying. You are exactly what it says on your business card. So chill out: We have your back.”
Egan laughed at the attempt to dispel his anxiety.
“Great,” he said. “Now tell me, who has my front?”
He was talking himself into paralysis. Marx had seen it before with colleagues. Once you let yourself start to worry, the floodgates opened.
“Suck it up,” she said. “Call me when you’re out. Anything else, call the ops center. Are we cool?”
“We’re cold,” said Egan. “Freezing.”
“Out, here,” said Marx, as if she were ending a radio transmission. There was nothing more to say.
“Out,” responded Egan gloomily.
And that was it. She didn’t think about him the rest of the day. He would get through it somehow, because people always did. She thought about writing a note to Gertz, her boss, suggesting that it was time to reassign Egan to something a little less stressful. People began to arrive soon after, and Marx fell into the atonal melody of office life.
The sign out front of the building where Sophie Marx worked said that it was the headquarters of The Hit Parade LLP, a firm that according to its Dun & Bradstreet profile sold international music and television rights, negotiated licensing agreements and organized trade shows on the side. That explained the office in the Valley, big and roomy, but cheap, too. It explained the contacts with dozens of small firms and their peripatetic representatives, always flying off to strange locations. And it explained the constant stream of international calls and email messages.
“Hit Parade—we’ve got what’s hot.” That was the way Marx answered the phone, if anyone ever called her number at the office. The name made it sound like she worked with the Beach Boys and Sandra Dee. She had business cards, too, with a dummy switchboard number that never answered, which she sometimes gave to men in bars who were annoying.
Marx knew the short history of the place, the founding “myth,” you might say. Like so many other things about America, The Hit Parade was an aftershock of September 11, 2001. The CIA had been sent off to war, and then a few years later it had been sent to the stocks for a public bashing, when people decided they didn’t like the nasty parts of what the intelligence agencies had been asked to do. That left people at Headquarters feeling demoralized and unloved; agency veterans tried to stay out of trouble by doing the slow roll, which only made things worse. Eventually a new administration took office, and the potentates said, in effect, why are we torturing ourselves? Let the old CIA tramp steamer rust away at the dock, and meanwhile we’ll launch a stealthy new speedboat.
The White House had called it “new think,” as opposed to the witless “old think” that had come before. There was a mantra, among the handful of people who knew about the project: The world had changed; an intelligence service couldn’t operate out of embassies when it was trying to recruit people who wanted to blow up embassies. Technology enabled a new clandestine structure. A secure communications system, which used to require an embassy code room, could now be put on a laptop, or even a BlackBerry.
They told new staff members like Marx that the new president loved the idea. He wanted to be a change agent, so he had decided to change the most reviled three-letter acronym in town. The chairmen of the two congressional intelligence committees had signed on, and so had the handful of other people who were briefed on the idea. The few who knew about it accepted the absolute necessity that it be a secret and deniable activity. The old system was a train wreck, so they had created something truly new—floated it free from the wreckage and hid it where no one would ever think to look.
The president turned over liaison with this new organization to his chief of staff, Ted Yazdi, a combative former investment banker who loved secrets and, in another life, might have been an intelligence officer himself. Yazdi managed the operation out of the White House. He never put anything in writing; he never told anyone other than the president what he was doing.
Headquarters didn’t like it, but they couldn’t stop it. They proposed that the new unit focus on the dirty work the traditionalists didn’t much like, anyway—“special activities,” otherwise known as covert action. So in addition to the existing stations abroad, an array of new “platfo
rms” was built for a cadre of nonofficial-cover officers and their laptops. The platforms had to connect up somewhere. The old boys wanted someplace close, like Fredericksburg or Rockville, where they could keep the great experiment from getting out of hand. But for once, the advocates of change had their way.
It was decided that the base for this new network should be far from Washington. Consideration was given to Denver, San Francisco, Las Vegas and even Charleston, West Virginia—which just happened to be the hometown of a key member of the congressional leadership. But finally a decision was made to locate the hub in Los Angeles, in a staggeringly ordinary office building in the San Fernando Valley, heretofore famous as the home of America’s pornographic movie industry. The building they chose had been the headquarters of a mortgage-lending company that had gone bust before the agency bought it through a series of cutouts.
To keep an eye on this experiment, Headquarters selected one of its crustiest old secret warriors, a man named Cyril Hoffman. He was the associate deputy director, the all-but-invisible number three position in the agency, and a man famous for keeping his head down. Hoffman was an eccentric who liked to collect first editions of British nineteenth-century novels, and whose iPod playlist featured modern operas by Philip Glass. He had a habit of humming when he was on the telephone and, occasionally, when he was in meetings. People who didn’t know Hoffman thought that he was a crank. That was a mistake.
Sophie Marx joined up because she was bored with her fancy job at Headquarters—and decided that she liked the iconoclastic man who had been chosen to run the new organization. His name was Jeffrey Gertz, and he was already something of a legend among younger officers.
Gertz had started his ascent in Morocco, making himself indispensable to the crown prince who later became king. Then he had gone into Baghdad in 2002, before the war, under paper-thin cover as an Eastern European diplomat. He had been a one-man station—planting listening devices, affixing infrared beacons to guide the bombers, recruiting and running agents. He had operated like it was 1943 in occupied France and he was working for the OSS. Young officers who were in the loop began trading stories about him: Have you heard what Gertz has done now?
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