The best of it was that he rarely asked permission. As the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, Gertz requested “lethal authority” from Headquarters—meaning that he could assassinate Iraqi targets of opportunity. The seventh floor was in a dither and asked for an opinion from the general counsel, but Gertz went ahead anyway. He had terminated two senior officials when he got retroactive permission, after the president heard about his exploits and said he wanted to give Gertz a medal.
Headquarters regarded Gertz as a troublemaker, but his reputation was made among the field officers. He went to the Counterterrorism Center after Baghdad, where he ran special access programs that nobody ever talked about. To stay out of trouble, he made friends with a few key senators and representatives on the Hill. He gave private briefings to the new president’s advisers during the transition. He had pushed all the right buttons, so when the White House decided to launch its bold new experiment, Gertz was in the right position.
Gertz had interviewed Marx in Los Angeles. She was one of several hundred people he tapped as possible candidates for the new unit. It was like being recruited by the CIA all over again. You didn’t apply; you were asked to appear at a clandestine location for an interview. When she met Gertz, Marx was initially prepared to dislike him. She had heard tales about his exploits and his reputation for arrogance, and she had known enough CIA macho men to last a lifetime.
But as they talked, she warmed to his pitch. He’d read into her record. He knew what she had accomplished in Beirut, and how she had been pulled out by a division chief who lost his nerve. He told her that she had been vegetating the past two years in a high-status, low-impact job at Headquarters that most other people thought was a big deal.
“You really need a change,” Gertz had told her. “If it isn’t this job, then I hope you find something else before you go stale.”
That did it. Marx knew that he was right. She was becoming a glorified “reports officer,” doing the same bland, facile work she had been given when she started at the agency. That was what the agency did with smart women: It made them managers and pushed them up the promotion ladder. It was a kind of repressive tolerance. Pretty soon they weren’t fit for real operations anymore, and they weren’t given an opportunity. They fell uphill.
Gertz offered the chance to take risks again. In the moment, Marx found that irresistible. A month later, she was settling into her new digs in Sherman Oaks and commuting in the pimpmobile to Studio City.
“Entertainment Is Our Business” was the logo on Marx’s new business card, just below the big letters that said: “The Hit Parade.” That was a lie, generically. But it was especially untrue on the day that she helped Howard Egan prepare for his trip to Pakistan.
3
KARACHI
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.
4
KARACHI
The afternoon was burning itself out in the old quarter of the city known as Saddar Town. The pink hazy light of dusk suffused the stucco buildings, but it would be gone before long. Howard Egan took a taxi to Mohammad Ali Jinnah Road, a mile north of the hotel, and wandered around the market where the old textile weavers hawked their goods. He didn’t turn to look for watchers, not even once. That was the hardest part before a meeting, to suppress the instinctual desire to see who might be following you.
Egan surveyed the old stock exchange; garlands of twinkling bulbs were draped from the roof like strings of pearls. To the southeast, past the “salty gate” of Kharadar, a half-moon was rising over the Arabian Sea. Pedestrians were spilling into the road, careening away like gulls at the approach of every car.
On the main streets, under the glare of the streetlights, the merchants and beggars were shouting for attention, and the car drivers were squawking their horns. But in the lee of the traffic, in the old shop stalls, there was a muffled quiet and you could hide yourself, as if in the folds of time.
The briefcase was heavy on Egan’s shoulder, and he was beginning to sweat through his shirt. That wouldn’t do. He sat in an air-conditioned coffeehouse on Jinnah Road until he had cooled off. At six-thirty he hailed a cab and traveled down Chundrigar Road to the Habib Bank Tower. Once, this had been Pakistan’s tallest building; but after thirty years of baking in the sun while other giant buildings sprouted nearby, it had become just another ziggurat of bleached concrete.
Egan sat in the air-conditioned lobby to cool off, and a few minutes before seven, he took the elevator to the eighteenth floor. Hamid Akbar’s secretary nodded in humble recognition. Egan had visited only a few months before. Akbar came out of the office to greet him.
“How do you do? How do you do?” Akbar took the American’s hand. “Beastly weather.”
Akbar was sweating, too. There were damp crescents under the arms of his tan suit, and the top of his shirt collar was moist. Well, why not? It was June. His face was soft and pudgy in the cheeks. He didn’t wear a mustache. He looked like the sort of ambitious young man who might join the Karachi chapter of the Young Presidents Organization: a man who wanted to meet foreigners, exchange business cards. He was a generation removed from the heat and dust.
Egan began his patter about Alphabet Capital’s new fund. It was called Oak Leaf II. Its predecessor, Oak Leaf I, was doing splendidly. Second-quarter returns could top 30 percent, on an annualized basis. It was an excellent new opportunity for clients such as Mr. Akbar.
“Tip-top,” said the Pakistani.
“Very impressive, I am sure.”
Akbar listened politely to the rest of the presentation, but he was distracted. When Egan finished, there was an awkward pause.
“It’s just that I am a bit strapped now,” said Akbar. “It’s not possible.”
Akbar cleared his throat. He opened his desk drawer and removed a piece of paper, which he pushed across the teak desktop toward Egan. It had an address in a suburban district of northwest Karachi. “11-22 Gilani Buildings, Sector 2, Baldia Town.” Below that was a time. “2100.”
Egan studied the paper and committed the information to memory. He took his pen from his coat pocket and wrote on the note:
“Tonight?”
Akbar nodded. He let the paper sit. He didn’t want to touch it. Egan pointed toward the message and crossed his hands in an X. Get rid of it. Akbar took the note and excused himself. Thirty seconds later there was the sound of a flush, and the Pakistani emerged from the toilet adjoining his office. He had combed his hair, but you could see the beads of sweat on his scalp.
Egan went back to his investment pitch. He talked about flexible minimums and alternative investments, just to finish out the time for anyone who might be listening. The Pakistani looked relieved when it was over.
Egan took the first taxi in the queue outside Habib Tower Plaza. He settled into the musty cabin of the Hyundai and pulled his BlackBerry from the briefcase. He sent the rendezvous address to the operations room in Los Angeles. They wouldn’t like that neighborhood. It skirted Ittehad Town, the district where migrants from the tribal areas had settled.
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