“I’ll call Langley in a minute,” he said. “Let me think. Where’s the nearest extraction team?”
“Bagram,” said Rossetti. “They’re saddled and ready, twenty-four/seven.”
“Well, call them. Tell them we may need them in a hurry, but don’t tell them why yet.”
“Sorry, Jeff, but we need an okay from Headquarters to call Bagram. Those are military assets. We don’t have the authority to task them.”
“That ask-permission crap was supposed to be over.”
“That’s not what Headquarters says. You want me to call CTC and find out what they’ve got cooking?” Rossetti, among other things, was the liaison to the Counterterrorism Center, where Gertz had worked in a previous assignment.
“Ask them what’s going on in the Tribal Areas. From what I hear it’s the same crazy shit out there. Tell CTC that if they have any Preds up today, maybe this one time they could hold off blowing people away, until we get our guy back.”
“Roger. But they won’t listen. We do our thing, they do theirs.”
“Precisely. Net result, zero.” Gertz shooed his hand for Rossetti to leave.
“I need to make some calls. Tell me when you hear from Egan. He’s a burnout, that guy, I’m telling you. Too long in the job. He’ll show up, and then I’m going to fire his ass.”
Gertz closed the office door. He sat back in his big black chair for a moment, trying to think it through, but he couldn’t focus. There were too many knots. He had no option but to ask for help.
He picked up the secure phone and called the associate deputy director in Langley, Cyril Hoffman, who was The Hit Parade’s official point of contact.
Gertz didn’t trust Hoffman; the man was odd: He liked to wear ascots and Panama hats and vests with gold chains. He was from a famous CIA family, which had sent cousins and uncles into the agency for generations. He had started in the Near East Division, like most of his notorious relatives, but a decade ago he had abandoned the family nest in favor of Support—arranging travel and housing and the other humdrum logistical details that allowed the agency to function. In that role, he had amassed an unusual network of power. Nearly everyone at the CIA owed him a favor, as did people in many other parts of the government, as well.
“Bad news?” asked Hoffman when he got on the line. He sounded almost merry.
“How did you know?” answered Gertz.
“Rossetti told me I should expect a call. And frankly, Jeff, why else would you be in touch?”
“I have an officer in Karachi who’s AWOL. He missed a meeting an hour ago. That place is the Wild West, and I’m worried.”
“Tell me what you need, my friend,” said Hoffman. His voice was liquid.
“Rossetti says you have a declared officer in the consulate in Karachi. I need for him to notify the Sindhi police right now that an American citizen is missing, presumed in trouble. Under no circumstances should he suggest any USG connection to the man. I’ll send you the alias name and passport number when I hang up. He was covered as a businessman working for a hedge fund in London called Alphabet Capital. He traveled often to Pakistan.”
Hoffman made a clucking noise with his tongue, as if he were correcting a pupil.
“I think you mean that the consular officer should talk to the Sindhi police, not the base chief, if you want to keep the agency out of it.”
“Right. As if the Paks think there’s a difference.”
“Oh, my, they know us better than you might imagine,” said Hoffman. “Can we give the Karachi police a location?”
“We have the GPS coordinates of his BlackBerry. But I suspect that the man and the BlackBerry are no longer in the same place.”
“That’s unfortunate. Anything else?”
“Find the driver,” said Gertz. “That’s where the Paks should start. Find the taxi driver who was taking my man to his meet.”
“Uh, what’s the flap potential here?”
“If he has been captured? Pretty damned big, I’d say. If he’s dead, not so big.”
“Can we grab him?”
“Sure, if we can find him. That’s the other favor I need to ask. Can you get an extraction team from Bagram on the scene, pronto?”
“Yes, but the Paks will get squirrelly.”
“Not if you don’t tell them. Fly in an extra team from one of the task forces. Put them in a hotel in Karachi. Send some weapons and shit over from the consulate. Have them chase any signals we pick up. If we don’t need them, you can send them back to Afghanistan and nobody will be the wiser.”
Hoffman paused. There was a reedy noise through the phone that sounded almost like he was humming.
“What about the ISI?” Hoffman resumed. “Should we inform them? They’re going to know something is up.”
“No. Let them guess. For all we know, they’re the ones who did this, them or their friends. I don’t think we should tell them a fucking thing.”
“The gentlemen from ISI are not stupid, I regret to say.”
There was another pause, and that humming noise began again, and then stopped.
“Should we tell the oversight committees anything?” mused Hoffman. “That’s what the director is going to ask me.”
“God, no. Don’t tell them a word. This is a missing American civilian. Full stop. That’s all the world is going to know. His identity is secret. Those are the rules of this game, right?”
“Excuse me, Jeff, but it would appear that somebody knew that secret identity already. If Egan was grabbed, that means his cover was blown. You might start thinking about how that happened. Before you have another, um, accident.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Gertz.
“I…”—Hoffman paused and took in a breath, “don’t…”—another delay, while he blew his nose—“know.”
With that, Hoffman rang off.
Gertz told Tommy Arden to send out a book cable to everyone, every officer and every platform that was part of The Hit Parade’s network. Report anything suspicious. Avoid unnecessary travel. If you are in a denied area, get out.
It was a big distribution list, more than a hundred people. The cable didn’t explain what was wrong, which spooked people in the field. But Gertz was such an operator that people were never sure what he was doing, even when he told them directly. They assumed that if there was trouble, he would take care of it, one way or another.
Gertz believed in lying; that was part of his special aptitude for the job. That was the message of the Chinese quotation framed behind his desk under the big picture of the Twin Towers. It was a passage from Sun Tzu that he had studied after September 11. The translation wasn’t written down, but Gertz had memorized it: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
Over the past year, Gertz had made a dozen copies of this plaque and given them to trusted colleagues. It was his version of the “commander’s coin” that general officers pressed into the hands of the troops. He wanted his people—his new warriors—to understand that lying was absolutely essential to their work. It wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of the job. It was the job.
Gertz made one more decision that morning, which would affect the future more than he could have realized. He knew that he needed to begin planning for the worst. Hoffman had fired a warning shot, on behalf of the secret barons who managed what was left of Headquarters. The questions would come at them, even if only a few people knew enough to ask. Why had Egan been grabbed? How had his identity been compromised? What else might have come unstuck?
Gertz needed help answering these questions, but only from someone who would be reliable. He trusted almost nobody outside The Hit Parade, and few people inside, either. His principal deputies all were potential rivals, loyal to him in the moment, but ready to switch sides. His operations chief, Rossetti, was
a plant from Headquarters. His general counsel spent his time worrying about the inspector general back in Langley. His Support chief, Tommy Arden, was loyal, but he was a mouse.
He went down the list of section chiefs and paused when he got to the name of Sophie Marx. She had just been promoted to her counterintelligence job, but she was smart and aggressive, and she knew the Howard Egan case. What stuck in Gertz’s mind was something else: She had done him a favor several months before. An auditor was visiting from Headquarters, and he had taken Marx off site and asked her a lot of questions about The Hit Parade’s operations. Marx had spun him, and then she had come to see Gertz later to give him a report.
Gertz had asked her why she ratted out the Headquarters man.
“He asked too many questions,” Marx had said, “and he was an asshole about it.”
Gertz had liked that. He knew the stories about her operations in Beirut, and how she had escaped an ambush once in Addis. Marx was lucky, that counted for something. And she was still in her mid-thirties, young enough to take risks. The book on her was that she was headstrong and independent. But Gertz thought he could handle her in a jam.
7
STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA
Sophie Marx was reading a case file when Jeffrey Gertz peered into her office just before noon. Her glasses were perched on the tip of her nose, and her black hair was gathered in a loose ponytail. She looked up at him briefly, awkwardly, and then back at the file. Gertz had never visited her office before. It was messy. The Thelma and Louise poster was askew. On the wall was a framed photograph of two people in sandals and woolly hair, hugging her at her Princeton graduation: The longhairs were her eccentric parents, in from the islands. On her desk was an open bag of SunChips.
Marx assumed that Gertz was on his way somewhere else, but he wasn’t.
“Am I interrupting something?” he asked.
“Yes, of course. I mean, that’s your job, isn’t it?”
He laughed and closed the door.
Marx stood up, shook the boss’s hand and then sat back down.
“I’m sorry about Howard Egan,” she said, putting the file folder on top of the bag of chips. “That was my case. I should have kept a tighter watch on him. Is there any more news?”
“The Paks just found his BlackBerry in a dumpster. If he’s lucky, he’s dead by now.”
She put her hand over her mouth, and there was a slight tremor of her head, as if she had just hit a blast of cold air. She had made her own runs into dangerous places. She recovered her composure quickly.
“Let me know how I can help,” she said. “I feel like this is my screwup, partly.”
“That’s why I’m here, actually,” said Gertz. “I have a problem, and it’s about to become your problem.”
Her eyes flashed. She wanted to be in the game, but she knew not to rush.
“What do you have in mind?”
“I need someone to investigate how this happened, and in a hurry. Otherwise, Headquarters will take it over. They’ll send their own counterintelligence team, and damage-assessment team, and finger-pointing team. I don’t want them ruining what we’ve been trying to build here.”
He was leaning toward her, imploring but also demanding. With his lean face and goatee, and that hungry look in his eye, he looked in this moment like a trumpeter who needed a fix.
“And you’re free to travel, right?” Gertz continued. “I mean, you don’t have a ball and chain here.”
Marx understood that the boss was asking, obliquely, about her sex life. She had been married briefly seven years before, to another case officer, but as with so many tandem couples, the romantic attachment was to the work, not the other person. She was always in Lebanon or Addis; he was always in Nicaragua; they were always nowhere.
“I’m free to travel,” she said.
“So let’s do it. Be my person. Make this case.”
She took off the reading glasses and folded her hands in front of her. Gertz was waiting for an answer, but she was still thinking.
“So you want me to get there first. And clean up the mess before Headquarters can make trouble. Is that it, more or less?”
He didn’t answer directly.
“I need someone I can trust,” he said. “You’re it. What do you say?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What you mean?” His voice was rising. “One of your colleagues has just disappeared in a garbage dump in Pakistan, and I’m asking you to help and you refuse? Are you kidding me? Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work.”
“I’m not refusing. Lower your voice. You’re shouting.”
“I want an answer.”
“You’re asking me to be your fixer. That’s not my job. You just hired me to run counterintelligence for you. Finding out what happened to Howard Egan is what I’m supposed to do. It’s not a favor to my boss. Even a boss I like and respect.”
Gertz smiled. She was fighting for her own space. That wasn’t a bad thing.
“Let’s start again. I need you to begin a confidential CI investigation of what happened to Howard Egan. You can have access to anything you want in the files, here or anywhere else. You can go anywhere you like. I want you to do it right. But you need to do it fast, or we are going to get blown out of the water. Sorry if I sounded like a jerk before. It’s my nature. So what do you say, now that I’m asking nicely?”
“I say yes. When do I start?”
“Right now. Come upstairs in fifteen minutes and I’ll show you what we’ve got. Then I’ll take you to lunch.”
“Sorry, but I can’t make lunch.”
“Oh, yeah? Why not?”
“Because I’ll be eating at my desk, reading the files you’re going to give me.”
Sophie Marx moved upstairs to a small office next to Gertz’s that had been cleared for her. They worked all that day and through the night, hoping that Egan might make contact. She assembled everything about Egan she could find—his travels, his contact reports, his cover documentation, his roster of agents. She already understood the smooth edges of the puzzle that formed the border of his operational life. Now she would start looking for the jagged ones.
Gertz’s secretary, a refugee from Headquarters named Pat Waters, rolled her eyes when she saw that Marx had temporarily joined the front office. She knew enough about her boss’s predatory social life to be suspicious of the new arrival. Marx ignored the secretary until she balked at a request for access to Hamid Akbar’s 201 personnel file.
“You’re not cleared for that,” Waters said brusquely.
Marx asked again, as if she hadn’t heard the first time, and when she got the same answer she thought of summoning Gertz for help. But that was exactly what the secretary would expect her to do. She asked Waters to step into her small office, little bigger than a closet.
“I am here on Mr. Gertz’s orders,” she said. “I don’t have a lot of time. I’ll ask you again, politely, and if that doesn’t work, this will get unpleasant for you in a hurry.”
Waters didn’t answer, but she nodded her head in submission. Marx was good that way: She wasn’t a shouter, but she usually got what she wanted.
The watch officer, Julian, came in regularly with reports from the operations center. A flash cable had arrived when the Pakistani police found Egan’s BlackBerry. The Paks reluctantly agreed to turn over the phone for forensic analysis. When it arrived at the consulate, the SIM card was missing.
The FBI had a team based in Islamabad, so two agents flew to Karachi to take apart the BlackBerry, along with the local representative from the NSA. They were able to document what everyone assumed: Egan’s last communication had been his email message to The Hit Parade with the coordinates of his meeting in Baldia Town. After that, silence. The GPS signal showed movements that were consistent with a normal surveillance detection run until just after eight p.m., when he stopped, or was stopped, in Rasheedabad, a district north of downtown on the way to Baldia. The GPS signal stayed there for abo
ut twenty minutes, moving a hundred yards north, then fifty yards west.
Rasheedabad seemed to be where disaster had struck. Then the GPS track moved rapidly north toward Ittehad Town, where it stopped dead around nine. That turned out to be the dumpster, where the Pakistani police found the phone.
Gertz’s first priority was to find the taxi driver. Egan would have taken a cab to the meet, probably a string of them. You didn’t need special intelligence to find a taxi, you just needed a lot of cops. He had Steve Rossetti work it through Langley, after his initial conversation with Hoffman.
Headquarters sent its man in Karachi a photo of Egan that the consulate could show to the cabbies. The Pakistani police were already pulling in drivers. Once they had a photo to work with, it became routine police work.
The cops quickly located two of the taxis that Egan had taken that night. The drivers confirmed that they’d carried the passenger in the photo. A third driver hauled into the dragnet said he had seen the gora, the white man in the photograph, getting into a red Toyota sedan. He remembered it because the passenger had sat in the backseat for a long while, as if he was thinking of getting out, and the driver had hoped maybe he could get the fare instead. But the Toyota had driven away.
Late in the afternoon a call came in from Headquarters. The Pakistani police had found the red Toyota, at three a.m. Karachi time. It was in Orangi, a district south of Ittehad Town where the BlackBerry had been found. The driver’s throat had been slit. The police guessed the driver had been dead about five hours, since that was about the time Egan went missing.
Gertz called Thomas Perkins late that night, L.A. time, early morning in London. He wanted to reach him at home before he went to the office. Perkins had been Howard Egan’s nominal boss at Alphabet Capital. Sophie was in his office when he made the call, and he nodded for her to pick up the muted extension phone. As he dialed the call, Gertz silently mouthed the word, Shit. This was the moment when the bad news would become as real and messy as a turd.
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