“My name is Mr. Jones,” Gertz began. His voice had risen an octave, and it had a nasally sound and a bit of a posh accent. It sounded so different that Marx wouldn’t have known it was him if she hadn’t been staring at him. He winked at her, acknowledging his impromptu tradecraft, as he continued speaking.
“I work for the United States government. I’m sorry to disturb you at home so early in the morning, but I have some bad news about one of your employees.”
“Where are you calling from?” The voice had the fragility of morning.
“From the U.S. government.”
“Oh.” There was a pause. “This is about Howard Egan, isn’t it?” Perkins seemed to know it before Gertz said a word. He had been worrying about this moment for a more than a year, and now here it was.
“Yes, sir. Mr. Egan is missing. He was meeting a client of your fund in Karachi last night, and after that he disappeared. I’ll tell you honestly, we are concerned.”
“Who is this?” asked Perkins. “Do I know you?” There was a tightness in the hedge fund manager’s voice now.
“Sorry, Mr. Perkins, can’t say much. I’m Mr. Jones. And your man Egan is missing.”
“Fuck! I knew something like this would happen. You need to take care of this.”
“We are, sir. We’re doing our best. But we need your help.”
“No. This is your mess. You clean it up.”
Gertz’s voice was firmer now. He had a way of establishing control by inflection.
“It’s not that easy, Mr. Perkins. Without your help, this will get very complicated, especially for you.”
The financier was still angry, but more compliant.
“What should I do? What should I tell people?”
“You need to put out a statement, sir, to your employees and everyone else. That’s why I am calling. You need to send a statement to the British police and to the wire services saying that one of your people has disappeared in Pakistan while he was on a business trip for your firm. You should say that you’re hoping he’s just lost, but you would appreciate any information. You need to do it this morning.”
“Okay, a statement. Let me get a pen. What should it say again?” The hedge fund manager spoke with an American accent, even though he had been living in London for almost a decade. He was trying to sound calm.
“The statement should say what I just told you. Howard Egan went missing last night while he was on a business trip to meet with investors in your fund. You are very concerned. Anyone with information should contact the Pakistani police or the U.S. consulate in Karachi.”
“Will it get picked up by the media? I don’t want a lot of reporters tromping around here. People promised there would be no publicity about…this. Ever.”
“There won’t be. The media won’t care about his disappearance. Not unless they find a body.”
“A body? You mean he’s dead?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, my god. What a mess. Poor Howard.”
“I’m sorry. Let me make a suggestion. Why don’t I send someone by your house this morning, right now, to help you draft the statement? Would that be a help?”
“Yes, it certainly would. At home, not in the office.”
The hedge fund chief was thinking. He was calculating risks, and he didn’t like what he saw.
“Can I ask you a question, whoever you are?”
“Sure,” said Gertz. “Fire away.”
“What happens if Howard gets, um, tortured? And he reveals during interrogation that he, ah, worked for the government. That his work for my firm was, ah, you know, a cover story. What happens then? Because that could, um, destroy my business.”
“You deny it. We deny it. We say it’s a complete fabrication. Outrageous falsehood. If need be, the State Department spokesman will say it’s propaganda to smear an innocent businessman. That’s the deal. Total denial. And it goes away.”
“Sorry to break this to you, whatever your name is, but people don’t believe the U.S. government.”
“Well, too bad for them. But nothing bad will happen to you. I promise. And your country appreciates what you have done. Deeply. And we know how to show our appreciation, as you are aware.”
“More help from the government. Just what I need.” There was a note of sarcasm in his voice now.
“I don’t think any of this is going to happen, Mr. Perkins. I should tell you that. I mean the interrogation and all that.”
“Oh, yeah? Why not?”
“Because I think that Howard is dead. He would resist capture by anyone. If he was taken, he had ways of, how shall I put this, avoiding interrogation.”
“You mean he would kill himself?”
Gertz didn’t respond. He waited a moment, and then went on with his speech.
“We’ll send someone by your residence this morning to help with the statement. All right? And then someone will contact you as we make a more careful investigation of all this.”
“What about the system? Is that going to continue?”
Gertz glanced at Marx. Her head was down. She was reading something.
“I don’t know about any ‘system,’ sorry. Can’t help you with that.”
“Should I talk with Anthony Cronin? He was my, you know, my regular ‘contact.’”
“No. Don’t talk to anyone except the people I send you.”
“Have I met you?” Perkins asked again.
Gertz ignored the question. He was impatient now. He had done his business with Perkins. He wanted to get off the phone.
“Who are you sending?” Perkins continued. “Because, frankly, I don’t want to get in any deeper. This is a mess. I don’t need some clumsy, uh, government official.”
“I will find a good contact for you,” said Gertz. He was looking at Sophie Marx, who met his eye this time. “I have someone sophisticated and sensible, who can put everything back together when the dust settles. We understand your problems. We’ll help you get them sorted out. That’s a promise.”
Gertz turned to Sophie when the call ended.
“How did I do?” he asked. He was vain that way. He wanted reviews.
“Adequately,” she answered. “Do you know him?”
“Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.”
He wasn’t going to answer, so she stopped trying.
“Poor Mr. Perkins,” she said. “I don’t blame him for being unhappy. We should never have used a real company as a platform for someone like Egan who could get grabbed. That was stupid. How did it happen? And what did he mean by ‘the system’? What’s that all about?”
“I have no idea,” said Gertz blandly. “Probably he was talking about the way they paid Egan.”
“Who’s Anthony Cronin?”
“Cronin’s an old NOC handler. And you’re right about Egan’s financial cover. It started before my time. Yours, too. Too late for second-guessing. Perkins will be all right. He’s just scared.”
It was near midnight, and Marx had many more hours of work to do. But Gertz had said something at the end of the phone call that she wanted to pin down.
“Were you suggesting that I go to London?” she asked. “Did I hear that right?”
“Maybe.” He winked. “If you want to.”
Her brow furrowed a moment, and she bit her upper lip. She was trying to decide if she should tell him something.
“I would like to go almost anywhere, and especially London. But you should know that I was on the no-travel list back at Headquarters. After I got burned in Beirut and Addis, they thought it was unsafe. I should have told you that before.”
“I don’t care what Headquarters says. What do you think? Are you still hot? Would it be dangerous?”
She shook her head.
“No. The cover job was insecure. They were on my phone. I have new documentation now. I’m solid.”
“That’s good enough for me. We can play with your passport some more. But you
don’t work for the CIA now. You’re a private citizen. So fuck it, right?”
She was smiling as she headed back to her cubbyhole. Gertz was a manipulator, but he also knew how to get things done in a hurry.
8
STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA
Sophie Marx worked through most of the night, sleeping a few hours in the women’s locker room of The Hit Parade’s fitness club. She took a walk early the next morning. Her windowless office was claustrophobic, and she needed to breathe. More than that, she needed to think. She had showered and washed her hair, but she still felt groggy. It was as if she were staring into a fogged-up window and couldn’t see the face inside. She wanted to do a good job for Gertz, but she needed a starting point.
Out on Ventura Boulevard it was already hot. The Mystic Eye Bookshop had a few early morning customers, and so did the tattoo parlor next door. Sophie wanted breakfast. She passed a Starbucks and a McDonald’s until she came to a diner called Hank’s. She ordered the “Hank Special”—scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns, toast. Her father used to make her breakfasts like that when she was a girl back in Florida, when he wasn’t too hung over to cook.
Her parents were living in Tortola last she heard, running a restaurant. They had taught her how to keep secrets; maybe that was the only virtue of the crazy, stoned-out life they led: Their daughter learned how to cover the family’s tracks as they moved, until the art of concealment became second nature. Oddly, the CIA was the one place she didn’t have to pretend. She had confessed it all, her whole crazy childhood, during the first interview. She felt safe. This was a family of weirdos and liars and manipulators, whose only rule was that they weren’t supposed to lie to each other.
As she ate her breakfast, Marx thought about Howard Egan, trying to imagine what could have happened to him in those last hours before the meeting in north Karachi. She ordered a second cup of coffee and drew herself a timeline on the back of a napkin. Egan had come to Karachi, checked into his hotel, called the access agent, done a first surveillance detection run, seen the access agent, done a second SDR, and then, disaster. There were many ways this story could have gone wrong, but there was only one place to start. She paid her check and walked back east on Ventura to the big, boxy building with the THE HIT PARADE sign out front.
Marx went first to see Steve Rossetti, hoping to clear a potential obstacle. The operations chief regarded Marx as an interloper. He had wanted to run the investigation of the Egan case himself.
“I need to talk to Hamid Akbar,” she said.
“Good luck, kid. Akbar is terrified. He thinks he’s next.”
“Have you debriefed him?”
“We tried to. I called him, but he didn’t want to talk. I told you, he’s frightened. He says that if he we try to contact him again, he’ll walk.”
Marx studied the operations chief. His face was smooth, well shaven. He smelled of Old Spice. He was a man who would rather do too little, tidily, than too much and risk making a mistake.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Akbar works for us. Who’s he to say he doesn’t want to be debriefed?”
“Take it to Gertz,” said Rossetti, shrugging his shoulders.
“I will,” she said, turning back toward her cubicle. “And Akbar is dirty. Wait and see.”
Marx called the Office of Security and requested the polygraph record for Hamid Akbar. She had been puzzling over his role since the previous day, when she was digging into the operational files. The Pakistani businessman was the last person known to have seen Howard Egan alive. Why had he moved up the time of the meeting with his uncle? Why had he proposed an insecure location? Where had he gone in the hours immediately after Egan’s disappearance?
It took an hour to pry loose the polygraph record from the registry. When the thin file was finally delivered to Marx, it deepened her concern. Akbar hadn’t been polygraphed since his initial recruitment in the United States. When he had been re-recruited, Gertz had waived a new test. It was too difficult to bring a polygraph operator on site, according to the file. The result was a counterintelligence officer’s nightmare—an agent whose reliability was unproven, in witting contact with a deep-cover officer. Howard Egan had trusted him, but now Egan was gone.
Marx knocked on Gertz’s door. This morning he looked like an over-the-hill Chicago sideman. There were circles of fatigue under his eyes, and his skin had a waxy pallor replacing the buff tan. He was wearing a cashmere blazer that was so loosely constructed it looked almost like a cardigan sweater.
“I don’t like Akbar,” said Marx.
“Me neither. What have you got?”
You couldn’t be sure with Gertz whether he had been thinking that all along, or had just considered the possibility when she mentioned it.
“It turns out he hasn’t been polygraphed in ten years. Why did you waive a poly on him when you went after him again?”
“It was too cumbersome getting a technician out in the field. And I needed to get to his uncle. The family came well recommended. So I went ahead.”
“Who recommended them?”
Gertz shook his head. “Sorry, I can’t tell you that. Too sensitive.”
She nodded. She knew there were secrets that didn’t get shared. That was part of the job.
“Okay, but I have a bad feeling about Akbar. I think he may have set Egan up.”
“Maybe. But he has an alibi.”
“I missed that. What alibi?”
“He delivered his uncle. The man was at the meeting place, just where he was supposed to be. If it was a setup, why would the uncle have gone to the meet? That’s where your theory gets squishy.”
“Maybe the uncle wasn’t witting. Or maybe the uncle showed up so they would have a cover story when Howard disappeared. I’m not sure, but I need to know more about him.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for starters, Egan called Akbar before he went to see him. That call was logged on his BlackBerry. So the NSA should have an audio file of the conversation. I need it. And don’t tell me I don’t have the right clearances, because you already promised me I could have anything I wanted.”
She crossed her arms stubbornly.
“You’re jamming me,” he said.
“Yes, I am. That’s part my job, isn’t it?”
Gertz looked at her with an extra measure of admiration. He liked troublemakers, so long as they were on his team.
“How long have you worked for The Hit Parade?” he asked.
“Nearly a year. Ten months, to be exact.”
“Do you know where we got the name ‘The Hit Parade’?
“No. I always wondered about that.”
“It’s from an old-time radio and TV show called Your Hit Parade. It started back in the 1930s, lasted for nearly forty years. They played a weekly list of top records, right, which they said was based on an ‘authentic tabulation.’ But that was all crap. They just made it up. Played what they wanted. Got payola from the record companies, for all I know.”
“That’s what you liked about it?” asked Marx, raising her eyebrows. “That it was a big con?”
“Yeah, that. Plus I like the idea of hitting people.”
She was shaking her head now, but Gertz gave her a playful punch on the shoulder, as if to say, Just kidding.
Gertz got Sophie Marx what she needed. He called Cyril Hoffman, who called the NSA, who called someone in the cryptographic agency’s South Asia Division. In an hour the requisite audio file was sitting in Marx’s computer queue. She listened to the brief conversation a half dozen times. What struck her was the stress in the Pakistani man’s voice—the coughs and pauses, the apology that the planned meeting time wasn’t “convenient.”
“Can we do the business tonight?” Egan had asked. The Pakistani had made a phone call before he answered. Was he calling his uncle, or someone else? And when he came back on the line, there was that cough—that knot of anxiety.
One of Marx’s tradecraft instructors, a decad
e ago, had told her that “behavior always leaks.” He had been talking about how to sense when someone is lying without using a polygraph. There are always clues, he had said—the extra words and phrases wrapped around a simple yes or no, the twitch of a leg, the flutter of an eyebrow, the clutch in the throat, the cough, the pause. Behavior always leaks.
She looked at the photograph of Akbar they’d dug out of the files. He looked smooth, Westernized and insincere. She was convinced that he was rotten. He had sent Howard Egan—a neurotic middle-aged NOC, a man trying to serve out his time until he was pensioned off—into a trap. She was going to squeeze Akbar until the truth popped out.
Marx went back to see Gertz. The door was closed, and the officious Pat Waters made her wait outside until the boss had finished his business. When the door opened, she swooped in and made her request.
“I want to go interview Hamid Akbar, right away. Give him a stress poly. Push him. I listened to the NSA audio file of his call with Egan and I am telling you, Jeffrey, that man is where our trouble started.”
“You can’t go to Pakistan. It’s too insecure. Sorry. Even you can’t sweet-talk me on that one.”
“Then yank him out. Pull his chain. Have you contacted him?”
“Yes, by phone. Rossetti made the call, and I listened. He’s scared shitless. He thinks he’s a target, too. Wants to go to ground, break off contact.”
“Well, he ought to be scared. He’s a bad man.”
“Excuse me? Aren’t you getting a little overwrought here?”
“That’s sexist, calling me ‘overwrought.’ I could file a complaint with HR, and I’d win, but I’m prepared to compromise. Just let me interview Akbar. Make it happen. Please. Order him to meet me in a third country. Tell him that if he doesn’t agree, he really is a dead man. Tell him that you’ll bust his balls, expose him to the ISI. Come on. This is the door. We have to walk through it.”
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