“That doesn’t bother me. People in that part of the world are always playing a double game. It goes with the territory. I learned that in Beirut. So, sorry, if you’re trying to frighten me off, it won’t work.”
“Good girl. Now I have another question for you, if you please. What do you think about Jeff Gertz?”
“That’s not an easy question. He’s my boss. I report to him. He gave me this job and a chance to exercise responsibility, so I’m grateful. He’s never done anything to harm my career.”
“Yes, yes. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Do you trust him? That’s what I want to know.”
She tried to think what the right answer was, politically speaking, and concluded that there wasn’t one. She just had to say the truth.
“He has powerful friends, Mr. Hoffman. That’s what people say, anyway. So my answer may get me in trouble. But no, I don’t trust Jeff fully. I don’t understand his agenda. He has a tight hold on our organization, but I don’t always understand what he’s doing. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but it’s what I think.”
Hoffman had closed his eyes again while she was talking, so she couldn’t read his reaction. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds after she had finished her answer, but then he spoke up.
“You have it exactly, precisely right, as far as I am concerned. That’s why I am going to ask you not to tell Gertz anything about your trip to Pakistan, or what you learn there. I want you to report back to me, and then we will figure out what to do.”
“I’ll get fired, Mr. Hoffman. Jeff won’t tolerate disloyalty. I know that about him. He’ll find out, because he always does, and then I’ll be out the door. You’re asking me to commit career suicide.”
“I don’t think so,” said Hoffman slowly. “I am actually offering you a means of escape from professional ruin. But there’s no way for you to be sure, is there? The reality here is that you will have to take my word. I cannot offer you any assurance that would be credible. In the end, it’s like everything else in our business. It is about trust.”
Marx looked out the window of this antiseptic hotel, toward the clustered buildings of the City of London. She had always hoped there would be a moment in her career like this, when someone would offer her the chance to do something really important. But now that it had arrived, it was so fragile, no more than a thread between two people who, until an hour before, had never talked.
“I trust you,” she said. “Let’s talk about the details.”
They spent another hour within the four bland walls of the Holiday Inn Express. Hoffman ate his french fries, both plates, but Marx had one of the beers. He explained the procedures for contacting Lieutenant General Mohammed Malik through his personal email address and his private cell phone number. Hoffman said he would send the Pakistani general a message advising that she was coming.
With that transmission of information, he warned, the real danger would begin. For it was a certainty that General Malik had been in contact with the people who were killing Marx’s colleagues, and he might do so again if he decided it was in his interest. And even if General Malik didn’t breathe a word, the trackers from Al-Tawhid might be able to follow Marx anyway, through their own surveillance, just as they had the other operatives of The Hit Parade.
They talked, finally, about what Marx would say to Jeff Gertz about her absence. She proposed the cover story: She had uncovered something important for the investigation in the files of Alphabet Capital: Howard Egan had met with someone in Dubai on his way to his fatal visit to Karachi. She needed to debrief this person immediately, and there hadn’t been time to check first with Gertz. She would apologize in an email that she would send from the airport, as she was about to board her plane.
“Will he believe that?” Hoffman asked.
“Probably not. But it will be too late for him to stop me by then. And you’ll protect my back when I return, assuming that I return.”
Marx meant that last line as a bravura joke, but neither of them laughed. This was a situation in which it was impossible to be sure that she was not walking into a trap.
That afternoon, when Marx returned to the Alphabet Capital office in Mayfair to make her travel arrangements through Perkins’s secretary, she received a “book cable” message from The Hit Parade in Studio City that had been sent to all personnel abroad. It stated that an officer of The Hit Parade had been killed in Afghanistan that day while on his way to a covert meeting. That made four.
The cable repeated, more emphatically, the earlier directive that no officer of The Hit Parade should travel without explicit permission. There was a global lockdown. Every foreign officer should take immediate precautions to ensure personal security, varying their routes, procedures and communications practices. They should stop using all credit cards and cellular phones, including those issued to them in alias names.
Sophie Marx ignored the message. Mona, the secretary at Alphabet Capital, had booked the initial leg of Marx’s flight to Islamabad via Dubai for that evening. She knew that if she didn’t leave immediately, she might not be able to do so at all. She knocked on Perkins’s door to say goodbye, but Mona said that he was out of the office, visiting his lawyer. She tried to write a note, but gave up after several tries in which she said either too little or too much.
When she got to Heathrow, Marx sent a message to Jeffrey Gertz, as planned, saying that she was on her way to Dubai. She was sitting in her seat waiting to take off when her phone rang. She moved to turn it off, fearing that it was Gertz, but she recognized Perkins’s number. When he came on the line, his voice was enthusiastic, almost breathless, as if he’d just made a big decision. He apologized that he had been away from the office. He had been doing some thinking, he explained.
“I’m not going to keep working with these bastards,” he said.
“Good,” she answered. “Don’t.”
“But you’re one of them.”
“Not anymore. I’m out.”
They were closing the door of the plane. The flight attendant was telling people to buckle their seat belts and turn off their cellular phones.
“What are you, then?” asked Perkins.
“I’m not sure.”
The flight attendant was walking down the aisle. Marx pretended to turn off her phone and when the attendant had passed, she put it back to her ear.
“Where are you?” asked Perkins. “It sounds like you’re on an airplane. Where the hell are you going?”
“I’m in a good place,” she whispered. “I can’t say any more now. Don’t ask.”
“Don’t go. I want to see you. I want to be with you. I’m the only one who knows your real name.”
“Don’t be a sentimental ass,” she said, which made him laugh. “And don’t do anything self-destructive. I like going to good restaurants.”
“Come back,” he said.
But she was gone. The flight attendant had threatened to take away her phone and have her removed forcibly from the plane if she didn’t stop talking immediately. She turned off her phone and removed the battery, so that nobody could track her GPS movements while she was away. Then she sat back in her seat and closed her eyes.
28
ISLAMABAD
They say the safest airline is the one that has just had a crash, because the crew takes extra precautions. On that theory, Sophie Marx decided that she would stay at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which had been the target of a catastrophic truck bombing some years before and was for a time off-limits to U.S. diplomatic personnel. She reasoned that if it was officially regarded as dangerous, the hotel would be the safest place in Pakistan. She was traveling in alias, and she was not normally a fearful person. But on her way into town from the airport in the late afternoon, the air heavy with the heat of summer, she thought about calling her parents, with whom she hadn’t talked in more than a year.
It was dark by the time Marx arrived, and an improbable array of blue Christmas tree lights twinkled along th
e length of the hotel’s front security barrier. It was a horizontal concrete block decorated with faux-Oriental arches, topped by the too-red Marriott emblem. The design said “America in Pakistan,” once a selling point but no more. The façade had been rebuilt after the attack, with double-thick walls that were now advertised by the hotel as “bomb-proof.”
Marx was tired from the flight and wanted to remain anonymous for a few more hours. She took a swim in the hotel’s indoor pool and then dined alone in the Japanese restaurant. She told herself that this was just another operation; there was an element of danger whenever she traveled; this time it was just more palpable. She took a pill before going to bed, but she awoke in the middle of the night. She finally drifted off toward four o’clock with the television on.
The next morning, before breakfast, she sent a text message to the cell phone number she had been given for General Malik, saying that she had arrived. She described herself as Mr. Hoffman’s friend. Thirty minutes later, the phone rang and it was the general himself, inviting her to pay a visit later that morning.
“Gentle lady,” he said solicitously, “I will send a car to the Marriott at ten o’clock to pick you up.”
“How do you know I’m at the Marriott?” Marx hadn’t told him where she was staying, and she was supposed to be traveling under clean cover.
“Please, madam, this is my country. There is very little here that I do not know. Let us not get off to a bad start before we have even met.”
Marx said that she would be ready at ten. She knew then for a certainty that she was in danger. Her identity had been compromised within hours of her entry into Pakistan, and she had no good way to protect herself. If she tried to leave the country now, the ISI could stop her; if she tried to seek protection in the U.S. Embassy compound, the ISI could block her way. The Pakistanis could arrest her anytime they wanted. Her security was in the hands of someone she didn’t know and had little reason to trust.
The general’s Land Cruiser arrived at ten o’clock as promised. When Marx emerged from behind the security wall, the driver jumped out of the vehicle and opened the passenger door. She was dressed in a cloak and scarf in deference to local sensibilities, but the driver seemed to know who she was by her appearance. Was there anyone in Pakistan who didn’t know that she was coming?
Marx wished she could leave a trail of bread crumbs to find her way back home, as in the children’s fairy tale. The moment she entered the car, she was effectively General Malik’s prisoner.
They headed south on Ataturk Road, in the direction of the ISI’s headquarters in Aabpara. But rather than turning right on the Kashmir Highway toward the office, the driver continued south into Shakarparian Park, a lush expanse of green that bordered the city center. He left the main avenue for a gravel road that wound through a grove of trees and came to a security checkpoint, where a guard waved him through. The Toyota stopped at the road’s end at a guesthouse on the banks of a large body of water, which Marx knew from her maps must be Rawal Lake.
In the heat of midmorning, nothing was stirring. The surface of the water was smooth as glass, and the air was thick. The trees were barely green, more a light tan, their leaves baked like chips in the oven. Even the birds had gone silent. The driver escorted Marx to the guesthouse and opened the door, beckoning her to take a seat on the couch. The room was cooled by a noisy window box that throbbed and rattled against the heat. The driver brought a cool drink from the pantry and set it before the guest. Then he retreated out the door and locked it from the outside.
Marx waited for more than an hour before the general arrived. She searched for something to read and found only one book, The Defense and Foreign Affairs Handbook on Pakistan. She opened to the first page: “Pakistan is, indeed, a nation on the edge. Many of the critical challenges facing Pakistan today, however, are not of its own making.” It was America’s fault, India’s fault, somebody’s fault. She put the book aside.
She debated calling Cyril Hoffman to tell him where she was, but decided against it. The call would surely be monitored, and there was nothing Hoffman could do now, in any event. It was easier simply to admit that she was helpless.
Rain clouds gathered, and there was a brief shower, the raindrops falling straight down into the water on this windless day, perforating the surface of the lake with tiny dots. The shower ended as quickly as it had begun, and in an instant the bright sun returned. It was like being in a terrarium. Her hair felt wet and matted against her neck; she pinned up her ponytail so that it formed a bun.
General Malik arrived just after noon, accompanied by an aide carrying a laptop computer. The general was a courtly man, trim in his uniform, handsomer than Marx had expected. The aide placed the laptop on a table at the far end of the room; he plugged it into the wall, powered it on and then disappeared out the door.
“I am so very sorry to be late,” began the general. “It must appear that this was a deliberate slight, but I assure you it was not intentional. I was talking with Cyril Hoffman, to be quite frank with you.”
Marx nodded but said nothing. It was always a mistake to be ingratiating, especially for a woman. Better to let the general say what he wanted. When she didn’t answer, the general arched his thick black eyebrows curiously and then continued.
“I was talking with Cyril about you, as a matter of fact. I am a bit worried, you see.”
Marx kept her silence for another moment, but she needed to understand what he was telling her.
“Why are you worried, General? Here I am, ready to do business.”
“Because I think it is possible that others know you are here in Pakistan. To be more specific, madam, I am concerned that your presence here is known to the Tawhid organization that is responsible for the deaths of the other American intelligence officers.”
Marx studied him. This clipped and controlled man was famous for his dexterity at lying, but in this case she thought he was being truthful.
“How could they possibly know I am here? You must have told them.”
“Certainly not, madam. That is why I called Cyril. I wanted to inform him of this danger, you see, and to assure him that I had played no role in disclosing the fact of your visit. No, I am sorry to say that they learned of your travel quite on their own. That is the problem, you know. They have found you out.”
“How can you be sure they know, if you didn’t tell them yourself?”
“Please, Miss Marx. Do not let us trifle with each other. I know because it is my job to discover the secrets of these miscreants. I have agents among them. I overhear their conversations. I watch and listen. And I am telling you, with the greatest of regret, that based on this intelligence I am quite certain that they are aware of your travel to Pakistan.”
“Can you control them? Can you keep them from harming me?”
“Achaah!” He tapped his forehead with his hand. “That is what you Americans can never understand. To know is not to control.”
Marx thought a long moment. She didn’t want to be panicked or rushed. She watched the general’s eyes. They were dark brown, with a sparkle of light at the center. It was an intelligent face, if not quite an honest one.
“I believe you, General,” she said.
“Thank you.”
The tightness in his cheeks eased. He tried to smile.
“So I must ask you,” she continued, “how do they know that I am here? What is this methodology that allows them to monitor our movements? Mr. Hoffman told me that you have ideas about how they are targeting our officers. He said that it involves our financial networks. He said you would help. That’s why I came. Now the matter is a little more personal. I am quite in your protection.”
“You touch me, madam.” He put his hand on his heart. “Come, sit down with me at the computer and I will explain what I can.”
He gestured for her to join him at the table at the far end of the bungalow, where the screen of the laptop was glowing faintly. She rose and followed him across the room.
He removed a small object from the pocket of his uniform. It was a computer flash drive. He fumbled with the drive, attempting to insert it in the USB port at the back of the machine.
“I am not very good at this, I am afraid. That is the problem with being a general. There is always someone younger and cleverer to do such things for me.”
Eventually he got the drive in place. He sat down at the computer and manipulated the mouse until he had clicked open the file from the external drive. A four-line Excel spreadsheet came up on the screen.
“This is what I wanted you to see,” said the general. “Mumbo jumbo, you will say. But look, please, and then we can talk about what it all might mean.”
He turned the computer screen toward her, so that she could read the document more clearly. It displayed the four strings of letters and numbers:
1) BANK JULIUS BAER BKJULIUS CH12 0869-6005-2654-1601-2 BAERCHZU 200 71835
BANK ALFALAH ALFHAFKA 720 34120
2) BARCLAYS BANK BARCLON GB35 BARC-4026-3433-1557-68 BARCGBZZ 317 82993
AMONATBONK ASSETJ22 297 45190.
He handed her a piece of paper that contained the same brief burst of information. That was his gift, for which he had summoned her, at considerable danger, from across the sea.
Marx studied the screen, trying to break the code. At length, she turned back toward the Pakistani officer. She was shaking her head.
“I want to understand what this means, General, but I am having trouble. It looks like bank routing numbers. Can you decipher it for me?”
“Perhaps I can,” he answered. “Not because I am smart about such things, which is very far from true. But I have a young major on my staff who is quite the computer buff. He has been helping me, you see, so that I could make some sense of this bloody nonsense.”
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