Bloodmoney

by David Ignatius

  “We don’t have our man yet,” she answered. “I’m scared we’ll blow our chance to get him.”

  “You should be scared. He is a dangerous man. I called because we have a first cut from NSA. The cell numbers are all dead. We’ll run patterns, but I think the links will be dead, too. This man is not a fool. The email address at Yahoo is still alive, but it hasn’t been used since the last message to Sabah. So the question is, what next?”

  Hoffman paused. He seemed to be waiting for her to pick up the thread.

  “I have a suggestion, assuming that I’m running this, and not Headquarters.”

  “My dear Sophie, you are Headquarters. And yes, you’re still running the operation. So far you haven’t made any mistakes.”

  “I want to set a trap for the Pakistani. We can use Mr. Sabah to make contact, and we have a live email address, but we need some juicy bait. Otherwise this won’t work. I’ve been thinking about it, and I have the right worm to put on the hook.”

  “Oh, do you, now? And who might that lucky invertebrate be?”

  “Me.”

  “Preposterous. Out of the question. You almost got killed several days ago in Islamabad. Don’t push your luck, my dear. It runs out, even for you.”

  “Don’t you see? The fact that he went after me before will make me an irresistible target. He missed once. This is a very disciplined man. He doesn’t like failure. He’ll come out of his hole if the prize is big enough. I don’t mean to be immodest, but I’m worth the trouble for him. Especially if Sabah sends him a message that will tell him we’re up to something really big. He’ll surface.”

  “How unreasonable you are.”

  “I will take that as a yes, Mr. Hoffman. We’ll get to work here on preparing the email message. I’ll need some help on details, to make the transfers look convincing. Can Information Ops get into Alphabet Capital’s accounts?”

  “Of course. We can get anything we like, if we know what to ask for.”

  “I need to know what accounts were used by Howard Egan, Alan Frankel and Meredith Rockwell, now deceased. Where the money began and where it ended. Send me those account numbers and routing codes.”

  “You are worthy colleague, Sophie.”

  “I’m a work in progress. What about the other traces I requested, about the CTC surveillance program and the consultants?”

  “We are still digging on the consultants. The true names are originator-controlled, I’m afraid, very tight access. But the first part of your question is easy. The chief of CTC’s Al-Qaeda covert-surveillance program at the time was a gentleman whose name will be quite familiar to you, painfully familiar: Jeffrey Gertz, former president of The Hit Parade LLP of Studio City, California, now defunct.”

  “Is that right?” she said blandly. Of course it was. She had known from the moment that Sabah described the videoconference by the CTC official, the earnest pitch, the bland amorality, that the speaker could only be her boss and sometime mentor.

  “Where is Jeff these days? I’ve been wondering that.”

  “He has ‘gone to ground,’ as they say in the fox-hunting milieu. He is conducting a global disappearing act, shutting down anything that has any link with his former activity. He seems to have authority from ‘the highest level,’ as we like to say euphemistically. He is traveling, at present, but precisely where, I do not know. Do you need me to find him for you?”

  “No, the opposite. I need for him to stay out of the way.”

  “That should not be a problem. I believe that Jeffrey’s current preoccupation is saving his own skin.”

  Marx sat down with Joe Sabah, who seemed actually to have missed her company, and began drafting the email message she would send to “George White.” To rouse the Pakistani’s interest, she planned to transfer $50 million from an Alphabet account to one that had been used by one of The Hit Parade’s operatives. To leave an unmistakable footprint, she decided that the transfer would move directly from Howard Egan’s account at FBS to the account he had used in Dubai for his initial meeting with the Pashtun tribal chief Azim Khan.

  She found Perkins’s secretary, Mona, who was still ensconced in what was left of the office on Mayfair Place, and had her make travel arrangements just as she had only a few days before for Marx’s trip to Islamabad. She advised Support to have one of its contacts at American Express make sure the payment cleared, regardless of any restrictions on Alphabet Capital.

  Sabah let her examine all his previous messages to “George White,” so that she could get the cadence right. He helped her encode the proper SWIFT wire transfer protocols, so the message would have the necessary detail. The final version, tweaked and massaged, was sent from Joseph Sabah’s Gmail account to George.White09@yahoo.com, with the subject line, follow up. It read:

  LARGE TRANSFER FROM PREVIOUSLY MONITORED ACCT FBS GENEVA. ORIGINATING ACCT: FBS AG GENEVA SWIFT BIC FBSWCHZH12A CH08 3771-7938-7155-8039-7. RECEIVING ACCT: CITIBANK NA/DUBAI SWIFT BIC CITIAEAD AE14-5300-5845-251. RECEIVER’S EUROCLEAR NO. 27593. TRANSFER AMT DLRS 50 RPT 50 MIL. APHELION.

  The message vanished into electronic space. Marx alerted Headquarters that it had been sent. From that instant, all the surveillance technology available to the United States focused on the Yahoo account of an unknown recipient, and on electronic signals from Pakistan, Dubai and anywhere else that might be linked to any known operative.

  Twenty-four hours passed without a nibble. But soon enough, there was a turbulence, a cascade of events, as the prey devoured the shining silver lure.

  37

  KARACHI

  From the turreted windows of the members’ lounge at the Karachi Boat Club at dusk, the light on Chinna Creek was a tawny pink. Dr. Omar was visiting one of his university colleagues, a man from one of the “good families” of this merchant city, who wanted to show off the old club. On the walls were yellowing photographs of the first regatta in 1881 and the early boat races against Calcutta, Madras and the other metropoles of the Raj. The people in these old photographs were all white-skinned Anglo-Saxons, the men in blazers and white duck trousers, the women “memsahibs” in enormous hats and lacy white dresses. There was not a dark face among them, but that didn’t seem to bother the present-day members. They drank their gin and tonics and whiskeys and celebrated the lost world from which their ancestors had been so systematically excluded.

  Dr. Omar was drinking nothing stronger than a Coca-Cola this evening. When he traveled to conferences abroad and wine was poured, he usually had a sip to be polite. He did not make a fuss about halal meat, either, the way some Muslims did. It was part of being a modern man, he liked to say, of living in the present.

  Revenge comes in different flavors. Sometimes it is a swift act of rage that shatters the mask the oppressor has created for you. Other times it is a slow process in which the mask is an essential shield to cover actions that the oppressor could not imagine. Sometimes with a disciplined man, the act of revenge is all but invisible.

  The professor did not appear to be angry; he was a protean figure who could assume whatever disposition suited the needs of the moment. That was one reason people rarely questioned his activities. He was an elusive personality, cleverer than his fellows. Since he was a boy, he had been off somewhere else, doing things that others knew they wouldn’t understand, even if they tried.

  The host asked Omar about the new research contract he had received from a European computer-security company. The professor explained modestly that he was only a small subcontractor: He had given a paper nearly a decade ago at a conference in London on encrypted search algorithms, and such papers had brought him a steady trickle of work ever since, enough to pay his bills.

  It was almost dark now on the water. The last of the sculls was being hauled up into the boathouse. Across the creek were the dense man-groves of the low water shoals, and beyond in the last light of the evening the dark aquamarine waters of the Arabian Sea, stretching west to Oman and then the world.

  Dr. Omar’s friend
asked if he should buy shares in the one of the Indian IT companies that was now a big software vendor in the subcontinent, and the professor replied no, it was not a wise investment. The future was not in boxed software, but in the “cloud,” the applications that would be available on the Internet to all, even in South Asia. He suggested several American companies that would be better bets.

  “The financial markets are treacherous,” said Dr. Omar. “I was just reading today in the Financial Times online that one of the big hedge funds in London may go under. Alphabet Capital, it was. Solid as a rock, people said. Had investors here in Pakistan, too, I believe. But it turned out to be rotten underneath. Fraud investigation and all that, CEO arrested, horrible mess. Not really a surprise. They are too fancy in the West; too clever for their own good.”

  “Good advice, old boy,” said the host. And a jolly nice evening, too, and time for another whiskey. But Dr. Omar had to excuse himself. He was working part of this summer term at Bahria University, near the club, as an adjunct professor of computer science. He had come from Islamabad a few days before, and he had a bit more work to do that night at the lab. As he left the members’ lounge, he admired the old photographs and memorabilia once more, the shots of men in flannel shorts holding their oars, and of men and women bathing together in the creek, before the water became polluted and the culture was transformed.

  Traditions mattered, said Dr. Omar’s friend, and the professor agreed that it was so.

  Dr. Omar was tired. He did not like to admit that to his friend at the club, or to anyone, but it was a fact. He was a boat that was always moving against the tide. He had struggled as a boy to escape the flow of his tribal world, and to find a new set of connections in the West. And he had succeeded, visibly and invisibly. But once those attachments had become firm—visits and conferences and briefings—an event had taken place that compelled him to paddle back toward home, this time entirely in secret. He was never at home, even when he was at home. There was no place that was comfortable or safe.

  The professor did not believe in permanent revenge, or in the permanence of anything that involved mortal beings. He had asked himself when it would be time to stop: How much blood would be enough? That was something his father had never explained when he talked about the tribal code. It was measure for measure, but how could you calculate the weight of an insult, or the commensurate volumes of honor and fear?

  When he had seen the television footage of the American woman at the hospital in Islamabad, the face of someone he had intended to kill, soothing a Pakistani widow, he had thought: Perhaps it is time. But vengeance is a heavy weight, and the momentum of the thing had carried him forward.

  Omar thought of his sister, the sole surviving member of his blood family, who was living in Peshawar. She had a son named Rashid who was now eleven years old. Omar had visited him six months ago, and brought him a small computer as a gift. The boy had pleaded for him to come back, but it was too dangerous to go more often. Too many people were curious about him, and he had worked so hard to erase his past.

  It had been uncanny, but on that last trip to Peshawar, his young nephew had asked to play number games.

  “I know all the perfect numbers,” the boy had said. “Six, twenty-eight, four hundred ninety-six, eight thousand one hundred twenty-eight.”

  “Very good,” Dr. Omar had said. “You are a bright boy.”

  “I know the prime numbers, too,” the boy had boasted. “Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen—”

  “Those are too easy. Tell me the primes over one hundred.”

  “One hundred one, one hundred three, one hundred seven, one hundred nine, one hundred thirteen.”

  “Bahadur!” Omar had exclaimed, which means brave man. “Over five hundred.”

  “Five hundred three, five hundred nine, five hundred twenty-one, five hundred twenty-three…”

  “W’Allah!” Omar had said, patting the boy on the head. As he listened to the numbers spilling out, he had felt himself falling through time. He had rung that same scale as a boy, saying the primes out loud to himself because his father couldn’t understand. This boy Rashid would not be caught between two worlds: He would live only in one.

  And Omar had thought to himself that day as he finished his visit to his sister’s home and said his goodbyes: Perhaps we have come to the end. Perhaps this is the balance.

  Dr. Omar walked to the university compound, a half mile from the Boat Club. He passed the cantonment where the senior naval officers had their residences, and then entered the gate of Bahria, which was itself a creation of the navy establishment. The naval engineers had been interested in Dr. Omar’s work, like so many others. The porter waved him through the gate and he climbed the stairs to his office, which overlooked a lawn that had faded to a sickly lime-green in the summer heat.

  He turned on his computer and checked his mail, account by account. The computer he was using at Bahria was a university machine whose IP address had no connection with him. The professor had nearly a dozen email identities, each with a different name and set of secrets. Near the end of this session, he visited a Yahoo account that he checked daily on the chance it might contain a new bit of information.

  What he saw in the Yahoo account this evening astonished him: The mischief-maker was persistent. You cut off this creature’s head, and still it kept moving. You closed down its financial hub and it found another way to move money. And back to Dubai, the same bank, too, and fifty million this time, to pay more bribes. This was arrogance, surely.

  The professor had imagined the time when he might be satisfied in his hunger for revenge, but this was a special opportunity. He sent his Belgian correspondent a brief reply in Americanese:

  Good stuff. Take care. Perihelion.

  The professor moved quickly to exploit this gift of information, using the confidential network he had assembled over the past year. He sent a message to a Pakistani who worked at the Citibank branch in Dubai, and asked him to monitor the receipt of a large transfer coming from an FBS account in Geneva. He emailed another Pakistani who worked for the UAE aviation-security authority in Dubai and asked him to forward the names and credit card numbers of all tickets purchased for travel to Dubai over the next week.

  It did not take him long to find a match. By late that night, Dr. Omar knew the identity of the woman who was coming to Dubai and when her flight would arrive. It was a paradox: This very person had appeared to show mercy, and yet she continued her evil work. He could only wonder at the cruel determination of the Americans. Their front company in London was collapsing, and still they continued with their meddling. That was why their adversaries would triumph; this America marched ever deeper into folly. It did not know when to stop. He wanted to go to Dubai himself to settle this account, as it seemed to him. But that would be unwise. Better to contact one of the members of his network.

  Dr. Omar sent all his messages and left the computer lab after midnight for his lodgings to catch a few hours’ sleep. He rarely communicated in such a burst, but he was impatient.

  The watchers and listeners were in place when the mysterious professor surfaced on the Internet. Cyril Hoffman had done his work: Small teams were on the ground waiting in Karachi, Peshawar and other Pakistani cities. Half a world away, people saw the messages, and they carried out the operations that had been planned. They were impatient, as well.

  Dr. Omar drifted in and out of time when he put down his head on the pillow. He was sleeping at the apartment of a new friend, Aziz. The professor was changing lodgings every few nights now, to be safe. This man Aziz was part of the network that supported Dr. Omar’s work. He was a “connected” man.

  Omar awoke suddenly, bathed in sweat. He had felt a sense of vertigo, not just stumbling as we do in our dreams sometimes, but falling through space as if from a great height, with nothing to break his fall. He tried to go back to sleep but he was roused after an hour.

  “There is a call, Ustad,” said his
host. “A man wants to speak to you.”

  “I am not here. Tell him that it is a wrong number.”

  “It is one of the brothers. He says he must talk now.”

  Omar put the phone to his ear. He listened to the voice. He cried out, as if a blade had punctured his skin.

  “Call me back, sweet brother, when you know,” he said, tears filling his eyes.

  Then he dropped the phone. He put his hands to his head and then across his chest. He bowed and tried to kneel in prayer, but his legs were too wobbly and he fell.

  “What is it, Ustad?” asked Aziz, reaching out to his guest and steadying him.

  “There was a bomb this night in Peshawar at the home of my sister. I do not know if she and my nephew have survived.”

  He turned to his host, his eyes wide with the horror of this new twist of the tourniquet of vengeance.

  “I am not a good Muslim,” said Omar, taking his host’s hand. “You must help me pray for my nephew.”

  The two men held hands and prayed together through the last hours of night. At length the phone rang again. Omar could not bear to answer it. He left it for Aziz. The host answered. He smiled and turned to Dr. Omar. He was still smiling as the tears formed in his eyes. That was how Omar knew that his nephew Rashid and his sister had survived.

  “God is great,” murmured Omar.

  Aziz nodded, but he was puzzled by what had happened.

  “They wanted to kill me,” said Omar. “I have slept in that house in Peshawar. Instead, they nearly killed this innocent boy and his mother. But this plot failed. Perhaps it is enough.”

  Dr. Omar put his head back down on the pillow. He had made a promise to God, in his prayers, when his young nephew’s life was in the balance. It was one of the promises that we all make when we are trying to bargain with God. If you spare this one I love, then I will stop. Give me this, and the score is even.