Bloodmoney (10 page)

“Yes, General. We smile, but we have a saying for this, too, sir. ‘A stone will not become soft, nor an enemy a friend.’ These Americans think they can change all things with money, even the hardness of the stone. But they cannot.”

“So here is my question, Azim Khan, the thing that still puzzles me. How did they know to come to you, an elder of the Darwesh Khel? Are they this clever, that they understand our tribes and clans? Or has some Pakistani person told them on what doors they should knock? I think it must be the second answer, don’t you?”

“I am sure I do not know, sir. These Americans have advisers for everything, and perhaps for this, too.”

“Now I must ask you another question. It has been troubling me ever since the day this American man disappeared. We know who took him. They are the miscreants, the
takfiris
who hide in these mountains beyond, who think they are God’s assassins.”

The old man nodded sadly.

“But what I do not know is how these miscreants learned that the American agent was coming. And I am wondering, Azim Khan, I will not play the rabbit with you, I am wondering if it was you who told these miscreants about your meeting. Or your nephew, perhaps it was him.”

“No, sir. We did not say a word. Why would we do that? I am not a greedy man. But now my two million dollars has gone. I do not have it. You can turn over every stone from here to Bannu, but you will not find it because I never got it. And the ten million more that they promised, surely that is gone, too. How will I get that now, General? I cannot.”

General Malik had taken his chin in his hand, which was something that he did when he was pondering a question and did not have the answer.

“So how did the miscreants know of the meeting, Azim Khan, if you did not tell them?”

“Sir, there are secrets and there are mysteries, and this is a mystery. It is a problem for the Americans. They are leaving footprints that cannot be seen. But someone is tracking them, just the same.”

General Malik said his goodbyes. He left presents, as well, gifts that he had brought that, although they were not two million dollars, still brought a deferential nod from the clan leader, and rented his loyalty for a season.

The general got back in his two-seat Mashaq trainer and flew back toward Peshawar through the late afternoon. The summer clouds were forming to the east, hot and sticky, and the plane was buffeted like a shuttlecock, so that the pilot felt that he must apologize to his distinguished guest for the turbulence. But the general barely noticed the rough ride, for he was lost in his puzzle book.

Where did the information come from that drove the American operations? That was what the general wondered, and it had bothered him more each year since September 11, as the Americans squeezed for more from Pakistan. He knew they had their agents, of course they did. The ISI tracked them, and usually it found them out. But this was something more delicate and evanescent. It was as if the Americans had found a window on the culture itself, so that they thought not just about this secret or that, but about the social glue that held the place together.

Who could tell them such things, that was what troubled the general. Who would be smart and subtle enough to see the patterns and describe them to the
Amriki
? If General Malik encountered a person with such a subtle mind, he would want to hire him for the ISI—unless he was a traitor, in which case he would kill him.

General Malik had searched for such an agent, most diligently. He had conducted surveillance, made arrests, interrogated people in the most unpleasant ways, looking for the one who might be opening to American eyes the family secrets of Pakistan.

The general had conducted what the services in the West described as “mole hunts.” But he did not like the word “mole.” It made these people sound cute and furry. He preferred to call them by the local slang,
gungrat,
which means “dung beetle.” For that was what they were, burrowing into the shit of the motherland and then scurrying away to the West. But if there was such a dung beetle, the general had never been able to find him.

He was too smart, this one, too mindful of the ways of intelligence services, and the general had concluded that he must be a man who knew enough to erase his tracks even as he made them. He was out there, for a certainty, and as the little plane bumped over the last ridge of mountains and began its descent toward Peshawar, General Malik made a promise to himself that he would find this man someday, and punish him.

LONDON

The sun was just
coming up over Hyde Park when Thomas Perkins got off the phone with “Mr. Jones.” The first rays were white gold. From the top-floor study of Perkins’s house in Ennismore Gardens, he could look across the rooftops to the rust-red bricks of Harrods on Brompton Road, and east across the park to the hotel towers that marked the boundary of Mayfair. The city was changing shifts—some boozy stragglers wandering in from Clubland, a ruddy crew of workingmen mounting the scaffolding that wrapped a building nearby—all bathed in the early summer light.

It was the sort of June morning that had made London irresistible to Perkins ever since he’d set up shop there in the late 1990s. What he had discovered was that this was the best place in the world to be rich. But even that pleasure had its limits.

Perkins told the housekeeper he was going out, and that if a visitor arrived, he should wait in the parlor for his return. He knotted a cashmere scarf around his neck against the morning chill and trundled down the back stairs of his townhouse, slipping out through his garage door onto a mews. He followed this passageway until he emerged at Rutland Gate, where he crossed into Hyde Park.

Perkins was preoccupied. He hadn’t liked talking to this fictitious “Jones,” the government official who so ostentatiously wouldn’t say who he really was. The arm’s-length treatment made him feel tawdry, like someone who had gotten caught doing something wrong. That wasn’t the way it had started. The “recruiter,” for that’s what he had been, had spoken of patriotism. September 11 was still a burning memory, and Perkins had wanted to help, like everyone else. And then it had gotten more complicated.

As he strode across the park toward Mayfair, Perkins appeared as a solitary figure, not one of the commodores of finance. Such men are driven by chauffeurs; they do not walk. And when they do venture out, they are accompanied by bodyguards and bag holders—the small army of retainers that exists to minimize contact between the very rich and real life. But in this respect, as in others, Perkins was a somewhat different package.

Thomas Perkins was a tidy man in his early fifties, with small round-rimmed glasses and a thatch of blond hair. He looked boyish; people had been saying that about him ever since he actually was a boy, and it was one of his advantages: It’s easy to underestimate someone who seems unmarked by life, to assume that he can’t know the same things as people who have visibly lived and suffered.

He was used to being the smartest person in the room, and that sometimes made his boyishness oppressive. Even when he wasn’t talking, his eyes darted from speaker to speaker, or to a BlackBerry or computer screen. When doing business, which was nearly always, he would rarely smile or frown. On very rare occasions, when something had especially caught his fancy, you might hear a burst of staccato laughter, ha-ha-ha, followed by a wry comment or question, or, simply, a return to silence.

His lawyer, Vincent Tarullo, had once told him that he looked like Mr. Peabody, the talking dog on
The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show
. Mr. Peabody always knew the answer to everything. Tarullo addressed him by that name even when they were in company, to the point that some people in his Washington law firm actually thought that Peabody was the client’s name.

Perkins had another nickname, one that said more about his business life: In the London hedge-fund world he was known as “Pacman” because of his skill in gobbling up assets. The name stuck: Thomas Perkins was the motorized mouth, powering through the maze of finance and eating all the dots in sight, until there weren’t any more and he got to start on a fresh screen. He had enemies among his competitors—how could anyone that successful avoid it? But even among the people who tried to follow his trading strategies, Perkins remained mysterious.

Perkins made his way across the Hyde Park meadow, his head down and his thin body in a walk that was almost a run. He walked to work most days from the townhouse in Knightsbridge to his office in Mayfair, and he regarded the park as his front yard. The daffodils that a few weeks ago had displayed a dozen shades of yellow were now mostly wilted and gone. A few tulips were still in bloom, plush lips of color atop their narrow stalks. Even in June, the morning chill left the grass wet so that it matted under Perkins’s feet.

Mayfair made the pursuit of money seem like the only rational calling in life. This tiny area, bounded by Park Lane, Piccadilly, Regent Street and Oxford Street, was home to many of London’s big hedge funds; it was the place where the world’s most talented financial minds had come to make fortunes of a size that could not have been imagined even in the heyday of the British Empire when this district had become fashionable.

Perkins halted at Stanhope Gate. He studied his BlackBerry for the Asian trading news as he waited for the light to change, and then crossed Park Lane and walked into Curzon Street.

This was his favorite part of the journey, watching this little village come awake each morning—the clubs and clothiers, the restaurants and art galleries. It was a ballet of money, choreographed anew each morning. A few refuse trucks were still out in the early morning light, collecting the trading-room litter from the previous day. Some of these lowly trash men were said to be running little businesses of their own, selling hedge-fund secrets to hungry operators who want to slipstream behind the big boys’ trades.

Perkins turned right on Stratton Street, and entered a modern building in Mayfair Place. He took the elevator to the top floor, which belonged to Alphabet Capital. At the far end was Perkins’s office, with an expanse of windows that looked out across Piccadilly to the Ritz Hotel and, beyond that, to Green Park and, in the far distance, Buckingham Palace.

Perkins opened the main door. It was just past seven, and he had expected that he would find the office empty. But in a far corner of the trading floor, bathed in shadow, Perkins could see one of the young traders who followed the Asian markets. Perkins called out hello and heard a wheezy answer from the trading desk.

Perkins disappeared into his vast office. There was a three-leafed desk, framed by computer screens as big as television monitors. There was a squawk box directly in front of where Perkins sat, with buttons for each of his main traders, so that he could give orders instantly when he saw opportunities in the markets.

Under Perkins’s desk, concealed behind a mahogany panel, was a safe. Perkins opened it and removed a tray of documents. Several of the documents bore the name of Howard Egan. Others were from accountants, auditors and lawyers. Perkins gathered them all and took them to the shredder. He ran the contents through once, and then passed the shreds a second time until they were confetti. He went to another safe, secreted in the private locker room behind his office, and removed another sheaf of documents. These, too, were shredded to dust.

Then Perkins picked up the telephone and called his private attorney, Vincent Tarullo, at home in Washington. Tarullo was a former prosecutor at the Justice Department and had run its National Security Section. He had seen almost every kind of trouble a person could get into.

“Sorry to wake you, Vince,” he said into the phone.

“No problem. I was just jerking off. That’s you, Mr. Peabody, I presume?”

“
Moi-même.
”

“Why are you at work so early?”

“I have a little problem,” said Perkins. “Something I never told you about.”

“Swell. I always like it when you go solo and exercise poor judgment. It gives me something to clean up.”

“Don’t try to be funny, Vince. This is not the moment. I have a man who has gone missing in Pakistan. His name is Howard Egan. E-G-A-N. He seems to have been kidnapped. I am going to put out a statement today here in London.”

“Why was he kidnapped, for chrissakes? And what was he doing in Pakistan? Does he really work for you?”

“Well, that’s the thing. This particular gentleman did a bit of moonlighting.”

“For whom?”

“You can guess, surely. Let us say that these people were not unknown to you in your former line of work.”

“Oh, Christ. You really are an asshole. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Complicated question. Simple answer: I wasn’t allowed to. Anyway, I didn’t, and that’s that. They want me to put out a statement and sit tight and wait for the whole thing to blow over. Does that make sense to you?”

“I don’t know. Do you have any other choice?”

“No. I want you to do something for me this morning. Call your old friends. Not the little guys, but the very biggest one you know, and tell him that I am assuming people will keep a lid on this. Tell him that if they don’t, the consequences will be extremely serious, for everybody.
Ooga-booga
. Scare them. You know how to do that.”

“Will they know what I’m talking about?” asked the lawyer.

“I rather think so. This is a little, um, difficult for them.”

“Are you going to tell me about this, Peabody? Because I think you should. I can fly over tonight. You need help.”

“Not now. Maybe I’ll tell you later. Right now it’s awkward. You would ask questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer.”

“Hey, level with me, my friend. Are you fucked up here?”

“No. I am the opposite of fucked up, whatever that is. I am just dandy. So long as everyone adheres to their bargains. Then I am fine. That’s all I really need you to worry about—that the dikes and levies are secure, and the floodwaters can be contained.”