Bloodmoney (15 page)

“You are looking in the wrong place. You are making a mistake that is characteristic of your country. I am surprised to hear you make it, because you are smarter than most of your fellows, but there we are.”

“I’m listening, Mohammed. What’s the mistake?”

“You do not realize your vulnerability. You do not realize that your adversary could do to you what you have been doing to them. There is a leak, my dear. I cannot say what it is, but it is for you to discover. I am sorry. Although you have been very clever in this new covert business, whatever it is, somehow they have found you out.”

“Old Cyril is a little slow today. You better explain more.”

“I cannot, sir. That is my point. I do not know. But someone knows. That is what you must consider.”

“These riddles are giving me a headache, Mohammed. Why don’t you tell me what it is you have to say?”

“Why should I? How can I? You have just accused me, more or less, of murder. Why should I think that you will listen to anything I say?”

“Do me a favor. Just say it. Tell me how we’ve been busted. Come on, say it, goddamn it.”

The general shook his head. He did not like to hear profanity, especially in the sanctuary of his own quarters.

“I have already told you the essential fact, Cyril. They are on to you. The fact that you did not understand me illustrates the problem. You ask me for more, but there is no more. Perhaps you will think about it as you fly home. Maybe you will think about it, at greater length, when you are home. Maybe you will do something about it. I cannot say. It is not my problem. It is yours.”

The general rose. The meeting was over. He shook the American’s hand, and then, feeling that this was not enough, kissed him again on the cheeks. This time, Hoffman did not reciprocate. And it was a cold hand that he offered, for he was certain that the Pakistani, for all his fine words, had been false with him.

The Pakistani looked at his visitor, his face registering at once anger and injury.

“He’s dead, by the way, your man in Karachi. The body cannot be recovered, but I do not think you would want to see it. His passing was a blessing, under the circumstances. Our police will say that he had an accident. He went trekking. Fell off a cliff. That will save us both from embarrassment. We will put something in a coffin and send it back to London. You can worry about the rest.”

Cyril Hoffman nodded. How very like the Pakistanis, to tidy up the mess. What he thought, as he walked back into the heat of the Rawalpindi morning, was that his dear friend General Malik could not possibly know about the death of this American intelligence officer unless he was working with the people who killed him.

ISLAMABAD

Dr. Omar al-Wazir parked
his car along Scholar’s Drive and mounted the concrete steps to his office at the National University of Science and Technology. It was located west of Islamabad, in an otherwise desolate quadrant of ground off the Kashmir Highway known as H-12. It was as if the authorities wanted to quarantine science and keep it at a safe distance. The palms at the entrance were so wilted they were bent nearly double, and the potted plants that lined the walkway were just so many stalks and clods of dirt in the midsummer heat.

Dr. Omar was holding office hours today at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was a research professor, a coveted position, since the only responsibility, other than his own work, was to supervise a few graduate students. He closed the blinds against the sun so that his office was almost dark. The whiteboard at the far end of the room, scribbled with notations and algorithms, was the only object that picked up any light.

Dr. Omar booted up his computer and waited for the screen to come alive. He didn’t do his sensitive communications here, but on another machine in the computer lab whose IP address was easier to mask. But there were puzzles he could solve in the office, too. He took off his suit jacket and put it on the hanger that hung from a hook on the door. He was neatly dressed, in a white shirt and lightweight summer suit that was the color of tobacco. His face was clean-shaven, not even a mustache, so that even with his big nose and dark complexion, he looked more Western than Pakistani.

There was a knock at Dr. Omar’s door. A young man with a scraggly beard peered into the room. His name was Tahir and he was a doctoral candidate under Dr. Omar’s supervision. His thesis topic was promising: “Traffic Analysis for Network Security using Streaming Algorithms and Learning Theory.” When it was completed, the army would probably decide to classify it, and then Tahir would be stuck, but for now he could dream.

“Excuse me, professor, I am sorry to bother you,” said the young man. He looked like he hadn’t eaten or slept in a week.

“Come in, Tahir,” said the professor, taking the student’s hand and pulling him gently into the room. “It is office hours. You are not bothering me. I belong to you today. What is it that you want?”

“I was wondering, Doctor, if you had heard from Stanford or Caltech?”

Dr. Omar had contacts in the computer-science faculties of both those schools, from his own days as prodigy in computer security. Tahir had asked for his help in arranging a postdoctoral fellowship at one of the California schools.

“I did talk to them, but I am afraid it is not good news. They cannot take you next year. They have already made commitments to people with similar research topics.
Koi baat nahin,
I tell you. Never mind. There will be other chances to study abroad. The university has many exchanges with China now.”

The young man shook his head sorrowfully. He did not want to go to China, but to the United States.

“What about Iowa State?” the student asked. “Or the University of Central Florida?” The National University of Science and Technology had official links with both those schools, too.

Dr. Omar laughed at the thought of little Tahir, scrawny as a she-goat, trying to make his way in the wilds of Orlando.

“We’ll try,” he said. “I don’t know anyone at either place, but I will send the abstract of your dissertation with a nice note, and you never know.”

“Thank you, professor.” The graduate student gave a little bow and backed out of the room, as if he were leaving an audience with a medieval prince.

Dr. Omar smiled as Tahir was leaving. They all wanted to go to America, these boys, even with the visa problems and the expense and everything else. The professor could understand it well enough. He had been much the same at that age, wanting to escape a world where you were bound to live with your mother until you had found a wife, who then behaved as if she were your mother, too.

Dr. Omar did not have that problem now, though it gave him no comfort. He had lost his mother nearly two years before, along with most other members of his family, and the memory was as bitter to him as if it were poison. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, the world went white again. He did not talk about it, ever, and few people even knew of it. He had one surviving sister, who had been away with her own family on that terrible day. She lived in Peshawar, where Dr. Omar visited her occasionally and sent her money to help pay for her children’s schooling.

The professor went back to his research, waiting for the next earnest student to knock at the door. His main project these days, at least officially, was in something known as “computational neuroscience,” which focused on the algorithms of the human brain. It was hopeful and uplifting, the idea that computers could mimic the processes that took place in threads of neurons, and in that sense it was a relief from the other work that Dr. Omar hid from everyone. He had told his contacts at the Military College of Signals in Rawalpindi, who reviewed his work, that computational neuroscience was the future of warfare, because it would someday drive robots. They liked that, and approved a handsome grant.

Dr. Omar kept his hand in computer security, too, to make everyone happy. He wrote occasional papers, and did consulting abroad, and gave lectures in Rawalpindi at the MCS when they asked. His original work as a graduate student had been in a specialty known as “pseudo-randomness,” a technique that used algorithmic techniques to produce numbers that were indistinguishable, in a technical sense, from random values. Dr. Omar had always been fascinated by numbers, ever since he was a little boy in Makeen when the solutions to number puzzles used to light up in his head like the display on a carnival arcade.

It had turned out that this topic of “pseudo-randomness” was a very hot one when Dr. Omar had gotten his doctorate in the late 1990s. A team at Stanford was doing similar work, and they had invited Dr. Omar to give a paper on his research. That was how he had met the Californians, and a lot of other people, too. The visiting analysts sitting in the back of the lecture hall had studied the Pakistani’s formulas, and found uses for them that were far beyond what the young man had imagined.

Omar al-Wazir, nicknamed “the Waz” by an Indian friend he met that summer, stayed in Palo Alto for a month. He lived in a suite in the graduate student housing behind the law school, but he spent most of his time in the computer science library in the Math Wing of Memorial Hall.

When Omar went to Peet’s Coffee & Tea nearby, the California girls often tried to pick him up. He was tall and exotic-looking, and he had the endearing manner, even then, of a young professor. A girl named Debbie finally succeeded in taking Omar home to bed. She lived in a big California ranch house on Page Mill Road. She had the biggest breasts Omar had ever seen or could imagine. They made love every day after that until it was time for him to fly home. She said she would write, but she never did; he was a summer romance.

Omar made many other friends that month in Palo Alto, who did stay in touch and continued to ask about his research. The Pakistani authorities queried him when he returned home, but they were proud of him, too. He did some consulting for the government, and as he began to be invited to conferences abroad, he always reported back on them—not all the details, and not every conference, but enough to keep everyone satisfied. Because of his tribal upbringing and his gentle ways, Omar al-Wazir was regarded as a man above reproach.

There had been a time several years ago, before the disaster in Makeen, when the Inter-Services Intelligence had invited him—commanded him, in fact—to pay them a visit in Aabpara. They were summoning a lot of professors in those days.

He was quizzed by an unpleasant man who called himself Major Nadeem. This interrogator took him through all the byways of his life.

“Why did you go to Cadet College at Razmak?” the major had asked.

“My father sent me. He said I would be useless as a hunter or a fighter, because I was always thinking about numbers. Don’t ask me how, but I knew which ones were primes and which ones were divisible by nine, or twenty-seven, or one hundred twelve. My father decided it was a gift, although a strange one. He said I should go to a real school. Here, you can call him and ask him.”

Dr. Omar had handed the major his cell phone.

His father was still alive then, a craggy old man trying to survive in a South Waziristan that was becoming, more each day, a shooting gallery.

The major shook his head. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to an old Pashtun grandfather living among the rocks.

“What did you do at Razmak?” the major had demanded.

“I studied math and engineering. I won all the prizes there, two years before I was supposed to, so they got me a scholarship to study at the University of Peshawar, where they had a computer science department. I lived in one of the hostels and joined the Khyber Islamic Culture Society. You can check.”

“Did you know any Americans then?”

“No. I wanted to. I had a picture on my wall of Bill Gates when he was young. He looked no better or smarter than any of the Pashtun boys in the hostel. We all wanted to be like him.”

The major nodded. Bill Gates was acceptable. He asked about the Stanford trip. Who had been interested in the research?

“So many people, I did not know them all. They studied my work. They asked me questions. I told the ISI about it when I got home. A major like you, he was. You can check.”

The major did not want to make more work for himself. And it was true, the story as it had been narrated and understood was all in the files.

“Why did you go back to America?” he demanded, looking at a sheet of paper.

“I was invited to present a paper at a conference that was cosponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It was a great honor for me, and for my university. You can ask them.”

He held out his cell phone again, so that Major Nadeem could make a call to verify, but the major shook his head.

They spent several more hours like this, going through the major episodes of Dr. Omar’s career. When they came to his most recent work on computer-security algorithms, Dr. Omar apologized that he could not talk about this work in any detail because it had been classified as “top secret” by the Pakistani military.

The major found nothing of interest. Dr. Omar was very careful, then and always. The major asked him to sign a paper, and to report any suspicious contacts, and Dr. Omar assured him that he would. The Pakistani authorities never came after him again. That was three years before his world went white.

Omar al-Wazir had multiple binary identities, it could be said. He was a Pakistani but also, in some sense, a man tied to the West. He was a Pashtun from the raw tribal area of South Waziristan, but he was also a modern man. He was a secular scientist and also a Muslim, if not quite a believer. His loyalties might indeed have been confused before the events of nearly two years ago, but not now.

Sometimes Dr. Omar grounded himself by recalling the spirit of his father, Haji Mohammed. He remembered the old man shaking his head when Omar took wobbly practice shots with an Enfield rifle, missing the target nearly every time. The look on the father’s face asked:
How can this be my oldest son, this boy who cannot shoot?
But Haji Mohammed had taught him the code of manhood, just the same.