Bloodmoney (6 page)

Gertz shook his head. This day had started off so reasonably. The bad news didn’t fit.

“Maybe Egan is spooked,” he said. “He got the jitters the last time he was in Karachi, aborted two meetings. Maybe the same thing happened this time. He’s just freaking out somewhere, having a drink and looking at shadows.”

“Maybe, but we don’t think so,” said Rossetti, the operations chief. “We’re still tracking his BlackBerry signal. It’s been on the move for the last two hours, plus. He’s just not answering.”

Gertz shook his head. The room was quiet. He looked at Rossetti.

“Christ. This is bad.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Gertz stared at the floor, trying to compose himself. The color had drained from his face. It was almost as if he were embarrassed that something had gone wrong. His people weren’t supposed to make mistakes. They had big hearts. There was a dead quiet, which Rossetti filled.

“What’s Egan’s cover job?” asked the operations chief. It wasn’t on his cheat sheet. He was new. He still didn’t know most of the network.

Gertz was still looking at the floor, stroking that goatee some more. Marx broke the silence.

“He works for a hedge fund in London called Alphabet Capital. The only person there who’s witting is the chief executive.”

“Perkins,” said Gertz. “His name is Thomas Perkins.”

“That’s not very secure,” said Rossetti. “Why doesn’t Egan have his own platform?”

Gertz frowned. He didn’t like being quizzed by his operations chief.

“He’s a legacy, Steve. Blame your friends at Headquarters. Where’s Tommy? He can explain it.”

Tommy Arden, who as head of Support was responsible for organizing cover, scurried forward.

“He was a holdover from the old NOC group,” said Arden. “We got him from the Global Deployment Center. He’d been working for another investment company in London. We found him a new cover. It seemed to work, until about an hour ago.”

“Who knows he’s traveling?” asked Gertz. “Does he have a wife and kids?”

“Nope, he’s the usual NOC loner.”

“Good, that’s fewer people to notify.”

Gertz was being a hard-ass, but that wasn’t right. Not today. To be a leader, you had to take the lead.

“Okay, when London wakes up I am going to call Perkins and tell him that his man is missing. He’ll have to put out a statement. Otherwise, zip it. Total radio silence. Understood?”

Sophie Marx nodded assent, along with everyone else. She watched as the group fell away. She wasn’t a religious person; her counterculture parents, when they had thought about religion at all, had told her it was lies and nonsense. But as she thought about Howard Egan, gone missing halfway around the world in a frightening city, she asked God to watch over him.

Marx recalled her last conversation with Egan. She wished now that she hadn’t told him to “suck it up” when he had expressed anxiety about the mission.

STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

Jeff Gertz bulled into
his office, Steve Rossetti trailing behind. The others understood that they weren’t needed anymore. It was a room with a view, but only of Ventura Boulevard. On the walls were trophies Gertz had collected from various assignments: a rich silk tapestry that the crown prince of Morocco had sent in gratitude after he ascended to the throne; a laughable portrait of Saddam Hussein dressed as a tribal sheikh that he had brought out of Baghdad; a miniature marquee that said, in looping neon script, “The Hit Parade,” which he had ordered from a signage company in West Hollywood when his crazy experiment was approved; and behind his desk a picture of the Twin Towers with a long Chinese quotation whose meaning Gertz shared with his intimate colleagues. This was his kingdom, but it was about to be turned upside down.

Gertz sat down in his big black leather chair, and then bounded up again and stared out the window at the traffic heading north on Ventura toward the studios. Part of his problem was that he didn’t trust most of his colleagues. He thought they were soft, sapped by an intelligence culture that tolerated weakness and poor performance. They had small hearts. They lived in the visible world. Gertz wouldn’t have said it out loud, but he regarded Howard Egan as a weak man; now the strong ones would have to bail him out.

“This is a shit storm,” muttered Gertz. “What have we got nearby?”

“In Karachi, nothing of our own,” said Rossetti. “There’s a consulate, and I think Headquarters still has a base there.”

Rossetti spoke slowly and precisely. He was a company man, a slow roller, and he was scared that he would get blamed if things went wrong. But Gertz wanted action.

“Could we send in a traveler, in a hurry? I want to keep this close.”

“Sure, but it would be insecure, moving that fast. It’s easier to use the guy in the consulate.”

“Goddamn it,” said Gertz. He hated having to depend on Headquarters for anything. It only confirmed the old boys’ wisdom that his new outfit was fine until the chips were down. Then it needed help from the old structure.

“I’ll call Langley in a minute,” he said. “Let me think. Where’s the nearest extraction team?”

“Bagram,” said Rossetti. “They’re saddled and ready, twenty-four/seven.”

“Well, call them. Tell them we may need them in a hurry, but don’t tell them why yet.”

“Sorry, Jeff, but we need an okay from Headquarters to call Bagram. Those are military assets. We don’t have the authority to task them.”

“That ask-permission crap was supposed to be over.”

“That’s not what Headquarters says. You want me to call CTC and find out what they’ve got cooking?” Rossetti, among other things, was the liaison to the Counterterrorism Center, where Gertz had worked in a previous assignment.

“Ask them what’s going on in the Tribal Areas. From what I hear it’s the same crazy shit out there. Tell CTC that if they have any Preds up today, maybe this one time they could hold off blowing people away, until we get our guy back.”

“Roger. But they won’t listen. We do our thing, they do theirs.”

“Precisely. Net result, zero.” Gertz shooed his hand for Rossetti to leave.

“I need to make some calls. Tell me when you hear from Egan. He’s a burnout, that guy, I’m telling you. Too long in the job. He’ll show up, and then I’m going to fire his ass.”

Gertz closed the office door. He sat back in his big black chair for a moment, trying to think it through, but he couldn’t focus. There were too many knots. He had no option but to ask for help.

He picked up the secure phone and called the associate deputy director in Langley, Cyril Hoffman, who was The Hit Parade’s official point of contact.

Gertz didn’t trust Hoffman; the man was odd: He liked to wear ascots and Panama hats and vests with gold chains. He was from a famous CIA family, which had sent cousins and uncles into the agency for generations. He had started in the Near East Division, like most of his notorious relatives, but a decade ago he had abandoned the family nest in favor of Support—arranging travel and housing and the other humdrum logistical details that allowed the agency to function. In that role, he had amassed an unusual network of power. Nearly everyone at the CIA owed him a favor, as did people in many other parts of the government, as well.

“Bad news?” asked Hoffman when he got on the line. He sounded almost merry.

“How did you know?” answered Gertz.

“Rossetti told me I should expect a call. And frankly, Jeff, why else would you be in touch?”

“I have an officer in Karachi who’s AWOL. He missed a meeting an hour ago. That place is the Wild West, and I’m worried.”

“Tell me what you need, my friend,” said Hoffman. His voice was liquid.

“Rossetti says you have a declared officer in the consulate in Karachi. I need for him to notify the Sindhi police right now that an American citizen is missing, presumed in trouble. Under no circumstances should he suggest any USG connection to the man. I’ll send you the alias name and passport number when I hang up. He was covered as a businessman working for a hedge fund in London called Alphabet Capital. He traveled often to Pakistan.”

Hoffman made a clucking noise with his tongue, as if he were correcting a pupil.

“I think you mean that the
consular
officer should talk to the Sindhi police, not the base chief, if you want to keep the agency out of it.”

“Right. As if the Paks think there’s a difference.”

“Oh, my, they know us better than you might imagine,” said Hoffman. “Can we give the Karachi police a location?”

“We have the GPS coordinates of his BlackBerry. But I suspect that the man and the BlackBerry are no longer in the same place.”

“That’s unfortunate. Anything else?”

“Find the driver,” said Gertz. “That’s where the Paks should start. Find the taxi driver who was taking my man to his meet.”

“Uh, what’s the flap potential here?”

“If he has been captured? Pretty damned big, I’d say. If he’s dead, not so big.”

“Can we grab him?”

“Sure, if we can find him. That’s the other favor I need to ask. Can you get an extraction team from Bagram on the scene, pronto?”

“Yes, but the Paks will get squirrelly.”

“Not if you don’t tell them. Fly in an extra team from one of the task forces. Put them in a hotel in Karachi. Send some weapons and shit over from the consulate. Have them chase any signals we pick up. If we don’t need them, you can send them back to Afghanistan and nobody will be the wiser.”

Hoffman paused. There was a reedy noise through the phone that sounded almost like he was humming.

“What about the ISI?” Hoffman resumed. “Should we inform them? They’re going to know something is up.”

“No. Let them guess. For all we know, they’re the ones who did this, them or their friends. I don’t think we should tell them a fucking thing.”

“The gentlemen from ISI are not stupid, I regret to say.”

There was another pause, and that humming noise began again, and then stopped.

“Should we tell the oversight committees anything?” mused Hoffman. “That’s what the director is going to ask me.”

“God, no. Don’t tell them a word. This is a missing American civilian. Full stop. That’s all the world is going to know. His identity is secret. Those are the rules of this game, right?”

“Excuse me, Jeff, but it would appear that somebody
knew
that secret identity already. If Egan was grabbed, that means his cover was blown. You might start thinking about how that happened. Before you have another, um, accident.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Gertz.

“I…”—Hoffman paused and took in a breath, “don’t…”—another delay, while he blew his nose—“know.”

With that, Hoffman rang off.

Gertz told Tommy Arden to send out a book cable to everyone, every officer and every platform that was part of The Hit Parade’s network. Report anything suspicious. Avoid unnecessary travel. If you are in a denied area, get out.

It was a big distribution list, more than a hundred people. The cable didn’t explain what was wrong, which spooked people in the field. But Gertz was such an operator that people were never sure what he was doing, even when he told them directly. They assumed that if there was trouble, he would take care of it, one way or another.

Gertz believed in lying; that was part of his special aptitude for the job. That was the message of the Chinese quotation framed behind his desk under the big picture of the Twin Towers. It was a passage from Sun Tzu that he had studied after September 11. The translation wasn’t written down, but Gertz had memorized it: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

Over the past year, Gertz had made a dozen copies of this plaque and given them to trusted colleagues. It was his version of the “commander’s coin” that general officers pressed into the hands of the troops. He wanted his people—his new warriors—to understand that lying was absolutely essential to their work. It wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of the job. It
was
the job.

Gertz made one more decision that morning, which would affect the future more than he could have realized. He knew that he needed to begin planning for the worst. Hoffman had fired a warning shot, on behalf of the secret barons who managed what was left of Headquarters. The questions would come at them, even if only a few people knew enough to ask. Why had Egan been grabbed? How had his identity been compromised? What else might have come unstuck?

Gertz needed help answering these questions, but only from someone who would be reliable. He trusted almost nobody outside The Hit Parade, and few people inside, either. His principal deputies all were potential rivals, loyal to him in the moment, but ready to switch sides. His operations chief, Rossetti, was a plant from Headquarters. His general counsel spent his time worrying about the inspector general back in Langley. His Support chief, Tommy Arden, was loyal, but he was a mouse.

He went down the list of section chiefs and paused when he got to the name of Sophie Marx. She had just been promoted to her counterintelligence job, but she was smart and aggressive, and she knew the Howard Egan case. What stuck in Gertz’s mind was something else: She had done him a favor several months before. An auditor was visiting from Headquarters, and he had taken Marx off site and asked her a lot of questions about The Hit Parade’s operations. Marx had spun him, and then she had come to see Gertz later to give him a report.

Gertz had asked her why she ratted out the Headquarters man.

“He asked too many questions,” Marx had said, “and he was an asshole about it.”

Gertz had liked that. He knew the stories about her operations in Beirut, and how she had escaped an ambush once in Addis. Marx was lucky, that counted for something. And she was still in her mid-thirties, young enough to take risks. The book on her was that she was headstrong and independent. But Gertz thought he could handle her in a jam.

STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA