Bloodmoney (7 page)

Sophie Marx was reading
a case file when Jeffrey Gertz peered into her office just before noon. Her glasses were perched on the tip of her nose, and her black hair was gathered in a loose ponytail. She looked up at him briefly, awkwardly, and then back at the file. Gertz had never visited her office before. It was messy. The
Thelma and Louise
poster was askew. On the wall was a framed photograph of two people in sandals and woolly hair, hugging her at her Princeton graduation: The longhairs were her eccentric parents, in from the islands. On her desk was an open bag of SunChips.

Marx assumed that Gertz was on his way somewhere else, but he wasn’t.

“Am I interrupting something?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. I mean, that’s your job, isn’t it?”

He laughed and closed the door.

Marx stood up, shook the boss’s hand and then sat back down.

“I’m sorry about Howard Egan,” she said, putting the file folder on top of the bag of chips. “That was my case. I should have kept a tighter watch on him. Is there any more news?”

“The Paks just found his BlackBerry in a dumpster. If he’s lucky, he’s dead by now.”

She put her hand over her mouth, and there was a slight tremor of her head, as if she had just hit a blast of cold air. She had made her own runs into dangerous places. She recovered her composure quickly.

“Let me know how I can help,” she said. “I feel like this is my screwup, partly.”

“That’s why I’m here, actually,” said Gertz. “I have a problem, and it’s about to become your problem.”

Her eyes flashed. She wanted to be in the game, but she knew not to rush.

“What do you have in mind?”

“I need someone to investigate how this happened, and in a hurry. Otherwise, Headquarters will take it over. They’ll send their own counterintelligence team, and damage-assessment team, and finger-pointing team. I don’t want them ruining what we’ve been trying to build here.”

He was leaning toward her, imploring but also demanding. With his lean face and goatee, and that hungry look in his eye, he looked in this moment like a trumpeter who needed a fix.

“And you’re free to travel, right?” Gertz continued. “I mean, you don’t have a ball and chain here.”

Marx understood that the boss was asking, obliquely, about her sex life. She had been married briefly seven years before, to another case officer, but as with so many tandem couples, the romantic attachment was to the work, not the other person. She was always in Lebanon or Addis; he was always in Nicaragua; they were always nowhere.

“I’m free to travel,” she said.

“So let’s do it. Be my person. Make this case.”

She took off the reading glasses and folded her hands in front of her. Gertz was waiting for an answer, but she was still thinking.

“So you want me to get there first. And clean up the mess before Headquarters can make trouble. Is that it, more or less?”

He didn’t answer directly.

“I need someone I can trust,” he said. “You’re it. What do you say?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What you mean?” His voice was rising. “One of your colleagues has just disappeared in a garbage dump in Pakistan, and I’m asking you to help and you refuse? Are you kidding me? Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work.”

“I’m not refusing. Lower your voice. You’re shouting.”

“I want an answer.”

“You’re asking me to be your fixer. That’s not my job. You just hired me to run counterintelligence for you. Finding out what happened to Howard Egan is what I’m
supposed
to do. It’s not a favor to my boss. Even a boss I like and respect.”

Gertz smiled. She was fighting for her own space. That wasn’t a bad thing.

“Let’s start again. I need you to begin a confidential CI investigation of what happened to Howard Egan. You can have access to anything you want in the files, here or anywhere else. You can go anywhere you like. I want you to do it right. But you need to do it fast, or we are going to get blown out of the water. Sorry if I sounded like a jerk before. It’s my nature. So what do you say, now that I’m asking nicely?”

“I say yes. When do I start?”

“Right now. Come upstairs in fifteen minutes and I’ll show you what we’ve got. Then I’ll take you to lunch.”

“Sorry, but I can’t make lunch.”

“Oh, yeah? Why not?”

“Because I’ll be eating at my desk, reading the files you’re going to give me.”

Sophie Marx moved upstairs to a small office next to Gertz’s that had been cleared for her. They worked all that day and through the night, hoping that Egan might make contact. She assembled everything about Egan she could find—his travels, his contact reports, his cover documentation, his roster of agents. She already understood the smooth edges of the puzzle that formed the border of his operational life. Now she would start looking for the jagged ones.

Gertz’s secretary, a refugee from Headquarters named Pat Waters, rolled her eyes when she saw that Marx had temporarily joined the front office. She knew enough about her boss’s predatory social life to be suspicious of the new arrival. Marx ignored the secretary until she balked at a request for access to Hamid Akbar’s 201 personnel file.

“You’re not cleared for that,” Waters said brusquely.

Marx asked again, as if she hadn’t heard the first time, and when she got the same answer she thought of summoning Gertz for help. But that was exactly what the secretary would expect her to do. She asked Waters to step into her small office, little bigger than a closet.

“I am here on Mr. Gertz’s orders,” she said. “I don’t have a lot of time. I’ll ask you again, politely, and if that doesn’t work, this will get unpleasant for you in a hurry.”

Waters didn’t answer, but she nodded her head in submission. Marx was good that way: She wasn’t a shouter, but she usually got what she wanted.

The watch officer, Julian, came in regularly with reports from the operations center. A flash cable had arrived when the Pakistani police found Egan’s BlackBerry. The Paks reluctantly agreed to turn over the phone for forensic analysis. When it arrived at the consulate, the SIM card was missing.

The FBI had a team based in Islamabad, so two agents flew to Karachi to take apart the BlackBerry, along with the local representative from the NSA. They were able to document what everyone assumed: Egan’s last communication had been his email message to The Hit Parade with the coordinates of his meeting in Baldia Town. After that, silence. The GPS signal showed movements that were consistent with a normal surveillance detection run until just after eight p.m., when he stopped, or was stopped, in Rasheedabad, a district north of downtown on the way to Baldia. The GPS signal stayed there for about twenty minutes, moving a hundred yards north, then fifty yards west.

Rasheedabad seemed to be where disaster had struck. Then the GPS track moved rapidly north toward Ittehad Town, where it stopped dead around nine. That turned out to be the dumpster, where the Pakistani police found the phone.

Gertz’s first priority was to find the taxi driver. Egan would have taken a cab to the meet, probably a string of them. You didn’t need special intelligence to find a taxi, you just needed a lot of cops. He had Steve Rossetti work it through Langley, after his initial conversation with Hoffman.

Headquarters sent its man in Karachi a photo of Egan that the consulate could show to the cabbies. The Pakistani police were already pulling in drivers. Once they had a photo to work with, it became routine police work.

The cops quickly located two of the taxis that Egan had taken that night. The drivers confirmed that they’d carried the passenger in the photo. A third driver hauled into the dragnet said he had seen the
gora
, the white man in the photograph, getting into a red Toyota sedan. He remembered it because the passenger had sat in the backseat for a long while, as if he was thinking of getting out, and the driver had hoped maybe he could get the fare instead. But the Toyota had driven away.

Late in the afternoon a call came in from Headquarters. The Pakistani police had found the red Toyota, at three a.m. Karachi time. It was in Orangi, a district south of Ittehad Town where the BlackBerry had been found. The driver’s throat had been slit. The police guessed the driver had been dead about five hours, since that was about the time Egan went missing.

Gertz called Thomas Perkins late that night, L.A. time, early morning in London. He wanted to reach him at home before he went to the office. Perkins had been Howard Egan’s nominal boss at Alphabet Capital. Sophie was in his office when he made the call, and he nodded for her to pick up the muted extension phone. As he dialed the call, Gertz silently mouthed the word,
Shit
. This was the moment when the bad news would become as real and messy as a turd.

“My name is Mr. Jones,” Gertz began. His voice had risen an octave, and it had a nasally sound and a bit of a posh accent. It sounded so different that Marx wouldn’t have known it was him if she hadn’t been staring at him. He winked at her, acknowledging his impromptu tradecraft, as he continued speaking.

“I work for the United States government. I’m sorry to disturb you at home so early in the morning, but I have some bad news about one of your employees.”

“Where are you calling from?” The voice had the fragility of morning.

“From the U.S. government.”

“Oh.” There was a pause. “This is about Howard Egan, isn’t it?” Perkins seemed to know it before Gertz said a word. He had been worrying about this moment for a more than a year, and now here it was.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Egan is missing. He was meeting a client of your fund in Karachi last night, and after that he disappeared. I’ll tell you honestly, we are concerned.”

“Who is this?” asked Perkins. “Do I know you?” There was a tightness in the hedge fund manager’s voice now.

“Sorry, Mr. Perkins, can’t say much. I’m Mr. Jones. And your man Egan is missing.”

“Fuck! I knew something like this would happen. You need to take care of this.”

“We are, sir. We’re doing our best. But we need your help.”

“No. This is your mess. You clean it up.”

Gertz’s voice was firmer now. He had a way of establishing control by inflection.

“It’s not that easy, Mr. Perkins. Without your help, this will get very complicated, especially for you.”

The financier was still angry, but more compliant.

“What should I do? What should I tell people?”

“You need to put out a statement, sir, to your employees and everyone else. That’s why I am calling. You need to send a statement to the British police and to the wire services saying that one of your people has disappeared in Pakistan while he was on a business trip for your firm. You should say that you’re hoping he’s just lost, but you would appreciate any information. You need to do it this morning.”

“Okay, a statement. Let me get a pen. What should it say again?” The hedge fund manager spoke with an American accent, even though he had been living in London for almost a decade. He was trying to sound calm.

“The statement should say what I just told you. Howard Egan went missing last night while he was on a business trip to meet with investors in your fund. You are very concerned. Anyone with information should contact the Pakistani police or the U.S. consulate in Karachi.”

“Will it get picked up by the media? I don’t want a lot of reporters tromping around here. People promised there would be no publicity about…this. Ever.”

“There won’t be. The media won’t care about his disappearance. Not unless they find a body.”

“A body? You mean he’s dead?”

“Maybe.”

“Oh, my god. What a mess. Poor Howard.”

“I’m sorry. Let me make a suggestion. Why don’t I send someone by your house this morning, right now, to help you draft the statement? Would that be a help?”

“Yes, it certainly would. At home, not in the office.”

The hedge fund chief was thinking. He was calculating risks, and he didn’t like what he saw.

“Can I ask you a question, whoever you are?”

“Sure,” said Gertz. “Fire away.”

“What happens if Howard gets, um, tortured? And he reveals during interrogation that he, ah, worked for the government. That his work for my firm was, ah, you know, a cover story. What happens then? Because that could, um, destroy my business.”

“You deny it. We deny it. We say it’s a complete fabrication. Outrageous falsehood. If need be, the State Department spokesman will say it’s propaganda to smear an innocent businessman. That’s the deal. Total denial. And it goes away.”

“Sorry to break this to you, whatever your name is, but people don’t believe the U.S. government.”

“Well, too bad for them. But nothing bad will happen to you. I promise. And your country appreciates what you have done. Deeply. And we know how to show our appreciation, as you are aware.”

“More help from the government. Just what I need.” There was a note of sarcasm in his voice now.

“I don’t think any of this is going to happen, Mr. Perkins. I should tell you that. I mean the interrogation and all that.”

“Oh, yeah? Why not?”

“Because I think that Howard is dead. He would resist capture by anyone. If he was taken, he had ways of, how shall I put this, avoiding interrogation.”

“You mean he would kill himself?”

Gertz didn’t respond. He waited a moment, and then went on with his speech.

“We’ll send someone by your residence this morning to help with the statement. All right? And then someone will contact you as we make a more careful investigation of all this.”

“What about the system? Is that going to continue?”

Gertz glanced at Marx. Her head was down. She was reading something.

“I don’t know about any ‘system,’ sorry. Can’t help you with that.”

“Should I talk with Anthony Cronin? He was my, you know, my regular ‘contact.’”

“No. Don’t talk to anyone except the people I send you.”

“Have I met you?” Perkins asked again.

Gertz ignored the question. He was impatient now. He had done his business with Perkins. He wanted to get off the phone.