Bloodmoney (12 page)

“Grant me another request, then, so that I will not leave with anger. For many years I have heard in these lands of ‘the professor.’ But this man is unknown to me.”

The commander looked at his visitor suspiciously. “I do not know who you are talking about.”

“Yes, you do. We have listened to your talk. Some call him the professor. Others call him
ustad.
We think maybe he talks with the Americans, maybe he works against them. We hear his footsteps, but we cannot find him. Where is he?”

The Pashtun man emitted a low guttural sound that might have been a snort or a laugh.

“Nowhere, sir. That is where he is. He does not exist. You have been dreaming, I think. There is no such man.”

The conversation continued in the Quetta hideaway for another hour, as the two men exchanged information and offered reciprocal promises. The general wanted help in planning operations against other Muslim groups, ones that Al-Tawhid despised. These other groups targeted their operations against the “little enemy,” the Pakistani army and state, rather than the “big enemy” of America. Commander Hassan shared information. Of course he did. That is how people survive in the East. For it is said: Friends are serpents; they bite.

General Malik did not offer information himself. He left that to his ISI case officer, a pudgy colonel whom he summoned late in the meeting. This man did what could not be done.

While General Malik paid a visit to the toilet, the colonel provided names, cell phone numbers, ISI contacts who would be helpful. He advised which villages in the tribal areas to stay away from, because they were on the American target list. He handed over new communications devices, whose frequencies were not tracked by the Americans. He was helpful, in all the big and little ways that are part of the secret world.

General Malik flew back to Rawalpindi that night in the cold, throbbing body of the C-130. He wanted to go to sleep, for he was tired after the long day, but he found that he could not. He was turning over in his mind the information that Commander Hassan had provided. More than that, he was thinking about the secrets the young warrior had not divulged.

But General Malik understood: Somehow, the brotherhood of Al-Tawhid had found its way inside the American compartment. It knew when a secret agent arrived in Karachi and whom he met. These simple men in their
shalwar khamiz
had not cracked the American code themselves, but someone had helped them. How was this possible? General Malik did not know the answer yet, but he set his mind to discovering it. What he would do with this secret, once he learned it, he did not know.

The plane bucked and shuddered as it skirted the summer thunderstorms of the Indus Valley. The general was somewhere else. He was thinking of his biggest unsolved mystery from his early days as director general. It dated back to 2005. The Americans were working their antiterrorism traces very hard in those days. They were pressing everywhere for information that they could load into their computers—to follow money flows and communications links and all the other strings that would lead them to Al-Qaeda. Of course, the Pakistanis were trying to help officially, just enough, but they had held something back, too.

It had become obvious to General Malik in the course of 2005 that the Americans had obtained the identities and communications protocols of several of the ISI’s most sensitive contacts with Al-Qaeda. This was evident because the Americans began targeting these men, and eventually killed two of them. What troubled the general was that only someone with an intimate knowledge of ISI tradecraft and Pakistani dialects could have uncovered these links. They had been disguised by codes within codes. That was when the general had begun to worry that a
gungrat,
a dung beetle, was loose in his stores of information.

General Malik had paid an unofficial visit that year to Washington, where he had called on the man in the CIA he knew best, a rotund and genial officer named Cyril Hoffman, who always understood more than he said.

“Are you inside our tent, Cyril?” the general had asked.

They were sitting in the CIA cafeteria, surrounded by signs warning agency personnel that a foreign national was in the area. Hoffman had leaned toward his Pakistani friend.

“Of course we are,” the American had whispered, his voice as soft as spun sugar. “But you can’t see us, and you can’t feel us, and you’ll never find us. So my advice is to stop worrying about it. You’ll only make yourself unhappy if you go poking around.”

Perhaps that had been the right advice, but General Malik had launched his investigations anyway, silently at first, and then more openly. He was looking for a Pakistani who understood signals intelligence, someone with the intellectual creativity to disassemble an elaborate puzzle. They called in a dozen suspects—military and intelligence officers, a senior executive of the leading wireless telephone company, several professors, a retired ISI officer who had been living in India. The investigators ruined the careers of most of these people, with their rough and stupid questions, but it couldn’t be helped.

Eventually, sometime in 2007, General Malik had given up, just as Cyril Hoffman had advised. The Pakistani leak seemed to have dried up, that was part of it. But Malik had concluded that Hoffman was right. This inside source was too well hidden. Perhaps the truth about this source would emerge one day, on its own, but tearing up the garden to try to find him was unwise.

Malik’s own private name for the case was “the Cheshire Cat,” because he could see the grin, but not the cat itself. It made him mad, still, to think that the Americans could vex him.

When he arrived at his office in Islamabad the next morning, General Malik summoned Homer Barkin, the CIA station chief. He told him that in four hours the Foreign Ministry would send a formal statement to the embassy declaring him and two other members of the CIA station at the embassy persona non grata because of their intelligence activities. They would be ordered to leave the country. He advised Barkin to leave that afternoon, to avoid unpleasant consequences at the airport.

Barkin was bewildered. He had met in this office with the ISI chief only a few days before. They had talked of friendship and trust.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked. “What is this all about?”

General Malik shook his head. He had a distant, wistful smile, as if remembering better times.

“It seems that you really do not know.”

“Know what?” asked the station chief.

“My poor, unfortunate Mr. Barkin: Your expulsion is a message to whoever in Washington thinks it is acceptable to send secret warriors with bribes into the territory of an ally. If it is true that you did not know about this operation in Karachi, then that is the greatest outrage. I suggest that you resign, sir, when you get home. These actions will have consequences. That is what you should tell Langley.”

Barkin, still astonished, sputtered a response.

“I protest, on behalf of my agency. We have done nothing wrong.”

“Thank you, Mr. Barkin. This is nothing personal, I assure you. Now you should leave. I fear that Pakistanis will be very angry. I would not be surprised if there were demonstrators tomorrow at the entrance to the diplomatic zone near your embassy, expressing their outrage. The embassy should take precautions, I think.”

DUBAI

The Dubai Airport had
a hungover, half-deserted look when Marx arrived. She made her way past bleary-eyed South Asians in transit, who were wandering up and down the corridor like weary birds looking for a place to alight. The customs hall was nearly empty, except for the Filipina “Marhaba” girls who were arrayed to greet any VIP visitors who chanced to arrive. The city beyond had the look of a new luxury car, its seats still wrapped in cellophane, standing in an empty showroom with no customers in sight.

“Things are looking up in Dubai,” insisted her taxi driver, an Indian from Kerala. He offered to show her an apartment that she could sublet, half price, no, quarter price. Marx took his card and then told him to be quiet. As the driver weaved along the airport road across the new downtown, they passed a dozen dazzling apartment towers that appeared to have few if any tenants. Would anyone ever live in them, or would they gradually decay into ruins of chrome and glass, with blowing sand caking the entryways and the elevators creaking to a halt for lack of maintenance?

Marx checked in to her hotel, a vast place made to look like the architect’s fantasy of an ancient Arab city. It had been immaculate a few years before, every surface of brass and wood polished and sparkling, so that if you rubbed one of the urns that decorated the lobby, you might expect Aladdin himself to pop out. Now the mahogany furniture was losing its stain, and some of the fancy carpets were discoloring from the sun and the foot traffic.

Marx loved Dubai the way earlier generations of intelligence officers had embraced Beirut or Hong Kong. It was a city that existed at the margins, between East and West, between the imaginary and the real. Plus it had good air service, and you could drink the water. She liked it even more now that the bubble had burst and the place had come back to earth. The hotels that were never full, and the parking lots that were still sprinkled with Mercedes cars that had been abandoned when their owners couldn’t make the payments.

She showered and changed, and lay on her bed for a while staring at the ceiling, thinking about how she would handle the interrogation of Hamid Akbar. An hour before the meeting, she rode the elevator down to the ground floor, which opened onto one of the ersatz canals that linked the buildings in this imaginary Medina. She took a seat in the stern of a dhow that served as a water taxi; behind her loomed the towers of a make-believe Arabian fortress.

She was dressed in a black pants suit, her hair pulled tight in bun, sunglasses masking the fatigue in her eyes. She turned her head toward the breeze blowing in off the Gulf. A gust caught a few strands of hair and pulled them loose. She had taken a pill to sleep on the long flight, and then another. Now that she had arrived, she felt groggy. She gave her cheek a gentle slap to wake herself up. With the sting came a bit of color.

The turbaned boatman tried to be friendly. He was a poor fisherman from Dar Es Salaam who couldn’t support his family running a boat back home. He spoke about fish. Sophie Marx didn’t want to make small talk, and she didn’t have any dirhams to give him a tip. She told him in Arabic to keep his eyes on the water or she would report him to the hotel manager.

The boatman deposited her at the Villas, the meeting place that Gertz’s support staff had arranged on short notice. The polygraph operator was already there. Gertz had dispatched him from Prague, where he nominally worked for an electronics company. Dubai station had a resident polygraph technician, but he reported to Headquarters, and Gertz vetoed that.

Marx stepped gingerly off the prow at the landing. The polygraph operator opened the door for her. He was a big, powerfully built man, well over six feet, with tattoos decorating his biceps. Marx was glad to see him.

“Hey, my name’s Andy,” he said, extending a forearm as thick as a log.

“Where did you come in from?” she asked.

“Ashgabat,” he said. “It was the quickest flight from Prague. I had to sleep in the transit lounge in Turkmenistan. Too hot. Glad to leave.”

“It’s hot in Dubai,” she said.

“Not when you’re in the pool.” He smiled. This assignment was a vacation for him.

Marx looked around the villa. It was too fancy for the task ahead: It offered a fine view of the water and beyond it the Burj Al Arab, billowing like the sail of a dhow forty stories tall. Marx closed the curtains and turned up the heat in the room till it would raise a sweat. She made herself a pot of coffee and waited for the Pakistani.

“Break him,” she told herself. “Make him talk.”

Hamid Akbar knocked gently on the door as if he were afraid that he would wake the neighbors. Through the intercom, he spoke the phrases of the recognition code. He retreated a step when Andy, the technician, opened the door. The American was so big. Akbar peered inside and saw that the CIA officer awaiting him was a compact and well-tailored woman. He bowed slightly in her direction and said, “Madam.”

“Welcome, Mr. Akbar,” she responded. “Please sit down. This will be a long visit, I’m afraid. I have many questions for you. Would you like some coffee?”

The Pakistani was waiting politely for her to sit down before seating himself.

She motioned sharply for him to take his seat, while she remained standing, her arms folded. She knew that she must establish dominance from the beginning.

“I am sorry about Mr. Howard Egan,” said the Pakistani, placing his hand over his heart. “It is most unfortunate that he is missing. I do not know what went wrong.”

The Pakistani sat awkwardly, his knees together primly. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. There was perspiration above his lip.

“We are all sorry, Mr. Akbar. But we need to know how this happened. People in Washington have questions about your role. I must warn you of that, so that we understand each other.”

The Pakistani arched his neck. He looked offended.

“Why me, madam? I have done nothing wrong, I assure you. It is I who am in danger. Next they will get me.”

Marx had been about to deliver to him the coffee she had promised, but she thought better of it. She set the cup down.

“I don’t think you get it, Mr. Akbar. You are a suspect. That is why you are here. You were the last person to see Mr. Egan. We need answers from you. My friend here is going to strap you to a machine that will tell me if you are lying. The reason we are doing this is because we have power over you. You must understand that.”

He looked at her warily. She was a woman; he was a man. But she was giving him instructions, and the big American with the tattoos was there to back her up.

“I can leave,” he said. He was trying to be assertive, but the way he formed the words it sounded more like a question.