Bloodmoney (27 page)

General Malik took a chair next to the window, so that the prisoner had to squint into the sunlight to see his visitor. For a long while, perhaps five minutes, the general didn’t speak. The captive courier strained against his shackles, making the muscles of his neck, face and arms taut with his resistance.

The general’s first word was a call to the major to come and unlock the metal cuffs. When the prisoner’s hands and feet were free, he stood for a moment, arched his back and then sat again in his chair with dignity. Major Tariq asked the general if he wanted a guard for protection, and the general said no, that he wanted to be left alone with the man.

The silence resumed, and as it continued, five minutes, ten minutes, it was the Pashtun man who became restless. He looked away, he cracked his knuckles, he coughed, he scratched his head. He was the one finally to speak.

“Nikka,” the prisoner began, using the Pashto word for grandfather. He quoted a famous warrior proverb, which the general had heard from other tough mountain fighters: “When I die, let it be in the way of a brave man, so that that everyone feels grief, not like a scorpion or a snake whose death brings to all relief.”

General Malik did not answer. The silence returned so that it filled the low room. At last he addressed the prisoner. He spoke in a low voice, not of menace, but authority.

“Who are you, brother?” asked the general. “What are you doing here?”

“I am Badal. That is my name. I am vengeance. What am I doing? Until I was caught, I was traveling to Afghanistan to take revenge on my enemies, the American spies.”

“Achaah,
” said the general. It was an Urdu word that could mean assent or skepticism. “And how were you going to do this, Mr. Vengeance?”

“We know them, Nikka. We understand their secrets. We know where they go and who they meet. We will use this information to kill them, one by one.”

“I do not like these Americans, either. But I am smarter than you, brother. I do not announce it. I think you must be weak, to talk so defiantly but to have only your little arms and legs to carry you. I will get farther, I promise you. And do not call me
nikka
. I am not your grandfather.”

The young man shook his head.

“That is a lie, Nikka. You do not fight the Americans. You are their friend.”

The general ignored the taunt. He let the silence build again, and spoke after another minute had passed.

“I feel sorry for you, brother. You are a foolish young man. Those who know do not speak. Ask your superiors in the Tawhid. They will tell you. I think I am finished with you. You have not earned my respect.”

The courier studied the general. This was not what he had anticipated. Every fighter expects to be beaten if he is captured, and he tries to prepare for torture. To be treated as a dangerous man is a mark of honor. But the fighter’s dignity had been challenged by the general’s scorn. He puffed his chest and thrust his chin up like a fighting cock.

“We
know
their secrets,” the courier repeated. “We will take them down, just as we did their agents in Karachi and Moscow. We see everyone and everything.”

“So that was your operation, then, in Moscow?” asked the general, inclining his head forward in a bow of respect.

“Of course, and there will be more to come, thanks God. Wait and you will see. It is not a lie. We know everything.”

General Malik sat back. He studied the prisoner and then shook his head.

“No, I do not believe it. If you were as important as you say, you would be carrying documents across the frontier. But we have looked at that little thing, that little chicken prick that you were carrying in your pocket. We have studied it, brother, and we know that it is just a few numbers and banks. If that is your big secret, then you are
kutti da putr
, as we say in the Punjab, the son of a dog.”

Now the courier was truly upset. He had been insulted, and he reacted in the way the general knew he would.

“You are wrong, Nikka. The proof of my words will come soon when more American agents are dead. Why do you think I was carrying the computer stick? Because I am taking the knowledge that it contains to my brothers in Afghanistan, and they will take it north, to Dushanbe. If I am caught, what of it? There are others on the road, and not just to Kabul. They travel to Cairo and even London and Paris. Soon the whole earth will be aflame and the American spies will not be able to walk upon it, anywhere.”

“The document has the names of banks in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Are the banks part of your plan for vengeance?”

“Ah, sir, that I do not know. I am a fighter, not a clerk. I do not study this computer stick, so I do not know what is on it. You are unlucky, sir. You have captured me for nothing.”

The general fell silent again, and not just for effect. He was thinking carefully about what the courier had said and trying to fit it with other things that he knew. After another long minute, during which the young man became restless again, the general posed a new question.

“Tell me about the man you call the professor. Do you know him?”

“No, Nikka, I do not know this man.”

“But you have heard of him. Do not lie, because I will find out and it will be worse for you later.”

The young man shrugged. “Of course I have heard his name. He is our sword, the professor. He is the one who knows. But I have never met him. Nobody meets him. He is the ghost. And now I am happy that you are asking, because it means you do not know who he is.”

“Do you think your computer stick comes from him?”

“Perhaps. Why not? I do not know. But it has the secrets, so maybe it comes from the professor. But I will never know. Nor will you, old general.”

“Are you lying to me, Haj Ali?”

“I am a fighter. I am Badal. I am taking vengeance for the death of my brother and my uncle and restoring the honor of my family. Why would I lie? You can beat me for a week and a month and a year, but you will learn nothing more than what I have told you.”

They did try to beat it out of him, of course. But, true to his word, he did not give up any more of the secret. General Malik observed the first interrogation session, back in Aabpara where they brought the prisoner, hooded for questioning. The general did not watch after that. He didn’t like torture, but more than that, he knew that in this case it would do no good. The man was just a courier. He didn’t understand the secrets of the letters and numbers himself. He only knew that they were deadly to the United States. They couldn’t let the courier go, after all that had happened. He died on his way to a prison in Lahore.

General Malik wondered whether he should share with the Americans what he had learned. He decided against it. It was not his job to protect intelligence agents of the United States, especially ones who were acting illegally inside his country. A simpler man would have set the Tawhid loose so they could bloody a few more
faranghi
spies, and gone off to the mosque to say his prayers. But General Malik was cursed with a Western trait: He brooded about his mistakes; he felt guilty about what he had left undone.

What did he really know? He had a four-item spreadsheet of numbers and letters. He would ask his analysts to explore what this intelligence meant, and then he would consider what to do with it. But it was not his problem. He would say to the Americans, much as they had said to him,
lund te char.
Hop on my dick.

DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN

Everyone loved Meredith Rockwell.
She was Istanbul’s answer to the Junior League. She was a pretty girl, with flowing blond hair, so flamboyant and social that nobody wondered when she went jetting off to Dubai or Casablanca for the weekend. She had quickly become a fixture in the American community in Istanbul, organizing lunches and dinners, séances with local artists and boat trips up the Bosporus. She was a widow, she told everyone, children going to boarding schools back home; a big trust fund from her late husband to help her travel and entertain. Colorful stories about her had spread in the year she had taken residence in her fancy apartment in Besiktas. She was having an affair with a French count; no, it was a Saudi prince, or, in a third version, a Russian oligarch. All the while, she kept partying with her friends and traveling to exotic places, coyly refusing to explain where and why.

She was found dead on a street in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, where she had gone for one of her famous trips. She had taken a suite at the new Dushanbe Hyatt Regency, the fanciest hotel in Central Asia. The staff recognized her; she had been there before. Her luggage was still in the room, two Louis Vuitton bags, one of them still unpacked. The local authorities let the embassy tidy things up.

The police report said she had gone to find a bank on Rudaki Avenue and then taken a walk in the city park near the hotel. She had met a man there; she seemed to know him, witnesses said. She brought him back to the hotel and up to her room, and then he left. The hotel staff members were not scandalized. They expected that sort of behavior from Western women. The man was Tajik, witnesses said, or perhaps Uzbek or Pakistani. Nobody got a very good description. The doormen and porters looked away politely when the couple arrived.

Next she had taken a taxi, north along the Varzob River and then right on Somoni Avenue. She got out near the presidential palace but walked the other way, away from the crowded boulevards and the traffic and down a quiet street. It was a Russified neighborhood, still bearing the remnants of Soviet days: wood frame buildings painted salmon pink; signage of twinkling lights that formed Cyrillic script; high-cheeked Tajiks strolling in their summer T-shirts and jeans. Through this cityscape passed the American woman. She seemed to be going somewhere, from her deliberate pace, but there was no evidence that she had planned a meeting.

The assassination was a professional job. A car with darkened windows pulled alongside Rockwell as she was making her way down a lane a half mile from the city center. The assassin opened the door and fired two shots with a silencer. People didn’t realize they were gunshots at first; nobody would have paid attention at all, if she hadn’t screamed so loudly in English as she fell. The police tried to talk to her in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, but she wouldn’t answer their questions. They thought she was in shock. She died in the emergency room as a Tajik doctor tried to stop the bleeding.

Jeffrey Gertz was awake when the call came in the early morning. He flinched when the watch officer gave him the news. He’d had an affair with Meredith Rockwell. She was a party girl in true name, as well as alias. He went back to the office, driving way too fast through the canyon, not caring about anyone or anything except keeping a lid on his little organization.

Steve Rossetti was already at the office when he arrived. The operations chief lived in Encino, a few minutes closer. He looked relieved to see the boss. He didn’t want this to be his problem.

Gertz took him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye.

“We are at war, and we don’t even know who with. We are not going to give this enemy any more targets. That’s order number one. I want everybody to get in a hole and pucker up until we understand what’s coming at us.”

Gertz told Rossetti to work out the details and report back in an hour. That wasn’t much time to organize the message traffic and the operational changes, but Rossetti got it done. He was efficient, when he was told what to do.

They went to ground, no halfway measures this time. Gertz issued an immediate stand-down order to everyone, every officer in every clandestine platform around the world. Nobody was to move; no operational travel; no agent meetings; no movement at all outside home unless absolutely necessary. People were allowed to come home, but that was it.

Gertz called his sources abroad, to see what they knew. He got much commiseration, but no facts. This network of consultants and friends, which he had assembled over the years, was his privy cabinet. They provided the tips and suggestions that shaped Gertz’s operations. He had one special informant in the shooting gallery of South Asia who usually knew something, but this time he was dry as dust. Whoever it was had left no tracks, the informant said.

Rossetti ventured that maybe the media would miss the story in faraway Dushanbe, but Gertz knew that was impossible. This was the kind of news that was made for cable television and gossip magazines: American socialite gunned down without explanation in one of the armpits of the world, leaving her millionaire wardrobe back at the presidential suite.

The media lit up in a way they hadn’t with the two previous deaths. Meredith’s friends from Istanbul were on camera within that first news cycle, talking about her charity balls and society dinners and shadowy love life. It was irresistible. Who was the blond mystery woman? What on earth had taken her to Dushanbe? Why had she been murdered there so brutally, in a manner that could not be blamed on purse snatchers?

Gertz had his people call reporters with tips that Meredith Rockwell had been leading a double life—that she was a coke-head who had gotten involved with international drug cartels. Several news organizations assigned reporters to cover that angle the first day. It was an axiom of journalism that you could not libel the dead.

The few people in the U.S. government who knew the truth were frightened. Cyril Hoffman called; the White House chief of staff called. They wanted to know what the government should say. Gertz gave them all the same answer as always: Don’t say anything. Don’t acknowledge or even hint at any U.S. government connection. This was a senseless attack on an American citizen. It had no connection with any other event. The victim obviously had a complicated personal life. Shit happens.

The cover story, threadbare as it was, might well have held up in the same way it had for the previous two deaths. But people had other ideas this time. They wanted credit.

Late in the afternoon on which Meredith Rockwell was murdered, a telephone call was received at the Associated Press bureau in Islamabad. The caller was known to the bureau chief as a member of the Islamic underground. He said that a statement would be posted in one minute on a jihadist website, sent by the Muslim group that called itself Al-Tawhid. He said that the statement was legitimate, and that the Associated Press should disseminate it immediately.