Bloodmoney (29 page)

“I take it you mean Pakistan, when you speak of the big picture.”

“I mean the big picture. Things she isn’t cleared for, but wants to know anyway. We need to get to closure here. People are getting killed and we don’t know why. I need to put more people on it, maybe next week. Right now, nobody is moving.”

“How do I reach this difficult woman? I might like a progress report of my own.”

“Sorry, Cyril. You can’t. She works for me. I’m not ready to declare open season yet. We’ll call you when we have something, and you can talk to her all you want then. But not now.”

Hoffman rang off a few minutes later, cheery as always. The moment he ended the call, he initiated another one to Steve Rossetti, who gave Hoffman a cell phone number for Sophie Marx and her secure email address.

Hoffman thought about calling her, but it was the middle of the night in London, and he didn’t need to speak with her now. He had already ascertained the only thing that mattered to him, which was that Marx was independent and restless enough to make Jeff Gertz nervous. He didn’t know if she was trustworthy, but you never really knew that about anyone until you took the risk and found out.

The two intelligence barons arrived in Doha the following afternoon in their unmarked private jets and went to the Four Seasons on the Corniche in West Bay. The hotel was an example of the instant luxury that had enveloped the tiny, absurdly rich nation of Qatar. It was a modern high-rise, sprinkled with bits of Islamic kitsch to reassure the locals: mirrored domes atop the two hotel towers, and an ersatz desert fort out front to house the parking attendants.

In the heat of high summer, a vaporous shimmer rose from the waters of the Gulf. The palms that ringed the hotel were drooping, despite the perpetual irrigation. The hotel lobby had the grand, empty look of a showroom: Any Qatari with sufficient money had fled the summer heat of the Gulf for the mountains of Lebanon or the Côte d’Azur.

Cyril Hoffman took the cheapest room they had. He didn’t have the director’s approval for the trip, and he didn’t intend to tell him about it. He had commandeered the plane on his own authority, but he might have to eat the hotel bill.

Hoffman sat in his room waiting for dinner, watching Arab girls in bikinis play in the pools below before returning home in their formless black cloaks and veils. What an odd part of the world this was: Hoffman reminded himself to be tolerant that night if the Pakistani general said something that he knew to be a lie; it was a matter of cultural dissonance.

They met in the private dining room of an Italian restaurant called La Fortuna, on the ground floor. Hoffman went down early and gave the waiter a hundred dollars and a credit card in the alias in which he had registered at the hotel. He told the waiter not to enter the private room unless he was summoned.

General Malik arrived at eight o’clock on the dot, dressed in a blue blazer, white shirt and a red-and-black, regimental-striped tie. He looked like a military officer even when he was in mufti. Hoffman was already there, luxuriating in a summer suit of white linen, with baggy trousers and a blousy double-breasted jacket. In place of a tie, he was wearing a paisley ascot. He looked like an art-history professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

Hoffman had ordered a fancy bottle of wine and an array of appetizers. They were on the table when General Malik entered the room. Hoffman told the waiter to go away and leave them alone. He poured his Pakistani friend a glass of the Brunello.

“Ain’t life grand?” said Hoffman, clicking his glass against that of his guest.

“No,” said Malik. “It isn’t grand at all. It is rather a mess. Chin chin.”

“No small talk, then? No foreplay? No ‘how’s the family?’”

“I think not. I am flying back to Rawalpindi tonight.” Malik looked at his watch. “In three hours, to be precise.”

Hoffman took a long sip of his wine and put down the glass.

“Let me get to the point, then. I came out here to tell you one big thing. I could get arrested for what I am going to tell you, put in jail for passing secrets to the enemy. So I want you to listen carefully. Will you do that?”

“Of course, Cyril. Why do you think I have come, if not to listen, and perhaps also to talk?”

“The operations that you and your Al-Tawhid friends have uncovered are not run by the CIA. They are being run by a new organization that has gone haywire. They are conducting a covert-action campaign against Pakistan without any legal authority, and it will fail. I say that because I am going to make it my personal business to take it down. This new organization has gotten the White House to play along, but that’s just because they’re inexperienced. I’m working on that, too.”

Malik shook his head. “This is poppycock. I know your tricks, Cyril. This is another cover story.”

“I thought you might say that, so I brought you a little something to establish my bona fides.” He took several sheets of paper from the pocket of his white suit and handed the document across the table to the Pakistani.

“What is this?”

“It’s a letter to the general counsel of the CIA from the White House counsel’s office. It’s dated two days ago. When you boil down all the legal verbiage, it says that the White House takes responsibility for all statements that will be made about the Al-Tawhid accusations. The agency will be ‘held harmless,’ as the lawyers say. It’s not their baby.”

“What does that prove? I am a military man, not a lawyer.”

“It proves what I just said. This is not a CIA operation. There is no official agency campaign to do anything to Pakistan. There is a crazy-ass operation run by some drugstore cowboys who have figured out a way to finance their activities without going to Congress, and who temporarily have gotten some hotheads in the White House to go along. But like I said, they are going down. I guarantee it.”

“Why are you telling me this, my dear? It is most unlike you to volunteer anything. I cannot ever recall a similar moment of generosity, with you or any of your famous cousins and uncles. What’s the ‘catch,’ so to speak?”

“I need your help, pure and simple. We have a nasty little war on our hands. Three people have gotten killed. Any more, and people will start to panic. They will take action to protect themselves. That gets ugly, real fast.”

“What can I do about it?” asked General Malik, with a shrug. “I am not a member of the Ikwan Al-Tawhid. I am not shooting any Americans. I am a victim, not a perpetrator.”

Cyril Hoffman wagged his finger at the man across the table. “But you
know
. Of course you do. That’s your job, and you’re good at it. You know the people who are doing the killing, and I have a feeling that you even know how they are doing it. They are getting information that helps them track the movements of people in this new organization that I was talking about. We’ve been looking for the leak, and we haven’t found it yet. But I’ll bet that you have.”

“You give us far too much credit, my friend. We are the ISI, not MI6 or the Mossad. And if you say that we are running the Tawhid, that is a lie, sir. A most despicable lie.” He pounded the table.

General Malik was protesting more heatedly than was necessary, or wise. For in the silence that followed his retort, Cyril Hoffman was able to look into his eyes and, in the uncanny way that Hoffman had, to read from his expressions a narrative.

“You can’t fool me, brother. I see that little smile under your mustache, Mohammed. I see that twinkle in your eye. You’ve got something. Yes, you do. And we need it. I will be frank with you, even though that’s not my nature. This could get dangerous if we don’t find a way to work together. I need you to help me out. Tell me what you know.”

The Pakistani did not answer at first. He was never a man to rush.

“Let us eat something, shall we?” he said.

General Malik reached for the plate of beef carpaccio, and slowly ate one of the paper-thin slices of meat, savoring the taste while he contemplated the situation. He helped himself to some foie gras, too, putting a generous lump on a piece of toast and chewing it, bite by bite.

Hoffman buttered his bread. He tried not to let his impatience show.

The Pakistani finished his little snack and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin.

“You’re right, of course. We do know a bit about the Tawhid, as you would expect. And you are also correct that we know something of how they are doing their targeting.”

“That’s my man. Come on, now. Tell me. You came here to say it. You know you did.”

“It involves banks. We just obtained some computer material that we took off a Tawhid courier. But I will be honest, I do not understand it. I have been trying to find the computer genius who put it together, but frankly, I have failed. I have been nervous about the material. It could be misused. So I have been sitting on it. But perhaps I could have one of my analysts take another look.”

Hoffman buttered his bread some more and then put it aside. He took a sip of the fine red wine. He was searching for different possibilities, but he kept coming back to the thought of Sophie Marx at the hedge fund in London. She was the one working this problem, and she was the most likely to crack the code that Malik had described.

“What if I sent someone to help you?” asked Hoffman. “She’s one of our best counterintelligence officers, and she is the person on our end who has been trying to understand the leak of information about our man in Karachi, and now the others. She’s smart, and she knows how to keep her mouth shut.”

“What is the name of this wonder woman, please?”

“Sophie Marx.”

General Malik took out his fountain pen and wrote her name in small, precise script in a black notebook he kept in the pocket of his blazer.

“You won’t find a whole lot about her in your files, or anyone else’s,” said Hoffman. “But if you asked the right people, you would discover that this young woman ran a very professional operation in Beirut that opened up to us Hezbollah’s communications network. She recruited a woman in one of the Lebanese telecommunications companies, and a man in the Ministry of Telecommunications. It was quite dangerous. We think very highly of her.”

“What would be the understanding, in the event that I were to receive her?”

“She would help you analyze this targeting information. She would investigate it. And then she would use the information to protect our people from further attacks.”

“She would uncover Al-Tawhid’s network of informants, in other words.”

“Well, sure, if that’s what it is. She would help you take them down. Or we’d take them down ourselves, if that’s easier.”

The general helped himself to another tasty glob of foie gras. He had barely touched his wine, up until now, but he took a healthy drink.

“What is in it for us, Cyril? I am sorry to be crass. But this is a human business, after all. In exchange for giving you this very important piece of intelligence, what do I get in return?”

“Well, now, fair question, entirely legitimate. First, you avert an open break with the United States of America, which despite its puny political leadership is still the strongest country on earth and can make life very difficult for countries it doesn’t like. Second, you have my promise that I will stop the covert action that has been undertaken against Pakistan. Stop it, cold. And if I don’t, you are free to go public with whatever the hell you want, and take me down, along with a lot of other people.”

“That’s very nice, but not tangible, Cyril. There are people in Pakistan who would argue that I am betraying an ally, which is Al-Tawhid, to assist an enemy, which is the United States. As you know, I am a moderate man, and I find that sort of thinking abhorrent, but there we are.”

“Look, my friend, if Al-Tawhid is in a position to kill our officers, they can kill China’s and Russia’s—and even your own ISI men. I don’t know what this secret surveillance capability is, but if they can use it against us, they can use it against anybody. That’s dangerous—but especially to you, brother, dear. So we will be doing you a big favor.”

“I am warming to this idea. But I still do not see a benefit for us commensurate with what we are giving up.”

“Hey, Mohammed, we’re talking about the fate of the world, and you’re haggling as if we’re in the spice bazaar. But that’s okay, because I love you. So let me say this about that: America would be very grateful for this help. I know that you would never ask me for any personal reward. But I would feel compelled to offer you one, in the quietest way possible. This rogue operation has been generating billions of dollars. And when we shut it down, some of it is going to fall off the truck. Do you follow me?”

General Malik smoothed the hairs of his mustache and patted his lips with his napkin, even though he had eaten little.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” he said.

Cyril Hoffman smiled. “Forgive me, even for mentioning it.”

“Why don’t you send this woman, Miss Marx, to me in Islamabad? Have her contact me on my personal phone when she arrives. We will see what is possible. More than that, I cannot promise.”

They finished the appetizers and the wine. Hoffman was going to order the main course, but General Malik said that he needed to get back to his plane and go home. People would ask questions if he were late in returning. So Hoffman ordered a jolly dinner and instructed the waiter that it should be sent up to his room, where he ate it while watching Fashion TV.

LONDON

When Cyril Hoffman’s Gulfstream
jet landed at RAF Mildenhall for what was supposed to be a refueling stop, he went to the distinguished visitors’ lounge and called Sophie Marx on her cell phone. It was morning in London, and she was at the office in Mayfair starting a day of investigation. The caller’s number was unfamiliar to her and she didn’t answer at first; the only person who called on this phone normally was Jeff Gertz. But when a second call came in immediately from the same number, she answered it.

Hoffman was groggy from travel, but he tried to sound cheery.

“You don’t know me,” he began, “but my name is Cyril Hoffman. I am the associate deputy director of your parent company, so to speak.”