“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.
7
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?”