“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.