Marx went back to see Gertz. The door was closed, and the officious Pat Waters made her wait outside until the boss had finished his business. When the door opened, she swooped in and made her request.
“I want to go interview Hamid Akbar, right away. Give him a stress poly. Push him. I listened to the NSA audio file of his call with Egan and I am telling you, Jeffrey, that man is where our trouble started.”
“You can’t go to Pakistan. It’s too insecure. Sorry. Even you can’t sweet-talk me on that one.”
“Then yank him out. Pull his chain. Have you contacted him?”
“Yes, by phone. Rossetti made the call, and I listened. He’s scared shitless. He thinks he’s a target, too. Wants to go to ground, break off contact.”
“Well, he ought to be scared. He’s a bad man.”
“Excuse me? Aren’t you getting a little overwrought here?”
“That’s sexist, calling me ‘overwrought.’ I could file a complaint with HR, and I’d win, but I’m prepared to compromise. Just let me interview Akbar. Make it happen. Please. Order him to meet me in a third country. Tell him that if he doesn’t agree, he really is a dead man. Tell him that you’ll bust his balls, expose him to the ISI. Come on. This is the door. We have to walk through it.”
Gertz smiled, and the tired eyes sparkled for a moment. It wasn’t just the tough-girl bit. She wanted so much to succeed.
“Where do you want to meet Mr. Akbar? Assuming that I can get him out?”
“I don’t care. Dubai is probably the easiest for him. Tell him Dubai in thirty-six hours. If he won’t come out, I’m going in after him.”
“I thought you wanted to go to London.”
“I do. But not until I have found the man who set up Howard Egan.”
Gertz, fatigued as he was, rose from his desk and walked toward her. He put his big hand on her shoulder and began to give her a hug, but thought better of it and shook her hand. He sent her off to Support to scrub her documents and book the next flight to Dubai.
Gertz locked his door. He had to make a call that he had been dreading for the past twenty-four hours. It was to the only person he considered his boss, other than the president himself, and that was the White House chief of staff, Ted Yazdi. He sent a BlackBerry message to costy@who. eop. gov. Hardly an unbreakable code: Chief of Staff Ted Yazdi. The message was just a subject line: Need to talk. The answer came back five minutes later. Call me now.
Gertz went to the STU-5, the latest model of the Secure Telephone Unit, and dialed Yazdi’s secure number at the White House. He answered it personally.
“What the fuck is going on?” asked Yazdi. He had the coarse, corrosive manner of a former Wall Street trader.
“We lost one of our boys in Pakistan.”
“So I hear. Is he dead?”
“I hope so, for his sake. But they may have gotten something out of him. That’s what I wanted to warn you about.”
“Shit. What do we do then? What if it’s all over the Internet?”
“Nothing. With respect, sir, don’t do anything. If these people issue a statement, have the State Department deny it. The agency will tell you that you have to brief Congress. My humble advice is that you should ignore them. This program is covered under the National Security Act. You have a legal opinion that says so. The congressional leadership has signed off on it. End of story.”
“Did the Paks screw us? Is this their hit?”
“Don’t know yet, but it’s quite possible. This is what they do.”
“The president is nervous. He asked me a few hours ago in the Oval if this Karachi thing was going to blow up. I said no, sir. Hunker down. It will go away. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Totally right. It’s contained.”
“These crazy fuckers still want to kill us, don’t they? These Pakistanis and Waziris and whatever the hell else. Why do they hate us so much? We’re trying to give them money, for god’s sake. We’re trying to make them happy. What the hell is wrong with them?”
“I don’t know, sir. I keep asking my sources that. They keep giving me new names to contact. Eventually we’ll get it right. Money talks.”
Yazdi couldn’t disagree with the efficacy of cash. It was one of his life rules. But still, he wanted to understand why this mission had gone off the rails.
“How did the bad guys make your man? I thought he was super-deep cover and all that.”
“It was a lucky shot, probably. If there’s a hole, we’ll plug it, don’t worry. I’ve put someone reliable on it.”
“Not a SWAT team, for Christ’s sake. That’s all we need is a bunch of people snooping around.”
“Not a team, a discreet investigator. But you will have to turn off the CIA director, if he comes knocking. Because he’ll want to tell Congress, and then it’s out for sure, and we’re all screwed.”
“What else? I gotta go.”
“That’s it. Just keeping you informed. Not to worry. Tell the president we have it under control.”
“Reassurance from you guys, that will scare the shit out of him. You need to come back here and see me soon, and remind me what the fuck you’re doing. Can you do that?”
“Yes, sir. I can come in the next week. I will send you a date and you tell me if it works.”
“One more thing, just so I don’t have nightmares. There’s no USG money here. Nothing that could bite us. It’s all clean.”
“Yes, sir. It’s self-contained financially, no government funds in or out. No paper trail, here or in D.C., all offshore.”
“Well, that’s something, at least. No more fuckups, please.”
“HUA, sir,” said Gertz. It was military-speak for “heard, understood, acknowledged.” But he was talking to himself. The chief of staff had scurried off to other business.
9
“Lund te char” is a pungent curse in the Punjabi dialect. It means, literally, “hop on my dick,” or as an American would say, “Fuck off.” That had been the CIA’s message to Lieutenant General Mohammed Malik with this business in Karachi, and he did not like it. Nobody wants to be embarrassed in public, but there is a special sting when a man’s honor is his most precious possession. So it particularly wounded the general that a previously unknown unit of American intelligence had sent an operative into his country, without authority, and then had gone to such trouble to conceal it.
It was an insult. The ISI chief had considered whether he should do something to hurt the Americans back. That would have been easy enough to arrange, for there were so many ways the Americans, tied down by their expeditionary wars and short of breath, depended on their Pakistani allies.
But General Malik was not a rash or vindictive man. And the more he considered the situation, the more it seemed to him that before seeking to punish the Americans, he needed to understand better what they were doing. He needed to understand, in particular, how this new intelligence unit was choosing its targets. And to do that, it was necessary to travel to the remote territory where the Karachi operation had been aimed. This was not a project he could delegate to one of his case officers, much less to one of the agents on the ISI’s string. For, in truth, he did not trust his colleagues on anything truly sensitive, especially involving the United States. So he made the phone calls himself, and sent messages by other channels, to be sure that the ground was prepared.
The general set off with his driver at first light one June morning in his Toyota Land Cruiser. He winced when the SUV passed beneath the illuminated portrait of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and below it the words of the founder’s invocation in 1947: unity, faith, discipline. How little Pakistan had of all three, after nearly sixty-five years, but the general was a hopeful man, and at least he could be disciplined.
They rolled along the Grand Trunk Road toward their first stop, the military air base just west of Peshawar. The trucks heading toward the Khyber Pass were decorated like the wagons of the Raj days: The drivers’ compartments were made of wood-intricately carved and then painted in rainbow colors and decorated with tiny mirrors and scarabs to ward off the jinns of the hills. In his younger days, the general had found these trucks colorful and charming, but today they seemed just another sign of his dear country’s backwardness. He closed his eyes and tried to understand the puzzle of what the Americans were doing.