“To my mind death is better than life, when life can no longer be held with honor,” Haji Mohammed had said one night after a long talk under the stars.
“Please, Father,” Omar had implored, thinking that the old man might put a gun to his son’s head at that very moment. But Haji Mohammed had laughed and explained that he was just quoting a passage from Khushal Khan Khattak, the warrior poet of the seventeenth century, and that it was the same now and always.
This was a code that understood war, but it had been tested by the great wars that shook the red-rock hills like a long, echoing chain of explosions.
When Omar was a little boy, the Russians were still over the border and his town was a staging ground for the Afghan holy warriors. Omar remembered how they would parade through town with the guns they had received from the Americans and their Pakistani agents. When the Russians finally left, the holy warriors became ordinary warlords and it was a world of anarchy. Then when Omar was a teenager, there were the fierce young men who called themselves Talibs and demanded justice. They marched through Makeen, too, on their way in and out of Khowst and Kandahar.
But all this was just a prelude to the big war that had come after Omar had left home to pursue his studies-when Al-Qaeda came to South Waziristan with its money, and then the Americans came after them, and brought all the hell there is on earth. Dr. Omar had wondered then if he should return home, but he knew that was impossible. He had pleaded with his mother and father to leave, but that was impossible, too. They were rooted in the rocky soil like two prickly cactus bushes.
Omar had thought for a time that he could end the war if he helped make Al-Qaeda go away, so that the Americans would go away, too. But that was beyond his powers.
There was a shadow that followed him, as it follows every Pashtun man, and that was shame. It was not enough to be successful; what was essential was to be an honorable man. That was why he had gone home two years before, to see if he could escape the shadow. But another shadow, a shame that was shameless, had darkened his world.
Omar had always wondered what he would do if something bad happened to his parents. And then, on that terrible day, he had discovered the answer.
Dr. Omar waited for more of his graduate students, but none came by for the rest of the morning. He locked the door of his office and went to the computer lab, a squat two-story building a hundred yards away, where he preferred to do his communications for reasons of concealment. He had a number of different email accounts that he visited and, it might be said, a number of different personalities that inhabited these electronic spaces.
Most times, Omar felt that he was living behind a mask. But oddly, when he did this work under a variety of assumed names, he felt something close to peace.
15
Sophie Marx was numb from fatigue when she returned from Dubai. She hadn’t slept well on the outward leg because of worries about the meeting ahead. She had hoped to collapse into her seat on the way home, but she slept only fitfully: Her body was too heavy for slumber, and her mind was too hot. She had taken on responsibility, on behalf of Gertz and the whole team, for investigating the disappearance of a colleague. But she was coming home empty-handed. Her theory had been wrong. She was still baffled about how Howard Egan’s cover had been broken, and she didn’t know who else in her organization might be vulnerable. It was an oppressive sense of failing in an assignment where she had badly wanted to do well.
She tossed back and forth on the couchette of the Emirates jet, trying to get comfortable. But sleep didn’t come, and she thought about ways she could answer her questions. Part of her problem, she concluded after many hours, was that she didn’t understand the context for these events: Why was Egan in Pakistan in the first place? Why was he paying money to tribal emirs? What was the mission for which Gertz had risked this man’s life?
Marx went to the office, tired as she was, after a brief stop at home to shower and change. She wanted to begin querying the files to see if she could answer these questions. Jeff Gertz was away on one of his mystery trips, which made it easier. She figured that she didn’t have to ask his permission to pull the operational files, because he had already granted it.
The Hit Parade’s most sensitive information was not in the computer system, but kept in hard copy only, in a large room called “the Vault” on the ninth floor. The keeper of this archaic library was a retired military officer who had formerly worked for the National Security Agency’s military cryptology branch, known as the Central Security Service. He was a fussy man who had helped protect some of the country’s biggest secrets for several decades. He was always called “the Colonel,” even though he had retired from active duty ten years before.
Marx took the elevator to the ninth floor and walked to the colonel’s lair. The door was closed and he didn’t answer at first, perhaps hoping that the visitor would go away. She knocked again, harder, and this time the door opened and out stepped the Colonel. He was a short, balding man, little taller than Marx herself, with a florid face and a bulbous nose. His actual name was Samuel Sinkler, but people rarely used it; he preferred rank only.
“Sorry to disturb you, Colonel, but I need to look at the Pakistan operations files.”
She showed him her badge.
“Nope,” he answered. “Sorry, you can’t have them.”
“But Mr. Gertz personally authorized me to look at all files I needed to investigate the Howard Egan case.”
“He didn’t tell me that.” The Colonel had a thin smile. He liked saying no.
Marx shook her head. She was tired and didn’t like being jerked around.
“I need those files, Colonel. I can’t do my work without them.”
“That’s not my problem, miss. You could get Mr. Gertz, but he isn’t here.” He smiled again.
She pondered what to do. He obviously expected her to give up if he said no often enough.
“I’m not leaving until I see those files. Will you give me access if Steve Rossetti says it’s okay?”
“That’s a hypothetical,” said the Colonel.
She picked up a phone on the nearest desk and dialed Rossetti’s extension.
“Steve, it’s Sophie. I’m back from Dubai and I have an emergency. I need access to some files on the ninth floor and Colonel Sinkler says he needs someone’s permission. Can you come up now?”
There was a pause, while Rossetti temporized on the other end. He didn’t like making decisions.
“I really need help now, Steve,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll have to call Jeff. He won’t be pleased, but I have no choice.”
That did it. Rossetti arrived five minutes later and personally signed the necessary piece of paper for the Colonel. Neither man was happy.
“Thanks, gents,” she said breezily. The Colonel marched her back to the Vault and unlocked the steel door, while Rossetti retreated to his office.
It was cold in the stacks. The Colonel was one of those men who believed that people worked more efficiently at lower temperatures. Marx was wearing a long-sleeved blouse, but she was shivering after thirty minutes. She descended to her office and returned with a cardigan sweater, which she buttoned to the neck. It was dark among the racks and cabinets, so she asked the Colonel for a flashlight, which he grudgingly provided. He seemed to think that darkness, too, was part of good security.
Marx started with the paper records of Egan’s travels. These were more detailed than the computer records she had consulted before. They showed a total of five trips to Pakistan over the previous thirteen months. Two of those journeys had been to Karachi, two to Lahore and one to Islamabad. To see what Egan had been doing on those trips, Marx had to consult two other sets of files. The first was his personal 201 file, which recorded the active cases he had been managing, but using cryptonyms to conceal the true names of his contacts. At the time of his disappearance, he was the case officer for four agents, all of whom had the digraph “AC,” which was The Hit Parade’s notation for Pakistan, borrowed from an old CIA cryptonym.