To learn the real identities behind those code names, Marx had to consult a separate registry inside the Vault, which was locked and guarded by video surveillance. Here again, the Colonel initially said no. Marx summoned Rossetti back, and he signed another piece of paper that allowed her access.
“I hope you find something,” said Rossetti. “If this turns out to be a wild goose chase, Gertz will be pissed off.”
“I’ll worry about Jeff,” she answered. “Not your problem.”
Rossetti walked back to elevator, muttering as he went, “Get some sleep.”
The Colonel told her to turn her back while he punched the proper code into the cyber-lock. The door clicked open. She fumbled for the light switch and set to work.
Marx began matching crypts with true identities. She first found the name of the man she had interrogated in Dubai, Hamid Akbar. She knew he would be one of the four. Egan had met him four times over the thirteen months, twice in Karachi, once in Istanbul and once in Abu Dhabi. The second name was Azim Mohammed al-Darwesh, whom she assumed must be Akbar’s uncle. Egan had met him just once, four months before the kidnapping, in Abu Dhabi, on the same date as the meeting with his nephew, Akbar, who evidently had accompanied him to an initial get-acquainted meeting outside the country. This much was simply confirmation of what she already assumed.
Then came the surprises.
The third name listed was Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Chaudhary. He appeared to be a serving officer in the Pakistani military. Egan had met him three times: once in London, once in Beirut and once in Lahore. Marx ran traces on Chaudhary’s name and discovered that he served in the office of the chief of Combat Development, which was the branch of the Pakistani military that had overseen its nuclear weapons program. He was from a prominent Punjabi family, and he was the third generation to have served in the military.
The fourth name was Professor Aziz Mukhtar. He was the rector of Mohiuddin Islamic University in Azad Kashmir. Traces on the professor showed that he was a leading activist for the liberation of Kashmir from Indian control. Egan had met with him twice, both times in Dubai.
It was an unlikely mix: A banker, a tribal leader, a military officer from a great aristocratic family and a Muslim activist. Marx was confused. These might be foreign-intelligence operations, designed to gather information about Pakistan’s plans and intentions. But Marx doubted that. FI collection was still the province of the old CIA structure. This looked like something different.
Marx knocked on the Colonel’s door. He assumed she was finished for the day, and extended his hand to receive the flashlight. But she had come with a new question.
“If you please, Colonel, I would like to look at the disbursements register,” she said. “I need to see what we’ve been paying the agents whose names I’ve been pulling.”
“You can’t,” answered the security officer. The blank, unhelpful look on his face shaded toward a smile. It gave him pleasure, once more, to say those words of refusal.
“Let’s not go through this again. I can go back downstairs and get Steve Rossetti a third time, and he can come up and tell you the same thing as before. But, honestly, Colonel, that’s a waste of time. Why don’t you just say yes?”
“I can’t. It’s not possible to see those records.”
“Why the hell not?” It was a relief to be able to swear at this cranky old man, but she wasn’t expecting his answer.
“Because those records aren’t here, that’s why not. And watch your language.”
“Where are they, if they aren’t here?”
“Mr. Gertz has them. I don’t know where he keeps them. And I know for certain that nobody has ever accessed them, because if they had, they would have asked me first, just like you did. But it’s a waste of time. The disbursements are off-line. When I have questions about money, I ask Mr. Gertz. So should you.”
Sophie Marx returned to the Vault, more confused now than before. She still wanted to answer the basic question: What were The Hit Parade’s objectives in Pakistan? But she wondered now if she might have been misjudging the program’s scope. She had assumed that Howard Egan was the only officer handling Pakistani cases, but that might be wrong. She took up her flashlight again and went prowling in the main personnel and travel files. Because the data wasn’t computerized, there was no easy way to do a search and cross-tab for anyone who had visited Pakistan or handled a Pakistani agent. It all had to be done by hand.
Marx went back to the registry of cryptonyms and looked for all the cases with the AC digraph, which marked the agents as Pakistani. It took her the rest of the afternoon to pull together the information, but it was worth the trouble. She realized that she had been looking at a piece of a larger Pakistan operation.
There were fully nineteen cases, including the four that had been handled by Howard Egan. The others had been run by case officers who were based in Paris, Beirut, New Delhi, Cairo and Amsterdam.
Armed with the agents’ code names, she went back to the inner file of true names and began to assemble the picture. The Hit Parade had recruited senior officials from all three major Pakistani political parties; it was paying money to the leaders of four more tribes in the frontier areas, two in North Waziristan, one in Orakzai and one in Malakand. It had two more agents from Kashmir on the payroll, and three prominent Pakistani clerics.
A new operation was scheduled soon, according to the files. A young case officer based in Amsterdam was about to meet for the first time with a new prospect, a young Pakistani diplomat from a well-known family who was serving in the Pakistan Embassy in Moscow. The name of The Hit Parade officer from Amsterdam stuck in her mind. It was Alan Frankeclass="underline" He was the guy with red hair who was writing a blog as part of his cover. She had met him six months ago, when he was getting some new tradecraft training. She had thought at the time that he was cute, and had half hoped he would ask her out, but he hadn’t.
What Sophie Marx had found looked like a broad network, of the sort that back at Headquarters might have been handled by the Special Activities Division. In theory, all such covert operations were supposed to be driven by a strategic plan, which was reviewed and updated periodically. But there was no trace of such strategic guidance for Pakistan operations. Where did these projects come from? How were they tasked? Who suggested the names?
She went to the Colonel one last time before turning in her flashlight for good.
“I’d like to see the Special Activities finding for Pakistan,” she said. “And don’t just say, ‘You can’t.’”
“You can’t.”
“Oh, please! Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t exist. Not on paper at least, not that I’ve seen.”
“Well, where is it? There has to be a plan. We don’t just send people all over the world willy-nilly. There’s a directive, a finding.”
“It’s in Mr. Gertz’s head. He’s the boss. Maybe he writes it down, and maybe he doesn’t, I wouldn’t know about that. I’m sure he reviews it with somebody, but I wouldn’t know about that, either. So what you’re going to have to do, Miss Marx, is wait to see Mr. Gertz when he gets back.”
For once, the Colonel had it completely right. There was no choice now but to wait for the boss to return.
Marx stopped by Rossetti’s office on her way out, to thank him for his intervention. He was still there, gazing at his computer screen, when Marx stuck her head in the door. Rossetti looked nervous at first, thinking she had come to ask him for something else, and he was relieved when she said she was packing it in for the night.