“You don’t give up, do you?” he said. “Are you always like this?”
The question caught her off guard. She was so tired, all she could do was answer honestly.
“I’m persistent. At least, I used to be, when I was in the field. I got lazy when I was back at Headquarters. It’s all in my file, if you want the details.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve been reading. I got curious.”
“So you know I got in trouble in Addis Ababa?”
“Yeah, but why? That wasn’t clear. They always leave the good stuff out of a 201.”
“I got burned, that’s what happened. I was covered as a UNESCO officer in Paris, which gave me a reason to visit U.N. offices in Lebanon and Ethiopia regularly. I was working developmentals mostly, going in and out of Beirut, working out of the UNESCO office in Mar Elias. I nailed a recruitment there that got us inside the Hezbollah communications net. I was thinking I was pretty cool. But then it got nasty.”
“What happened?”
“They made me on my next trip to Ethiopia. It was bad.”
“Tell me the story. I was in Addis for a few months in the nineties.”
“Okay, so I picked up surveillance my first day. I thought I saw a chase car following my taxi to U.N. headquarters. I didn’t worry too much, and I didn’t report it. Addis wasn’t a high-threat assignment, and there were friendlies all over, and I didn’t want to scratch the trip. So I went out a second day, this time in a UNESCO staff car, a nice big Mercedes to visit a demonstration project in Debre Zeit.”
“That was a mistake, I take it.”
“Big time. Two vehicles shadowed us as soon as we left the international zone. We kept going until we got to a Muslim district called Saris, where the Somali refugees lived. The road narrowed. No friendlies around. Bad scene. Ambush zone.”
“What saved you?”
“Luck, frankly. I screamed at my driver as the cutoff car was coming toward us. I told him to floor it, and that if he slowed down, I would shoot him. It turned out that he driven a taxicab in America. That was our salvation, the fact that this Ethiopian knew how to drive like a crazy man. He gunned the car onto the shoulder. The chase cars tried to follow, but he was driving a Mercedes that could do over a hundred, no problem, and their cars were crap. So we outran them, basically.”
“No shit.” Rossetti was shaking his head. He was impressed, despite himself.
“I called the emergency number at the embassy, and the police showed up a few minutes later, and that was that.”
“And nobody got hurt?”
“Not physically. My cover was gone. Even I knew that. I put in my resignation papers at UNESCO, gave up my super-gorgeous Paris apartment and came home to Headquarters, where I was vegging out until Gertz rescued me.”
“How did the bad guys make you?” asked Rossetti “Did CI ever figure it out?”
“Nothing official. But I think it was a technical hit, some kind of data mining, back in Lebanon.”
“Come on!” Rossetti shook his head. Insurgents weren’t smart enough to do data mining.
“I’m serious. It was my cell phone calls. The Lebanese government, meaning Hezbollah, had accessed my call records. When they matched up the call data with calls made by other people they were watching, I was busted. They passed the information to their friends in Addis.”
“You really think they’re that smart?”
“They don’t have to be smart, Steve. They just need to have the same stuff we do: data-mining software; pattern analysis, link analysis; watch lists. They could be stupid as mules, but they could still nail the old CIA. That’s why The Hit Parade exists, right? To go places where they can’t find us.”
“I hope that still works,” said Rossetti.
Marx was going to say something upbeat in response, but it wasn’t in her.
Jeff Gertz’s mystery trip was to Washington, D.C., perhaps the least mysterious city in the world. He went there to meet with the president’s chief of staff, Ted Yazdi. It was an unusual encounter nonetheless. It took place in a private home in Bethesda that belonged to one of Yazdi’s assistants, who had vacated the house at the boss’s request. It was like an agent meeting in that respect, though it was hard to say who had recruited whom.
The safe house was a big suburban estate up on a hill. It looked like the clubhouse of a country club, with a big portico and a facade of brick and stone, and well-mowed grass on all sides. The floodlights were on, and a man in a bulky suit was standing in the driveway, scanning the street.
Yazdi was waiting in the living room when Gertz knocked on the door. He was wearing dark glasses, even though the curtains were drawn, and was chewing on a piece of gum. He sat on the edge of the couch, anxious for the meeting to begin. There are civilians who are easily seduced by secrets, who chortle over the details the briefers throw in about foreign leaders’ sex lives or health problems, and Yazdi was one of them. He was eager to enter an otherwise forbidden world.
Yazdi had asked for an update on The Hit Parade’s operations. Nothing on paper, for obvious reasons. The president was preoccupied with his legislative agenda, and the chief of staff didn’t want to bother him, so he was holding it in his head. It was hard for him to keep it all straight.
“I get paid to be nervous,” he began. “That’s what I do for a living. So I need to know all your shit. It’s on me if anything goes wrong. I’m holding the bag.”
“Nobody’s holding the bag, sir, because there is no bag. As I told you when we agreed to set up our capability, we don’t exist. We are self-funding, and self-liquidating.”
Yazdi took off his sunglasses. He had a narrow face and a mouth that was always parted slightly at the lips, as if ready to bite.
“I don’t believe you. How is that possible? I worked for an investment bank. Money has to come from somewhere.”
“Don’t ask me, Mr. Yazdi, please. You don’t want to know. We have a system. It works. We have more than enough money.”
“Okay.” Yazdi nodded. He hated not having every last secret. “Tell me the list.”
Gertz ran through the list of countries where they had operations. It had all the names you would expect: Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan. And it had a few names that you wouldn’t expect, such as China and Russia and France.
“Pakistan’s the biggest, right?” asked Yazdi. “That’s the hardest one, isn’t it? They’ve got two hundred million pissed-off people, plus nuclear weapons. Scary shit.”
“The Paks are our main target right now, sir. That’s where we have put the most effort, in people and money.”
“Is it working?” asked Yazdi. “That crazy shit in Karachi when your guy vanished scared me.”
“It will take time. But money does wonders when you spread it around. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to be rich. Even in Pakistan.”
“How do you get your names? I mean, how do you know who to bribe?”
“People tell us things. Old friends, new friends, throw in some secret ingredients. Put them all together, cook it in the oven and, voila, it’s a souffle.”
“I hope so, buddy. This is ‘Project Pax.’ That’s what I told the president. We’ve spent enough time fighting our enemies. Now we are going to buy them off. It’s time for ‘global green,’ meaning money. We are going to have a leveraged buyout of all the people who have been trying to fuck us over. That’s my line to the boss, just so you know. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s the strategy.”
Gertz nodded. Strategy was not something that interested him. He was an operator; he usually left the big-think stuff to others, though in this case there wasn’t really anyone to leave it to, other than the gum-chewing White House chief of staff, who had only the vaguest notion of what they were doing.
Gertz didn’t worry about it. His job was to serve the president, and if the president wanted to hose the war zone with money so people would stop killing Americans and he could get reelected, that was fine. Gertz wanted to get the job done. He found the right people, assembled lists of names, developed capabilities and covers. And soon the activity had taken on a life of its own; it had been set in motion and now it was hard to stop.