“Sorry, but you are pushing me where I cannot be pushed.”
His face had gone to stone.
“Was it intelligence-gathering, or Special Activities? I found a receipt in Egan’s operational file for gold bars that he took from the depository for one of his earlier operations. It was over fifty pounds, nearly a million dollars. What was that for? We don’t pay any agent that much.”
He took her wrist and held it, not a gentle touch, but a hard squeeze.
“These are questions I can’t answer, and you shouldn’t ask. We do things that are very secret, and this is one of them. Don’t ask me again, because you’ll get the same answer.”
“I’m trying to do my job.
“You’re pushing too hard. You’ll rupture a disk. Like I said, lighten up.”
A Baskin-Robbins was just ahead: pink, gaudy, an incongruous relic.
“You want an ice-cream cone?”
“Ugh.” She shook her head. “You can get me something else, though, if you’re in a generous mood.”
“What is it? I’m always in a generous mood with you.”
“A ticket to London. I want to meet Egan’s boss, the guy who runs the hedge fund. I want to understand how they do business, how many people there knew about Egan’s travels. The bad guys must have pumped poor Howard about where he worked. They know more than I do.”
“Thomas Perkins.” He spoke softly, enunciating each syllable. There was on his face an odd look of suspended animation. He had been caught off guard.
“Right, Perkins. Alphabet Capital. You told him that I might be coming to visit. Well, I want to do it, as soon as I can.”
“This is a complicated relationship. There’s a lot of baggage, not all if it ours. Maybe it’s better to leave this one to me.”
“Hey, Jeff, if I can’t do this, I might as well leave the whole thing to you. What’s the point? Maybe you should have someone else do your investigation.”
She was threatening him, subtly. He had little choice but to accede. She was his best hope for keeping the lid on.
“You have to be careful. Do not go turning over rocks when you don’t know what’s underneath. Remember, madam: You are a snake handler, not a snake charmer.”
“Don’t worry.” She put her arm through his, a feminine version of his arm around the shoulder. “I’m always careful.”
18
It would be wrong to say that Cyril Hoffman was a dandy. He was too big and substantial a man for that. But he dressed in a way that suggested another time, the 1950s perhaps, when CIA officers wore suits with vests, and hats that were not baseball caps, and senior agency officials acted like members of the very best club that ever was. On this evening, the man had a straw boater banded with a regimental stripe. He flourished the hat when he saw Jeffrey Gertz enter the restaurant.
Hoffman was a master of the details that other people forgot. That had been his secret when he ran Support. He organized a small army of covert logisticians who would find safe houses in a hundred cities around the world, and put reliably discreet renters in them so they didn’t have the telltale empty look. He organized what amounted to a string of private airlines, and schemed to find ways to keep them flying when other nations got pissy after the scandals about rendition and torture.
Hoffman kept the balls in the air, as best he could, but even he had understood that the old days, in which the Hoffman clan and their mates were a law unto themselves, were over. Real life had caught up. Sensing the hurricane that menaced the family business, Hoffman had wanted a safe place where he could ride out the storm, a “lily pad,” as they liked to say in the agency. He was rewarded with the position of associate deputy director-formerly known as executive director, until it was sullied by a predecessor-which was reckoned to be the third most powerful job at Headquarters.
Hoffman had used that position to fight for the agency’s self-preservation at a time when most of official Washington wanted it neutered. Sometimes that meant acceding to ideas he wouldn’t have chosen himself. Indeed, that was how he had come to be Jeff Gertz’s point of contact and seeming patron: Hoffman had understood that the new administration wanted to conduct this experiment with a new clandestine service far from Langley and the old culture. He would never intercede. But he wanted to keep an eye on this new creation and its headstrong, charismatic boss. Gertz was the sort of man, in truth, who embodied everything that Hoffman was not.
Despite Hoffman’s genial, flaccid exterior, he disliked such “hot-shots” more than anyone realized. He was reassured by the knowledge that they always made mistakes. He had the deep, abiding anger that a man feels when he watches others take the credit and win the glory, over many years, for things they couldn’t have accomplished without his help. But he had mastered the art of containing this rage in the most genial possible package-making himself appear an object of mirth rather than of envy or threat.
Hoffman had proposed that they meet at a modest restaurant called the Anvil, just past Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and about ninety minutes from Washington. It was an eccentric choice, and Gertz assumed that Hoffman had selected it for security. But that was only part of the reason, as it turned out.
Before coming to dinner, Hoffman had visited the racetrack in Charles Town, a few miles farther down the road. He had won more than a thousand dollars, thanks to tips from a former agency officer who had bought a stable in the vicinity and claimed to know, for a certainty, which horses were reliable bets and which ones were clunkers. Hoffman was still glowing from his winnings, and his smile initially suggested to Gertz that this would be an easy conversation.
“Welcome to the Anvil,” said Hoffman grandly, gesturing to the nearly empty restaurant. “To an anvil, everything looks like a hammer, to coin a phrase. Are you an anvil, Jeffrey, or a hammer?”
“I am definitely a hammer, sir.”
“Not a very effective one of late, I’m afraid. You keep hitting your thumb, or someone does.”
“We’ve had some bad luck these last couple weeks, for sure. But we’ll get our mojo back.”
“What in the Sam J. Hill is going on out there? If you don’t mind my asking, or even if you do.”
“We’re working it, but obviously we have a problem.”
“Yes, I think that would be a fair statement. Losing one officer is unlucky. Losing two is, well…you tell me: What is it?”
“It’s a mess. But like I told you on the phone, maybe the two aren’t related. Maybe one is an operational problem, and the other is gangster stuff: Moscow rules. That’s what I told my people.”
“Well, it’s preposterous. Don’t insult my intelligence by saying it again.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hoffman wagged a fat index finger at his guest.
“You seem to think you can bluff your way through this, my boy. That is a big mistake. You have a serious problem. Your officers are supposed to be invisible, but evidently they are not. Someone knew their movements. That is dangerous, my friend. What if you have a serious leak? What if all your operations are insecure? Then you are bleeding, hemorrhaging. Are you not?”
“That’s not going to happen. I have someone working it. We’re doing an investigation. We’re going to find the leak, if there is one, and close it.”
“Oh, good. There should always be an investigation. That way, if it blows up and people get the willies, you can say, ‘Sorry, but we can’t discuss it. It’s under investigation. ’ And who is conducting this no-holds-barred inquiry for you, please?”
“My chief of counterintelligence. Her name is Sophie Marx.”
Hoffman took from his pocket a white index card and a fountain pen, and wrote her name in neat script.
“Is she the cute one, with the ponytail, who was in Beirut, with the hippie parents?”
“Correct. She’s very good. And she knows how to keep a secret.”