“Well, madam, you really did it this time. You really shot the pooch.” He was shaking his head.
“Hi, Jeff. Good to see you, too. What the hell are you talking about?”
“I kept telling you to be careful, not to go sticking your pinky into whatever looked tasty. But you were too smart for that. You had to ask Mr. Lucky to tell you everything, and in the first twenty-four hours, too. And now you’ve put him and me and the whole goddamned enterprise at risk, and yourself, too, by the way. You really are a piece of work, Sophie.”
He stood up, as if he couldn’t contain his consternation sitting down, walked a few paces and then came back to his seat on the bench. She watched, waiting for him to calm down.
“What on earth are you talking about, Jeff? Obviously you’re furious at me, but I don’t know why. What have I done?”
“Give me a break. That sweetie-pie stuff may work with Perkins, but he doesn’t lie for a living, and I do. You deliberately compromised me by asking Perkins about a confidential comment that he made to me on the phone two weeks ago. And don’t pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know that you pumped the guy for that information today at your fancy bullshit lunch.”
“You mean when I asked Perkins about ‘the system’?”
“Of course that’s what I mean. I can’t believe that you would do that. That is lame-ass judgment. That would normally be a CEI. You know what that is? A career-ending incident.”
“Slow down.” Her mind was jumping backward and forward in time as she tried to understand her boss’s rage.
“So Perkins called Anthony Cronin already? And Cronin called you? That was fast. You people don’t waste any time.”
“Jesus, girl, how dumb are you? I am Anthony Cronin. I have been Perkins’s case officer for the last few years.”
“Oh.” She felt manipulated, but more than that, she felt stupid.
“So here’s what we’re going to do, now that you have pushed your way into the part of the china shop marked do not enter. I am going to explain ‘the system’ to you. And then you are going to help me keep it going. Because if you don’t, your job will end, effective immediately, and I will do everything I can to make it impossible for you to work anywhere else for a long frigging time. Are we clear?”
“Yes, we’re clear.”
He smiled, for the first time since his cyclone had blown into the park. His teeth were so white and sharp they seemed to sparkle in the summer sun. He had her now: She was in his loop again, and he was relieved.
“That’s better.”
“For you, maybe. What’s the system?”
“The system in question is actually quite simple. For it is based on the clearest precept of human life-the golden rule of reciprocity-which is, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ That means Thomas Perkins helps us. And we, in turn, help Thomas Perkins.”
“How do we help him?”
“We give him the coin of the realm, my dear, which is information. We know things that move markets. We tell him. He makes money. Some for him, and some for us, thank you very much.”
“What do we do with our share?”
“We spend it. If you hadn’t noticed, we have agents all over the world who are paying people large stipends: Bribes, to be blunt. Where do you think the money comes from-given that we don’t exist? Well, I’ll tell you: We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it. Thomas Perkins provides the structure. We provide the information. Put them together and you have a money machine.”
“That’s the system?”
“Yup. And starting this minute, you are a part of it.”
Marx surveyed the tidy park. The grass under her feet was emerald-green. Within a half-mile radius was perhaps a trillion dollars of wealth, in constant invisible motion.
“Can I ask a question?”
“No. The part where you ask questions is over. Now it’s the part where you follow orders.”
“I’m going to ask the question anyway, Jeff. Is this legal, what we’re doing?”
He put his arm on her shoulder, not roughly, but in a way that was meant to reassure.
“Yes. The Hit Parade was created under the National Security Act. It has powers and authorities to do things that other organizations are not permitted to do. That’s what allows us to operate. By other rules, we may be illegal, but we have our own rules. Does that help?”
“Not really, Jeff. You managed to say yes and no at the same time.”
“Well, then, you got it right. That’s where we live.”
21
Dr. Omar returned home to South Waziristan on the second anniversary of the day when hell came to earth. He told no one. People said it was too dangerous in the tribal areas now, and few of his university friends even knew that he was a refugee from that world. But memories of the place haunted him, especially of that last afternoon. When he closed his eyes, he saw the metallic gleam in the sky ten thousand feet above; he saw the flash-click, like the pop of a flashbulb and the opening and closing of a camera shutter-that transformed life into death; he watched as his family vanished in a pulse of light. Sometimes it was all he saw.
He had dreamed of leaving this place forever. His exile had begun when his father sent him away to school in Razmak, up the road in North Waziristan. When he left, Omar had only the tendrils of beard. But even then he wanted a life that would not be bounded by the primitive triad of zar zam zamin -gold, women and land. He was the bright boy who excelled in mathematics, the one destined for college and engineering school. Omar had embodied the possibility of escape. But he had come to understand that this was an illusion. There is no escape from the tribal code that defines who you are.
People called him Dr. Omar, or “professor,” and religious friends used the Islamic honorific ustad, or “learned one.” The handful who knew he was from the Tribal Areas spoke of him as the hope for progress and reconciliation. His black hair was trimmed by a barber; he shaved his face every morning with an electric razor; he dressed like a college professor, in a sports jacket and open-necked shirt. His hands were soft, too. He did not believe in violence as a way of life; for him the code of revenge was learned and, in that sense, unnatural. That was why he needed to go home: to remember and recommit.
Dr. Omar told friends in Islamabad that he was going away for a bit of holiday up in the mountains. People thought he meant Gilgit or Chitral, in the far north. He borrowed a friend’s Toyota and headed southwest toward Bannu, where he stopped at the ISI office to get the necessary papers and permissions. He showed them his identity card, which listed his birthplace. He was visiting home, he said: Peace was coming to his native region, thanks to the ISI, and he wanted to see the place again and tell people about the new world that was waiting outside these barren hills.
The road west into the mountains was treacherous, better traveled by animals than cars. Omar took his time; he wanted to see every tree and hillside. Driving down the dusty road from Razmak toward Makeen, he went so slowly that the other cars honked and raced past him, calling out names. He didn’t care. The distant landscape hadn’t changed: the low hills rising from the narrow valley, dotted with pines and scrub brush, and beyond, the slate-gray hillsides of the dry mountains. And everywhere the rocks, as if God had made this land his slag heap for the pieces that wouldn’t fit anywhere else.
As he got closer to home, Omar began to see the scars of the war. The big compound in Makeen where the young fighters had done their training was shattered by bombs. He stopped the car and got out to look: He saw corrugated metal from what had once been a roof; and the collapsed walls, chunks of concrete pierced by steel reinforcing bars. These were the big targets that had been hit by the Pakistani air force; they were the visible wounds. There were new stores in the market center; bright signs that advertised cellular telephone carriers and Japanese automobile tires and laundry powder from Lahore; there was even a new red sign that read, coca-cola.