“Yes,” said the Pakistani. “I will meet you tomorrow night in Doha. Please come alone. I will do the same. This is not a meeting that I am prepared to acknowledge in any way.”
“Don’t you worry. Uncle Cyril is going to use a clean plane, with virgin tail numbers. And I would be most grateful, dear friend, since we are talking about discretion here, if you didn’t share my itinerary with the gentlemen in Al-Tawhid, should you chance to encounter any of them. I’m not saying that to pick a fight, just being honest.”
General Malik was going to protest, but with three American intelligence officers dead, it was not an unreasonable request.
Hoffman made a second call that evening, to Jeff Gertz. He asked for a summary of the investigation that Gertz’s shop was conducting into the leak of information that had led to the attacks on Howard Egan and the others. Hoffman recalled that the probe was being conducted by that nice young woman, Gertz’s chief of counterintelligence, the one who’d been stationed in Beirut, with the peculiar family. How was she getting along?
“Sophie Marx is the officer’s name,” answered Gertz. His voice was clipped. He didn’t want to be answering questions from Headquarters now.
“And where is Miss Marx, pray tell?”
“She’s in London, investigating the hedge fund where Egan worked. She’s headstrong, and she hasn’t found the magic bullet yet. If she doesn’t figure it out soon, I’ll get someone else who will.”
“A bit hard to manage, is she? Knocking on too many doors?”
“Yes,” answered Gertz. “Something like that. Plus, she isn’t getting me any answers. Just more questions. She keeps asking about the big picture. This is a detective job.”
“I take it you mean Pakistan, when you speak of the big picture.”
“I mean the big picture. Things she isn’t cleared for, but wants to know anyway. We need to get to closure here. People are getting killed and we don’t know why. I need to put more people on it, maybe next week. Right now, nobody is moving.”
“How do I reach this difficult woman? I might like a progress report of my own.”
“Sorry, Cyril. You can’t. She works for me. I’m not ready to declare open season yet. We’ll call you when we have something, and you can talk to her all you want then. But not now.”
Hoffman rang off a few minutes later, cheery as always. The moment he ended the call, he initiated another one to Steve Rossetti, who gave Hoffman a cell phone number for Sophie Marx and her secure email address.
Hoffman thought about calling her, but it was the middle of the night in London, and he didn’t need to speak with her now. He had already ascertained the only thing that mattered to him, which was that Marx was independent and restless enough to make Jeff Gertz nervous. He didn’t know if she was trustworthy, but you never really knew that about anyone until you took the risk and found out.
The two intelligence barons arrived in Doha the following afternoon in their unmarked private jets and went to the Four Seasons on the Corniche in West Bay. The hotel was an example of the instant luxury that had enveloped the tiny, absurdly rich nation of Qatar. It was a modern high-rise, sprinkled with bits of Islamic kitsch to reassure the locals: mirrored domes atop the two hotel towers, and an ersatz desert fort out front to house the parking attendants.
In the heat of high summer, a vaporous shimmer rose from the waters of the Gulf. The palms that ringed the hotel were drooping, despite the perpetual irrigation. The hotel lobby had the grand, empty look of a showroom: Any Qatari with sufficient money had fled the summer heat of the Gulf for the mountains of Lebanon or the Cote d’Azur.
Cyril Hoffman took the cheapest room they had. He didn’t have the director’s approval for the trip, and he didn’t intend to tell him about it. He had commandeered the plane on his own authority, but he might have to eat the hotel bill.
Hoffman sat in his room waiting for dinner, watching Arab girls in bikinis play in the pools below before returning home in their formless black cloaks and veils. What an odd part of the world this was: Hoffman reminded himself to be tolerant that night if the Pakistani general said something that he knew to be a lie; it was a matter of cultural dissonance.
They met in the private dining room of an Italian restaurant called La Fortuna, on the ground floor. Hoffman went down early and gave the waiter a hundred dollars and a credit card in the alias in which he had registered at the hotel. He told the waiter not to enter the private room unless he was summoned.
General Malik arrived at eight o’clock on the dot, dressed in a blue blazer, white shirt and a red-and-black, regimental-striped tie. He looked like a military officer even when he was in mufti. Hoffman was already there, luxuriating in a summer suit of white linen, with baggy trousers and a blousy double-breasted jacket. In place of a tie, he was wearing a paisley ascot. He looked like an art-history professor at Sarah Lawrence College.
Hoffman had ordered a fancy bottle of wine and an array of appetizers. They were on the table when General Malik entered the room. Hoffman told the waiter to go away and leave them alone. He poured his Pakistani friend a glass of the Brunello.
“Ain’t life grand?” said Hoffman, clicking his glass against that of his guest.
“No,” said Malik. “It isn’t grand at all. It is rather a mess. Chin chin.”
“No small talk, then? No foreplay? No ‘how’s the family?’”
“I think not. I am flying back to Rawalpindi tonight.” Malik looked at his watch. “In three hours, to be precise.”
Hoffman took a long sip of his wine and put down the glass.
“Let me get to the point, then. I came out here to tell you one big thing. I could get arrested for what I am going to tell you, put in jail for passing secrets to the enemy. So I want you to listen carefully. Will you do that?”
“Of course, Cyril. Why do you think I have come, if not to listen, and perhaps also to talk?”
“The operations that you and your Al-Tawhid friends have uncovered are not run by the CIA. They are being run by a new organization that has gone haywire. They are conducting a covert-action campaign against Pakistan without any legal authority, and it will fail. I say that because I am going to make it my personal business to take it down. This new organization has gotten the White House to play along, but that’s just because they’re inexperienced. I’m working on that, too.”
Malik shook his head. “This is poppycock. I know your tricks, Cyril. This is another cover story.”
“I thought you might say that, so I brought you a little something to establish my bona fides.” He took several sheets of paper from the pocket of his white suit and handed the document across the table to the Pakistani.
“What is this?”
“It’s a letter to the general counsel of the CIA from the White House counsel’s office. It’s dated two days ago. When you boil down all the legal verbiage, it says that the White House takes responsibility for all statements that will be made about the Al-Tawhid accusations. The agency will be ‘held harmless,’ as the lawyers say. It’s not their baby.”
“What does that prove? I am a military man, not a lawyer.”
“It proves what I just said. This is not a CIA operation. There is no official agency campaign to do anything to Pakistan. There is a crazy-ass operation run by some drugstore cowboys who have figured out a way to finance their activities without going to Congress, and who temporarily have gotten some hotheads in the White House to go along. But like I said, they are going down. I guarantee it.”
“Why are you telling me this, my dear? It is most unlike you to volunteer anything. I cannot ever recall a similar moment of generosity, with you or any of your famous cousins and uncles. What’s the ‘catch,’ so to speak?”
“I need your help, pure and simple. We have a nasty little war on our hands. Three people have gotten killed. Any more, and people will start to panic. They will take action to protect themselves. That gets ugly, real fast.”