“He has powerful friends, Mr. Hoffman. That’s what people say, anyway. So my answer may get me in trouble. But no, I don’t trust Jeff fully. I don’t understand his agenda. He has a tight hold on our organization, but I don’t always understand what he’s doing. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but it’s what I think.”
Hoffman had closed his eyes again while she was talking, so she couldn’t read his reaction. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds after she had finished her answer, but then he spoke up.
“You have it exactly, precisely right, as far as I am concerned. That’s why I am going to ask you not to tell Gertz anything about your trip to Pakistan, or what you learn there. I want you to report back to me, and then we will figure out what to do.”
“I’ll get fired, Mr. Hoffman. Jeff won’t tolerate disloyalty. I know that about him. He’ll find out, because he always does, and then I’ll be out the door. You’re asking me to commit career suicide.”
“I don’t think so,” said Hoffman slowly. “I am actually offering you a means of escape from professional ruin. But there’s no way for you to be sure, is there? The reality here is that you will have to take my word. I cannot offer you any assurance that would be credible. In the end, it’s like everything else in our business. It is about trust.”
Marx looked out the window of this antiseptic hotel, toward the clustered buildings of the City of London. She had always hoped there would be a moment in her career like this, when someone would offer her the chance to do something really important. But now that it had arrived, it was so fragile, no more than a thread between two people who, until an hour before, had never talked.
“I trust you,” she said. “Let’s talk about the details.”
They spent another hour within the four bland walls of the Holiday Inn Express. Hoffman ate his french fries, both plates, but Marx had one of the beers. He explained the procedures for contacting Lieutenant General Mohammed Malik through his personal email address and his private cell phone number. Hoffman said he would send the Pakistani general a message advising that she was coming.
With that transmission of information, he warned, the real danger would begin. For it was a certainty that General Malik had been in contact with the people who were killing Marx’s colleagues, and he might do so again if he decided it was in his interest. And even if General Malik didn’t breathe a word, the trackers from Al-Tawhid might be able to follow Marx anyway, through their own surveillance, just as they had the other operatives of The Hit Parade.
They talked, finally, about what Marx would say to Jeff Gertz about her absence. She proposed the cover story: She had uncovered something important for the investigation in the files of Alphabet Capitaclass="underline" Howard Egan had met with someone in Dubai on his way to his fatal visit to Karachi. She needed to debrief this person immediately, and there hadn’t been time to check first with Gertz. She would apologize in an email that she would send from the airport, as she was about to board her plane.
“Will he believe that?” Hoffman asked.
“Probably not. But it will be too late for him to stop me by then. And you’ll protect my back when I return, assuming that I return.”
Marx meant that last line as a bravura joke, but neither of them laughed. This was a situation in which it was impossible to be sure that she was not walking into a trap.
That afternoon, when Marx returned to the Alphabet Capital office in Mayfair to make her travel arrangements through Perkins’s secretary, she received a “book cable” message from The Hit Parade in Studio City that had been sent to all personnel abroad. It stated that an officer of The Hit Parade had been killed in Afghanistan that day while on his way to a covert meeting. That made four.
The cable repeated, more emphatically, the earlier directive that no officer of The Hit Parade should travel without explicit permission. There was a global lockdown. Every foreign officer should take immediate precautions to ensure personal security, varying their routes, procedures and communications practices. They should stop using all credit cards and cellular phones, including those issued to them in alias names.
Sophie Marx ignored the message. Mona, the secretary at Alphabet Capital, had booked the initial leg of Marx’s flight to Islamabad via Dubai for that evening. She knew that if she didn’t leave immediately, she might not be able to do so at all. She knocked on Perkins’s door to say goodbye, but Mona said that he was out of the office, visiting his lawyer. She tried to write a note, but gave up after several tries in which she said either too little or too much.
When she got to Heathrow, Marx sent a message to Jeffrey Gertz, as planned, saying that she was on her way to Dubai. She was sitting in her seat waiting to take off when her phone rang. She moved to turn it off, fearing that it was Gertz, but she recognized Perkins’s number. When he came on the line, his voice was enthusiastic, almost breathless, as if he’d just made a big decision. He apologized that he had been away from the office. He had been doing some thinking, he explained.
“I’m not going to keep working with these bastards,” he said.
“Good,” she answered. “Don’t.”
“But you’re one of them.”
“Not anymore. I’m out.”
They were closing the door of the plane. The flight attendant was telling people to buckle their seat belts and turn off their cellular phones.
“What are you, then?” asked Perkins.
“I’m not sure.”
The flight attendant was walking down the aisle. Marx pretended to turn off her phone and when the attendant had passed, she put it back to her ear.
“Where are you?” asked Perkins. “It sounds like you’re on an airplane. Where the hell are you going?”
“I’m in a good place,” she whispered. “I can’t say any more now. Don’t ask.”
“Don’t go. I want to see you. I want to be with you. I’m the only one who knows your real name.”
“Don’t be a sentimental ass,” she said, which made him laugh. “And don’t do anything self-destructive. I like going to good restaurants.”
“Come back,” he said.
But she was gone. The flight attendant had threatened to take away her phone and have her removed forcibly from the plane if she didn’t stop talking immediately. She turned off her phone and removed the battery, so that nobody could track her GPS movements while she was away. Then she sat back in her seat and closed her eyes.
28
They say the safest airline is the one that has just had a crash, because the crew takes extra precautions. On that theory, Sophie Marx decided that she would stay at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which had been the target of a catastrophic truck bombing some years before and was for a time off-limits to U.S. diplomatic personnel. She reasoned that if it was officially regarded as dangerous, the hotel would be the safest place in Pakistan. She was traveling in alias, and she was not normally a fearful person. But on her way into town from the airport in the late afternoon, the air heavy with the heat of summer, she thought about calling her parents, with whom she hadn’t talked in more than a year.
It was dark by the time Marx arrived, and an improbable array of blue Christmas tree lights twinkled along the length of the hotel’s front security barrier. It was a horizontal concrete block decorated with faux-Oriental arches, topped by the too-red Marriott emblem. The design said “America in Pakistan,” once a selling point but no more. The facade had been rebuilt after the attack, with double-thick walls that were now advertised by the hotel as “bomb-proof.”
Marx was tired from the flight and wanted to remain anonymous for a few more hours. She took a swim in the hotel’s indoor pool and then dined alone in the Japanese restaurant. She told herself that this was just another operation; there was an element of danger whenever she traveled; this time it was just more palpable. She took a pill before going to bed, but she awoke in the middle of the night. She finally drifted off toward four o’clock with the television on.