Marx made a note to herself, and put a star next to it.
“Anything else?”
Sabah pondered the question a moment, searching his memory, and then came back to her.
“One more thing. He said America had a weapon called a Predator that could follow the Al-Qaeda fighters from the skies, by flying over the places where they were hiding in Pakistan. They had been using it since 2002, but now there were more of them. I had only read about these Predators in the newspaper, but here was someone talking about them. He said that with our help, America would take revenge for September 11, so that it would never happen again. They cannot escape justice, he said. It was supposed to make us feel happy and strong.”
“Did any of the consultants say anything, when this man from the CTC talked about the Predators?”
“Everyone was very quiet. We were all thinking, I suppose, about how powerful America was, that it could follow people and kill them from the sky.”
They took a break. Sabah wanted to walk his dog and asked if there were any plastic bags. One of Major Kirby’s men kept an eye on him and Emile as they circumnavigated the property several times.
Marx wrote a quick cable for Cyril Hoffman about the discussion she had just had with Sabah. She asked him for two pieces of information. First, she wanted a list of any Pakistani nationals who had been used as consultants during the SWIFT phase of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. She requested every shred of information they had on such people-phone numbers, addresses, travel records, security assessments, reports from liaison services. Second, she wanted a list of any senior officials from the Counterterrorism Center who had briefed foreign nationals involved in the SWIFT program in 2005.
She sent the cable in the restricted-handling channel, requesting an urgent response. But she thought she already knew the answer to her second question.
While dog and master were still outdoors, Marx tried to reach Thomas Perkins in London. His cell phone was turned off. A policeman answered his office extension and said that it would not be possible to talk to Mr. Perkins or leave a message for him at present. That was a relief for Marx, in truth, knowing that Perkins was under police quarantine.
Marx sat down again twenty-five minutes later with Sabah. He looked restored by his brief jaunt outdoors. There were grass stains on the seat of his trousers, from where he had evidently lain down on the lawn for a tussle with Emile. Sabah turned on his laptop computer as soon as he was seated, before Marx had a chance to ask him. He wanted to do his work now and get it finished.
It took thirty seconds for the machine to boot up and the screen to come alight. He opened his contact file and searched for names, mumbling to himself as he tried one, then another. Eventually, he voiced a relieved, “Ah,” and called up the name.
“I was looking in the g ’s for ‘George,’ but I had him listed by the last name he is using now on his emails, which is a w. I forgot that. Do you want the address?”
“Yes, please.” She tried to sound at ease, as if this piece of information weren’t something her life might depend on.
“It’s George. White09@yahoo. com. That’s what he called himself, George White. That’s the address we used to communicate the last half dozen times. Before that it was GeorgeWhite17@hotmail. com. I still have that address but it doesn’t work. He closed the account.”
Marx asked for his cell phone numbers. Sabah had two, but he thought they were both dead. The U.S. number was 001-703-202-1211. The Swiss number was 4179-555-6548. She repeated the email addresses and the numbers back to Sabah carefully, digit by digit, to be certain she had them right.
“Do you mind if we take another little break?” she said. “I need to share these with my colleagues so that they can do some detective work.”
She gave him a kiss on the cheek, which pleased and embarrassed him, and then excused herself and went into the control room, where they had set up a secure communications suite. Major Kirby brought in the dog to keep Sabah company, along with a sandwich and a glass of beer. Sabah drank the beer but fed most of the sandwich to Emile.
The communications officer helped Marx set the right designators for her message. She sent the cable to Hoffman, this time copying the Information Operations Center, which managed CIA exploitation of cyber-intelligence, and copying the operations center of the National Security Agency, as well. Then she waited.
36
Sophie Marx was exhausted. It was only when she had completed her debriefing of Sabah that the fatigue enveloped her; she felt empty, depleted of every calorie of energy and desire. She wanted to collapse into bed, pull a white comforter over her head and sleep for a week. That fantasy of escape was punctured by the anxiety, and the satisfaction, too, of knowing that hundreds of people were counting on her now. She went into the kitchen of the safe house and made herself a double espresso, then drank a Red Bull.
That wasn’t enough; she still felt groggy. Come on, girl, she told herself. Get your shit together. She asked Major Kirby whether there was a fitness room in the house, and of course the answer was yes. That was the first thing the Support team had organized when they secured the place, even before they finished the communications room. In the basement, they had installed a recumbent bicycle, an elliptical trainer and some free weights.
Marx spent nearly an hour on the elliptical trainer, striding like a space walker, listening to music on her iPod. She had eclectic tastes, but right now she wanted to hear music by tough women who had been lied to by manipulative men, such as her boss.
On her iPod she had a playlist she labeled “Revenge Music,” and she selected it now. Top of the list was Carrie Underwood singing “Before He Cheats,” about a woman who takes a baseball bat and bashes in the headlights of her two-timing lover’s car. Then there was Miranda Lambert’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” about an angry woman who walks in on her man while he’s playing pool with a new girl and thinks of shooting her. For sure, she had “Goodbye Earl,” by the Dixie Chicks. But her favorite song on the revenge playlist was Lambert’s “White Liar,” with its insistence that the truth finally comes out, even for liars. She turned up the volume and closed her eyes.
As the music played, Marx thought about her next steps. Jeffrey Gertz was in one compartment of revenge. But right now she needed to close on her Pakistani target-to flush him from his lair and into the open. The challenge was to think of a prize tantalizing enough that a supremely careful operator like this “professor” would take the risk to go after it. Her legs rocked back and forth on the trainer, keeping pace like a metronome. The more she considered this puzzle, the more obvious it was what she should do.
Hoffman called on the secure phone while Marx was working out. She rang him back a few minutes later when she had caught her breath. Her cheeks were flushed and beads of perspiration dotted her forehead.
“You’ve had rather a good day,” he said. “You have opened the gates, I do believe.”
“We don’t have our man yet,” she answered. “I’m scared we’ll blow our chance to get him.”
“You should be scared. He is a dangerous man. I called because we have a first cut from NSA. The cell numbers are all dead. We’ll run patterns, but I think the links will be dead, too. This man is not a fool. The email address at Yahoo is still alive, but it hasn’t been used since the last message to Sabah. So the question is, what next?”
Hoffman paused. He seemed to be waiting for her to pick up the thread.
“I have a suggestion, assuming that I’m running this, and not Headquarters.”
“My dear Sophie, you are Headquarters. And yes, you’re still running the operation. So far you haven’t made any mistakes.”
“I want to set a trap for the Pakistani. We can use Mr. Sabah to make contact, and we have a live email address, but we need some juicy bait. Otherwise this won’t work. I’ve been thinking about it, and I have the right worm to put on the hook.”