“Oh, do you, now? And who might that lucky invertebrate be?”
“Me.”
“Preposterous. Out of the question. You almost got killed several days ago in Islamabad. Don’t push your luck, my dear. It runs out, even for you.”
“Don’t you see? The fact that he went after me before will make me an irresistible target. He missed once. This is a very disciplined man. He doesn’t like failure. He’ll come out of his hole if the prize is big enough. I don’t mean to be immodest, but I’m worth the trouble for him. Especially if Sabah sends him a message that will tell him we’re up to something really big. He’ll surface.”
“How unreasonable you are.”
“I will take that as a yes, Mr. Hoffman. We’ll get to work here on preparing the email message. I’ll need some help on details, to make the transfers look convincing. Can Information Ops get into Alphabet Capital’s accounts?”
“Of course. We can get anything we like, if we know what to ask for.”
“I need to know what accounts were used by Howard Egan, Alan Frankel and Meredith Rockwell, now deceased. Where the money began and where it ended. Send me those account numbers and routing codes.”
“You are worthy colleague, Sophie.”
“I’m a work in progress. What about the other traces I requested, about the CTC surveillance program and the consultants?”
“We are still digging on the consultants. The true names are originator-controlled, I’m afraid, very tight access. But the first part of your question is easy. The chief of CTC’s Al-Qaeda covert-surveillance program at the time was a gentleman whose name will be quite familiar to you, painfully familiar: Jeffrey Gertz, former president of The Hit Parade LLP of Studio City, California, now defunct.”
“Is that right?” she said blandly. Of course it was. She had known from the moment that Sabah described the videoconference by the CTC official, the earnest pitch, the bland amorality, that the speaker could only be her boss and sometime mentor.
“Where is Jeff these days? I’ve been wondering that.”
“He has ‘gone to ground,’ as they say in the fox-hunting milieu. He is conducting a global disappearing act, shutting down anything that has any link with his former activity. He seems to have authority from ‘the highest level,’ as we like to say euphemistically. He is traveling, at present, but precisely where, I do not know. Do you need me to find him for you?”
“No, the opposite. I need for him to stay out of the way.”
“That should not be a problem. I believe that Jeffrey’s current preoccupation is saving his own skin.”
Marx sat down with Joe Sabah, who seemed actually to have missed her company, and began drafting the email message she would send to “George White.” To rouse the Pakistani’s interest, she planned to transfer $50 million from an Alphabet account to one that had been used by one of The Hit Parade’s operatives. To leave an unmistakable footprint, she decided that the transfer would move directly from Howard Egan’s account at FBS to the account he had used in Dubai for his initial meeting with the Pashtun tribal chief Azim Khan.
She found Perkins’s secretary, Mona, who was still ensconced in what was left of the office on Mayfair Place, and had her make travel arrangements just as she had only a few days before for Marx’s trip to Islamabad. She advised Support to have one of its contacts at American Express make sure the payment cleared, regardless of any restrictions on Alphabet Capital.
Sabah let her examine all his previous messages to “George White,” so that she could get the cadence right. He helped her encode the proper SWIFT wire transfer protocols, so the message would have the necessary detail. The final version, tweaked and massaged, was sent from Joseph Sabah’s Gmail account to George. White09@yahoo. com, with the subject line, follow up. It read: LARGE
TRANSFER FROM PREVIOUSLY MONITORED ACCT FBS GENEVA. ORIGINATING ACCT: FBS AG GENEVA SWIFT BIC FBSWCHZH12A CH08 3771-7938-7155-8039-7. RECEIVING ACCT: CITIBANK NA/DUBAI SWIFT BIC CITIAEAD AE14-5300-5845-251. RECEIVER’S EUROCLEAR NO. 27593. TRANSFER AMT DLRS 50 RPT 50 MIL. APHELION.
The message vanished into electronic space. Marx alerted Headquarters that it had been sent. From that instant, all the surveillance technology available to the United States focused on the Yahoo account of an unknown recipient, and on electronic signals from Pakistan, Dubai and anywhere else that might be linked to any known operative.
Twenty-four hours passed without a nibble. But soon enough, there was a turbulence, a cascade of events, as the prey devoured the shining silver lure.
37
From the turreted windows of the members’ lounge at the Karachi Boat Club at dusk, the light on Chinna Creek was a tawny pink. Dr. Omar was visiting one of his university colleagues, a man from one of the “good families” of this merchant city, who wanted to show off the old club. On the walls were yellowing photographs of the first regatta in 1881 and the early boat races against Calcutta, Madras and the other metropoles of the Raj. The people in these old photographs were all white-skinned Anglo-Saxons, the men in blazers and white duck trousers, the women “memsahibs” in enormous hats and lacy white dresses. There was not a dark face among them, but that didn’t seem to bother the present-day members. They drank their gin and tonics and whiskeys and celebrated the lost world from which their ancestors had been so systematically excluded.
Dr. Omar was drinking nothing stronger than a Coca-Cola this evening. When he traveled to conferences abroad and wine was poured, he usually had a sip to be polite. He did not make a fuss about halal meat, either, the way some Muslims did. It was part of being a modern man, he liked to say, of living in the present.
Revenge comes in different flavors. Sometimes it is a swift act of rage that shatters the mask the oppressor has created for you. Other times it is a slow process in which the mask is an essential shield to cover actions that the oppressor could not imagine. Sometimes with a disciplined man, the act of revenge is all but invisible.
The professor did not appear to be angry; he was a protean figure who could assume whatever disposition suited the needs of the moment. That was one reason people rarely questioned his activities. He was an elusive personality, cleverer than his fellows. Since he was a boy, he had been off somewhere else, doing things that others knew they wouldn’t understand, even if they tried.
The host asked Omar about the new research contract he had received from a European computer-security company. The professor explained modestly that he was only a small subcontractor: He had given a paper nearly a decade ago at a conference in London on encrypted search algorithms, and such papers had brought him a steady trickle of work ever since, enough to pay his bills.
It was almost dark now on the water. The last of the sculls was being hauled up into the boathouse. Across the creek were the dense man-groves of the low water shoals, and beyond in the last light of the evening the dark aquamarine waters of the Arabian Sea, stretching west to Oman and then the world.
Dr. Omar’s friend asked if he should buy shares in the one of the Indian IT companies that was now a big software vendor in the subcontinent, and the professor replied no, it was not a wise investment. The future was not in boxed software, but in the “cloud,” the applications that would be available on the Internet to all, even in South Asia. He suggested several American companies that would be better bets.
“The financial markets are treacherous,” said Dr. Omar. “I was just reading today in the Financial Times online that one of the big hedge funds in London may go under. Alphabet Capital, it was. Solid as a rock, people said. Had investors here in Pakistan, too, I believe. But it turned out to be rotten underneath. Fraud investigation and all that, CEO arrested, horrible mess. Not really a surprise. They are too fancy in the West; too clever for their own good.”