Cyril Hoffman, the concertmaster, embraced the Pakistani professor. He kissed him on both cheeks, and took the man’s hand.
“You came,” said Dr. Omar. “I was not sure you were ready to see me, after everything that has happened.”
“Of course I came,” said Hoffman. “I could not refuse a request from a man who has suffered, even if that man has made mistakes. For we all make mistakes, don’t we? Yes, we do.”
There was movement in the woods, but the professor did not hear or see it.
“I have been thinking,” said Dr. Omar, “that it is time to find an ending. There are so many dead, so much saz. It is enough, now. I come to ask forgiveness and asylum. I pray that you will be an honorable man and grant my request.”
Hoffman was about to speak, but he did not have time. Events moved more quickly than he could express the words. But what he wanted to say was, Yes, I grant your wish. It is over.
The other two men who had been awaiting Dr. Omar’s approach had moved into the clearing, too. They watched this greeting with utter astonishment and rage, in the case of General Malik, and a grim appreciation of the concertmaster’s art, on the part of Jeffrey Gertz. But they had come for their own reasons, these two, and they were not to be deterred.
General Malik walked toward Dr. Omar. There was a look of recognition in both men’s faces. They had been circling each other for so long. Each had tried to imagine the other’s motivations, and each had been wrong.
The general was the first to speak. He turned to his bodyguard.
“Execute this man,” he said, pointing to Dr. Omar. “He is a traitor. He is an American spy.”
The general’s bodyguard fired his service revolver. The sound was muffled by the silencer.
Gertz had drawn his own weapon. His eyes had been fastened on Dr. Omar, his sometime adviser. The Pakistani was the last piece of Gertz’s botched conspiracy that needed to be cleaned up. Gertz had been prepared to do the necessary job, as soon as Hoffman had told him about the meeting, but now it seemed that he was redundant.
Gertz watched the Pakistani professor fall, and saw the blood spurt from his shattered skull. He crouched and swiveled his body in a quick turn, aiming first at the bodyguard, then at General Malik, then at Cyril Hoffman-uncertain who was the enemy. Always have a plan, and always make the first move. That was his rubric, but it failed him now. He didn’t have a plan for this bizarre situation, and he hadn’t moved first.
There was a muffled sound of impact, like a fist hitting a pillow, and again. Two more gunshots had been fired. The first took down General Malik’s bodyguard. The second struck Jeffrey Gertz. These shots came from a different direction, from the nearby woods. The concertmaster had brought along a shooter of his own, with very precise instructions. They were clean shots to the head, both of them meant to kill.
Hoffman pulled at General Malik’s arm.
“We need to go now,” he said.
The Pakistani general surveyed the scene and made a quick decision. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to wipe clean the prints on Gertz’s gun, and then put it into the hand of Dr. Omar. Malik was good at that sort of thing. He knew how to compose the frame.
“He was a stupid, dangerous man,” said Hoffman, staring at Gertz’s body as the life slipped away.
Hoffman led Malik away toward the cottage from which he had emerged minutes before. It was at the far end of the park, along Kew Road. A car was waiting for Hoffman, but he gave it to the Pakistani general and sent him away. He summoned another car for himself, and it was there in thirty seconds. If there was one thing Hoffman understood, it was logistics.
They exchanged a few words before they parted, about money. Oddly, on such a grim afternoon, both men were smiling as they said farewell.
43
Sophie Marx arrived at Pentonville the next afternoon at the appointed time. The guard asked her to take a seat in the reception room outside the warden’s office. She had been up much of the night, unable to sleep, but she had dressed up for Thomas Perkins in a bright new frock, the color of toasted almonds, that she had bought on New Bond Street the day before. She thought it would cheer him up, but it wasn’t just that. She wanted to look nice. After she had waited nearly an hour in the visitors’ lounge, she knocked on the warden’s door and asked his assistant if something was wrong.
The warden’s deputy apologized that there had been some last-minute discussions involving Mr. Perkins’s case and asked Marx to wait a bit longer. She returned to her chair in the spartan reception room, certain that something bad had happened. The guards changed shifts at four and a new group came in, but still she waited. The only reading matter in the room was the newsletter of the prisons bureaucracy that carried the anodyne name National Offender Management Service.
She didn’t want to close her eyes, despite her fatigue. Every time she did, she saw the face of Jeffrey Gertz. She had wanted him dead, that was the grisly part of it; she had said as much to Hoffman. And now that he was dead, she wondered if it was her doing.
It had sounded impossible, when Cyril Hoffman first hinted at what had happened in a phone conversation the night before. But the late newscasts had bits of it, and she had spoken at length with Hoffman that morning, before he caught his flight back to Washington. He had asked her to come to breakfast at the Travellers Club on Pall Mall. It was his home away from home, he said: lots of food, badly cooked, and eccentric old men who appreciated the medicinal benefits of alcohol.
He told her the outlines of the story, at least the version that was being fed to the media with the cooperation of the ever-pliant British. A former CIA officer named Jeffrey Gertz had gone to a rendezvous in Richmond upon Thames the previous afternoon, at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Gertz was now a private contractor, according to the version for public consumption, working for a Blackwater-type firm. He was pursuing a Pakistani terrorist named Omar al-Wazir, a renegade academic who had been linked with the recent killings of American citizens overseas. Gertz had been hired by one of the victims’ families to track him down, that was the cover story. The terrorist had brought along an accomplice, a Pakistani soldier who was in his pay. There had been a shoot-out, and all three were dead.
“How useful for you,” Sophie had said when he finished. “No loose ends.”
“None whatsoever.” Hoffman smiled. “It even makes Jeffrey look heroic. And it avoids that awkward business about his ‘consulting’ arrangement with the enemy.”
“Why were they meeting? Explain that to me.”
“It’s quite scandalous, actually. I suspect that Jeffrey was stealing money, with help from this Wazir fellow, and diverting it to bank accounts around the world. Greedy little bastard, it turns out. He fooled everyone. Perhaps it was a dispute about money. Perhaps they truly wanted to kill each other.”
“Is any of that true, Mr. Hoffman?” Sophie had asked.
“We’ll never know, will we?”
Sophie had looked into Hoffman’s catlike eyes. What he had said was mostly nonsense, but it would hold up. He was so easy to underestimate. That was how he had survived and prospered.
“Gertz didn’t fool you, did he, Mr. Hoffman? You knew his operation would go bad. That’s why you kept tabs on him, always.”
“I had my doubts, that’s a fact. It’s well documented in the cable traffic, I’m sure. I thought this covert-action capability he and his White House chums were creating was bound to get us all in trouble. I’m glad that it has been dismantled, so that we can go back to normal order. The doctrine is affirmed: Outside the Church there is no salvation. But it’s no satisfaction to have been proven right, believe me.”