David Ignatius - Bloodmoney

“Poor Mr. Perkins,” she said. “I don’t blame him for being unhappy. We should never have used a real company as a platform for someone like Egan who could get grabbed. That was stupid. How did it happen? And what did he mean by ‘the system’? What’s that all about?”

“I have no idea,” said Gertz blandly. “Probably he was talking about the way they paid Egan.”

“Who’s Anthony Cronin?”

“Cronin’s an old NOC handler. And you’re right about Egan’s financial cover. It started before my time. Yours, too. Too late for second-guessing. Perkins will be all right. He’s just scared.”

It was near midnight, and Marx had many more hours of work to do. But Gertz had said something at the end of the phone call that she wanted to pin down.

“Were you suggesting that I go to London?” she asked. “Did I hear that right?”

“Maybe.” He winked. “If you want to.”

Her brow furrowed a moment, and she bit her upper lip. She was trying to decide if she should tell him something.

“I would like to go almost anywhere, and especially London. But you should know that I was on the no-travel list back at Headquarters. After I got burned in Beirut and Addis, they thought it was unsafe. I should have told you that before.”

“I don’t care what Headquarters says. What do you think? Are you still hot? Would it be dangerous?”

She shook her head.

“No. The cover job was insecure. They were on my phone. I have new documentation now. I’m solid.”

“That’s good enough for me. We can play with your passport some more. But you don’t work for the CIA now. You’re a private citizen. So fuck it, right?”

She was smiling as she headed back to her cubbyhole. Gertz was a manipulator, but he also knew how to get things done in a hurry.

Sophie Marx worked through most of the night, sleeping a few hours in the women’s locker room of The Hit Parade’s fitness club. She took a walk early the next morning. Her windowless office was claustrophobic, and she needed to breathe. More than that, she needed to think. She had showered and washed her hair, but she still felt groggy. It was as if she were staring into a fogged-up window and couldn’t see the face inside. She wanted to do a good job for Gertz, but she needed a starting point.

Out on Ventura Boulevard it was already hot. The Mystic Eye Bookshop had a few early morning customers, and so did the tattoo parlor next door. Sophie wanted breakfast. She passed a Starbucks and a McDonald’s until she came to a diner called Hank’s. She ordered the “Hank Special”-scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns, toast. Her father used to make her breakfasts like that when she was a girl back in Florida, when he wasn’t too hung over to cook.

Her parents were living in Tortola last she heard, running a restaurant. They had taught her how to keep secrets; maybe that was the only virtue of the crazy, stoned-out life they led: Their daughter learned how to cover the family’s tracks as they moved, until the art of concealment became second nature. Oddly, the CIA was the one place she didn’t have to pretend. She had confessed it all, her whole crazy childhood, during the first interview. She felt safe. This was a family of weirdos and liars and manipulators, whose only rule was that they weren’t supposed to lie to each other.

As she ate her breakfast, Marx thought about Howard Egan, trying to imagine what could have happened to him in those last hours before the meeting in north Karachi. She ordered a second cup of coffee and drew herself a timeline on the back of a napkin. Egan had come to Karachi, checked into his hotel, called the access agent, done a first surveillance detection run, seen the access agent, done a second SDR, and then, disaster. There were many ways this story could have gone wrong, but there was only one place to start. She paid her check and walked back east on Ventura to the big, boxy building with the THE HIT PARADE sign out front.

Marx went first to see Steve Rossetti, hoping to clear a potential obstacle. The operations chief regarded Marx as an interloper. He had wanted to run the investigation of the Egan case himself.

“I need to talk to Hamid Akbar,” she said.

“Good luck, kid. Akbar is terrified. He thinks he’s next.”

“Have you debriefed him?”

“We tried to. I called him, but he didn’t want to talk. I told you, he’s frightened. He says that if he we try to contact him again, he’ll walk.”

Marx studied the operations chief. His face was smooth, well shaven. He smelled of Old Spice. He was a man who would rather do too little, tidily, than too much and risk making a mistake.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Akbar works for us. Who’s he to say he doesn’t want to be debriefed?”

“Take it to Gertz,” said Rossetti, shrugging his shoulders.

“I will,” she said, turning back toward her cubicle. “And Akbar is dirty. Wait and see.”

Marx called the Office of Security and requested the polygraph record for Hamid Akbar. She had been puzzling over his role since the previous day, when she was digging into the operational files. The Pakistani businessman was the last person known to have seen Howard Egan alive. Why had he moved up the time of the meeting with his uncle? Why had he proposed an insecure location? Where had he gone in the hours immediately after Egan’s disappearance?

It took an hour to pry loose the polygraph record from the registry. When the thin file was finally delivered to Marx, it deepened her concern. Akbar hadn’t been polygraphed since his initial recruitment in the United States. When he had been re-recruited, Gertz had waived a new test. It was too difficult to bring a polygraph operator on site, according to the file. The result was a counterintelligence officer’s nightmare-an agent whose reliability was unproven, in witting contact with a deep-cover officer. Howard Egan had trusted him, but now Egan was gone.

Marx knocked on Gertz’s door. This morning he looked like an over-the-hill Chicago sideman. There were circles of fatigue under his eyes, and his skin had a waxy pallor replacing the buff tan. He was wearing a cashmere blazer that was so loosely constructed it looked almost like a cardigan sweater.

“I don’t like Akbar,” said Marx.

“Me neither. What have you got?”

You couldn’t be sure with Gertz whether he had been thinking that all along, or had just considered the possibility when she mentioned it.

“It turns out he hasn’t been polygraphed in ten years. Why did you waive a poly on him when you went after him again?”

“It was too cumbersome getting a technician out in the field. And I needed to get to his uncle. The family came well recommended. So I went ahead.”

“Who recommended them?”

Gertz shook his head. “Sorry, I can’t tell you that. Too sensitive.”

She nodded. She knew there were secrets that didn’t get shared. That was part of the job.

“Okay, but I have a bad feeling about Akbar. I think he may have set Egan up.”

“Maybe. But he has an alibi.”

“I missed that. What alibi?”

“He delivered his uncle. The man was at the meeting place, just where he was supposed to be. If it was a setup, why would the uncle have gone to the meet? That’s where your theory gets squishy.”

“Maybe the uncle wasn’t witting. Or maybe the uncle showed up so they would have a cover story when Howard disappeared. I’m not sure, but I need to know more about him.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for starters, Egan called Akbar before he went to see him. That call was logged on his BlackBerry. So the NSA should have an audio file of the conversation. I need it. And don’t tell me I don’t have the right clearances, because you already promised me I could have anything I wanted.”