David Ignatius: Bloodmoney

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.

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.”

“And what about the money that Jeffrey stole? Where’s that?”

“Goodness. Hard to find now, I’m afraid. Not clear even who it belongs to.”

Sophie laughed. She didn’t mean to, but she couldn’t help herself. He might as well have stuffed it in the pockets of that lime-green suit.

“I like a good yarn as well as anyone, Mr. Hoffman, but please tell me the truth. What did you know about Omar al-Wazir? Gertz told me you were the one who set this all in motion. Is that true?”

“Don’t be silly, my dear. Of course it’s not true. If I had been running this, it never would have gotten so messy. Be very careful not to spread that sort of malicious gossip. It will do no one any good.”

Hoffman excused himself to go upstairs and pack. Otherwise he would miss his flight. He invited Marx to come visit him at Langley as soon as she returned to Washington. There was an opening for a senior job on the seventh floor, he said, and Marx would be an ideal candidate.

It was nearly six when the warden’s door finally opened and out walked Thomas Perkins, a free man. He was dressed in the pin-striped suit he had been wearing when he was first taken into custody and sporting a pair of handmade shoes from John Lobb. The pencil-nosed warden was shaking his hand and apologizing strenuously for the inconvenience of the last few days.

When Perkins saw Sophie in the waiting room, a smile rolled across his face like a gentle wave breaking on the ocean. She leapt from her chair and, without thinking about it, embraced him and kissed him on the cheek. The warden handed over a manila envelope that contained Perkins’s wallet, gold cuff links and other valuables that had been collected when he was first taken prisoner.

“That’s it?” Perkins asked. “I’m really free to go?”

The warden nodded in a proprietary way and walked him out the gate onto Caledonian Road. He offered to send Perkins home in one of the vehicles of the National Offender Management Service, but Perkins said he would rather walk with his friend and savor his new status as a free man.

They ducked into the first pub they saw. It was early evening, and the summer sun was low in the sky. They brought two pints of beer out into the courtyard. Perkins had purchased a pack of cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked one in more than twenty years, he said, but he had promised himself that if he was released from prison, the first thing he would do would be to have a cigarette. He lit it up, breathed the smoke in deep, coughed, took another puff and threw it away. He looked like a man who had awakened from a nightmare and realized that none of the horrors he had been experiencing were real.