Bloodmoney (47 page)

“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.

LONDON

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.

Sophie demanded an explanation. Why had he been freed, after so much thunder and rage? Had he bribed the prime minister, or just the home secretary?

“I frightened your friends at the CIA,” Perkins answered. “They thought I was going to tell the truth, and they panicked. They contacted the British government last night, and they negotiated all morning. Hush-hush, the warden told me. By the time the meetings were over, they had decided they wouldn’t bring any charges. Terrible misunderstanding, they told my lawyer, frightfully sorry.”

“What are you going to do now? Go back to being a billionaire?”

“I’m not a billionaire anymore, sweet girl. Not even a tiny fraction of one. The run on my firm was like a fire sale. I’ll be lucky to avoid bankruptcy.”

Sophie took his hand. She wanted to be supportive, but she wasn’t sure how. She had never been very good at relationships.

“You can build it all back up, if you want.”

“That sounds boring. I’ve done that. I want to try something new. I want to see what’s on the other side of all those things that we’re supposed to want.”

Sophie thought of the dreams she’d had as a young intelligence officer, the places she had been and the risks she had taken. What had all of this produced?

A string of lies, near as she could tell: colleagues who lied and cheated and only got upset if it seemed that someone was about to blow the whistle. They had been dropping bombs on people for so long, it had begun to seem natural. That was the corrosive part: If you killed someone at close range with a knife, at least you knew what it felt like to have blood on your hands. But if you did it from ten thousand feet, looking at a picture on a television screen, you forgot that there were real people down below. It wasn’t that the cause was wrong, but that it wasn’t an honest fight.

“I want to see what’s on the other side, too,” said Sophie. “I’ve had enough dishonesty to last a lifetime. I want to see what it’s like to tell the truth.”

“Want some company?” asked Perkins.

She nodded and took his hand. They finished their beers, and had another round, and eventually they caught a taxi on Caledonian Road and went off to find a restaurant in Camden Town where, Perkins assured Sophie, there would be nobody that either of them knew.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is dedicated
to Garrett Epps, a professor of constitutional law and novelist, and my closest friend since we met at college more than forty years ago. Each of my novels has included a nod of appreciation to Garrett as a reader and critic, but my debt is greater than that: I would not have written any of these books without his generous and patient help. Garrett’s assistance was especially valuable with this novel.

This book is set largely in Pakistan—not in the real country but one of my invention. Similarly, although the book describes a fictional Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, it should not be confused with the real organization by that name. This is a work of fiction, and the characters, events and institutions have no connection with actual ones. There are no real people or intelligence operations in these pages.

I have tried to paint my fiction using colors that are true to life. I was lucky enough to visit South Waziristan, Dushanbe and many of the other places described in this book. My most important guides and advisers are best left unnamed here, but I am deeply grateful to them. I owe a special debt to Pakistan scholar extraordinaire Christine Fair of Georgetown University, whose knowledge of Punjabi curse words is surely unmatched this side of Lahore. I have drawn on many written sources, but the most helpful was the Pashtun cultural material collected by the website
khyber.org
.

A second locale for this book is the domain of hedge funds centered around Mayfair in London. Here again, my primary consultants are best left anonymous. But I would like to thank my friend Carla Rapoport for her hospitality during a week of research in London. I also thank, once again, my friend Jonathan Schiller, who gave me a hideaway at his law firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner, during the early months of composition. And I thank my friends Lincoln Caplan, Jamie Gorelick, and Candy Lee for their steadfast support.

I am grateful to those who read and commented on early drafts: my wife and first reader, Dr. Eve Ignatius; my esteemed literary agent, Raphael Sagalyn, and his colleagues Bridget Wagner and Shannon O’Neill; and my agent at Creative Artists Agency, Robert Bookman. It is my good fortune to be published by W. W. Norton, and I owe special thanks to many people there, starting with my superb editor, Starling Lawrence, and including Jeannie Luciano, Bill Rusin and Rachel Salzman.

My greatest luck, for twenty-five years, has been to work at
The Washington Post
, and I would like to thank all my colleagues there, especially Don Graham, Fred Hiatt, Steve Pearlstein, Alan Shearer and James Hill.

This book is ultimately about how wars end, and I pray that such a process happens in real life in Pakistan and Afghanistan.