Bloodmoney (40 page)

“All the places you would think. There was a man from Saudi Arabia, a man from Kuwait, one from Morocco, two from Egypt, two from Pakistan, maybe more.”

Marx had been making notes as he talked, but she paid special attention now as he spoke of the consultants.

“Did you meet them, these consultants? Did you learn any of their names?”

“Oh, no. That was against security. This was a videoconference, remember. We were all watching from separate locations. I only know about the others because when they began the session, they gave an overview, so that we would know what a big thing this was. They wanted us to feel we were part of something important.”

“But there was a consultant from Pakistan, you said.”

“Two, I think. But I never saw them. They were trying to protect our identities.”

“Do you think George could have been one of the consultants?”

“I didn’t think so when he contacted me last year. He said he was an American, and that he had been part of the program, and they were restarting it. But when you told me at the other house that my George was a Pakistani, I thought maybe yes. He might have been one of the consultants. He seemed to know all the same things that I did, when he contacted me.”

“We’ll get to George in a minute. But what else can you tell me about this meeting with the man from CTC, by videoconference?”

“He was like a coach in one of those American sports movies. He wanted to get us excited. He told us we were part of the war on terrorism, and that people in every country were working with us. He said that by helping identify members of Al-Qaeda, we would help America bring justice to the world. They could not escape, he said, I remember that. He said Americans had big hearts, or strong hearts, or something like that. They could not hide. America would hunt them down and kill them.”

Marx made a note to herself, and put a star next to it.

“Anything else?”

Sabah pondered the question a moment, searching his memory, and then came back to her.

“One more thing. He said America had a weapon called a Predator that could follow the Al-Qaeda fighters from the skies, by flying over the places where they were hiding in Pakistan. They had been using it since 2002, but now there were more of them. I had only read about these Predators in the newspaper, but here was someone talking about them. He said that with our help, America would take revenge for September 11, so that it would never happen again. They cannot escape justice, he said. It was supposed to make us feel happy and strong.”

“Did any of the consultants say anything, when this man from the CTC talked about the Predators?”

“Everyone was very quiet. We were all thinking, I suppose, about how powerful America was, that it could follow people and kill them from the sky.”

They took a break. Sabah wanted to walk his dog and asked if there were any plastic bags. One of Major Kirby’s men kept an eye on him and Émile as they circumnavigated the property several times.

Marx wrote a quick cable for Cyril Hoffman about the discussion she had just had with Sabah. She asked him for two pieces of information. First, she wanted a list of any Pakistani nationals who had been used as consultants during the SWIFT phase of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. She requested every shred of information they had on such people—phone numbers, addresses, travel records, security assessments, reports from liaison services. Second, she wanted a list of any senior officials from the Counterterrorism Center who had briefed foreign nationals involved in the SWIFT program in 2005.

She sent the cable in the restricted-handling channel, requesting an urgent response. But she thought she already knew the answer to her second question.

While dog and master were still outdoors, Marx tried to reach Thomas Perkins in London. His cell phone was turned off. A policeman answered his office extension and said that it would not be possible to talk to Mr. Perkins or leave a message for him at present. That was a relief for Marx, in truth, knowing that Perkins was under police quarantine.

Marx sat down again twenty-five minutes later with Sabah. He looked restored by his brief jaunt outdoors. There were grass stains on the seat of his trousers, from where he had evidently lain down on the lawn for a tussle with Émile. Sabah turned on his laptop computer as soon as he was seated, before Marx had a chance to ask him. He wanted to do his work now and get it finished.

It took thirty seconds for the machine to boot up and the screen to come alight. He opened his contact file and searched for names, mumbling to himself as he tried one, then another. Eventually, he voiced a relieved, “Ah,” and called up the name.

“I was looking in the
g
’s for ‘George,’ but I had him listed by the last name he is using now on his emails, which is a
w
. I forgot that. Do you want the address?”

“Yes, please.” She tried to sound at ease, as if this piece of information weren’t something her life might depend on.

“It’s [email protected]. That’s what he called himself, George White. That’s the address we used to communicate the last half dozen times. Before that it was [email protected]. I still have that address but it doesn’t work. He closed the account.”

Marx asked for his cell phone numbers. Sabah had two, but he thought they were both dead. The U.S. number was 001-703-202-1211. The Swiss number was 4179-555-6548. She repeated the email addresses and the numbers back to Sabah carefully, digit by digit, to be certain she had them right.

“Do you mind if we take another little break?” she said. “I need to share these with my colleagues so that they can do some detective work.”

She gave him a kiss on the cheek, which pleased and embarrassed him, and then excused herself and went into the control room, where they had set up a secure communications suite. Major Kirby brought in the dog to keep Sabah company, along with a sandwich and a glass of beer. Sabah drank the beer but fed most of the sandwich to Émile.

The communications officer helped Marx set the right designators for her message. She sent the cable to Hoffman, this time copying the Information Operations Center, which managed CIA exploitation of cyber-intelligence, and copying the operations center of the National Security Agency, as well. Then she waited.

MONS, BELGIUM

Sophie Marx was exhausted.
It was only when she had completed her debriefing of Sabah that the fatigue enveloped her; she felt empty, depleted of every calorie of energy and desire. She wanted to collapse into bed, pull a white comforter over her head and sleep for a week. That fantasy of escape was punctured by the anxiety, and the satisfaction, too, of knowing that hundreds of people were counting on her now. She went into the kitchen of the safe house and made herself a double espresso, then drank a Red Bull.

That wasn’t enough; she still felt groggy. Come on, girl, she told herself. Get your shit together. She asked Major Kirby whether there was a fitness room in the house, and of course the answer was yes. That was the first thing the Support team had organized when they secured the place, even before they finished the communications room. In the basement, they had installed a recumbent bicycle, an elliptical trainer and some free weights.

Marx spent nearly an hour on the elliptical trainer, striding like a space walker, listening to music on her iPod. She had eclectic tastes, but right now she wanted to hear music by tough women who had been lied to by manipulative men, such as her boss.

On her iPod she had a playlist she labeled “Revenge Music,” and she selected it now. Top of the list was Carrie Underwood singing “Before He Cheats,” about a woman who takes a baseball bat and bashes in the headlights of her two-timing lover’s car. Then there was Miranda Lambert’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” about an angry woman who walks in on her man while he’s playing pool with a new girl and thinks of shooting her. For sure, she had “Goodbye Earl,” by the Dixie Chicks. But her favorite song on the revenge playlist was Lambert’s “White Liar,” with its insistence that the truth finally comes out, even for liars. She turned up the volume and closed her eyes.

As the music played, Marx thought about her next steps. Jeffrey Gertz was in one compartment of revenge. But right now she needed to close on her Pakistani target—to flush him from his lair and into the open. The challenge was to think of a prize tantalizing enough that a supremely careful operator like this “professor” would take the risk to go after it. Her legs rocked back and forth on the trainer, keeping pace like a metronome. The more she considered this puzzle, the more obvious it was what she should do.

Hoffman called on the secure phone while Marx was working out. She rang him back a few minutes later when she had caught her breath. Her cheeks were flushed and beads of perspiration dotted her forehead.

“You’ve had rather a good day,” he said. “You have opened the gates, I do believe.”

“We don’t have our man yet,” she answered. “I’m scared we’ll blow our chance to get him.”

“You should be scared. He is a dangerous man. I called because we have a first cut from NSA. The cell numbers are all dead. We’ll run patterns, but I think the links will be dead, too. This man is not a fool. The email address at Yahoo is still alive, but it hasn’t been used since the last message to Sabah. So the question is, what next?”

Hoffman paused. He seemed to be waiting for her to pick up the thread.

“I have a suggestion, assuming that I’m running this, and not Headquarters.”

“My dear Sophie, you
are
Headquarters. And yes, you’re still running the operation. So far you haven’t made any mistakes.”

“I want to set a trap for the Pakistani. We can use Mr. Sabah to make contact, and we have a live email address, but we need some juicy bait. Otherwise this won’t work. I’ve been thinking about it, and I have the right worm to put on the hook.”

“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 [email protected], 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.