had studied after September 11. The translation wasn’t written down, but Gertz had memorized it: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
Over the past year, Gertz had made a dozen copies of this plaque and given them to trusted colleagues. It was his version of the “commander’s coin” that general officers pressed into the hands of the troops. He wanted his people-his new warriors-to understand that lying was absolutely essential to their work. It wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of the job. It was the job.
Gertz made one more decision that morning, which would affect the future more than he could have realized. He knew that he needed to begin planning for the worst. Hoffman had fired a warning shot, on behalf of the secret barons who managed what was left of Headquarters. The questions would come at them, even if only a few people knew enough to ask. Why had Egan been grabbed? How had his identity been compromised? What else might have come unstuck?
Gertz needed help answering these questions, but only from someone who would be reliable. He trusted almost nobody outside The Hit Parade, and few people inside, either. His principal deputies all were potential rivals, loyal to him in the moment, but ready to switch sides. His operations chief, Rossetti, was a plant from Headquarters. His general counsel spent his time worrying about the inspector general back in Langley. His Support chief, Tommy Arden, was loyal, but he was a mouse.
He went down the list of section chiefs and paused when he got to the name of Sophie Marx. She had just been promoted to her counterintelligence job, but she was smart and aggressive, and she knew the Howard Egan case. What stuck in Gertz’s mind was something else: She had done him a favor several months before. An auditor was visiting from Headquarters, and he had taken Marx off site and asked her a lot of questions about The Hit Parade’s operations. Marx had spun him, and then she had come to see Gertz later to give him a report.
Gertz had asked her why she ratted out the Headquarters man.
“He asked too many questions,” Marx had said, “and he was an asshole about it.”
Gertz had liked that. He knew the stories about her operations in Beirut, and how she had escaped an ambush once in Addis. Marx was lucky, that counted for something. And she was still in her mid-thirties, young enough to take risks. The book on her was that she was headstrong and independent. But Gertz thought he could handle her in a jam.
7
Sophie Marx was reading a case file when Jeffrey Gertz peered into her office just before noon. Her glasses were perched on the tip of her nose, and her black hair was gathered in a loose ponytail. She looked up at him briefly, awkwardly, and then back at the file. Gertz had never visited her office before. It was messy. The Thelma and Louise poster was askew. On the wall was a framed photograph of two people in sandals and woolly hair, hugging her at her Princeton graduation: The longhairs were her eccentric parents, in from the islands. On her desk was an open bag of SunChips.
Marx assumed that Gertz was on his way somewhere else, but he wasn’t.
“Am I interrupting something?” he asked.
“Yes, of course. I mean, that’s your job, isn’t it?”
He laughed and closed the door.
Marx stood up, shook the boss’s hand and then sat back down.
“I’m sorry about Howard Egan,” she said, putting the file folder on top of the bag of chips. “That was my case. I should have kept a tighter watch on him. Is there any more news?”
“The Paks just found his BlackBerry in a dumpster. If he’s lucky, he’s dead by now.”
She put her hand over her mouth, and there was a slight tremor of her head, as if she had just hit a blast of cold air. She had made her own runs into dangerous places. She recovered her composure quickly.
“Let me know how I can help,” she said. “I feel like this is my screwup, partly.”
“That’s why I’m here, actually,” said Gertz. “I have a problem, and it’s about to become your problem.”
Her eyes flashed. She wanted to be in the game, but she knew not to rush.
“What do you have in mind?”
“I need someone to investigate how this happened, and in a hurry. Otherwise, Headquarters will take it over. They’ll send their own counterintelligence team, and damage-assessment team, and finger-pointing team. I don’t want them ruining what we’ve been trying to build here.”
He was leaning toward her, imploring but also demanding. With his lean face and goatee, and that hungry look in his eye, he looked in this moment like a trumpeter who needed a fix.
“And you’re free to travel, right?” Gertz continued. “I mean, you don’t have a ball and chain here.”
Marx understood that the boss was asking, obliquely, about her sex life. She had been married briefly seven years before, to another case officer, but as with so many tandem couples, the romantic attachment was to the work, not the other person. She was always in Lebanon or Addis; he was always in Nicaragua; they were always nowhere.
“I’m free to travel,” she said.
“So let’s do it. Be my person. Make this case.”
She took off the reading glasses and folded her hands in front of her. Gertz was waiting for an answer, but she was still thinking.
“So you want me to get there first. And clean up the mess before Headquarters can make trouble. Is that it, more or less?”
He didn’t answer directly.
“I need someone I can trust,” he said. “You’re it. What do you say?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What you mean?” His voice was rising. “One of your colleagues has just disappeared in a garbage dump in Pakistan, and I’m asking you to help and you refuse? Are you kidding me? Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work.”
“I’m not refusing. Lower your voice. You’re shouting.”
“I want an answer.”
“You’re asking me to be your fixer. That’s not my job. You just hired me to run counterintelligence for you. Finding out what happened to Howard Egan is what I’m supposed to do. It’s not a favor to my boss. Even a boss I like and respect.”
Gertz smiled. She was fighting for her own space. That wasn’t a bad thing.
“Let’s start again. I need you to begin a confidential CI investigation of what happened to Howard Egan. You can have access to anything you want in the files, here or anywhere else. You can go anywhere you like. I want you to do it right. But you need to do it fast, or we are going to get blown out of the water. Sorry if I sounded like a jerk before. It’s my nature. So what do you say, now that I’m asking nicely?”
“I say yes. When do I start?”
“Right now. Come upstairs in fifteen minutes and I’ll show you what we’ve got. Then I’ll take you to lunch.”
“Sorry, but I can’t make lunch.”
“Oh, yeah? Why not?”
“Because I’ll be eating at my desk, reading the files you’re going to give me.”
Sophie Marx moved upstairs to a small office next to Gertz’s that had been cleared for her. They worked all that day and through the night, hoping that Egan might make contact. She assembled everything about Egan she could find-his travels, his contact reports, his cover documentation, his roster of agents. She already understood the smooth edges of the puzzle that formed the border of his operational life. Now she would start looking for the jagged ones.
