“How about your uncle? Did he ever talk to the ISI?”
“That I would not know. It is not something that I would ask, or that he would answer.”
Marx looked at Andy. He shrugged, out of sight. It all registered true.
“Please, madam. If you doubt me, check your files. I explained it all. I have never told a lie.”
“How recently did you meet with the police?”
“The last time? It was six months ago, perhaps. We met at my office. They came round, to stop and talk.”
“And they never asked about Mr. Egan?”
“No. They knew about my investments, all right. The ministry has a section that monitors foreign accounts. But they did not ask about Mr. Egan.”
Marx thought a moment, trying to see how the pieces fit.
“Have you ever had your office swept, Mr. Akbar? To check for microphones or cameras?”
“Oh, no. Why would I do that?”
“Just to be safe,” she said. She closed her eyes.
She offered Hamid Akbar a cigarette and a glass of whiskey, while Andy unstrapped the wires. He accepted both. She opened the bottle and poured a drink for everyone. They’d had a couple of shots each when Marx pulled her chair up a little closer.
“We’re friends now, right? So I am going to ask you a question, friend to friend. How do you think Howard Egan was discovered, then, if you didn’t tell anyone?”
“I am sorry,” said the Pakistani. “It is not for me to say.”
“Go ahead. Tell me what you think.”
He closed his eyes, and spoke a sentence in Pashto. “Da cha, pakhpala. Gila ma hawa dab ala.”
“Sorry, but that’s not very helpful.”
“It is a saying of my Pashtun people. It means: ‘These are self-inflicted wounds, not from others.’”
She was startled. “What do you mean by that?”
“I think that you have a problem, madam. The problem is not me. Mr. Egan’s job was very secret. The people who have taken him, I am sorry for that, but they would not have known who he was unless someone told them. There is a leak. They are inside your house. It must be that. I am sorry to say it. That is why I am frightened. What this leak might be, I cannot say, but I hope that you will find out. Yes, truly I do.”
Sophie didn’t answer him at first. She didn’t want to start telling lies herself. Eventually she spoke. It was the voice of a tired combatant on an ill-lit battlefield.
“We will protect you,” she said. “America has great power. When we look weak, that is an illusion.”
The Pakistani nodded respectfully, but inwardly he smiled. How could these Americans protect anyone, when they did not know who had stolen their secrets?
13
A few days after the expulsion of Homer Barkin, an unusual American visitor arrived in Islamabad. The man came in a Gulfstream jet, unmarked except for the tail number, and he took a suite at the Serena Hotel, at the crest of a hill overlooking the diplomatic quarter of the capital. The gentleman was dressed more flamboyantly than a normal Western traveler, in a double-breasted summer suit that enfolded him like a tent and a Panama hat with a parrot feather, of yellow and blue, stuck in the black satin hat-band. The traveler had long maintained that the best disguise was to be so visible that people would take you as a public personality, albeit undefined, and overlook the possibility that you had a separate and secret life.
The traveler’s name was Cyril Hoffman, and he was, in fact, associate deputy director of what remained of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Hoffman had come to pay a quiet visit to Lieutenant General Mohammed Malik. It was not a normal liaison trip, of the sort CIA officials frequently made, and for that reason Hoffman had not informed the U.S. Embassy or the acting chief of station. He had discreetly consulted a Pakistani source he had developed over the past decade, a man who had helped him to understand the nature of the insurgency that was devouring Pakistan and the Tribal Areas. But otherwise he had kept his own counsel, waiting to deliver his message to the ISI chief.
General Malik was a family friend, of sorts. The Pakistani had been befriended by Cyril’s flamboyant cousin Ed, during his years as chief of the CIA’s Near East Division. And the young Mohammed Malik had been friendly with Cyril’s uncle, Frank, after he retired as chief of station in Beirut and set himself up as a consultant and fixer in Riyadh. It was the personal touch that mattered in this part of the world, Cyril Hoffman had told the director in proposing his off-the-record visit to Islamabad. He would be back in the office in forty-eight hours, he promised.
The Serena had the empty feeling of a mausoleum. The floors were waxed and buffed to a high gloss, which never seemed to lose its shine because so few feet traversed the lobby. Hotels had been targets for suicide bombers in Pakistan the last few years, and the American Embassy directed most visitors to anonymous “guesthouses” whose locations, it was thought, were unknown to the jihadists. To Hoffman, the fact that the Serena was avoided by Washington visitors made it the ideal place to hide.
The morning of his arrival, Hoffman took his breakfast in the chandeliered dining room, at one of the tables that were arrayed around a marble-clad fountain. There was only one other diner in the room, a businessman who was shouting details of his commercial plans into his cell phone. Hoffman placed foam-rubber plugs in his ears to block the noise, and went to the breakfast buffet.
Hoffman had one breakfast, a heap of scrambled eggs and turkey bacon and buttered toast. And then, for good measure, he returned to the buffet table and had a second breakfast, this time a big bowl of bran flakes and fruit that would aid his digestion. There were also donuts, small and lumpy and dusted with confectioner’s sugar, and he took two of these, to eat with his coffee. He installed himself at his table and devoured this feast, reading the English-language newspapers, Dawn and The News, until it was time to go calling.
General Malik had proposed that they meet in Rawalpindi, at a guesthouse on the compound of the military’s General Headquarters. That would be a more confidential setting than the ISI’s headquarters in Aabpara, the Pakistani general advised. He sent his own limousine to pick up Hoffman, so that the American would not be bothered by awkward questions at the GHQ gate.
When the car arrived at the Serena, Hoffman gathered his billowing suit jacket around him and took a seat in the back, behind a smoked-glass partition. He put the buds of his iPod in his ears and clicked on a recording of Cosi fan tutte, one of the library of operas and musical comedies that he carried with him to maintain a sunny mood, even as he traveled long distances. He hummed to himself as the car made its way through Islamabad’s western suburbs.
The entrance to General Headquarters was a reminder that the Pakistani military was a living remnant of the British colonial army. There was an emerald cricket pitch just outside the gate, with a pavilion where the players could retire for tea in the late afternoon. Batsmen in white trousers and cable-knit sweaters, impervious to the summer heat, were practicing their strokes in the batting nets as Hoffman’s car passed. The entry gate itself looked as if it hadn’t much changed since imperial days; it was a banked by green lawns and ceremonial cannons, and walls of marble and granite.
General Malik was waiting for Hoffman at the guesthouse. He embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks, and the American reciprocated, and not with air kisses, but with the soft smack of lips puckered against skin. Since Hoffman had never married, it was occasionally rumored about the agency that he might be homosexual. What he told people, in the rare moments when they ventured into his private life, was that sex of any kind was a bore and a distraction: It was too hot and wet and uncomfortable.
The Pakistani had turned up the air-conditioning, so that it was positively chilly in the small sitting room. A steward in white gloves arrived with tea almost as soon as they were seated, and then with little sandwiches on white bread whose crusts had been removed.
“Well, sir, I can see that we have gotten your attention,” said the Pakistani general. “Such a speedy journey!
