“Do I know about this?”
“Of course you do. You know about everything. If you want details, check the White House.”
“Why was he killed? This sounds like another Karachi problem. He’s dead, by the way, your man Egan. Confirmed. Roger that. I think this second one was a mafia hit.”
“You’re joking, surely,” said Hoffman.
“That’s what they’re saying on television. Chechen mobsters.”
“But surely that’s untrue.”
“Maybe. But it’s convenient. Don’t rock our boat, Mr. Hoffman. That’s my advice. I am trying to keep a lid on. I hope you are, too.”
“Be careful about Pakistan. My sources say people there are rather upset with us. They don’t like being vaporized from ten thousand feet. And they don’t like having money thrown at them by the CIA, even in the benign and invisible form you like to imagine that you have created.”
“My sources tell me that when people are shooting at you, you buy up their guns.”
“Does that refer to us or the Pakistanis, I wonder?”
“Both, sir.”
“Bold words: I will send you a soapbox.”
“Hey, Mr. Hoffman, if you’re unhappy with me, just say so.”
“Heavens, no. Following your adventures is one of my few pleasures. But perhaps a little more contact with the home office. The personal touch. What say?”
They talked for several more minutes before the associate deputy director said, “Cheerio!” in his usual, incongruously upbeat voice, and rang off.
When Gertz finished his conversation with Hoffman, he called Steve Rossetti and said he wanted to hold a senior staff meeting in the secure conference room.
The group gathered on the third floor. People dropped their cell phones in the locker outside the room and trundled in. There were about twenty people, the heads of all the main operational departments and their deputies, plus a few other key staff members. They nodded stiffly at Gertz as they entered. They had liked being part of his great experiment, but most of them didn’t know him very well.
Sophie Marx entered the room and took a chair at the far end. She was wearing a black suit, well tailored but somber. She was tired, with the sallow look that agency officers sometimes described as a “safe house tan.” After the quick trip to Dubai she had labored for many hours in the Colonel’s files. She needed to talk with Gertz. She had sent him a brief memo about her polygraph of Hamid Akbar and asking for a meeting to discuss her plans, but he hadn’t answered.
Marx was settled in her chair, wishing she had worn more makeup to hide her fatigue, when Gertz walked toward her. He passed all the way around the conference table to her place. She had wanted to talk to him, but not now, with the senior staff listening.
“How was Dubai?” he queried, shaking her hand. “Good trip?”
“Yes and no,” she answered. “It demolished one of my theories. Now I have to start over.”
“We all do,” said Gertz. “Come see me later today, when this Moscow business is sorted out. We’ll decide what to do next.”
Everyone in the room heard the exchange. People moved in their chairs, or cleared their throats, or otherwise signaled their unease. They could see, if they hadn’t known already, that Sophie Marx had a special role in this crisis, and that whatever Gertz was doing to contain it, she was his partner.
Gertz waited until everyone had arrived, and gave them a little more time after that, until there were no more coughs and whispers.
“I want to confirm what most of you have already heard,” he began. “Today in Moscow, one of our officers was killed. He was shot downtown, near the Kremlin, three times at close range. I am told that he died on the scene.”
There were groans around the room. For all the bravura of people in the intelligence business, things like this didn’t happen to them. They weren’t soldiers, and they certainly didn’t expect that their colleagues would be gunned down, Mafia-style.
“Let me say a few words about our colleague Mr. Frankel. He was operating under very deep cover, unknown even to some of the people in this room, and he was an unusually capable young officer. He epitomized what our new organization is about-secrecy, speed, daring. He was one of the best. Unfortunately, the world will never, ever know that. He took his cover with him to the grave. He would want us to keep it there. I trust we are all clear on that.”
In the silence, Steve Rossetti spoke up. He was wearing his blazer with the American flag pin on the lapel. He was known to be close to Headquarters, so people listened to him with special attention.
“Can we still maintain that cover?” Rossetti asked. “I mean, won’t the NSC want to look at this? And the inspector general at Langley? And the congressional committees, won’t they have some issues here?”
“No, no, and no,” answered Gertz. “We are not going to open our doors for anyone. There’s nothing to disclose. This is a personal tragedy, and there are some operational issues we have to address. But that’s our business and nobody else’s.”
“So what do we do?” asked the operations chief.
“We maintain radio silence. And we do nothing-I repeat, nothing-that would suggest any link between Mr. Frankel and this organization or its parent in Langley. Remember, we do not exist. We have been given a license to operate as a true clandestine service. That is very precious, and we have to guard it, especially now.”
Rossetti pressed ahead, even though it was obvious to all that his intervention was not welcomed.
“But we’ve lost two officers now, sir. I’m worried about the safety of our people. Around this building, people are asking what’s going on.”
Gertz could sense the uneasiness in the room-the fear that can turn into revolt, and disorderly retreat, and failure. He had to give them something.
“Thank you, Steve, for raising that. I want to address it directly. The case of Howard Egan worried us all. He was taken by people who evidently knew that he had a secret role separate from his business cover. We believe he’s dead, which is perhaps a blessing. As you may know, I have asked our chief of counterintelligence, Sophie Marx, to conduct an aggressive internal investigation to figure out what happened. The case of Alan Frankel is quite different. I have talked with Headquarters, and we think this is unrelated to the other attack.”
“What is it, then? Who hit Frankel?”
“From what we’ve seen so far, this looks like a Russian mob hit. It was not the sort of thing that terrorist operatives do, much less intelligence services. Too bloody, too much out in the open. I’m guessing at this point, but I think Chechen businessmen ordered the hit. They were worried that our young man was pushing into their territory.”
“Why would they think that?” asked Sophie Marx from the back of the room. “So far as anyone knew, he was just a kid selling ads, right?” It was the first time she had spoken in a big staff meeting. Her tone was hardly deferential.
“Within this room only, let me explain why local mobsters might have been upset: Mr. Frankel met in Moscow with representatives of a publishing company owned by one of the Kremlin’s pals. That may have been his mistake. My guess is that somebody thought he was muscling in on their territory. Or maybe the Kremlin got nervous. But the point is, there’s no reason to think that his cover was blown.”
“Except that he’s dead,” said Sophie. She was pushing him, in a way that even Rossetti wouldn’t have dared. That was the advantage of being the boss’s pet.
“Listen, folks, I am trying to level with you. I know this is hard on all of us. But this looks to me like a mafia hit. That’s what the initial reporting on Moscow television is saying. And that’s what I told Headquarters a few minutes ago.”
“What does Cyril Hoffman think?” asked Rossetti. He was skeptical that the associate deputy director would buy into this explanation quite so quickly.
“Hoffman thinks it’s our case,” answered Gertz. “He trusts our judgment.”
The meeting broke up, with the members of The Hit Parade’s leadership team a bit calmer than they had been an hour before, but still not sure they understood what was going on.
Gertz had left out only one thing in his valedictory mention of Cyril Hoffman. Although the associate deputy
