had given her years before when she graduated from the Career Trainee class.
Marx used a Skype connection to call Howard Egan at the hedge fund in London that provided his cover. The name of the firm was Alphabet Capital, and it managed many billions of dollars, but Marx had never understood just how it worked: how much of it was real, and how much was a cover for intelligence operations. She had asked Egan once, and he had said not to worry: The only person who really knew was the owner of Alphabet Capital, a man named Thomas Perkins, and he wouldn’t talk if his pants were on fire.
Marx tried to sound enthusiastic as she went through her list of bullet points with Egan. He answered grumpily, giving brief responses to each. When she finished her script, there was a pause.
“I hate this trip,” Egan said. “It’s insecure.”
“It will be fine,” Marx answered. “Stop worrying. You are exactly what it says on your business card. So chill out: We have your back.”
Egan laughed at the attempt to dispel his anxiety.
“Great,” he said. “Now tell me, who has my front?”
He was talking himself into paralysis. Marx had seen it before with colleagues. Once you let yourself start to worry, the floodgates opened.
“Suck it up,” she said. “Call me when you’re out. Anything else, call the ops center. Are we cool?”
“We’re cold,” said Egan. “Freezing.”
“Out, here,” said Marx, as if she were ending a radio transmission. There was nothing more to say.
“Out,” responded Egan gloomily.
And that was it. She didn’t think about him the rest of the day. He would get through it somehow, because people always did. She thought about writing a note to Gertz, her boss, suggesting that it was time to reassign Egan to something a little less stressful. People began to arrive soon after, and Marx fell into the atonal melody of office life.
The sign out front of the building where Sophie Marx worked said that it was the headquarters of The Hit Parade LLP, a firm that according to its Dun amp; Bradstreet profile sold international music and television rights, negotiated licensing agreements and organized trade shows on the side. That explained the office in the Valley, big and roomy, but cheap, too. It explained the contacts with dozens of small firms and their peripatetic representatives, always flying off to strange locations. And it explained the constant stream of international calls and email messages.
“Hit Parade-we’ve got what’s hot.” That was the way Marx answered the phone, if anyone ever called her number at the office. The name made it sound like she worked with the Beach Boys and Sandra Dee. She had business cards, too, with a dummy switchboard number that never answered, which she sometimes gave to men in bars who were annoying.
Marx knew the short history of the place, the founding “myth,” you might say. Like so many other things about America, The Hit Parade was an aftershock of September 11, 2001. The CIA had been sent off to war, and then a few years later it had been sent to the stocks for a public bashing, when people decided they didn’t like the nasty parts of what the intelligence agencies had been asked to do. That left people at Headquarters feeling demoralized and unloved; agency veterans tried to stay out of trouble by doing the slow roll, which only made things worse. Eventually a new administration took office, and the potentates said, in effect, why are we torturing ourselves? Let the old CIA tramp steamer rust away at the dock, and meanwhile we’ll launch a stealthy new speedboat.
The White House had called it “new think,” as opposed to the witless “old think” that had come before. There was a mantra, among the handful of people who knew about the project: The world had changed; an intelligence service couldn’t operate out of embassies when it was trying to recruit people who wanted to blow up embassies. Technology enabled a new clandestine structure. A secure communications system, which used to require an embassy code room, could now be put on a laptop, or even a BlackBerry.
They told new staff members like Marx that the new president loved the idea. He wanted to be a change agent, so he had decided to change the most reviled three-letter acronym in town. The chairmen of the two congressional intelligence committees had signed on, and so had the handful of other people who were briefed on the idea. The few who knew about it accepted the absolute necessity that it be a secret and deniable activity. The old system was a train wreck, so they had created something truly new-floated it free from the wreckage and hid it where no one would ever think to look.
The president turned over liaison with this new organization to his chief of staff, Ted Yazdi, a combative former investment banker who loved secrets and, in another life, might have been an intelligence officer himself. Yazdi managed the operation out of the White House. He never put anything in writing; he never told anyone other than the president what he was doing.
Headquarters didn’t like it, but they couldn’t stop it. They proposed that the new unit focus on the dirty work the traditionalists didn’t much like, anyway-“special activities,” otherwise known as covert action. So in addition to the existing stations abroad, an array of new “platforms” was built for a cadre of nonofficial-cover officers and their laptops. The platforms had to connect up somewhere. The old boys wanted someplace close, like Fredericksburg or Rockville, where they could keep the great experiment from getting out of hand. But for once, the advocates of change had their way.
It was decided that the base for this new network should be far from Washington. Consideration was given to Denver, San Francisco, Las Vegas and even Charleston, West Virginia-which just happened to be the hometown of a key member of the congressional leadership. But finally a decision was made to locate the hub in Los Angeles, in a staggeringly ordinary office building in the San Fernando Valley, heretofore famous as the home of America’s pornographic movie industry. The building they chose had been the headquarters of a mortgage-lending company that had gone bust before the agency bought it through a series of cutouts.
To keep an eye on this experiment, Headquarters selected one of its crustiest old secret warriors, a man named Cyril Hoffman. He was the associate deputy director, the all-but-invisible number three position in the agency, and a man famous for keeping his head down. Hoffman was an eccentric who liked to collect first editions of British nineteenth-century novels, and whose iPod playlist featured modern operas by Philip Glass. He had a habit of humming when he was on the telephone and, occasionally, when he was in meetings. People who didn’t know Hoffman thought that he was a crank. That was a mistake.
Sophie Marx joined up because she was bored with her fancy job at Headquarters-and decided that she liked the iconoclastic man who had been chosen to run the new organization. His name was Jeffrey Gertz, and he was already something of a legend among younger officers.
Gertz had started his ascent in Morocco, making himself indispensable to the crown prince who later became king. Then he had gone into Baghdad in 2002, before the war, under paper-thin cover as an Eastern European diplomat. He had been a one-man station-planting listening devices, affixing infrared beacons to guide the bombers, recruiting and running agents. He had operated like it was 1943 in occupied France and he was working for the OSS. Young officers who were in the loop began trading stories about him: Have you heard what Gertz has done now?
The best of it was that he rarely asked permission. As the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, Gertz requested “lethal authority” from Headquarters-meaning that he could assassinate Iraqi targets of opportunity. The seventh floor was in a dither and asked for an opinion from the general counsel, but Gertz went ahead anyway. He had terminated two senior officials when he got retroactive permission, after the president heard about his exploits and said he wanted to give Gertz a medal.
Headquarters regarded Gertz as a troublemaker, but his reputation was made among the field officers. He went to the Counterterrorism Center after Baghdad, where he ran special access programs that nobody ever talked about. To stay out of trouble, he made friends with a few key senators and representatives on the Hill. He gave private briefings to the new president’s advisers during the transition. He had pushed all the right buttons, so when the White House decided to launch its bold new experiment, Gertz was in the right position.
Gertz had interviewed Marx in Los Angeles. She was one of several hundred people he tapped as possible candidates for the new unit. It was like being recruited by the CIA all over again. You didn’t apply; you were asked to appear at a clandestine location for an interview. When she met Gertz, Marx was initially prepared to dislike him. She had heard tales about his exploits and his reputation for arrogance, and she had known enough CIA macho men to last a lifetime.
But as they talked, she warmed to his pitch. He’d read into her record. He knew what she had accomplished
