with grappa and baked nespole, an Italian fruit that looked like an apricot and had a taste between sweet and tart.
“Tell me about Beirut,” he said, as they were drinking the last of the dessert wine. “You said that you worked there, but you didn’t tell me what you did.”
“Of course I didn’t. Don’t be silly. That’s a no-no.”
“I don’t mean the details, just generically, sort of. Make it up, as if it were a spy novel.”
“Okay. Imagine an international civil servant. She works for UNESCO in Paris, at least that’s what her card says. She travels regularly to Beirut. She stays at the Phoenicia, on the corniche. She spends her days at UNESCO’s office out near the airport, but she has free time at night and on the weekends. She goes to restaurants. She has a chalet at the beach. She’s always meeting people. Sometimes they’re her agents. Sometimes they work for Lebanese intelligence, or for the Syrians, or the Iranians. Sometimes they exchange information for money. One of them tells her a big secret about how Hezbollah communicates with its operatives. They have a private telephone system. He tells her where the cables are buried.”
“Is she in danger, this woman?”
“Not usually, if she does it right. It may sound like she’s taking big risks, but she knows how to operate, she’s just another pretty girl in Beirut. But then people worry her cover is too thin, and she has to get out of Lebanon in a hurry. And then a bad thing happens to her, in Addis Ababa, and it’s obvious she has been burned. They make her go home. She gets a fancy job, but she’s bored stiff. She hates success.”
“You see! That’s why I like you so much. We’re the same person.”
“But I escaped success, Tom. I went back in the trenches. You’re still a billionaire.”
He shook his head. He loved her story, but it couldn’t be that easy, even for a woman who had mastered the covert life as a young girl, for whom lying was part of survival.
“Is that true, what you told me, more or less?”
“Not a word of it,” she said. She closed her eyes. “I’ll make up more stories another night.”
They were in Perkins’s car, heading back to Mayfair. The food and wine had sent her into low-earth orbit in the restaurant, but now she had come back to ground.
Neither of them spoke for a time, and in the silence Sophie recalled the events of the day. Whatever else you could say about it, the trading that had made a paper fortune in a few hours was illegal. Normal people went to jail for insider trading.
That wasn’t a stopper, in itself. What the agency did, routinely, was to break the laws of other countries. If a job were simple and aboveboard, then some other entity of the government could take care of it. Intelligence officers were supposed to do the twisty things, and that was especially true of the new service for which she worked. But even by these debased rules, she sensed that what she and Perkins had done was over the line.
“It was fraud, what we did today, wasn’t it?” she said. “Trading on private information, and making all that money. That’s against the law.”
“How can it be illegal, if the government told us to do it?”
She nodded. That was the right answer. That was what Jeff Gertz would say. But it was a mistake to confuse Gertz with the United States government.
“You want some advice from your new energy analyst?”
“Of course I do. I want to know everything you’re prepared to tell me, about every subject.”
“Okay, then, if my colleagues ask you to do something, and they say it’s legitimate, then get in writing. That’s my suggestion. Don’t go on a patriotic speech and a handshake. In our business, those don’t mean much.”
“I tried that already. I asked Anthony Cronin. He told me it wasn’t possible. He said, ‘Trust me.’ So I did.”
“Oh, Jesus.” She shook her head, and then she laughed. It was funny, really, when dishonest people told you to trust them.
“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Do you think you can get out of this, if you decide that it’s wrong?”
Perkins thought a long moment. He took her hand, and then let it go.
“It would be difficult now. When your people came to me, I had borrowed a lot of money. I had emptied the tank, pretty much, and was running on fumes. They helped me pay off the debts, and then once the system began to work, we were rolling in money. But they have a call on it. They take their share of the profits.”
“You mean they own you?”
“They call it partnership. And it’s so much money now that I don’t really care. I mean, it’s north of ten billion dollars, heading for twenty billion. Even if they take three quarters of it, I’m still absurdly rich.”
“Read the fine print, Tom. These people are killers. That’s what they do. Whereas you’re a nice person, so far as I can tell. I don’t want you to get caught.”
Perkins took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t look quite so young now.
“I am caught, Sophie. That’s the point. We have an expression in economics, ceteris paribus. It means ‘all other things being held constant.’ It allows you to make assumptions and build models. But in this case, all other things aren’t constant. What’s been done can’t be undone. I don’t like what’s happening. It scares me that Howard Egan got killed. If people found out he was a spy, they can find out other things about my business. And then the whole thing will come down.”
Marx took his hand and gave it a squeeze. She wanted to say something encouraging, even if she didn’t fully believe it.
“I don’t know anything about economics. But when I was a girl, my dad liked to tell me, ‘The only way you can be free is by working for yourself.’ In his case, that basically meant doing nothing, but he was right. You’ve got to find a way to get free of this. Maybe I can help you.”
“Smart man, your dad; smart daughter, too. I’m trying. I’m looking for ways to dig out. Maybe we could share a shovel.”
As they neared the Dorchester, Perkins asked, once more, if she wanted to come back with him to Ennismore Gardens for a nightcap. She answered once again that it was a nice idea, really nice, but no, she would not.
24
The people of the Tribal Areas have a fondness for proverbs, and there is one that sounds like this in the Pashto language: “Khar cha har chaire hum law she, bia hum hagha khar we.” The literal meaning is that a donkey will remain a donkey, no matter where it goes. Or, to put it more elegantly: Nature cannot be changed.
When Lieutenant General Mohammed Malik first heard this saying from one of his Pashtun case officers, he knew that it expressed a truth about the people of the frontier region: They were what they were; they could be pushed and prodded, but not changed. Money, flattery, pressure, guns-these might convince the donkey to move a little to the left or right, but they did not change its character. The people lived by their Pashtunwali, their tribal code. Its pillars were personal honor, the obligation to avenge an insult, and the chivalry that allowed the stronger man to be generous toward the weaker one.
General Malik recalled these tenets as he traveled toward Peshawar on his way into the Pashtun heartland. He had received a call the day before from one of his ISI officers in the field. A member of the Al-Tawhid brotherhood had been captured in Bajaur Agency in the far northwest. He was carrying an unusual piece of information that the local case officer did not understand. The man seemed ready to talk, but he was not yet talking. The ISI case officer did not want to pass the information up the chain of command. He wanted General Malik himself to come to Malakand Fort, to interview the Tawhid courier and see his documents.
General Malik set off at dawn in his Land Cruiser. He traveled in a small convoy this time, one vehicle ahead and one behind, with bodyguards armed against an ambush. He planned a stop in Peshawar on the way, to meet with the major general who headed the Frontier Corps, the constabulary force that was supposed to keep the peace in the Tribal Areas and sometimes did.
As the Grand Trunk Road neared the outskirts of Peshawar, a great reddish mound became visible. From a
