General Malik bit his lip. He shook his head. He appeared sorrowful, but that was only to hide his feeling of guilt. He had been warned that such an attack was coming and he had done nothing to stop it. That was the fact. He leaned toward her across the table.
“I am sorry for this, but it could not have been helped.”
She kept silent for a moment, but she was angry. The operative in Kabul had been her colleague. He had a wife and children.
“Yes, General, it could have been helped. You could have stopped the people who killed him. Or you could have told us. This is a strange friendship, where you watch our people get killed and don’t do anything to prevent it. We deserve better than this, don’t you think?”
He put his hands up, palms extended limply. “Please, please. This is not the time for recriminations. We have much for which we could reproach you. This is a tricky game, you know. We are not playing cricket on a nice green lawn. Perhaps I should go away. What is the use? It is the same old story: You blame us, we blame you.”
He pulled back his chair and rose, as if he were preparing to leave.
“Please stay, General. Talk with me. I am trying to be honest with you. It is a measure of my respect. We must understand each other, for it is a fact that we need your help.”
He bowed his head, not quite in deference. He was still standing.
“Please,” she repeated.
“Very well,” he said, taking his seat again. “We will not think about the past, but the future. Let me continue with my story. We intercepted this courier fellow. He was carrying the computer drive that I have shown you, containing the information that is on the screen there. He told us that there were others on the road carrying the same information. We did not understand it at first.”
“But now you do?”
“Yes. My clever major thinks he does, at least. These are bank codes, just as you say. They are numbered, one and two, for two American agents that the Tawhid was tracking. Let us look at the first line.” He pointed to the first line of code on the screen:
1) BANK JULIUS BAER BKJULIUS CH12 0869-6005-2654-1601-2 BAERCHZU 200 71835.
“So here is what we think: This is the coding for the bank account from which a payment originated. It is Bank Julius Baer, a private bank in Zurich, which is known as ‘BKJULIUS.’ What follows that is a twenty-one- character code, beginning with ‘CH12.’ We believe this is the International Bank Account Number for the originating account. This is called the IBAN, I am told. The final entry, which begins ‘BAERCHZU,’ is what is known as the SWIFT code. I had always assumed this was a reference to making haste. But no, my major tells me that it is an acronym for Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which manages this system for wire transfers. I hope that makes sense, perhaps just a bit.”
“It makes perfect sense, General. And let me make a guess. The second line is the recipient account.” She pointed to the second line on the screen:
BANK ALFALAH ALFHAFKA 720 34120
“You are the clever one, madam. This is the account that your operative in Kabul was using to receive the payment for the gentleman he intended to, what shall we say, to bribe. It does not include an IBAN designator because Afghanistan is not part of the IBAN system. But it does include a SWIFT account address with the ‘AF’ and ‘KA’ notations to signify Afghanistan and Kabul.”
“What about number two? I assume it’s the same pattern, originating account and receiving account.” She traced the two lines with her finger:
2) BARCLAYS BANK BARCLON GB35 BARC-4026-3433-1557-68 BARCGBZZ 317 82993 AMONATBONK ASSETJ22 297 45190.
She looked at the end of the string for the SWIFT code of the recipient bank. “TJ” was the country designator. She groaned and shook her head. That stood for Tajikistan. This was the address of the bank in Dushanbe that had been receiving money for Meredith Rockwell, now deceased.
Marx closed the laptop. She did not want to look at the ghostly glow of the screen anymore.
“I knew the recipient,” she said. “This message was her death sentence.”
“Yes, it was. I am sorry to say so. These miscreants are very smart. They obtain the routing numbers, you see, and then they recruit people in the banks, simple Muslim boys who are clerks. That way they learn who controls these accounts. When a payment arrives, they know the paymaster is coming soon, and they know the name, the work name, you see. And there are other things, I think.”
“What other things are those, General Malik?”
“Credit card numbers, perhaps, airplane reservations, patterns, signatures. Who can say? Whatever is on a computer. All the things that you think are confidential. That is how they know that you are here, madam. They start with a few pieces of data, and then they connect them. They highlight the person who buys the ticket from London to Islamabad using the same telephone number or wire-transfer procedures as someone already on their list. They follow the patterns, you see. Like any clever idea, it is really quite simple. You just have to be smart enough to think of it.”
She put her head in her hands. She had been trying to solve this puzzle, piece by piece, and at last she could see the picture: It was a system that had been constructed as if in a mirror image.
“My God. It’s so obvious,” she said.
The Pakistani general looked at her curiously, waiting for some explanation of her outburst.
“Do unto others,” she said.
“I beg your pardon, madam.”
“We call it the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Well, now they’re doing it unto us.”
He looked at her dumbly, as if this were all too complicated for a simple Pakistani.
“I am sorry, Miss Marx, but I do not understand your golden rules and riddles. If you want my help you will have to explain it more clearly.”
“I am sure you understand very well, General. You probably figured it out long ago. And it is no riddle at all, just good tradecraft. We built a system to capture terrorists. We watched their bank transfers, their money flows, their phone calls, their credit-card purchases; their movements. Then we used computer programs to look for links and patterns, so that we could identify our targets. And then we killed them. Sometimes you helped.”
The general coughed.
“And now they are using the same tools against us. That is what has happened, isn’t it?”
The general smoothed the skirt of his uniform jacket. It was awkward to have to answer such a direct question.
“I think you may be on to something there, madam. Very well said, I think. They have taken your book of plays and made a copy, turned it inside out, rather. Yes, I think you have smoked it out now.”
He was playing with her and she didn’t like it. She reached out her hand again for his, but he withdrew his arms from the table and folded them, his long fingers intertwining.
“Who is this smart, General Malik? Who has organized this system? Do you have any idea?”
He stared at her, blankly at first, his face a mask. But then he softened slightly; his lips turned up at the corners and his eyes relaxed.
“Tell me,” she pressed. “Too many people have died.”
“Very sensitive, this one is. Not easy to talk about.”
“But you must help me. Mr. Hoffman said you were the only hope. I risked my life to come see you, General. I implore you.” She extended her hand again. She did everything but cry.
He sighed and smiled. Perhaps he had intended to tell her all along, but he acted as if it were a gesture of gallantry for a damsel in distress.
“Ah, Miss Marx, how can I refuse you? It is easier to be cold-blooded with a man, but a charming woman melts the heart.”
She disliked this playacting, but it obviously appealed to the general’s vanity.
“You are a gentleman,” she said. That brought a look of solemn satisfaction to the Pakistani’s face.
“Here is what I can tell you: There is a man we have been trying to apprehend for some time. He has many names, as you might expect. Usually people call him ‘the professor,’ or ‘ustad,’ which means the learned one. We think that he is the one who has solved these technical puzzles. We have made many investigations. But we do not
