Sophie Marx was exhausted. It was only when she had completed her debriefing of Sabah that the fatigue enveloped her; she felt empty, depleted of every calorie of energy and desire. She wanted to collapse into bed, pull a white comforter over her head and sleep for a week. That fantasy of escape was punctured by the anxiety, and the satisfaction, too, of knowing that hundreds of people were counting on her now. She went into the kitchen of the safe house and made herself a double espresso, then drank a Red Bull.
That wasn’t enough; she still felt groggy. Come on, girl, she told herself. Get your shit together. She asked Major Kirby whether there was a fitness room in the house, and of course the answer was yes. That was the first thing the Support team had organized when they secured the place, even before they finished the communications room. In the basement, they had installed a recumbent bicycle, an elliptical trainer and some free weights.
Marx spent nearly an hour on the elliptical trainer, striding like a space walker, listening to music on her iPod. She had eclectic tastes, but right now she wanted to hear music by tough women who had been lied to by manipulative men, such as her boss.
On her iPod she had a playlist she labeled “Revenge Music,” and she selected it now. Top of the list was Carrie Underwood singing “Before He Cheats,” about a woman who takes a baseball bat and bashes in the headlights of her two-timing lover’s car. Then there was Miranda Lambert’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” about an angry woman who walks in on her man while he’s playing pool with a new girl and thinks of shooting her. For sure, she had “Goodbye Earl,” by the Dixie Chicks. But her favorite song on the revenge playlist was Lambert’s “White Liar,” with its insistence that the truth finally comes out, even for liars. She turned up the volume and closed her eyes.
As the music played, Marx thought about her next steps. Jeffrey Gertz was in one compartment of revenge. But right now she needed to close on her Pakistani target-to flush him from his lair and into the open. The challenge was to think of a prize tantalizing enough that a supremely careful operator like this “professor” would take the risk to go after it. Her legs rocked back and forth on the trainer, keeping pace like a metronome. The more she considered this puzzle, the more obvious it was what she should do.
Hoffman called on the secure phone while Marx was working out. She rang him back a few minutes later when she had caught her breath. Her cheeks were flushed and beads of perspiration dotted her forehead.
“You’ve had rather a good day,” he said. “You have opened the gates, I do believe.”
“We don’t have our man yet,” she answered. “I’m scared we’ll blow our chance to get him.”
“You should be scared. He is a dangerous man. I called because we have a first cut from NSA. The cell numbers are all dead. We’ll run patterns, but I think the links will be dead, too. This man is not a fool. The email address at Yahoo is still alive, but it hasn’t been used since the last message to Sabah. So the question is, what next?”
Hoffman paused. He seemed to be waiting for her to pick up the thread.
“I have a suggestion, assuming that I’m running this, and not Headquarters.”
“My dear Sophie, you are Headquarters. And yes, you’re still running the operation. So far you haven’t made any mistakes.”
“I want to set a trap for the Pakistani. We can use Mr. Sabah to make contact, and we have a live email address, but we need some juicy bait. Otherwise this won’t work. I’ve been thinking about it, and I have the right worm to put on the hook.”
“Oh, do you, now? And who might that lucky invertebrate be?”
“Me.”
“Preposterous. Out of the question. You almost got killed several days ago in Islamabad. Don’t push your luck, my dear. It runs out, even for you.”
“Don’t you see? The fact that he went after me before will make me an irresistible target. He missed once. This is a very disciplined man. He doesn’t like failure. He’ll come out of his hole if the prize is big enough. I don’t mean to be immodest, but I’m worth the trouble for him. Especially if Sabah sends him a message that will tell him we’re up to something really big. He’ll surface.”
“How unreasonable you are.”
“I will take that as a yes, Mr. Hoffman. We’ll get to work here on preparing the email message. I’ll need some help on details, to make the transfers look convincing. Can Information Ops get into Alphabet Capital’s accounts?”
“Of course. We can get anything we like, if we know what to ask for.”
“I need to know what accounts were used by Howard Egan, Alan Frankel and Meredith Rockwell, now deceased. Where the money began and where it ended. Send me those account numbers and routing codes.”
“You are worthy colleague, Sophie.”
“I’m a work in progress. What about the other traces I requested, about the CTC surveillance program and the consultants?”
“We are still digging on the consultants. The true names are originator-controlled, I’m afraid, very tight access. But the first part of your question is easy. The chief of CTC’s Al-Qaeda covert-surveillance program at the time was a gentleman whose name will be quite familiar to you, painfully familiar: Jeffrey Gertz, former president of The Hit Parade LLP of Studio City, California, now defunct.”
“Is that right?” she said blandly. Of course it was. She had known from the moment that Sabah described the videoconference by the CTC official, the earnest pitch, the bland amorality, that the speaker could only be her boss and sometime mentor.
“Where is Jeff these days? I’ve been wondering that.”
“He has ‘gone to ground,’ as they say in the fox-hunting milieu. He is conducting a global disappearing act, shutting down anything that has any link with his former activity. He seems to have authority from ‘the highest level,’ as we like to say euphemistically. He is traveling, at present, but precisely where, I do not know. Do you need me to find him for you?”
“No, the opposite. I need for him to stay out of the way.”
“That should not be a problem. I believe that Jeffrey’s current preoccupation is saving his own skin.”
Marx sat down with Joe Sabah, who seemed actually to have missed her company, and began drafting the email message she would send to “George White.” To rouse the Pakistani’s interest, she planned to transfer $50 million from an Alphabet account to one that had been used by one of The Hit Parade’s operatives. To leave an unmistakable footprint, she decided that the transfer would move directly from Howard Egan’s account at FBS to the account he had used in Dubai for his initial meeting with the Pashtun tribal chief Azim Khan.
She found Perkins’s secretary, Mona, who was still ensconced in what was left of the office on Mayfair Place, and had her make travel arrangements just as she had only a few days before for Marx’s trip to Islamabad. She advised Support to have one of its contacts at American Express make sure the payment cleared, regardless of any restrictions on Alphabet Capital.
Sabah let her examine all his previous messages to “George White,” so that she could get the cadence right. He helped her encode the proper SWIFT wire transfer protocols, so the message would have the necessary detail. The final version, tweaked and massaged, was sent from Joseph Sabah’s Gmail account to George. White09@yahoo. com, with the subject line, follow up. It read: LARGE
TRANSFER FROM PREVIOUSLY MONITORED ACCT FBS GENEVA. ORIGINATING ACCT: FBS AG GENEVA SWIFT BIC FBSWCHZH12A CH08 3771-7938-7155-8039-7. RECEIVING ACCT: CITIBANK NA/DUBAI SWIFT BIC CITIAEAD AE14-5300-5845-251. RECEIVER’S EUROCLEAR NO. 27593. TRANSFER AMT DLRS 50 RPT 50 MIL. APHELION.
The message vanished into electronic space. Marx alerted Headquarters that it had been sent. From that instant, all the surveillance technology available to the United States focused on the Yahoo account of an unknown recipient, and on electronic signals from Pakistan, Dubai and anywhere else that might be linked to any known operative.
Twenty-four hours passed without a nibble. But soon enough, there was a turbulence, a cascade of events, as the prey devoured the shining silver lure.
37
