Bloodmoney Read online

  BLOODMONEY

  ALSO BY DAVID IGNATIUS

  Agents of Innocence

  Siro

  The Bank of Fear

  A Firing Offense

  The Sun King

  Body of Lies

  The Increment

  DAVID IGNATIUS

  BLOODMONEY

  A NOVEL

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK LONDON

  Copyright © 2011 by David Ignatius

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication data

  Ignatius, David, 1950–

  Bloodmoney: a novel of espionage / David Ignatius.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-08213-5

  1. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Fiction. 2. Espionage—Fiction. 3. Intelligence officers—Violence against—Fiction. 4. Women intelligence officers—Fiction. 5. Deception—Fiction. 6. Revenge—Fiction. 7. Retribution—Fiction. 8. Pakistan—Fiction.

  I. Title. II. Title: Blood money: a novel of espionage.

  PS3559.G54B56 2011

  813’.54—dc22

  2011003003

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For Garrett Epps

  Revenge, at first though sweet,

  Bitter ere long back on itself recoils.

  —JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST

  First, you push on your territories, where you have no business to be, and where you had promised not to go; secondly, your intrusion provokes resentment, and resentment means resistance. Thirdly, you instantly cry out that the people are rebellious and their act is rebellion…. Fourthly, you send out a force to stamp out rebellion; and fifthly, having spread bloodshed, confusion and anarchy, you declare with your hands uplifted to the heavens that moral reasons forced you to stay: for if you were to leave, this territory would be left in a condition which no civilized power could contemplate with equanimity or with composure.

  —VISCOUNT JOHN MORLEY,

  STATE SECRETARY FOR INDIA, 1905-1910,

  summarizing the anger of Pashtun tribesmen;

  quoted in C. F. Andrews, The Challenge of

  the North West Frontier, 1937

  BLOODMONEY

  MAKEEN, SOUTH WAZIRISTAN

  This is Omar’s last night in Makeen. He will have dinner with his family and then return to his computer laboratory in Islamabad, and his brothers Nazir and Karimullah will go back to their fighting. Arab guests who have taken refuge in Makeen will share their meal this night, and the malik will visit to say goodbye to “Ustad Omar,” as they call him, the wise Omar who has visited places like Dubai and London, which the people of Makeen can barely imagine.

  Omar and his youngest brother, Karimullah, have been walking in the high hills above the town before dinner. Omar is nearly forty, and a city man now, whose knees ache as he climbs the rocky escarpment and whose lungs gasp for breath when he stands atop the ridgeline, only the thorny shrubs of acacia for cover. Karimullah is nimble, too much so, his brother thinks, hardened to muscle and bone by the years of war in these mountains. The boy looks like a wolf: narrow-faced, relentless, ravenous for the kill.

  Omar looks down from the ridge across the rock-strewn panorama of his valley. The tall pines soften the landscape; they cover the boulders and the ruined fields and the craters where the bombs have exploded. There is the slightest trickle in the riverbed that skirts the hillside; not enough water there to sustain anything except hatred. This is not my land, he thinks. Not anymore. Omar has escaped to another world that regards barren mountains as free-fire zones, and where social networks are not the intimate bond of tribe and blood, but things that come out of a machine.

  They are descending the ridge now. Karimullah has his gun, as always, and he takes aim at a bird that has flushed from the brush and is careening toward them. The young man could shoot it in an instant, Karimullah never misses, but he puts the gun down and smiles at his brother: What is our quarrel with this bird?

  Omar looks down the hillside again, at the fruit trees and vegetable gardens that his father has worked so hard to cultivate. I am the fruit, Omar thinks. I was nurtured in this place so that I could escape. All those afternoons as a boy, doing number games in the courtyard while his father, Haji Mohammed, wondered if there was something wrong with his oldest son; all those nights when he lay awake with the number puzzles illuminated in his mind like electric lights; all those mornings when he didn’t know whom to tell: Those were the signposts to his flight. He had tried to explain it once to an American friend, what it had been like to be a boy in his village, and the man, a mathematician, too, had just laughed in incomprehension.

  Karimullah whispers in his brother’s ear. He has a secret. He takes the older man down a switchback in the trail, to an abandoned outpost of the Frontier Corps where the young warriors train. They have a simple shooting range to practice with their Kalashnikov rifles, and a room where they do exercises to make themselves strong. Omar tells his brother to be careful. These Americans are dangerous people. The attack on their towers in New York has made them crazy.

  Yes, Karimullah knows. He and Nazir are not afraid of these half-men of America. He repeats a Pashtun saying that Haji Mohammed has taught his sons: “Who today is disgraced, tomorrow is lost.”

  They are almost home. Karimullah is running ahead now to tell their mother that they are back, so that she can prepare the meal. The light is dying in the afternoon. The mountains are pink where the sun hits the ridges and, in the shadows, deep purple and cherry-black. The sky is a cold dark blue; the moon is up, but the stars are not yet visible. Omar looks up by reflex. The sky is empty, he thinks, but then a ray of the disappearing sun catches something in the sky, a ping of light. He shouts to his younger brother, but he is too far ahead to hear now. The guests are already gathering; their trucks are parked in front of the walled compound.

  It is impossible, Omar thinks. These demons will not harm my family. I have tried to help them. Even my brothers and the other fighters: What have they done to America?

  Omar begins to run. He has been thinking about what he will say tonight to his father and his brothers, but now his subtle mind is no more capable of forming a thought than that of an animal on the run. He can hear the sound: It is the faint throb of an engine and he wants to think it is coming from town, down the road a few miles away, but it is sharper and more persistent. He looks up again, and he knows with the instinctual certainty of the hunted that the sound is coming from the sky, ten thousand feet above.

  He cries out to his brother as he runs toward the walls that contained his life when he was a boy, and that now shelter his mother and sisters and the young children. Another truck is arriving for the dinner, kicking up dust, and Omar is wailing for his brother now as loud as he can, screaming for his attention. But it is too late; the light is gone, and each frame of time is too short. The whisper overhead has become the relentless hum of a giant indestructible insect.

  Karimullah has stopped. He hears the sound, too, and he is looking to the sky. He raises his gun instinctively, but it is useless and he begins to run. The gates of the compound burst open and members of his family try to dash away, tumbling in their robes, calling on God. They are helpless. They cannot see what is overhead, but they sense it from the sound, and they experience the degradation of fear. Their bowels give way, they stumble and fall; t
he little ones put their hands over their ears, as if that will stop what is coming. Haji Mohammed does not run. He is a man; he walks slowly and deliberately from the compound, holding the hand of one of his guests.

  Omar is on the ground now, and he sees the sudden shadow of a metal arrow darken the orchards. The fire dragon is descending, but he cannot hear its roar. It is moving faster than its sound. It is so quick, this last moment, no more than the blink of the eye and it is too late. The trees bend and the grass goes flat and the animals bellow for help, and the people of Omar’s world are stopped in time.

  The flash of detonation is white sulfur. The air is sucked into the mouth of the explosion and the fireball rises in an instant to the height of the surrounding mountains. The force of the explosion throws Omar into the air like a clod of dirt. He is unconscious for a time, and at first when he awakes, he cannot hear and cannot see and he thinks he must be dead. The world is white, and he is happy to be gone.

  Pain tells him he is alive. Several bones are broken, and he is bleeding from many wounds. He begins to cough up dust and blood. When he opens his eyes, he sees that the world in which he was raised has been destroyed. Where his family compound stood is now rubble dotted by smoldering fires. He can see body parts a few yards from where he is lying, and he hears the cries of the wounded. He tries to stand, but he cannot support the weight.

  Let me die, Omar thinks. But in the hours and days and years that follow, he has another thought that comes from his blood and sinews more than his mind: Let me have the honor that is badal, the insult that answers the insult. He does not mean this in a general sense, but in a very particular way. The people who operate the drones, Omar knows very well, are from the Central Intelligence Agency. He knows too much about them. It is not enough to hate these people; he wants to have power over them and make them afraid.

  He does not take this revenge in the immediate, visceral way that his brother Karimullah might have done. He returns to the National University of Science and Technology. His physical wounds heal, and he does not discuss what happened in Makeen. He continues with his consulting work, too, for the IT departments of a bank in Dubai and another in Geneva. He maintains his other contacts abroad, with the friends he met in California. When people introduce him to foreigners, they say that he is a model for the future of the tribal areas: a gifted man, world-class, you could say, a young man from South Waziristan who shows that it is possible to escape the tribal code.

  People address him as “ustad,” the learned one. But truly he is a ghost. He travels to the Persian Gulf and to Europe. He is so thin and fit he might run a marathon, or enter a monastery. He finds new friends who are useful to him. It is still many months before our story begins, but he is motivated by one thought: The people who think they are safe must know what it is to be hunted.

  Contents

  1 ISLAMABAD

  2 STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

  3 KARACHI

  4 KARACHI

  5 STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

  6 STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

  7 STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

  8 STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

  9 WANA, SOUTH WAZIRISTAN

  10 LONDON

  11 QUETTA, PAKISTAN

  12 DUBAI

  13 ISLAMABAD

  14 ISLAMABAD

  15 STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

  16 MOSCOW

  17 STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

  18 CHARLES TOWN, WEST VIRGINIA

  19 LONDON

  20 LONDON

  21 MAKEEN, SOUTH WAZIRISTAN

  22 LONDON

  23 LONDON

  24 MALAKAND, PAKISTAN

  25 DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN

  26 DOHA, QATAR

  27 LONDON

  28 ISLAMABAD

  29 ISLAMABAD

  30 BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

  31 WATERLOO, BELGIUM

  32 STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

  33 LONDON

  34 LONDON

  35 MONS, BELGIUM

  36 MONS, BELGIUM

  37 KARACHI

  38 WASHINGTON AND LONDON

  39 LONDON

  40 LONDON

  41 ISLAMABAD

  42 LONDON

  43 LONDON

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1

  ISLAMABAD

  In the softening light of another afternoon, nearly two years later, the façade of the Inter-Services Intelligence headquarters looked almost welcoming. It was an anonymous gray stucco building in the Aabpara neighborhood of the capital, set back from the Kashmir Highway. The only distinctive feature was a ribbon of black stone that wrapped around the front, making it look as tidy as a gift box. Although the building was unmarked, the ISI’s presence in the neighborhood was hardly a secret. Pakistanis in other branches of the military referred to its operatives as “the boys from Aabpara,” as if they were a neighborhood gang to whom special respect must be paid. Ordinary Pakistanis made it a rule not to speak about the ISI at all.

  Inside this house of secrets, facing onto an enclosed garden, was the office of the director general, who in recent years had been a soft-spoken man named Mohammed Malik. On his shoulders, he wore the crossed swords-and-crescent insignia of a lieutenant general. His authority didn’t come from his rank in the army, but from his control of information. It was almost always the case that General Malik knew more than the people around him, but he made it a rule never to flaunt what he knew, or to disclose how he had obtained it. That would be insecure and, worse, impolite.

  General Malik was not an imposing man, at least in the way of a military officer. He was trim, with a neat mustache, and he was careful about what he ate and drank, almost to the point of fastidiousness. He had soft hands, and a reticent manner. It was easy to forget that he was in fact a professional liar, who told the entire truth only to his commander, the chief of army staff.

  On this particular spring afternoon, General Malik had a concern that he wasn’t sure how to address. The brigadier who represented his service in Karachi had called to alert him to a potential problem. Now, there were large and small problems in Pakistan, but the very biggest ones were often connected to the words “United States of America.” For it was said, not without reason, that Pakistan’s life was bounded by the three A’s—Allah, Army and America. And in the brigadier’s news from Karachi, all three were tied up in one.

  It was part of General Malik’s aura among his colleagues at General Headquarters in Rawalpindi that he knew how to handle the Americans. This was based partly on the fact that he had spent a year at the Army War College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. And if you knew Kansas, people said, well, then, you knew the real America. Malik had actually disliked Kansas, and the only part of America that he had truly loved was the Rockies, where the thin air and the steep peaks reminded him of his ancestral home in the mountains of Kashmir. But he knew how to sham, in the way that is an art form for the people of South Asia, and so he had pretended for years to have a special fondness for Americans from the heartland.

  In that spirit of sincere and also false bonhomie, the director general placed a call to Homer Barkin, the chief of the CIA station at the ever-expanding American Embassy in Islamabad. Their regular liaison meeting was scheduled for later in the week, but General Malik asked if his American partner might stop by that afternoon, perhaps right away, if it was convenient. He didn’t explain why, for he had found that it is always a good rule to say less than you mean, particularly when you are dealing with Americans, who do the opposite.

  “My friend Homer,” said General Malik in greeting the chief of station when he arrived in Aabpara forty-five minutes later. He usually addressed him that way, and the American responded by calling him “my friend Mohammed,” or sometimes, when he wanted something, just “my friend Mo.” General Malik found that especially grating, but he never said anything. He clasped his visitor’s hand in the firm way that Americans liked.

  Barkin did not look well. His face was doughy, and he looked bulky in
his suit jacket, like a sausage ready to burst its casing. General Malik knew why: Homer Barkin had been drinking, and the reason was that he had legal problems back home. He was one of the many CIA officers who had been caught in the boomerang effect of the “war on terror.” It was said that he had “crossed the line” in a previous job by being overzealous in targeting the enemy.

  Looking at Homer Barkin, his eyes dark from the sleeplessness of depression, his collar button straining against the flesh of his neck, it seemed unlikely that he had ever been capable of zealotry in any form. But this was the “after” picture; he would not have been made station chief in Islamabad if there had not been a “before.”

  “My dear friend Homer,” the Pakistani continued, “I hope you will not mind me saying so, but you are looking a little tired. You must be working too hard.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, believe me,” said the CIA officer.