Bloodmoney Page 14

  Jeffrey Gertz thought of Frankel as one of his up-and-comers. He sometimes referred to him as “Blogger Boy” in meetings with his senior staff in Studio City. Frankel was the new-age operations officer who could go anywhere in the world he wanted because his cover was impenetrable.

  Sometimes Gertz posted his own comments to “Admonitions,” under the screen name “Ironman23.” He would opine on publicity campaigns for new movies and music releases. Occasionally he would post a subtle word of praise for Frankel following an especially good operation, disguised in what he imagined was blogger language and signed, Ironman23.

  Russia was a hard place to operate, even Gertz admitted that. The Russians had total control of the environment, with fixed surveillance everywhere: They saw you coming in and going out; they watched as you waited for a Metro train, or crossed the street, or sat in the hotel lobby. It wasn’t worth the trouble arranging meetings in Moscow, anyway, the old pros said. It was so easy now for Russians to get out of the country. Let them fly to Croatia or Majorca with the other tourists and meet you there.

  But that no-go logic was for losers, according to Gertz. There was no such thing as a denied area in his world of mobile platforms. The Hit Parade could operate anywhere and everywhere—getting its people in and out before the local service had a chance to notice their passport stamps, let alone rumble their missions. In his operational atlas, Moscow was no different from Munich or Montreal.

  Alan Frankel had come to Moscow to meet a Pakistani diplomat who had been posted to Moscow a year before. He was from a prominent Punjabi family in Lahore, whose members included the leaders of the political party that dominated the province, some of whom had a history of making trouble for America. Frankel was going to offer him a lot of money—so much money that in the old, pre-Gertz days, it would have been authorized by a covert action “finding.” What the Pakistani would have to do in return was steer his family away from the anti-American virus that infected Punjabi politics.

  Gertz had gotten a tip from one of his sources that this Pakistani was ripe for recruitment. Frankel’s job was to close the deal.

  Frankel kept living his bulletproof cover when he arrived in Moscow. He made an appointment with TanyaTech, an ad agency that did political work for the Kremlin. They had lavish offices in an old mansion along the river; inside the door were pretty young Russian girls to greet visitors and show them to their appointments. In other lives, these long-legged, silken-haired women might have been oligarchs’ girlfriends, or worse, but here they were decorative office ladies.

  Frankel had asked to see the boss, Lev Lieberman. He was out, or so claimed his secretary, a woman with striking white-blond hair and purple eye shadow. Frankel charmed and pestered this woman into making a call, and a few minutes later the director trundled down the hall.

  The Russian listened sleepily to Frankel’s presentation, staring at his iPhone most of the time. He perked up slightly when the American said that he could rep TanyaTech for one-quarter of the price that the fancy advertising firm in London was charging. But then he shook his head—impossible!—and went back to tapping out messages on his phone.

  The Russian finally got rid of Frankel by sending him to NovyaBank, a financial company in Moscow that was part of the same business network. When the American asked for a contact there, the Russian rolled his eyes and called a friendly underling at the bank, who reluctantly agreed to see Frankel that afternoon at his office east of the city center.

  The NovyaBank headquarters was a gray slate building that, in the harsh summer light, had the sooty look of an unwashed truck. The traffic was a knot on the way out of downtown Moscow, so Frankel was fifteen minutes late. When he arrived and asked the doorman to call upstairs, he was told that his contact was out. The man’s secretary said in broken English that the gentleman in question had left two hours ago—not long after Lieberman had called to make the appointment.

  Frankel spelled his name twice for the secretary and gave her his telephone number and email address. For good measure, he left his card with the doorman. All he wanted was embellishment for his identity, which he had achieved simply by going to the bank’s offices.

  Frankel never once looked for surveillance. That was the virtue of a three-country SDR. If anyone became suspicious along the way and began asking questions, they would find only reinforcing pieces of the cover legend, place to place and meeting to meeting. It wasn’t a legend, really; it was a true lie.

  The meeting with the Pakistani diplomat was set for ten that night, at a bar near the Moscow hills where young couples went to get their wedding pictures taken. Gertz favored that kind of open meeting place; he believed that once your cover was established, it was best to hide in plain sight. What drew attention were the attempts at concealment.

  Frankel had six hours to kill. He went back to his hotel and dropped off his briefcase. Near the hotel was the Tretyakov Art Gallery, which he had missed on his earlier trips to Moscow. That was a plausible stop for a visiting American businessman, and it was better than sitting in his hotel room.

  He walked the few blocks to the gallery, still housed in its nineteenth-century palace. The collection was an ark of the Russian past: The paintings on the walls conveyed all the contradictory yearnings of the Russian elite—their French manners and fashions, their awkward enjoyment of privilege born on the backs of serfs who were no better than chattel slaves, their forays into intellectual terrain that more cautious Europeans barely dared to imagine. Room by room, with its portraits of pallid aristocrats and fierce, bearded peasants and desolate winter landscapes, the gallery conveyed a foreboding of what lay ahead for Russia.

  Frankel paused occasionally to savor the paintings; he sat for a good minute looking at a Kramskoy portrait titled Unknown Woman, haughty in her carriage, a white feather in her sable hat. He doubled back to an earlier room, to see the brushwork of a portrait painted fifty years before by Borovikovsky of a similarly haunting Russian beauty. That was when he had the first inkling that he was being followed. A dark-browed beetle of a man he had noticed on his way into the gallery had appeared again, he was certain. This time the dark figure was wearing sunglasses and a red-checked beret.

  Frankel made no sign he was aware of surveillance. But having glimpsed it once, he saw other signs. A woman loitered in one gallery when he entered and stayed when he left. Among the members of the guided tour that moved from room to room, there was a mottled face that was too hard and unblinking to be believable as a normal gallery visitor.

  Was he spooking himself? That was the trouble with operating far from home, at the end of a long string of false names and meetings: You began to see shadows even when they weren’t there.

  When Frankel exited the Tretyakov in the afternoon sun, he sat down on a bench and composed a BlackBerry message to The Hit Parade’s dummy address, using veiled language. “I may have competition for the Moscow account. I’m hoping they will give up, so I can relax and enjoy my evening. Let me know if you have any business tips.” But after a minute’s deliberation, he deleted the message, rather than send it. Gertz would think he was a pussy. And what could they do to help him, anyway?

  Frankel walked toward the Moscow River, not too fast, and then along the banks to the Kamenny Bridge. He crossed into Red Square, pausing at St. Basil’s Cathedral, and then at Lenin’s Tomb. The marble façade of the tomb looked dirty, as if it hadn’t been polished since 1989. He couldn’t see anyone now, but in a big open space like this, surveillance was so much harder to detect. He walked down the narrow footpaths of the Alexandrovsky Gardens and then back along those same walkways through the square and toward the Tverskaya Street.

  He saw faces that looked familiar, but he couldn’t be sure. Even in the chill of the late afternoon, as the sun disappeared behind the low clouds, he was sweating.

  He crossed the square to Tverskaya Street and walked half a block to the grand old façade of the National Hotel. It was a fine building, with salmon-pink brick inte
rlaid with white all the way up to its crenellated roof. Under an awning stood the front door, gleaming wood with polished brass handles, framed by stone carvings of flowers and grapes. Standing guard was a doorman in his summer uniform, hat and vest.

  As Frankel moved toward the entrance, the doorman stopped him and asked if he was a guest. There was a private function that evening, he said. No visitors.

  Frankel needed to get away. This was the wrong place to be. He heard commotion in the hotel lobby and a throng of people pushed out the door toward the noisy arcade of the street.

  Just outside the hotel entrance stood a man with a shock of black hair, chewing on one of his fingernails as his eyes fixed on Frankel. He looked like a proper Moscow gangster, with a pin-striped suit and pair of thick, black-framed sunglasses. He was moving toward Frankel now, pointing to a car parked along Tverskaya Street with the door opened, motioning for him to get in. Two more men were approaching from behind.

  The man shouted out something to Frankel. He spoke with an accent, so it was hard for passersby to understand what he was saying. The Moscow News reported the next day, quoting people who had been on the sidewalk, that he said “addition,” or perhaps “rendition.” But that made no sense. The other papers said he had just growled out a curse.

  Frankel lunged away and sprinted up Tverskaya. The black-haired tough followed him, and then another man, faster and stronger, who was gaining ground. The boulevard was crowded with early evening shoppers. Frankel weaved among them: Nobody would fire a gun into such a crowd; there were too many people.

  Frankel looked back and saw the two men following close behind. He was too obvious, shirttails out, arms churning. He tripped on a loose brick as he headed up the street, and he stumbled for a moment. Even if they didn’t shoot, this was a sure path to disaster. If he kept running amid this crowd, the police would arrest him even if his other pursuers peeled away. He would be busted either way.

  He saw an opening to his left, Nitinsky Street, and peeled off toward it. The two men followed. As Frankel ran up the street, he saw a third man coming toward him to block his escape. He ducked into a dark alley that was lined with trash bins from the neighboring buildings.

  The police found Frankel’s body in the alleyway a little after six p.m. He had struggled when his pursuers tried to drag him off, people in offices and apartments above told reporters. As he tried to flee, he was shot point-blank, three bullets, a silencer on the gun.

  The newspapers described two of the killers: dark features, swarthy, they all but announced they were from Chechnya. But like so many crimes in the new Russia, this one remained unsolved. The assassins disappeared into the lawless second city of the capital, where they owned the police. The spokesman for the Moscow prosecutor’s office said it looked like the work of the Chechen mafia, but people always said that about unsolved crimes.

  17

  STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

  Jeffrey Gertz was watching Morning Joe in the bathroom, trimming his beard and wondering what jacket to wear, when he heard the news bulletin that an American businessman had been shot in Moscow. They didn’t give a name, and it didn’t occur to him that the victim might be one of his own people. Gertz had just returned to Los Angeles from Washington the night before, and was thinking mainly about whether to go to Las Vegas that weekend. As he was dressing, the phone rang. It was Albert, the new watch officer in Studio City. There was a hitch in his throat, and he had to cough before he could speak.

  “Sorry to bother you at home, Mr. Director.” He had only been in the job a few days and addressed Gertz as if he were a cabinet secretary.

  “What is it, Albert? I’m getting dressed.”

  “An American has been shot in Moscow. It’s on the wires. Mr. Rossetti thinks he may be one of ours. He said you would want to be informed.”

  “I just saw that story on television. That’s our guy? What the hell?”

  Gertz was unsteady for a moment, and sat down on the leather bench in his dressing room. He had a towel wrapped around his waist, but it fell away. He muttered, more to himself than to the watch officer.

  “Christ, it must be Frankel.”

  “Roger that, sir. The embassy has someone at the morgue. The Russians have ID’d the victim as Alan Frankel, birthplace Denver, date of birth May twenty-sixth, 1980. His business cards say he runs an ad agency in Amsterdam named Kiosks Unlimited. Headquarters called Mr. Rossetti a few minutes ago, and he called me. I checked. All that information matches our operational files. What should I do?”

  “Nothing. Wait for me. Don’t talk to Headquarters until I’m there. And don’t talk to Mr. Rossetti, either. He’s not your boss, damn it.”

  There was a pause on the other end. The watch officer wasn’t sure what he was allowed to say.

  “People are kind of upset here, Director. We’ve gotten two messages from the field already, asking what’s up. What should I tell them?”

  “Tell them I’m on my way in. Tell everyone to chill out for a few minutes. This may not be what we think it is. No messages to anyone until I get there.”

  “Yes, Director.”

  Gertz felt better giving an order, even if it was just to shut up and sit tight. He thought a moment. The story was moving so fast, he needed to backstop the cover right away.

  “One more thing,” said Gertz. “Call Tommy Arden in Support and tell him to make sure someone in Europe is answering the Kiosks Unlimited phone in Amsterdam. This person should confirm Frankel’s cover biography, but that’s it. Express shock, grief, ‘How could anyone have done this to Mr. Frankel,’ et cetera. Do that now, and tell people to stay cool. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  Gertz finished dressing, a plain blue blazer instead of the summer-weight plaid he’d been planning, and a tie, too. He stood for a moment staring out the window, trying to collect his thoughts.

  His apartment was on the top floor of a building on the eastern edge of Beverly Hills, almost to West Hollywood. One bank of windows looked across Doheny Drive toward the leafy suburbs and the hills. Another looked down Santa Monica Boulevard toward the sprawl of downtown, half hidden by the smoky mist of the morning. He took a Red Bull out of the refrigerator, and then popped one of the energy pills his homeopathic counselor had recommended.

  Gertz threw his briefcase in the Corvette. Though it was a sunny day, he left the top up. He turned on the local NPR station and listened until they mentioned the Moscow shooting. Then he turned the radio off. He didn’t want to hear.

  Gertz knew how to take a punch. That was part of why he had risen so quickly in the agency. He had been ready to take risks when other people were worrying about whether their legal insurance was paid up. When people had decided the CIA was so messed up it was time to start over, Gertz had been there, the resilient one, ready to take the enterprise deep underground.

  This was a combination punch: Two members of his organization had been targeted in two weeks, and he didn’t know why. He felt bad about the people, in a generalized sort of way, but he barely knew them. He felt worse for himself. If he didn’t draw a tight circle now and control information, the structure he had created would begin to wobble. People would ask questions, secretly at first, but that would lead to other questions. The garment would begin to fray along the seams, and then—if people really began to pull—it would come apart.

  It was the same as with any flap, Gertz told himself. The best solution was to hunker down and wait for it to go away.

  When Gertz arrived at the office block on Ventura Boulevard, the façade was bleached white in the morning sun. Inside, there was a hum of anxiety: People had been waiting for the boss to arrive, and now they wanted him to give orders. There was a low-level panic. The news had spread rapidly; how could it be otherwise? People worried that their invisible organization had somehow come under a spotlight, and that they all were vulnerable.

  Gertz did the one thing nobody would have expected, which was to act normal. He said hello to the secretar
ies by name, and then went into his office to read the message traffic. He summoned Arden for a report: The calls to Kiosks Unlimited in Amsterdam were being answered by the reports officer who worked with Frankel as his secretary; she was quoted in the latest news reports expressing shock and sorrow. The dam was holding, at least for the moment.

  Gertz placed a call to Cyril Hoffman at Headquarters. Hoffman didn’t know much, either, but he agreed that in a situation of uncertainty, the best thing to do was for everyone to keep their mouths shut. The best damage control policy, in this case, was to do nothing.

  “What was your man working on in Moscow, anyway?” asked Hoffman. “Odd spot to visit.”

  “Pakistan. He was meeting a diplomat.”

  “Do I know about this?”

  “Of course you do. You know about everything. If you want details, check the White House.”

  “Why was he killed? This sounds like another Karachi problem. He’s dead, by the way, your man Egan. Confirmed. Roger that. I think this second one was a mafia hit.”

  “You’re joking, surely,” said Hoffman.

  “That’s what they’re saying on television. Chechen mobsters.”

  “But surely that’s untrue.”

  “Maybe. But it’s convenient. Don’t rock our boat, Mr. Hoffman. That’s my advice. I am trying to keep a lid on. I hope you are, too.”

  “Be careful about Pakistan. My sources say people there are rather upset with us. They don’t like being vaporized from ten thousand feet. And they don’t like having money thrown at them by the CIA, even in the benign and invisible form you like to imagine that you have created.”