Bloodmoney Read online

  “I still don’t get the CIA part. How did you end up there? With that crazy childhood, I would think you’d want to do something utterly ordinary—work in a bank, or an insurance company.”

  Her eyes were alight. She was getting tipsy, on the wine and the company.

  “Isn’t it obvious? The CIA was the only place where people understood me. I found a whole government agency full of people who lived on the run, and had secrets they couldn’t tell anyone, and were always pretending. It was a building full of weirdos like me. I told the agency recruiters everything about myself. I had to. It was the first time I had told anyone the whole story. And do you know what? They loved it.”

  “Come, now, Miss Devereux. Are you always pretending? Like now, for example.”

  “Every minute, and especially now. I’m always afraid someone will expose me as a fraud. I have dreams about it. And my name is Marx.”

  Perkins took her hand. It was an unusual thing to do, even in the midst of this intimate conversation.

  “You probably won’t believe this, but I have the same anxiety. I think I’m going to be found out. The world I’ve built is going to come crashing down, and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to pick up the pieces. I’m scared, all the time.”

  “You? That’s ridiculous. What do you have to be afraid of?”

  “Failure, collapse, bankruptcy. When you’re playing with so much money, it’s easy to get in trouble. That’s why I agreed to help the agency. I tried to explain this to you. At the time we got seriously connected, I was on the ropes. My investors didn’t know it, and the Street didn’t know it. But your friends did. They understood that I was vulnerable. That made me a perfect recruit. Isn’t that what you people say?”

  “Yes, that’s what we say.”

  She looked at Perkins across the table. He wanted to explain, and she was truly the only one he could tell.

  “How did it happen?” she asked. “How did we recruit you?”

  So he told her the story. It was a peculiar play, where the audience seemed to understand the story as well as the actor.

  “You know Anthony Cronin, the man who introduced us?” he began.

  She nodded. Yes, she knew him. That was all she wanted to say, for now.

  “I first met Cronin in New York five or six years ago, I can’t remember. That was the easy part, before the squeeze began. The meeting had been arranged by a hedge fund manager I knew. It was obvious that he had intelligence connections but he never explained them.”

  “He was the spotter,” Marx said with a wink. “That’s what we call them.”

  “Okay, so he called one day and said he had a friend in the government named Cronin who was a big deal, and that we should meet the next time I was in the States. And I thought, sure, great. A lot of people in finance were helping out after 9/11 and I thought I should, too. So I telephoned the number he gave me for Cronin and left a message saying that I would be in New York in a week. Cronin called back the next day. He suggested we meet at the Athenian Club, where I guess he was a member.”

  Marx smiled at the thought of such a rendezvous. She had visited the club herself, with one of her professors, when she was an undergraduate at Princeton. It was a handsome beaux arts front on West Forty-Third Street, with a white marble façade, elaborate carvings and moldings and a club flag flapping in the breeze next to Old Glory.

  “A perfect place to take an ex-professor like you,” she said. “Old paintings on the wall, books in the library shelves, rooms with bathtubs and no showers: old school. Nothing bad could happen there.”

  “Cronin was waiting upstairs, sitting in a leather chair and sipping a martini as if he owned the place. He rose as soon as I entered the room. He obviously had a picture of what I looked like. The waiter arrived, and I thought, what the hell, do the James Bond thing, so I ordered a martini, too. I took a sip, we talked for a while. He told me about how some famous names in finance were helping: This man got them a new building on Fifth Avenue, pronto, after the New York station went down on 9/11. That one used his company as a front to catch a terrorist from Pakistan. All very impressive.”

  “So the hook was in.”

  “Definitely. After a while, he popped the question: ‘How would you like to help your country in a time of need?’”

  “We call that ‘the pitch.’ What did you say?”

  “I told him of course I would. I had decided that I would say yes on the flight over. I asked him what it would involve, and he said little things, until we got to know each other better. And that’s all it was, the first few years. Little things: Can you tell us about your foreign contacts? Can you help us facilitate a payment overseas? Can we use one of your houses as a meeting place? Easy stuff.”

  “That’s ‘development,’ by the way, the part where we watch you and see how you’re doing. When did it get nasty?”

  Perkins looked down at his plate. As much as he had wanted to tell the story, it got harder at this point.

  “They caught me cheating. That was the start. I had a man inside the Bank of England. He was giving me information about the Monetary Policy Committee. I was paying him five hundred thousand dollars a year, to a bank in the Cayman Islands, and making twenty times that off his information. But the transfers got picked up by the U.S. money-laundering snoops, and my guy panicked. He thought he had been caught by the Inland Revenue for tax evasion.”

  “So you asked for help?”

  “Exactly. I told Cronin about it. I didn’t exactly ask him to fix it, but he knew that’s what I wanted. Case went away. Poof. No more questions.”

  “And you were relieved. And you thought, these intelligence friends of mine are pretty helpful.”

  “Just so. But then it turned. The markets began to go screwy, and I was in trouble. Like a lot of people, I had bought fistfuls of credit swaps that I thought could never go bad, I mean, how’s Morgan Stanley ever going to go bust, right? But everything turned to shit in a couple of weeks, and I was desperate to raise cash.”

  “And you got a call from Cronin?”

  “You know the script. Cronin called and said he had a great idea. He’d heard I was in a little trouble and he knew the perfect way out. We should do what I had been doing with my guy in the Bank of England, but on a global scale. He would supply the inside information, I would trade on it and we would split the profits.”

  “‘The system.’”

  Perkins nodded. “And now you’re part of it. That’s my fault.”

  Marx shook her head. “I’m a big girl. I know what I’m doing. And this guy Anthony Cronin isn’t ten feet tall. Believe me. If you really want a way out, you’ll find one.”

  Perkins wanted to order cheese, but she said no, at the end of so much heavy talk she wanted something sweet. Dolce, she said, but not dolcissime. He ordered panna cotta, a delicate dessert of cooked cream, served 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.”<
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  “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

  MALAKAND, PAKISTAN

  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 distance it looked like a small hill with a garrison arrayed across the flat-top summit. This was the Bala Hisar fort, which since the sixteenth century had controlled the entry to the Khyber Pass, thirty miles to the west, and thus the gateway between Afghanistan and the great Indus Valley that contained the modern nations of Pakistan and India.

  The general’s convoy was waved through a checkpoint and took the steep road up this man-made hillock. In the courtyard atop the fort, a company of Frontier Corps guards mustered for his welcome. They wore the tunics and daggers of the British Raj, and their units were still called by the same names: the Khyber Rifles, the South Waziristan Scouts, the Bajaur Scouts and a half dozen others.

  The corps commander greeted him. He was a big man, well over six feet, with a large belly and a growth of stubble on his face. He was a Pashtun himself, the descendant of the princely family that had ruled the ancient trading city of Bannu, a stopping point between Peshawar and Quetta. He knew how to run the frontier in the old-fashioned way, but he was n
ot a man suited for the ISI’s intelligence game. If he encountered an adversary, his instinct was to shoot him, rather than recruit him.

  General Malik pumped for information about Al-Tawhid. Was the group still growing in Bajaur and the Waziristans? Was the Tawhid content to attack the Americans and their Afghan allies across the border, or was it threatening Pakistan? The general would never have admitted it to the outside world, but the ISI was prepared to tolerate the Tawhid so long as it didn’t directly challenge the government. A double game was manageable, but not a triple game.

  The Frontier Corps commander answered as best he could: Al-Tawhid lived village to village, operation to operation. It had not attacked the Frontier Corps yesterday, or for six months of yesterdays, but it could do so easily tomorrow. Its operatives were here on the frontier, but they were in the settled areas, too: in Karachi and Lahore and Quetta, and in Islamabad itself. General Malik nodded his agreement; he knew the reach of this “brotherhood” too well.

  “These Tawhid are cocky buggers,” said the corps commander. “To rule the frontier, you need a big wallet and a big gun. These miscreants have neither, and they have been punished by the drones. But still they think they can take on America. I do not see it. Under their turbans, they are just men. They pretend to know, but what can they know? They are little men with big Korans.”

  The corps commander, with his protruding gut and his rough speech, had unwittingly stated the problem that concerned General Malik. What did the Tawhid know? Where did these “little men” get the information that allowed them to poke the giant? The ISI had picked up the chatter, about a learned professor and his secretive ways. But the analysts didn’t understand what it meant, and that troubled the general. There were so many professors on the ISI payroll already; was this master miscreant one of them?