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  There was another message sent the next morning. A small bomb detonated at Bahria University just before dawn. The explosion shattered most of the windows in the engineering department, where the computer science faculty had its offices. No students were killed, mercifully. If the bomb had detonated several hours later, as they were coming to class, some of the young men would surely have been wounded.

  Dr. Omar thought about his own graduate students when he heard the news. They were young men who had come to the city to do their studies, just as he had years before, the flower of the youth of Pakistan.

  “It is a blessing,” Omar told his host, who brought him the news.

  “But surely it is a curse from the evildoers,” replied Aziz. There were fresh tears in his eyes. He was angry. “They meant to destroy you with this bomb, too, Ustad.”

  “No, it is a blessing, you see, that no one died. There is no more badal. We shall not argue about this anymore. I have had enough argument.”

  Dr. Omar thought: I have brought this danger to people who were innocent. This is what wars do. They destroy the guilty, yes, but also the innocent. That is why all wars must end.

  When he bathed and dressed that morning, the professor’s ruminations had hardened into a decision. It was time to resolve his business, to go back to the center point. He had been living on two sides of the world, on two sides of the knife. He could not do that anymore. Now it was time to close the double-edged franchise, for the project was nearly complete.

  He was exhausted, in his head and heart. It had been more complicated than anyone could imagine. He had conducted his campaign of vengeance, as was required. But he had never stopped the other life, of providing advice and guidance. He had thought of himself as a giver and avenger, combined. He named the beneficiaries of the enemy’s largesse, so that these eminent persons were showered with money. Then he arranged to kill the courier-spies who came to deliver the payments. It had the simplicity of the balance wheel in a watch, flicking from side to side. But it could not continue.

  Omar sent a message, to an account that he had not used for a very long time, to a man who had once been his mentor, for whom he had acted as a consultant, in fact, in the time before his world went dark. The man did not answer his message, so he called him by phone, using a cellular number that he had been told was only for the most unusual emergencies. It was a clean number; a phone to be used for this one purpose only.

  The man answered in the comfortable, noncommittal way that Americans do. Yes, of course he remembered the professor. His consulting help had been invaluable. It would be a pleasure to see him again, indeed. A trip to Pakistan was impossible, but perhaps they could meet in London, where he had business. They would have to meet discreetly, leaving no electronic traces. It is always good to visit with an old contact, said the American, and close a circle.

  Just so, said the Pakistani professor. Close a circle. They discussed where they might meet. Neutral ground, where they would both feel secure: a park outside the city. The American suggested Kew Gardens, at the far western end of London, a particular remote area of the park that he named.

  The Pakistani made several other requests of the American, naming other people who should be part of their meeting. It was a question of gundi, he said. He did not bother to translate the word, and the other man did not ask, but it meant “balance” in the Pashto language.

  38

  WASHINGTON AND LONDON

  Cyril Hoffman’s office was on the celestial seventh floor at Headquarters, but not on the fashionable side that looked out over the trees toward the Potomac. That view was afforded to the director and his deputies for operations and analysis, but not to the humble cleanup man, the associate deputy director, the one who kept the place running while the high-flyers and the A-students were off taking credit. His office looked the other way, toward the cafeteria and the dull façade of the new Headquarters building and beyond to the acres of parking lots, cutely named in bright colors: blue, green, yellow, purple.

  Hoffman gorged on his unfashionableness and indispensability. He knew the real secrets that kept the place running—where the money flowed, how the safe houses were acquired, where the air assets were sheltered, how their tail numbers were disguised. He understood what his flamboyant relatives in the agency had never realized: Power was not one big thing, but an accumulation of little things.

  This was a good day for Hoffman. The systems that he and Sophie Marx had set in motion to track their quarry had worked. For as Hoffman liked to say: Finding a needle in a haystack was not as hard as it sounded, if you had a thread tied to the needle. It was a matter of fusing the lookers and the finders—or, in intelligence parlance, the analysts and the operators. Hoffman had launched this process of location and discovery when he received the operational plan from Marx in Belgium.

  This CIA did many things wrong, but it understood this humble job of identifying targets. The targeters were not the “chosen ones” from the Clandestine Service, or “knuckle-draggers” from Ground Branch, but Hoffman’s people, the nerds and geeks in the Science and Technology Directorate who thought up the gadgets, the clods in Support who put them in the right places, and the analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence who figured out what the information meant.

  Every day, teams of analysts prepared lists for the Joint Special Operations Command. They could map a country’s entire telephone network, and overlay the patterns of who had called whom until the Al-Qaeda pockets glowed like Christmas tree lights; they could find the location of a particular cellular handset “of interest” down to the meter, and once they had located the target, they could track it with persistent surveillance and strike when the moment was opportune.

  For a few deadly weeks, this process of discovery had eluded the agency because it lacked the right coordinates to program into this architecture of discovery. But now the pieces had combined. The email message from “George White” at Yahoo was monitored instantly through a Yahoo server in the United States. It had taken a little longer to locate the computer in Karachi where the message had originated, but soon enough they had it, and the Information Operations Center in Langley had been able to monitor other messages being sent to and from that computer. Calls to U.S. cell phones were harder to track because of legal limitations, but the rest was easy.

  When the analysts called Hoffman to report that they had identified their target, he knew that it was essential to take action to remove this target as quickly as possible, but also in an appropriate way. He roused his CIA colleagues in Karachi, Islamabad and Dubai. He alerted the JSOC liaison at Headquarters to get military assets ready. He had one more essential call, but it could wait a few minutes. First, he wanted to reward himself for his unsung mastery.

  He sent his secretary down to the cafeteria to purchase a cup of soft-serve ice cream, a chocolate and vanilla swirl. Some men, when they want to celebrate, might do something reckless—buy themselves a night with a fancy hooker, or get fall-down drunk in public. But Hoffman’s pleasures were gentler. When the ice cream arrived, he took from his desk a package of oatmeal cookies and crumbled one on top of the ice cream, to add a crunchy texture to the cool on his tongue.

  When he finished his ice cream, Hoffman placed the call to Sophie Marx in Belgium. She was still at the villa on the edge of the NATO compound, awaiting approval to travel to Dubai. She had been dozing, allowing herself the pleasure of an afternoon nap, but she braced up when she heard the voice on the other end of the line.

  “We’ve got him,” said Hoffman. “You can unpack your bag and relax.”

  She was speechless for a moment. When you’ve wanted something badly, it’s hard to believe that it has really happened.

  “Thank God,” she said. “Who the hell is he?”

  “He’s a Pakistani computer scientist named Omar al-Wazir. The analysts are still assembling the file, but from what we know he’s a Pashtun, some kind of a computer genius. He travels all over. He’s in Karachi now,
working out of one of the universities there, but he’s based at the National University of Science and Technology in Islamabad. I don’t think you’re in his sights anymore. His main concern right now would be staying alive, I would think.”

  “Can we grab him? I want this guy in a box.”

  “I don’t think capture would be the right solution here. We’re doing a little of this and that. The consulate sent a team last night to the university. Surveillance-plus, shall we say. Islamabad station found another spot where he stayed in the past and sent a team there. We fired a few warning shots, you might say.”

  “Have you told the Paks?”

  “Goodness, no. I make it a rule never to tell General Malik anything unless it’s for the purpose of deceiving him. That’s the way he treats me, invariably. I will have to tell him something, sooner or later. We need help in dismantling the good Dr. Omar’s underground network. We can’t kill them all ourselves.”

  “What have you got on the network?”

  “We have identified two people in Dubai, thanks to his messages. The UAE will arrest them at dawn. We’re analyzing old message traffic, from Professor al-Wazir and anybody he has touched. Each time we get a good name, we will take them down.”

  “You are the ayatollah, Mr. Hoffman.”

  “Thank you, but I haven’t told you the most interesting part. We have been running checks on Dr. Omar’s contacts with Americans, and guess who turns up in our first run-through? It’s a bit upsetting, I have to warn you.”

  She knew the answer. She felt as if she had known it for days, maybe weeks.

  “Jeff Gertz,” she muttered.

  “Clever girl! How did you know, pray tell?”

  “It had to be him. From what Joseph Sabah told me about the consultants, I figured there must have been contact between Gertz and the Pakistani. I just didn’t want it to be true.”

  “Well, believe it,” said Hoffman. “Jeffrey has stepped on a rather large turd, I’m afraid.”

  “What have you got on him?”

  “Not much as yet. The analysts have just started looking. But there were regular chats, it seems. This is rather sensitive, as you can imagine. It’s embarrassing for us; the White House, too. But we’ll pry it loose, and then take a look at it. The White House will want to limit damage, no doubt, and I’m sure they will understand better the case for strengthening the agency that I have been making on behalf of the director.”

  “Where is Jeff now? Is he still in L.A.?”

  “Heavens, no. He closed that operation down, kaput. Your beloved office has probably been turned into a tanning spa or a manicure salon. Jeffrey is on the move, tidying up this, shutting down that. And no wonder. Last I heard, he was on his way to Britain.”

  “That’s my destination, too, Mr. Hoffman. Now that we have our man al-Wazir, I want to go back to London. I left all my things there. I’m sick of wearing the same clothes. And honestly, I’m worried about Tom Perkins. I want to see if there’s some way to talk with him. Maybe I can help him out. Do I have your permission?”

  “I don’t think you need my permission, actually. It’s not really clear who you work for. But I would never want to separate a lady from her wardrobe for too long. And if you’re going to London, perhaps I’ll just come along, too. We can have a reunion, what?”

  “A cast party,” she said. “Like on the night when they close down a show.”

  “Not at all, my dear. This show has a way still to run. Just a few cast changes.”

  39

  LONDON

  The Metropolitan Police took Thomas Perkins first to a holding cell at the West End Central Station. It was on Savile Row, a few doors away from Perkins’s tailor, as it happened. The station was a flat brick box, constructed in the bland, suppressed style of British public buildings of the 1960s and ’70s when there never seemed enough money to decorate a façade or build a proper-sized room. The police held Perkins overnight in the lockup downstairs, not sure what to do with him. There was high-level interest in the case, not just from the Serious Fraud Office, but from a young man who claimed to represent the Foreign Office and camped out in the squad room with the sergeant on duty.

  That first evening the superintendant’s office at New Scotland Yard issued a directive saying that the new prisoner at West End Station was a security risk. The order didn’t specify whether the risk was to others or to the prisoner himself, but an extra detail arrived at the lockup to keep an eye on him. The security officers were mum about who had dispatched them, but the sergeant on duty was told by one of his mates at headquarters that they were from the counterterrorism command known as SO15. They established a cordon around the station and banned parking on upper Savile Row and the adjoining Boyle Street.

  Perkins himself was quite content. He ate a hearty dinner of spaghetti and meat sauce, and tried to converse with the other two over-night prisoners in the lockup. That was not productive, since both had been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. The first was raving piss-drunk and the second passed out.

  After thirty-six hours, Perkins was moved on order of the crown prosecutor to an old Victorian-era prison in North London called Pentonville. This was a much bigger and more imposing establishment, built in Victorian times as a model penal institution. Its entrance was a creamy white façade that might have belonged to a Georgian townhouse; inside were facilities for fitness, wellness and the modern range of therapies. A plaque outside the gate noted that inmates over the years had included such luminaries as Oscar Wilde and Boy George.

  Perkins was nervous at first when they put him in the police transfer van, worrying that the CIA might be planning some form of secret extradition. But through the barred windows he saw that the van was not moving west, toward Heathrow, but north, past King’s Cross and St. Pancras stations and up Caledonia Road toward Islington.

  The prison warden, a tall man with a long nose and fringe of white hair, greeted Perkins personally and issued him a set of gray coveralls. He was assigned a cell in A-wing, where new arrivals were housed. But after an hour, an order came that he should be segregated from other prisoners, so he was moved to an empty corridor of D-wing, which was reserved for “enhanced” prisoners who were thought to be nonviolent. They gave Perkins his own television set and a stack of back issues of a celebrity magazine called OK! that featured pictures of big-breasted actresses and members of the royal family.

  Perkins’s lawyer from Washington, Vincent Tarullo, came to visit him the first afternoon he was at Pentonville. He was accompanied by the dough-faced British solicitor who had been negotiating with the prosecutors. They were given an interview room in the entrance wing, near the warden’s office. Tarullo was a big man who usually walked jauntily on the balls of his feet, but today his body was slumped. His eyes were rimmed with fatigue from his fruitless efforts on two sides of the Atlantic to secure his client’s release.

  The attorneys were seated at a wooden table when the guards brought in Perkins, who was smiling and looking relaxed. Tarullo had an unlit cigar in his mouth, which one of the guards told him to put away.

  “Hi, Vince,” said Perkins. “You look absolutely awful. That must be my fault. Sorry about that.”

  “What are you so cheery about? You are in very deep shit, my friend.”

  “I like it here. I get three meals a day and my own toilet and a nice bed. I haven’t slept so well in months, actually. You should try it.”

  “Don’t get used to it. I am busting you out of here, whether you like it or not. I brought along Mr. Chumley, here, who will be filing motions and petitions.”

  “Gormley,” said the solicitor. “My name is Gormley.”

  ‘I have a question, before we go any further,” said Perkins. “Did you find Anthony Cronin?”

  Tarullo shook his head.

  “Jesus, Vince! The last time we talked I told you to squeeze everyone you knew until you found the guy. He’s the one who got me into this. He’s the way out.”

  Taru
llo sighed. He shrugged; he took his cigar out of his breast pocket, put it in his mouth again and then laid it down on the table between himself and his client.

  “There is no Anthony Cronin, at least nobody who matches your description. I turned the government upside down trying to find him. Called in every chit I had, with the agency and the bureau, too. I paid consulting fees to two former chiefs of the CIA station in New York. I even paid some dope to look at the membership roster of the Athenian Club. Sorry. No such person.”

  “Of course there is. I talked to him, repeatedly. We signed papers. We set up joint accounts at FBS in Geneva. Anthony Cronin was my freaking business partner.”

  “It’s a false name, brother. Sorry to break it to you, but they do that. Whoever he is, he’s gone with the wind.”

  “Then have the agency find the person who was using that cover.”

  “I tried that. They claim there was no such operation. No Cronin, nobody with that work name, no connection with Alphabet Capital. Nothing.”

  “But that’s bullshit, Vince. These people are paid to lie.”

  “Maybe so, but they’ve been lying to everyone in town, in that case, because nobody knows shit about any of this. I even went to the congressional committees—that’s how much I love you. I got one of my buddies on the House side who is the ranking member, a gentleman who owes me a favor, owes me his fucking seat, to be honest. He has all the clearances. He went up to the vault and asked to see all the covert-action findings and proprietary operations involving U.S. financial companies overseas. They did a special search for him, and he didn’t get diddly squat. It’s not there.”

  Perkins pounded the table, causing the cigar to roll toward the edge, where Tarullo caught it.

  “Those fuckers! They are squeezing me, Vince. I’m the fall guy. They’re closing out the operation they were running through my firm, and now they are taking me out, too. They’re finished with whatever they were doing. I’m expendable.”