The general headed off again, now in mufti. His frail car passed through the city center, past the knot of people gathered at the four-pillared front of the railway station, and then north toward the red rocks that framed the northern approach to the city. The driver turned off the main road, into a neighborhood that was largely Afghan refugees. For the Quetta police, this was no-man’s-land. But for the director general of the ISI, there was no such thing as a forbidden zone. The car zigged and zagged down several byways until it came to a rough-hewn mosque and next to it a walled compound shielding a rambling two-story villa.
General Malik called a number on his cell phone and spoke to an ISI case officer inside the villa, to advise that he had arrived. A metal gate swung open and the Hyundai turned into the compound and parked, while the gate was quickly closed and relocked. The general walked toward the villa, its rough concrete blocks topped by the rust-red protruding rods of the steel reinforcing bars.
The young ISI officer met the visitor at the threshold of the villa. He was dressed in the garb of Pashtun tribesmen: a turban around his head, a long vest, loose trousers billowing in the breeze. The general entered the building and was escorted into the salon. It was curtained against the midday sun, but in the low light the prize was visible: Seated on the couch was a fierce-looking young man, a warrior prince, he seemed, with a grizzly black beard and long hair under a white turban.
“Commander Hassan,” said the general, extending his hand. The young man took the general’s hand in both of his. There were no kisses on the cheeks; these were men who, but for the ritual hospitality of the meeting, might shoot each other.
The others retreated from the room, including the ISI case officer who had arranged the meeting, and even the young commander’s bodyguards, who were present with him always and everywhere. There remained just the distinguished Pakistani general, his mustache finely trimmed as always, and the fearsome tribal warrior.
“It is a pleasure to see you again,” said the general. “You have been busy. We hear about you. But we do not see you.”
The young fighter responded with appropriate reticence, by quoting a Pashtun saying. “Da khali daig ghag lor de,” he said, which means, “An empty vessel makes much noise.” This vessel, real and full, was silent.
General Malik answered in his own ritual phrases, proverbs rather than declarative sentences. To have done otherwise would have seemed barbaric.
“You are a mojahid, Commander Hassan. It is said that cowards cause harm to brave men, but clearly there are no cowards among you. It is said that fear and shame are father and son, but you do not know these emotions. You are from another family, I can see that.”
The young fighter bowed his head at the compliments and offered thanks to God for his success.
“Now I must ask you a question, Hassan. For that is part of why we talk, you and I, so that I can ask and you can tell.”
“Yes, badshah, I understand.” He paused then, and unwound his turban slowly, so that his long hair was free. It was rich and lustrous, even in the heat of the house. He swept it back from his face. He was a young lion, this one.
Hassan spoke another Pashtun phrase: “Wrori ba kawu hesab tar menza.” This one was unfamiliar to the general, so he asked what it meant. The young man translated into Urdu: “We will behave like brothers, but we shall know what is yours and what is mine.”
“So then I will ask: How is the American man, the one who disappeared in Karachi?”
“He is dead, General. He died several days ago.”
“Did he die badly?”
“Yes, General. He would not talk at first, so we had to use methods. Then it becomes hard. It must end.”
The general nodded. He had used torture himself, but he did not like it. He turned back to Commander Hassan.
“What did you learn from the American? I think he had many secrets, this one. Perhaps you can tell me.”
“Ah, badshah, we have our secrets, too. We cannot tell you everything. You are our enemy, sir, when you are not our friend. But I will tell you a little.”
The general put his hand on his heart. It was a dignified way to say that he was grateful.
“The American worked for the CIA. You know that. But it was a part of the CIA that was not the CIA. It was something new and evil. A new way to spread lies.”
“What was he doing here?” The general thought he knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it, just the same.
“He came with money, to give to a traitor from the Darwesh Khel: a soft Pashtun man, not a fighter. The American was going to bring him more money, and more money, until he had bought up as many of our people as were for sale. That was his mission. They know they are losing, you see. They want the war to be over, so they hope to buy peace. It is always this way with the gora.” They run up the hill, but they do not know how to get down.”
The general nodded. He waited for the young man to say more about Azim Khan, but he didn’t. Instead, he spat into a bowl beside his chair.
“Did the American confess how his organization operates?” asked the general.
“Yes, as much as he understood. It hides inside of businesses. It has a big headquarters. He said before he died that it was in Los Angeles, but how can we check? He pretended to work for a finance company in London. They sent him on his travels, as if he were one of them.”
“And will Al-Tawhid pursue other members of this CIA that is not a CIA?”
“Forever. We are not finished with the Americans, or with the Pakistanis who have been so misguided that they chose to help the Americans.”
The general didn’t take the bait. He nodded again, and then spoke more softly, so that the young warrior had to lean toward him to hear.
“I have one more question about this incident, Commander. Then we can talk of our other affairs. And my question is this: How did you know that the American was here in Pakistan? How did you know that he was working for this CIA that is not the CIA? That is a very big secret. How did you discover it?”
“This, sir, I cannot tell you.”
“Why is that, Brother Hassan? Is it because you do not trust me? For I tell you, this is the most important thing, what I have asked. I want you to answer me.”
“It is true that I do not trust you, badshah. But that is not the reason I will not tell you.”
“Why, then? When I have humbled myself and told you that I want this information especially, only for you to shame me in this way?”
“Because I do not know the answer. We have a friend who gives us this information. He is our teacher and guide. But how he obtains it, I do not know. Nor do I know his identity. We never see or hear him. We received an electronic message about the American in Karachi. We did not ask more questions. As we say in our Pashto language, Chi na kar, pa hagha the sa kar. When it is not your business, stay away.”
“Why does this mysterious guide help you, Commander Hassan?”
“I cannot say, General. Why does the scorpion sting when he is disturbed, or the wolf devour his prey? He has a reason, this man, but I do not know what it is. He is our ghost.”
General Malik reflected a moment. He sensed from the man’s demeanor that he was being truthful. The commander did not know this secret of how the American’s deep-cover identity had been cracked, but perhaps he could find out. And if not him, perhaps it could be discovered by one of the ISI’s other contacts in the brotherhood of Al-Tawhid.
“So what did you learn from this experience with the American, Commander Hassan? Not the little things that we have discussed, but the big thing?”
Hassan thought a moment. He ran his fingers through that long hair once more, and then spoke in his Pashto tongue.
“Da maar bachai maar wee. This is what I know: The baby of a snake is also a snake. This new CIA is worse than the old one. Its money is more dangerous than its rockets. For that, General, you must beware.”
“Grant me another request, then, so that I will not leave with anger. For m
any years I have heard in these lands of ‘the professor.’ But this man is unknown to me.”
The commander looked at his visitor suspiciously. “I do not know who you are talking about.”
“Yes, you do. We have listened to your talk. Some call him the professor. Others call him ustad. We think maybe he talks with the Americans, maybe he works against them. We hear his footsteps, but we cannot find him. Where is he?”
The Pashtun man emitted a low guttural sound that might have been a snort or a laugh.
“Nowhere, sir. That is where he is. He does not exist. You have been dreaming, I think. There is no such man.”
The conversation continued in the Quetta hideaway for another hour, as the two men exchanged information and offered reciprocal promises. The general wanted help in planning operations against other Muslim groups, ones that Al-Tawhid despised. These other groups targeted their operations against the “little enemy,” the Pakistani army and state, rather than the “big enemy” of America. Commander Hassan shared information. Of course he did. That is how people survive in the East. For it is said: Friends are serpents; they bite.
General Malik did not offer information himself. He left that to his ISI case officer, a pudgy colonel whom he summoned late in the meeting. This man did what could not be done.
While General Malik paid a visit to the toilet, the colonel provided names, cell phone numbers, ISI contacts who would be helpful. He advised which villages in the tribal areas to stay away from, because they were on the American target list. He handed over new communications devices, whose frequencies were not tracked by the Americans. He was helpful, in all the big and little ways that are part of the secret world.
General Malik flew back to Rawalpindi that night in the cold, throbbing body of the C-130. He wanted to go to sleep, for he was tired after the long day, but he found that he could not. He was turning over in his mind the information that Commander Hassan had provided. More than that, he was thinking about the secrets the young warrior had not divulged.
But General Malik understood: Somehow, the brotherhood of Al-Tawhid had found its way inside the American compartment. It knew when a secret agent arrived in Karachi and whom he met. These simple men in their shalwar khamiz had not cracked the American code themselves, but someone had helped them. How was this possible? General Malik did not know the answer yet, but he set his mind to discovering it. What he would do with this secret, once he learned it, he did not know.
The plane bucked and shuddered as it skirted the summer thunderstorms of the Indus Valley. The general was somewhere else. He was thinking of his biggest unsolved mystery from his early days as director general. It dated back to 2005. The Americans were working their antiterrorism traces very hard in those days. They were pressing everywhere for information that they could load into their computers—to follow money flows and communications links and all the other strings that would lead them to Al-Qaeda. Of course, the Pakistanis were trying to help officially, just enough, but they had held something back, too.
It had become obvious to General Malik in the course of 2005 that the Americans had obtained the identities and communications protocols of several of the ISI’s most sensitive contacts with Al-Qaeda. This was evident because the Americans began targeting these men, and eventually killed two of them. What troubled the general was that only someone with an intimate knowledge of ISI tradecraft and Pakistani dialects could have uncovered these links. They had been disguised by codes within codes. That was when the general had begun to worry that a gungrat, a dung beetle, was loose in his stores of information.
General Malik had paid an unofficial visit that year to Washington, where he had called on the man in the CIA he knew best, a rotund and genial officer named Cyril Hoffman, who always understood more than he said.
“Are you inside our tent, Cyril?” the general had asked.
They were sitting in the CIA cafeteria, surrounded by signs warning agency personnel that a foreign national was in the area. Hoffman had leaned toward his Pakistani friend.
“Of course we are,” the American had whispered, his voice as soft as spun sugar. “But you can’t see us, and you can’t feel us, and you’ll never find us. So my advice is to stop worrying about it. You’ll only make yourself unhappy if you go poking around.”
Perhaps that had been the right advice, but General Malik had launched his investigations anyway, silently at first, and then more openly. He was looking for a Pakistani who understood signals intelligence, someone with the intellectual creativity to disassemble an elaborate puzzle. They called in a dozen suspects—military and intelligence officers, a senior executive of the leading wireless telephone company, several professors, a retired ISI officer who had been living in India. The investigators ruined the careers of most of these people, with their rough and stupid questions, but it couldn’t be helped.
Eventually, sometime in 2007, General Malik had given up, just as Cyril Hoffman had advised. The Pakistani leak seemed to have dried up, that was part of it. But Malik had concluded that Hoffman was right. This inside source was too well hidden. Perhaps the truth about this source would emerge one day, on its own, but tearing up the garden to try to find him was unwise.
Malik’s own private name for the case was “the Cheshire Cat,” because he could see the grin, but not the cat itself. It made him mad, still, to think that the Americans could vex him.
When he arrived at his office in Islamabad the next morning, General Malik summoned Homer Barkin, the CIA station chief. He told him that in four hours the Foreign Ministry would send a formal statement to the embassy declaring him and two other members of the CIA station at the embassy persona non grata because of their intelligence activities. They would be ordered to leave the country. He advised Barkin to leave that afternoon, to avoid unpleasant consequences at the airport.
Barkin was bewildered. He had met in this office with the ISI chief only a few days before. They had talked of friendship and trust.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked. “What is this all about?”
General Malik shook his head. He had a distant, wistful smile, as if remembering better times.
“It seems that you really do not know.”
“Know what?” asked the station chief.
“My poor, unfortunate Mr. Barkin: Your expulsion is a message to whoever in Washington thinks it is acceptable to send secret warriors with bribes into the territory of an ally. If it is true that you did not know about this operation in Karachi, then that is the greatest outrage. I suggest that you resign, sir, when you get home. These actions will have consequences. That is what you should tell Langley.”
Barkin, still astonished, sputtered a response.
“I protest, on behalf of my agency. We have done nothing wrong.”
“Thank you, Mr. Barkin. This is nothing personal, I assure you. Now you should leave. I fear that Pakistanis will be very angry. I would not be surprised if there were demonstrators tomorrow at the entrance to the diplomatic zone near your embassy, expressing their outrage. The embassy should take precautions, I think.”
12
DUBAI
The Dubai Airport had a hungover, half-deserted look when Marx arrived. She made her way past bleary-eyed South Asians in transit, who were wandering up and down the corridor like weary birds looking for a place to alight. The customs hall was nearly empty, except for the Filipina “Marhaba” girls who were arrayed to greet any VIP visitors who chanced to arrive. The city beyond had the look of a new luxury car, its seats still wrapped in cellophane, standing in an empty showroom with no customers in sight.
“Things are looking up in Dubai,” insisted her taxi driver, an Indian from Kerala. He offered to show her an apartment that she could sublet, half price, no, quarter price. Marx took his card and then told him to be quiet. As the driver weaved along the airport road across the new downtown, they passed a dozen dazzling apartment towers that appeared to have few if any tenants. Would anyone ever
live in them, or would they gradually decay into ruins of chrome and glass, with blowing sand caking the entryways and the elevators creaking to a halt for lack of maintenance?
Marx checked in to her hotel, a vast place made to look like the architect’s fantasy of an ancient Arab city. It had been immaculate a few years before, every surface of brass and wood polished and sparkling, so that if you rubbed one of the urns that decorated the lobby, you might expect Aladdin himself to pop out. Now the mahogany furniture was losing its stain, and some of the fancy carpets were discoloring from the sun and the foot traffic.
Marx loved Dubai the way earlier generations of intelligence officers had embraced Beirut or Hong Kong. It was a city that existed at the margins, between East and West, between the imaginary and the real. Plus it had good air service, and you could drink the water. She liked it even more now that the bubble had burst and the place had come back to earth. The hotels that were never full, and the parking lots that were still sprinkled with Mercedes cars that had been abandoned when their owners couldn’t make the payments.
She showered and changed, and lay on her bed for a while staring at the ceiling, thinking about how she would handle the interrogation of Hamid Akbar. An hour before the meeting, she rode the elevator down to the ground floor, which opened onto one of the ersatz canals that linked the buildings in this imaginary Medina. She took a seat in the stern of a dhow that served as a water taxi; behind her loomed the towers of a make-believe Arabian fortress.
She was dressed in a black pants suit, her hair pulled tight in bun, sunglasses masking the fatigue in her eyes. She turned her head toward the breeze blowing in off the Gulf. A gust caught a few strands of hair and pulled them loose. She had taken a pill to sleep on the long flight, and then another. Now that she had arrived, she felt groggy. She gave her cheek a gentle slap to wake herself up. With the sting came a bit of color.
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