Bloodmoney by David Ignatius

suspicious. Avoid unnecessary travel. If you are in a denied area, get out.
    It was a big distribution list, more than a hundred people. The cable didn’t explain what was wrong, which spooked people in the field. But Gertz was such an operator that people were never sure what he was doing, even when he told them directly. They assumed that if there was trouble, he would take care of it, one way or another.
    Gertz believed in lying; that was part of his special aptitude for the job. That was the message of the Chinese quotation framed behind his desk under the big picture of the Twin Towers. It was a passage from Sun Tzu that he had studied after September 11. The translation wasn’t written down, but Gertz had memorized it: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
    Over the past year, Gertz had made a dozen copies of this plaque and given them to trusted colleagues. It was his version of the “commander’s coin” that general officers pressed into the hands of the troops. He wanted his people—his new warriors—to understand that lying was absolutely essential to their work. It wasn’t an unfortunate consequence of the job. It was the job.

    Gertz made one more decision that morning, which would affect the future more than he could have realized. He knew that he needed to begin planning for the worst. Hoffman had fired a warning shot, on behalf of the secret barons who managed what was left of Headquarters. The questions would come at them, even if only a few people knew enough to ask. Why had Egan been grabbed? How had his identity been compromised? What else might have come unstuck?
    Gertz needed help answering these questions, but only from someone who would be reliable. He trusted almost nobody outside The Hit Parade, and few people inside, either. His principal deputies all were potential rivals, loyal to him in the moment, but ready to switch sides. His operations chief, Rossetti, was a plant from Headquarters. His general counsel spent his time worrying about the inspector general back in Langley. His Support chief, Tommy Arden, was loyal, but he was a mouse.
    He went down the list of section chiefs and paused when he got to the name of Sophie Marx. She had just been promoted to her counterintelligence job, but she was smart and aggressive, and she knew the Howard Egan case. What stuck in Gertz’s mind was something else: She had done him a favor several months before. An auditor was visiting from Headquarters, and he had taken Marx off site and asked her a lot of questions about The Hit Parade’s operations. Marx had spun him, and then she had come to see Gertz later to give him a report.
    Gertz had asked her why she ratted out the Headquarters man.
    “He asked too many questions,” Marx had said, “and he was an asshole about it.”
    Gertz had liked that. He knew the stories about her operations in Beirut, and how she had escaped an ambush once in Addis. Marx was lucky, that counted for something. And she was still in her mid-thirties, young enough to take risks. The book on her was that she was headstrong and independent. But Gertz thought he could handle her in a jam.

STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

    Sophie Marx was reading a case file when Jeffrey Gertz peered into her office just before noon. Her glasses were perched on the tip of her nose, and her black hair was gathered in a loose ponytail. She looked up at him briefly, awkwardly, and then back at the file. Gertz had never visited her office before. It was messy. The Thelma and Louise poster was askew. On the wall was a framed photograph of two people in sandals and woolly hair, hugging her at her Princeton graduation: The longhairs were her eccentric parents, in from the islands. On her desk was an open bag of SunChips.
    Marx assumed that