Bloodmoney by David Ignatius Page A

Gertz was on his way somewhere else, but he wasn’t.
    “Am I interrupting something?” he asked.
    “Yes, of course. I mean, that’s your job, isn’t it?”
    He laughed and closed the door.
    Marx stood up, shook the boss’s hand and then sat back down.
    “I’m sorry about Howard Egan,” she said, putting the file folder on top of the bag of chips. “That was my case. I should have kept a tighter watch on him. Is there any more news?”
    “The Paks just found his BlackBerry in a dumpster. If he’s lucky, he’s dead by now.”
    She put her hand over her mouth, and there was a slight tremor of her head, as if she had just hit a blast of cold air. She had made her own runs into dangerous places. She recovered her composure quickly.
    “Let me know how I can help,” she said. “I feel like this is my screwup, partly.”
    “That’s why I’m here, actually,” said Gertz. “I have a problem, and it’s about to become your problem.”
    Her eyes flashed. She wanted to be in the game, but she knew not to rush.
    “What do you have in mind?”
    “I need someone to investigate how this happened, and in a hurry. Otherwise, Headquarters will take it over. They’ll send their own counterintelligence team, and damage-assessment team, and finger-pointing team. I don’t want them ruining what we’ve been trying to build here.”
    He was leaning toward her, imploring but also demanding. With his lean face and goatee, and that hungry look in his eye, he looked in this moment like a trumpeter who needed a fix.
    “And you’re free to travel, right?” Gertz continued. “I mean, you don’t have a ball and chain here.”
    Marx understood that the boss was asking, obliquely, about her sex life. She had been married briefly seven years before, to another case officer, but as with so many tandem couples, the romantic attachment was to the work, not the other person. She was always in Lebanon or Addis; he was always in Nicaragua; they were always nowhere.
    “I’m free to travel,” she said.
    “So let’s do it. Be my person. Make this case.”
    She took off the reading glasses and folded her hands in front of her. Gertz was waiting for an answer, but she was still thinking.
    “So you want me to get there first. And clean up the mess before Headquarters can make trouble. Is that it, more or less?”
    He didn’t answer directly.
    “I need someone I can trust,” he said. “You’re it. What do you say?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “What you mean?” His voice was rising. “One of your colleagues has just disappeared in a garbage dump in Pakistan, and I’m asking you to help and you refuse? Are you kidding me? Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work.”
    “I’m not refusing. Lower your voice. You’re shouting.”
    “I want an answer.”
    “You’re asking me to be your fixer. That’s not my job. You just hired me to run counterintelligence for you. Finding out what happened to Howard Egan is what I’m supposed to do. It’s not a favor to my boss. Even a boss I like and respect.”
    Gertz smiled. She was fighting for her own space. That wasn’t a bad thing.
    “Let’s start again. I need you to begin a confidential CI investigation of what happened to Howard Egan. You can have access to anything you want in the files, here or anywhere else. You can go anywhere you like. I want you to do it right. But you need to do it fast, or we are going to get blown out of the water. Sorry if I sounded like a jerk before. It’s my nature. So what do you say, now that I’m asking nicely?”
    “I say yes. When do I start?”
    “Right now. Come upstairs in fifteen minutes and I’ll show you what we’ve got. Then I’ll take you to lunch.”
    “Sorry, but I can’t make lunch.”
    “Oh, yeah? Why not?”
    “Because I’ll be eating at my desk, reading the files you’re going to give me.”

    Sophie Marx moved upstairs to a small office next to Gertz’s that had been cleared for her. They worked all that day and