Bloodmoney by David Ignatius Page B

through the night, hoping that Egan might make contact. She assembled everything about Egan she could find—his travels, his contact reports, his cover documentation, his roster of agents. She already understood the smooth edges of the puzzle that formed the border of his operational life. Now she would start looking for the jagged ones.
    Gertz’s secretary, a refugee from Headquarters named Pat Waters, rolled her eyes when she saw that Marx had temporarily joined the front office. She knew enough about her boss’s predatory social life to be suspicious of the new arrival. Marx ignored the secretary until she balked at a request for access to Hamid Akbar’s 201 personnel file.
    “You’re not cleared for that,” Waters said brusquely.
    Marx asked again, as if she hadn’t heard the first time, and when she got the same answer she thought of summoning Gertz for help. But that was exactly what the secretary would expect her to do. She asked Waters to step into her small office, little bigger than a closet.
    “I am here on Mr. Gertz’s orders,” she said. “I don’t have a lot of time. I’ll ask you again, politely, and if that doesn’t work, this will get unpleasant for you in a hurry.”
    Waters didn’t answer, but she nodded her head in submission. Marx was good that way: She wasn’t a shouter, but she usually got what she wanted.
    The watch officer, Julian, came in regularly with reports from the operations center. A flash cable had arrived when the Pakistani police found Egan’s BlackBerry. The Paks reluctantly agreed to turn over the phone for forensic analysis. When it arrived at the consulate, the SIM card was missing.
    The FBI had a team based in Islamabad, so two agents flew to Karachi to take apart the BlackBerry, along with the local representative from the NSA. They were able to document what everyone assumed: Egan’s last communication had been his email message to The Hit Parade with the coordinates of his meeting in Baldia Town. After that, silence. The GPS signal showed movements that were consistent with a normal surveillance detection run until just after eight p.m., when he stopped, or was stopped, in Rasheedabad, a district north of downtown on the way to Baldia. The GPS signal stayed there for about twenty minutes, moving a hundred yards north, then fifty yards west.
    Rasheedabad seemed to be where disaster had struck. Then the GPS track moved rapidly north toward Ittehad Town, where it stopped dead around nine. That turned out to be the dumpster, where the Pakistani police found the phone.

    Gertz’s first priority was to find the taxi driver. Egan would have taken a cab to the meet, probably a string of them. You didn’t need special intelligence to find a taxi, you just needed a lot of cops. He had Steve Rossetti work it through Langley, after his initial conversation with Hoffman.
    Headquarters sent its man in Karachi a photo of Egan that the consulate could show to the cabbies. The Pakistani police were already pulling in drivers. Once they had a photo to work with, it became routine police work.
    The cops quickly located two of the taxis that Egan had taken that night. The drivers confirmed that they’d carried the passenger in the photo. A third driver hauled into the dragnet said he had seen the gora , the white man in the photograph, getting into a red Toyota sedan. He remembered it because the passenger had sat in the backseat for a long while, as if he was thinking of getting out, and the driver had hoped maybe he could get the fare instead. But the Toyota had driven away.
    Late in the afternoon a call came in from Headquarters. The Pakistani police had found the red Toyota, at three a.m. Karachi time. It was in Orangi, a district south of Ittehad Town where the BlackBerry had been found. The driver’s throat had been slit. The police guessed the driver had been dead about five hours, since that was about the time Egan went missing.

    Gertz called Thomas Perkins late that