Bloodmoney Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the Ethernet cable. He scrolled the news, and then opened the VPN connection to check his email from The Hit Parade in Los Angeles. They had mastered the art of digital camouflage. In the new service, your covert life existed in the cloud of the Internet, to be accessed whenever needed but never downloaded into the here and now.
    Sophie Marx didn’t have anything new for him. The meeting was still set for fourteen hundred the next afternoon. No change in the ops plan, no change in the security status, no change in the authorities or rules of engagement. Egan logged off and tried not to think about tomorrow. That meeting was in another space, beyond the vertiginous horizon.

    Howard Egan had come to Karachi to meet Hamid Akbar, a Pakistani banker who was a nominal client of Alphabet Capital. Anyone who read the emails they had been exchanging would see that Egan was there to promote a new Alphabet fund that invested in distressed real estate assets in North America and Europe. If anyone had asked questions, Egan would have referred them to Mr. Perkins, the chief executive officer of Alphabet Capital.
    The real story of Hamid Akbar was more complicated. Twelve years before, he had been recruited as an “asset” by the Central Intelligence Agency. He was spotted when he was an engineering student at the University of Baltimore, and formally pitched a year later, before he went home to Pakistan. He was a Pashtun, which caught the CIA’s interest, even back then.
    But Akbar had broken off contact with the agency soon after his return. He said that the relationship was insecure. The Pakistani security authorities would easily discover his covert connection, and they would imprison him. His CIA handler was sympathetic: He suggested that the agency might be in touch later, when he had cooled off, but for nearly a decade they had left the Pakistani alone.
    Then one day, roughly a year ago, Hamid Akbar had received a visit from an American who had initially introduced himself as an investment adviser, Howard Egan. Egan had proposed a different sort of relationship, with an American entity that had no name or formal existence. It was an offer so lucrative that the Pakistani could not refuse—dared not refuse—and so he had returned to the secret fold.
    Where did Akbar’s name come from? Gertz had him on a list of prospects; he never said how it was assembled. Gertz gave Egan a Pashtun proverb to share with Akbar at the first meeting: Awal zaan resto jahan. First yourself, then the universe. Gertz didn’t say where he got that gem, either.
    Akbar’s value as an asset lay in his family contacts. His uncle was a leader of one of the Darwesh Khel clans that ruled the western border. Like many tribal chiefs, this uncle had become a bit soft and citified, coasting along on rents and levies. The political officer of the South Waziristan agency took him for granted, and so did the Interior Ministry, the Frontier Corps and Inter-Services Intelligence. That made him an ideal target: He was an influential man whose value had been overlooked by others.
    “Uncle Azim” was the name Akbar used for his well-connected relative, or sometimes the honorific “Azim Khan.” At Egan’s request, the two Pakistanis had traveled to Abu Dhabi for a get-acquainted meeting. The American had outlined the financial benefits of a relationship; what Gertz told Egan to request in return was help in pacifying the border areas. Uncle Azim asked for several months to think about it.
    And now it was time. Akbar was to arrange a rendezvous spot. Gifts would be exchanged.
    Jeff Gertz loved the operation. It was a demonstration of what his new organization could do. Some of the old-timers who had joined The Hit Parade worried that the plan was half-baked, but Gertz insisted that it was solid. Somebody just needed to deliver the loot. He told his colleagues the same bromide he had offered to Egan: The thing about winners is that they know how to win.
    Gertz was