Read Bloodmoney for Free Online Page A

site. He just vanished. Overhead surveillance didn’t have a fix on him in the jumble of traffic. Headquarters confirmed from the reconnaissance log later that he had never arrived at the rendezvous. His contact, Azim Khan, had been there waiting for him, right where he was supposed to be in Baldia Town. Overhead showed the Pakistani arriving a little before nine. He waited until after eleven and then left in his chauffeured Mercedes back to his villa in a posh suburb. What did it mean that the Darwesh Khel leader had shown up for the meet? Nobody could be sure then, or for a while after.
    They tried to find Egan all night and into the next day. They mobilized a paramilitary rescue team from Bagram, ready to shoot the shit out of everyone in the effort to find him, but they never got close. The Pakistani police were given the GPS coordinates from his BlackBerry, which indicated that he was in Ittehad Town north of the city center. The police moved quickly into that raw neighborhood, but all they found was the phone. It had apparently been discarded on the run, thrown into a dumpster, where the police fished it out.
    They never found Egan’s body. It was just gone. That was all you could say. A photo surfaced on a jihadist website, showing a man strapped to a table. There was a cloth over his mouth, and you could see a hand holding an earthen jug, pouring a cascade of water down the man’s throat.
    They couldn’t be sure that it was Egan, or even an American. There was just a glimpse of one of his eyes, contorted by suffering and the instant of agony in which the picture was taken. He was dressed in an orange T-shirt. What you could see of the body were the marks from the cigarette burns and the gruesomely precise cuts of the hacksaw. People who saw the picture never forgot it.

STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA

    Jeffrey Gertz spent his last minutes of ignorance in his car, driving over the mountains to work from an appointment with his dentist in Beverly Hills. That was what made him late. The operations center hadn’t wanted to call him until they were sure they had a problem, what with the twelve-hour time difference from Pakistan. And then, when the ops center tried, they couldn’t reach him. So he didn’t get the news that Howard Egan was missing until he got to work. Gertz fired the watch officer later, as if it had been his fault.
    It was a June morning, the air so clear and fluffy it might have been run through the washer-dryer. Gertz steered his shiny red Corvette through the downward slope of Coldwater Canyon, chewing sugarless gum and listening to a military history audiobook on the car stereo. It was just past nine, and the sun was streaming into the San Fernando Valley. He was listening to An Army at Dawn , the first volume of Rick Atkinson’s history of World War II. When he was done, he would buy the second volume and listen to that, too. Like every warrior, he wanted a good war.
    The cassette ended as he neared Ventura Boulevard. The only sound in the car now was the air-conditioning and the murmur of traffic. Gertz let his mind wander. Maybe The Hit Parade needed a motto, he mused. Every successful organization had one, including secret organizations. “The invisibles: We deliver”…or: “The shadow service: Reinventing intelligence.” He thought about it, and wondered if maybe he should order up a secret logo, as well, with something spooky like a half-moon or a lightning bolt and no words, no explanation at all.
    Gertz had a face that was all angles: raised cheekbones; a firm chin; sharp eyes. He had started wearing a goatee a few years ago, to soften his appearance and make him look less like an Army Ranger. He had short brown hair, trimmed once a month by a stylist in Beverly Hills. He had stopped challenging colleagues to do push-ups on the office floor a few years before, but that was mainly because a superior had advised him it was offensive to women and would hurt his career.
    Gertz’s nickname had