Bloodmoney by David Ignatius

who think they are God’s assassins.”
    The old man nodded sadly.
    “But what I do not know is how these miscreants learned that the American agent was coming. And I am wondering, Azim Khan, I will not play the rabbit with you, I am wondering if it was you who told these miscreants about your meeting. Or your nephew, perhaps it was him.”
    “No, sir. We did not say a word. Why would we do that? I am not a greedy man. But now my two million dollars has gone. I do not have it. You can turn over every stone from here to Bannu, but you will not find it because I never got it. And the ten million more that they promised, surely that is gone, too. How will I get that now, General? I cannot.”
    General Malik had taken his chin in his hand, which was something that he did when he was pondering a question and did not have the answer.
    “So how did the miscreants know of the meeting, Azim Khan, if you did not tell them?”
    “Sir, there are secrets and there are mysteries, and this is a mystery. It is a problem for the Americans. They are leaving footprints that cannot be seen. But someone is tracking them, just the same.”

    General Malik said his goodbyes. He left presents, as well, gifts that he had brought that, although they were not two million dollars, still brought a deferential nod from the clan leader, and rented his loyalty for a season.
    The general got back in his two-seat Mashaq trainer and flew back toward Peshawar through the late afternoon. The summer clouds were forming to the east, hot and sticky, and the plane was buffeted like a shuttlecock, so that the pilot felt that he must apologize to his distinguished guest for the turbulence. But the general barely noticed the rough ride, for he was lost in his puzzle book.
    Where did the information come from that drove the American operations? That was what the general wondered, and it had bothered him more each year since September 11, as the Americans squeezed for more from Pakistan. He knew they had their agents, of course they did. The ISI tracked them, and usually it found them out. But this was something more delicate and evanescent. It was as if the Americans had found a window on the culture itself, so that they thought not just about this secret or that, but about the social glue that held the place together.
    Who could tell them such things, that was what troubled the general. Who would be smart and subtle enough to see the patterns and describe them to the Amriki ? If General Malik encountered a person with such a subtle mind, he would want to hire him for the ISI—unless he was a traitor, in which case he would kill him.
    General Malik had searched for such an agent, most diligently. He had conducted surveillance, made arrests, interrogated people in the most unpleasant ways, looking for the one who might be opening to American eyes the family secrets of Pakistan.
    The general had conducted what the services in the West described as “mole hunts.” But he did not like the word “mole.” It made these people sound cute and furry. He preferred to call them by the local slang, gungrat, which means “dung beetle.” For that was what they were, burrowing into the shit of the motherland and then scurrying away to the West. But if there was such a dung beetle, the general had never been able to find him.
    He was too smart, this one, too mindful of the ways of intelligence services, and the general had concluded that he must be a man who knew enough to erase his tracks even as he made them. He was out there, for a certainty, and as the little plane bumped over the last ridge of mountains and began its descent toward Peshawar, General Malik made a promise to himself that he would find this man someday, and punish him.

LONDON

    The sun was just coming up over Hyde Park when Thomas Perkins got off the phone with “Mr. Jones.” The first rays were white gold. From the top-floor study of Perkins’s house in Ennismore Gardens, he could look across the