“Well, I’m picking up echoes in our information. What we are giving the two sides is evidently volatile enough that it’s getting amplified and driving the debate within their own systems. There’s something of a positive feedback loop in operation. What they know about each other, or what they think they know about each other, affects what they do and the choices they make, which in turn influences what they think about each other. The program was supposed to promote transparency and information exchange in the service of peaceful dispute resolution, but it’s having the opposite effect. It’s making the leadership increasingly paranoid and trigger-happy.”
“I’m seeing the same thing as Shoe is in Islamabad. Our intel is dominating the discussion and reinforcing the hardliners. The program needs to be scaled back in some way, because it’s starting to warp the decision-making process in ways we don’t entirely understand.”
“I’ll raise it upstairs,” Sam promised. “But don’t get your hopes up. Those programs are managed by the director of National Intelligence, not Argus.”
Dorothy stuck her head into the conference room.
“Spears’s office called,” she announced. “He’d like to see you, Sam.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
“Tell Patty I’m on my way.”
• • •
Sam took the elevator to the fourth floor where Argus CEO Garret Spears had his office. The fourth floor was more lavishly decorated than the others. The elevator opened onto a small atrium with skylights and tropical plants growing in oversize pots. A short corridor leading toward the north side of the building ended in a T junction. To the left was Spears’s office. To the right, a massive metal door with a cipher lock mounted on the center. As Sam reached the turn, a large man with acne-scarred skin was just coming out from behind the steel door. Sam recognized him as Spears’s special assistant, John Weeder.
There was a sizeable group of men with an unmistakable military bearing who worked behind that particular door and who seemed to have no particular responsibilities. The analysts referred to them as the “Morlocks.” Sam had not been read into the program, but he had a pretty good idea of what they were doing behind the door. Argus’s contract with the Agency was for the collection and analysis of intelligence information on South Asia. Sam’s team handled the analysis. The Morlocks, he suspected, were responsible for collection. And Weeder, he believed, was the king of the Morlocks.
Weeder did not so much as register Sam’s existence as he walked past him toward the elevator. His hair was not quite long enough to reach his collar, and Sam could see the tattoo on his neck, a small frog holding a trident. There was something unsettling about the man. Sam felt a slight chill as Weeder passed him, almost as if he moved inside an envelope of cold air. Sam turned left toward the office of the CEO.
• • •
Spears’s secretary, Patty Delaney, was a no-nonsense Washington veteran who was unquestionably loyal to the CEO. They had been together a long time, going back to Spears’s years in the navy. She kept Sam waiting for five minutes while the CEO finished up a phone call. Patty was not a big believer in idle chitchat, and she spent the time managing e-mails while Sam leafed through a copy of the salmon pink Financial Times from the side table and mentally rehearsed his apology. Argus had not been mentioned in Kamen’s column, but the people in town who mattered would know.
“Okay,” Patty said. “He’s off. You can go in.”
“Good morning, Sam,” Garret Spears said, rising from his desk to shake hands after Patty had ushered Sam into the room.
“Morning, Garret. Welcome back.” Spears had been away for the better part of the last two weeks on a business trip to Europe and the Middle East. It was a reminder for Sam that South Asia was only a small part of what Argus Systems did on behalf of the American government.
They sat in stylish black leather chairs that were paired with a matching couch and clustered around a sleek glass-and-bronze coffee table. The only sign that this was not the office of a Wall Street executive was the two-foot-square stainless-steel sliding door inset into one wall. This was a burn chute. At the end of the workday, Spears could toss his classified papers down the chute where industrial-strength shredders would chew them up before feeding the material into a smokeless furnace that reached temperatures well above the famed minimum of Fahrenheit 451. Every unit in the building had one. Spears had his own.
Without being asked, Patty brought in a silver tray with a carafe of coffee and a pair of mugs emblazoned with the Argus pyramid and the company’s motto: semper vigilans, ever vigilant. Sam thought the motto, and the Latin, was a little pretentious. Spears considered it good business.
“This is the good stuff,” Spears said, pouring the coffee. “Jamaican Blue Mountain. I did some counternarcotics work with the Jamaican services a few years back and they’ve kept me supplied with my drug of choice ever since.”
Spears’s smile was that of a politician, easy, practiced, and plastic. It was not quite enough to overcome the cruel set to his mouth. He was in his late forties and had founded Argus Systems after a twenty-year career in the navy, much of it with the Special Forces community. The Argus CEO kept his sandy blond hair shorter than the Washington norm. Sam had always suspected that this was to remind people of his professional past as a SEAL. He also kept in shape with the help of a private gym that was part of the executive suite. Even under his suit jacket, you could see that Spears had the arms and shoulders of a serious bodybuilder.
There were creases around Spears’s icy blue eyes that seemed to speak of years squinting against the sun, either out to sea or in some inhospitable desert clime. Sam knew better. Before accepting the job at Argus, he had called in a few markers at DIA and reviewed Spears’s classified military personnel file. Spears was a former SEAL, and he had done a few operational deployments, but he had spent the vast bulk of his navy career in the Pentagon and at the headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command in North Carolina. He had also done a stint at the National Security Council as an advisor on counterterrorism. It was the connections Spears had developed as a “political” SEAL that had helped Argus stand out in a sea of government-contracting outfits.
The coffee was good.
“I’m sorry about the Kamen column this morning,” Sam said. “I let things get a little heated with Newton. It was my mistake. I should have known better. I hope this doesn’t make too much trouble for you or Argus.”
“Trouble?” Spears replied. “You have it backwards. I’m glad you stuck it to Newton. He and I had it out once over some security work that we did for the Agency for International Development in Iraq and he doesn’t play nice in the sandbox. I would have been happy to have Argus’s name associated with anything that puts Richard Newton in his place. Maybe next time you could wear a company tie when you demolish him in public. It was well done.”
This was hardly what Sam had been expecting to hear. It certainly would not have been the reaction of anyone at the State Department if he were still an active FSO. Maybe this was just one more advantage of life in the private sector.
“Thanks, Garret. I appreciate that. I’m still enough of a diplomat to want to keep my name out of the papers.”
“And I’m enough of a businessman to believe that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, as long as it doesn’t involve a prison sentence, or at least a long prison sentence. Sam, I know it’s been a while since you and I have had a chance to talk. I suppose we could go over the latest news from the region, but I’m sure you and your team are on top of all that. I don’t believe in micromanaging. I would, though, like to get your take on a couple of hypotheticals.”
“Sure. Shoot.”
“You’ll have to bear with me. The questions seem a little odd. Understand, please. There are no right answers to any of this. This is more like the Myers-Briggs personality test. It isn’t pass-
fail.”
“Okay.” Sam was a little nonplussed at this, but it was certainly preferable to having to defend his ill-considered remarks at the CFR meeting.
“I want you to imagine that you’re the sheriff in a small town in the Old West. There’s been a horrible crime and a group of townsfolk are rioting, demanding justice. They have five hostages they’re threatening to kill if you don’t find the man responsible. You have no idea who committed the crime, but you could frame a man, and let’s say for purposes of this story that he’s what they used to call a no-account drifter, and hang him for the crime. That would save the hostages, all of whom are productive citizens of your town. Would you do it?”
“No,” Sam replied without hesitation.
“What if you were the driver of a runaway trolley and you were going to run over a group of five workmen on the track? You could switch the car to a side track on which there was a single worker, killing only the one instead of the five. Would you do it?”
Sam actually recognized this question. It was one of a series of moral dilemmas loosely clustered together as an ethical thought experiment. It was sometimes called “trolleyology” and Sam vaguely remembered reading about it in a moral philosophy class in college. The question Spears had just posed was the most basic variant.
“Yes.”
“What’s the difference between the two scenarios? Don’t both involve sacrificing one to save five?”
“Maybe at their most utilitarian, if the only thing you’re trying to do is count. But the first seems to me to be deliberative and the second reactive.”
“So it’s a question of how much time you have to make a decision?”
“In part. But it also seems to me that the second scenario is binary. You only have two tracks. The first scenario includes a world of possibilities that you left out. Maybe there was a better answer to the problem than judicial murder.”
Spears nodded his head and seemed to be considering his next question.
“What if the single worker on the track was a friend or a relative? Your brother, perhaps, or your son or daughter. Would you make the same choice?”
“No,” Sam admitted. “Probably not.”
“Is that ethical?”
“No. But I’d do it anyway.”
“What if the balance was ten to one? Or ten thousand to one? What would you do?”
“I hope I never have to find out.”
“One more variation,” Spears said. “The last one, I promise. You’re standing on a bridge watching the runaway trolley bear down on a group of workmen. You could stop the trolley by pushing a heavy weight onto the tracks. Coincidently, you are standing next to a fat man. A complete stranger who weighs three hundred pounds. Pushing him off the bridge would save the five men working on the line. Do you do it?”
“No.”
“What’s the difference between pushing the fat man off the bridge and switching the train onto the side track to kill the one instead of the five?”
“People are not entries on a balance sheet. We all have an internal moral compass, an inner voice in our heads and our hearts that tells us the difference between right and wrong. You need to listen to that voice even if you don’t always understand why it has reached the conclusions that it has.”
Spears seemed oddly disappointed by Sam’s answer.
“I think that’s all that I need. Thanks for bearing with me. I know this can seem a little odd, but I find this line of reasoning very helpful in what we do.”
“But not helpful enough to ask the questions in the initial interview?”
“No,” Spears admitted. “This isn’t for everyone. I want to get to know the person first. And I only run through this exercise with a select few.”
Sam knew he should leave it at that, but he also knew that he would not.
“You wouldn’t hesitate, would you?” he asked.
“About what?”
“About switching tracks, framing the drifter, even pushing the fat guy off the bridge. You’d do it in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?” Sam tried not to make the question sound accusatory. He was not entirely successful.
Spears paused for maybe half a beat as he considered his response.
“Yes,” he acknowledged. “Yes, I would.”
LAHORE, PAKISTAN
MARCH 18
Kamran Khan was devoted to the mission. It was the single most important thing in his life after his love of Allah. He had sacrificed so much already and he was prepared, he knew in his heart, to sacrifice so much more. There were days, however, that tried his patience. Since giving himself over to jihad, Khan had spent most of his time in menial and uninspiring duties: cooking, cleaning, keeping watch, delivering the occasional package or letter to a particular person at a particular address. E-mail, cell phones, radio. All of these were dangerous. The Indians or the Americans with their computers the size of houses would find you and take for themselves that which you had hoped to keep hidden. That was why the Pakistani leadership of Haath-e-Mohammed, for all of their ambitions to liberate Kashmir from the Hindu yoke, communicated almost exclusively by courier. The couriers themselves knew nothing of what they carried. That was not their concern.
Haath-e-Mohammed meant the Hand of the Prophet. HeM, as it was called in the newspapers, or the Hand, as they called themselves, was not as well known as Lashkar-e-Taiba or some of the other top-tier jihadi groups. But the fighters as well as the leaders in HeM were righteous and committed. They would make their mark.
Kamran Khan played his part, and so far he had played it patiently. He was, however, running out of patience.
He had once asked his friend Ali, the one real friend he had made in his first five months in the Hand, why his role in the organization was so circumscribed. Ali had already been sent for training to one of the camps in Afghanistan. He had been gone for more than a month, and when he returned, he was stronger and more confident. He had already been on three missions inside occupied Kashmir. Khan was envious of his friend’s success and embarrassed by that envy.
“It is simple,” Ali had told him. “They don’t trust you.”
“Who doesn’t trust me?”
“Masood Dar and the people around him.” Dar was the number two person in the Hand, operations commander, and deputy to the organization’s spiritual leader, Hafiz Muhammad Said.
“Why would they distrust me?” Khan asked.
“You have been to school,” Ali explained. “You speak languages. You are not the usual quality of recruit we see straight out of the madras whose passion for jihad burns in the veins. Your relationship with jihad is more a matter of the head than the heart. You are smart, Khan, maybe too smart. The HeM leaders prefer their foot soldiers to be a little on the slow side. That is why I am successful.”
Khan had bowed his head at that, for he knew that Masood Dar was not wrong. He was guilty of the sin of pride, like Iblis, the devil, who had refused to prostrate himself before Adam as Allah had ordered because, as a jinn, he had been made by Allah from smokeless fire while Adam was a mere creature of clay. Iblis had been cast out for his arrogance. Masood had been merciful in letting Khan remain, even if only to sweep the floors. In the three months since that conversation, Khan had endeavored to be humble in all that he did. His time would come.
Khan was working in the garden of the villa in the city of Lahore that the Hand used as a kind of informal headquarters. He was on his hands and knees, weeding around the grapevines, when Masood’s secretary tapped him on the back.
“You have been summoned,” he announced.
“Can I at least wash my hands?”
The secretary looked with some distaste at Khan’s dirt-stained clothes.
“I think that would be a good idea.”
Masood received Khan in his library. Khan looked with wonder at the walls of books with their spines label
ed in Urdu and Arabic. There were even a couple of books in Russian. For a moment, Khan was struck by how much he missed books. Here, the Quran was the only book he read. It was the most important book in the world, he knew, but he was not among those who believed it to be the only book worth reading. Neither, evidently, was Masood.
The mullah was a heavyset man with a long and somewhat unkempt black beard. Oversize tortoiseshell glasses gave him something of an owlish appearance. He wore a white skullcap and a tunic with a vest. His feet were bare.
“As-salamu alaykum,” Khan said, with a slight bow.
“Sit,” Masood commanded.
There were chairs in the library, but Masood was sitting on the floor, which was where Khan sat. He rested one arm on an overstuffed pillow and accepted a cup of green tea that the secretary served from a copper tray. The tea, called kahwah, was boiled with saffron, cinnamon, and cardamom.
Khan sipped his tea somewhat uncomfortably as Masood looked him over as though he were inspecting vegetables in the marketplace.
“How long have you been with us?” he asked.
“Almost eight months, Janab,” Khan said, using the formal title that was the closest approximation to “sir.”
“And in those eight months, what have you done for us?”
“I have kept house, Janab. I have delivered messages. I have done what has been asked of me.”
“And does that satisfy you?”
“No, it does not.”
“You would like to do more for the organization, would you? More for jihad? For Kashmir?”
“I would, Janab.”
“You will have your opportunity.”
Khan said nothing, but he felt his heart quicken slightly.
“You speak languages,” Masood said. It was not a question.
Khan nodded agreement.
“How is your English?”
“It is excellent.” Khan spoke in English and was rewarded with a slight smile from Masood.
Secrets of State Page 5