“I need a translator,” the mullah explained. “For a meeting that must remain secret. My regular interpreter is too ill to travel. Everything you do with respect to this event you will carry with you to the grave. If you do anything that causes me to question your loyalty and obedience, you will find yourself explaining your choices to Allah somewhat earlier than you otherwise might.”
“I understand, Janab.”
“Do you? Do you really?”
• • •
Masood did not tell Khan where they were going. But only an idiot would have failed to understand at the early stage of the journey that they were crossing into India. They traveled at night, on mountain roads that the Hand used as infiltration routes. Masood’s face was well known in India, and Hindu extremist groups would have paid significant sums to see his head mounted on a pike.
HeM operatives took them as far as Amritsar. For most of the trip, Khan and Masood were wedged into a smuggling compartment in the back of a truck. They traveled largely in silence. Near Amritsar, they were allowed out of the truck to stretch and relieve themselves. It was dark and cool, and the place they had stopped seemed far from any lights. Their Pakistani guides left them here and three Indians took their place. Their new guides were beardless and their hair was cut short in military style. Khan said nothing to them, but he observed everything around him carefully.
Their new guides drove through the night until they reached their destination. Khan was not certain where they were, but when he got out of the truck, they were parked in front of a dimly lit warehouse building. Inside, a cluster of four wooden chairs stood in a pool of light cast by a single bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. Two of the chairs were occupied. One man had dark skin and was wearing a Western-style suit with no tie. He was short and wiry and almost completely bald. He looked to be in his midfifties. Khan assumed he was an Indian Muslim. Although India was a Hindu country, it was so vast that its Muslim minority numbered in the hundreds of millions. There were nearly as many Muslims in India as there were in Pakistan, many of them no doubt sympathetic to the HeM and Islamabad’s claim to Kashmir. The second man was younger and looked Middle Eastern with an olive complexion and a carefully trimmed mustache. He was dressed in a white Arab-style thawb, or dishdasha.
Without asking permission, one of the Indian escorts frisked both Khan and Masood quickly and expertly.
The older Indian-looking man rose and offered Masood a traditional greeting. “As-salamu alaykuma.” Peace be upon you. As he said it, he placed his right hand over his heart. The use of alaykuma meant that Khan was included in the sentiment.
“Wa alaykumu s-salam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.” Masood replied with the most elaborate and polite of the available formal responses. May peace, mercy, and the blessings of Allah be upon you too.
“We will speak English,” the Indian said. “We will use no names.”
Khan translated into Urdu for Masood, who nodded.
“That is most sensible,” he agreed. Khan translated back into English. His English was good, with only the slightest trace of an accent. He also spoke passable French and decent Russian.
“Our mutual friends have made it known to me that you are interested in acquiring a certain package. I have the information necessary to facilitate this. It is not, however, a simple matter.”
“There is nothing about this that is simple for any other than Allah,” Masood replied. “But the cause is righteous and He is with us.”
The Indian nodded. The man dressed as an Arab produced a black briefcase from beside his chair and handed it to Masood.
“Inside is the information you will need,” the Indian said. “It includes timetables and maps regarding the transport of the package and precise information about its location. You will also find special instructions regarding the handling of the package. The contents are . . . sensitive.”
“I understand.” Masood did not open the case.
“You have considered the consequences of this?” the man asked.
“Very carefully.”
“There have been certain . . . expenses . . . associated with procuring this information.” The Indian addressed this to the Arab, if that was, in fact, what he was.
“I understand,” the Arab replied with equanimity. His English was smooth and cultured, the accent more British than American. “My organization strongly supports this project. The agreed sum will be deposited in the account in the Caymans as you requested. A second deposit will follow upon successful conclusion of the operation.”
The Indian turned back to Masood.
“You understand that the time frame for this operation is very precise. It is not open-ended. There will be only this single opportunity. If you miss the window, we will not try again at a later date. There are no second chances.”
“That has been made clear to us,” Masood replied. “We will be ready. God is great.”
“Yes,” the man agreed. “But He is also extremely busy. You will have to do most of the work yourself.”
Masood smiled enigmatically.
“We will be ready,” he repeated.
• • •
Masood and Khan left the warehouse by a side door. Khan carried the briefcase with the mysterious instructions. The young Indian who led them was wearing a dark suit, but it was not much of a disguise. With his square shoulders and straight back, he looked like what he was, a soldier out of uniform. Khan was glad for the guide. The streets were dark and unfamiliar. The Indian soldier led them to a guest house on the edge of the industrial zone where the warehouse was located. There was a reception area on the ground floor, but no one else was there, and there was no sign on the building announcing its identity as a hostel. It did not have the feel of a business. Khan suspected that this was a safe house operated by Indian military intelligence.
“Is this place secure?” Khan asked their guide in the Hindi he had learned from watching Bollywood movies and Indian television.
“It should be. We have been careful.” For such a large man, the soldier had a surprisingly soft, almost feminine voice. “I will keep watch outside your door. You may sleep if you wish. Your ride will be here before dawn. I will wake you.”
The room was spartan. The wood floor was splotched with betel-nut stains where previous occupants had spit gummy wads of the noxious leaf mixed with tobacco or areca nuts. The thin breeze coming through the slats of the windows carried the intermingled smells of sewage and curry. Khan felt his stomach turn slightly, and he was glad that he and Masood had not eaten that day. There were two single beds with low wooden frames and mattresses stuffed with lumpy rice straw. Khan had slept on worse. The moment he saw the beds, Khan realized that he was bone-crushingly tired. Masood insisted that they pray before sleep and Khan complied. They removed their shoes and spread the thin prayer rugs they had carried with them on the floor, giving thanks to Allah for bringing the tools of victory so close. When they had finished, Khan settled onto the bed fully clothed. Within a minute of laying his head on the rough rice-husk pillow, he was asleep.
• • •
A sharp cough woke him. He thought at first that it was Masood, but in the dim light he could see that the portly mullah was lying asleep on the next bed, snoring softly. There was a second cough, followed by a dull thud from the other side of the door. Now Khan recognized the sound. A silenced pistol. Their Indian protector was dead. The night was warm enough that there was no need for blankets. Khan only had to roll to his left and he was on his feet, crouched next to the bed frame. He needed a weapon. There was a lamp on the bedside table. He pulled the cord from the wall and stripped off the cheap paper shade. The lamp felt solid in his hands and he tested the base against his palm. Through the door, he could hear the sound of the dead guard being dragged awkwardly to one side.
Moving on the balls of his bare feet, Khan glided soundlessly over to the
door and stood with his back pressed up against the wall. The doorknob turned slowly and silently. There was only the slightest click as the latch disengaged. The door swung inward on its hinges. A black-clad arm extended a pistol carefully into the room, sweeping the gun from left to right. A long sound suppressor was screwed onto the front of the barrel.
Khan did not wait for the intruder to finish his reconnaissance. He grabbed the gunman’s forearm with his right hand and pulled. The intruder lunged forward, off balance, and Khan brought the base of the lamp down hard against the back of his skull. In a single motion, he wrapped the cord around the man’s neck and twisted him so that the gunman’s body was between him and the door. He was limp in Khan’s grasp. Whether he was stunned, unconscious, or dead Khan was not certain.
As he had anticipated, a second man appeared in the doorway, firing a suppressed automatic. Three rounds slammed into the body of the gunman Khan was using as a shield. The intruders were using subsonic ammunition to dampen the noise of the shots, and as Khan had gambled, the body of the first shooter absorbed the bullets with no through-and-throughs. He thrust the body of the dead gunman into the path of the second shooter as he tried to rush into the room. Khan leaped forward at the same moment, swinging the lamp in a wide arc that connected with the assassin’s gun hand. The wrist broke with a satisfying crack of bone. Khan reversed his swing and brought the lamp back up quickly, catching the killer on the chin and snapping his head back into the doorjamb. Without hesitation, Khan retrieved the first man’s gun from where he had dropped it on the floor and methodically shot both of the intruders twice in the head.
When Khan turned around, Masood was sitting up in the bed, squinting somewhat to compensate for the glasses he was not wearing. Calmly, Masood took in the scene before him.
“Where did you say you went to school?” the deputy Hand of the Prophet asked.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
MARCH 31
Sam could not escape the feeling that he and Garret Spears had been having two completely different conversations. Spears had been testing him about something. And Sam had, he suspected, failed that test. Washington was a town where management fads came and went with dizzying speed. Reinventing government, matrix management, total quality management, and Six Sigma had all had their day. Some senior leaders swore by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a kind of personality test based on the theories of Carl Jung. Others were devotees of the balanced scorecard or contingency theory. Spears was the first executive Sam had encountered who relied on moral philosopher Philippa Foot’s somewhat arcane trolleyology thought experiments as a management tool.
As an undergrad, Sam remembered being irritated by Foot’s elaborate hypotheticals predicated on a set of circumstances so bizarrely particular as to be impossible to reconcile with the complexities and subtleties of the real world. There was a legal aphorism that difficult cases made for bad law. The same, Sam believed, was true of morality. The trolleyology dilemmas were attractive both to ethicists and neuroscientists who liked to pose the questions to subjects in the lab while imaging their brains with PET scanners to see which areas would light up. The trolley scenarios were appealing because the fundamental decision point was so simple. Do you hit the switch or not? That’s why Foot relied on trolley cars rather than buses or trucks for her scenarios. Hitting a switch was a binary choice. There was no third option, no middle ground in which to steer. The real world was rarely that neat and clean. There was, Sam supposed, a good argument to be made for simple mathematics. The greatest good for the greatest number. But people were more than numbers. If Lena was the one, it wouldn’t matter to Sam if the whole world was on the other side of the equation.
The unit was busy. All of his analysts had assignments and they were working on deadline. The U.S. intelligence machine was an insatiable beast with an ever-expansive appetite for information, data, and analysis. There was an eager audience for everything the unit could produce. Sam sat at his computer reviewing the most recent intel reports. Reading intelligence was a tricky business. Individual reports could be wildly misleading. It was important to put things in context, to read skeptically and critically. HUMINT sources could be wrong or deliberately seeking to mislead. SIGINT intercepts could well have recorded two people lying to each other for reasons unknown. There was nothing as dangerous as raw intel in the hands of senior policy makers. It made them feel smart even if they did not know how to read them with a critical eye.
Sam paged quickly through the afternoon’s take, using subject lines to sort the small number of interesting reports from the ocean of marginal data. He was scanning reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the NSA, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on his Top Secret computer system when he saw something that made him freeze. A name in a report.
Vanalika Chandra.
• • •
He clicked on the link to call up the complete report. It was an NSA product, an intercept of a telephone conversation picked up by the omnivorous ECHELON collection system. ECHELON gathered electronic data from all over the world and transmitted it to giant computer farms warehoused in suburban Maryland. Artificial intelligence programs constructed around complex algorithms searched massive databases of intercepted communications looking for key words. Certain combinations of words or phrases—bomb, New York, and jihad, for example—would flag the message for secondary review by a human analyst. Most of those were discarded as immaterial or obscure. A few, a tiny percentage of all of the messages sucked into the maw of ECHELON, were disseminated to the intelligence community as raw product. Sam’s team took the raw reports and used them, along with diplomatic reporting out of the embassies in South Asia and open-source reporting from foreign newspapers and media outlets, to prepare finished intelligence products for policy makers that represented, at least in theory, the collective wisdom of the expert analysts.
The piece on the screen in front of him was a single raw report. By itself it would have been of little significance were it not for the name.
Vanalika Chandra.
Sam thought briefly about deleting the report unread, but he knew he could not.
ORCON, GAMMA, FIVE EYES, NOFORN, PANOPTES, ECHELON
DTG: 03292014Z1030
ASSOCIATED NUMBERS: +1 (202) 645-1970; +91 (11) 7789-5492
Participants: Vanalika Chandra; political counselor; Indian Embassy; Washington, D.C.
Panchavaktra Guhathakurta, director of the Pakistan Desk; Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; New Delhi
1. Chandra pressed Guhathakurta for a status report on the program (NFI). She complained that time was running short and the group (NFI) was in danger of letting an opportunity slip through its fingers. (Prime Minister) Rangarajan was determined to restore equilibrium to the relationship with Pakistan. The group could not allow that. The mullahs needed to be put in their place, and if that required another war with Pakistan, then so be it.
2. Guhathakurta urged patience. The group was reluctant to contemplate any changes to the plan. The others would come around, but in the meantime, it was important to drive a wedge between the United States and Pakistan so that when the inevitable conflict came Delhi would not find itself under intolerable pressure to cease hostilities before finishing the job and bringing an end to the Pakistani threat once and for all.
3. Chandra agreed that separating Pakistan from its U.S. protector was essential. She assured Guhathakurta that she and her associates (NFI) had a workable plan and they were executing it. They had allies in the CIA and the Pentagon. Under President Lord, the White House was less sympathetic to India’s concerns about Pakistan than it had been in previous administrations. The Department of State was also a problem, but ultimately the diplomats did not have an especially loud voice on South Asia policy. At the end of the day, the diplomats would salute and follow their instructions.
4. Guhathakurta thanked Chandra for the work she had done to date and the ser
vices she would continue to provide in the weeks ahead.
The piece in front of him was shocking on multiple levels. It was damning in terms of what it said about Vanalika and her politics. It undermined the integrity of her relationship with Sam. It implied that there was a cabal of highly placed actors in Delhi pushing for war. And it was almost certainly a fake. For one, it did not sound like Vanalika. Sam could not reconcile the hard-edged and cynical worldview of the character from the intercept with the warm, sophisticated, witty woman he knew and, he admitted to himself although they had never said it, loved.
More significant, the date-time group on the report indicated that the conversation had taken place last Saturday while Sam and Vanalika had been at the cabin in the Shenandoah with no landline and no cell reception. Vanalika could not have made the call when she was supposed to have done so. The intercept was a fabrication.
It was a good fake, Sam had to admit. It looked real. The cell number associated with the call was hers. He knew it by heart. To those who did not know Vanalika, it would sound credible. Only her friends would know it was out of character. Only Sam would know that the timing was impossible.
He picked up the phone and dialed another number he had committed to memory.
“Krittenbrink.”
“Hi, Andy. It’s Sam.”
“Hey. It was great to see you the other night even if being seen talking to you was not the best career move for me. Not after the blistering you gave Newton the Golden. Nice piece in the Post, by the way.”
“Do you think they got my best side?”
“Thin-skinned, easily riled, and smarter than the guest of honor? Yeah, I’d say so. To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
“I need a favor.”
“Tell me.”
“Can we meet this afternoon?”
• • •
Sam had not been back to the State Department since the day he had retired nearly six months ago. The process of joining the Foreign Service was full of pomp and circumstance. There was a swearing-in ceremony and reception in the ornate Benjamin Franklin room on the eighth floor. Often, the secretary of state or some suitably senior stand-in muckety-muck delivered the oath. Newly minted officers received commissions signed by the president and embossed with the Great Seal of the United States. At this point in their careers, officers were unlikely to know that the physical Great Seal was actually kept in a giant Lucite box on the first floor near the cafeteria, knowledge that tended to strip some of the majesty from the proceedings. Clerical staff occasionally entered the box to stamp stacks of commissions or treaties on the one-hundred-year-old press, looking like nothing so much as figures in a life-size diorama at a low-budget museum. There were more ceremonies tied to graduating from A-100, the diplomatic equivalent of basic training, and receiving your first assignment.
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