President Lord was going to miss Braithwaite. Her administration had proven difficult to control. This was not unusual. Sam remembered reading something that Truman had said when Eisenhower had won the 1952 election. “Poor Ike. He’s used to giving orders . . . and having them obeyed.” But the Lord cabinet was especially fractious, and Braithwaite had been Emily Lord’s most important ally and confidant. It would be more difficult for her to control the hardliners in her own cabinet without Braithwaite to hold the whip in hand. Sam liked Lord. He had voted for her, but you did not need to be an experienced analyst to see that internal divisions within her administration could undo everything that she had accomplished.
The phone rang. Sam glanced at the caller ID screen. It read FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. He used the remote to turn down the radio.
“Trainor,” Sam said, when he picked it up, taking care not to slur.
“Sam. It’s Andy.”
“Hah. I was just thinking about our little project. Are you still in the office? It’s late.”
“Yeah, I kinda lost track of time. You’ll understand why when you see what I have.”
“What is it?”
“Not for the phone is what it is. Can we meet tomorrow? Early . . . like, six a.m. I’d rather have this conversation when there’s no one else around.”
“Sure.” Sam felt a rush of adrenaline burn through the light fog of alcohol at the implication in Andy’s comment that he had uncovered something significant. “I can be at State at six. Your office?”
“No,” he replied. “Let’s meet in the Fish Tank. That early, we’ll have the place all to ourselves.”
The products that INR dealt with could only be handled in secure rooms. Most of the bureaus in the State Department maintained a SCIF where senior officials would do a weekly read of the “traffic” and hold particularly sensitive conversations. INR was the keeper of the department’s SCIF network and had given internal nicknames to most of them. The Fish Tank was the secure conference room in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. It was one of the more obscure SCIFs in the building, and the civil-service scientists who made up the bulk of the bureau’s personnel rarely dealt in the kind of highly classified information that was INR’s stock-in-trade. At six in the morning, the OES bureau would be a tomb. It was a strictly nine-to-five operation.
“The Fish Tank at six,” Sam agreed. “I’ll see you there.”
“Good.”
“Andy, is this big?”
“It’s bigger than that.”
• • •
When Andy got excited, his left eyebrow twitched. It was an obvious tell, the kind Sam had seized on when he had been subsidizing his college costs at Northwestern by playing poker against barely numerate liberal arts majors. At six in the morning, Andy’s eyebrow was jumping up and down like he had made an inside straight on the final pot.
The Fish Tank was one of the smaller SCIFs. There was room for maybe eight to sit around the table. They had the room all to themselves. Sam set his cardboard cup of Starbucks on the polished conference table and took the seat opposite Andy.
“You look like you’ve already had your coffee,” Sam said.
“Three cups. The guys in INR got one of those espresso machines a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t used to drink the stuff, but I’m starting to like it a lot.”
Sam could see Andy’s hands shaking slightly from the caffeine overload.
“You might want to think about cutting back on the hard stuff,” Sam commented, “or you’ll have a hell of a time sitting at your workstation.”
“There’s no time to sit. We’ve found something . . . Hell, I’ve found something . . . that’ll blow the doors off the intel community. We’re going to be famous.”
Sam was not entirely persuaded this should be considered a good thing.
“Go on. Tell me what you’ve got.”
There was a dark blue briefcase on the table made of ballistic cloth. An industrial-strength zipper at the top was closed with a chunky key lock. It was the kind of bag used to move intel products from one secure location to another. This one was emblazoned with the State Department’s Great Seal and the words BUREAU OF INTELLIGENCE AND RESEARCH.
Andy pulled a key out of his pocket and opened the lock. Unzipping the bag, he pulled out a brown folder sealed with tape. Andy was always one for following the rules, Sam thought.
The young analyst used a pair of scissors to slit the thick envelope open and slid a sheaf of papers onto the table.
“I’ve got somebody by the balls is what I’ve got.”
It was a bit melodramatic, and Sam had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling at Eagle Scout Andy Krittenbrink’s best effort at cursing like a sailor.
“Who?”
Andy suddenly seemed less triumphant.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted, before adding somewhat defiantly, “yet.”
“Show me. Walk me through what you’ve put together.”
“Okay. I started from the assumption that the Vanalika intercept was fraudulent. As you know, I wasn’t entirely sold on that idea, but I was willing to test it out. It makes no sense as a lone plant, so I went looking for similar products, things that we could cross-check. I found almost thirty pieces that don’t check out, both HUMINT and SIGINT. Conversations that allegedly took place when the participants were known to be in different countries. Telephone intercepts that aren’t backed up by the raw logs of calls made and received. That sort of thing.”
“Let me see some of them.”
“Sure.”
Andy riffled through the papers in front of him like an experienced Texas Hold’em dealer in Vegas.
“Let’s start with this one.” He slid a single report across the table to Sam.
“It’s purportedly an intercept of a conversation between General Qalat from the Pakistani Army’s Third Missile Corps and Hasfan Darzada from President Talwar’s office. Most of the conversation was focused on nuclear triggers tied to specific Indian provocations. It’s a fairly complex topic, and they agreed to meet for lunch the next day to continue the conversation. Only that’s impossible. Qalat was in Brussels for a meeting with NATO on Afghanistan and would be there for another four days. I have cables from the U.S. Mission to NATO that report on Qalat’s interventions at the meetings. Darzada was in Islamabad. There’s a newspaper account of his meeting with clerics at the Presidency on the same day he and Qalat were allegedly lunching together.”
Sam had skimmed quickly through the report as Andy was describing it. It was exactly what he said it was, but there was something else about it as well. It was too perfect. It provided a crystalline snapshot of high-level Pakistani thinking about nuclear doctrine. It was the kind of thing that Indian strategic planners would have been salivating over. But it was too neat. The intel world, in Sam’s experience, was muddy, murky, and uncertain. Significant information rarely came gift-wrapped with ribbons and bows. It had to be painstakingly assembled from data that often pointed in different directions. The piece in front of Sam just did not feel real.
“Show me a few more.”
“Okay. This one is a HUMINT piece. The Indian source provides details of an analysis of a reported incursion across the Line of Control by elements of the Second Artillery Division’s Third Brigade. That division doesn’t have three brigades. Maybe the source was wrong, that’s always a possibility with HUMINT. But this one is harder to explain.” He passed another report to Sam. It was formatted as an NSA product, meaning it was signals intelligence.
“This is an intercept of a call by Rangarajan’s national security advisor to the number two person in the Indian intel service outlining hypotheticals for an assassination attempt on President Talwar in the event of an imminent nuclear launch. This stuff is absolute dynamite. But we also happen to have access to the complet
e call log of one of the phones associated with the conversation. There’s no record of the call having taken place. In fact, the date-time group overlaps with another call to a different number. There was no report of that conversation, meaning that NSA didn’t consider it interesting or important enough to circulate. I got a friend at Fort Meade to dig up the original tape of the call. The guy was just making plans with a friend to go to the symphony with their wives. A far cry from planning to murder a head of state.”
Andy offered up a few more. All were damning and all had that too-perfect quality that Sam had sensed in the first report.
“Is there any pattern to the reports? Anything that ties them together?” Sam asked.
“You mean other than being super scary and threatening to start World War III?”
“Yes. Other than that.”
“There are a couple of things. Nearly all of the products have been marked for inclusion in the intel-sharing program.”
“These were being given to the services in Islamabad and Delhi?”
“Yes.”
Jesus, Sam thought. This must be what Sara and Shoe were seeing when they talked about the intel program driving relations between the two giants of South Asia off a cliff. These pieces were confirming the two sides’ most paranoid fears about each other.
“The one thing I can’t understand is who benefits from this,” Andy added. “Cui bono is one of the standard analytical frames and on this one I have no idea. It’s like someone wants a war in South Asia, but who in their right mind would want that? Guys who make body bags, maybe?”
“Is there anything else about the reports that stands out?” Sam asked. “Any clues that might help answer that question.”
“Well.” Andy sounded a little hesitant, as though there were parts of the story that he had not yet puzzled out. “There is an origin code on nearly every one of the products that I haven’t seen before. It’s not one of the standard programs like Five Eyes or Hardcore. I’m not sure what it means.”
“What’s the program name?”
“Panoptes.”
Sam remembered seeing this code on the report of Vanalika’s conversation with Guhathakurta. He had not recognized it either, but it had not seemed important at the time. Now, Sam realized, it was crucial.
“I don’t know what it refers to,” Andy continued, “but I have a friend over in DNI and I was going to ask him when he gets to work this morning.”
“Don’t do that,” Sam said just a little too quickly.
“Why not?”
“Let me handle that one, okay? I think I know where to look for that answer.”
“All right, Sam. You’re the boss.”
Even though that was technically no longer true, Sam was grateful that Andy was not fighting him on this point. A few pieces had clicked into place for Sam, and he understood that the ice they were standing on had grown thin and brittle.
“Who else have you talked to about these reports?”
“No one.”
“I need you to do me a favor. Keep it that way for a while.”
“I don’t understand. This is a big deal. I think some pretty serious laws are being broken here . . . procedures and protocols for sure. Whoever’s doing this should at least lose their jobs, maybe even go to jail. We’d be the ones to break this thing. Think about what that could mean. I know it’s selfish, but there’s a GS-14 job coming open at the CIA next month, and something like this would make me a lock for the position.”
Sam understood full well the pull of ambition in the Washington universe. The idea of holding back on something like this was hard for Andy to wrap his mind around. Mentally, he was already picking out what he would wear to the Rose Garden medal ceremony. Sam was confident that even in his narcissist fantasy Andy’s suit would be too big. There was more at stake here, however, than the young analyst could know. Sam would have to rein him in.
“I’m not sure the system would reward you for blowing the whistle on this thing just yet. Let’s make sure all of the ducks are lined up before we start shooting. There are some angles on this that I want to check out first.”
“Sam, you gotta understand something. These reports are almost certainly fake, but they are beautiful fakes. Someone here really knew what they were doing. The mistakes are small, and if I hadn’t gone looking for them, I never would have found them. There’s something big at the heart of this. I can feel it.”
“I can too, Andy. That’s exactly why I want to make sure that we have covered all the bases. I need you to trust me on this. We will do the right thing, and the bad guys will be punished appropriately. But there are some things I need to do first. This is important. Okay?”
“All right.” Andy did not sound convinced. “But I think it’s a mistake. I think we need to move fast or we’ll lose the leads.”
Sam was less concerned about that. The prime suspect was not going anywhere.
I should have keyed in on it earlier, he thought angrily. Not that figuring it out made it any easier to know what to do. Panoptes was Greek for “all-seeing.” In mythology, it was also the epithet for Hera’s faithful guardian, the monster who could sleep with half of its hundred eyes open and watchful. Hera had sent her servant to watch over the white heifer, Io, and protect her from Zeus.
Hera’s servant was Argus.
Panoptes was Argus Systems.
THE TOBA KAKAR RANGE
APRIL 6
It was a brazen daylight assault. The six men advanced toward the objective in pairs, with two teams providing cover for the third and trading off as they leapfrogged forward. Khan could see the silhouette of a man in one window, but no one raised an alarm. The metal pistol grip of the Zastava M92 carbine he carried was smooth and just slightly slick from gun oil. The stock was extended, and he pressed the butt firmly against his shoulder to ensure maximum control.
When they reached the single door of the building, Khan shifted the carbine to hang over one shoulder. He was no longer a shooter. He reached back and his partner, a hulking Pashtun tribesman named Saad Ahmedani, slapped an explosive charge into his hand, a white-gray block of Semtex plastic explosives with an electrical detonator.
Something about the charge in his hand did not feel quite right, but the team was in position and primed for entry. There was no time to consider the nagging uncertainty that pulsed from somewhere deep in the recesses of Khan’s brain. He slapped the charge along the door frame just over the lock and pressed his body up against the wall.
“Clear,” he hissed, before triggering the charge. The other members of the assault team lowered their chins to their chests.
The moment the charge went off, he realized why it had felt wrong in his hand. It was much too big. A spray of rocks and dirt and wood debris covered the team. A piece of the door frame whipped past Khan’s head, traveling almost too quickly to see. Although they had been braced for the blast, two of the six commandos had been knocked off their feet. Khan could feel a hot line stretched across one cheek where a flying splinter had cut him almost down to the bone.
Khan knew what had gone wrong. Ahmedani was carrying two charges, a small one for the door and a substantially larger one that Khan would have used to blow a hole through the back wall if the team needed an emergency exit. His partner had handed him the wrong charge.
It was a good thing that this was just practice, or they would all be dead.
One of the jihadis who had remained on his feet, a man with a wild black beard and wild eyes, stepped toward Khan and slapped him in the face.
“You’ll blow us all to Allah, you son of a whore, if you aren’t more careful with the fucking explosives!”
“I’m sorry, Jadoon,” Khan said evenly.
He was quite confident that Ahmedani’s “mix-up” with the charges had not been an accident. He was the outsider here. The others on the team never mi
ssed an opportunity to let him know in no uncertain terms that he was not welcome. Moreover, there was no chance that Ahmedani had come up with that idea on his own. The tribesman may have been devoted to freeing Kashmir from the Indian yoke, and he was most certainly as strong as an ox, but he was as clumsy as one as well and maybe not as bright.
Team leader Sangar Jadoon was not finished.
“That hunk of lumber could have taken someone’s head off,” Jadoon growled. “It might as well have been yours, because you don’t seem to be using it.”
“Yes, Jadoon.” Khan did not try to defend himself. There was no point.
Jadoon hit him again.
The team leader was quick and strong, but the open-handed slap he employed so liberally that it was almost a leadership style was intended more to shame and dominate than to inflict pain. For Khan, the slap was evocative of Kathleen Halloran’s father and the “filthy raghead” slur that the meaty trucker had thrown in his face after striking it. He bore it as he knew he must. Jadoon, he understood, was hoping to provoke a response that would let him send Khan back to Lahore. He bore it. But it was not easy.
“You are here because you are Masood’s lucky number,” Jadoon continued, and Khan could hear the anger and contempt in his voice. “I don’t believe in any of that mystical magic-number shit. You’re an amateur and a liability. Allah does not play games. He favors those who fight in His name and those who fight well above all others. Allahu Akbar.”
The last was shouted as a challenge to the entire group. Jadoon stalked off in disgust.
The team leader’s frustration was understandable. This was their third “assault” on the objective, a single-story building made of pressed board and cheap framing timber and defended by department store mannequins wearing Indian army uniforms. Each of the assaults had quickly degenerated into farce. If this was all that the HeM could muster, Khan thought sardonically, then neither India nor the mighty West had anything to fear. They would have to do better.
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