Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  Khan shifted his grip to the gun and used it as a lever to force the havildar’s arms up until the weapon was pointed at the ceiling. His left arm wrapped around the sergeant’s neck even as his right leg swept the Indian soldier backward. Khan kept his grip on the gun until he was able to lever it out of his opponent’s hands.

  He had the Indian soldier bent backward in a bridge. Khan was in a half crouch. His left knee was pressed in between the sergeant’s shoulder blades. Releasing the gun, he wrapped his right arm over his left around the Indian’s neck. “Allahu Akbar,” he grunted, as he rose from the crouch, simultaneously pulling his opponent’s head backward with a quick jerking motion.

  Back in New Jersey, his jujitsu instructor had warned him never to do this either in training or in the ring. You could snap a man’s neck, he had explained.

  He was right. The neck broke with a dull crunching sound. The Indian sergeant went limp.

  Khan looked over in time to see Ahmedani finish up his adversary. There was no finesse to the big jihadi. He had his powerful hands wrapped around the sepoy’s neck and was simply choking the life out of him.

  The sepoy was little more than a kid. If he was older than twenty, it was by a matter of months rather than years. Still, Khan put him in a different category than he had the goatherd. This was an enemy soldier, armed and trained. He was fair game, and if he was less skilled or less lucky than Ahmedani, that was the will of Allah.

  The sepoy clawed at Ahmedani’s wrists and hands, but his movements were panicky rather than purposeful. In truth, he was already dead. Khan watched the light in his eyes go out. Ahmedani laid the dead sepoy gently, almost tenderly, on the floor of the car.

  No more than two minutes had passed since Jadoon had opened the door.

  The team leader stepped inside the car. He pulled two black rubbery bags from his backpack. Body bags.

  “Bag ’em,” he ordered.

  Khan helped Ahmedani with the sepoy first.

  “We can remove the bodies,” Khan said to Jadoon. “But won’t these two be missed on the other end?”

  “There will be no record of guards on this train,” Jadoon replied confidently. “These two were dead before you killed them. They died this morning when their helicopter crashed in the Indian Ocean. Their names are on the flight manifest, but their bodies could not be recovered. There are sharks in that sea.”

  Jadoon’s smile made him look like a shark himself. Khan considered the kind of juice it had taken with the Indian military establishment to make those arrangements. He thought about the bald man he and Masood had met with in India. He must be high up in the military hierarchy.

  As Khan and Ahmedani were dealing with the bodies, Umar and Amir Kror were wrestling the heavy box from the truck into the train car. They loosened the straps holding the duplicate box in place and made the requisite switch, being careful to reattach all of the straps and to cinch them as tight as a bowstring.

  Twenty minutes later, they had both the bodies and the mysterious box in the back of the truck. Atal had dismantled his sniper’s nest and all of their gear was locked down. A whistle and the harsh sound of metal striking metal indicated that the engineers had succeeded in clearing the track and the train was moving out.

  Umar and Ahmedani pulled the camouflage net off the truck and added it to the stack of equipment piled up against the cab wall.

  Ali began maneuvering the clumsy deuce and a half back down the access road.

  From a soft-sided bag wedged into one corner, Jadoon pulled out a tool that Khan recognized. It completed the picture of the operation.

  The instrument was about the size and shape of a book with a screen and a handful of buttons. Something that looked like a microphone was attached to it by a cord. It was not a microphone.

  Jadoon held the instrument up to the big steel box they had taken from the train car and pushed one of the buttons.

  Click, click, click, sounded the Geiger counter as it measured the radiation from the nuclear warhead that Khan knew was inside the box.

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  APRIL 12

  The Morlocks, whose formal name was Argus Systems Security Operations Unit, kept to themselves. They did not socialize with other Argus employees. They did not participate in the regular senior staff meetings. They were a company within the company, a piece of Argus but not a part of it. The Morlocks worked behind their iron gate, which marked them as a thing apart as surely as their regulation haircuts and straight-backed military bearing. But like all such gates, it had a keeper.

  The keeper, Sam realized, was the gate’s weak point. His name was Neil Linnehan and his world was as subterranean as that of the original Morlocks in the H. G. Wells novel. He was the head of IT and his office was in the subbasement, where the racks of servers could be easily cooled and the secure connections with Langley and Fort Meade could be protected.

  Sam had briefly considered stealing a passkey from one of the Morlocks and then somehow figuring out the unique cipher lock code that went with that key. All of the various scenarios he played out in his head, however, ended with a jarhead’s beefy hands wrapped around his throat. The Security Operations Unit was staffed by professionals. None of them was going to leave a passkey lying around unattended, and the idea of taking one by force or theft was just unrealistic.

  If he could not steal a key, Sam decided, the next best thing would be to make one. Neil Linnehan made the keys, and Neil had a weakness of his own. Her name was Sara Zehri.

  Sam had thought through the plan from every angle, trying out different variables. The timing was tricky. Sara would have to play her part to perfection.

  As an additional complication, Sam could not explain to Sara why he needed her help. It was safer for her that she not know what he intended to do and why. Certainly, he could not share his suspicions that Weeder and his cohorts were somehow complicit in Andy’s death. Sara would likely have marched down the hall to bang on the iron door with the heel of one of her Manolo Blahniks and demand Weeder surrender himself to her justice. Sam had been cryptic in his explanation. He had simply told her that he needed a favor and it was important. Sara did not press him for an explanation. She even seemed to enjoy the secretive nature of the request.

  “Don’t worry,” she had assured him. “I can handle Neil.”

  It was good to have friends.

  Sam was not certain exactly what he expected to find behind the steel door on the fourth floor. Maybe there were no answers there to be found. Maybe Weeder and his team had nothing to do with Andy’s death. The evidence, such as it was, was all circumstantial. But Sam believed at a gut level that there was something important on the far side of that door. Something important and wrong and dangerous. Something worth killing to keep secret.

  • • •

  There was nothing dark or dingy about the basement levels at Argus. B2 was just another floor, no different really from the floor where Sam and his team worked. The lack of natural light did not matter. None of the rooms in the secure parts of the building had windows. The one thing that set the subbasement apart from the other floors was a constant low-level hum. The massive banks of computers and servers that Argus needed to maintain its thousand-eyed reach out into the world produced a kind of white noise that was easier to feel than hear. The slight vibrations under the soles of his feet seemed to whisper to Sam of power and secrets.

  Linnehan was in the office, which—while not unusual—was something of a lucky break. Sam had not wanted to give the IT head any advance warning of his request, so he was popping in unannounced. Linnehan’s was a small kingdom. He had only two technicians who worked under him. But his word in this narrow world was absolute law.

  Sam knocked on the door as a courtesy before opening it. The IT space at Argus had seemingly been designed for a different era when teams of people might have been needed to staff the operation.
Now Argus, itself a beneficiary of government outsourcing, had outsourced much of its IT needs to other, smaller firms that chased after subcontracts like pilot fish feeding on the leavings from a great white’s meal.

  The IT space was big and echoing, and Linnehan sat alone at his desk behind a long counter that in a busier office would no doubt have been where staff members came for customer service. Linnehan was short, balding, and overweight, the middle-aged trifecta, and his sartorial choices provided nearly irrefutable evidence of his bachelor status. His sweater was stained and fraying at the collar, and his corduroy pants were a color that was not found in nature.

  “How you doing, Neil?” Sam asked.

  Linnehan looked up from the monitor, seemingly perturbed at the interruption.

  “What? There are no phones on the third floor?”

  “Yeah, I probably should have called.”

  “It’s like your lot thinks that I have nothing to do all day but sit here and wait for you to need something.”

  “I’m sure it feels that way. Do you need me to come back another time?”

  “No.” Linnehan seemed mollified by Sam’s offer. “What do you need?”

  “I’m having some trouble in the office,” Sam said, striving for a tone that suggested he was bringing Neil into his confidence. “We’ve gotten dinged for a couple of security violations in the last few weeks. Safes left unsecured. Classified left on the printer. That sort of thing. Shoe and Ken are accusing each other of being the last out of the office on the nights in question. I’d like to look at the logs to see when they swiped in and out of the office. That should give me a sense as to which one of them is in the right.”

  “Sara’s not a suspect, is she?” Linnehan asked with evident concern.

  Sorry, Neil. She is way out of your league.

  “No. It’s got to be either Shoe or Ken. Nothing else fits.”

  “Okay. Let me call up the records.”

  Linnehan turned back to his monitor and began furiously pounding keys. Sam walked around the counter and pulled up a chair to sit next to him. As best he could, he tried to follow what Linnehan was doing and where the key cards were stored in the database. It looked like the cards were grouped by unit and each card had a series of columns associated with it that identified the date of issuance, the holder’s clearance levels, and authorized areas of access. A subfolder contained a complete history of where and when the cards had been swiped and the codes punched in. It was neat and orderly. Maybe even a little obsessive. Just like Neil.

  “Let’s begin with Mr. Balusibramanijan,” Neil suggested, with just a hint of pleasure in his voice. Sam suspected that the IT head considered Shoe a rival for Sara’s imagined affections. Love is blind, but did it have to be stupid too? Probably.

  “Sounds good.”

  “What dates did you want to check out?”

  Sam made a show of looking through his notebook. He took his time.

  “Let’s start with the twenty-fourth.”

  “Okay. It looks like Shushantu swiped into the suite at seven forty-seven a.m. He swiped out again at ten-twelve and back in at ten-twenty.”

  “Candy machine,” Sam explained.

  Neil read through the details of Shoe’s comings and goings for the day. Abstractly, Sam understood that this was what the ID cards were for, but to see the monitoring of a friend laid out on the screen as raw data was still somewhat disconcerting. Orwell would have understood twenty-first-century America and he would have been amazed at its subtlety. Big Brother had nothing on Big Data. People had gradually become accustomed to their loss of privacy and anonymity, first in the name of security and then in the name of convenience and commerce. The technology had evolved to the point where the surveillance was all but invisible. It was also all but constant. There was no place to hide.

  Near the end of Neil’s recitation of Shoe’s movements for March 24, the door opened with an attention-demanding bang. Sara Zehri was standing there with a laptop tucked under one arm.

  “Sorry to interrupt your fantasy football league or whatever it is you boys are working on down here in the basement, but I need a favor from Neil.” The smile she gave Linnehan should have made a statistically significant contribution to global warming.

  Sam noticed that Sara had undone both the top buttons of her blouse and the madam-librarian bun she typically favored. She had also ditched the headscarf and the reading glasses. With her hair loose around her shoulders, she looked several years younger and several degrees less intimidating. To Neil, Sam was quite certain, Sara’s new look was like catnip, utterly irresistible.

  “What do you need, Sara?” Neil asked, already rising from his workstation.

  “What are you offering?”

  Linnehan’s Adam’s apple jumped up and down as he swallowed.

  “For you? Anything.”

  “Good to know. Let’s start with this laptop.”

  As Sam had hoped, Linnehan had left him alone with the workstation logged on as administrator. He did not have much time, but if Sara could just keep Linnehan busy for a few minutes . . .

  He clicked out of Shoe’s history and into his own card file. Clicking on the access column produced a drop-down menu that allowed him to drag and drop parts of the building into a box marked AUTHORIZATIONS. Most of the locations on the menu were familiar to Sam, but he could not find anything that looked like the Security Operations Unit.

  With a part of his attention, he listened in on the conversation between Sara and Neil, trying to gauge how much time he had to work with.

  “Have you tried rebooting the system?” he heard Neil ask. It was the standard IT department first-line answer to every computer problem and it fixed 80 percent of them.

  “No. I didn’t even think to do that,” Sara replied in an embarrassed voice that was Academy Award–level acting. How someone as smart and blunt as Sara Zehri could play the coquette was beyond Sam, but she seemed to be enjoying herself.

  Sam considered simply pushing all of the available choices into the authorized box and hoping that one of them controlled access to the Morlocks’ lair. This would be the fastest method and the odds seemed good, but Sam wanted to be sure. Realistically, he would have only one shot at this.

  Instead, he navigated back several screens until he found the badge entries for Weeder and his team. He clicked on Weeder’s name and looked to see what parts of the building the Commander was authorized to access. There was one entry he did not understand. It didn’t have a name, just a number code, H6576-89.

  “Let me get the manual out of my desk drawer,” he heard Neil say. The hairs on the back of Sam’s neck stood up and he was about to hit the red X in the upper right corner to exit the program when Sara stepped in to save him.

  “Oh, I’m sure you don’t need the book to tell you what to do, Neil. Let me come over there with you and we can look at this together.”

  Sam glanced quickly over his shoulder as Sara glided around the edge of the counter and sidled up so close to Linnehan that their hips were pressed together. She spun the balky laptop around to face them and pointed at something on the screen.

  “What does this mean?” she asked innocently. “It wasn’t there before.”

  Oh, Neil, you poor dumb bastard.

  Sara had bought him a little extra time.

  Sam quickly noted down the mysterious authorization code and navigated back to his own card file. Rather than drop and drag, he input the code manually into the appropriate field and hit SAVE.

  A dialogue box popped open. SYNCHRONIZING DATA SYSTEMS. THIS MAY TAKE A FEW MINUTES. PLEASE DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER.

  Fuck.

  A bar at the bottom of the dialogue box tracked the progress in completing the operation. The bar filled up with a reassuring digital blue as the system processed the upgrade to Sam’s access authorities. But slowl
y. Too slowly.

  We’re so close. Just give me a minute or two, Sara.

  “Your antivirus software is out-of-date,” Neil warned. “You’ll need to reinstall the new company security program.”

  “Sure,” Sara said breezily. “How do you do that?”

  To Sam, Sara’s helpless female act was wearing thin. It was so counter to her nature that it was hard to maintain the fiction of incompetence. But Neil was smitten, and he seemed incapable of seeing past whatever Sara put forward on the surface.

  After an agonizing wait that felt to Sam like an hour but according to the clock on the computer screen was closer to two minutes, the bar filled to the end and a new dialogue box opened to announce CHANGES ACCEPTED.

  As quickly as he could, Sam navigated back to the page listing Shoe’s movements through the building.

  “I really need to check one thing,” Neil said, and Sam could feel him turning around even as he clicked on the last icon to return to the screen that had been up on the monitor just before Sara had appeared at the door.

  “You okay there, Sam?” Linnehan asked.

  “Never better.” Sam minimized the window and looked quickly at Sara before turning his attention back to Neil. Even for the socially obtuse IT head, the message was unmistakable. Sara shouldn’t know what they were doing.

  “I think I have everything I need,” Sam added. “I’ll leave you two kids to sort out the laptop.”

  • • •

  Late at night, the Argus building was deserted. The operations centers at Langley and the State Department were staffed twenty-four hours a day. Argus was strictly nine-to-five, which in Washington-speak typically meant eight-to-seven, or at least to six-thirty. In a town where what you did largely defined who you were, working long hours was fundamental to one’s self-respect.