Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  “Thanks, Neil,” Sam heard her say in a light, flirtatious tone. “You’re an absolute lifesaver.”

  “Anytime.”

  Neil seemed as puffed up as a peacock.

  “Did you log your bag in, Sam?” he asked, returning to business.

  “Sure thing.”

  Neil picked up the clipboard and scanned it briefly. Then he set it back on the hook and steered the overloaded cart out into the hall.

  When Sam turned around, Sara and Shoe were standing shoulder to shoulder glaring at him as though he were a wayward child.

  “Sam, what are you doing?” Shoe asked.

  “Something I have to.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Andy’s death?” Sara asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Sam admitted. “Maybe. I think so.”

  “The Morlocks?”

  “Yes.”

  Sara seemed to consider this information for a moment.

  “Do me a favor?” Sara asked.

  “Name it. I owe you.”

  “If they had anything to do with what happened to Andy . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Make them pay.”

  “You know I will.”

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  APRIL 13

  Taking classified information home was a cardinal sin in the intelligence world, right up there with cohabitating with a North Korean. For the thousandth time, doubts about what he was doing crept to the surface. Sam brushed them aside. He was faced with a series of open questions, and he had to hope that the answers were in the bag.

  He set the burn bag down on top of the coffee table in his living room. He had smuggled it out of Argus in his gym bag. And while there was no reason to believe that anyone other than Shoe and Sara knew what he had done, he did not want to leave the bag in his home for longer than was absolutely necessary.

  Sam piled kindling and a few split logs in the fireplace and lit a small block of fire starter. Within a few minutes, the logs had caught and the kindling was crackling. He dumped the contents of the bag onto the coffee table and shaped the pile into a semblance of order. The paper on the top was marked CONFIDENTIAL. It was an assessment from the National Intelligence Office about the ways in which climate change would increase the risk of conflict in Central Asia over the next decade. It was perfectly ordinary. Sam tossed it in the fire.

  One by one, he read through the thick stack of papers. Most were uninteresting. A few were from special access programs that Sam did not know existed. These he read carefully. They were far from uninteresting. One in particular that identified possible candidates in Yemen and Somalia for targeted assassination was fascinating, if appalling. When other governments did this sort of thing, it was extrajudicial killing. When the United States did it, on the other hand, it was policy. None of the documents from the burn bag offered any insights into Panoptes, the Stoics, or Andy Krittenbrink’s death. Murder, Sam reminded himself.

  After two hours of reading, near the bottom of the pile, he found something different.

  Unlike the other papers in the burn bag, this one had no classification markers on it. In fact, it had no markings of any kind. It was just a block of text. A single page. The draft of a speech or at least the fragment of a speech. The first sentence was enough to grab Sam’s attention.

  “My fellow Americans,” it began.

  There was only one person who would deliver a speech that began with those words. This was intended for Emily Lord. Someone had been working on the speech with a red pen, striking out words and phrases, and scribbling notes in the margin. It was a work in progress.

  Sam read quickly through the draft with a growing sense of disbelief. The outline of what the Stoics were planning was becoming clearer, and it both angered and terrified him. It was monstrous. And it made no sense. Why would they do this? Sam’s mind whirled in confusion as he read through to the end. How could he stop it?

  He poured himself a drink. Three fingers of Talisker. Neat.

  My fellow Americans, he read again.

  Today, we have witnessed the world’s first act of nuclear terrorism, the nightmare we have long feared. Although the target was not an American city, make no mistake that this was an attack directed against all of human civilization. It was an act of barbarism that has no equal.

  An untold number of people, but certainly many tens of thousands, lost their lives. And with the death of Indian Prime Minister Rangarajan, the world has lost a great friend of peace.

  Although no one has stepped forward to take responsibility for this cowardly and callous act of mass murder, I promise you that my administration will not rest until those behind this attack have been identified. Whether the perpetrator of this crime is a state or a nonstate actor, the terrible swift sword of justice will be unsheathed.

  Today, we are all Indians. Today, we are all citizens of . . .

  There was a blank space where the name of the target city should be. It was an Indian city and the prime minister was clearly among the victims, but that did not necessarily mean it was New Delhi. Rangarajan traveled widely throughout India. The city could just as easily be Kolkata or Varanasi . . . or Mumbai.

  Mumbai.

  Lena.

  If this speech was more than a creative-writing exercise. If it was part of an actual operation—and Sam felt at an instinctive level that it was—then Lena might be in terrible danger. Not incidentally, so was a major world city.

  This speech and the falsified intelligence that Andy had uncovered were linked somehow. They were part of a plan, an operation that Sam sensed was ambitious to the point of audacity. Sam and Andy had uncovered a small part of the operation, but like an iceberg, the vast bulk was still hidden underwater and out of sight. Whatever it involved, it was enough to unnerve a cold-blooded killer like Weeder.

  He looked at his watch. It was eight-thirty. In Mumbai, it would be six in the morning. He picked up the phone and dialed from memory.

  “Hi, Dad,” Lena answered. She sounded surprised to hear from Sam.

  “Hi, sweetie. I hope it’s not too early.”

  “Not at all. I was just getting ready to leave for the school.”

  “I’m glad I caught you.”

  “How’s everything in D.C.?”

  “Not so good, Lena. Listen, baby, I need you to come home.”

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  “No. It’s nothing like that. It’s just that I’ve come into some information that makes me think that Mumbai is not safe.”

  Lena laughed.

  “Of course it’s not safe, Dad. It’s a city of twenty million people, 98 percent of whom don’t have two rupees to rub together. It’s dirty and dangerous and there’s sewage in the street and I love it wildly.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. That stuff is all background. I’m talking about a specific threat to the city. A bomb.”

  “I spend most of my time in Dharavi. A bomb would be redundant. Don’t worry. I’ll stay away from the Taj and any other place that would make a likely target. It’s not really my scene anyway.”

  “The kind of bomb I’m talking about won’t care that you’re not standing right next to it.”

  “What do you mean? Like, a nuclear bomb?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think India and Pakistan are going to start lobbing nukes at each other, Dad. Or at least there’s no more risk of that than there was a week ago.”

  “What about terrorists?”

  “And nukes? Where are they going to get them?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Sam admitted.

  “Okay then. Let me know when you are sure.”

  “Lena. I’m serious. I don’t have all the evidence, but I feel in my bones that something very bad is about to happen. I think there’s a very real risk of
a city in India being attacked with a nuclear bomb, maybe by Pakistan, maybe by one of the terrorist groups. I don’t know. I just know that I want you out of there.”

  “I know you do, Dad. But I’m not ready to leave. The risks you’ve described are always there. I knew that when I decided to move here. You knew that when you made the same choice, and if you hadn’t, then I wouldn’t be here today. Listen, I’ll be back for Christmas, okay?”

  Sam fought on gamely, but it was a losing battle. He didn’t have the evidence he needed to persuade his daughter, and Lena was like her mother: stubborn, independent, and self-assured. He thought about getting on a plane and flying to Mumbai and somehow physically carrying her back to Washington. That was not going to end well. Sam wasn’t ready to give up. But he knew he was not going to win this round. He would need to pull back, marshal his arguments, and try again. He’d need something compelling and concrete to bring Lena around, to get her to leave that city. Sam knew he would never sleep well as long as his daughter was on the subcontinent.

  • • •

  The draft speech alone, Sam realized, was a terribly thin reed on which to build a case against Argus. It was just a Word document. It could have been written by anyone for any purpose. It was not a part of the system. It lacked agency. There were no origin codes, no information about the drafter, no clearance page, no routing information, nothing that gave life to the information in the context of the government, nothing that would leave electronic footprints. It was a dead block of text that could have been drafted on any computer.

  The falsified intelligence reports, on the other hand, were something altogether different. These were official records. They had agency and accountability. Together with the speech, Sam believed, he could use these to make a credible argument that would get traction with people in the system he thought he could trust.

  Andy was gone, but Sam should be able to re-create the file of falsified reports that the young analyst had put together.

  At the office the next morning, Sam logged on to his high-side system where he could access NSA products and typed a few key words into the search function. He chose Vanalika Chandra and Panchavaktra Guhathakurta as the easiest route to find the original piece that had triggered his approach to Andy.

  The search took only seconds, but the response was frightening in its implication.

  NO RECORD FOUND.

  Sam tried again, using the original date-time group that he still remembered.

  NO RECORD FOUND.

  He tried searching for Panoptes as a program function and drew a blank.

  He tried other key words and got the same response. Quickly, he tried to search for the other intel pieces that Andy had shown to him. Sometimes, his search produced results but not the relevant product he was looking for. More often, the search algorithm repeated the NO RECORD FOUND mantra.

  Someone had gone through the database and stripped out all of the suspect products linked to the Panoptes program. Sam was pretty sure he knew who had done that. He was also confident that Weeder and his team had covered their tracks carefully.

  The draft speech was now the only real “evidence” he had that Argus Systems was up to no good. The odds were that it would not be enough.

  • • •

  That assessment turned out to be distressingly accurate. Sam went to see an old friend at the State Department. J. Winston Tennyck, who went by the almost unbearably preppy nickname “Tenny,” was a deputy assistant secretary in the South Asia Bureau. He was third-generation Foreign Service and had grown up bouncing around the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East back in the days when India had been part of the Near Eastern Bureau. Even so, there was a substantial piece of Tenny that was forever Connecticut, from his penny loafers with no socks to his Brooks Brothers linen driving cap. He was more Groton than Goa.

  Sam had cashed in a couple of favors to get on Tenny’s calendar that afternoon. He had hesitated before making the call, but he needed to go to someone in a position to make a difference and Tenny was an unlikely candidate for membership in the Stoics. His attitude toward South Asia had always seemed to border on noblesse oblige. He was a classic on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand-let’s-split-the-difference State Department deal maker, the kind of person who saw the world in shades of gray rather than the stark black-and-white of the Stoics. Moreover, if you could get past the preppy exterior, Tenny had a sharp and incisive mind that would allow him to recognize the significance of what Sam had uncovered . . . if only he could summon the necessary imagination. Sam showed Tennyck the draft presidential speech, asking him to keep their conversation strictly in confidence and being somewhat vague about exactly how he had acquired a copy.

  Tennyck was a few years older than Sam and he needed reading glasses. There were at least half a dozen pairs scattered around the office that Sam could see. Doubtless there were even more stuffed into the desk drawers and the pockets of the spare blazers Tenny kept in the office closet.

  When he had finished reading the speech, the DAS removed his glasses and wiped them idly on the skinny back half of his club tie before setting them down next to the bone china cup that held his tea.

  “It’s really not a terribly good speech,” he observed. “A bit windy, maybe even a tad pompous for the occasion. The ‘terrible swift sword’ thing in particular struck me as a bit over the top.”

  “That’s not really the point, Tenny. I didn’t write this. It was drafted by someone who knows what’s coming because he’s part of the group that’s planning to make it so.”

  “Yes. The Stoics, was it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you had other material evidence, but it’s mysteriously disappeared from the servers of the intelligence community. Do I have that right?”

  “Yes,” Sam said helplessly. He knew how ridiculous the whole thing sounded.

  “Do you want to know what I think this is?” Tenny asked.

  “Tell me.”

  “I think this is part of a war-game exercise. Argus does that sort of thing, doesn’t it?”

  “On occasion.”

  “So this is almost certainly one of the pieces the game designer has put together to include for color. You know, the kind of thing they need to make the otherwise terribly dull at least palatable. That’s probably why they left the name of the city out of the draft, so that they could have some flexibility in the scenario. Some people like it, I suppose, but I find war gaming so tedious, like talking about food and wine rather than sitting down to dinner.”

  Deputy Assistant Secretary Tennyck had missed his calling. He should have been a colonial official in India during the British Raj. Give him a pith helmet and he would blend right in.

  “I understand how this sounds,” Sam said. “I know that the evidence is weak. But look at what’s happening on the ground. Tensions between Delhi and Islamabad are spiking for no real reason. I believe someone is cooking the intelligence that we are sharing with the services there and that the data being fed into the system is designed to push the two sides closer to conflict.”

  “But why?” Tennyck asked. “Cui bono? as they say. Who benefits?”

  “I think the Stoics would tell you that we do . . . in the end.”

  “Well, it’s all right then, isn’t it?”

  Sam knew that it was time to cut his losses.

  “This has to remain strictly between us,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, Sam. I’m not taking this up with anyone. I’m quite certain no one would believe me if I did.”

  • • •

  Garret Spears hated Washington parties. Boring, plastic people eating boring, plastic food and trolling for gossip. Whoever you spoke to would keep looking over your shoulder with at least one eye hoping to spot someone more important in the crowd so they could trade up. As much as Spears hated going to the parties, however, he woul
d have hated not being invited considerably more. He wanted to be A-list, a confidant to presidents and prime ministers.

  Argus was just a starting place for a journey that he was sure had limitless upside potential. Secretary of defense, perhaps. Senator Spears. Maybe even one day an office with no corners and its own rose garden. Why think small? Ambition was not a sin.

  For now, however, it sometimes meant putting in appearances, which is why he was here at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in downtown D.C., where Raytheon was hosting a reception for the president of Kazakhstan. No doubt the corporate titans at Raytheon assessed that Nursultan Nazarbayev could be persuaded to purchase multiple billions of dollars of Raytheon missiles in exchange for little plates of cheese and crackers and tumblers of icy vodka.

  Spears helped himself to a glass of sparkling water with lime from the tray of one of the gloved waiters circulating the room.

  The third-tier congressman that Spears was technically talking to, if not really listening to, was prattling on about something, maybe ethanol. Spears didn’t really care. He was from some Podunk district in the Midwest with more hogs than constituents . . . unless you counted the hogs as constituents and maybe he did. He was also, however, on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, so Spears was ready to stand there and smile while he blathered.

  That the congressman had sought him out was a good sign. People were talking about him. His membership in the Stoics was putting him on the Washington map. Not the one of gala dinners and congressional hearings. The one that mattered. The Washington of back rooms and secret deals. Real power.

  The next few weeks would be critical. Spears and Argus were on point for perhaps the most complex and far-reaching operation in the Stoics’ long history. If he pulled it off, he would be able to move up in the organization’s rigid hierarchy, assuming, of course, that the operation came off as planned.

  It was a shame about the kid . . . Krittenbrink. But when Quick had told him about the analysis he had done, Spears knew that there was no other choice. There had not been time to summon the Council. Spears had made the call as head of Operations and Weeder had done the work. It was not as elegant as how he had handled Braithwaite, but he hadn’t had much time to work with and Krittenbrink’s death would go largely unnoticed, except by his family, of course.