There was silence. It was not the silence of assent. It was the silence of mounting anger.
“Jesus Christ.” The Vice Chairman was the first to speak in response. “How do you know that Krittenbrink and Trainor were a duo? How do you know that there aren’t three or four or a hundred and fifty more who know about Panoptes and Cold Harbor, or at least enough about the programs to make them dangerous? How can you assume anything at all at this point?”
“Yes,” Plans added. “You haven’t given us enough information to formulate an effective response.”
“I appreciate the difficulties of the position we are in,” Spears said. “That is why I asked for this session. We are on the cusp of something great. We have options. And we must not lose heart. We must not give in to our fears.”
“That is easy to say,” Plans replied. “But that does not absolve you from the responsibility for the security breach. How did a junior analyst like Krittenbrink get access to the Panoptes messages to begin with?”
“Panoptes was integrated into the mainstream intelligence reporting. That was a decision we made to reinforce the credibility of the product. It was the only way we could ensure that Panoptes material would be included as part of the regular intelligence-sharing program with Islamabad and New Delhi. Krittenbrink had access to all of this information as a matter of course. So did Sam Trainor. One of them must have identified a pattern in the Panoptes material that triggered concerns. We are looking into this.”
“You are assuming again that it was either Trainor or Krittenbrink who realized something was out of place. Couldn’t it just as easily have been a third party? Someone you have yet to identify.”
“It is possible, yes,” Spears acknowledged reluctantly.
“The level of incompetence demonstrated here is frankly stunning,” Plans said. “I think that merits further review. We need to understand what the hell happened.”
“There will be time enough for a postmortem later,” the Chairman interjected. “There is no percentage in seeking to assign blame at this point. That can wait. For now, our task is to identify a way forward that protects the operation.”
“How many people do we know Trainor’s talked to?” Finance asked.
“Just one,” Spears said. “A DAS at State who dismissed him as a loon. As I said, Trainor doesn’t have any evidence, and without that, the story he has to tell is quite literally incredible.”
“If he doesn’t have anything solid to offer, maybe we should just leave it alone. That may be the least risky course of action.” Unsurprisingly, this was Legal. Washington lawyers, in Spears’s experience, were all alike. They never wanted to do anything. In contrast, Spears himself had always believed in the credo embodied in the slogan of the SEALs’ British counterparts, the SAS: Who Dares Wins.
“I don’t think we can afford to take the chance,” Vice said. “If the subject is aggressively pushing a story line that, in fact, comes to pass, it would add ex post facto credibility to the allegations that the outcome in the Indo-Pak conflict was manipulated. No, I think we need to engage.”
Spears noted the way the Vice Chairman used “subject” instead of Sam’s name. It was clinical. Dehumanizing. The prelude to what in the SEALs they used to refer to as “direct action.” Spears knew which column he could put her in.
“I’m inclined to agree,” Reports said. Others around the table nodded their heads.
“Commander,” the Chairman asked. “Could you take care of Mr. Trainor in such a way that it would not arouse suspicions? An accident or even a suicide. A second random homicide of a friend of Krittenbrink’s would be an extraordinary coincidence. It would attract too much attention and perhaps raise some awkward questions.”
There was a pause while Weeder considered the answer.
“It can be done. But it will take some time to arrange.”
“Weeks?”
“Days.”
“Wait a moment,” Plans interjected. “Shouldn’t we be thinking about interrogating him first? We don’t know if there are any others. I would suggest that we need an opportunity to discuss this with Mr. Trainor in a manner conducive to complete honesty.”
Torture, Spears thought. That was the word you didn’t want to use, you prig. Language was the last refuge of the moral coward.
Like all SEALs, Spears had been through SERE training: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. As part of the training, the young SEALs had been waterboarded until they revealed a secret that they had been instructed to keep. They all broke. Torture was effective as long as the subject had the information you were after. If not, he or she would make up anything you might desire if it promised to stop the pain.
“Commander?” the Chairman asked.
“That will take a little more time. But it can be done.”
“Very well. Make the necessary preparations.”
“Is there anything else we should be doing?” Vice asked. “Are there other sources of leverage against the subject that we could potentially employ as part of a backup or contingency plan?”
“He has a daughter,” Weeder replied.
“Here in Washington?”
“No. In India. In Mumbai, in fact.”
A few eyebrows were raised at that.
“That’s not of much help then,” Finance commented.
“We have a team on the ground in India that could potentially pick her up. She would be leverage against him.”
“That would seem an appropriate precaution.”
“Again, the preparations would take some time.”
“How much time?”
“Days.”
“At a minimum,” the Chairman suggested, “I believe we should put the daughter under surveillance and develop the option to take her if necessary. The authority to take that step can be invested in the Commander here. Is that agreed?”
It was.
“And the father?” the Chairman continued. “Should we authorize the Commander to use all necessary means to determine whether there are any others who may know about Cold Harbor and Panoptes, and to take any other action that he deems appropriate to protect the integrity of the operation?”
“I believe we should,” Reports said quickly. “I’ll make the motion. Trainor is a legit threat.”
“I agree,” said Finance. “Seconded.”
It was unanimous.
MUMBAI, INDIA
APRIL 14
It sat in the center of the room as though it were some kind of conversation piece. But they did not talk about it. As much as they could, the men tried to ignore its existence. They had not opened it. No one had told them what was inside. It was not necessary. They knew. They were living with a bomb.
Although the sealed box was a grim reminder of death, Khan was almost exultant. Now he understood. This was his mission. This was why he had abandoned everything he had known in America and pledged himself to the Hand of the Prophet. This was jihad.
Jadoon had set them up in an abandoned movie studio in Navi Mumbai, a depressed industrial zone separated from the city center by the Thane Creek estuary. Hill Station Productions had specialized in cheap, low-end musicals that typically went straight to video. The studio had tried to go more up-market, but a few big bets on bad movies had sent Hill Station Productions into bankruptcy. It was perfect for their needs, isolated but still close to downtown. Toward the end of its life, and in what Khan suspected had been a desperate attempt to stave off the creditors, the studio had started pirating basic services such as electricity and water. These still worked because there was no record of Hill Station Productions being connected to the grid.
Jadoon had implied that there was another reason he had chosen the abandoned studio as their base, but he had been secretive as to exactly why.
The set for the last movie the studio had pinned its hopes on was still standin
g in the spacious soundstage, and if you ignored the film of grit and dust that covered every exposed surface, the cameras looked ready to roll at the call to “action.” It must have been a period piece, because the set was an old Hindu temple made of fiberglass and Styrofoam. There doubtlessly would have been a barbarian princess, sword fights, and—it was Bollywood, after all—song-and-dance numbers. To Khan, the set looked terribly cheesy. Maybe it would have shown up better on film, or maybe there was a good reason that Hill Station Productions was out of business.
On the second day, a new member of the team arrived. Adnan was no fighter. He was small and thin to the point of emaciation. He could not even grow a proper beard. It grew in uneven patches like the fur on a mangy dog. He wore a white taqiyah prayer cap. Khan suspected it was more a mark of vanity than piety since it covered his substantial bald spot. Jadoon had told him that Adnan was a professor of physics and high up in the Pakistani nuclear bureaucracy. The jihadis agreed that he looked like a toad.
Adnan seemed afraid of the guns the HeM jihadis carried, but he had no fear of the box. He set a small wooden stool and a box of tools alongside it. Khan helped him lift the lid gently. Inside was a perfectly ordinary-looking bomb, with tail fins and a bulbous nose. A small hemisphere protruded from the tip and Khan wondered if something as sophisticated as a nuclear bomb could be triggered by something as primitive and basic as a contact fuse.
“Masood told me that you know explosives,” Adnan said.
“Yes. I was trained to be part of a bomb squad.”
“For the Americans, no?”
“Yes.”
Adnan looked at him appraisingly.
“I need an assistant for what I am about to do. Someone with steady hands and no fear of death.”
“I will do my best.”
“Yes. You will. And you will not fail me.”
“Insha’Allah.”
Adnan handed him a plastic badge on a metal chain. A small manila envelope was slotted neatly into the badge. Khan could see that Adnan was already wearing one around his own neck.
“You will want one of these,” Adnan said.
“What is it?” Khan asked.
“Something I can use to measure our exposure to radiation.”
“What’s in the envelope?”
Adnan laughed and gestured toward the soundstage.
“Movie film.”
With a small screwdriver from the toolbox, Adnan removed the screws securing a large convex plate to the side of the bomb. The casing had been painted army green and the panel was glued in place by the dried paint. Adnan needed to scrape the paint clean to remove the panel. Khan did not know what he had expected, but the inside of an atomic bomb was disappointingly ordinary, a sphere of what looked like pretty standard explosives with electronic triggers embedded in the material. Adnan seemed to sense what Khan was thinking.
“It’s an implosion-style warhead, with high explosives surrounding a hollow core of uranium-235. The explosives have to go off at precisely the same time to collapse the core fast enough for the uranium to reach critical mass. If the timing is off, you get a nuclear fizzle rather than an explosive chain reaction. Really quite embarrassing if you’re trying to blow up a city.”
“What was in the box that we put on the train?” Khan asked. “A different bomb?”
“A dummy,” Adnan explained. “It will pass a simple visual inspection and weighs exactly the same as the real thing, but there is no warhead inside. No fissile material. For most purposes, nuclear weapons don’t need to work as long as the enemy believes they will. For most purposes. Not ours.”
“You know how this thing works?”
“I designed it. Indian intelligence stole the blueprints for one of our warheads and the Indian defense establishment adapted the plans to their own purposes. It was my design. It will produce a ten-kiloton yield consistent to within plus or minus 5 percent.” The pride in his voice was plain, as though he were describing the accomplishments of his children.
“What now?”
“Now we teach a bomb trained to go off at a certain altitude to go off at a certain time.”
Adnan pulled a set of metal rods from the box and built a rectangular frame alongside the bomb. For the next three hours, he worked meticulously to extend the electronic controls of the weapon out of the bomb casing and onto the external frame. Khan held the light for him and assisted with the wiring when Adnan asked him to. The circuitry was complex, much more so, Khan thought, than it needed to be. It looked almost as though the bomb had been hooked up to a life-support system.
“Why all of the redundant loops?” he asked.
Adnan stopped what he was doing and turned to him with a look that somehow straddled impressed and irritated.
“Some of the complexity stems from my need to circumvent the PAL, the permissive action link. Essentially, it’s a code that lets the warhead know that it’s okay to fire. Some of the complexity is about setting up the timing mechanism and introducing the connections for our own PAL. And then some”—Adnan paused as if considering what he should say—“some of the loops are traps meant to prevent tampering. If someone cuts random wires or otherwise tries to disable the weapon without knowing the proper sequence, it will explode. The timing may not be optimal in those circumstances, but it would be a shame to waste a perfectly good fissile core and at the very least it would take the saboteur with it to Hell.”
“Are you expecting trouble from any of us?” Khan asked, shocked.
“Of course not. We are all servants of Allah. But we are in the middle of an enemy city and the Indian services are far from amateur. It is a precaution is all. And now for the final piece.”
The physicist pulled two thin rectangular objects made of glass and steel from the toolbox. Each one had a screen and there was a row of buttons along the bottom edge. Adnan looked at his watch and pressed a series of buttons on one of the boxes. A row of numbers appeared on the screen glowing in blood red and upside down to Khan. He tried to read them, but it was hard to get a good look. The last four numbers were 2-5-0-0. The preceding number might have been a 7 or a 9. The physicist’s thumb partly obscured that number and the 3 in front of it.
Adnan set the second box on top of the first and pushed at the corners until they snapped together with a metallic click. The blank screen on the upper device lit up with a sequence of numbers. Now Adnan was holding the object in such a way that Khan could read the screen easily. He saw two things. The sequence of numbers was 20072500.
And it was counting down.
It was a timer.
20:07:24:59
20:07:24:58
There was no need for Adnan to explain what would happen when the counter reached 0. At 0, Mumbai would burn.
“We’re almost there,” Adnan said. “I just need to lock it.”
He touched a larger button on the side of the device and the screen toggled to present a row of nine dashes.
Adnan entered the code, but his body blocked Khan’s view and he could not see the numbers.
“Now we control the weapon,” Adnan explained. “It will respond only to our PAL. Masood himself gave me the code. He was quite insistent on the sequence of numbers. It was all mumbo jumbo, mystical nonsense to me. But any string of numbers is as good as any other as long as you remember what it is.”
“What is it?” Khan asked.
Adnan smiled.
“Something that only Masood and I are empowered to know,” he answered.
• • •
Adnan’s modifications may have been essential to the operation, but they left the bomb leaky. He instructed Khan to cover the box with lead blankets like the kind that a dentist might drape over a patient before taking an X-ray, in New Jersey, at least, if not necessarily in Lahore. As an added precaution, he distributed film badges to each of the jihadis. Khan a
nd the other foot soldiers took turns guarding the box.
They passed the time with prayer and exercise. When Khan had been in the army, the soldiers had whiled away the hours of boredom with card games. But gambling was haram, sinful. The only book they had was the Quran. It was enough. Khan took his turns standing guard over the box. They waited. Once a day, the physicist would develop the film to check their levels of exposure to radiation. So far, the level of exposure was within acceptable limits, at least according to Adnan.
Khan had just finished his morning shift on guard duty five days after the HeM team had set up camp at Hill Station Productions when Jadoon summoned him.
“I have a new assignment for you.” He did not seem happy about it.
“What is it?”
“I want you to follow someone.”
“Follow him where?”
“Her. And wherever she goes. I want you to watch this woman, track her movements, learn as much as you can about her habits.”
“Am I going to kill her?”
“I don’t know. At least not yet. As it stands, our instructions are just to follow her. We will learn more when we need to know.”
“Who is this woman?”
“Her name is Lena Trainor.” Jadoon put a thin manila envelope on the desk of the office where they were meeting. The walls were decorated with posters from Hill Station movies, mostly crime dramas, it looked like.
“Why is she important?” Khan asked. “What does she have to do with our mission?”
Jadoon shook his head impatiently.
“You ask too many questions.”
“The answers might be important.”
Secrets of State Page 21