Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  “They might,” Jadoon conceded. “But not as important as obedience to orders.”

  “I understand. When do I start?”

  “Right now.”

  “Why me, Jadoon? Why not one of the others?” Khan was genuinely curious about why the team leader had chosen him.

  “Because you are not a robot,” Jadoon replied. “The others on the team will do as I command, but they cannot think for themselves. I do not know what will happen with this girl, but I suspect that it will require a man of judgment to know what to do when the time for action comes.”

  “And you think that I am this man?”

  “I do.”

  Khan wished that he could be so certain.

  The file had not been especially informative or useful. There were a few headshots of the woman he was supposed to follow. One looked like a driver’s license or passport picture, and the other may have been a college yearbook photo. There was a name and address for her employer, a high-tech company called SysNet on Hari Mandi Road. There was some biographical information about the subject, her work history, and a summary of her impressive academic credentials. There were a few interesting tidbits. She had both American and Indian citizenship. Her father had been a minor-league bureaucrat in the State Department and was now a government contractor of some kind. Her mother was from Mumbai, a designer or artist who had died some ten years ago. Her father was an American, an Anglo judging by Lena’s photographs. The mother’s last known address in India was included. It was in Dharavi.

  • • •

  She was beautiful. That was the first thing Khan thought when he saw the subject walk out the front door of SysNet Technology. He was sitting in a café with a cup of tea and a small plate of cookies. He had a magazine that he pretended to read as he kept watch on the entrance to SysNet. Tucked discreetly into the magazine was one of the headshots from her file that he had brought in case he needed a reference. The photograph had not done her justice. She was tall for an Indian, half Indian he reminded himself, and she moved with an enviable grace and self-assuredness that the two dimensions of film had been unable to convey.

  He did not yet know how the subject moved around town. Whether she had a car and a driver or took taxis or public transportation or even walked. A Kawasaki two-stroke motorbike parked nearby would help Khan navigate the dense Mumbai traffic without calling undue attention to him. But it looked at least for now as though she was moving on foot. He would do the same.

  Khan dropped a hundred-rupee note with its picture of Gandhi on the table and slipped the photograph of the subject back into his wallet before stepping out from under the umbrella that had shaded him from the intense afternoon sun. He could feel a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. His sensitivity to the heat was something of an embarrassment to him. He felt it marked him as an outsider. A citizen of New Jersey rather than Pakistan.

  He took a position on the street opposite the subject, where he could keep her in sight without looking like he was following her. Even on the crowded streets of Mumbai, she stood out. The subject was wearing Western clothes, a white blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons, and a skirt that was somewhere in between blue and green. Her shoes were flats, sensible, made for walking through the congested streets of a sprawling, chaotic megacity. Khan had thought that Islamabad had prepared him for Mumbai, but it was not even close. Nothing could prepare you for Mumbai except perhaps another Indian city. They were in a class of their own.

  Mumbai was a shadow’s paradise. It was nonstop sensory overload with so much coming at you in the form of sounds, smells, crowds, and spectacle that it was hard to focus on any one thing. Certainly not on one man who did not wish to be noticed trailing at a discreet distance.

  Indian street life was a mass of contrast and contradiction. Cows wandered freely through the streets, their ribs sticking out prominently in testament to the travails of city life for a grazing animal. The cows brushed up alongside the cars and trucks that jammed Mumbai’s streets. Everything from Bentleys to rickshaws were packed in nose to tail. On the sidewalks, crippled boys begged for spare change and girls as young as seven or eight hawked fresh sugarcane juice or street food from carts piled high with fried chapati and green coconuts.

  The air smelled of manure and urine and fried food. It was an unfortunate combination.

  She walked with purpose and Khan suspected that this was her regular evening commute. If he followed her, she would show him where she was living. It was the kind of information that he was expected to gather. Her home address had not been in the file, which Khan understood to mean two things: The information on the subject had been assembled quickly and it was unlikely that she either owned her own apartment or lived in one of the higher-end rental buildings that catered to expats and kept electronic records of their tenants. If the subject was living on the cash economy, it was on Khan to find out where.

  They walked past a Hindu temple covered in ornate and intricate carvings of gods that Khan could not identify. Monkeys lounged insouciantly on the temple steps, waiting out the worst of the afternoon heat. Next to the Hindu temple was a mosque with whitewashed walls and green shutters on the windows. The minaret was squat with a dome on top that was almost a Russian-style onion.

  Khan followed the subject to the edge of the great Dharavi slum. Walking up to the entrance of an unprepossessing apartment building on 60 Feet Road, she pulled a set of keys out of her purse, the universal signal for “I’m home.” That she needed keys also signaled that there was no doorman. That bit of information might prove to be important at some point and Khan filed it away. He watched from the other side of the street and was rewarded by a light that came on in a window on the third floor on the far right side of the building. The subject’s apartment.

  He waited alongside the foul-smelling canal that delineated the border of the Dharavi slum. Some thirty minutes after she had gone inside, the subject reemerged dressed considerably more casually in khaki pants and a short-sleeved blouse.

  She waited for the light to change and crossed over 60 Feet Road, walking almost directly toward Khan. He turned away from her, hoping to blend into the crowd on the sidewalk without losing track of which direction she took. She surprised him by turning neither left nor right, but proceeding across the wooden bridge that spanned the canal. The entrance to the slum.

  It seemed an odd destination for a Mumbai yuppie.

  A legless boy with a hideous growth on his neck sat on the ground at one end of the bridge begging passersby for a few rupees. Khan watched as she leaned over the boy. She spoke a few words and pressed something into his hand. The boy nodded his head to acknowledge the gift.

  Khan followed at a distance. There was nothing about the subject’s behavior that indicated she was aware that she had grown a tail. She was all but oblivious to what was happening behind her. But the legless beggar boy watched him suspiciously. Khan was a stranger, an outsider to Dharavi. That could be a problem if he needed to make a return visit. The bridge was a chokepoint. Moreover, he suspected that this was the boy’s permanent home. There was a sleeping mat under the bridge and a few small boxes that doubtlessly contained his worldly possessions.

  The narrow, twisting alleys of Dharavi were like a maze, and Khan was careful to identify landmarks on the route so he could find his way back. The slum was surprisingly vibrant. There was more industry here than he would have thought. Massive trays of bread were piled up on the street in front of bakeries waiting to be delivered, he supposed, to restaurants and hotels across the city. Small-scale factories turned out cheap cookware and plastic washtubs. The entire district smelled of sweat and decay and desperation.

  Khan hoped that the subject’s stop in Dharavi was a onetime thing. He was soon disabused of that. She led him to a single-story warehouse-style building that looked to be in a slightly better state of repair than the buildings around it. There were screens on the wind
ows and doors. Metal shutters could be rolled down to cover the windows, and Khan saw that they could be secured with substantial padlocks. There was something inside worth protecting. For those undeterred by mechanical obstacles, there was a man sitting on an overturned bucket by the door. He was not especially large or otherwise physically imposing, but something about him said “don’t mess with me.”

  A hand-lettered wooden sign next to the front door identified the building as THE DHARAVI ACADEMY OF MATH AND ENGINEERING. Khan did not slow down as he walked past the school. The guard looked alert, and like the boy on the bridge, he would recognize and remember an outsider. Khan would need to find a place off 60 Feet Road from where he could keep an eye on both the bridge and the subject’s apartment, at least until he had learned her routine. He did not yet know what he would be tasked to do with that information, and he was not sure that he wanted to know.

  • • •

  The next morning, Khan waited for Lena on the canal side of 60 Feet Road. He was amused to find himself thinking of her as “Lena” rather than the “subject.” He told himself that it was because he was trying to get inside her head, to learn everything that he could about her. But he knew that wasn’t the full truth of it. Lena Trainor was an attractive woman, and it had been a long time for Khan since he had been with a woman. Following her like this was the nearest thing he had had to a date since starting down the all-consuming path of jihad.

  He squatted on the back of his heels in the South Asian style, sucking idly on a clove cigarette. A few old magazines were spread out on the sidewalk in front of him as though he were just one of the thousands of small-time peddlers working the streets of Mumbai. He had changed his clothes and his hairstyle from the day before, but the legless beggar seemed to look at him from time to time with keen interest. Khan sensed that he was a bright kid. He would need to be to survive for long on the streets given his handicap. That was one thing that India and Pakistan had in common, the extraordinary amount of human talent they wasted by tossing young minds into the crushing jaws of poverty.

  He did not yet know Lena’s morning routine, so he had been up early. It would be easier with a team of watchers, but Jadoon could not spare any of the others to join him. Khan alone had been given the assignment.

  It was close to eight before Lena appeared at the front entrance to her building dressed for work. She waved at the boy on the far end of the bridge and he waved back.

  Khan abandoned the magazines, sweeping them up into a pile and leaving them in the shadow of a palm tree. He imagined the boy on the bridge marking his sudden departure. He would need to find a new vantage point tomorrow.

  Khan had thought Lena would retrace her route to SysNet, but instead she flagged down an auto rickshaw that headed off through the crowded streets of South Mumbai in the opposite direction. Khan was prepared for this eventuality too. The Kawasaki was parked nearby. Trailing the rickshaw was even easier than following Lena on the street. She led him on a twenty-minute drive through the smog-cloaked streets of the city, dodging potholes and sacred cows. The rickshaw stopped in front of a run-down concrete building with a sign over the door that read GUMMADI BROTHERS REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT.

  Khan drove past without slowing down and pulled his bike over to the side of the road on the next block. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and quickly Googled the Gummadi brothers. It did not take long to make the connection. There were numerous articles in the local press about the Gummadis’ plans to develop a swath of the Dharavi slum into a gated community. Maybe Lena was working with the Gummadis. Even as he formulated the thought, however, Khan knew that he had it backwards. The boy on the bridge was hardly on the lookout for a new home with central air-conditioning and a shared pool, and her work at the Dharavi “academy” did not match the profile of a grasping land speculator. Lena, he was quite sure, was on the opposite side of that fight.

  He waited.

  As camouflage, Khan bought a vada pav from a street vendor for ten rupees. Mumbai was world famous for its street food and the vada pav was the apotheosis of working-class cuisine. Two deep-fried balls of mashed potatoes were sandwiched in a bun with a chutney made from coconut meat, tamarind pulp, and garlic. It was incredibly good and, more important, eating it gave Khan a reason to be standing on the street in front of the Gummadi brothers’ building.

  Less than thirty minutes later, Lena emerged from the building looking downcast. Yes, she was on the other side, and she was losing. Instinctively, Khan empathized with her position. She was representing the downtrodden against the powerful. Khan could relate to that.

  He thought of the box that sat at the abandoned studio under the watchful gaze of Adnan and the jihadis. Lena Trainor had her mission, but its significance paled in comparison with his own.

  Khan followed Lena’s auto rickshaw through the backstreets, but he saw quickly that she was headed to SysNet. When he was certain that she had gone into the shiny headquarters building, Khan rode his bike back to Lena’s apartment.

  The lock on the front door to the building was not difficult to bypass, but it took nearly thirty seconds and Khan was concerned that he was drawing further unwelcome attention from the boy on the far side of the bridge. Khan slipped inside quickly and closed the door firmly behind him. In the bare concrete entryway, a sleek rat sat up on its hind legs staring insolently at Khan as though he too recognized an outsider when he saw one.

  This building was a far cry from the kind of high-end apartment that someone with a job like Lena’s should have been able to afford. The stairs were dark and narrow. There were four apartments on the third floor, but it was easy to identify the door that was associated with the windows Khan had marked earlier. This door was even easier for Khan to jimmy open than the entrance door on the ground floor had been. Inside, the apartment was more comfortable than the austere common areas indicated. Lena had clearly put some thought into making it livable and a little bit of money into furnishing it. The dining table and living room set were worn but perfectly serviceable. A television in one corner had neither aerials nor a cable connection, but an Indian-brand DVD player and a pile of American movies offered some indication of how it was used. Cheery yellow curtains framed the windows and the kitchen area was clean and well stocked with fresh fruits and vegetables.

  The most striking thing about the apartment was the art on the wall. There were five or six paintings that appeared to be the work of the same artist. One painting seemed to be of the rape of Europa with an Indian twist. A distinctive humped Brahman bull was straddling a woman with dark blue skin and four arms that Khan recognized as an incarnation of the goddess Kali. It was a powerful image, and disturbing. Khan wondered why Lena would want it hanging over her couch. It said in her file that her mother had been an artist. Maybe the paintings were hers.

  The bedroom was separate from the living area, and it was there that Khan found what he was looking for, Lena’s desk. There was an Apple PowerBook on the desktop and an accordion file with papers. The computer was password-protected. With the right equipment, Khan knew, he would be able to circumvent that protection, but now was not the time.

  The papers in the file were mostly related to Lena’s efforts to stymie the Gummadi brothers’ plans to develop Dharavi. There were copies of letters to the BMC and the Times of India as well as blueprints outlining the extent of the developer’s ambitions. It was a big project that would no doubt generate considerable money for well-placed city officials and create a large number of newly homeless who would simply be swallowed up by the streets.

  Within forty-five minutes, Khan had learned everything about Lena that he could from her apartment. He was building a mental picture of her and a database of her habits and preferences that he could draw from when the order came from Jadoon to do what must be done.

  He did not yet know what that would be. But he found himself already hoping that he would not be ordered to harm her
.

  That realization came as something of a surprise. It was a weakness. It was exploitable. He would have to be careful. He was expendable. So was Lena Trainor.

  The mission must come first.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  APRIL 20

  It was, perhaps, the ultimate Washington cliché, but the city’s monumental core was beautiful at night. The National Park Service used enough electricity along the Mall to power a small town, and the effect was to isolate the individual monuments and memorials in islands of light. Stripped down to their basic geometric forms, they looked like enormous translucent blocks of glass that seemed to glow from within rather than from reflected external light. On a warm spring night, it was all but magical, and Sam and Vanalika were just one pair of lovers among many who strolled hand in hand along the Tidal Basin. It was one of the few times and places where they could be both public and anonymous.

  “I think maybe you are making too much of this,” Vanalika suggested gently. “I mean, what are you basing all of this on? Some obscure intelligence reports that seem to have gone missing and a rough draft of a speech that may or may not be part of an exercise of some sort.”

  “And a dead friend,” Sam observed grimly. “Let’s not forget about Andy so quickly.”

  “You know that I haven’t. I liked him too, and I am terribly sad about what happened to him. But he lived in kind of a sketchy neighborhood. D.C. has gotten much safer over the years, but it isn’t Disneyland. Is it possible that you’re hearing hoofbeats and seeing zebras where there should be horses?”

  Sam shrugged.

  “I don’t think so. What Andy and I found, the Panoptes material, was pretty exotic for horses.”

  “You know that I asked a friend in our service to dig up the piece about me, the one you told me about.”

  “Yes.”

  “There was nothing there, Sam. There is no such piece anywhere in the records. Is it possible, is it conceivable, that what you and Andy tapped into was all part of a gaming exercise of some sort and there was some break in the firewalls that made it look, even for a time, like these were real products? They may have been using the names of actual players to give it a veneer of reality. That would explain how come these Panoptes products were close to true but somehow just a little bit off.”