Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  “Give me time to pack a few things,” she said.

  ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

  APRIL 21

  It had been a long time, maybe thirty years, since Sam had taken the bus. The Greyhound that crossed back and forth between Richmond and Asheville looked like it was at least that old. The passengers were the same eclectic mix of people that Sam remembered. Some kids on the way home to see the family. Retirees. And a few weirdos. One old man in a raincoat sitting all the way in the back spent the better part of three hours talking to himself.

  What the bus offered, and what Sam needed at that point more than speed or convenience, was privacy. No one batted an eye if you paid cash for a bus ticket. No one checked IDs. Except for the psychotic in the rear, nobody tried to make conversation. No one even really looked at Sam once he had settled into his seat. He had dried his clothes as best he could under the hand drier in the bus station bathroom, but his jeans still felt clammy and cold.

  Sam had four hundred and eighty-six dollars in his damp wallet. After walking from the boathouse to Georgetown, he had taken as much as he could out of a gas station ATM. The bus ticket to Richmond had set him back forty-three dollars and the connection to Asheville was another one hundred and twenty-four dollars. He did not know when he might be able to risk another try at an ATM. There were few more effective ways of broadcasting a “here I am” message to Weeder and his hired assassins.

  For now, he needed to find a place to hide and think. He’d need to stretch his money out for as long as he could. And he would need allies. The men who were after him were not amateurs, and Sam was dispiritingly aware that he was now playing out of his league. He was not kidding himself about what had happened on the parkway. He had gotten lucky.

  The only one he could think to turn to was Earl Holly. There was no guarantee that Earl would be willing to help, but Sam did not have any better ideas.

  His phone had been ruined by the swim across the river. He had briefly thought about buying a prepaid phone in Georgetown. The idea of carrying around anything electronic was unsettling enough that he had decided to leave that for later. Nothing mattered now but space and time. And Lena. Sam was worried about her. He had wanted Lena to get out of Mumbai and come back to Washington, but maybe that was only trading one kind of danger for another.

  It started to rain, and Sam watched the fat drops splash against the window. His head hurt and various parts of his body ached dully from the crash. He tried to sleep, but he was too keyed up. His hands shook slightly as though from too much coffee. He wished that he could talk to Vanalika.

  By the time they reached Asheville, it was almost noon. Sam realized he was famished and wolfed down a club sandwich and french fries at a diner across the street from the bus station. That set him back another eight dollars. There was a local bus leaving for Linville in just over an hour. Sam bought a couple of newspapers and found a Starbucks nearby where he could sit. He caught himself staring at the door and out of the plate-glass windows expecting to see a team of Morlocks that had somehow tracked him down. It would be easy to grow paranoid, he realized.

  The bus to Linville was slow. It made half a dozen stops and waited for at least twenty minutes at each one. Sam had no idea why and he did not want to ask. He did not want to do anything that might attract attention, something that might lead people to remember his face.

  Linville did not have a bus station. The driver let him off in front of the IHOP in what passed for a downtown. It had been even longer since Sam had hitchhiked than it had been since he had been on a Greyhound. It was not that hard to get a ride. After about fifteen minutes, a man with a bushy red beard and a flannel shirt coming out of the pancake house offered him a ride to the end of Dry Gulch Road. From there, he walked the mile and a half or so to No. 9.

  Earl was sitting on the front porch right where Sam had left him. It was late afternoon. There was a bottle of Knob Creek and a half-full glass on the coffee table next to a copy of Tyler Grigorievich’s book on the history of India’s Congress Party. Earl’s eyes were closed.

  “That book put me to sleep too,” Sam said.

  “Are you sure it’s not the bourbon?” Earl asked. His eyes did not open.

  “Pretty sure. I know Tyler.”

  “So what brings you back so soon?”

  “Somebody tried to kill me.”

  Earl opened his eyes.

  “Thought that might happen. Go on and sit.”

  Sam sat in one of the raggedy easy chairs that did not really belong on a porch.

  “Was it Weeder’s people?” Earl asked.

  “I think so.”

  “So how is it that you ain’t dead?”

  Sam told him about being pulled over by the fake park police, the desperate chase down the GW Parkway and his midnight swim across the Potomac. Earl listened intently but did not interrupt. When Sam had finished, he stood and waddled into the kitchen, returning with a second glass and a few ice cubes. He poured a stiff shot of the Knob Creek and set it in front of Sam.

  “Serves you right for not driving American,” he said. “That little Japanese piece of crap could get run off the road by a tricycle.”

  Earl raised his glass and offered a toast.

  “To not being dead.”

  They drank.

  “Why were they after you?”

  “I found something I wasn’t supposed to. And then I tried to get other people interested in it. People who were in a position to do something about it.” Sam told him about the speech he had found in the Morlocks’ burn bag and his unsuccessful efforts to get Tennyck to pay attention to it.

  “Fuck me,” Earl said, when Sam had finished. “I didn’t think they would really do it. Not even them.”

  “Tenny was convinced that it was just part of some war-game exercise.”

  “Tennyck is an asshole. John Weeder doesn’t play games. Leastwise, nothing that you or I would recognize as a game.”

  “You agree it’s real? The speech, I mean.”

  “I do.”

  “Earl, there’s something you’re not telling me. Something important. I think you almost told me the last time, but you didn’t. What is it? I know you have secrets to keep. But not this one. Not now. I need to know what you know. I overheard Weeder talk about something called Cold Harbor when I was stuck in that damn burn chute. It seemed to scare him. Do you know anything about it?”

  Earl was quiet. He sipped the bourbon and set the glass down on the table. Then he looked down at the floorboards between his feet. This pause in the conversation was considerably longer than the others. Sam could hear the thrum of insects in the woods girdling the farmhouse. A black-headed Carolina chickadee landed on the railing by his elbow. The bird bobbed his head twice as though in greeting and flew off.

  Earl finally looked up. His face graver than it had been.

  “Sam, there’s a program you haven’t been read into that you should probably know about.”

  Earl was talking about Sensitive Compartmented Information. All SCI material was “need to know.” A Top Secret clearance was just the baseline. Just because you had a clearance did not mean that you had access to any and all classified information. There were a significant number of information streams that were restricted to people who had an operational need for the knowledge. They were called programs. Each one had its own rules and “being read in” meant first being briefed on what they were and then signing away your firstborn as the penalty for violating them.

  Sam waited.

  “Cold Harbor is part of a larger set of protocols,” Earl said, after another thirty-second pause that he had, no doubt, used to consider the question of whether he should go further. Earl was out of government service, but he was still bound by the rules of secrecy that had governed his professional life. “Nuclear protocols. The various scenarios are named after Civil War battles. I
don’t know the history behind that, but the program is highly classified. Even the name ‘Cold Harbor’ is considered SCI.”

  “If I remember right, Grant got his ass handed to him by Lee at Cold Harbor. Seems like odd nomenclature for an Agency program.”

  “It’s military. Cold Harbor is a contingency plan for United States Special Forces to seize control of Pakistan’s existing nuclear weapons and for the air force and navy to destroy every last nuclear site on Pakistani soil.”

  “Couldn’t Pakistan just rebuild the weapons after a few years?” Sam asked.

  “Not if all their nuclear scientists and engineers are dead. There’s a kill list. Drones and SpecOps. That’s another part of the protocol.”

  “The Lord administration would never do that. This president would never give that kind of order.”

  “No,” Earl agreed. “She wouldn’t.”

  “So how does Cold Harbor tie into Panoptes?”

  “Cold Harbor has prearranged triggers. A major war between India and Pakistan is supposed to set Cold Harbor in motion before Pakistan either uses a nuke or loses control of a weapon to the extremists. The actual use of a weapon is an automatic trigger. The president could stop it, but the hardline elements in her own administration could make that very, very hard to do both politically and strategically. She’d likely have to go along with the recommendation from her own SECDEF. Otherwise, the Republicans on the Hill would tear her apart.”

  Sam knew that this was true. The presidency was a bully pulpit, but presidents had considerably less freedom in decision making than many people assumed. Time and again, presidents had been maneuvered by the people around them into making decisions that they would come to regret, often recognizing the trap well in advance but feeling powerless to stop it. Like Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs. The outlines of the Panoptes program now seemed clear—and terrifying.

  “You’re telling me that the Stoics are prepared to kill two hundred thousand people, give or take, to force president Lord to authorize the Cold Harbor operation.”

  “They’d be prepared to do a lot more than that. But I’m guessing they figure that that’ll do the trick. The Cassandra projections scared people, Sam. Powerful people. They see Pakistan’s nuclear capability as an unacceptable threat to U.S. interests, and they would happily sacrifice a million Indians to defend ten thousand Americans.”

  “Is there any paper trail for Cold Harbor?” Sam asked. “Is this written down anywhere?”

  “Somewhere, I’m sure. But I couldn’t tell you where and I don’t think you’ll have any luck getting access, not if you aren’t read in. And that’s not even counting the highly capable killers who would just as soon see you dead right now.”

  “We can’t let them get away with this.”

  “We? Sam, I’m just an old drunk living in the woods with an expensive telescope. Look, you can stay with me for a while until you figure out what to do, but I don’t have much left in me to help.”

  Sam looked at Earl more carefully than he had. His old friend did not look well. The skin on his neck was loose and sallow. His white hair was brittle and thinning.

  “What’s wrong, Earl?”

  “I’m dying. Cancer.”

  “How much time?”

  “Not a lot. A couple of months, maybe. I feel all right. I’m just tired is all.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. My ex told me that the bourbon would kill me. It’s worth dying of cancer just to prove her wrong.”

  They sat in silence for some time.

  “So what are you gonna do now?” Earl finally asked.

  “I don’t know. I need some time to think that over, and if you have any brilliant ideas, I’m all ears. I want to get in touch with Lena, make sure she’s okay. I’d like to take another run at getting her out of India.”

  “If that speech you read talked about Rangarajan’s death, then Delhi is the most likely target, no?”

  “I suppose so . . . but the blank space bothers me. It’s like the bomb is an instrument of assassination and the tens of thousands of other casualties are collateral. If they’re going after the prime minister personally rather than the capital, they could attack anywhere, and at least some of the extremist groups from Pakistan have already demonstrated an ability to operate in Mumbai.”

  “They may have had a little extra help on this one,” Earl said carefully.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Stoics are hardly unique. There are homologues in other countries, particularly in the democracies where the elites sometimes feel they need to shield their irrational publics from some of the more unsavory necessities of governing. The one-party dictatorships usually have security services that can operate pretty much as they see fit. They don’t need a man behind the curtain.”

  “So there’s an Indian equivalent of the Stoics?”

  “We think so. They call themselves the Sons of Ashoka after the Maurya emperor who conquered pretty much the entire subcontinent in the third century BC.”

  “But why would they cooperate in a plot to destroy an Indian city? It’s kind of counterintuitive.”

  “Losing one city in exchange for a guarantee that your sworn enemy will be stripped of his nuclear weapons, the program burned to the ground, and the earth salted? Seems like a pretty fair exchange, particularly if your stock-in-trade is strategic thought. Herman Kahn and the boys at RAND came up with way wackier shit in the sixties. About the time I left the Agency, there were reports that Ashoka and the Stoics were making common cause on Pakistan, but it was all pretty hazy and nonspecific. We didn’t know the players or the programs. It was just shadows. Black holes where there should be stars.”

  “It still seems to me like a huge risk, even for a big payoff.”

  “They may be using a cutout. One of the militant groups active in Kashmir. Something deniable.”

  “That seals it. I need to get my daughter out of there.”

  “Well, if the mountain will not come to Muhammad . . .”

  “Yeah, I’ve thought about that. First, I need to see if I can get ahold of Lena. I need to talk to her. I don’t want to use your phone. It would be too easy for Argus to trace it back here.”

  “Yeah. I wouldn’t use the phone. But you can use my car. The keys are in the kitchen.”

  • • •

  Earl drove an ancient Chevy Blazer. Jouncing down Dry Gulch Road, Sam could feel every bruise and muscle kink in his body complaining about the shocks. On Earl’s advice, he drove into Tennessee. Knoxville was the closest big city, but Sam drove right through it and kept going another two hours to Chattanooga. Argus had direct access to the NSA database and it would be easy enough to trace a call to Lena’s number back to the point of origin. Earl was pretty sure that Weeder’s team was already working up a “known associates” matrix, a kind of wire diagram of Sam’s connections built from Facebook and other social media sites, phone and e-mail records, and the address book on his Argus computer. Earl was somewhere on that list, and Knoxville was close enough to Linville that it would not be too difficult for the analysts to zero in on No. 9 Dry Gulch Road as Sam’s most likely hiding place. Chattanooga was far enough away to fall outside the immediate search zone, and it would look like Sam was on his way to Atlanta or even Mexico.

  For the foreseeable future, Sam knew that he was going to have to think this way about all of his movements. It was not natural to him and he did not like it. Neither did he especially like the Beretta M9 pistol tucked under the driver’s seat. It’s like an umbrella, Earl had explained. You probably don’t need it, but if you don’t have one, it’s sure as shit gonna rain.

  Earl had also given him two thousand dollars in cash.

  “Who keeps two grand lying around a house in the woods?” Sam had asked.

  “Ex-spies.”

  It was almost ten
-thirty at night when he reached Chattanooga. At a Walmart on the outskirts of town, Sam bought a prepaid cell phone. He picked up an international phone card from a pharmacy in a nearby Latino neighborhood. He paid cash and he did not park the Blazer close to either of the stores. If Weeder and his team succeeded in tracking the call back to the phone’s purchase, he did not want any security-camera footage that might show the license plate. It would not take fifteen minutes for the Morlocks to trace the plate back to Earl. There was no answer when Sam dialed Lena’s cell. After half a dozen rings it rolled over into voice mail. Sam did not leave a message. Lena did not have a landline in her apartment and there were any number of harmless explanations as to why she might not have her cell phone with her. Still, it made him nervous. He wanted desperately to speak to her.

  In line with the plan that he and Earl had hashed out, Sam was supposed to check his e-mail in Chattanooga as well. Then, he would drive south for two hours before trying Lena again and logging on to his Gmail account. Assuming Weeder was tracking his personal e-mail, Argus would eventually get the location of the computer he used to access his account from the service provider. It might take time, but they would get it in the end. Sam was laying a trail of electronic breadcrumbs that was supposed to make it look like he was heading toward Atlanta. Then he would turn around and drive back north to Linville.

  “Does this stuff work?” Sam had asked Earl, looking for reassurance when they had mapped out this strategy.

  Earl had shrugged.

  “Sometimes.”

  Internet cafés were not as easy to find as they were even five years ago. Smartphones had undermined the business model. There were still a few places, however, and Sam found a café with a view of the Tennessee River that brewed decent coffee and had computers available for rent.

  He checked the Washington Post first, looking for anything about a single-car accident on the GW Parkway. There was nothing. Sam wondered whether the Morlocks had hauled his Prius back up the hill or if they had just pushed it into the river. His next car, he decided, would be a Chrysler 300 with a V-8 or some similar iron monster. Screw the gas mileage.