Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  “Congratulations. That’s a great gig.” Sam forced himself to smile in feigned enthusiasm.

  “Hey, what are you doing back here? I heard you’d retired.”

  “Lecturing the South Asia Area Studies students about India and Pakistan. I’m running late actually. My class starts in five. Give my best to the family.”

  “Will do, Sam. And my best to . . .” He paused somewhat awkwardly. “Lena. I heard about Janani. I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  Roger Browley headed off across the Quad, stepping gingerly around piles of goose shit, while Sam continued toward C Building uncomfortably aware that he had just dodged a bullet.

  A woman who looked to be about Sam’s age with graying hair and overly large glasses sat at a registration desk in front of room C-247 with a printed list and a matrix of name tags spread out on the tabletop. Knots of eager students stood deep in conversation, many clutching cups of the execrable coffee served in the FSI cafeteria.

  “Your name, please,” the woman asked, when Sam approached the desk.

  “Bill Christiansen,” he replied, making a show of looking for his name tag.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have you on the list,” she said, after thumbing through a number of pages. “Are you sure you’re registered for the course?”

  “My CDO signed me up,” Sam said, using the acronym for career development officer, the State Department’s equivalent of Human Resources. “It’s kind of last-minute. I’m supposed to be the backup consular officer in Mazar and I get on a plane in three days.”

  “Oh.” The woman looked genuinely sympathetic. Afghanistan was something of a magic word in the personnel process. It was unpleasant and dangerous duty, and the system was under instructions to do everything necessary to make sure personnel assigned there got to post when they were supposed to. Mazar-e-Sharif was even worse duty than Kabul. It was the job at the bottom of the barrel that was itself at the bottom of a whole big stack of barrels. The registrar’s “Oh” had somehow managed to convey all of that in a single syllable.

  “Is there any chance you could contact your CDO to reschedule?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Sam said pleasantly. “The checklist for Afghan training is as long as my arm, and there’s a mandatory security course that starts this afternoon and runs almost through to takeoff. If I can’t get this training done, it’ll likely mean pushing back my departure by a couple of days.”

  “Well, we can’t have that,” the registrar agreed, and the evident sympathy in her voice made Sam feel guilty about deceiving her. “I can take your name and I’ll put it into the system later to make sure you get credit for the course. Is it Christianson with an ‘o’?”

  “With an ‘e,’” Sam replied, as though he had been answering that question all of his life.

  Bill would eventually see credit for the course show up in his personnel folder. It would be months before that happened. This was the government. He might well spend the rest of his career trying to get that course credit removed from his file.

  C-247 was a cross between a classroom and a machine shop. There were desks arranged to face one of the new “smart” boards that for twenty thousand dollars did the same thing as a fifty-dollar chalkboard. There were also clusters of machines arranged around the room, some of them connected directly to computer terminals. The air smelled vaguely of acetone and burning plastic.

  Sam took a seat toward the back. He looked around the room. He was the oldest “student” in the course by at least a decade, maybe two. The Foreign Service attracted many second-career types, but the majority of entry-level officers were still somewhere in their twenties. There were about twenty people taking the class. More than half were women. The Service had changed in that respect since Sam’s A-100 days when women made up a quarter of the class at most. Seventeen of the twenty students were white. Two were Asian and only one was African American. Maybe the Service had not changed that much after all.

  At ten o’clock on the dot, the instructor walked in and stood in front of the class. Sam was relieved that he did not recognize him. Some of the teaching spots in ConGen were civil-service positions with the same person teaching the same course year in and year out. Some were rotational positions for FSOs, and there was always the risk that the teacher could have been someone that Sam had worked with before.

  “Good morning, everyone. My name is Hal Piedmont and this is the passport class. If you’re here for anything else, then you’re in the wrong room. Today, we’ll be learning the nuts and bolts of passports, essentially how to start with a blank book and turn it into a viable travel document. This is the practical course. Issues related to passport law and application procedures are covered separately. Any questions so far?”

  There were none.

  “This is a blank passport book,” Hal said, holding up a blue tourist passport. “Back in the days before biometrics, a blank book would have had a street value of maybe five thousand dollars. Now it’s worthless without the ability to link the information about the passport holder to PIERS, which is the Passport Information Electronic Records System. This is how we know you are who you say you are. You all are the gatekeepers to PIERS. Your street value is considerable higher than five Gs.”

  Hal spoke for another ten minutes. Most of what he said was not relevant to Sam. The other students in the course could expect to make hundreds if not thousands of passports over the course of their careers. Sam only needed to make one.

  “Now I’d like you to play with the machines for a bit,” Hal finally said. “Practice making a passport or two. Take a look at how you would link the data with PIERS, but be careful not to complete the sequence or you will put Elmer J. Fudd into the U.S. consular database for real. That might be hard to explain to Congress.”

  It actually was not that difficult. The students entered data into the system following a series of prompts. An informal competition developed as to who could invent the most oddball characters. One group of three announced that they were issuing passports to Sheila B. Cummings, Rhonda Mountain, and Wen Shi Kum. They had to sing it before the others got the joke.

  Sam laughed along with the rest, but he could feel the tension in his shoulders as he input the data for “William J. Christiansen.” The program had a number of photos you could choose from for training purposes, but Sam stuck a memory stick into the computer and called up his own photo, which he was able to click and drag into the box on the form.

  “Hey, that guy really looks like you.”

  Sam almost jumped out of his skin.

  He turned to see one of his fellow students looking over his shoulder. He was a kid. He could not have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. Maybe not even Lena’s age.

  “Yeah, that’s why I picked him,” Sam said with a smile that he hoped did not look forced.

  “I made mine out to Che Guevara. You finished with that machine?”

  “Almost. Give me two more minutes.”

  When Sam had input the data, he clicked over to PIERS and walked through the steps necessary to link William Christiansen with the database. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE? the program prompted him. He clicked YES and was rewarded with DATA ENTRY SUCCESSFUL. DO YOU WISH TO ENTER ANOTHER APPLICANT? He did not.

  Sam printed a foil that had his picture and William Christiansen’s name and identifying information. He pasted it onto the first page of a blank passport book and laminated it in the machine. When he was finished, what he held in his hand looked like a genuine U.S. passport. Hell, it was a genuine passport. It was William J. Christiansen—or at least this William J. Christiansen—who wasn’t real.

  At the end of the class, Hal Piedmont had them deposit the passports they had made in a box at the front of the room for eventual destruction. It was all on the honor system. These were sworn officers in the Foreign Service of the
United States who could issue passports and visas to whomever they chose. If the system could not trust them, it could not function. Sam palmed his passport as he pretended to put it in the box and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  Soon enough, William J. Christiansen would be on a plane to Mumbai.

  MUMBAI, INDIA

  APRIL 25

  When Lena was very young, maybe six or seven, she had gone through the typical princess phase. She had a collection of elaborate princess dresses in various shades of pink and purple, a silver plastic tiara, and plastic high-heeled shoes. She all but wore out a collection of Disney DVDs featuring Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.

  One afternoon, her father found her sitting inside a fort made of couch cushions. She was a prisoner in a high tower, Lena had explained, and she was waiting to be rescued by a handsome prince.

  Sam sat his daughter down for a serious talk. It was no good waiting to be rescued, he said seriously. It was up to Lena to take care of herself. If she was ever trapped by an evil wizard in a tower of glass, then it was on her to find a way out. “You make your own fate,” Sam had explained. “You are not helpless. You are not a victim. You can wear the tiara if you must, but wear it with a sword.”

  That was the end of Lena’s princess phase. She had put the dresses away, but she had held on to the lesson. Now Lena was being held hostage in a temple that looked like a castle, albeit one made of plywood and fiberglass, and built as a Bollywood movie set. Her guards, however, were both real and dangerous.

  Lena hoped that her father would come looking for her. With limited time and under the watchful gaze of her captors, she had done her best to let him know where she was. There was no way to know, however, whether the message had been received and understood. It was cryptic and coded, but her father knew her well. It had been just the two of them for a long time. Even so, she would not rely on him. She would not wait passively for rescue like some damsel in distress.

  She would find her own way out.

  Although neither Khan nor any of her other captors had offered any insight into the reason they had kidnapped her, Lena assumed that it had something to do with her father. It had to. Why else would the leader, the one Khan called Jadoon, want her to record that message to him? It could not be about money. The Trainor family was far from wealthy. In their last conversation, her father had warned her about militants targeting an Indian city with a nuclear weapon. It had seemed so preposterous at the time that she had even worried about her father’s mental state. Now she wasn’t so sure. But even if he was right, what did it have to do with her? Was she just leverage to use against her father? If so, how much danger was he in?

  For now, there was no way to find answers to any of these questions. She was a prisoner. Khan had put her in a room that looked like it had once been an office for a studio executive. It was wedged in behind the soundstage, and her captors had likely chosen the room because it had only one door and no windows. The walls were covered in framed posters of B- and C-grade musicals featuring actors and actresses that Lena had never heard of. There was a couch she could use as a bed, a cheap-looking rug on the floor, and a desk with an old-fashioned wooden swivel chair. Everything was covered in dust, as though the building had been abandoned for months.

  They took turns guarding her door and bringing her food, a bland diet of overcooked rice and lentils. As near as she could tell, they were all Pakistanis. Only Khan seemed to understand English, but Hindi and Urdu were mutually intelligible, and Lena would have been able to communicate with them all without any difficulty if they had been willing. Only Khan seemed interested in talking to her.

  Some of the others were clearly interested in her in a different way, however. The small man with the pinched features named Umar was the worst. Whenever he delivered her meal, he stared at her with a barely concealed lust that made her feel violated.

  It was her fifth day in captivity.

  Although she had nothing to do all day but sit in her cell and think, Lena struggled with a bone-crushing exhaustion. It was, she knew, the fear.

  No one had threatened her directly, but the constant tension weighed heavily on her. She had little appetite. It was hard to sleep.

  The fear coiled tightly in her belly like a snake, cold and scaly. If she let it, it would consume her, swallow her, trade places, and leave her trapped and helpless in the belly of the snake. She would not let it loose.

  • • •

  Her thoughts crossed back and forth over the same uncertainties without conclusion. The boredom of captivity was almost as debilitating as the fear. Lena wished that she had packed a book, anything to distract her from thinking about what her captors would do to her. They had made no effort to hide their faces from her. That did not bode well for the future.

  Lena sat on the couch rereading a three-day-old copy of the Times of India that Khan had given her when there was a knock on the door.

  Khan came in without waiting for an answer. He was carrying a bowl and a plastic bottle of water.

  She should hate him, she supposed, or at least fear him. It surprised her somewhat that she did neither. She had no illusions about the danger she was in, but not—she felt—from Khan. He seemed different than the other jihadis. Less coarse. Less brutal.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked in his raspy tristate accent as he set her meal on the desk. Lena realized that she did not know what meal it was. It could be dinner or breakfast. She had lost track of time.

  “It’s chef’s surprise tonight,” Khan continued. “Rice and lentils instead of lentils and rice.”

  Dinner, then.

  Lena did not let Khan’s lighthearted attempt at humor distract her from the fundamental truth that she was his prisoner.

  “Thank you.”

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No.”

  Khan seemed not to take the hint. He sat on the couch while Lena picked listlessly at the food.

  “Just make yourself at home,” Lena suggested, with a hint of bitterness to her voice that even someone with a much more limited facility in English than Khan would have found hard to miss.

  “Su casa es mi casa.”

  “It certainly is.”

  “I am sorry about this, you understand. The circumstances made it necessary, but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant.”

  “Why is it necessary? What on earth do you need from me?”

  “That has not been revealed to me.”

  “Well, then, what good are you?”

  “The less you know, the safer you are. I promise you that.”

  “Is this about my father? Are you planning to hurt him in some way?”

  “I am just a foot soldier,” Khan said. “All the rest is the will of Allah.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Lena said vehemently. “You are a thinking adult accountable for the consequences of your decisions. You can’t just pass the buck to Allah and call it a day. How do you know what Allah wants? How does He contact you? Does Allah prefer e-mail or does He SMS with the cool kids?”

  Khan looked around quickly. “That kind of talk is very dangerous,” he said in a soft voice. “If Jadoon hears you blaspheme, it will become much harder for me to keep you alive.”

  For no good reason, Lena believed him.

  “You know they’ll be looking for me, don’t you? My father knows people. Powerful people. Dangerous people. And then there are the people at SysNet. What are they going to think when I don’t show up for work?”

  “Your father has been . . . discouraged . . . from looking for you.”

  “Threatened, you mean.”

  Khan shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “This is all about him, isn’t it? You’re just using me against my father.”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

 
; “Does it matter?” Khan shrugged again.

  “To me it does.”

  “I wouldn’t count on SysNet either. Engineers here are a dime a dozen. You might already have been replaced.”

  This, Lena reasoned sadly, was almost certainly true. Turnover at start-ups like SysNet was notoriously high, and not everyone who left for a better offer bothered with an exit interview. “Where are you from, Khan?” she asked, changing the subject. “New York? Philly? With that accent, it’s gotta be somewhere tristate.”

  “I’m from Quetta,” Khan insisted. “Via Newark,” he added a moment later.

  “Jersey. What the hell are you doing here kidnapping girls who don’t give a fig for geopolitics or religious wars?”

  “The Quran says: I possess no power to harm or help myself except as Allah wills. Every nation has an appointed time. When their appointed time comes, they cannot delay it a single hour or bring it forward.”

  “What about karma? I’ll see your Quran and raise you the Vedanta. According as a man acts and according as he believes so will he be; he becomes pure by pure deeds and evil by evil deeds.” Lena had her father to thank for her knowledge of Hindu scripture. Before her mother had gotten sick, Sam had been working on a new translation of a set of ancient Vedic texts called the Upanishads, also known as the Vedanta. He had liked to read them aloud to Lena and she had liked to listen to even the ones she could not quite understand.

  “We can debate theology, but I do not think it will serve much purpose. Nothing in life is simple. The choices I have had to make are complicated. I am not comfortable with all of them, but I have my mission and my mission is my guide, even as it requires me to make . . . sacrifices.”

  “And what is your mission?”

  “Jihad.”

  It was an answer that stirred the snakes in Lena’s stomach from their torpor and sent them crawling up her spine.

  Khan’s cell phone beeped. It was not an incoming call. It was an alarm. Khan turned it off and pulled on a beaded silver chain around his neck. He was wearing a plastic card under his shirt that looked like it might have been an ID card except that there were no identifying marks on it. It was just a solid blue piece of plastic. Khan removed a small manila envelope from the back and slipped it into his pocket. From another pocket he extracted a second envelope and clipped it in place behind the plastic card before slipping it back under his shirt.