Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  The Hard Men concentrated their fire on the catwalk, and Sam saw the bearded jihadi spin in place and fall over the rail. He hit the floor with a dull thud and one of the Hard Men moved in quickly to claim the Kalashnikov that was still in his hands.

  Sam’s job was not to kill jihadis. He had to find Lena.

  As the fighting descended into chaos, he moved along the wall calling her name.

  He could not see Vanalika anywhere either, and he hoped that she had decided to stay outside with Ramananda.

  The Pakistanis had set up the temple as a strong point. The Hard Men had to assault the position as though they were attempting some kind of medieval siege.

  Sam saw two more Hard Men go down, caught by automatic weapons fire. The Dalit could not match the jihadis’ firepower, but it was apparent even to Sam that the attackers had the defenders outnumbered. They were taking casualties, but they were pushing the Pakistanis hard.

  An explosion ripped through one group of Hard Men who had gathered together to charge the defended temple. Men screamed, and Sam saw one young Dalit street tough choking on his own blood.

  Sam did not want to think about what might happen if a grenade went off near the big steel box in the middle of the room.

  One of the Dalit attackers went to the aid of the boy who had been injured in the grenade explosion. Sam was surprised to see that it was Ramananda. His love of Lena, Sam knew, was strong. It was why he had come. But if Rama had come inside, where was Vanalika?

  A bearded man wearing a taqiyah prayer cap popped up in one of the windows of the temple and aimed an AK-47 at Ramananda. Sam fired two shots at the jihadi, forcing him to take cover before he could shoot at his friend.

  He had one bullet left.

  When the temple fell, it fell from behind. Vishnu’s team succeeded in driving the Pakistanis out from the cover of the fiberglass set.

  Sam counted three Pakistanis who escaped from the temple and took shelter behind a stack of wooden crates. Sam thought one of them looked like the man he had seen in the driver’s license photo from the wallet that Nandi had acquired.

  There was a break in the shooting, a pause as men stopped to reload and catch their breath.

  Into that pause came a single gunshot directed at the ceiling that seemed to demand attention.

  Everyone in the room turned to look. Sam saw Lena coming out from behind the temple. She was not alone. Vanalika was with her.

  It took a moment for Sam’s brain to process what he was seeing.

  Vanalika—his friend, his ally, his lover—was standing behind his daughter with an arm wrapped around her throat and a pistol pointed at her head.

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  You’re one of them, aren’t you, Vee,” Sam said sadly. “One of the Sons of Ashoka. The Indian Stoics.”

  “I’m a patriot, Sam. And I’m not hung up on labels. But, broadly speaking, yes. So put the guns down all of you or I will put a bullet through the skull of this beautiful girl . . . and that would be terribly sad.”

  Sam was pointing the revolver at Vanalika’s head. It was a makeable shot, for someone who knew what he was doing and who had an accurate weapon. Sam had already missed with his first five shots and the margin of error had been measured in feet rather than in inches. Moreover, Vanalika was turning side to side, making it hard to aim.

  He had no doubt that she was serious. Vanalika was nothing if not fiercely determined, and for the first time, Sam could see the glint of fanaticism in her eyes. These were the mysterious depths that Sam had sensed in Vanalika. How well had he really known her? Not well at all, it seemed. Vanalika, he could see, was in the grip of a belief greater than herself, greater than Lena or Sam or the untold number of innocents whose lives she was prepared to sacrifice.

  Sam did not lower his gun. Neither did the Dalit who were locked in a kind of Mexican standoff with the jihadis. They all stood there frozen in an absurd tableau, no one daring to move or break the delicate balance of terror that had been struck. None of the Dalit had an angle on Vanalika as good as Sam’s. It was on him.

  “Was it all an act, Vanalika? Were you using me from the very beginning?” Sam was stalling for time, but he also desperately wanted to know the answer to this question. Not two minutes ago, he would have given his life for this woman. Now he wanted nothing more than to take hers.

  “No, Sam. You weren’t important until you made yourself a problem. No, I genuinely like you, which is what makes this so hard, but I love India. Country comes first, I’m afraid.”

  “For love of country you would kill hundreds of thousands of your own people? That’s insane. You must see that.”

  “You’re exaggerating. This is a relatively low-yield weapon. Models put the death toll at well under one hundred thousand, and thanks to our American friends, we have run that through one of the most sophisticated computers in the world. India can spare a few tens of thousands. It’s a rounding error, really. Now, put the gun down.” Her expression hardened and she pressed the barrel even more tightly to Lena’s temple.

  “You’ll just kill us all if we drop our guns. Your big Sikh friend sure wasn’t looking to talk.”

  “That wasn’t my decision. It was a mistake, a waste of valuable material. I can still use you and you’re worth considerably more to us alive than dead. But if you don’t believe me, go ahead and shoot. Maybe you’ll kill me, but I think it’s more likely that you’ll kill your little girl. I don’t think you’ll take that risk.”

  Aim true, Ramananda had told him. Squeeze the trigger. And what you are aiming at will die.

  Sam’s finger tightened on the trigger. He held the gun with both hands, the way the State Department had taught him in Crash-and-Bang. In the training course, they had shot at paper targets. This was profoundly different.

  It was Spears’s damn trolleyology test made real. What if you could sacrifice one to save five? What if you could sacrifice one to save one hundred thousand?

  What if the one was your daughter? Your only daughter.

  He couldn’t do it.

  Sam looked at Lena. He had been so focused on Vanalika that he had not really looked at her. He could see she was scared, but she would not let herself panic or lose control.

  God, she looked like her mother.

  He felt a warmth flood his chest at the thought.

  “Lena, baby . . .”

  “Dad.”

  “I love you.”

  Sam started to lower the gun.

  Vanalika’s left eye exploded. She arched backward and collapsed to the floor. A pool of blood framed her head like a halo. Lena fell to the ground as well, gasping for air. Sam ran to her and gathered her into his arms even as he was dimly aware of the exchange of gunfire around him.

  • • •

  Khan saw the opening he had hoped for, a brief window of possibility. There were only three of them left standing: Khan, Jadoon, and the little turd Umar. He knew what he had to do.

  Without the slightest compunction, he shot Vanalika in the back of the head. Before her body hit the ground, Khan had pivoted and put two rounds from the SIG Sauer into Jadoon’s midsection. The big jihadi leader looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. He tried to train his Kalashnikov on Khan, but there was no strength in his hands. Jadoon fell to his knees and then slumped forward as though in prayer.

  Umar was as quick as the weasel that he resembled. He beat Khan to the draw. The bullet from his Kalashnikov shattered Khan’s forearm. The SIG Sauer fell from Khan’s nerveless fingers to clatter on the concrete.

  I have failed, Khan thought. I am dead and my mission is over.

  But Khan did not die.

  A dozen bullets from the guns of the Hard Men slammed into Umar. The jihadi crumpled to the ground as if he were made of straw.

  The Hard Men pointed their
weapons at Khan, who again was certain that he would die and who was again spared.

  “Stop!” Ramananda called, freezing the Hard Men in place. “I don’t think this man is our enemy.”

  Allah be praised, Khan thought.

  His arm was spurting blood. The bullet had severed the radial artery. He might not need to be shot again to die.

  Khan stripped off his shirt and wrapped it around his right forearm as tightly as he could.

  The pain was white hot and Khan feared for a moment that he might pass out. He felt nauseous and dizzy. His field of vision had contracted. The edges were fuzzy and gray. A disinterested part of his consciousness recognized that he was sinking into shock. But he needed to check on Lena to make sure that she was unhurt.

  Lena was sitting up now. A man Khan assumed was her father was wiping bits of blood and brain off the side of her face. Her breath was coming in rapid gasps.

  “Lena,” he said gently. “Are you hurt?”

  She looked up at him and shook her head, but did not try to speak. Khan felt that her being alive validated every choice he had made no matter what happened next.

  “Who are you?” the man kneeling beside her asked.

  “I’m an American,” Khan said. “I’m a government agent who works—used to work,” he corrected himself—“directly for White House Chief of Staff Solomon Braithwaite.”

  “Which agency?” the man asked.

  “One you’ve never heard of. One that doesn’t exist. How is she?”

  “Unhurt. Thank you. Thank you for what you did.”

  “You’re her father?”

  “Sam Trainor.”

  “Kamran Khan.”

  “You need to get that arm taken care of.”

  • • •

  The simple act of breathing was a struggle. Her lungs did not seem to work right, and the numb tingling in her hands and feet made it feel as though they were being deprived of oxygen. Lena let the muscle spasms run their course, let her breathing slow on its own, let the feeling return to her fingers. It was the second time in three hours that someone had held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her. It was not the kind of thing that you could get used to.

  She clung to her father as he wiped the blood and slime from her face and hair. He had come for her. Somehow, she knew that he would.

  A part of her listened to the exchange between Khan and her father. He was not one of them. Somehow, she had known that too.

  Khan was hurt, something about his arm. She hoped it was not serious.

  Lena pulled back from her father far enough that she could turn and look at him eye to eye. She was breathing almost normally now.

  “I knew you’d find me,” she said.

  “Every time, honey. You’re my girl.”

  Lena looked to Khan and saw that the erstwhile jihadi was sitting on the floor. His face was gray. His clothes were red with blood.

  Lena released her grip on her father and struggled to her feet. She was a little unsteady, but she made it to Khan’s side and kneeled down alongside him.

  “Kamran,” she said. “You did it. You saved us. Now we need to get you to a hospital.”

  “Lena,” her father said gently. He was standing behind her and put one hand on her shoulder. “We’ll get help for Khan, but first we need to do something about what’s in the box.”

  The expression on her father’s face was grave. Lena tried to sound reassuring and confident in her response.

  “It’s okay, Dad. I saw the timer. We have almost two days before it’s supposed to go off.”

  “I don’t think that’s right. Everything I saw, everything that led me here, makes me think that the target is Rangarajan. He’s here in this city for another couple of hours at most. They wouldn’t miss this window.”

  Lena looked at Khan.

  “Is that right, Kamran? Do you know what the plan was?”

  “We never talked about the bomb or the goals of the operation. We followed orders. Jadoon was the only one who knew the big picture.” Khan nodded his head in the general direction of the big jihadi he had shot after he had killed Vanalika. “But Lena’s right about the timer. I watched Adnan, the physicist, set it.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “Gone,” Khan said. “I don’t know where.”

  “Like a rat jumping ship?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Come with me, Lena,” her father urged. “Let’s look inside the box. When we’re sure that’s secure, we can figure out who to call for help.”

  After what they had been through, Lena could not doubt her father. How could she ever have doubted him? If he had reason to be afraid, then so did she. The box sat in the middle of the room, undisturbed by the firefight that had so recently raged around it. Sam lifted the lid. Lena could see the confusing jumble of wires and circuit boards that made it look as though the bomb had been turned inside out.

  “Why did they do this?” she asked.

  “Adnan came here from Lahore with instructions from Masood,” Khan said. Lena turned and saw that he was standing up and making his way painfully over to the bomb. He held his injured arm up against his chest, and Lena could see blood leaking through the improvised bandage. He needed a hospital urgently. “He made the modifications, allegedly because the warhead was configured for airburst and controlled by an altimeter rather than a timer. He also entered some kind of code that is supposed to make it tamper proof. The new circuitry is deliberately complex and, according to that little shit Adnan at least, loaded with traps. Doing anything to the bomb without the right code or cutting the wrong circuit is supposed to trigger the warhead. I doubt very much that that was part of the original design.”

  Lena looked at the circuitry. It was a mess. Figuring it out would take considerable time. The digital timer affixed to the side of the bomb offered some reassurance even as it counted down the seconds. The angry red letters flashed 02:00:25:47.

  “The timer shows a little more than two days before the bomb is supposed to go off,” she said to her father. “Do you think it’s a trick of some sort?”

  “I think it’s a lie. It’s one thing to be a martyr in the abstract. It’s quite another to watch the last seconds of your life count down. The only one who knows for sure is this man Adnan, and he’s mysteriously disappeared. Rangarajan is the target. He’s here now. He won’t be here two days and twenty-five minutes from now. Something’s not right.”

  “Fuck me.” What little color was left in Khan’s face seemed to drain away.

  “What is it?” Sam asked urgently. “What do you know?”

  “There were two pieces to the timer when Adnan assembled it,” Khan explained. “I saw him fit them together like a sandwich. Two layers, each with a screen. Why would he do that, unless . . .”

  “They show a different time,” Sam said, finishing his thought.

  Once more, Lena reached inside the bomb as if she were a surgeon reaching inside a patient’s chest. Her hands were shaking.

  Calm down.

  She pulled her hands back, squeezed them into fists, and then extended them as far as she could. A few repetitions of this exercise helped dampen the shakes. If she pulled the wrong wire loose, it would be the end of everything.

  Patiently, carefully, Lena examined the timer. It was chunky, thicker than it needed to be. A line bisected the device all around the outer edge, and the connecting wires were attached to the lower half of the timer. At the top right corner, she found a small notch. It was just big enough for her fingernail. She hooked one nail into the notch and pulled up. With a sharp click, the top of the timer detached. It was battery-powered and not connected to the rest of the circuitry. Underneath, there was a second timer. It was counting down and Lena had no doubt that this one was real.

  00:00:21:19

  00:00:21:18
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  00:00:21:17

  Oh God.

  • • •

  “Adnan knew,” Khan said. “Masood was going to kill us all.” He was not surprised. The HeM leader was as cold-blooded as a cobra.

  “Sure looks like it,” Sam said grimly. “And he may get his way yet.”

  Khan kneeled down next to Lena and looked intently at the weapon in the box. His arm throbbed, but there was nothing he could do about that. “Lena, I worked on a bomb-disposal unit with the U.S. Army. Let me help you.”

  “I’ll take any ideas you have,” Lena said.

  “I think most of the complexity here is just for show. It’s smoke. The timing circuit should be relatively simple and straightforward if you can identify it. Remember that it needs to link into that timer.”

  “What are the buttons on the timer?” Lena asked.

  Khan looked where she was pointing. There was a row of ten black buttons along the bottom edge of the timer labeled 0 through 9 and one larger green button with a Greek delta, the engineering symbol for change.

  The timer itself flashed 00:00:19:37.

  “I think that’s to enter the code. It’s a PAL, a permissive action link. You need the code before making any modifications to the bomb. In a normal situation, the PAL is supposed to keep someone from arming the bomb without authorization. Adnan has rewired it so that you need the authority to disarm it. If you don’t know the code, you can’t deactivate it.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you take a look at the circuitry and see if you can figure out how to stop this thing. I’ll see if I can work out a way to get around the code.”

  Khan and Lena knelt shoulder-to-shoulder beside the box as they searched desperately for a way to halt the countdown. Blood from Khan’s wounded arm stained Lena’s clothes.

  The timer was remorseless and implacable as it counted down the seconds.