Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  00:00:18:12

  00:00:18:11

  With his good hand, Khan examined the timer, looking for some kind of answer in the physical object. It offered few clues. The timer itself was a solid block of steel and glass. There were no markings on the casing and no instructions. When he hit the green button, the screen would toggle back and forth between the countdown and a row of nine blank boxes where Khan would have to enter the code he did not know.

  Good security practice would have been to use a random series of numbers as the code. If this is what Adnan and Masood had done, they were all as good as dead. But Khan did not believe that the code was random. Adnan had looked in his little black notebook before entering the code. He had gotten his instructions from Masood and Masood, Khan knew, was a mystic. He believed in the raw power of numbers. The numerical key code for this—the Hand’s most ambitious operation; perhaps the most ambitious operation by a nongovernmental actor in all of human history—would not be left to chance. Masood would not accept that. It would not be a random number. It would be carefully chosen. Symbolic. An act of worship.

  Khan tried to recall the details of what Masood had told him about numerology. Masood chose him for the mission as a good-luck charm with the right combination of letters in his name. Could his name be the key? The mullah had his own unique numerological system, and there was no way to know the values he had assigned to the alphabet. Moreover, Kamran Khan did not have the right number of letters. There were ten letters in his name and nine digits in the code. It didn’t fit.

  Nineteen was a critical number, he remembered. Over it are nineteen. And we have set none but angels as the guardians of the hellfire. That’s what the sura said, and the code was certainly the guardian of hellfire. But again, it didn’t fit, not neatly. If he entered the number 19 five times, he would leave a dangling “1” at the end of the string. It was not, Khan understood, beautiful. The code would have nine digits. It could not be split evenly in half. But it could be divided.

  Nine.

  Three times three.

  Could it be?

  The answer clicked into place. There was no way to test it, but it had to be right. It felt right. It was all that they had. If Khan was wrong, the city of Mumbai would die. They would all die.

  “I know the code,” Khan said to Lena. I think.

  She nodded, but did not respond. There was a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead.

  • • •

  Lena was at a loss. The circuitry was so complex and so dense that she could not understand it. She could not see it. It had always been easy for her to visualize systems. That had always been her strength as an engineer. But she had never before tried to apply this skill to a system that was deliberately obtuse. Most of the loops she identified and tracked were connected only to themselves. Some looked like traps, triggers that would set the bomb off if the circuits were disrupted. What she could not find was the central circuit, the one that controlled communication between the timer and the warhead.

  Lena looked inside the bomb, maybe there was something there, a more obvious vulnerability that she could exploit. But there was not, at least not that she could see.

  She looked at the timer. That was a mistake, the equivalent of a rock climber halfway up the cliff face looking down.

  00:00:12:35

  00:00:12:34

  00:00:12:33

  I can’t see it. Where is it?

  “I know the code,” she heard Khan say.

  She nodded. That’s good. But it’s meaningless if I can’t figure this out. There isn’t time. I need more time.

  00:00:11:49

  Her hands started to shake again slightly with the strain.

  Khan must have seen it. He reached out with his good hand and took hold of one of hers. His grip was strong, the skin smooth and cool.

  Lena closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them, the circuitry in front of her was less of a tangled mass than it was a set of complete loops and circuits laid one on top of the other. She could see it. She could see the central trunk and the wires she would need to cut to interrupt the critical circuit. It was clear to her. If Khan had, in fact, solved the puzzle of the code, she could deactivate the bomb.

  And they had better hurry.

  00:00:08:35

  00:00:08:34

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m ready. Let’s do it.”

  • • •

  Khan used the green button to switch from the countdown screen to the row of nine empty squares. They blinked at him impassively, arrogantly. Do you think you can defeat me? I contain one billion possibilities . . . and only one truth. Do you really believe you can find me?

  He entered the code.

  786-786-786.

  The Basmala. Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim. In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. Masood had called it the most sublimely beautiful of numbers, representative of the divine. “Never forget this,” he had told Khan, as they dined on red beans and rice. Khan had not. The HeM leader believed in magical numbers and 786 was the most magical of them all. It had to be right.

  The screen went blank. For a moment, Khan expected the bomb to explode. Would he see it? Would he feel anything as his body was atomized? How would he explain his failure to Allah? Was this, in fact, His will? Khan felt the icy grip of doubt.

  The screen flashed back to life.

  CODE ACCEPTED.

  Khan could breathe again. He was ashamed of his doubt, of his weakness. It was not Allah’s will that a city should die.

  He pressed the green button and toggled back to the countdown screen.

  00:00:06:27

  00:00:06:26

  He looked at Lena.

  She was composed and beautiful.

  “Finish this.” With his one good hand, Khan pulled the razor-sharp knife out of his boot and handed it to her. When she looked at him, he could see the doubt in her eyes that mirrored his own.

  “Do not worry. You know what to do. Your instincts are right and Allah will guide your hand.”

  Lena took the knife and picked up one of the loops of wire coated in pale blue plastic. She crimped the wire in a half loop and inserted the tip of the knife. Khan put his hand lightly on her shoulder.

  “Make the cut.”

  Lena drew the edge of the knife up inside the loop and severed the wire. Moving quickly, she picked up a red wire that ran parallel to the blue wire and sliced through it neatly.

  The timer flashed.

  00:00:05:17

  00:00:05:17

  00:00:05:17

  Her father hugged her. There were tears in his eyes and an expression that Lena recognized as neither relief nor joy but rather pride.

  Khan slumped down beside the box. His complexion was pallid.

  He was dying.

  “We need to get an ambulance for him,” she said.

  Ramananda pulled a phone out of his pocket.

  “I will call one now,” he promised. “We will meet it out by the gate.”

  “Who do we call about the bomb?” she asked her father.

  “I don’t know,” he conceded. “The people who orchestrated your kidnapping call themselves the Stoics. They have high-level government connections and access to the raw feed from ECHELON. I don’t know who to trust in either the Indian or the American government at this point.” He looked at Vanalika’s body, and there was a deep sadness about him that Lena knew would take a long time to heal, if it ever would.

  “These Stoics are all national-level politicians? Not state or local?”

  “So far as I know.”

  “Then I know what to do.”

  “What?”

  “I’m using Uncle Ramananda’s phone . . . and I’m calling city hall.”

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

 
; SEPTEMBER 15, 1777

  The war is not going especially well, is it?”

  It was the kind of understatement for which Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge was justly famous. George Washington’s army had been soundly defeated at Brandywine Creek only four days earlier, and William Howe’s redcoats were advancing on Philadelphia with the grim inevitability of a river rising to break its banks.

  Tallmadge sat with two other men in the back room of the Bull and Barrel drinking weak ale out of pewter mugs. Although the Bull was considered a respectable establishment, there were rooms upstairs where at least a few of the barmaids plied a parallel and considerably more lucrative trade. Doubtlessly, Tallmadge thought, they would service the British officers with equal enthusiasm once the redcoats took the city, even if the more patriotic among them could be counted on to charge the occupiers double the rate for the Continentals.

  Officially, Benjamin Tallmadge was an officer in the regular Continental Army attached to the Second Light Dragoons. In reality, he was the head of General Washington’s military intelligence operation and a spymaster of some skill. His companions at the Bull were Robert Livingston, an influential New York politician, and Hugh Mulligan, an Irish trader who owned a controlling interest in a small fleet that operated just barely on the legitimate side of the triangle trade in molasses, rum, and slaves. They were all three patriots, and they shared a growing conviction that the Continental Army was losing the war.

  “Brandywine was a bloody disaster,” Livingston said vehemently, snatching the bait that Tallmadge had dangled in front of him. “How many days until Howe marches into Philadelphia?”

  “Two weeks at the outside,” Mulligan offered, his County Cork brogue softened only slightly by twenty years in the New World.

  “Desperate times, desperate measures,” Tallmadge suggested.

  Livingston eyed him skeptically.

  “What exactly do you have in mind, Colonel? Your invitation was circumspect to the point of conspiratorial.”

  Tallmadge raised an eyebrow.

  “Was it now? I do apologize for that. It’s so hard to know who to trust these days. Just look at what happened to my man Nathan Hale. Betrayed by his own cousin and hanged by the neck until dead. Poor boy.”

  “So, what is it then, lad?” Mulligan asked. “Something that involves a little trading, I’d wager. Otherwise, what would I be doing here?”

  “This is partly about your ships,” Tallmadge admitted, “and your financial resources, Livingston. But, ultimately, it is more about you. What I have to suggest requires a certain intestinal fortitude, a willingness to think through an issue with clarity and act as pure logic dictates in the finest tradition of Pericles or Zeno. In this regard, I find both sentimentality and a surfeit of religiosity to be considerable handicaps. And I do not believe that either of you gentlemen suffers from one or the other of these maladies.”

  Mulligan and Livingston nodded at this characterization, acknowledging the accuracy of Tallmadge’s assessment. Both men were classically educated and understood the allusion to the Athenian luminaries.

  “We’re listening,” Mulligan offered.

  “We are at some risk of losing this war,” Tallmadge said, “and most likely hanging for it in consequence. But there may be a way to tip the balance and hurt our enemy sore in a manner that he does not expect, albeit at a not inconsiderable cost to ourselves.”

  “What is the nature of our mysterious benefactor?” Livingstone asked.

  “Smallpox.”

  “An indiscriminate killer,” Mulligan said, shaking his head. “It would lay low at least as many bluecoats as red.”

  “Not if Washington can be persuaded to inoculate the army in advance of the outbreak,” Tallmadge explained. “I would propose to import blankets, linen, and mattresses from the hospitals at Guadeloupe that even now are filled to overflow with the victims of a smallpox outbreak. We consign the shipment to the British port authorities in New York and here in Philadelphia, and then help our enemy bury his dead with a glad heart.”

  “Washington would never agree to this,” Livingston said dismissively.

  “No, he would not. Which is why I will tell him that my spies have learned that the British are planning to use smallpox against us. I am confident that I can persuade the general to order the entire Continental Army inoculated against the disease and to even accept a certain necessary rate of fatalities among those treated.”

  “And what of the civilian population?” Livingston continued. “Those without the resources or organization to effect quarantine in the period when the inoculated are most infectious.”

  “There will be losses among the civilians,” Tallmadge admitted. “Maybe even considerable losses. But their sacrifices will be in the service of liberty.”

  “And I will lose the crew of the ship that carries the consignment,” Mulligan said.

  “Almost to a man,” Tallmadge agreed. The negotiations began in earnest.

  It took time, but by nightfall, the three had agreed on the outlines of a plan. There was only one more matter to be resolved.

  “You should know that I do no business in Guadeloupe,” Mulligan said. “I have no connections there to make the necessary arrangements.”

  “I have already contracted with a young man whom I consider sufficiently resourceful to serve in that capacity.”

  “What is his family name?” Livingston asked.

  “Smith,” Tallmadge replied. “Should he prove equal to the task, it may well prove that we should wish to procure his services again. Our new nation will, from time to time, find itself in need of the kind of guidance and clear thinking that only men such as we can provide.”

  “True,” Livingston agreed. “So very true.”

  CUMBERLAND, VIRGINIA

  MAY 4

  It was raining and the roads were slippery. Spears was glad that he had taken the Mercedes rather than the Porsche. The 911 was a beautiful piece of machinery, but it didn’t handle well in the rain. An unobtrusive brown sign with gold lettering marked the entrance to the OAKHURST CONFERENCE CENTER. Spears turned off the rural highway and followed the narrow road to the main building.

  The Oakhurst was one of several conference centers and sylvan retreats of indeterminate ownership scattered across central Virginia and Maryland’s tobacco country. The especially curious would find in the county records that the Oakhurst was the property of a holding company registered in Richmond that was itself a subsidiary of a Singapore-based shell corporation that had a history of association with the Central Intelligence Agency. Among the Oakhurst’s less public features was a safe house where more than a few Eastern Bloc defectors had spent their first six or so months under guard in the land of liberty.

  It was unusual for the Governing Council to meet outside the Beltway, but these were unusual times. The failure of Cold Harbor had left the Stoics more exposed than they had ever been in their history. They were suddenly vulnerable. The klieg lights of a government investigation were probing the shadows that they had made their home.

  Spears drove up to the front of the main building and parked. Like the other buildings on the Oakhurst’s expansive and well-manicured grounds, it was built in a faux Tudor style with a steeply pitched slate roof. It looked expensive, and since the ultimate source of financing was the CIA’s black budget, it almost certainly was. The Oakhurst was a little twee for Spears’s taste, but they would not be here long.

  The staff had made themselves scarce. Even the cleaning crew at the Oakhurst was cleared Top Secret/UMBRA, but there was no point in taking chances. The members of the Council could pour their own damn coffee.

  The expressions around the table in the main conference room were grim. All of the Governors appreciated how much danger they were in. Commander Weeder was already there, sitting with the other backbenchers in the outer row right next to the door. Spears nodded
at him as he entered the room, and Weeder acknowledged his existence with the slightest movement of his head. His scarred face was otherwise immobile and all but impossible to read.

  Legal and Vice were the last to arrive, just a few minutes behind Spears. The Chairman quickly gaveled the meeting to order.

  “This may be our last session for some time,” he began. “The Lord administration has rediscovered its spine after the fiasco in Mumbai and is trying to walk the cat back on our operation. The odds that they will succeed in following the trail back to this group are not negligible.”

  “What happened in India was absolutely unacceptable,” Plans said indignantly. “Moreover, it was amateur. We need to do our own internal assessment to establish accountability.”

  About half of those at the table looked over at Spears expectantly. He was Operations and it was on him to defend his actions. For the Stoics, “amateur” was among the most vicious epithets.

  “Mumbai was a setback,” Spears agreed. “At first we thought the problem was with Ashoka, that the Indians had been penetrated. That frankly wouldn’t have been a huge shock. Their OPSEC was always a weak link. But it looks like the problem was with our instrument rather than our partners. Somehow, Braithwaite got an agent inside the Hand of the Prophet. That agent insinuated himself into the operation and disrupted it from the inside. After the fact, it appears that this same agent was able to connect the Indian services with the Ashoka leadership. Our Indian counterparts were picked up in sequence. Ashoka has, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist.

  “There was no way we could have foreseen that, and we could not vet individual members of the HeM team. The whole idea was to do this through cutouts so we would have distance and deniability, but we paid a price in terms of control and visibility. It’s something we should factor into future planning.”

  “There will be no future planning,” Plans said vehemently. “Your fuckup has left us bare-assed in the wind and the president’s people are crawling all over this. We’ll be lucky if we don’t all end up sharing a maximum-security wing in Leavenworth. If we’re unlucky and they’re ballsy enough, they’ll just kill us and feed us to Lord’s fucking labradoodle.”