Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  “Good thing you did. And I know the price was high.”

  “How did your organization learn about Cold Harbor? Was there a leak of some kind?”

  “Truth is, we didn’t know about it. We had picked up some signals that some big op was under way, but the details were fuzzy. We knew it involved a Pakistani extremist group. The Hand of the Prophet was just one of the organizations we were tasked to penetrate, and it was far from the most likely source of the threat. I drew that particular assignment, but I had colleagues targeting other groups. Some made it in. Some are dead.”

  “I’m glad you’re not. It was a hell of a thing you did.”

  “Infiltrating HeM was my mission. My form of jihad against the barbarians and wackos who have hijacked my religion. That’s what jihad means, at least to me. Jihad is struggle, the struggle for the future of Islam being waged between the modernists and the medievalists. I saw for myself what that meant when I was stationed in Afghanistan. There was a local, a Pashto translator who worked with my unit. I was invited to his wedding. The Taliban exploded a truck bomb during the reception to punish him for collaborating. That was the point where I focused my jihad on the struggle within my religion.”

  “Civil wars are always the bloodiest. No one can hurt us like the ones closest to us.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. The medievalists hit their high-water mark on 9/11 and the Hand was determined to do them one better. But by the time I was able to put the pieces together, Braithwaite was dead and I didn’t know who I could trust. The communications were all compromised, and there was no way to know if I would be accidentally alerting the Stoics to my presence in HeM. I had to figure something out on my own. But I wouldn’t have made it without you and Lena. I thought I had it set up so that Jadoon would leave me alone with the bomb at the end, but with the fake timer, I was never going to get that chance.”

  “How did you know that your wallet would find its way to us and that we’d be able to follow it back to you?”

  “I didn’t. I had to trust that I knew the will of Allah.”

  “Cast your bread upon the waters?”

  Khan shrugged.

  “Something like that, I suppose.”

  “How’s the hunt for Weeder going?”

  “He’s disappeared. We can’t find him and we don’t even know where to start looking. The guy has had the same training I have and then some. If he wants to stay lost, it’ll be very, very hard to track him down.”

  “We found bin Laden.”

  “After ten years and ten billion dollars. And then we only caught him because he was still part of an organization that needed to communicate with itself. We found a loose end and we were able to follow it all the way back to his compound in Abbottabad. Weeder’s a lone wolf. Meanwhile, the Stoics look like they’ve gone to ground and we may never know who besides Spears and Weeder were part of it.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “When my arm heals, I’m going to join the task force full-time.”

  “To what end?”

  “John Weeder murdered Solomon Braithwaite, my friend and mentor. I’m going to find Weeder, and I’m going to kill him.”

  Sam looked at him appraisingly. Kamran Khan was dead serious. Sam suspected that he would somehow find a way to succeed.

  Lena broke away from the city official she had been schmoozing to join them, linking arms with Sam and leaning into him slightly in a gesture of affection. Sam knew what this meant. She wanted something from him. This was his daughter and he could read her moods like an experienced sailor could read the sea and sky.

  “Dad, could I ask you to give Tahir a hand?” she asked. “I want to make sure he gets a good seat.”

  “He’ll get the best in the house,” Sam promised.

  That was what she wanted, he understood, time alone with Khan.

  He picked his way through the crowd, moving in the direction of the bridge that the boy called home. He couldn’t begrudge her some private time with Khan, her captor and her savior. It was complicated. No doubt, they had a lot to talk about.

  Besides, she had earned it.

  This was Lena’s day. Her victory.

  Sam was immensely proud of her.

  • • •

  Although surrounded by people, Lena and Khan were now effectively alone for the first time since her last day as his prisoner. Khan looked different, of course. The jihadi disguise was easy enough to peel off with a change of clothes and a haircut. But his eyes were the same. Intense. Bright. Clear. Lena knew there could never be anything between them. The distance that separated their lives was too great. But if not Khan, she also understood that this was the kind of man she could love. Still, there was something that she needed to know.

  “I want to ask you something.”

  “I think I know what it is,” he replied carefully. “But I don’t know the answer. That’s the truth even if it isn’t especially satisfying. It was right on the knife edge. It could have gone either way.”

  “So why did you hesitate?”

  “All is according to the will of Allah. If I had shot you, the bomb would have exploded and Mumbai would have been destroyed.”

  “That only works as an explanation after the fact. It’s not much of a guide. You still need to choose. Life is about choices. And karma,” she added. “Good karma, in this particular case.”

  “Yours or mine?” Khan smiled.

  “We’ll see.”

  • • •

  Lena looked out over the crowd. She could see her father standing in the front row with Tahir perched on his shoulders smiling broadly as only a ten-year-old can. Sam held on to his legs to help him stay balanced, clearly unconcerned that they both ended at the knee. He was good about things like that, and Lena loved him for it. There was a bandage on Tahir’s neck where a local surgeon Sam had known for years had removed a fibrous tumor as a favor to her father. It was a first step. Eventually, she hoped to get the boy off the streets and into her school.

  It was almost time for the official ceremony to start. Uncle Ramananda was already on the dais with the mayor and the commissioner. The commissioner was a wily fox of a politician, and he had forged an alliance with Ramananda that Lena hoped would help the Dalit to move away from the margins of Mumbai society and create opportunities for kids like Nandi and Tahir.

  The Gummadi brothers had secured seats on the stage as well. As a consolation prize for losing the permits to the Five Star development, they had landed the contract to build the school and the first tranche of housing.

  That was not the only reason for the Gummadi brothers’ flattery, however. In addition to her own standing, Lena was the only daughter of Emily Lord’s nominee as the next United States ambassador to the Republic of India. Political appointee ambassadors were typically big-money campaign donors who had essentially purchased their new government jobs—not for the meager salary, but for the grandeur of the title. Sam had earned the job. He deserved it.

  Lena was immensely proud of him.

  CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA

  DECEMBER 12

  EPILOGUE

  Alejandro Vargas rolled his copy of El Tiempo into a tube and, with a casual flick of the wrist, crushed the fat fly that had been creeping greedily toward his fried plantains. When he unrolled the paper, he noted with some satisfaction that the greenish guts of the fly were smeared across the face of Emily Lord. The story that accompanied the picture was about the president’s valedictory tour of South America. Lord had only a few short weeks left in her eight-year, two-term presidency. Like most of what the spineless Latin American press wrote about her, the article was laudatory, highlighting the Lord administration’s determined efforts to promote trade and investment in South America, and to reframe what it called the unwinnable and morally bankrupt war on drugs as a challenge to be met more through social pr
ograms than through military might.

  Vargas was unimpressed. And the American people seemed to agree with him, having elected Lord’s most consistent opponent in the Senate, Harrison Fletcher, to succeed her in office. Fletcher was a dyed-in-the-wool neocon, which was not ordinarily Vargas’s preferred flavor of conservative. Too ideological. But the president-elect was also, by reputation, a little on the slow side and relatively easy to manipulate if you knew which buttons to push. That was most definitely a combination Vargas would have used to his advantage. At least back in the day.

  He reached up to touch a rough patch of skin on the side of his neck where the doctor had removed the tattoo, and for a brief moment, he was once again Commander John Weeder, USN. The moment passed quickly. He had gotten used to thinking of himself as Alejandro Vargas, and he was reasonably content with the life he had carved out for himself in Colombia. The old cartels had been pushed out of the drug business by a group of newcomers known loosely as bandas criminales emergentes or BACRIM. Emerging criminal organizations. They were not afraid of violence and had need of the kind of services that Vargas could provide. The BACRIM paid handsomely in cash or cocaine or gold depending on the circumstances. If you had money and status, the señoritas in Colombia were beautiful and willing. So were the señoras, for that matter, if their husbands were away. Or dead.

  It was a good, comfortable life, but he missed the sense of purpose he had found through his work on the Council. Maybe Fletcher’s ascent would open up opportunities that the stunning failure of Cold Harbor had foreclosed. Vargas could only hope and wait.

  He took a long swallow from the bottle of cold Cerveza San Tomás. For all of their trigger-happy shortcomings, the Colombians sure knew how to brew beer.

  He unrolled the newspaper, turning from the fly-stained global affairs pages to the sports section. His football team, Atlético Nacional, had battled the Patriotas to a 1–1 draw at Atanasio Girardot Stadium. Vargas could not allow himself to follow the real football scores, it would draw attention to his Americanness. He had learned to like the South American variety well enough and to appreciate the passion that the players and fans brought to the sport. Some years ago, a star defender for Atlético had been gunned down in the streets of Medellín after accidentally scoring on his own team. It was, perhaps, a little extreme, but Vargas could admire the enthusiasm of the fan base.

  On the table next to the half-eaten plate of plantains, his phone buzzed softly. A text.

  He picked it up.

  Where the incoming number should have been, there was just a line of dashes. His pulse rose. The message confirmed his hopes.

  Navy Yard; Building C; Room 467

  December 17; 1500 hrs.

  Congratulations, Mr. Smith.

  —The Chairman

  Alejandro Vargas dropped a ten-thousand-peso note onto the table to settle the bill, and James Smith walked out of the café with a spring in his step. Six years in Colombia was long enough. It was time to get back to work.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  KASHMIR—THE REAL STORY

  Bill Clinton once called Kashmir “the most dangerous place on earth.” In part, this was in recognition of the reality that Kashmir was—and still is—a violent place where a host of armed groups with irreconcilable visions of the future compete for influence. President Clinton was also, however, concerned about the nearly seventy-year-old Kashmir dispute serving as a catalyst for conflict between those fractious neighbors, India and Pakistan. Adding nuclear weapons to the mix, a spark struck in Kashmir is one of the more plausible scenarios leading to a nuclear war, albeit one that would most likely be limited to South Asia.

  The roots of the Kashmir conflict are deep and date back to the 1947 partition of the British Raj into the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India. The two nations suffered through a violent birth. Millions, most of them Muslims, were displaced. Hundreds of thousands died in widespread violence. The territory of Kashmir was a prize that New Delhi and Islamabad fought over from the very beginning. Under the terms of the partition plan, the maharaja of Kashmir—Hari Singh—had the option to join either Pakistan or India or remain neutral. He opted for neutrality, doubtlessly hoping to parlay that into his own little absolute monarchy.

  The Hindu Singh, who ruled a princely state that was largely Muslim, was riding a tiger. Within a few weeks, Muslim tribesmen under the direction of the new authorities in Pakistan were at the gates threatening the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar. Singh fled to India, and in exchange for Delhi’s protection, he turned over the keys to Kashmir. Fighting between India and Pakistan continued until New Year’s Day in 1949 when a UN-brokered cease-fire froze the situation on the ground with India in control of some 65 percent of Kashmir and Pakistan in possession of the rest. It was meant to be a temporary solution. Seven decades later, however, the Line of Control between the two—so familiar to Sam—is still the effective border between India and Pakistan.

  Since 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them triggered by disputes over Kashmir. While tensions have eased some in recent years, the situation is far from stable and the underlying causes of the conflict remain unresolved. It is easy to see how these two South Asian giants could stumble blindly into a war that neither wants, locked in a violent struggle conducted along the very edge of the nuclear abyss. It is even easier to see how a major war on the subcontinent would undercut fundamental U.S. interests, including, in particular, in Afghanistan.

  Pakistan has long been a prickly partner for Washington, jealous of its prerogatives and unhappy with the line it is forced to walk between its commitment to the alliance with America and the political problems posed by their homegrown Islamic extremists. Pakistan is an exceptionally difficult place to govern, and many observers are deeply concerned about the growing influence of the Islamists, including, it is rumored, in the military.

  The “loose nukes” scenario is a real one, at least among war gamers and planners. There have been reports that the Pentagon has contingency plans in place to “snatch” Pakistan’s nuclear weapons should it look like the Pakistani military can no longer ensure the integrity of command-and-control. This would be an enormously risky thing to do, but the prospect of one or more of the hardline groups in Pakistan’s tribal belt gaining control of a nuclear warhead has the power to concentrate the mind.

  The Cold Harbor protocol that Earl briefs to Sam is fiction, but the fears that underpin it are very real.

  As the Afghan war winds down, there will be a temptation on the part of policy makers to turn away from this exasperating region and invest U.S. political capital elsewhere. This would be a mistake. South Asia is a volatile but vital region that merits a major investment on the part of the United States. America’s diplomats, Sam Trainor among them, are at the pointy end of the spear.

  Secrets of State is a work of fiction. The opinions expressed in the novel are those of the characters themselves. The views offered here are my own and—as always—do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State.

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