by Vince Flynn
“Dammit!” Vinter flicked her cigarette into the side of the container, sparks cascading to the ground. “The last thing we need right now is some brute from the CIA screwing this up. I’ve worked way to hard.” Vinter thought of her career at the State Department and all of the sacrifices she’d made to climb the ladder alongside all of the other scheming and plotting diplomats. She’d taken this god-awful posting in Afghanistan for multiple, complicated reasons and one very simple one-because it would further her career. Vinter hated Afghanistan. It was a country filled with people who were stuck in some ancient misogynistic culture that should have died a century ago. The place was filled with hocus-pocus religious fanatics, who had less respect for women than most men had for their dogs.
As much as it bothered Vinter that a bunch of bearded freaks could terrorize women with impunity while the U.S. government stood by, her boss had made it clear that there were other priorities. The orders had come from the White House that with the election bearing down on the administration they needed to accelerate the military withdrawal. The administration was looking for an excuse, any excuse that would satisfy the independent voters. For several years, Vinter had been pushing reintegration as a solution. The original term had been amnesty, but it didn’t poll well, so she came up with something more benign. After multiple focus groups and $125,000 to one of K Street’s top PR firms, they landed on reintegration. The word had a more clinical sound to it, but more important, it would pave the way for exit and victory.
It was one of those rare moments in Vinter’s career when her genius had led to something that she didn’t want. It had been nearly a year ago when the secretary of state’s assistant told her to come on up to the palatial office for a very important meeting. It started out well enough. The secretary told her the president loved her idea. Vinter had beamed with pride, like a child finally receiving due recognition from a distant parent, and then came the bad part. The president wanted her to take the lead, run with her idea, and make sure it got implemented. Her boss told her, “The president wants you on the ground in Kabul supervising the entire operation. You’ll report directly to me. We’re putting a lot of power in your hands. The ambassador will be told to aid you in any way you need and the White House is prepared to lean very heavily on the Pentagon and the CIA to make sure they support you. For all intent and purposes you will be running the show in Afghanistan.”
Vinter didn’t really hear the rest of it; her mind hung up on the part about living in Kabul, as if it were some bone-jarring pothole in an otherwise smooth road. Vinter had traveled to Afghanistan on multiple occasions, and she had long ago decided that she detested the place, but this was a career maker. She knew almost immediately that if she did her year or two in hell she could demand any post she wanted afterward. Her husband was not thrilled that she had failed to consult him on the decision, but she knew he wouldn’t have the balls to really stand up to her. And besides, her teenage son was driving her nuts. There was too much testosterone in the house for her liking. She rationalized that it might be the best thing for her to take a break from the two men in her life, and if it caused her marriage to fall apart, that was something she could deal with. After seventeen years, change might not be the worst thing.
“He’s a small cog in an extremely big wheel,” Poole said, trying to calm her down.
Vinter was an extremely intelligent and passionate woman, but she could handle only one passion at a time, and Poole was more interested in getting her to hike up her skirt at the moment. He reached out and placed his right hand on her shoulder. “One call to the secretary and you can have him shipped off to Antarctica.” He started rubbing her shoulder.
Vinter turned that possibility over in her mind until she figured out that her little Army boy was a little too earnest in his physical contact. “What in the hell are you doing?”
“I’m trying to help you relax. You don’t think clearly when you get like this.”
“And you don’t think clearly when you let your dick do your thinking. I’ve seen that look in your eye before. You’re not worried about me thinking clearly, you’re focused on having sex.” Vinter saw the playful grin on Poole’s face. “It’s only been, what… six weeks and I already have you figured out. There will be no screwing back here between the storage containers like a couple of dogs in heat. It happened once. It was a moment of weakness, and it will never happen again.”
“Come on,” Poole half moaned. He pulled her close, adding, “I need you.”
“You had me two days ago. I don’t think you need it that bad.”
“Normally I’m not like this, but you make me crazy.” He kissed her lips while his hands found her backside.
Vinter pushed him away. “We have a meeting in ten minutes. Snap out of it. Zahir is threatening to take his men and go back to the mountains. If that happens it could create a domino effect and all of the progress I’ve achieved over the past year will vanish. All because some spook got kidnapped.” She thought about the strange turn of events. “I hear this mercenary who is trying to undo all of our hard work is going to show his face at the meeting.”
Poole pulled Vinter’s hand toward his crotch. “Speaking of hard.”
Vinter almost slapped him. “Stop it. We need to focus. Darren is absolutely beside himself. He says this Rapp has serious mental issues. Do you know what Washington will do if they hear we screwed this up?”
Poole had finally got it through his head that they weren’t going to have sex. He took a deep sigh. “You’re making way too big of a deal out of this. We didn’t screw anything up. We’re on schedule with reintegration. If this thing goes off the tracks at this point we blame it on Rapp. We lay it at the feet of the CIA and get out of the way.”
“That doesn’t work for me. I don’t fail.” Vinter stabbed herself in the chest with her index finger, attempting to add some unneeded emphasis to her position. Her hazel eyes wild with fury, she added. “I’m not going back to D.C. a fucking disaster.”
Poole sighed. It appeared that a confrontation was unavoidable. He wondered if there was any way to minimize the oncoming clash. Vinter would expect 100 percent support from him, but Poole had already decided it would be foolish to confront Rapp in such an open way. Poole had learned that when going into battle against an unknown enemy you must set your ego aside and have a contingency in place for a tactical withdrawal. That was the careful course he would have to navigate. Vinter would scream at him later, but even with the great sex, he was growing tired of her browbeatings. Maybe this would present an opportunity to balance the scales and make her more compliant.
“I’m going to support you, but I’m warning you he might not be the kind of guy you want to pick a fight with.”
“Well, I’m not the kind of woman you want to pick a fight with. And it’s not going to be a fight. I’m going to tear his balls off and send him packing and that’s going to be the end of it.”
As much as Poole wanted to believe her, he shared none of her confidence. “Arianna, I know I’m not going to be able to change your mind, but don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.” Having no desire to hear her response, Poole turned and began making his way toward the main building.
Chapter 7
Inter-Services Intelligence HQ, Islamabad, Pakistan
Nadeem Ashan walked down the broad hallway with a sense of dread. After twenty-nine years of working for Pakistani intelligence, one would think Ashan would be used to these bumps in the road, but this particular bump concerned him for reasons that he was extremely reluctant to share with anyone else in the building. Ashan was an expert navigator when it came to the turbulent waters of the ISI, and that historical knowledge only added to his growing concern. The place was not some monolithic bureaucracy where like-minded men shaped the intelligence-gathering and covert activities of Pakistan. The ISI was a deeply divided, sectarian institution composed of intelligence professionals and military personnel who had vastly different ideas about what was best f
or their country.
The main fault line lay between the secularists and the religious fanatics, with various groups within each camp. The secularists typically pushed for modernity and stability. They had warned for years that the intelligence agency’s support of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir, India, would eventually bite them in their proverbial behind. The religious fanatics saw the Taliban as an ally that could be used to keep neighboring Afghanistan weak, and the fiercely nationalistic element of the group refused to waver in their support for the terrorists in Kashmir. Their hatred for India ran so deep that they blindly supported the savages who intentionally killed civilians in an effort to make Kashmir a free state.
The hard-liners were exposed as reckless fools in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks that left 195 dead and the world-famous Taj Hotel a smoldering ruin. The international outcry was deafening. As the deputy general for Analysis and Foreign Relations, Ashan heard it the loudest. Even before the attacks on New York and Washington, Ashan had had a very close relationship with the CIA and MI-5. After those attacks, Ashan began to see just how dangerous it was to support the mongrel dogs of jihad. Even President Musharraf began to see the light, and when he moved to support the United States in the War on Terror, those dogs turned on him and tried unsuccessfully to take his life seven times during his tenure as Pakistan’s head of state. Only five of those incidents had been reported. Ashan and his colleagues at ISI helped cover up the other two due to the conspirators’ ties to certain intelligence officials.
All of these incidents were embarrassing for the ISI, but none of them compared to what was uncovered when the Americans sent in one of their elite commando units to kill the world’s most notorious terrorist. Bin Laden, it turned out, had been hiding in Pakistan for years. Ashan instantly knew that factions within the ISI had been harboring him. Money would have changed hands, to be sure, but the primary motivation was undoubtedly ideological symmetry. No matter how Pakistan tried to deny it, there were a significant number of men in the Pakistani military and ISI who supported and applauded the actions of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Ashan was on his way to see just such an individual. Lieutenant General Akhtar Durrani was the deputy general of the ISI’s External Wing. Durrani and Ashan ran two of the ISI’s three main groups. Their influence was vast, and they both reported directly to the ISI’s director general. Ashan managed to move back and forth between the secularists and the hard-liners depending on the situation, while Durrani was firmly in the camp of the hard-liners. Ashan’s pragmatism was driven by an obvious fact-Pakistan was overwhelmingly a Muslim country.
Ashan moved past the handpicked military bodyguards and his colleague’s male personal assistant with nothing more than a nod. ISI Headquarters was a sprawling compound and the Foreign Relations Wing was a healthy distance from the offices of the External Wing, but even so, the two deputy generals were very close. Almost every day Ashan made the lengthy walk from his office to Durrani’s. Unlike most of the Pakistani men his age, Ashan was very focused on his health. Neither of his parents had made it to sixty. His father died of a heart attack brought on by years of smoking cigarettes and his mother died of lung cancer brought on by years of smoking. Ashan abhorred smoking and made every effort to eat right and walk every day. He was intent on living well into his eighties.
The heavy door to Durrani’s office was closed. Ashan glanced over his shoulder at the assistant who checked the lights on his phone.
“He’s alone.”
Ashan knocked on the door and turned the knob. He stepped into the large rectangular office and was enveloped in a haze of gray smoke. Ashan didn’t hesitate. He flipped a switch on the wall and the hum of an exhaust fan kicked in. He had had the unit installed nearly four years ago, because he could no longer tolerate sitting in the smokefilled office. He considered chastising his friend for not having it on, but thought better of it. The man was breathing the carcinogens directly into his lungs. The exhaust fan would make little difference.
“Nadeem,” Durrani said, leaning back in his high-back black leather chair, “what a pleasure.” Durrani was dressed in his Army uniform, lest anyone forget the duality of his importance.
Ashan, having served only four years in the Air Force, was dressed in a blue suit and yellow tie. “I was in the neighborhood and I decided to stop by.”
“Exercising again.” Durrani smiled and held out his cigarette. “I’ve warned you, if you keep that up it will kill you.”
“Yes, I know. If only I smoked like you and the rest of the country I would be much healthier.”
“You might have more fun,” Durrani said with a broad grin forming under the ample black mustache that seemed to be a prerequisite for being an officer in the Pakistan military.
“I have plenty of fun.” Ashan continued past the two chairs in front of his friend’s large desk and sat in the chair by the window that looked out onto one of the many inner courtyards of the compound. The armchair was something else he had ordered on his own. The two chairs in front of Durrani’s desk were stubby little things that forced the occupants to look up at Durrani as if he sat high atop K2. Ashan couldn’t be certain, but he suspected that the seating arrangement was a holdover from the old colonial days when British officers ran their country.
“So what brings you to my little enclave this morning? Do you need the dirty tricks of the External Wing to save your rear end once again?”
More serious than kidding, Ashan said, “Your dirty tricks are usually what puts my posterior into the hot water.”
“Oh, come now,” Durrani said with a deep laugh. “We all have our roles to play.”
Ashan was not in such a playful mood. He knew his friend too well. Knew his capabilities and his weaknesses, and if he had been stupid enough to lend any of his people or expertise to facilitate the lunacy in Jalalabad, then they were all in a great deal of trouble. “Let us just pray for a moment that no one in the External Wing had anything to do with what happened across the border last night.”
“Which border are you referring to?”
Ashan ran a hand across his clean-shaven face and tried to gauge whether his old friend’s ignorance was real of feigned. The man had become so adept at playing this game that Ashan could no longer glean the difference. He decided to play it straight. “The border to our north.”
“Ah… Mr. Rickman. Very unfortunate. I’m surprised you have heard.”
Ashan was used to the constant shots at the capabilities of his department. “Foreign relations is our specialty.”
“How did you learn of it?”
“The embassy. They sent a cable this morning.” Ashan told only half the truth. He’d also spoken with the CIA directly. “The Americans are very upset.”
“I would imagine they are. Mr. Rickman is not someone I would want to lose.”
Ashan turned and glanced out the window. He sensed his friend was playing some kind of game, but he could no longer be sure. They had met thirty-five years ago while he was studying at Oxford and Durrani was at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Back then Durrani was an open book-transparent about his passions and plans. Ashan had always appreciated his honesty and forthright manner. The ISI had slowly turned him into a duplicitous spymaster, however, and Ashan feared there was an ever-deepening divide between them. “Akhtar, I have to ask you something.”
Durrani gave a welcoming smile, signaling for his friend to proceed.
“You will not like this question.”
“People ask me questions every day that I do not like. It is part of my job.”
Ashan watched him light another cigarette and then casually asked, “Do you or any of your people have any information about the kidnapping of Rickman?”
Durrani didn’t answer right away, as he was taking in a deep breath of smoke to make sure the cigarette stayed lit. Only fools had to relight a cigarette. He shook his head and exhaled, saying, “That is a pretty broad question. Co
uld you be more specific?”
“Did you have any knowledge that he was a target?”
“Personally, I had no knowledge.”
“And your people?”
Durrani scoffed. “Why would my people be involved in something so reckless?”
Ashan could come up with a half dozen reasons that would make his point. He was going to let it go and then something pushed him further than he had gone with his friend in some time. “Maybe you should tell me, since we both know some of your people decided it was a good idea to hide bin Laden from the world. In our own backyard, I should add.”
Durrani’s easy expression hardened. “It has been decided that we are not to discuss that matter.”
Yes, it had been decided. In the embarrassing aftermath of the SEAL team raid, the president and the director general had asked Ashan to investigate any potential involvement by the ISI in aiding bin Laden. A two-star Army general had been ordered to investigate the potential involvement of the armed forces as well. The general had come back with a pathetic report that cleared the military of all involvement. Ashan’s investigation was an entirely different matter. Six intelligence officers were implicated as well as five Army officers and a handful of subordinates, and there were more. Before Ashan could finish his investigation, the director general stepped in and seized all evidence and had it destroyed.
Ashan was furious, but he was told it was for the good of Pakistan. The director general told him the Americans had penetrated his investigation and were now in possession of information that they could use to blackmail Pakistan into doing their bidding. Ashan knew the answer was a complete fabrication. His investigation was taking him to the doorsteps of some very influential people. He was on the brink of exposing to the world that senior Pakistani officials had harbored the world’s most notorious terrorist. Rather than clean house and admit their mistakes, the president and his senior cabinet members decided to bury the entire matter. Not a single person was punished, and since firing those involved might bring about more speculation, they were allowed to stay in their positions. Ashan found the entire thing infuriating but was left with no recourse except one. He very quietly and carefully passed what he knew on to the Americans.