Secrets of State (12 page)

“These were being given to the services in Islamabad and Delhi?”

“Yes.”

Jesus,
Sam thought.
This must be what Sara and Shoe were seeing when they talked about the intel program driving relations between the two giants of South Asia off a cliff. These pieces were confirming the two sides' most paranoid fears about each other.

“The one thing I can't understand is who benefits from this,” Andy added. “Cui bono is one of the standard analytical frames and on this one I have no idea. It's like someone wants a war in South Asia, but who in their right mind would want that? Guys who make body bags, maybe?”

“Is there anything else about the reports that stands out?” Sam asked. “Any clues that might help answer that question.”

“Well.” Andy sounded a little hesitant, as though there were parts of the story that he had not yet puzzled out. “There is an origin code on nearly every one of the products that I haven't seen before. It's not one of the standard programs like Five Eyes or Hardcore. I'm not sure what it means.”

“What's the program name?”

“Panoptes.”

Sam remembered seeing this code on the report of Vanalika's conversation with Guhathakurta. He had not recognized it either, but it had not seemed important at the time. Now, Sam realized, it was crucial.

“I don't know what it refers to,” Andy continued, “but I have a friend over in DNI and I was going to ask him when he gets to work this morning.”

“Don't do that,” Sam said just a little too quickly.

“Why not?”

“Let me handle that one, okay? I think I know where to look for that answer.”

“All right, Sam. You're the boss.”

Even though that was technically no longer true, Sam was grateful that Andy was not fighting him on this point. A few pieces had clicked into place for Sam, and he understood that the ice they were standing on had grown thin and brittle.

“Who else have you talked to about these reports?”

“No one.”

“I need you to do me a favor. Keep it that way for a while.”

“I don't understand. This is a big deal. I think some pretty serious laws are being broken here . . . procedures and protocols for sure. Whoever's doing this should at least lose their jobs, maybe even go to jail. We'd be the ones to break this thing. Think about what that could mean. I know it's selfish, but there's a GS-14 job coming open at the CIA next month, and something like this would make me a lock for the position.”

Sam understood full well the pull of ambition in the Washington universe. The idea of holding back on something like this was hard for Andy to wrap his mind around. Mentally, he was already picking out what he would wear to the Rose Garden medal ceremony. Sam was confident that even in his narcissist fantasy Andy's suit would be too big. There was more at stake here, however, than the young analyst could know. Sam would have to rein him in.

“I'm not sure the system would reward you for blowing the whistle on this thing just yet. Let's make sure all of the ducks are lined up before we start shooting. There are some angles on this that I want to check out first.”

“Sam, you gotta understand something. These reports are almost certainly fake, but they are beautiful fakes. Someone here really knew what they were doing. The mistakes are small, and if I hadn't gone looking for them, I never would have found them. There's something big at the heart of this. I can feel it.”

“I can too, Andy. That's exactly why I want to make sure that we have covered all the bases. I need you to trust me on this. We will do the right thing, and the bad guys will be punished appropriately. But there are some things I need to do first. This is important. Okay?”

“All right.” Andy did not sound convinced. “But I think it's a mistake. I think we need to move fast or we'll lose the leads.”

Sam was less concerned about that. The prime suspect was not going anywhere.

I should have keyed in on it earlier,
he thought angrily. Not that figuring it out made it any easier to know what to do.
Panoptes
was Greek for “all-seeing.” In mythology, it was also the epithet for Hera's faithful guardian, the monster who could sleep with half of its hundred eyes open and watchful. Hera had sent her servant to watch over the white heifer, Io, and protect her from Zeus.

Hera's servant was Argus.

Panoptes was Argus Systems.

THE TOBA KAKAR RANGE

APRIL 6

I
t was a brazen daylight assault. The six men advanced toward the objective in pairs, with two teams providing cover for the third and trading off as they leapfrogged forward. Khan could see the silhouette of a man in one window, but no one raised an alarm. The metal pistol grip of the Zastava M92 carbine he carried was smooth and just slightly slick from gun oil. The stock was extended, and he pressed the butt firmly against his shoulder to ensure maximum control.

When they reached the single door of the building, Khan shifted the carbine to hang over one shoulder. He was no longer a shooter. He reached back and his partner, a hulking Pashtun tribesman named Saad Ahmedani, slapped an explosive charge into his hand, a white-gray block of Semtex plastic explosives with an electrical detonator.

Something about the charge in his hand did not feel quite right, but the team was in position and primed for entry. There was no time to consider the nagging uncertainty that pulsed from somewhere deep in the recesses of Khan's brain. He slapped the charge along the door frame just over the lock and pressed his body up against the wall.

“Clear,” he hissed, before triggering the charge. The other members of the assault team lowered their chins to their chests.

The moment the charge went off, he realized why it had felt wrong in his hand. It was much too big. A spray of rocks and dirt and wood debris covered the team. A piece of the door frame whipped past Khan's head, traveling almost too quickly to see. Although they had been braced for the blast, two of the six commandos had been knocked off their feet. Khan could feel a hot line stretched across one cheek where a flying splinter had cut him almost down to the bone.

Khan knew what had gone wrong. Ahmedani was carrying two charges, a small one for the door and a substantially larger one that Khan would have used to blow a hole through the back wall if the team needed an emergency exit. His partner had handed him the wrong charge.

It was a good thing that this was just practice, or they would all be dead.

One of the jihadis who had remained on his feet, a man with a wild black beard and wild eyes, stepped toward Khan and slapped him in the face.

“You'll blow us all to Allah, you son of a whore, if you aren't more careful with the fucking explosives!”

“I'm sorry, Jadoon,” Khan said evenly.

He was quite confident that Ahmedani's “mix-up” with the charges had not been an accident. He was the outsider here. The others on the team never missed an opportunity to let him know in no uncertain terms that he was not welcome. Moreover, there was no chance that Ahmedani had come up with that idea on his own. The tribesman may have been devoted to freeing Kashmir from the Indian yoke, and he was most certainly as strong as an ox, but he was as clumsy as one as well and maybe not as bright.

Team leader Sangar Jadoon was not finished.

“That hunk of lumber could have taken someone's head off,” Jadoon growled. “It might as well have been yours, because you don't seem to be using it.”

“Yes, Jadoon.” Khan did not try to defend himself. There was no point.

Jadoon hit him again.

The team leader was quick and strong, but the open-handed slap he employed so liberally that it was almost a leadership style was intended more to shame and dominate than to inflict pain. For Khan, the slap was evocative of Kathleen Halloran's father and the “filthy raghead” slur that the meaty trucker had thrown in his face after striking it. He bore it as he knew he must. Jadoon, he understood, was hoping to provoke a response that would let him send Khan back to Lahore. He bore it. But it was not easy.

“You are here because you are Masood's lucky number,” Jadoon continued, and Khan could hear the anger and contempt in his voice. “I don't believe in any of that mystical magic-number shit. You're an amateur and a liability. Allah does not play games. He favors those who fight in His name and those who fight well above all others.
Allahu Akbar.
”

The last was shouted as a challenge to the entire group. Jadoon stalked off in disgust.

The team leader's frustration was understandable. This was their third “assault” on the objective, a single-story building made of pressed board and cheap framing timber and defended by department store mannequins wearing Indian army uniforms. Each of the assaults had quickly degenerated into farce.
If this was all that the HeM could muster,
Khan thought sardonically,
then neither India nor the mighty West had anything to fear. They would have to do better.

Individually, the team members had résumés that should have made them perfect for the job. Khan was far and away the least experienced. The others were hardened jihadis with multiple missions across the Line of Control into India. Jadoon alone had crossed into Indian-occupied Kashmir at least twenty times and had a dozen or so notches carved into the stock of his Kalashnikov. After a week's training, however, the group had yet to jell into a coherent fighting force.

Khan was on the team at Masood's insistence because the value of the letters in his name was an “auspicious number.” Jadoon was a believer and a jihadi, but he was a practical man with no time for the abstractions of Masood's somewhat idiosyncratic theories. Jadoon was a warrior and a Kashmiri patriot. He wanted to express his love of Allah by killing Hindus and returning all of Kashmir to the
ummah
, the wider Islamic community.

Masood had tried to reassure Jadoon that Khan could handle himself, but the commando refused to credit the HeM spiritual leader's report of what Khan had done to the Indian security forces at the guest house near Amritsar.

The men collected their gear. It would take time to rebuild the section of the Indian “outpost” that Khan's explosive charge had demolished. There would be other training sessions. The HeM camp up here in the rugged Toba Kakar Mountains was well equipped. The Hand had money. The weapons were good. Whatever equipment they needed Jadoon could secure. And there was cash to buy influence and access in Islamabad and abroad. The organization had not always been this flush. No one Khan had spoken to could explain where the money came from, and few expressed much curiosity. Allah provided for the faithful.

They humped their heavy packs down the hill to the main camp.

The camp had a bunkhouse, dining hall, and classroom space as well as workshops and a fully equipped garage. There was an obstacle course as good as any that Khan had used in the American army, rifle and pistol ranges with their own armories, and an expansive area backing a cliff face set aside for practice with explosives. A sandy pit in the heart of the camp was intended for training in martial arts. There was also, of course, a mosque. The camp was built to house many more people, but now it was just the six of them. Jadoon had not explained why, but Khan knew the answer. Security.

Jadoon was waiting for them. He seemed calmer, but he had not completely lost his look of irritation and disappointment.

“Prayers first,” Jadoon said. “Then food.”

Outside the small wooden mosque was a platform with benches and faucets that the men used for
wudu
, the ritual ablution that was an essential component of prayer. They removed their boots and lined them up on a shelf that was there for that purpose. Khan washed his hands up to the elbows and his feet and legs almost up to his knees. The baggy
shalwar kameez
made this easy to do. The water from the faucet was cold and bracing as Khan washed first his face and then the back of his neck. He ran his wet fingers through his hair for a cleaning that was more symbolic than effective.

The team laid out their prayer rugs inside the small mosque, facing west toward Mecca. Khan's rug was an antique Baluch design, abstract symbols and a representation of the Tree of Life. Some of the jihadis had Afghan-style rugs bearing images of Kalashnikovs and attack helicopters.

It was time for
zuhr
, the noon prayer. The men recited the prayers in unison, in this if in nothing else working in a spirit of cooperation. As it always did when he prayed, a feeling of peace descended on Khan. He felt the universe in harmony and the warm love of Allah embracing him. He knew there was nothing that he would not sacrifice in defense of the will of Allah. He knew that the others praying beside him felt the same, and for a brief moment, they were a team, united in their vision of an Islamic world. The
ummah
.

Then the prayers concluded and the divisions on the team returned.

After the
zuhr
prayers, Jadoon announced that it was time for lunch. The stove in the cookhouse was wood-fired. The sniper, Atal Mashwanis, used small lumps of Semtex to help coax a fire from a pile of damp sticks before adding enough kindling to boil the water. Khan did the cooking. It seemed that even though he had traded in his broom for a submachine gun, he was still regarded as little more than a jumped-up houseboy. The other men laughed and joked as their rice and lentils cooked. Khan was not included.

They ate with their hands, using only the right hand to touch the food as Islam prescribed. The rice was gluey and the lentils were bland. This was fuel rather than a meal. They ate quickly, conscious of how little time they had to drill before the action would be for real.

When Khan finished, he collected the plates and brought them to the sink. Doing the dishes was another of the duties that Jadoon had assigned him as punishment for his temerity in being Masood's pet. Khan bore this minor indignity too without complaint.

After lunch, Jadoon led them on a double-time march straight up the hill wearing heavy packs and carrying weapons. It was understood by all that this was a form of punishment. The team leader was running out of patience. A forty-five-minute hike brought them to a relatively flat area at the top of the hill.

“I want you to low-crawl your way to that rock,” Jadoon announced, pointing to a distinctive white boulder pointing to the sky like a bony finger.

“Any man sticks his head up for any reason and I'm going to shoot him with this.” Jadoon held up his rifle, an Italian Beretta M501 Sniper. “Full packs,” the team leader added.

Khan estimated that it was maybe half a kilometer across scrub and stony soil. With the weight of their packs pressing on their forearms, it was going to hurt.

The five jihadis crawled on their bellies across the rough ground. Khan's bare arms were soon scraped and bleeding, and they stung fiercely every time he pushed off to claim another half meter of ground.

Periodically, Jadoon fired rounds into the ground near their heads or in between their legs. One bullet struck a rock maybe a foot and a half from Khan's face.
Thank Allah, he's a good shot.

With only fifty meters or so to go, Khan looked to his right and saw something that made him forget the pain in his forearms. A scorpion. It was about four inches long and black. Its chitin was smooth and gleamed in the sun like a piece of polished jet. The broad weaponized tail was distinctive. Khan recognized it immediately. The fat-tailed scorpion was the world's deadliest. From the genus
Androctonus
. Greek for “man killer.” The powerful neurotoxin in its sting was nearly always fatal.

This one was inches from the outstretched hand of Atal Mashwanis. The stinger was raised, poised to strike the fingers that looked to the arthropod like either a meal or a threat.

There was a gap of some two meters between Khan and Mashwanis.

In one smooth movement, Khan pulled the five-inch knife strapped to his boot and rose to his knees. Pushing off with his legs and left hand, Khan leaped for the scorpion shouting, “Atal, roll right!”

As he brought the knife down toward the scorpion, his aim was nearly spoiled by a sudden sharp pain in his right thigh. Jadoon had shot him. Ignoring the pain, Khan drove the blade through the carapace, pinning the scorpion to the ground. Mashwanis rolled to his right and sat up before abruptly falling back to the ground. Jadoon had shot him too.

Khan looked at his leg. There was no blood and it did not hurt enough to be a real bullet wound. Jadoon must have been using rubber riot-control rounds. Mashwanis was in much worse shape. Jadoon's second shot had hit him right in the head, and the sniper was clearly struggling to remain conscious.

Jadoon quickly closed the gap with Khan and the other jihadis. He had abandoned the Italian rifle and was marching forward with a grim determination.

Khan rose and spread his hands in an effort to placate the HeM leader.

“Listen, Jadoon,” he tried to explain. “There was a scorpion.”

Jadoon was not listening.

He stepped in close with the clear intention to slap Khan.

Enough of this shit,
Khan thought, as Jadoon started to swing his arm. Khan shifted his weight back just a little in rhythm with Jadoon's attack. The HeM commander struck nothing but air. His hand whistled harmlessly past Khan's face. Jadoon grunted in surprise and anger. His fingers closed into a fist and he shot a short jab at Khan's solar plexus. It was a good punch. Khan could see that he had had some training. But Jadoon had done his killing in Kashmir with guns and bombs. It had doubtlessly been a long time since he used his fists against someone other than his subordinates, his wives, and their children. Khan bent his left knee and twisted his torso sharply to the right. Jadoon's punch grazed the fabric of his tunic but did no damage. Khan counterpunched with his left hand, striking Jadoon with the base of his palm at the intersection of his jaw and right ear. Jadoon's head snapped back and the HeM commando fell to one knee with a slightly dazed look on his face.