Secrets of State (32 page)

The haggling was good-natured, but Khan did not buy the tea.

When he reached down to retrieve his wallet, the bag was gone. One of Mumbai's legion of thieves had made off with it.

Khan struggled to force a complex mix of emotions into some semblance of order. As so often he did, he found comfort in a passage from the Quran.

Those who believe and do deeds of righteousness, for them there is forgiveness.

MUMBAI

APRIL 30

I
t was like chasing ghosts. Ramananda's vast network of informants had produced little but rumors and shreds of hearsay that led nowhere. Lena had simply disappeared. After two days of looking and questioning, Sam was no closer to finding his daughter than he had been when he had stepped off the plane. The few leads that the Dalit foot soldiers had uncovered had been dead ends. There had been one reported sighting of the gray panel van, but the kiosk owner who had seen it had been unable to follow the vehicle. It might not even have been the right van.

Privately, Sam was also obsessively tracking the movements of Prime Minister Rangarajan. He did not know which city would be targeted, only that Rangarajan was supposed to be there when the bomb went off, assuming that the fragment of the speech he had pulled out of the Morlocks' burn bag was an accurate indication of the Stoics' intentions. Unfortunately, the Indian prime minister fancied himself a man of the people who spent more time outside of Delhi visiting other parts of India than he did in the capital. The list of potential targets seemed endless.

They had converted the first floor of the house in Dharavi into a war room complete with an oversize map of Mumbai that they used to chart the few gossamer-thin reports that came in from the pickpockets and extortionists on Ramananda's payroll. The midlevel managers in his criminal network provided daily updates under the direction of three of the Hard Men. The Dalit enforcers did not offer Sam their names, but each sported a sizeable tattoo of a different Hindu god and he had started thinking of the three Hard Men captains as Ganesh, Vishnu, and Shiva.

Sam hunched over the laptop on the table, trying to concentrate on a press release from the prime minister's office about an upcoming trip to Chandigarh. This was near Kashmir, increasing somewhat the odds that this city could be the target for the Stoics or Ashoka or whatever militant group was playing the role of the cutout. But there was no way to know.

The air in Ramananda's house felt hot and oppressive. Sam needed a break.

“I'm going to step out for a minute to get some air,” he announced.

“Why don't you take one of the Hard Men with you?” Ramananda suggested.

Sam wanted to be alone with his thoughts, if only for a few minutes.

“I'll be fine, Rama. I'm not going far and I'm your guest. No one here is going to hassle me.”

Outside, the temperature was only a few degrees cooler. But there was a light breeze and walking helped to clear the fog in Sam's head.

Although it had been years since he was a regular visitor to the slum, Sam still remembered his way around. He walked toward one of the open squares where the children of Dharavi played soccer and
kabaddi
. It was late, however, and there were few people still out on the streets. The square itself was empty. Sam stood in the middle of the open area where he had the best chance to catch a hint of the breeze. A few pale beams of moonlight struggled through the clouds and smog that shrouded Mumbai in a perpetual haze to offer some dim illumination.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow move. At an instinctual level, Sam recognized that whatever was there was a threat. Too late, he turned to run. The shadow had cut off his line of retreat. The clouds parted for a moment, bathing the figure in moonlight. It was the Sikh Sam had first seen at the airport, his tangerine turban traded in for one that was blood red.

At his belt, the Sikh wore a
kirpan
, his religion's ritual dagger. Most
kirpans
were small ceremonial objects. This one, however, was twelve inches of steel, and it made a thin, raspy sound as the powerfully built Sikh drew it from its sheath.

Sam was cornered. He had been stupid.

The Sikh closed in, confident. In his meaty hand, the long knife looked like a toy.

The shadows deepened as the moon was again obscured by the clouds.

Sam cast about for a weapon of some kind.

Without warning, the silhouette of the Sikh stiffened, and Sam heard a dull grunt followed by a thud as his assailant fell to the ground.

The moon reappeared.

The Hard Man with the tattoo of Vishnu on his forearm was standing where the Sikh had been. The blade of his knife was wet with blood that gleamed black in the moonlight against the steel.

“Ramananda sent you to follow me,” Sam said.

Vishnu nodded.

“Thank you.”

Vishnu nodded again. He wiped his blade on the body of the Sikh and it vanished into an unseen sheath.

Sam looked at the corpse at his feet. The Sikhs had a proud warrior tradition that stretched back centuries. This was no street tough. This was an assassin. The Stoics or maybe Ashoka.

How the hell had they found him? And what would they do to Len
a?

•   •   •

Two days later,
they were no closer. The prime minister had visited both Chandigarh and Ludhiana without triggering a mushroom cloud. Today, he was in Mumbai, which made Sam nervous. But he had no reason to believe Mumbai was the target any more than New Delhi or Chandigarh.

He did not know what the deadline was, but Sam sensed that time was running short. He could not sleep. He had to force himself to eat.

“You can't help Lena by killing yourself, Sam,” Vanalika pleaded.

“I'm fine,” Sam insisted, all evidence to the contrary. He ran his hand through his hair. It was greasy. It had been days since he had showered or changed his clothes. His eyes were framed by dark circles and felt like they had been scrubbed with sandpaper. Sam and Vanalika were sitting at the small table in the war room at Ramananda's home.

“Let me get in touch with some people I know in Indian intelligence,” Vanalika urged. “They may be able to help.”

“We can't do that. Whoever you talk to at the Intelligence Bureau is going to communicate with others in your government over the phone or by e-mail. The NSA will vacuum that information up and put it into the system where Argus and the Stoics would have access to it. It would not take long for them to figure out that I'm in Mumbai turning over every rock I can find. Once they know, that son of a bitch who calls himself Zeno will kill Lena. I'm certain of it.” The Dalit communicated face-to-face. They had no computers and few phones. In the high-tech world of twenty-first-century espionage, the low-tech Dalit were a hard target for Western intelligence.

Ramananda limped into the room, accompanied by the boy, Nandi, who followed him everywhere when he was not out on the streets plying his light-fingered trade. Ramananda sat down heavily in the third chair at the table. Nandi stood beside him.

“We have news,” the Dalit leader announced.

Sam felt some of his lethargy drain away and be replaced by hope.

“Good news?”

“A lead, at least. Show him, Nandi.”

The young thief put a wallet on the table. It was brown leather, worn, cheap, and stained with sweat.

“This picture was inside the wallet,” the boy said, laying a small photograph on the table. It was Lena, the same picture that Zeno had posted in the self-erasing message that he had sent Sam. This was the real deal.

“Where did you get it?” Sam asked eagerly.

“One of the boys on another team . . . found it . . . at the green market in Sion.”

“When?”

“Yesterday,” Nandi admitted sheepishly. “The boy gave the money to his underboss, but he kept the wallet. The picture was in the wallet. He didn't know Ms. Lena, so he didn't recognize her. He kept the picture because he thought she was pretty.” Nandi blushed when he said that. It was clear that he thought she was pretty too.

“Anyway,” he continued, “he showed the picture to another boy this morning, someone on my team who knew Ms. Lena. He recognized her and passed the wallet on to me. Here it is.”

“Thank you, Nandi,” Sam said. “This is our first real lead. You've given us something to work with. I'm grateful.”

Nandi bowed his head. Ramananda patted him on the back.

Sam examined the wallet. Whatever cash had been in it was long gone. There were no credit cards. A driver's license in the name of Baahir Daoud was tucked into one of the wallet pockets. The grainy photo was of a young bearded man with a serious expression, an aquiline nose, and intense dark eyes. He looked like a hundred thousand other men in this city of twenty million. Sam was quite certain that the license was a fake and Baahir Daoud did not exist. It was a cover identity.

There was nothing personal in the wallet: no pictures beyond the one of his daughter, no receipts for purchases, no train tickets, nothing.

Under a flap in the pocket for banknotes, Sam found a small sealed manila envelope. He opened it carefully.

A strip of exposed film fell out onto the tabletop. Sam held it up to the light to get a better look at the image on the film. What he saw made his blood freeze. If Sam was right that Lena was in Mumbai, she was not the only one who was in danger. He looked carefully at the film. The edges on both sides were perforated like movie film. Along one side, the words
HILL ST
were visible. The rest had been cut off.

“Rama, is there a Hill Street in Mumbai?” Sam asked. “I've never heard of it.”

“Not that I know of,” Ramananda answered. “And I'd know of it if there was.”

“Vanalika, can I use your phone?”

She unlocked her iPhone and handed it to Sam.

Calling up Google, Sam typed
MUMBAI HILL ST
into the search box. Google offered three options to complete the search: Hill Station, Hill Station resorts, and Hill Station Productions.

“What's Hill Station Productions?” he asked.

“It was one of the Bollywood movie studios,” Ramananda answered. “They went bankrupt maybe six months ago. I had lent some money at a favorable rate to one of the owners as a favor to a friend. I lost the capital and the friend.”

“Show me where the studio is on the map,” Sam said to Ramananda.

Ramananda pointed to a spot in Navi Mumbai on the other side of Thane Creek. Sector 18, just off Palm Beach Road.

“Jesus Christ, that's right across from the Jain temple in Trombay.”

Sam felt sick. He knew exactly what was going to happen and when. There was so little time.

Ramananda looked at him curiously. “And that is significant because . . . ?”

“Because today is Mahavir Jayanti, the biggest holiday on the Jain calendar, and the prime minister is attending the festival there this afternoon.”

“I still don't understand why that is important.”

“I think the people holding Lena are planning to kill the prime minister and a lot of other people, and they're going to do it today.”

“How?”

“With a bomb.”

“From across the estuary? That is a very big bomb.”

“Yes, it is. Take a look at this.” Sam pushed the strip of exposed film across the tabletop to Ramananda and Vanalika.

Ramananda held it up to the light.

“There's no picture here that I can see. Just dots.”

“Those dots are from neutrons hitting the film,” Sam explained. “I used to work on nonproliferation issues in Washington. This is part of a tool that people use to measure exposure to radiation.”

“What kind of people?”

“Dentists, for one . . . radiologists . . . and people who work with nuclear weapons.”

“I don't suppose that our daughter was kidnapped by a gang of renegade orthodontists.”

“I don't suppose so.”

“The festival is this afternoon?”

“In about three hours.”

Ramananda was silent for a moment. His expression was grave.

“Nandi,” he said, turning toward the boy. “Tell the Hard Men I need them. All of them. I need them now.”

He looked at Sam, who nodded in understanding and agreement.

“Let's go get our girl.”

HILL STATION STUDIOS

MAY 2

T
he old pipes in the building carried sound with exceptional clarity, and if Lena sat close to the vent, she could listen to her captors debate when and how she should die. The dispute as to whether she should die had never really gotten much traction. That discussion had featured Kamran Khan on one side and every other jihadi on the other side. It was an unequal fight. Khan had gone down swinging, but he had lost. Lena had been sentenced to die.

All things considered, she felt surprisingly calm.

The room was dark. They would not trust Lena with another light. She sat on the floor with her back pressed up against the wall, listening to the men on the other side quarrel over her death. The small one, Umar, wanted to rape her first, of course. He had some arcane theological justification for his desire—as a captive, she was their “property” and therefore rape was not
haram
, or sinful—but it was pretty clear even to his fellow jihadis that that was just an excuse.

“If you touch this woman in that way, Umar,” she heard Khan say, “I will grab you by your scrawny neck and squeeze until your eyeballs pop out and I can tie them in a bow, you brother fucker.”

There was a scuffling sound that Lena imagined was the smaller Umar taking up Khan's challenge. It was over quickly, however, and she suspected that the other jihadis had broken up the fight before it became serious.

“That is enough,” she heard Jadoon's booming voice command, as he sought to regain control of his fractious terrorist cell. “You, Umar, will stop thinking with your cock. And you, Khan, the strongest of us, you have been made weak by this woman.” Somehow, Jadoon made the word
woman
sound like an insult. In his world, Lena suspected, it was exactly that.

“That is not true, Jadoon. I am thinking of the mission. I do not trust the Indians and I see no advantage in killing this woman. Alive, she is a bargaining chip, leverage. Dead, she is nothing.”

“We have been down that road already, Khan. The woman is a liability, a distraction. You more than anyone here should appreciate that.”

“The mission is all that matters to me. I have given everything to it.”

“As have we all,” Jadoon said more gently. “The path of jihad is rocky and steep. But you do not walk it alone.”

“No,” Khan agreed. “I walk my path with Allah.”

“And your brothers,” Jadoon insisted.

“As you say.”

“But your weakness has cost you the trust of your brothers. Trust that must be reclaimed if you are to join us in fulfilling our mission.”

“I understand.”

“You know that this woman will die, do you not?” Jadoon asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you know how?” His voice was again gentle, probing.

Khan was silent.

“Do you know how?” Jadoon repeated, more fiercely.

“Yes.” Khan's voice was soft and sad.

“How?”

“I am going to kill her.”

“Yes,” Jadoon said, satisfied. “Yes, you are.”

For the first time since she had been taken captive, Lena Trainor felt truly bereft.

•   •   •

Khan delayed
the inevitable for as long as he could. His mind cast about wildly for some solution, some answer. There was still time to work with. The remorseless countdown clock that Adnan had attached to the bomb had more than two full days left to run before it reached zero. That could not be changed without the code known only to the diminutive physicist, and he seemed to have disappeared that morning. No one knew where he had gone. Jadoon tried his best not to show that it bothered him, but he had not been entirely successful. The entire team was on edge, which was one of the reasons they had been so quick to condemn Lena.

There was nothing that Khan's panicky thoughts could identify as a way out. Khan was compromised in the eyes of the other jihadis. He was suspect. There was only one way to prove his commitment to the mission and secure the honor of guarding the bomb. Reluctantly, Khan opened the door to the office that had become Lena's cell.

She was sitting on the floor with her legs pulled up against her chest. Her arms clutched her legs tightly, as though they could shield her from what was coming. Lena blinked in the unaccustomed light, but her eyes were dry. She cast a challenging look at Khan.

“Lena,” he began, and then froze. He did not know where to begin. All of the choices before him were unacceptable.

“I know,” she said. “I heard.”

“I'm sorry.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What I have to.”

“You don't have to, Khan. You have a choice.”

“What is that choice?”

“You can choose life over death. My life. Your life. The lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents that that monstrous bomb in the other room will steal when it explodes. No god could want that. Not Allah. Not Kali. Not the Christian god. No god could will what you are planning to do.”

“That is not a choice” was all Khan could say.

•   •   •

Khan led her
out of the cell and through the Styrofoam temple to the main room where the bomb was located. A slight tremble in her shoulders was the only sign she offered that she was afraid. The other jihadis were waiting. They were all armed. Not because of Lena, Khan knew, but because of him. There was a chair.

“Sit, Hindu,” Jadoon commanded.

Lena sat in the chair.

The HeM leader pulled a pistol from under his robes. He handed it to Khan.

Khan stood behind Lena. He raised the pistol, pointing it at the base of her skull. It felt to him as though his arm belonged to someone else, as though it were not his hand that held the gun or his brain that would command the trigger finger. This was all happening to someone else.

He could feel his pulse beating behind his eyes, feel the blood vessels in his temples constrict, leaving him light-headed and dizzy.

His hand started to shake. He tightened his grip on the pistol, hoping that the others would not notice.

His finger tightened on the trigger. The SIG Sauer would fire at about ten pounds of pressure. Khan knew the feel of the gun, and he could watch the hammer as it pulled back, gathering the kinetic energy to strike the firing pin. It was almost at its apex now. The gun shook slightly as his finger kept the hammer poised just below the peak. Another pound of pressure, another fraction of a pound, would push it over the top and it would fire.

Khan stood poised on the edge of the precipice.

He willed his trigger finger to contract, but it did not want to obey his command.

I am Allah's instrument.

There was no choice. This was the price of jihad. The terrible price.

A phone rang.

It was Jadoon's cell.

Khan looked at him. Jadoon held up one finger.

“Wait.”

He answered the phone.

“Yes.”

Khan could hear the voice on the other end, but not well enough that he could understand.

Jadoon listened.

“I understand,” he said, after more than a minute had elapsed.

He looked at Khan thoughtfully.

“You were right, Khan. The girl is leverage. That was our Indian friend telling me that we have been discovered. But it is not the police who are coming for us. Their source tells them that it is the girl's father and his Hindu friends. I do not know why he has not called the authorities, but it is the will of Allah that we succeed. The girl may yet prove more useful alive than dead.”

Khan lowered the gun and took a deep breath.

•   •   •

Lena felt drained,
emotionally and psychologically. She had just been through the equivalent of an execution, and nothing in her young life had prepared her for that experience.
How could anything prepare you for that?
For all intents and purposes, she had been dead. Now she was not. It might have been exhilarating if Lena had any feelings left inside her. But it was as if she had used them all up and would have to wait for the reservoir to refill before she could feel anything again.

Reaching deep inside, almost unexpectedly, she found at least one emotion that pulsed like a hot coal among the ashes. Anger. Anger for what they had done to her. Anger for what they would do to her father. And anger for the hateful tool of mass murder she had seen in the steel box. Lena could still summon anger. It would have to do.

Her father was coming for her. He had found her in a city of twenty million people in a country of more than a billion human beings. She was a needle in a hundred thousand haystacks. When she was a girl, her father had diligently checked in the closet and under the bed for monsters. He had never found any. Not before today.

They had put her back in her cell. The only light was what leaked through the ill-fitting door frame. It was enough to allow her to pace back and forth without fear of running into the walls or furniture. She was too keyed up to sit down.

The adrenaline rush of her near-death experience and the darkness of her cell played hell with Lena's sense of time. She might have been in the room for an hour or two. It might have been much longer. She could not tell.

In the dark, the click of the bolt in her cell door retracting was as loud as a gunshot. Quietly and carefully, Kamran Khan slipped into her cell.

“Lena,” he said softly into the dark.

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry.”

She was silent.

“I had no choice.”

“You do now, Khan. It's not too late. You can do the right thing. You can be on the right side.”

“I am on the right side,” Khan insisted. “I am on the side of Allah.”

Lena could hear the pain and confusion in his voice.

“Help me,” she said.

“That is why I'm here. All of my . . . brothers . . . are busy preparing to defend this place. There is no one to guard your cell. I will leave the door unlocked. When the shooting begins, leave this place. There is a window to the right of your cell that opens onto the parking lot. You have to wait for the fighting to begin, because the window is visible from the main room. If they see you trying to escape, they will shoot you. Once you are outside, the fence is climbable and there is no barbed wire. Go. Escape. Go as far as you can. Get out of this city.”

“Thank you” was all she could say.

Khan exited the room as quietly and as carefully as he had entered, leaving Lena alone in the dark with her thoughts.

Her father was coming to save her, and he was walking into a trap. Lena would not allow it.

Although it was dark, she closed her eyes as she thought through the kernel of an idea that she hoped would grow into a plan. It helped her to concentrate.

The elements of the incipient plan swirled in her head as she paced back and forth. Her father would not approve of what she was thinking, but she could not bring herself to accept Khan's offer to run away. If she thought that there was any chance she could get the Indian authorities to believe her story in time to raid the studio before the jihadis either moved or exploded the bomb, she might think differently about it. Her experiences with the BMC had taught her to be realistic about the speed with which the Indian bureaucracy moved.

•   •   •

It was not
a complex plan. That was its strength. Its weaknesses were too obvious and too numerous to worry about.

Lena was still shaking from her brush with violent death. Her hands would need to be steady for what she had in mind. Concentrating on her breathing, she willed her heart rate to slow. When she could hold her hands reasonably still, Lena went to the door and carefully turned the handle. The mechanism moved smoothly and easily. As Khan had promised, it was unlocked. She cracked the door and peered out. There was no guard in sight and the movie set shielded her from whatever preparations the jihadis were making in the big soundstage.

Lena stepped out of her cell and closed the door behind her. To the right was the window that Khan said led to the back parking lot. Until they were distracted by the fight to come, the jihadis would almost certainly spot her if she tried to escape that way. There was no door on the back side of the building. Her father and her godfather would have to come in through the front door.

Lena turned left. Near the corner of the room behind an eight-foot-tall blue plasticine Rama was an electrical panel that she had seen when the Pakistanis first brought her here. It looked to her like one of the master panels that could control every light in the studio. It made sense that the grips and lighting technicians would want to keep that close at hand.

Even better, when she got close, she saw that the switches and fuses were labeled. Without that, she almost certainly would have been forced to abandon her plan. Lena scanned the labels quickly, looking for the one she needed. It was not hard to find, a white toggle switch labeled
FRONT DOOR
. The fuse above it was set in the off position. She switched it to on. As long as the bulb was not burned out or missing, there was no reason this shouldn't work.