Secrets of State (35 page)

00:00:21:19

00:00:21:18

00:00:21:17

Oh God.

•   •   •

“Adnan knew,”
Khan said. “Masood was going to kill us all.” He was not surprised. The HeM leader was as cold-blooded as a cobra.

“Sure looks like it,” Sam said grimly. “And he may get his way yet.”

Khan kneeled down next to Lena and looked intently at the weapon in the box. His arm throbbed, but there was nothing he could do about that. “Lena, I worked on a bomb-disposal unit with the U.S. Army. Let me help you.”

“I'll take any ideas you have,” Lena said.

“I think most of the complexity here is just for show. It's smoke. The timing circuit should be relatively simple and straightforward if you can identify it. Remember that it needs to link into that timer.”

“What are the buttons on the timer?” Lena asked.

Khan looked where she was pointing. There was a row of ten black buttons along the bottom edge of the timer labeled 0 through 9 and one larger green button with a Greek delta, the engineering symbol for change.

The timer itself flashed 00:00:19:37.

“I think that's to enter the code. It's a PAL, a permissive action link. You need the code before making any modifications to the bomb. In a normal situation, the PAL is supposed to keep someone from arming the bomb without authorization. Adnan has rewired it so that you need the authority to disarm it. If you don't know the code, you can't deactivate it.”

“So what do we do?”

“I don't know. Why don't you take a look at the circuitry and see if you can figure out how to stop this thing. I'll see if I can work out a way to get around the code.”

Khan and Lena knelt shoulder-to-shoulder beside the box as they searched desperately for a way to halt the countdown. Blood from Khan's wounded arm stained Lena's clothes.

The timer was remorseless and implacable as it counted down the seconds.

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

T
he 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.”