Secrets of State (37 page)

“I move that we authorize the Commander's disappearance and make available the necessary financing to support that operation.” Finance made the motion and it would be his responsibility to identify the financial assets that would be employed.

“Seconded,” said Vice.

Spears voted yes.

Again, it was unanimous.

“Which leaves Operations,” Reports said, with just a hint of regret in her voice.

“I could disappear like Weeder,” Spears said. Even to himself he sounded desperate. He had also, he realized, violated Council protocol by speaking Weeder's name out loud. It was one more strike against him. “I could make it to Mexico and use that plastic surgeon we contracted with for the Bolivians. I have contacts in South America, a network. No one would ever find me.”

“It seems an unnecessary risk,” Legal commented.

Spears pushed his chair back slightly from the table, calculating the distance to the doorway and wondering if they had disabled his car. He was too late. Weeder's meaty hand settled on his left shoulder, and Spears felt something cold and hard pressed up against his neck right over the carotid artery. He did not need to look to know what it was. A jet injector. Powered by a cartridge of compressed gas, the jet injector would drive a narrow stream of liquid straight through the skin without the need for a needle. Charged with sodium thiopental or another fast-acting barbiturate, it was the weapon of choice for SEALs in snatch-and-grab operations. The jet injector could also be charged with other drugs that served other purposes.

There was nothing Spears could do. He was pinned at the table and Weeder had every conceivable advantage of position.

“I'm sorry, Ops,” the Chairman said. “But while the talents that the Commander brings to the organization are all but irreplaceable, your particular abilities are more . . . shall we say . . . commonplace.”

“I have important friends,” Spears protested. “Congressmen. Committee chairs. People who matter in this town. You need me.”

“You do understand,” Plans said, “that there are fifteen other people in this room whose security and well-being are at risk as long as the Lord administration's investigation is focused on you. The math is really quite simple. If you could sacrifice one to save fifteen, why wouldn't that be the optimal solution?”

“The logic does seem unimpeachable,” Finance added.

“Do we have a motion?” the Chairman asked.

For Spears, everything seemed be moving as slowly as though they were underwater. His mouth felt dry and cottony. Even if he had known how to plead his case effectively, he did not think he would be able to speak.

“I move that the current chief of operations be removed from his position on the Governing Council and then neutralized as a threat to the organization's future.” Reports made the motion, but she seemed to take no pleasure in it.

“Seconded,” said Plans, who did not bother to disguise his own eagerness.

“We will have a vote on the motion,” the Chairman said. “Ops, at this point you are still a member of the Governing Council and entitled to vote, but I would ask that you do so by raising your left hand and I caution you to move slowly.”

Spears voted no.

Otherwise, it was unanimous.

DHARAVI

JUNE 12

H
ow's the arm?”

“Getting better. I've had three surgeries and the rehab's a bear, but I'd be lying if I said it was the hardest thing I've ever done.”

Sam smiled at that.

“I'll bet.”

The last time Sam had seen Kamran Khan, the American mole in the HeM was being unceremoniously shoved into the back of a Toyota panel van outfitted as an ambulance. One of the paramedics had told Sam that Khan's chances were no better than 50/50. Khan had beaten those odds, which were far from the longest he had faced that day.

Khan's arm was out of the cast, but still in a sling. He had abandoned Pakistani dress in favor of a tan summer-weight suit. Sam had to look closely to spot the slight bulge on the right side of his suit jacket. Khan was armed, but he would have to draw with his off hand for a while. His beard was trimmed short, and he wore fashionable rectangular glasses with gold wire rims that made him look more like an art history teacher than a secret agent.

Sam's feelings about Khan were complicated. This was the man who had both kidnapped Lena and protected her; killed for the Hand of the Prophet and taken a bullet to save the city Sam loved. He was, at a minimum, a complex person.

“What do the doctors say?”

“They tell me I'll get back full use of the arm with three or four months of physical therapy. There's no nerve damage, so there shouldn't be any lasting effects.”

“And then what?”

“Then it's back to work.”

“Well, I'm glad you were able to make it today. Lena appreciates it as well.”

“She's something else,” Khan said admiringly.

“Yes, she is.”

Sam could see his daughter standing about fifty feet away talking to one of the BMC officials. She laughed politely at something he said and lightly touched his arm. She would have been a hell of a diplomat. She was dressed formally in a sleeveless
choli
with a vermilion sari draped over her left arm. The chain across her throat was a thick braid of gold in three different colors. It had belonged to her mother, a gift from Sam. Her earrings were small golden hoops and there was a gold pin in her thick, lustrous hair that a high-end stylist had spent hours fussing with earlier that morning. He loved her so much and the knowledge of the danger she'd been in because of him clamped on to his heart like a vise. When he thought about what a near-run thing it had been, it was hard to breathe.

It was a sizeable crowd. There were at least several hundred people gathered alongside the freshly cleaned and scrubbed canal that divided the slum from the rest of Mumbai. Two square blocks on the Dharavi side of the bridge had been cleared and leveled. Half would be for new housing, a mixture of middle-income homes and subsidized apartments for the residents of the slum. The other half was set aside for a new school: the Janani Trainor Technical Academy.

In less than half an hour, Lena and the mayor of Mumbai would be breaking ground for the school construction with a gold-colored shovel. Until the school was built, Lena would continue to teach the children of Dharavi out of her old building, albeit with brand-new computer equipment donated by the city. What happened at the Hill Station Productions studio had been kept out of the newspapers, but the commissioner knew what Lena had done and just how close his city had come to annihilation. Approving a new, more sustainable plan for the development of Dharavi was the least he could do.

There would be time enough to speak with Lena later. Right now, he had some questions for Khan.

“I wanted to ask you about the status of the investigation into Argus and the Stoics. I've learned a few things over the last weeks, but this is all being kept very close and I suspect that your sources on this may be a little more direct than mine.”

Khan smiled ruefully at that.

“That's probably true,” he admitted.

“So what's the latest?”

“It's not easy. The president has given the FBI the lead. The agents involved have been handpicked and then polygraphed about any connection to the Stoics or Cold Harbor. Argus Systems and its leadership are the most obvious places to start, but the Argus building in Arlington burned down before the investigators could go through it. There's no lead on the arsonist. It was a real professional job.”

Sam knew about the fire. It had made the news, and he had spoken to Shoe, Sara, and Ken, who had already all found positions in rival firms.

“What about Spears?”

“They pulled his body from the Potomac just a few days after we interrupted Cold Harbor. He drowned. Kind of ironic for an ex-SEAL. We're keeping it quiet for now, and when it comes out, it'll officially be an accident of some kind. The currents up by Great Falls can be pretty treacherous.”

“We?”

“Yeah. My organization has loaned me to the investigation.”

“You're still not going to tell me what that organization is, are you?”

“No way. You're not cleared for it. I'm in it and I'm hardly cleared for it.”

“So what are you doing here? Isn't the investigation in D.C.?”

“In between my PT sessions, I've been helping the services here roll up the Sons of Ashoka, the Stoics' Indian counterparts. They've had more success than we have. I was able to ID the go-between who met with Masood and Jadoon, and he rolled over on his comrades in conspiracy faster than Sammy the Bull. Turned out he was an Indian Air Force general with access to the nuclear weapons codes. He and the rest of Ashoka were ready to sacrifice Mumbai if it meant we'd step in and strip Pakistan of its nukes. It's hard to believe some of the people who were in that group. People you'd never imagine.”

“Tell me about it.”

Khan looked abashed.

“I'm sorry about that. I wasn't thinking.”

“It's okay. It's something that I'm going to have to come to terms with. You know the irony of it is that Vanalika really did make the phone call that started all this. She had a satellite booster up in the cabin where we were staying. I thought the intercept of the call was fake, and when I went looking, Andy Krittenbrink and I found other reports that had been falsified by Weeder and his people. Argus was salting the Panoptes material with real intel products that were consistent with the messages they were trying to send to Delhi and Islamabad. But if I hadn't been suspicious of the Vanalika intercept, I never would have found the others.”

“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.