Secrets of State (4 page)

“Janani was from Dharavi,” Sam explained. That in itself was a powerful statement. Dharavi was one of Mumbai's largest slums, a million people living in an area half the size of Central Park, most without running water or reliable electricity. Janani had been born into poverty and, by all rights, she should have died in poverty. But there had been a spark to her, a drive.

“Her parents died when she was young and one of the convent orphanages took her in. Somehow, she stayed in school when nearly all of her classmates dropped out to work, or beg, or marry, or steal. She had a talent for art, and the nuns helped her get a scholarship to the University of Mumbai. When I met her, she was running her own graphic-design company. It was small but growing. She had her own apartment. She had made it all the way out. There are not many who do. Most of those who make it out cut all their ties to their former lives. After we got married, Janani could have left Dharavi behind her forever. As the wife of an American diplomat, she could have essentially ceased being Dalit. She wouldn't do that. She taught art to Dalit kids and worked with various aid agencies active in Dharavi right up until she died. She was”—Sam paused as he grappled for the right word—“extraordinary.” The word was a poor stand-in for how Sam felt, but it would have to do.

“I know that I'm the one who is technically married, but I can't help being a little bit jealous of Janani. I hope she doesn't mind.”

“Quite the contrary. She'd like that. Janani never shied away from a little competition.”

Sam reached over Vanalika for the iPhone that was sitting on the nightstand. Argus had offered him a government-standard BlackBerry, but the IT department was willing to at least tolerate his iPhone, something the more controlling State Department would never do. He glanced at the screen. There was still no reception.

“The one woman in my life I really need to talk to I can't reach,” he complained.

“Lena?”

“Yeah. It's her birthday. She's twenty-four today. What does that make me? Thirty-eight, maybe?”

Vanalika laughed. “Don't worry. You're not old, Sam. You have some miles on you. But the warranty's still good.” Vanalika was almost ten years younger than Sam. She teased him about his age occasionally, but always gently, as though she knew he was sensitive about it. Sam was not one of those men who felt compelled to fend off awareness of their own creeping mortality by chasing after much younger partners. He had had opportunities. Women, he knew, found him attractive, even if in something of an unconventional way. One former girlfriend had described his appeal as “nerd chic.”

“I'll tell you what,” Vanalika continued. “Why don't you get dressed and go get us a bottle of wine at that place we passed on the way in. There should be reception down there and you can call Lena. And I'd like a bottle of West Virginia's finest cabernet.”

“You want some pâté on a crusty baguette to go with that? Maybe a moon rock or a piece of the true Cross?”

“Just go,” Vanalika said, pushing him playfully toward the edge of the bed. “If you can find even a halfway decent bottle of wine, I'll find a suitable way to reward you. I promise.”

Sam dressed quickly and stepped out into the crisp chill. Up here in the mountains, winter had not quite released its grip. The drive down to Mathias took no more than fifteen minutes. In honor of his daughter, Sam popped Lena Horne's 1962 album
Lena on the Blue Side
into the CD player and listened to her velvet voice as he steered his Prius down the dark and windy road. He and Janani had shared a love for Lena Horne's music, and they had listened to her so much through the course of the pregnancy that it seemed a natural choice to give her name to their daughter. In a box somewhere in the attic of their Capitol Hill townhouse, Sam still had the vinyl LPs they had played.

Mathias had a family-style restaurant, a general store, and three bars of cell reception. Sam parked in front of the general store and used his Skype app to make a call to Mumbai. It would be morning there, but Lena was an early riser. She picked up on the third ring.

“Hello.”

“Hi, sweetie. Happy birthday.”

“Dad. How are you?”

“Except for the part where I'm eight thousand miles away from my little girl, I'm pretty good.”

Lena had moved back to Mumbai after finishing her master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University. She could have had her pick of jobs in the United States, but Lena said that she wanted a chance to live on her own in her mother's hometown for at least a while, not as a “dependent” of the U.S. consulate, but as an Indian. She had a job at a high-tech start-up and an apartment in a modest building only a short distance from the Dharavi slums. Her real labor of love, however, was the school she ran in Dharavi, teaching science, math, and engineering to Dalit and other lower-caste children. They spoke at least once a week, and Sam was already planning his first private-sector junket to the region that would include a stop in Mumbai.

“What's new on your end?” he asked, after catching her up on the latest family gossip and the early reports on the Nationals' spring training.

“I'm struggling a bit here, Dad, with the city bureaucracy. There's a developer who wants to bulldoze Mom's old neighborhood and turn it into a gated community for the uberrich. Uncle Ramananda and I are trying to stop it, but the developer has some powerful allies and I don't know if we're going to succeed.”

Jarapundi Ramananda was the unofficial mayor of Dharavi, a con artist, an organized-crime figure of some repute, and a close friend of Sam's from his days at the consulate in Mumbai. He was also Lena's godfather. Sam liked Ramananda tremendously, but he did not necessarily trust him. He hoped Lena was mature enough to understand the difference.

“I have confidence in you, honey. But be careful with your uncle. I'm sure he has his own agenda.”

“He always does. But I think there's considerable overlap between his and mine at this point.”

“All right. Keep me posted. Let me know if there's some way you think I can help.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you too, sweetheart. Happy birthday.”

After they hung up, Sam sat in the dark car for a minute or so, thinking about how much he missed his daughter. He was proud of her and the woman she was becoming. Lena was the one thing in his life, he thought, that he had gotten absolutely right.

As luck would have it, the Mathias General Store catered to the D.C. tourist trade as well as to local tastes. He found a perfectly acceptable California cabernet nestled between a case of Miller High Life and an enormous stack of Ring Dings. When he got back to the cabin, Vanalika was still in bed.

She was true to her word.

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

MARCH 31

T
hose commuters who rode the Orange Line into the District from the distant suburbs of northern Virginia referred to the experience as the Orange Crush. The metro had been designed for a more genteel time and a ridership less than half the size of the crowd who piled on at stops from Vienna to Rosslyn. Federal drones on the Orange Crush, dressed in drab trench coats with plastic ID cards hanging around their necks on cheap metal lanyards, were packed in cheek-by-jowl in a morning rush hour that seemed to expand in both directions by a few minutes every year. The rush now lasted from about six-thirty until well after nine. There was no escaping it. It was an unpleasant way to start the workday, which is why a basement-level parking pass was the ultimate status symbol in nearly every federal agency.

The reverse commute from downtown to the inner suburbs was not nearly as bad. Sam's ride in from Capitol Hill to Argus Systems headquarters in Arlington was an easy twenty-minute trip. On most mornings, he got a seat and the chance to finish the
Washington Post
on the way in to work. Usually, he read the heavy news over breakfast and the train ride out to Ballston was for the sports page and the comics. This Monday morning, however, Sam was rereading every Washington insider's favorite gossip column, Al Kamen's “In the Loop.” There was a three-paragraph report in the column about Sam's embarrassing Richard Newton at the CFR event on Friday.

Talking to a reporter about who said what in a closed CFR meeting was an egregious violation of the Council's rules, but there were few real secrets in the nation's capital. Not for long, in any event. Only a fool would say something at a Council meeting he wouldn't want to see in the
Washington Post
. Sam felt like a fool. One of Newton's competitors or enemies—and while there was a difference between the two, it could sometimes be hard to tell them apart—had evidently decided there was some advantage in outing the exchange between Sam and the powerful chairman of American Century. Anonymously, of course. Kamen could always be relied upon for discretion, which was clearly more than could be said of the CFR membership. Newton was the target. Sam was collateral damage. He was too small a fish for Al Kamen's readership to care about. Everyone read Kamen. There was no way that Sam wasn't going to hear about this at the office.

Argus headquarters occupied almost half a block of high-end real estate three blocks south of the metro. On one side of the building there was a Gold's Gym. On the other was a strip mall with a veritable United Nations of small businesses, including a Vietnamese noodle restaurant, a Korean dry cleaner, a halal butcher, and a Peruvian rotisserie chicken joint. Arlington, like much of fast-growing northern Virginia, was an eclectic mix of middle-class feds, old Southern families, and new immigrants. One of the best things about immigrants, Sam believed, was the restaurants they brought with them. He was a regular at the Vietnamese place where the former sergeant in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam who ran it referred to him unironically as “Uncle Sam.” The wall behind the Formica bar in the restaurant was decorated with a mix of U.S. and South Vietnamese flags and laminated
National Geographic
maps of Vietnam that predated the fall of Saigon. Ethnic food was the second way Americans learned about global geography. The first, of course, was war.

The Argus building itself was unprepossessing, a utilitarian concrete-and-glass structure that looked like so many other similar structures spreading out from the city center. Their growth was uneven, not in concentric rings like a tree but in long tendrils interwoven with major roads that blossomed around the metro stations. The strings of office parks were like some kind of aggressive vine growing up a garden lattice and watered by the seemingly endless stream of money that had been flowing without a break since that sad September morning now more than ten years in the past.

A small sign at the front gate announced in sensible navy blue lettering that the building was home to
ARGUS SYSTEMS
. The “
A
” in
ARGUS
was an almost perfect equilateral triangle and the top half was a stylized Eye of Providence similar to the pyramid on the back of a dollar bill. Those like Sam who knew what to look for could see the telltale hallmarks of a building where people processed classified information. A high fence surrounded the facility. The elegant finials looked decorative but were, in fact, designed to make the fence harder to scale. Two thick wires running along the top could, Sam suspected, be electrified. He had never wanted to ask. There were numerous cameras visible and no doubt others that were not. The windows were narrow and tall and, most important, dark. There was nothing special looking about the facility, but to the experienced eye, it was far from ordinary. And far from cheap.

The guard at the gate waved Sam through with only a cursory look at his ID. Inside, Argus Systems was all about function over style. If upper management was trying to send a message to the employees through its choice of decor, it was that the company considered itself a workhorse rather than a show horse. The South Asia Unit was on the third floor. The entire floor was a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility where cleared personnel could read, create, and talk about the most highly classified and tightly controlled information in the American intelligence system. The elevator opened onto a small atrium with a locked door and an armed guard. This time, the guard really did look at Sam's badge before he was allowed to key in his personal code to open the door to the analytic suites. There were a number of different units on the floor responsible for various global hot spots where Argus was under contract to the U.S. government to provide intelligence support. The Middle East Unit was the largest and, until recently, the Afghan Unit had been the most lucrative. The South Asia contract that CEO Garret Spears had signed with the CIA a few months earlier had pushed the Afghan team into the second slot. They were none too happy about it, as the office realignment had cost them a coveted location near the vending machines. Analysts, like software coders, kept strange hours and ate many of their meals out of microwave ovens with vending-machine candy bars as a chaser. There was no other way to delineate status on the third floor. Corner offices had no meaning here. The third floor had no windows.

When Sam opened the door to the unit, the buzz of conversation suddenly stopped. A tight knot of people stood bent over one of the desks. You did not need to be a psychic to know that they were looking at the
Washington Post
.

“Anything good in the papers?” Sam asked innocently.

“Boss, what did you do?” As always, Dorothy Cornett, the unit's hyperefficient admin assistant, cut right to the chase.

“Ah, nothing much. Kamen has blown it way out of proportion. It's a one-day story. No one will even remember it tomorrow. But, since it looks like we're all here, we might as well do the Monday staff meeting.”

A few dramatic groans greeted this last pronouncement. The office was centered around a small cube farm where the analysts worked. Sam had a private office, but in a show of solidarity with the staff, he had had maintenance remove the door. There was a conference room that they used for meetings. The office furniture was all new and high-quality. It was also blandly generic. The staff had made an effort to decorate the space with political campaign posters from South Asia. The effect was to make the unit look like an odd parody of a teenager's room decked out in posters of rock stars or sports heroes.

The staff filed into the conference room and sat around a table that looked like it had been carved from a solid block of hard plastic. Sam considered his team. They were a mismatched assortment, but in the aggregate they were as good as any group of analysts he had ever worked with. The team had an almost implausible symmetry. Sara Zehri was a Pakistani American who was a leading authority on India, while Shushantu “Shoe” Balusibramanijan was an Indian American expert on Pakistan. The third member of the team, Ken Davenport, was a military analyst with no military experience who could not yet buy a beer in a D.C. bar without being asked for ID. They were young, wildly opinionated, and intellectually curious. Sam had grown quite fond of them in their relatively short time together.

“You've all seen the
Post
this morning,” Sam began. “I've dug a little bit of a hole for myself that I'm going to have to climb out of, and I expect to get called up to the fourth floor at some point today to hear about it. So let's make sure that I'm at least smart on our issues. Otherwise, you'll be getting a new team leader, and I think I know who they'd bring in to take my place. Trust me. You wouldn't like him. Sara, why don't you start?”

Sara was smart. All the analysts were bright, but Sara was scary smart. If she had a shortcoming, it was that her intellect was unconstrained by any sense of mercy. Once she identified a weakness in an argument, or in a person making an argument, she would drill down and destroy it element by element until nothing was left. Sam had seen her do it to senior analysts from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Men—they were all men—who were used to deference. It was simultaneously fascinating and a little repellent to watch, like looking at a school of piranhas strip a cow down to its bones one little bite at a time.

She was attractive in a rather severe way, a look she accentuated by pulling her hair back into a tight librarian-style bun that she covered with a headscarf. As far as Sam could tell, Sara's religious devotion did not go much beyond the headscarf and the halal food she brought from home. Certainly she had skipped over any verses in the Quran that advocated women being subordinate to men. A consistently stylish dresser, today she was wearing turquoise slacks with an alligator belt and a white tailored shirt. Her headscarf matched the slacks. A pair of chunky reading glasses hung on a chain around her neck.

She opened a cream-colored folder with the latest intelligence reports. Sara liked to do most of her reading on paper copies. The monitors, she claimed, gave her headaches.

“It's not good news,” she said. In truth, it rarely was. At least it hadn't been in the last couple of months as India and Pakistan careened toward what many feared would be a disastrous confrontation.

“The Indian papers are pushing an anti-Pakistan, rabble-rousing line that has hardened popular attitudes,” Sara continued. “Rangarajan is doing what he can, but he's increasingly boxed in by hardliners in the military. We have one report from a sensitive source that the BSP may be planning a no-confidence vote on the prime minister if he doesn't harden his stance toward Islamabad. I'll leave it to Ken to talk about the military angle on this, but the political pressure on Rangarajan is definitely building.”

The Bahujan Samaj Party was the Congress Party's most important coalition partner. If the BSP pulled out, it would bring the government down and trigger new elections. In the current climate, the Hindu nationalists stood to gain the most, and the prospects for peace had the most to lose.

“Sara's right about the pressure,” Ken chimed in. “And the generals aren't making it any easier for him. The Chief of the Army Staff, General Patel, is a particular problem. We have picked up a few rumors in SIGINT and HUMINT reporting about the parachute regiment under Patel's direct command developing contingency plans for the introduction of martial law, which looks like some sort of soft coup option. No word on what the triggers might be, but it's almost certainly tied in in some way with Talwar and Islamabad. I'd like to put together a piece outlining some of the possible scenarios ranging from a show of force as a tool for intimidation right up to the imposition of military rule. At this point, I don't think we can rule anything out.”

Although he looked like a high school intern, Ken knew his business. He had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the militaries in South and Central Asia, including their command structures, order of battle, hardware, and doctrine. Sam had come to trust his judgment and respect his ability to string data points together into a logical and understandable narrative. His products were easy to read and were what Sam called “senior policy maker friendly.” Political heavyweights would tell you that they wanted information before making decisions, but that was not entirely accurate. They wanted reassurance. It was not information that offered this so much as a story that was comprehensible.

“Go ahead and get started on that,” Sam said. “Let's aim to get something up to the fourth floor by Thursday for dissemination to the community on Friday. What about you, Shoe, what's the latest from Islamabad?”

“Like Sara said, not good.” Shoe was the complete nerd package: president of the chess club and captain of both the math and debate teams in high school, B.S. in political science from Harvard, master's degree from the University of Chicago. He was one of the few people unafraid to stand toe-to-toe with Sara in an argument. They had few real professional disputes, however, and no issues stemming from their nominal ethnic and religious affiliations. The only knock-down-drag-outs in the office were over American politics. Sara was a hard-core Republican and Shoe a card-carrying Democrat. Ken, thankfully, was a libertarian who was often called on to moderate.