Secrets of State (7 page)

Moving on the balls of his bare feet, Khan glided soundlessly over to the door and stood with his back pressed up against the wall. The doorknob turned slowly and silently. There was only the slightest click as the latch disengaged. The door swung inward on its hinges. A black-clad arm extended a pistol carefully into the room, sweeping the gun from left to right. A long sound suppressor was screwed onto the front of the barrel.

Khan did not wait for the intruder to finish his reconnaissance. He grabbed the gunman's forearm with his right hand and pulled. The intruder lunged forward, off balance, and Khan brought the base of the lamp down hard against the back of his skull. In a single motion, he wrapped the cord around the man's neck and twisted him so that the gunman's body was between him and the door. He was limp in Khan's grasp. Whether he was stunned, unconscious, or dead Khan was not certain.

As he had anticipated, a second man appeared in the doorway, firing a suppressed automatic. Three rounds slammed into the body of the gunman Khan was using as a shield. The intruders were using subsonic ammunition to dampen the noise of the shots, and as Khan had gambled, the body of the first shooter absorbed the bullets with no through-and-throughs. He thrust the body of the dead gunman into the path of the second shooter as he tried to rush into the room. Khan leaped forward at the same moment, swinging the lamp in a wide arc that connected with the assassin's gun hand. The wrist broke with a satisfying crack of bone. Khan reversed his swing and brought the lamp back up quickly, catching the killer on the chin and snapping his head back into the doorjamb. Without hesitation, Khan retrieved the first man's gun from where he had dropped it on the floor and methodically shot both of the intruders twice in the head.

When Khan turned around, Masood was sitting up in the bed, squinting somewhat to compensate for the glasses he was not wearing. Calmly, Masood took in the scene before him.

“Where did you say you went to school?” the deputy Hand of the Prophet asked.

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

MARCH 31

S
am could not escape the feeling that he and Garret Spears had been having two completely different conversations. Spears had been testing him about something. And Sam had, he suspected, failed that test. Washington was a town where management fads came and went with dizzying speed. Reinventing government, matrix management, total quality management, and Six Sigma had all had their day. Some senior leaders swore by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a kind of personality test based on the theories of Carl Jung. Others were devotees of the balanced scorecard or contingency theory. Spears was the first executive Sam had encountered who relied on moral philosopher Philippa Foot's somewhat arcane trolleyology thought experiments as a management tool.

As an undergrad, Sam remembered being irritated by Foot's elaborate hypotheticals predicated on a set of circumstances so bizarrely particular as to be impossible to reconcile with the complexities and subtleties of the real world. There was a legal aphorism that difficult cases made for bad law. The same, Sam believed, was true of morality. The trolleyology dilemmas were attractive both to ethicists and neuroscientists who liked to pose the questions to subjects in the lab while imaging their brains with PET scanners to see which areas would light up. The trolley scenarios were appealing because the fundamental decision point was so simple. Do you hit the switch or not? That's why Foot relied on trolley cars rather than buses or trucks for her scenarios. Hitting a switch was a binary choice. There was no third option, no middle ground in which to steer. The real world was rarely that neat and clean. There was, Sam supposed, a good argument to be made for simple mathematics. The greatest good for the greatest number. But people were more than numbers. If Lena was the one, it wouldn't matter to Sam if the whole world was on the other side of the equation.

The unit was busy. All of his analysts had assignments and they were working on deadline. The U.S. intelligence machine was an insatiable beast with an ever-expansive appetite for information, data, and analysis. There was an eager audience for everything the unit could produce. Sam sat at his computer reviewing the most recent intel reports. Reading intelligence was a tricky business. Individual reports could be wildly misleading. It was important to put things in context, to read skeptically and critically. HUMINT sources could be wrong or deliberately seeking to mislead. SIGINT intercepts could well have recorded two people lying to each other for reasons unknown. There was nothing as dangerous as raw intel in the hands of senior policy makers. It made them feel smart even if they did not know how to read them with a critical eye.

Sam paged quickly through the afternoon's take, using subject lines to sort the small number of interesting reports from the ocean of marginal data. He was scanning reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the NSA, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on his Top Secret computer system when he saw something that made him freeze. A name in a report.

Vanalika Chandra.

•   •   •

He clicked on the link
to call up the complete report. It was an NSA product, an intercept of a telephone conversation picked up by the omnivorous ECHELON collection system. ECHELON gathered electronic data from all over the world and transmitted it to giant computer farms warehoused in suburban Maryland. Artificial intelligence programs constructed around complex algorithms searched massive databases of intercepted communications looking for key words. Certain combinations of words or phrases—
bomb
,
New York
, and
jihad
, for example—would flag the message for secondary review by a human analyst. Most of those were discarded as immaterial or obscure. A few, a tiny percentage of all of the messages sucked into the maw of ECHELON, were disseminated to the intelligence community as raw product. Sam's team took the raw reports and used them, along with diplomatic reporting out of the embassies in South Asia and open-source reporting from foreign newspapers and media outlets, to prepare finished intelligence products for policy makers that represented, at least in theory, the collective wisdom of the expert analysts.

The piece on the screen in front of him was a single raw report. By itself it would have been of little significance were it not for the name.

Vanalika Chandra.

Sam thought briefly about deleting the report unread, but he knew he could not.

ORCON, GAMMA, FIVE EYES, NOFORN, PANOPTES, ECHELON

DTG: 03292014Z1030

ASSOCIATED NUMBERS:
+1 (202) 645-1970; +91 (11) 7789-5492

Participants: Vanalika Chandra; political counselor; Indian Embassy; Washington, D.C.

Panchavaktra Guhathakurta, director of the Pakistan Desk; Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; New Delhi

1. Chandra pressed Guhathakurta for a status report on the program (NFI). She complained that time was running short and the group (NFI) was in danger of letting an opportunity slip through its fingers. (Prime Minister) Rangarajan was determined to restore equilibrium to the relationship with Pakistan. The group could not allow that. The mullahs needed to be put in their place, and if that required another war with Pakistan, then so be it.

2. Guhathakurta urged patience. The group was reluctant to contemplate any changes to the plan. The others would come around, but in the meantime, it was important to drive a wedge between the United States and Pakistan so that when the inevitable conflict came Delhi would not find itself under intolerable pressure to cease hostilities before finishing the job and bringing an end to the Pakistani threat once and for all.

3. Chandra agreed that separating Pakistan from its U.S. protector was essential. She assured Guhathakurta that she and her associates (NFI) had a workable plan and they were executing it. They had allies in the CIA and the Pentagon. Under President Lord, the White House was less sympathetic to India's concerns about Pakistan than it had been in previous administrations. The Department of State was also a problem, but ultimately the diplomats did not have an especially loud voice on South Asia policy. At the end of the day, the diplomats would salute and follow their instructions.

4. Guhathakurta thanked Chandra for the work she had done to date and the services she would continue to provide in the weeks ahead.

The piece in front of him was shocking on multiple levels. It was damning in terms of what it said about Vanalika and her politics. It undermined the integrity of her relationship with Sam. It implied that there was a cabal of highly placed actors in Delhi pushing for war. And it was almost certainly a fake. For one, it did not sound like Vanalika. Sam could not reconcile the hard-edged and cynical worldview of the character from the intercept with the warm, sophisticated, witty woman he knew and, he admitted to himself although they had never said it, loved.

More significant, the date-time group on the report indicated that the conversation had taken place last Saturday while Sam and Vanalika had been at the cabin in the Shenandoah with no landline and no cell reception. Vanalika could not have made the call when she was supposed to have done so. The intercept was a fabrication.

It was a good fake, Sam had to admit. It looked real. The cell number associated with the call was hers. He knew it by heart. To those who did not know Vanalika, it would sound credible. Only her friends would know it was out of character. Only Sam would know that the timing was impossible.

He picked up the phone and dialed another number he had committed to memory.

“Krittenbrink.”

“Hi, Andy. It's Sam.”

“Hey. It was great to see you the other night even if being seen talking to you was not the best career move for me. Not after the blistering you gave Newton the Golden. Nice piece in the
Post
, by the way.”

“Do you think they got my best side?”

“Thin-skinned, easily riled, and smarter than the guest of honor? Yeah, I'd say so. To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”

“I need a favor.”

“Tell me.”

“Can we meet this afternoon?”

•   •   •

Sam had not been back
to the State Department since the day he had retired nearly six months ago. The process of joining the Foreign Service was full of pomp and circumstance. There was a swearing-in ceremony and reception in the ornate Benjamin Franklin room on the eighth floor. Often, the secretary of state or some suitably senior stand-in muckety-muck delivered the oath. Newly minted officers received commissions signed by the president and embossed with the Great Seal of the United States. At this point in their careers, officers were unlikely to know that the physical Great Seal was actually kept in a giant Lucite box on the first floor near the cafeteria, knowledge that tended to strip some of the majesty from the proceedings. Clerical staff occasionally entered the box to stamp stacks of commissions or treaties on the one-hundred-year-old press, looking like nothing so much as figures in a life-size diorama at a low-budget museum. There were more ceremonies tied to graduating from A-100, the diplomatic equivalent of basic training, and receiving your first assignment.

The process of leaving the Foreign Service, in contrast, was something of an anticlimax. Sam had turned over his badge and his BlackBerry to some bureaucrat in the personnel office he had never met before and signed a few forms. That was it.

He stood in the art moderne C Street lobby looking up at the row of flags from the some hundred and ninety nations with which the United States had diplomatic relations. He was an outsider now. He had a new badge that allowed him access to the building, but it was marked with a red “C” for contractor. It might as well have been a scarlet “A.”

The uniformed guard looked at his badge with what seemed to Sam like mild contempt but was almost certainly nothing more than bored indifference.
I'm projecting,
he thought to himself.

On the walls of the lobby, names and dates were carved into green malachite panels and highlighted in gold. This was a list of American diplomats who had given their lives in the line of duty. It was a long list, stretching back to William Palfrey, 1780. The older names listed the cause of death. Going backward in time, gunshots and bombs became less frequent with more disease and natural disasters accounting for the grim toll. There were even a few who had been killed by “volcanoes.” Next to Palfrey's name was the inscription “Lost at Sea.” Palfrey had been aide-de-camp to George Washington in the Continental Army. After the war, the Congress named him consul-general to France. His ship had vanished without a trace.

Sam had some friends on one of the newer panels on the east side of the lobby. He had lost two friends when al-Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in Kenya. One had been his closest friend from A-100. Another colleague, a vivacious woman who had worked with Sam on the visa line in Islamabad, died in a plane crash in Bolivia. He stopped to read their names and offer them a silent moment of remembrance.

INR was accessible by a single bank of elevators that served the subbasement. Besides the analysts, the only other State Department personnel to ride that particular set of elevators were members of the maintenance crew responsible for the boilers. The INR office space made the South Asia suite at Argus headquarters look like a sultan's palace. There was a definite cut-rate flair to the bureau and something of a 1970s vibe to the decor. On one wall was a framed and faded poster inviting travelers to
FLY PAN AM TO YUGOSLAVIA
. Both had ceased to exist about the last time the office was redecorated.

As a junior analyst, Andy Krittenbrink occupied one of the less desirable cubicles near the copy machine. The copier should have been retired two secretaries of state ago, but there never seemed to be enough money in the ever-shrinking budget. Something had come loose in the machine years earlier and it rattled around inside like loose change in a dryer.

Andy had three computer monitors on his desk alongside a pile of unread Indian newspapers and magazines.

“Hi, Andy.”

Andy jumped. He had clearly been so engrossed in whatever was on the monitor that he had not seen Sam approaching.

“Jesus, you scared me. How'd you get in here?”

Sam showed him the department ID card hanging around his neck.

“Part of the contract with Argus. I get passes to State, the Agency, and the Pentagon. NSA is a little more labor-intensive.”

“Sweet. I'd spend most of my time at the Agency. The cafeteria is way better and the girls are prettier.” It was an old line about the intelligence world: The CIA hired for beauty; the NSA hired for brains; and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency hired the rest.

“Nothing beats coming back home.”

“True 'nuff. Pull up a chair and let me know what I can do for you.”

Sam sat in the one guest chair that Andy could fit inside his cube.