Secrets of State (9 page)

The Vice Chair had been Spears's predecessor as Ops, moving up in the group's hierarchy to the number two spot on the Council when the previous Vice had left government service and returned to his walnut farm in California. She was young, both for this job and the senior management position she occupied at the State Department. She was also telegenic, something that had not hurt her rapid rise to the top.

“What do you have?”

“We have a new problem with the White House.”

“What is our dear friend Emily up to now?”

“It's not Lord personally. It's her chief of staff, Solomon Braithwaite. Our op has too many moving parts to fly completely below radar. The White House has picked up enough data to suspect that something is going on in South Asia that does not have official sanction. I have a source in the NSC who told me that Braithwaite has put together his own team of experienced operatives who report directly to him and, through him, to President Lord. I don't have any information on numbers or the nature of their assignment, just that they are out looking for us. I know Braithwaite. He's a pit bull. Once he gets his teeth into a problem, he's not going to let go easily.”

“What about co-opting Braithwaite?” the Chairman asked. “What are his weaknesses?”

“He's a bit of a prig,” Reports offered. “But he's squeaky clean. Nothing exploitable.”

“Do you think he could be persuaded? Made to see reason? Would he understand the underlying logic of what we're doing?”

“I'd be surprised,” Legal said, shaking his head with an air of sorrowful resignation. The group's lawyer, a graying D.C. native from the Justice Department, was the longest-serving member of the Council. Twice over the last ten years he had turned down offers to assume the Chairman's role, a lack of ambition that Spears found hard to understand. “Braithwaite and Lord go back a long way. They were allies in New Jersey when she was governor and he was majority leader in the state senate. I don't see him doing anything he would interpret as betraying her.”

“Legal's correct,” Finance chimed in. Although a banker by both training and disposition, Finance had a keen political mind as well as close connections to the Lord administration. In his civilian life, Finance had been a partner at Goldman Sachs and a leading fund-raiser for Emily Lord before joining her administration as an undersecretary at the Treasury Department. He had quickly grown disenchanted, however, with what he saw as the softhearted naivete of the Lord White House. The current Vice Chair had recognized his discontent and recruited him to the Stoics. It had been a real coup on her part and even the Chairman respected Finance's views on Lord and her inner circle.

“Braithwaite is even more obtuse than Lord when it comes to the Islamist threat,” Finance continued. “They're essentially apologists for the extremists. As though it were somehow the fault of the United States that lunatics in thrall to a violent ideology would seek to do us harm. Braithwaite would not understand. And he is a dangerous opponent. It would be an error to underestimate him.”

“We are at an extremely delicate moment in both the operation and the history of our country,” the Chairman said. “We cannot afford the risk that Braithwaite might be successful in interfering with the plan. If he cannot be suborned or reasoned with, he must be removed from the equation. But I would put that decision to a vote of Council members to be recorded in the records. It is not one to be made lightly.”

“Seconded,” Spears said.

“All in favor?”

Seven hands rose in the air. Only the Librarian did not vote. He kept the records and the history, but by tradition, he did not have voting rights. Spears could hear the thin scratching sound of the Librarian's Waterman pen recording the results of the vote in the black ledger.

The hands were lowered. There was a pause. Spears recognized it for what it was. A moment of silence.

The Chairman looked over at John Weeder, who nodded his understanding.

LAHORE, PAKISTAN

MARCH 31

K
amran Khan's days of sweeping the floors at the villa in Lahore were over. He had not yet, however, been assigned to an operational unit. Instead, he waited. He prayed. And he practiced patience. Shortly after he and the HeM leader had returned from India, the villa's steward had moved him from the communal bunkhouse to his own room on the second floor of the main building. It was a mark of Masood's favor. But Khan had not seen the leader since their return from India, and he did not know what Masood had planned for him.

He had hoped that the physical prowess he had displayed in India would open the door to jihad. Khan could feel the weight of his mission pressing on his heart, and that mission had nothing to do with a broom and a dustpan. It seemed, however, that there were still tests to pass. One afternoon, a battle-scarred veteran of the Kashmir wars had taken Khan into the mountains to see if he could handle a weapon. Khan could shoot, and he proved himself to be a more than adequate marksman with both rifle and pistol. Most of the tests were pen and paper. Some of it was religious exegesis exploring his depth of knowledge in the study of the Quran and the Hadith. Much of it, however, seemed to be standardized intelligence testing with logic puzzles and analogies. He was also asked to write a number of essays, including one on the history of Kashmir and another on the meaning of jihad. Khan breezed through the tests. He was smart and he knew it.

Ten days after the fight in the guest house in India, the steward told him that he had been summoned to lunch with Masood Dar. Khan changed into clean clothes and combed his hair, but he left his beard untrimmed as a mark of his piety. He knew Masood would be pleased by that.

The HeM leader typically ate in his study on the third floor, the same room where he had interviewed Khan before agreeing to take him on the trip to India. Masood was wearing a white
shalwar kameez
, the national dress of Pakistan with the pajama-like trousers and a long tunic slit at the sides. He sat cross-legged on the floor in bare feet. Khan removed his sandals and left them on a rack by the door. He sat on a cushion across from Masood and bowed slightly.

“As-salamu alaykuma.”

“Wa alaykumu s-salam.”

The steward served the meal, small plates of traditional Punjabi dishes. Masood was a strict vegetarian so there was no tandoori. Instead, the meal featured
sarson da saag
made with green mustard leaves and eaten with corn-flour roti,
dal makhani
—a dish of lentils with cream—and a thick stew of red beans and rice called
rajma
.

Khan ate sparingly and drank weak tea, while Masood consumed impressive quantities of the excellent food and drank yogurt spiked with mint and salt. Khan would have eaten more, but he felt self-conscious as Masood seemed to be examining him as he would a bug under a magnifying glass, an impression heightened by the HeM leader's oversize spectacles.

“You will be pleased to know that we have identified the viper who betrayed us to Indian intelligence. A low-level member of our group working on the logistics of our little trip. It seems he had a rather serious gambling problem of which we were unaware and which made him vulnerable to temptation. It is not a mistake that we shall soon repeat.”

“I trust that you interrogated him before you had him killed,” Khan said emotionlessly. This was business.

“Of course. But he knew nothing, not even the name of his contact in RAW.” The Research and Analysis Wing was the branch of Indian intelligence responsible for overseas collection and counterterrorism. RAW had been playing cat-and-mouse with the Hand of the Prophet and other Pakistani groups for years. The Indian service was small, nothing like the massive American, Russian, or Chinese services, but it was competent and, as Khan himself had seen, ruthless.

“Trust me,” Masood continued. “Had he known anything of value he would have given it up. There are some people in our organization who can be most persuasive.”

Khan did not doubt the truth of that statement. He said nothing.

“I have not thanked you,” Masood said, “for saving my life. Had the Indian assassins succeeded, our movement would have been most seriously damaged. Which is not to say that I am irreplaceable. I am a mere instrument of Allah's will. But even so, there are certain things I know that would be lost if I were to die prematurely.”

“All death is according to the will of Allah,” Khan replied dutifully.

“Of course.”

Masood lapsed into silence, and Khan was again cognizant of the intensity of the mullah's gaze.

“Tell me about your family,” Masood commanded.

“My family is from Quetta. We are Baluchs. My parents spoke Saraiki at home.”

“I thought I recognized the accent. Brothers and sisters?”

“I have a brother. He is a dentist.”

“In Quetta.”

“No.” Khan paused, considering whether there was a way to avoid the inevitable. There was not. “In New Jersey,” he admitted.

Masood did not seem surprised by this. Khan suspected that the HeM leader already knew about his family history. Their experience in India had no doubt piqued his interest in Khan's past.

“You also have spent considerable time in America?”

“Yes.”

“And you hid this fact from us?”

“No, Janab. I did not hide. Nobody asked me where I was from and I did not feel it was necessary to offer this particular piece of information.”

“Because you felt we would reject you if we knew?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Maybe we would have been right to do so.”

“In which case, Janab, you would be dead.”

Masood smiled at that.

“There are Americans in al-Qaeda,” Khan continued. “There are Americans in the Taliban. I am Pakistani first by birth and choice, and I choose to defend Islam against the Hindus rather than the crusaders, but I believe that I have proven my loyalty to you and my commitment to jihad.”

“Tell me about your time in America.”

“My family moved there when I was ten and my brother was eight. It's been eighteen years. My uncle was a mechanic in Newark and he got a visa for us to immigrate. My father went to work for him at the garage.”

“Did you like America?”

“At first,” Khan said. “We had a television and I learned English by watching cartoons. I did well in school, but it wasn't easy to fit in. We didn't fall in with any of the established groups. Too dark for the white kids. Too Asian for the black kids. Too Muslim for the Asian kids. There were only a handful of Pakistanis in the school and we were the only Baluchs.”

“Were you pious?”

“Not especially. My family was not devout. But living among the godless Americans taught me the value of submission to the will of Allah.”

“How did your family react to the awakening of your Islamic identity?”

“Not well,” Khan answered truthfully. If anything, this was something of an understatement.

“You went to college in the United States,” Masood said. It was not a question.

“Yes. I studied math and computer science for two years at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.”

“Why didn't you finish?”

“I heard the call for jihad.”

“What happened?”

Khan hesitated. His awakening to jihad predated his time at NJIT by several years. The decision to drop out of school had developed slowly rather than overnight. Like many who had followed a similar path, Khan had made a decision born of anger and pride. It was a story he had told to very few people.

Inwardly, Khan burned at the memory. He was sixteen. She was a pretty blond girl named Kathleen. Never Kathy. She insisted on Kathleen. They were lab partners in chemistry. She liked Khan, she was drawn to him, but she did not want her Irish Catholic friends to know that she was seeing a dark-skinned immigrant kid.

They thought they were alone in her house that afternoon. Kathleen's shirt was off and Khan was fumbling with the unfamiliar bra strap when her father burst through the door of her bedroom with a look of anger and contempt on his face that Khan could easily recapture even though more than a dozen years had passed. Kathleen's father had hit him with an open hand, but hard enough to give him a black eye.

“Get away from my daughter, you filthy raghead!” the beefy trucker had shouted, as Khan fled the house. Kathleen had never spoken to him again.

It was uncomfortable to think that the roots of something as pure as jihad could be grounded in the muck of teenage sexual humiliation. Khan had no desire to share this with Masood. It was, in any event, too American a story for him to really understand.

“There was a teacher in Newark, Janab,” Khan offered instead. “He opened my eyes and my heart to jihad. All the rest has been according to the will of Allah.”

Masood seemed satisfied with that answer and it was true, after a fashion.

“In India, I saw you fight in a manner I would not have expected from a student of math. How did you come by those skills?”

“The imam in Newark encouraged a few of us to study martial arts. He said it would sharpen our minds and would one day help us with jihad.”

This also was not entirely true. Khan had begun training in Brazilian jujitsu the day after Kathleen Halloran's father had humiliated him. His teacher had been a Mexican immigrant with a run-down dojo in a strip mall in a low-rent part of a low-rent city, but he was an experienced semipro fighter and as quick as a bat. He had taught Khan well.

“And what did you do after you left school?” the mullah asked. “Did you work? At your uncle's garage perhaps?”

“No, Janab. I joined the army.”

“The American army?”

“Yes.”

“The army of the infidel?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do this?”

“Because they had much to teach me and I had much to learn.”

“What did the infidel teach you in their army?”

“Explosives, Janab. I was trained to dispose of unexploded ordnance. To do this, they must teach you about explosives.”

“And where did you apply these skills in the service of the army of infidels?”

“In Afghanistan.”

“And what did you learn there?”

“I learned how to hate, Janab.” In his mind's eye, Khan could see the bodies and the pieces of bodies at the wedding party in Herat, the bride and groom and scores of guests blown apart by the powerful bomb. He could smell the stench of burned flesh and singed hair. He could feel anew the anger that flowed so freely through his veins, the source of his dedication to the mission. His call to jihad.

“And so now you have joined the army of the righteous?” Masood asked.

“Yes.”

They ate in silence for some time as Masood seemed to be weighing what Khan had said.

“Your name is auspicious,” the HeM leader offered, after perhaps ten minutes of contemplation.

This was somewhat cryptic and Khan was not sure that he had understood properly.

“Khan? How so?”

“Kamran Khan. You have three vowels in your name, all ‘a's. The numerical values of the consonants total nineteen according to the system that I recently developed on the basis of revealed knowledge. It is the same as the numerical value for the word
wahid
, which is Arabic for one and representative of the oneness of God. The word
wahid
is used to describe Allah in the Quran exactly nineteen times.”

Khan nodded at this as though he understood what Masood was saying. In truth, he had no idea.

“The sum of the digits in the number nineteen is ten as there are ten digits in Kamran Khan and the sum of those digits—one and zero—is one, completing the circle. The Quran itself elevates the number nineteen. Sura 74.30 explains that ‘over it are nineteen. And we have set none but angels as the guardians of the hellfire.' God has ninety-nine names, but he himself is one and loves odd numbers. There are markers in the physical world as well. The ecliptic cycle of the earth and moon is exactly nineteen years. The word
year
occurs seven times in the Quran and the word
years
twelve. Together they are a perfect nineteen.”

It was now clear to Khan what Masood was saying and why. He was a mystic. Numerology was a vehicle for the direct experience of the divine. This was Sufi stuff . . . and it was dangerous. It was a belief system that Salafist fundamentalists such as the Taliban would have considered heretical. And there was only one acceptable punishment for heretics. The Hand of the Prophet, however, was less dogmatic.

Masood wasn't finished.

“Nineteen is an extraordinary number. It is matched only by the Basmala. In fact, 786 is the most sublimely beautiful of numbers. I have written many books and scholarly articles, but I never write the name of God. The number 786 preserves the purity of our prayers.”