Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  The conference room was dated. It was outfitted with the kind of electronics and communication equipment that would have been used to fight World War III in the Johnson administration. The hard metal folding chairs around the table were spotted with rust. Still, it was secure and the Stoics most certainly valued security above comfort.

  Spears was five minutes early, but he was still the last to arrive. The Chairman looked at him with unconcealed irritation. He was famous, at least in Washington policy circles, for a militant insistence on starting meetings on time. Bite me, Spears thought. It was easy enough for you to be on time for this meeting; you work in this building.

  Spears locked the door behind him and took his seat at the table.

  There were eight of them. There were always eight on the Governing Council. Each had a role and a mission. When they moved on from the positions that made them useful to the organization, they were replaced. They were six men and two women. All were white. This was not deliberate, but neither did it disturb anyone at the table. The Stoics considered both racism and affirmative action to be the height of illogic. One of the men wore an army uniform with the three stars of a lieutenant general on his shoulders. The rest were in business attire appropriate for Washington’s formal-but-not-flashy ethos. Spears was the only member of the Council not drawing a government paycheck. Two of the members were rich beyond counting from family money, but their positions on the Council were due to their government jobs rather than to their wealth. Spears was the only denizen of the private sector, and his appointment was a sign that even the Stoics were not immune from the push for outsourcing government responsibilities.

  Another eight people sat in a row of chairs lined up along the back wall. Each Council member was entitled to one assistant, who could—in extremis—take the principal’s place at the table until a permanent replacement could be found. There was a little more color in the back row, an African American woman who was an up-and-comer in the Treasury Department and two Hispanics. The Chairman’s assistant was the colorless but capable James Smith. By long tradition, the individual in that position always used the name Smith, although the records were somewhat fuzzy as to the origins of that custom. Spears’s backbencher was Commander John Weeder.

  “Now that we’re all here,” the Chairman began, with only a quick glance in Spears’s direction to indicate that he meant it as a rebuke. “Let’s get started. Reports, can I ask you to begin with an update on South Asia?”

  Real names were never spoken aloud in meetings. This was more than just another layer of OPSEC, it connected the current members of the Council to their predecessors. It tied them to those who had come before.

  “Reports,” a career professional with three decades of experience at the CIA, was the twenty-fourth person and the third woman to carry that name on the Council. She was responsible for intelligence and had perhaps the most analytical mind among the eight.

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Reports said. Her face was long and thin, and reminded Spears of a greyhound. “The rise of the Islamists in Pakistan is accelerating. Talwar is effectively captured by the clerics, and the traditional role of the military as a bulwark against Islamist influence is eroding. The army has sponsored Islamist groups for decades and used them as proxies against India. What’s changed is that the military establishment can no longer control the extremists in the way they used to. Tensions between Pakistan and India are as high as they have been since the midseventies, but Rangarajan is doing everything he can to defuse them. He doesn’t want the war that Pakistan is offering.”

  “We need the war as the trigger for Cold Harbor,” Plans commented. He may have been a brilliant academic, but Spears thought that the man responsible for strategic planning on the Governing Council had an annoying habit of stating the obvious.

  “Yes,” Reports replied calmly. “That is why we have developed the intel-sharing program. It is also the reasoning behind our current delicate undertaking.” She put a slight emphasis on the word reasoning. For the Stoics, reason was both their touchstone and their shibboleth. Plans’s intervention had been laced with frustration and anxiety, emotions that had no place in the Council’s deliberations. It was an artful put-down.

  For Spears, the rest of the brief on developments in the region tracked pretty closely with what he had already read in the assessments that Sam’s South Asia Unit had prepared for Argus. Reports’s analysis may, in fact, have been drawn directly from those same products. The world of intelligence could be unwittingly circular, and there was always something of an echo-chamber effect in analytical judgments. Irrespective of the sourcing, it was clear that Pakistan was a basket case, a failed state in all but name that was slipping inexorably under the control of the Islamists.

  When Reports had finished with the brief, the Chairman looked at Spears. “Operations, can you update us on the progress your team is making?” Spears was Operations, or “Ops,” responsible for translating the Council’s decisions into action. It was a position he shared with some of the most exalted, if controversial, figures in American history. Allan Pinkerton had held the job during the Civil War. Colonel House had served as Operations during the Wilson administration. Harry Hopkins held the title during the Second World War, even as he had been living in one of the upstairs bedrooms at the White House. Spears was conscious that the history books would never group him together with these lions of the American experience. He was anonymous. A gray eminence. But, the operation he was spearheading would—he knew—be greater than anything that they had accomplished in his position. It was elegant. Visionary. And it was a shame that the world must never know.

  “The wheels are turning, Mr. Chairman,” Spears said. “Everything is in train.” Spears smiled at this private joke. There was a level of granular operational detail that the Council did not need to know.

  “But this is a complex op,” he continued, “and it will take time to come together. We have identified a number of possible time slots for the final stage, with the earliest opportunity approximately a month out. The initial meeting between our Indian and Pakistani assets was successful. The Indians have set it up as a false flag. Masood and the HeM think that they’re dealing with Middle Easterners who have purchased access to the . . . material. There will be no direct transfer. The Hand of the Prophet will have to make the next move on its own timeline. This obviously limits our ability to dictate the pace of events, but it significantly reduces our risk profile. The information we have made available to HeM, however, is time-sensitive. They will have to move quickly if they are going to move at all.”

  “They had better move pretty damn quickly,” Plans said vehemently. “We’ve all seen the Cassandra projections.”

  Spears nodded. It had been almost a year since the oddly mismatched pair of academics from Agilent Industries had presented their preliminary findings to the Council. It was only a matter of time, they had predicated with high confidence, until a nuclear bomb exploded in an American city as an act of terror. The massively powerful computer system and clever algorithms that Agilent had funded had been equally clear about the origin of the weapon itself. The bomb that would destroy an American city and kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens would come from Pakistan. Agilent was, in reality, a front company registered in the Bahamas and controlled by the Council. So, for that matter, was Argus Systems. The Council made use of the tools it had and made the tools it needed.

  “There is precious little time,” the Chairman agreed. “But we are moving as quickly as is possible under the circumstances. We all approved of the plan and the schedule that Operations outlined for us. Now is not the time to second-guess. It is the time to look for loose ends, anything we may have missed that could jeopardize the success of the operation. Does anyone at the table have a useful contribution to make in this regard?”

  “I believe that I might,” the Vice Chair remarked.

  The Vice Cha
ir 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

  Kamran 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,” Masoo
d 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.”