The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

  Feldman traveled freely and without escort within the city even in the worst of times. He enjoyed wining and dining. And he especially favored the bar at the Marriott Hotel, newly renovated with bombproof security walls and HESCO barriers since a terrorist-driven dump truck blasted a 60-foot crater near the entrance in September 2008.

  Ever the believer in the notion that lightening never strikes twice, Feldman considered the Marriott to be the safest building in the capital. He visited the hotel once or twice a week, occasionally lunching at Jason’s Restaurant, which made a passable imitation of an American cheeseburger.

  More frequently, he came in the evening to drink bourbon at the bar, sometimes in the company of one or more Embassy staffers. Often, he drank alone. One evening a few weeks after the OBL takedown, Feldman was nursing a bourbon and water by himself at a table at the Marriott bar. Well into his third or fourth drink, Feldman was startled to see Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood observing him from a dark corner of the room. Feldman was already slightly drunk, but the roguish mustache and slicked-back hair could not be mistaken. The brigadier was dressed in a Western business suit. When he saw Feldman, Mahmood slowly approached, taking a seat at Feldman’s table.

  “My dear friend, I hope I am not intruding,” Mahmood said.

  “Are you kidding? I’m dying for some company,” Feldman said, motioning for a server.

  “When I was visiting America, I was quite fond of bourbon.”

  “Me too,” Feldman said. “And here in Pakistan, I continue to be fond of bourbon. Won’t you join me?”

  “I fear I cannot. I am not the same man I was in America.”

  Mahmood ordered a glass of club soda when the waiter came by.

  “It’s been a while,” Feldman said. “I miss our talks.” He was quickly feeling his native alertness returning. Meetings with ISI flag officers in bars did not occur frequently. In fact, this was a first. The last time he had chatted with Mahmood was in the Serena Hotel the day after OBL’s death. That meeting, behind closed doors, had not gone well. There had been a frosty interval since then.

  “I do not want you to feel neglected,” Mahmood said. “Pakistan is a country of contradictions.”

  “Meaning that not everyone within the ISI is against us?”

  “You grasp my drift perfectly.”

  “Well, to be honest, if you guys helicoptered into Texas to take out an enemy of Pakistan in Dallas, you might not be too popular in the American media yourselves, so I have more sympathy for the present situation than you may imagine.”

  “I know this,” Mahmood said. “We are both in the intelligence business. Outsiders fail to understand the courtesies we extend one another, assuming wrongly that we are as emotional as they. We have more in common than they know, common enemies.” He paused. “There is also another reason for my coming by to chat this evening.”

  Mort Feldman looked up from his drink. He was fully alert now and listening carefully.

  “I wanted you to know—we wanted you to know—that the chatter about this bomb that I’m sure you have been listening to as carefully as we…. It isn’t one of ours.”

  “It isn’t one of yours?”

  “Without equivocation or question. I want you to assure your people back in Washington. This bomb, it isn’t one of ours.”

  Mort Feldman slowly put down his drink.

  ***

  After failing to draw out Brigadier Mahmood any further, Feldman took his leave and drove the four miles from the Marriott Hotel to the American Embassy, moving in record time. It was ten o’clock in the evening when he reached his desk, noon at CIA headquarters in Langley.

  Rather than write a cable, Feldman decided to call Olof Wheatley on a secure phone.

  “I just had the weirdest conversation with Mahmood Mahmood,” he said when Wheatley came on the line. He summarized the brigadier’s enigmatic comments about the nuclear weapons intercepts.

  “It’s not one of theirs?” Wheatley said. “So what the fuck does that mean?”

  “For starters, it means that they think it’s a real bomb. It means that they are taking this chatter about nuclear bombs more seriously than we are,” Feldman said. “And I hope that scares the shit out of you as much as it scares the shit out of me.”

  The silence on the line suggested that it did.

  “Were you able to get any details from him?” Wheatley said at last.

  “No. He was clearly delivering a message from his boss, General Pasha, though he never mentioned Pasha by name. And he just delivered the message, no more, no less. It was scripted. When I asked him to elaborate, he just repeated that his people at ISI wanted our people to know that this bomb the bad guys have been talking about isn’t one of theirs.”

  “So, have you ever suggested to them that we thought it was?”

  “No way,” Feldman said. “We haven’t talked about nuclear security in months. In fact, we haven’t talked about much of anything recently. I’m in the doghouse since OBL. But I’ve never been worried about loose nukes in Pakistan. They take this shit seriously. No one outside the military has a chance in hell of getting one of their nukes.”

  Wheatley understood that relations between Pakistan and the United States had rarely been frostier.

  “Maybe they’re just being extra cautious during this time of heightened tension?”

  “Could be, but why are they volunteering this information unasked? It’s inescapable to me that they are taking the recent intercepts as an indication that Al-Zawahiri and his boys have actually got hold of a weapon, something Musharaf and others are on record as saying is next to impossible.”

  “Or maybe they’re just afraid that we think that, and they’re trying to head off our concerns, to quash any fears we might have before they fully develop.”

  “But why would they go down that road?” Feldman said. “No one here on our side has approached them. They have taken us on tours of their facilities. They know we know they guard their stuff.”

  “They’re really pissed at us,” Wheatley said. “Maybe they’re planning some sort of op.”

  “You better believe it. They are mad at us. Which makes this evening’s dialogue with Mahmood all the more inexplicable. The only conclusion I can draw is that they have better intelligence on this than we do, and that this is more serious than we thought. They can’t deal with it, and they want us to”

  “You’re saying that Al Qaeda has a nuclear weapon?”

  “No, I’m saying that the ISI is treating the chatter we’ve been hearing more seriously than we have been. And we better figure out why fast. They have access to information I just don’t have.”

  “But that doesn’t help me, Mort. If it’s not just some mid-level Al Qaeda yo-yo making this up, then what is it?”

  “I don’t have a fucking clue, and I couldn’t get any further with him tonight. Maybe I can try again in a day or two. And maybe we better start thinking of how we can run this down ourselves.”

  Wheatley considered the odds.

  “If there is a loose nuke in Pakistan and it’s not of Pakistani origin, then where is it from?”

  Feldman paused, thinking of Russia, North Korea, India, Iran...

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “But I would bet first on Russia.”

  “Maybe I need to come out there myself.”

  “Yes, I think so,” Feldman said appreciatively. “If you do that, we’ll both get in to talk personally with General Pasha. He won’t turn you down, no matter how pissed he is. And if ever we had reason to work cooperatively, it’s now.”

  “OK, let me make some arrangements on my end. I’ll be in touch. Meanwhile, go home and get some sleep.”

  ***

  And that was the last Olof Wheatley heard from Mort Feldman.

  The portly station chief left the Embassy shortly after concluding his phone call, got in his car, and arrived at his home a little after midnight. The chowkidar was not in his guardhouse, but that did not alarm him. The P
akistani protective detail often took ‘breaks’ late at night to visit girlfriends or eat unscheduled meals. Feldman activated the radio-controlled gate opener and pulled into his driveway, heading toward the garage behind the house.

  Before the automatic gate mechanism could close, a dark, unmarked panel truck appeared out of nowhere and rammed the back of Feldman’s car hard, jolting his neck and blocking his retreat. Three armed men poured out of the truck and tried to pull open the locked doors of Feldman’s car. When that failed, they shattered both the driver’s side and passenger’s side windows and flipped up the locks, dragging Feldman, who was unarmed, out of the driver’s seat and throwing him hard onto the ground. He felt a searing pain at the base of his neck and he thought he might have fractured a vertebra. One of the men yanked a black cloth bag over his head and tied it loosely beneath his jaw.

  Mort Feldman was unceremoniously bundled into the back of the panel truck like a sack of potatoes. The truck roared out of the drive in reverse, tires squealing, and then drove off into the night.

  The engine of Feldman’s car was still running hours later at dawn when Pakistani police reported their discovery to the Marine guard on duty at the Embassy. The Marine called the Regional Security Officer who took the precaution of driving out to the house on Margalla Road to see the situation for himself before calling the ambassador at home.

  He ruined the ambassador’s breakfast by telling him that Mort Feldman had disappeared, kidnapped by unknown assailants.

  Chapter 10 — Moscow

  Simon Wantree had never visited Russia, even as a tourist. When his Aeroflot flight from London landed at the newly renovated Terminal F at Sheremetyevo International Airport north of Moscow, Wantree experienced a giddy joy. He felt he was stepping back in time, to a period when espionage, (which is what he styled his work to be, in his own imagination), was more dash than drudgery.

  The 50-minute drive in heavy traffic along the Leningradskoe Highway broke the spell for him, an endless parade of grim, gray housing blocks with dreary balconies hung with laundry as dingy as the walls. English prisons were probably more welcoming.

  The battered taxi deposited him at the foot of the steep granite steps of the Slavyanka Hotel on Suvorovskaya Square, about two miles north of the Kremlin. The Stalinist-era Slavyanka was imposing, like a government office—which, in a sense, it was.

  The heavy-set taxi driver charged him $40 for the trip, complaining that the traffic had caused him to lose valuable time and that Wantree should bear the cost. The driver insisted on being paid in dollars or euros, not rubles.

  Colonel Marchenko had selected the Slavyanka for Wantree mainly because it was inexpensive, but also because it was still run by the Russian Ministry of Defense, a fact that caused Marchenko considerable wry amusement. This fact was apparent to Wantree when he entered the building. Russian soldiers were everywhere, along with scruffy-looking students from Germany and Poland. Wantree was unnerved by the unkempt exuberance of the place; modern Russia was, if anything, more chaotic than the old USSR. He calmed himself by reflecting that there was nothing on his person or in his luggage to give away the true purpose of his visit.

  Wantree soon found that his 30-euro-a-night room did not have a bathroom and that the public bath at the end of the corridor did not have hot water. The freezing tap water from the lavabo next to his bed was a rusty brown, the color of stale tea. He used it to shave and he cut himself. His room, more a cell, really, did have Wi-Fi. Wantree was able to send a message by email to Colonel Marchenko to tell him he had arrived. While waiting for a reply, he took a swim in the frigid indoor pool in the hotel basement, substituting that for a shower.

  A platter of fatty cold cuts on display at the entrance to the hotel’s restaurant was buzzing with flies. It was so unappetizing that Wantree opted to explore the neighborhood for more tasty fare. A city block from the hotel, he was distracted by the enormous Central Armed Forces Museum and its collection of obsolete military equipment, not including anything, regrettably, made after the Soviets tested their first nuclear bomb in 1949.

  After wandering around the neighborhood for twenty minutes, he found a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the Dostoevskaya metro stop, the newest in the city. He let the waiter bring him a plate of half a dozen excellent pelmeni, portions of ground pork and onion wrapped in thin, unleavened dough and boiled, like a dumpling. He followed this with a dish of herring and potatoes, washed down with vodka. He had more vodka after his meal and arrived back at the Slavyanka pleasantly drunk.

  Colonel Marchenko had responded to his email when he checked his computer, indicating that he would come to the hotel the following morning around 10 AM.

  In order to reduce the risk of their emails being detected, Jacques LeClerc and Wantree had agreed that they would each access a dummy MSN Hotmail account LeClerc had set up before Wantree left England. Each of them had the password and would leave messages in the Drafts folder, unsent.

  When Wantree had read LeClerc’s message, he would delete it, write his response, and save it, too, in Drafts. That way, no email traffic was actually sent over the Internet. The emails were simply saved internally within the account to which both men had access. They were read there, and then deleted, unsent. Such a system could not alert tracking devices because there was nothing to track.

  When he was through checking for Marchenko’s emailed response, Wantree noticed there was a new message in Drafts. It was from LeClerc and read “Expect client rep to join you in Moscow later this week. M has been advised.” The more the merrier, Wantree thought, as he deleted it. He would ask Marchenko about it. He drafted no reply to LeClerc.

  ***

  The retired KGB colonel was waiting for him the next morning in a stuffed armchair in the lobby. Wantree spotted him at once. Marchenko was a flamboyant figure, with a military bearing his civilian clothes could not disguise—dark eyes under a stern brow; a neatly clipped mustache. It occurred to Wantree that Jacques LeClerc was likely no match for him, physically or intellectually. He approached the Russian.

  “So, Mr. Wantree, you are English, are you not?” The colonel did not extend his hand or get up from his chair.

  “English indeed, and a military man like yourself,” Wantree said jauntily. He immediately regretted the boast.

  “Ha!” Marchenko roared. “I am glad to know it! Then we will work well together!”

  “I meant I served as a civilian technical advisor to my government,” Wantree said.

  “I take your meaning. To be frank, I had forgotten that the British maintained the kind of—capability—to which you refer. You were always a small part of NATO, and NATO is another acronym for USA.”

  “We are a proud nation, like Russia.”

  “You will take a coffee with me?”

  Wantree nodded. Marchenko raised his hand and snapped his fingers with a crack like a dry tree limb breaking. A waiter came scurrying over and Marchenko spoke to him peremptorily. Then he sat back and studied Wantree.

  “I am not enthusiastic about Monsieur LeClerc’s plan to have you make an inspection,” Marchenko said when the two espressos arrived. “It complicates matters, and it weakens security.”

  “I am discreet.”

  “That may be. But now I learn that LeClerc is sending someone else. This is unacceptable.”

  “I too was surprised by this. I just learned of it myself. I was not involved in your negotiation with Jacques LeClerc,” Wantree said. “He simply hired me the way the buyer of a used car might hire a mechanic to check out the vehicle before sale. I am merely a technician.”

  Marchenko took this in, holding the espresso cup delicately in his large hand.

  “Tell me what you will require to authenticate the device.”

  “I will need to see it of course, preferably in one place, and I will need time to test circuits.”

  “In one place? What do you mean?”

  “LeClerc told me that the physics package was kept in a differen
t location from the electronics.”

  “That has changed,” Marchenko said. “All the materials are ready to be assembled at a special site. I have also undertaken the precaution of having my own technical advisor check the circuits and other components.”

  “That will simplify my work considerably,” Wantree said. “He will have told you that I will want especially to examine the core. Oxidation and flaking, and so forth.”

  Marchenko made an impatient motion with his hand.

  “The Soviet Union was the greatest military state in the history of mankind, excepting perhaps the Romans, or the armies of Hannibal,” Marchenko said slowly. “Do you have any idea how carefully we tested and maintained in constant readiness all our matériel?”

  “Then you also know that plutonium is a remarkably unstable metal.”