The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

  “I hardly think so. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of nearly 25,000 years.”

  “That is not what I meant,” said Wantree peevishly. “When exposed to damp air, it forms oxides and hydrides that bubble up off the metal with huge increase in volume, much as rust does on exposed iron, except that in this case these materials can flake off and spontaneously ignite in oxygen. Even in pristine condition, if stored anywhere near the other components, plutonium rots them with gamma rays. When your device was part of the Soviet arsenal, it received almost constant maintenance and care.”

  “Of course I know it, because I myself provided that maintenance,” Marchenko said sharply. “And I have continued to provide it, nursing this mechanism almost as I would a grandchild.”

  The two men sat for some minutes without speaking. Wantree had no wish to further provoke a man whose cooperation Jacques LeClerc had already promised him. He realized that it had been a mistake to come without LeClerc to undertake precisely the kinds of negotiations that were necessary to secure Marchenko’s cooperation. Fighting for access was not part of his brief.

  “Did you bring your own tools?” Marchenko said at last.

  “No. It seemed a foolish and also a needless risk. Anyway, all I need for the first visit is my own pair of eyes.”

  “Your first visit?”

  “I imagine it will take more than one, but I may be wrong,” Wantree said timidly.

  “This other man,” Marchenko said. “This consultant LeClerc wants to send me in addition to you, do you know when he arrives in Moscow?”

  “I’m afraid not. I do not even know his name.”

  “He’s an Arab,” Marchenko said, almost spitting out the words. “Al-Greeb, Yasser al-Greeb.”

  ***

  The slight man with the stained carpetbag left the No. 7 train from Almaty and slipped anonymously into the vast marble reaches of the Paveletsky train station in south central Moscow. Though the trip had taken 90 hours, Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb felt refreshed and alert. Ever since his imprisonment in 2005 by Jordan’s Mukhabarat, every day he had control over his life and movements seemed like a gift to him from Allah. Even the surly old woman snoring and cursing in the seat next to him had failed to irritate him.

  The business that brought him to Moscow would take no more than an hour or two, and the round-trip travel time amounted to almost eight days. Far from being bothered by this, Al-Greeb took this as a measure of the care with which he approached his work and another opportunity to push away from infidel mispriorities. The Western obsession with time seemed absurd to him. He would happily have traveled the distance from Almaty by camel had it sharpened the quality of his service to Allah.

  He was traveling with a Kazakh identity card rather than a passport, which allowed him unlimited travel within the Russian Federation without the scrutiny sometimes invited by a passport.

  Without leaving the station for the open air above, Al-Greeb traveled six miles north by underground to Komsomolskaya Square, an historic central nexus of the city now seedy with pickpockets, the homeless, and the poorer visitors from the steppes of central Asia. He inhaled the familiar smells of poverty, less pungent here in the cooler summer climate of Moscow than they were in Pakistan and Jordan, yet recognizable and welcoming. He blended in.

  Al-Greeb purchased green onions and a crust of unleavened bread from a street vendor and sat for a time by the fountain, eating. He found a hostel catering to Kazakhs and residents of the eastern regions of Russia, rented a bed in a garage-like dormitory ripe with stinking men, and made arrangements by pay telephone to meet with Colonel Marchenko the following day at the Slavyanka Hotel.

  Yasser al-Greeb was 34 years old. Though 5 feet 9 inches tall, he was somewhat above average height in the crowds of vitamin and nutrient-starved Russians. His skin was a darker olive than that of most natives of the southern Mediterranean and he had a lean, muscular build, weighing in at 160 pounds. His thinning jet-black hair was slicked straight back from a sloping forehead, a crooked, bony fin of a nose, and sunken cheeks. His irises were so dark that his pupils were almost invisible. Though he was a natural boxer and could adopt an aggressive posture when challenged, he was generally not the sort of person whose demeanor suggested that one give him wide berth on a sidewalk. Yet there was something about him that invited caution; dense as it was with thieves, no one bothered him in the precincts of Komsomolskaya Square.

  The following morning was a fine one, sunny, the crisp Moscow air warmed to a balmy 70 degrees. Though he could have taken a short subway ride to reach the hotel, Al-Greeb began walking west from his hostel just north of Moscow’s inner ring road. He made the three-mile trek in less than an hour. Colonel Marchenko and Simon Wantree were waiting in the same corner of the lobby where they had shared coffee the previous morning.

  “May I suggest some privacy?” Al-Greeb said in the accented English he had picked up in Amman. He had recognized Marchenko and Wantree instantly.

  “I have a room here,” Wantree offered.

  Wantree led the way to an ancient brass-framed lift. In his dim cubicle on the fourth floor, Wantree apologized because he had only one chair, a narrow wooden one. The three men stood.

  “This need not take long," Al-Greeb said. “Only to satisfy myself that everything is in readiness.”

  “I arrived only yesterday myself,” Wantree said. “I have not had an opportunity to examine the device, nor to perform certain tests...”

  “But Colonel Marchenko, you told Jacques LeClerc that everything is in order, and that if this transaction is consummated the device will function as promised?”

  “That is what I have always maintained,” the colonel said flatly. “All these ‘tests’ are a waste of time and a risk to security.”

  Al-Greeb studied both men.

  “I’m not sure that any test, short of detonation, would prove anything.”

  “Exactly!” Marchenko barked.

  Wantree held his tongue. Surely these were discussions LeClerc should have held with Marchenko before he was called to Moscow.

  “I will make some inquiries,” Al-Greeb said. “Meanwhile, I suggest Mr. Wantree that you enjoy your visit to Moscow for another day until I have had a chance to talk to your employer Jacques LeClerc. Then we will reconvene.”

  Yasser al-Greeb said good-bye to Simon Wantree in his hotel room and asked Colonel Marchenko to accompany him downstairs to the hotel lobby.

  Once the elevator doors were closed, he said, “You saw the laptop next to the bed?”

  Marchenko nodded.

  “You must seize it today, and you must destroy it,” Al-Greeb said.

  “And what of Wantree himself? He is a loose cannon. He is not to be trusted.”

  “I agree,” Al-Greeb said. “You must get rid of him. It would be an error for him to leave Moscow. It is a shame we were not dealing with you directly from the beginning. Jacques LeClerc is no better than a rug merchant in a bazaar. He has never fought a war.”

  “You know I am not in a position to engage—in something of this nature, it is too wet,” Marchenko protested. “These are not the Cold War years and I no longer command a staff. There are laws now.”

  “If it is a question of reward,” Al-Greeb said, “I can pay you five thousand dollars to dispose of Simon Wantree. Fifty thousand if his body is never found. You decide which course to take.”

  Colonel Marchenko stared at Al-Greeb in astonishment. He had never been spoken to in this way

  “And you will please to remember too, colonel, that we will expect your merchandise to function flawlessly. For what we are paying, we expect a lifetime guarantee. Your lifetime, and your guarantee. Do we understand one another?”

  Chapter 11 — Washington, D.C.

  Olof Wheatley’s Georgetown townhouse was in the 3200 block of Q Street, just south of Dumbarton Oaks. Built in 1947, it had five bedrooms, a masculine first-floor study paneled in cherry, and a dining room that could seat ten for dinner, twelve in a pinch. H
e had purchased it in 2005 for $2.5 million, though he figured its market value now was closer to $1.8 million. Such were the sacrifices one made in the service of one’s country.

  The two-story brick colonial was at the corner of 32nd Street NW and had only ten per cent of the living space of his 45,000 square foot seaside mansion in Rye, New York. His wife referred to it as “our Washington pied-à-terre.”

  She had initially balked at leaving New York. Eloise Wheatley soon discovered that being married to a high-ranking CIA spymaster carried the sort of social cachet that put the couple on the ‘A’ list of diplomatic and social Washington. She found herself spending more time organizing dinner parties in the nation’s capital. There was a lovely patio and walled garden behind the house perfect for cocktail receptions. With heaters and canvas tenting, it even served in winter, doubling their entertainment space. New York charities were dull affairs by comparison.

  When he moved in to the Q Street townhouse, Wheatley had two secure phones installed, one in his study and one in the master bedroom suite. These allowed secure, scrambled communication with his office and, through CIA switchboard, with the White House and other key centers of power.

  He later ordered the secure phone in the bedroom removed when he realized that it took him the time required to walk from his bedroom to his study to clear his mind sufficiently to handle the sort of call that was likely to come at three in the morning. This was doubly true on nights when he had indulged in after-dinner scotch and sodas.

  The phone call from the duty officer at Langley came at quarter to midnight. Wheatley was reading in bed. He walked deliberately downstairs to his office. He knew the news would not be good, and based on his earlier conversation that day about nuclear weapons in Pakistan, he suspected it might also involve Mortie Feldman.

  The duty officer had a terse message for him: “Sir, our station chief in Islamabad has been kidnapped. You have a cable from the ambassador.”

  Wheatley felt a knot tighten in his gut. Was Feldman dead? The death of an agent in the field was the nightmare of every CIA officer at headquarters, a catastrophe from which there was no road back. One hundred and two stars engraved in the Memorial Wall of white Vermont marble on the northernmost end of the OHB lobby testified to those officers who had died in the line of duty.

  Would the master stone carver now be summoned to engrave the 103rd?

  “What do we know?”

  “The RSO called it in with the cable. They found Feldman’s car, engine running, in the driveway of his house.”

  “So he may still be alive. And his wife, is she ok?”

  “She’s stateside, sir, and hasn’t been told. There was no one else in the residence but a Pakistani housekeeper.”

  Wheatley couldn’t remember the wife, though he must have met her. Mortie Feldman was not the sort of person whose image conjured up a woman hanging on his arm. He was glad he would not have to deal with an anguished spouse in Islamabad, but he made the decision immediately that he would be the one to telephone her with the news, not leave it to a subordinate.

  He asked the duty officer to patch him to the RSO at the Embassy in Islamabad and later spoke also to the ambassador, telling him that he planned to fly to Pakistan later that day. Last, he called his assistant at home and asked her to have one of the G-4s assigned to the intelligence pool ready to leave for Islamabad from Andrews Air Force base no later than noon. Only then did he call his boss, the D/CIA to brief him.

  After making his phone calls, Olof Wheatley sat for twenty minutes in the dark in his cherry-paneled study, then took a Restoril capsule and returned to bed. He set his alarm for 5 AM, an hour earlier than usual. He would call Feldman’s wife after coffee in the morning.

  ***

  Kate Langley knew something was wrong the minute she walked into the CTC. The usual low buzz that filled the room was dampened and several of her colleagues appeared to have been crying. Phillip Drayton was already at his desk. She asked him what had happened.

  “Your old boss Feldman—he’s been kidnapped in Islamabad. Happened a few hours ago.”

  “Oh, my God!” Kate brought a hand to her mouth in an involuntary motion. She felt as though someone had punched her in the stomach. She recalled the many times Mortie had cautioned her about security in Pakistan and how she needed to maintain constant alertness about her surroundings. Had Feldman failed to follow his own advice?

  “Yeah, it sucks,” Drayton said. “Especially after the flap with the ISI over Bin Laden. We really need the ISI now when they are not likely to feel disposed to help us much. Olof is taking a company plane to Pakistan this afternoon. He wants to talk to you.”

  Kate called Wheatley’s assistant, but the boss was with the Director on the Seventh Floor. He would have to call her back. While waiting for the return call, Kate read the cable traffic from Islamabad for the past 24 hours. The Regional Security Officer reported that Feldman’s Blackberry had been recovered in a trash can in Rawalpindi, 40 miles from his house, and that the last call he made, a few hours before the kidnapping, had been to Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood.

  As she finished reading the cables, Olof Wheatley came by her desk on his way to his own office. He looked like a man who had been through the wringer.

  “I want you to leave for Bagram first thing next week,” he told her. “Come with me to that conference room down the hall where we can have some privacy, there are a few things I need to update you on.”

  “Sir, did you see that Feldman’s Blackberry has been found?”

  “Yes, I got that upstairs.”

  “And that Mortie had been in touch by phone with Mahmood?”

  “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Wheatley said, closing the door. “Mortie called me yesterday to report on a meeting he had with Mahmood. It was about that nuclear weapons chatter. Mahmood told Feldman there may be more to it than we thought.”

  Wheatley gave her the gist of the conversation he had had with Feldman before Feldman’s disappearance.

  “This makes his kidnapping that much worse, if that’s possible,” Kate said. “The two events must be related somehow.”

  “Of course they are. The key to Feldman’s kidnapping may well be Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood. Foreign spies don’t get kidnapped in Islamabad without Mahmood knowing about it. I plan to spend as much time with him as possible while I’m in Islamabad. If anyone can help us find Mortie Feldman, he can. And we are going to have to make him want to, real bad.”

  “Do you think Mortie’s still alive?”

  Wheatley looked away with a blank expression.

  “I remember a case in Beirut,” Wheatley said, “just after I had joined the Agency in the ‘80s. Our station chief there was kidnapped. Years later, we learned that he had been kept alive for a year and two months, tortured mercilessly to reveal everything we had about the Middle East, before they finally killed him. It took us five more years to recover the remains, by then just a canvas sack of disarticulated bones. Thinking about him fills me with the most God-awful feeling. Death may not be the worst thing that can happen to Mort Feldman.”

  “Mort is tough. He can probably buy us some time,” Kate said.

  “I think so too. If they had simply wanted to kill him, whoever they are, why dispose of the Blackberry separately? No, I think he’s still alive, and that we have a few days at least...”

  Wheatley sat down at the bland conference room table and handed her a folder he had been carrying.

  “These are your travel orders. You’re to leave here on a regular military transport to Bagram under cover as an IT technician assigned to the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing. That will put you in the proper place to exfiltrate you into Kabul under non-official cover as part of one of the cooperating relief NGOs. I haven’t quite worked that out yet. From there, you’ll find a reason to head for the border area—somewhere between Kandahar and Khost perhaps, we’ll leave that decision until you’ve been on the ground for a while.”

/>   Kate said she was raring to go, and in fact she felt eerily calm.

  “This is the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done for us,” Wheatley said. “You’ll have no diplomatic cover, just an American passport. We’ll officially deny any connection to you if you get caught, though of course I’d work like hell to get you out.”

  ***

  A little after 6:30 PM, Claire Stoppard descended from her fourth floor office in the stately Greek Revival temple of money on Pennsylvania Avenue known as the Treasury Department. She left the building by the south entrance and turned by the enormous statue of Alexander Hamilton in the small plaza by the ellipse. She then doubled back north along 15th Street and walked a block beyond F Street to the bar of the Old Ebbitt Grill, a favorite hangout of her colleagues.

  Kate Langley was there waiting, her brunette hair loosely held in a ponytail, sipping a dry gin martini at a table beneath a mahogany-framed oil canvas depicting a flock of wild ducks.