Secrets of State (14 page)

“I know. I know. We've talked about this. But I have a good job out here and I feel perfectly safe.”

“Okay for now. But I want you to promise me that you'll get out immediately if I tell you that things are moving closer to a fight.”

“We'll see,” Lena equivocated.

•   •   •

It was a good thing,
Sam thought after he broke the connection with Lena, that he had stopped playing in high-stakes card games. His poker face was clearly not what it once was. Or maybe it was only Lena. Maybe she understood him in ways that no one else could. No one except her mother, at any rate.

Sam took a look around the townhouse. His housekeeper, Carmen, had been by that day, and the place was in reasonable shape. He had a date with Vanalika in just a few hours, and if the planets aligned, there was a chance she would be able to come home with him. Of course, that depended in part on how well things went with the difficult conversation that Sam knew they had to have. He took a quick shower and changed into a pair of dark slacks and a blazer. Vanalika, he knew, would be dressy. She always was.

It was a forty-five-minute drive to Rockville, Maryland. Rockville was actually considered a close-in suburb of D.C. It was not far from Capitol Hill as the proverbial crow flies, but there was no easy way to get there. Rather than cut north through the city, it actually made sense to drive south and get on 395. This soon put Sam on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, one of his favorite drives in D.C. There was a Coltrane disc in the CD player and he let
Giant Steps
wash over and through him as he sped down the rain-slicked parkway.

Rockville was a soulless suburb that seemed to be made up entirely of car dealerships and tae kwon do studios with grubby windows, but it had at least one redeeming quality: spectacular ethnic food. A few minutes before eight, Sam pulled up in front of Goa, an Indian restaurant that was nothing special to look at from the outside. Inside, however, Goa was intimate and charming, decorated by someone with good taste and the budget to make good use of it. The decor was midcentury modern rather than Indian kitsch, and the artwork on the walls was more than a cut above what one would have expected from a strip-mall restaurant.

The reservation—somewhat unimaginatively, Sam thought—was under the name of Johnson. Vanalika claimed to like the cloak-and-dagger aspects of their illicit relationship, but she was not especially good at it.

The maître d', a young Indian woman in an elegant emerald green sari, seated Sam at a table in the corner under a Keith Haring lithograph.

He ordered a Kingfisher.

Vanalika walked in and bypassed the maître d' and came straight over to Sam. They did not kiss their hellos. Avoiding PDA was part of what Vanalika in mock seriousness called their OPSEC protocol.

“Hello, handsome,” she said, taking the seat across from him.

“Good evening, beautiful.”

Under the table, Vanalika slipped one foot out of her pump and rubbed it against Sam's calf. Secret PDA was part of another equally important protocol.

“You look . . .” Sam paused, looking for the right words. “Like a goddess.”

“Is it my elephant head?” She giggled.

“If only. I have a thing for girls with substantial noses. But I was thinking more of the one with eight arms.”

“Careful. That's Durga the Inaccessible. She hurls thunderbolts and rides a lion. You sure you want to go there?”

“I like my chances.”

“Play your cards right and you'll believe I have eight arms before the night is done.”

The waiter came by to take their orders. Goa specialized in South Indian food, which was generally spicier than its northern cousin, and Vanalika chose a vegetarian
biryani
made with saffron and nutmeg, and a yogurt chutney. Unconstrained by Vanalika's vegetarianism, Sam ordered lamb with coconut curry, roti, and a cucumber and mint
pachadi
to help cut the heat of the curry.

While they waited for the food, they chatted about largely inconsequential things: a conference of South Asia academics that Vanalika was helping to organize in Chicago in a month's time, a new biography of Nehru that Sam was reading, and the upcoming India-Australia cricket test match.

The waiter arrived with a large tray balancing half a dozen dishes. Steam from the dishes wafted across the table redolent of curry and tamarind. The food at Goa was worth the drive up from Capitol Hill. Sam had eaten here before, but it was Vanalika's first time.

“I'm impressed,” she said, after sampling the food. “This is the real deal.”

Sam had to nod his agreement, his mouth full of lamb.

After the food had been cleared away, they ordered coffee and cognac. It was the perfect counterpoint to the spicy Indian meal.

“Vee, there's something I want to talk to you about,” Sam said.

“I'm still not moving in with you, Sam,” Vanalika replied lightheartedly.

“Not that. Or at least not only that. No. It's something else.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

Sam hesitated. This was uncertain ground for him. No matter how general he was, he was about to discuss highly classified information. It was a breach of not only his professional obligations but also the law. He could, in theory, go to jail for what he was about to say. Choosing his words carefully seemed the least he could do.

“You're familiar with the intel-sharing setup that we have with you and Islamabad?”

“Sure. You share stuff on Pakistan with us and stuff on us with Pakistan, something of a confidence-building arrangement.”

“Yes. And it's been a successful program up to now.”

“Up to now?”

“Yes. I have reason to believe that there is information being passed through that channel that is . . . not accurate.”

“How inaccurate?”

“Try 100 percent. Like fiction, only considerably more dangerous.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you're a part of the story, Vee. When was the last time you talked to Guhathakurta?”

“Panchavaktra? It's been a couple of weeks. Maybe even a month or so.”

“Well, I saw an intel piece last week in which you supposedly called Guhathakurta in Delhi to complain about the prime minister coddling the Pakistanis. It was pretty aggressive stuff, but Guhathakurta is known as a hardliner, and people who don't know you would find it pretty credible.”

“Panchavaktra's a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. He and I disagree on many things, politics not least among them.”

“People see what they want to see or what they expect to see. Guhathakurta sets the frame for this piece. People expect him to be like this. They could have picked any of a dozen people senior enough to be the foil in the conversation, but they picked you. On top of that, you supposedly made the call on the evening of March 29.”

“That Saturday? The day we went to the mountains?”

“Yeah.”

“With no phone lines and no cell reception?”

“Yeah.”

“Kind of poor planning on their part.”

“Or good planning on ours.”

“Except that we can't tell anybody where we were that night. It would cost us both our jobs.”

“There is that.”

“And this work of fiction has been shared with Pakistan's intelligence services?”

Sam thought Vanalika looked worried. She had reason to be.

“I think so.”

“That's not good.”

It was an enormous understatement.

“No. It's not.”

They were silent for a moment as Vanalika seemed to mull over what Sam had told her.

“It's not the only one, is it?” she asked. “There would be no real point to it if it was the only one.”

Vanalika,
Sam thought to himself again,
was extremely smart.

“No,” he acknowledged. “It's not.”

“How bad are the other messages?”

“Pretty bad.”

“And they go in both directions? Some for Islamabad and some for us.”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do about it? Besides telling me, I mean.”

“I don't know yet.”

“Who's behind it?”

“I don't know that either.”

“Why? What's the purpose? Who benefits?”

Sam shrugged.

“Sam . . .”

“Yes?”

“Whoever is in a position to do something like that is in a position to do an awful lot of other things too.”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Be careful,” she urged.

“I will.”

“Don't do anything stupid.”

“We'll see.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.

APRIL 8

A
ndy is dead.”

Sam felt like he had been punched in the gut. He did not need to ask which Andy Sara meant.

“How?”

He could see that Sara had been crying. Her eyes were red, and there was a dark smudge on one cheek where she had tried to wipe off a line of mascara that had blackened her tears.

“He was murdered. Maureen in INR told me that the police are calling it a mugging gone bad. You know that he moved into that apartment up by the Mount Vernon metro stop a few months ago. It's kind of a rough neighborhood that's starting to turn around. ‘Pioneering,' he called it.”

Sara started to cry again, and what was left of her eye makeup dripped onto her cheeks. Sam pulled a pack of Kleenex out of his desk drawer and offered it to her. As Sara wiped her eyes, Sam walked around the desk. With a stifled sob, she turned toward him and buried her face against his chest, clinging tightly to his arms with both hands.

They stood that way for a minute or more before Sam broke the clinch and steered Sara to one of the two chairs in his office. He sat across from her. His shirt felt hot and wet where she had cried against his chest.

Sam wanted desperately to close his eyes, put his head on the desk, give himself over to the crushing sadness that came with the knowledge of his friend's death.

“What can I do?” he asked instead.

“You can't do a damn thing, Sam. Andy's dead.”

“I meant for you, Sara.”

Sam was glad to see Sara demonstrating the kind of combative moxie she was famous for. It would help her through this. Sara and Andy had been friends for years. It was going to be hard for all of them. She shook her head.

“Not now.”

“Do you know anything more about what happened?” Sam asked.

“Just that he was found early this morning on Ridge Street, about three blocks from the metro station. He'd been shot. His wallet and watch were gone, and the police think it was an addict looking for a quick score. The neighborhood fits the profile. There are no suspects.”

Even under emotional duress, Sara Zehri could give a briefing.

“His watch was gone?” Sam asked.

“Yes. Why?”

“Andy wore one of the cheapest digital watches I have ever seen. It looked like something you would find in a box of cereal. It couldn't have cost him more than a couple of bucks. Who'd want to steal it?”

“I doubt the guy thought it through. He's probably got a mental checklist: wallet, rings, watch. That kind of thing. Addicts aren't the most logical sort.”

If it was an addict,
Sam thought to himself. As an analyst, he did not believe in coincidences. On Tuesday, Andy Krittenbrink identified a data set that linked a secretive government contractor to what was potentially a massive intelligence fraud. On Thursday, he was dead. Correlation is not causality. But it was still suspicious as hell. The first creeping tendrils of guilt began to claw at Sam's conscience.

Sam did not want to jump to conclusions without evidence. It was most likely that Andy's death was just what it was purported to be, tragic and utterly explicable. A bad neighborhood. Bad luck. And a bad day. Unless Andy had done the one thing Sam had asked him not to do and had talked to someone about the Panoptes messages. They had not spoken about it on the phone, at least not in a specific way. But Sam was not willing to write Andy's death off as a random act of violence. Not yet. Could he have inadvertently put Andy in danger by asking him to dig into the intel records? It was possible. Maybe the search that Andy had performed in the database had triggered a warning. Sophisticated algorithms stood guard over the nation's secrets, looking for the kind of search queries that were hallmarks of espionage. Edward Snowden's exposure of the full range of NSA activities had prodded the intelligence community into reinforcing that kind of passive surveillance. Andy's search terms may have tripped an alarm of some sort. If so, was Sam ultimately accountable for his death? It was painful to even consider the question.

“What about the funeral arrangements?” he asked.

“The Parklawn cemetery in Rockville on Saturday morning. Andy's parents have suggested a donation to the Red Cross instead of flowers. Andy was never a big flowers guy.”

She started to cry again, softly this time.

Sam closed his eyes. There would be time later for questions and recriminations. For now, he had a friend to mourn.

•   •   •

Mother Nature offered
up a suitably gloomy backdrop to the funeral. It wasn't raining, but it wasn't not raining either. The sky was an iron gray, and the mist that clung to the ground ensured that the mourners were damp and miserable despite the black umbrellas that many of them carried.

There was a good turnout, somewhere around fifty or sixty people. Sam hoped that he did as well when his time came. He knew some of them, mostly South Asia policy people and a few other State Department types. Most of the mourners, however, were strangers, family and friends from other parts of Andy's life.

An attractive blond woman in a tailored black suit had been introduced to him as Andy's fiancée. She looked to be totally out of Krittenbrink's league.
Well done, young grasshopper,
Sam thought.
I'm so terribly sorry about the life you're going to miss out on: love, family, a house in one of the D.C. suburbs with good schools for the kids. It's not fair.

Andy's parents were stolid Midwesterners who were staggering under the weight of a burden that no parent should have to bear. To Sam's surprise, Andy's mother had asked him to be a pallbearer.

“He looked up to you,” she had explained. “He talked about you all the time and said that he admired your integrity. I would like it if you would help carry him to his final rest and maybe say a few words.”

Sam had been struck by her composure, and now he stood waiting for the hearse to arrive alongside the eclectic group that would carry Andy's body the short distance to the gravesite: a brother, a cousin, a friend from Andy's hometown in Minnesota, a college roommate, and a Sri Lanka specialist from Brookings with whom Andy had been working on a book.

The hearse pulled up as close to the grave as possible, and Sam helped pull the heavy maple coffin out of the back. It felt like an out-of-body experience. When he closed his eyes, he was looking down on the scene, hovering some twenty feet overhead like the figure in Janani's final painting. His feet moved over the slippery grass, and he carried his share of the weight, but it was all autopilot. Muscle memory.

The funeral home had laid a green carpet around the grave as a kind of border lined with flowers in white and yellow. It was a poor disguise. Like garish makeup on a corpse. Gussied up, it was still a naked gash in the earth in which Sam would have to place the body of a friend. The pallbearers laid the coffin on the thick nylon webbing that stretched over the grave itself. The coffin was suspended in space, lying on the cusp of the underworld.

•   •   •

Folding chairs stood
in ragged rows under a broad white awning. Sam sat between Sara and Shoe. It was raining for real now and the light staccato of the rain beating against the canvas was oddly soothing.

Andy hadn't exactly been the churchgoing type. The Unitarian minister who had agreed to lead the services had never actually met Andy. He had met with the family and a number of friends so that he would have some material to work with, but it was still pretty threadbare. Sam paid minimal attention to the minister's words. Inevitably, the man quoted Ben Jonson's line—“in short measures, life may perfect be”—which was actually about fleeting moments of happiness rather than death and certainly not about dying too damn young. Andy would have known that, and it would have rankled just a little. As an analyst, he had been nothing if not precise.

But what did it matter? What did it matter to Andy?

While the minister spoke, Sam's mind wandered back and forth across the problem set. Was Andy's death a tragic accident, to the extent that murder can ever be an accident? Or was it somehow connected to the mysterious Panoptes program. How was Panoptes tied to Argus Systems? And—he approached this one tentatively, ashamed of its inherent selfishness—if whoever was behind Panoptes knew about Andy, did they know about Sam too? Underlying all of this was the $64,000 question: What the hell was Panoptes?

He felt a sudden sharp pain on his right instep. Sara had driven one six-inch heel down hard on his foot. He realized that the minister had stopped speaking. People were looking at him. It was his turn to speak.

Sam stood and made his way to the front. There was a lectern decorated with the outlines of doves. Sam stood beside the lectern rather than behind it, leaning one hand on the top for support.

“Hello,” he began. “My name is Sam Trainor and Andy Krittenbrink was both my colleague and my friend. We worked together in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. INR they call it. I was just passing through, but it was Andy's professional home for most of his adult life. We shared a passion for South Asia: the people, the cultures, the history, and the complex politics of the place. Nothing made Andy happier than solving a puzzle.

“Not long after I joined INR, one of the youngest analysts we had, heck one of the youngest analysts I'd ever seen . . . he looked to me to be all of sixteen or seventeen . . . gave me a report to review. It was a piece of leadership analysis, essentially a bio of the new chief of the Bangladeshi military who was coming to Washington for a round of introductory calls. We were under pressure to keep everything we wrote short and tight, and there was a paragraph in the report about the general's lepidopterist leanings. He was evidently an avid butterfly collector, a point that this young analyst had expanded into some four sentences of our one-page report. When I told him to cut the butterflies and replace them with something more military-sounding, Andy pushed back. Firmly and persuasively. The butterflies were what he called the telling detail, the small point that illuminated the larger whole. The general, he explained, was acquisitive and almost pathological in his need for order and structure. He liked small things. He was more a tactician than a strategist. That was the point. It wasn't about the butterflies.

“In the end, the butterflies survived and we got the report back from the secretary of state with a hand-scribbled note about how much she had enjoyed reading the bio and how helpful it had been. I learned something pretty important that day.

“With that in mind, I would offer you a brief story about Andy that I consider a telling detail.

“Two years ago, Andy and I were part of a fact-finding team traveling through India and Sri Lanka assessing the progress in the fight against human trafficking. Slavery is not a thing of the past. Tens of thousands of people still live in bondage in South Asia.

“As part of our research, we met with the director of a shelter and halfway house in Lucknow who was working with victims of trafficking to help them start new lives. It was a noble mission, but an expensive one, and the director told us that the center would likely have to close its doors sometime in the next couple of months unless he could find a consistent source of funding. The twenty-odd families living there would be out on the streets.

“This was not an uncommon tale of woe in what we jaded diplomats often dismissively refer to as the do-gooder sector. Listening with empathy, or at least apparent empathy, is part of the job. We had all heard stories like this many times before, however, and five minutes after leaving the meeting it was gone, like water off a duck's back. For me that is. Not for Andy.

“Andy showed up for breakfast in the hotel the next morning looking like he'd slept in his clothes—like he hadn't slept at all, in fact. The rest of us teased him mercilessly, I'm embarrassed to admit, about a young man's night on the town in Lucknow.

“On our way to the first meeting of the morning, Andy asked to stop by the shelter we had visited the day before. There, he handed the director a memory stick with a well-researched and carefully constructed grant application along with the names and e-mail addresses of a dozen relevant foundations. Andy had stayed up all night to write it.

“The shelter got the grant and it is still in operation today, helping some of humanity's least fortunate to build new and better lives.

“Andy was a superb analyst, but he was an even better human being. He was not content simply to observe the world. He wanted to change it. And he did.”

And it may have killed him,
Sam added silently.

“The world is a poorer place without Andy Krittenbrink in it,” he concluded, looking at Andy's mother as he said the final words. From the brightness in her tearstained eyes, Sam could tell that he had hit the right note. He hoped that he had brought her some small measure of comfort in her hour of grief.