Secrets of State (22 page)

“That would seem an appropriate precaution.”

“Again, the preparations would take some time.”

“How much time?”

“Days.”

“At a minimum,” the Chairman suggested, “I believe we should put the daughter under surveillance and develop the option to take her if necessary. The authority to take that step can be invested in the Commander here. Is that agreed?”

It was.

“And the father?” the Chairman continued. “Should we authorize the Commander to use all necessary means to determine whether there are any others who may know about Cold Harbor and Panoptes, and to take any other action that he deems appropriate to protect the integrity of the operation?”

“I believe we should,” Reports said quickly. “I'll make the motion. Trainor is a legit threat.”

“I agree,” said Finance. “Seconded.”

It was unanimous.

MUMBAI, INDIA

APRIL 14

I
t sat in the center of the room as though it were some kind of conversation piece. But they did not talk about it. As much as they could, the men tried to ignore its existence. They had not opened it. No one had told them what was inside. It was not necessary. They knew. They were living with a bomb.

Although the sealed box was a grim reminder of death, Khan was almost exultant. Now he understood. This was his mission. This was why he had abandoned everything he had known in America and pledged himself to the Hand of the Prophet. This was jihad.

Jadoon had set them up in an abandoned movie studio in Navi Mumbai, a depressed industrial zone separated from the city center by the Thane Creek estuary. Hill Station Productions had specialized in cheap, low-end musicals that typically went straight to video. The studio had tried to go more up-market, but a few big bets on bad movies had sent Hill Station Productions into bankruptcy. It was perfect for their needs, isolated but still close to downtown. Toward the end of its life, and in what Khan suspected had been a desperate attempt to stave off the creditors, the studio had started pirating basic services such as electricity and water. These still worked because there was no record of Hill Station Productions being connected to the grid.

Jadoon had implied that there was another reason he had chosen the abandoned studio as their base, but he had been secretive as to exactly why.

The set for the last movie the studio had pinned its hopes on was still standing in the spacious soundstage, and if you ignored the film of grit and dust that covered every exposed surface, the cameras looked ready to roll at the call to “action.” It must have been a period piece, because the set was an old Hindu temple made of fiberglass and Styrofoam. There doubtlessly would have been a barbarian princess, sword fights, and—it was Bollywood, after all—song-and-dance numbers. To Khan, the set looked terribly cheesy. Maybe it would have shown up better on film, or maybe there was a good reason that Hill Station Productions was out of business.

On the second day, a new member of the team arrived. Adnan was no fighter. He was small and thin to the point of emaciation. He could not even grow a proper beard. It grew in uneven patches like the fur on a mangy dog. He wore a white
taqiyah
prayer cap. Khan suspected it was more a mark of vanity than piety since it covered his substantial bald spot. Jadoon had told him that Adnan was a professor of physics and high up in the Pakistani nuclear bureaucracy. The jihadis agreed that he looked like a toad.

Adnan seemed afraid of the guns the HeM jihadis carried, but he had no fear of the box. He set a small wooden stool and a box of tools alongside it. Khan helped him lift the lid gently. Inside was a perfectly ordinary-looking bomb, with tail fins and a bulbous nose. A small hemisphere protruded from the tip and Khan wondered if something as sophisticated as a nuclear bomb could be triggered by something as primitive and basic as a contact fuse.

“Masood told me that you know explosives,” Adnan said.

“Yes. I was trained to be part of a bomb squad.”

“For the Americans, no?”

“Yes.”

Adnan looked at him appraisingly.

“I need an assistant for what I am about to do. Someone with steady hands and no fear of death.”

“I will do my best.”

“Yes. You will. And you will not fail me.”

“Insha'Allah.”

Adnan handed him a plastic badge on a metal chain. A small manila envelope was slotted neatly into the badge. Khan could see that Adnan was already wearing one around his own neck.

“You will want one of these,” Adnan said.

“What is it?” Khan asked.

“Something I can use to measure our exposure to radiation.”

“What's in the envelope?”

Adnan laughed and gestured toward the soundstage.

“Movie film.”

With a small screwdriver from the toolbox, Adnan removed the screws securing a large convex plate to the side of the bomb. The casing had been painted army green and the panel was glued in place by the dried paint. Adnan needed to scrape the paint clean to remove the panel. Khan did not know what he had expected, but the inside of an atomic bomb was disappointingly ordinary, a sphere of what looked like pretty standard explosives with electronic triggers embedded in the material. Adnan seemed to sense what Khan was thinking.

“It's an implosion-style warhead, with high explosives surrounding a hollow core of uranium-235. The explosives have to go off at precisely the same time to collapse the core fast enough for the uranium to reach critical mass. If the timing is off, you get a nuclear fizzle rather than an explosive chain reaction. Really quite embarrassing if you're trying to blow up a city.”

“What was in the box that we put on the train?” Khan asked. “A different bomb?”

“A dummy,” Adnan explained. “It will pass a simple visual inspection and weighs exactly the same as the real thing, but there is no warhead inside. No fissile material. For most purposes, nuclear weapons don't need to work as long as the enemy believes they will. For most purposes. Not ours.”

“You know how this thing works?”

“I designed it. Indian intelligence stole the blueprints for one of our warheads and the Indian defense establishment adapted the plans to their own purposes. It was my design. It will produce a ten-kiloton yield consistent to within plus or minus 5 percent.” The pride in his voice was plain, as though he were describing the accomplishments of his children.

“What now?”

“Now we teach a bomb trained to go off at a certain altitude to go off at a certain time.”

Adnan pulled a set of metal rods from the box and built a rectangular frame alongside the bomb. For the next three hours, he worked meticulously to extend the electronic controls of the weapon out of the bomb casing and onto the external frame. Khan held the light for him and assisted with the wiring when Adnan asked him to. The circuitry was complex, much more so, Khan thought, than it needed to be. It looked almost as though the bomb had been hooked up to a life-support system.

“Why all of the redundant loops?” he asked.

Adnan stopped what he was doing and turned to him with a look that somehow straddled impressed and irritated.

“Some of the complexity stems from my need to circumvent the PAL, the permissive action link. Essentially, it's a code that lets the warhead know that it's okay to fire. Some of the complexity is about setting up the timing mechanism and introducing the connections for our own PAL. And then some”—Adnan paused as if considering what he should say—“some of the loops are traps meant to prevent tampering. If someone cuts random wires or otherwise tries to disable the weapon without knowing the proper sequence, it will explode. The timing may not be optimal in those circumstances, but it would be a shame to waste a perfectly good fissile core and at the very least it would take the saboteur with it to Hell.”

“Are you expecting trouble from any of us?” Khan asked, shocked.

“Of course not. We are all servants of Allah. But we are in the middle of an enemy city and the Indian services are far from amateur. It is a precaution is all. And now for the final piece.”

The physicist pulled two thin rectangular objects made of glass and steel from the toolbox. Each one had a screen and there was a row of buttons along the bottom edge. Adnan looked at his watch and pressed a series of buttons on one of the boxes. A row of numbers appeared on the screen glowing in blood red and upside down to Khan. He tried to read them, but it was hard to get a good look. The last four numbers were 2-5-0-0. The preceding number might have been a 7 or a 9. The physicist's thumb partly obscured that number and the 3 in front of it.

Adnan set the second box on top of the first and pushed at the corners until they snapped together with a metallic click. The blank screen on the upper device lit up with a sequence of numbers. Now Adnan was holding the object in such a way that Khan could read the screen easily. He saw two things. The sequence of numbers was 20072500.

And it was counting down.

It was a timer.

20:07:24:59

20:07:24:58

There was no need for Adnan to explain what would happen when the counter reached 0. At 0, Mumbai would burn.

“We're almost there,” Adnan said. “I just need to lock it.”

He touched a larger button on the side of the device and the screen toggled to present a row of nine dashes.

Adnan entered the code, but his body blocked Khan's view and he could not see the numbers.

“Now we control the weapon,” Adnan explained. “It will respond only to our PAL. Masood himself gave me the code. He was quite insistent on the sequence of numbers. It was all mumbo jumbo, mystical nonsense to me. But any string of numbers is as good as any other as long as you remember what it is.”

“What is it?” Khan asked.

Adnan smiled.

“Something that only Masood and I are empowered to know,” he answered.

•   •   •

Adnan's modifications
may have been essential to the operation, but they left the bomb leaky. He instructed Khan to cover the box with lead blankets like the kind that a dentist might drape over a patient before taking an X-ray, in New Jersey, at least, if not necessarily in Lahore. As an added precaution, he distributed film badges to each of the jihadis. Khan and the other foot soldiers took turns guarding the box.

They passed the time with prayer and exercise. When Khan had been in the army, the soldiers had whiled away the hours of boredom with card games. But gambling was
haram
, sinful. The only book they had was the Quran. It was enough. Khan took his turns standing guard over the box. They waited. Once a day, the physicist would develop the film to check their levels of exposure to radiation. So far, the level of exposure was within acceptable limits, at least according to Adnan.

Khan had just finished his morning shift on guard duty five days after the HeM team had set up camp at Hill Station Productions when Jadoon summoned him.

“I have a new assignment for you.” He did not seem happy about it.

“What is it?”

“I want you to follow someone.”

“Follow him where?”

“Her. And wherever she goes. I want you to watch this woman, track her movements, learn as much as you can about her habits.”

“Am I going to kill her?”

“I don't know. At least not yet. As it stands, our instructions are just to follow her. We will learn more when we need to know.”

“Who is this woman?”

“Her name is Lena Trainor.” Jadoon put a thin manila envelope on the desk of the office where they were meeting. The walls were decorated with posters from Hill Station movies, mostly crime dramas, it looked like.

“Why is she important?” Khan asked. “What does she have to do with our mission?”

Jadoon shook his head impatiently.

“You ask too many questions.”

“The answers might be important.”

“They might,” Jadoon conceded. “But not as important as obedience to orders.”

“I understand. When do I start?”

“Right now.”

“Why me, Jadoon? Why not one of the others?” Khan was genuinely curious about why the team leader had chosen him.

“Because you are not a robot,” Jadoon replied. “The others on the team will do as I command, but they cannot think for themselves. I do not know what will happen with this girl, but I suspect that it will require a man of judgment to know what to do when the time for action comes.”

“And you think that I am this man?”

“I do.”

Khan wished that he could be so certain.

The file had not been especially informative or useful. There were a few headshots of the woman he was supposed to follow. One looked like a driver's license or passport picture, and the other may have been a college yearbook photo. There was a name and address for her employer, a high-tech company called SysNet on Hari Mandi Road. There was some biographical information about the subject, her work history, and a summary of her impressive academic credentials. There were a few interesting tidbits. She had both American and Indian citizenship. Her father had been a minor-league bureaucrat in the State Department and was now a government contractor of some kind. Her mother was from Mumbai, a designer or artist who had died some ten years ago. Her father was an American, an Anglo judging by Lena's photographs. The mother's last known address in India was included. It was in Dharavi.

•   •   •

She was beautiful.
That was the first thing Khan thought when he saw the subject walk out the front door of SysNet Technology. He was sitting in a café with a cup of tea and a small plate of cookies. He had a magazine that he pretended to read as he kept watch on the entrance to SysNet. Tucked discreetly into the magazine was one of the headshots from her file that he had brought in case he needed a reference. The photograph had not done her justice. She was tall for an Indian, half Indian he reminded himself, and she moved with an enviable grace and self-assuredness that the two dimensions of film had been unable to convey.