Secrets of State (24 page)

Within forty-five minutes, Khan had learned everything about Lena that he could from her apartment. He was building a mental picture of her and a database of her habits and preferences that he could draw from when the order came from Jadoon to do what must be done.

He did not yet know what that would be. But he found himself already hoping that he would not be ordered to harm her.

That realization came as something of a surprise. It was a weakness. It was exploitable. He would have to be careful. He was expendable. So was Lena Trainor.

The mission must come first.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

APRIL 20

I
t was, perhaps, the ultimate Washington cliché, but the city's monumental core was beautiful at night. The National Park Service used enough electricity along the Mall to power a small town, and the effect was to isolate the individual monuments and memorials in islands of light. Stripped down to their basic geometric forms, they looked like enormous translucent blocks of glass that seemed to glow from within rather than from reflected external light. On a warm spring night, it was all but magical, and Sam and Vanalika were just one pair of lovers among many who strolled hand in hand along the Tidal Basin. It was one of the few times and places where they could be both public and anonymous.

“I think maybe you are making too much of this,” Vanalika suggested gently. “I mean, what are you basing all of this on? Some obscure intelligence reports that seem to have gone missing and a rough draft of a speech that may or may not be part of an exercise of some sort.”

“And a dead friend,” Sam observed grimly. “Let's not forget about Andy so quickly.”

“You know that I haven't. I liked him too, and I am terribly sad about what happened to him. But he lived in kind of a sketchy neighborhood. D.C. has gotten much safer over the years, but it isn't Disneyland. Is it possible that you're hearing hoofbeats and seeing zebras where there should be horses?”

Sam shrugged.

“I don't think so. What Andy and I found, the Panoptes material, was pretty exotic for horses.”

“You know that I asked a friend in our service to dig up the piece about me, the one you told me about.”

“Yes.”

“There was nothing there, Sam. There is no such piece anywhere in the records. Is it possible, is it conceivable, that what you and Andy tapped into was all part of a gaming exercise of some sort and there was some break in the firewalls that made it look, even for a time, like these were real products? They may have been using the names of actual players to give it a veneer of reality. That would explain how come these Panoptes products were close to true but somehow just a little bit off.”

“That's an awful lot of trouble to go through for no apparent purpose.”

“But hardly the strangest thing that your government has ever done, no?”

“No.”

“I'm worried about you.”

“Don't worry about me. I'm fine. I'm worried about Lena.”

“Of course you are. You're her father. That's your job. But she's a big girl now. She can take care of herself.”

“And then some.”

“Living on the subcontinent is always something of a risk. But is it really that much riskier now than when you took her there as a child? Or is it just that you're not there to look after her in person?”

“It's not the same. The tensions between India and Pakistan are so much higher than they were back then. Couple that with nuclear weapons and the growing reach of the Islamists in Pakistan and it's hard to be optimistic.”

“Who can be? But that's pretty much true anywhere on the planet. Even in India, Lena is more at risk from typhus and traffic accidents than she is from nuclear bombs. It's normal for a parent to jump to the far end of the bell curve of possibilities, the nightmare scenario. You're hardly the first to do so. Children have to find their own way in the world. Lena will come home when she's ready. Or she won't. But it will be her choice.”

Sam could hear a note of bitterness in Vanalika's words. He suspected she was thinking of her own structured upbringing and the choices that had been made for her at least as much as she was thinking of Lena. Sam could not fault her for it. For all of its privileges, Vanalika's life had been something of a golden cage.

As if reading his thoughts, Vanalika squeezed his hand.

“You must think I'm a selfish little bitch projecting my own frustrations onto Lena's situation,” she said.

“Not at all,” Sam said, but he laughed. Vanalika Chandra was very, very perceptive. He felt a brief flash of pity for her husband, Rajiv. There was no way he would be able to keep up. “All right, maybe a little,” he confessed.

Vanalika stopped. She put her arm around Sam's waist and turned toward him, tilting her head back slightly.

“Kiss me,” she commanded.

Sam was only too happy to comply.

Later, he drove Vanalika home to the bucolic estate in Potomac, Maryland, that had been the home of the Indian Embassy's political counselor for at least the last two decades. The neighbors were “horse people” who looked somewhat askance at the parade of dark-skinned men and women in saris who came and went from No. 97 Hickory Lane.

Vanalika made him park two blocks away to minimize the risk that anyone she knew would see them together. There was little chance of that. The houses here were far apart and there were only a few streetlights to do battle with the inky suburban darkness.

“It's not too late to change your mind and come home with me,” he said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Can I see you next week?”

“We'll see. The assistant minister is coming to town and he will want to be feted in the style that he feels is appropriate to his station. It could be busy. If it is at all possible, then, yes. I would like to see you.”

She kissed him softly. Her lips tasted of dark cherries and chocolate.

He ran his hand over her black silky hair and along the curve of her neck.

“I love you, Vanalika.”

“No, you don't. You just think you do. You're a sweet man, Sam Trainor.”

She kissed him again and she was gone.

•   •   •

Was she right?
Sam wondered. Maybe he was confusing love with a lack of loneliness. This was the first time he had said “I love you” to a woman since Janani had died. He had not thought about it. He had just said it. Did that make it more true or less true? Did it even matter? Vanalika Chandra was complex. There were depths to her that Sam knew he could never plumb, mysteries and secrets that she would never reveal. How much did he really know about her? How much could anyone ever really know about someone else's inner life?

In any event, Vanalika had made it clear to Sam that what they had together was enough for her. It would have to be enough for him too. Maybe she was right. Maybe he didn't love her. But he sure did enjoy her. Vanalika was something else.

He turned off the Capital Beltway onto the George Washington Parkway. During rush hour, both the beltway and the parkway came to a virtual standstill. This late at night, there was little traffic on the roads and Howlin' Wolf was singing the blues on the CD player.

“I am a backdoor man,”
the Wolf sang in his unmistakable gravelly voice.
“When everybody trying to sleep, I'm somewhere makin' my midnight creep.”

“I can relate, Chester,” Sam said sardonically. When the lyrics to classic blues songs started to feel relevant, you knew you were in trouble.

Just south of Potomac Overlook Park, he saw flashing blue lights in his rearview mirror. The single squawk of the siren was universal police talk for “pull over.”

Shit.

How fast had he been going?

Sam pulled over to the side of the road, grateful that there was so little traffic. He fumbled in the glove box for the registration. It had been years since he had been pulled over for anything.

A man wearing the blue uniform of the park police tapped lightly on the glass. Sam lowered the window.

“Sorry, officer. Was I speeding?”

“License and registration, please.”

Sam handed over the documents.

There was something familiar about the officer, but he could not quite place what it was. Maybe he had seen him on patrol downtown at some point. The man was tall and had dark hair that was mostly covered by his cap. He was unsmiling and had a prominent lantern jaw with a cleft chin. It was a distinctive feature and there was something about it that made Sam uneasy.

In the rearview mirror, he could see a second cop get out of the vehicle, which was an unmarked Ford. The flashing blue lights had been set into the grille. They had been turned off in favor of the Ford's regular blinking hazards. Was it normal for uniformed officers to ride in unmarked cars? That would seem to defeat the purpose.

“Sir, I need to ask you to step out of the vehicle, please.”

“What's the problem, officer?”

“Just step out of the car, please.” Sam saw the cop's right hand drift down toward the gun on his hip. Something did not feel right.

An image of the cop flashed into his mind, dressed not in the blue of the park police but in U.S. Army green. Sam remembered where he had seen this man before. He had been with John Weeder coming out from behind the steel door that led to the Morlocks' lair. Sam wondered if this was the last man to see Andy Krittenbrink alive.

Without conscious thought, he slammed the shift lever into drive and smashed his foot on the accelerator. The Prius jumped forward and the “cop” stepped back, fumbling for his gun.

Sam had a head start, but he was driving a 134-horsepower Prius and the big Ford was soon on his tail. That they were not using the lights and siren only reinforced for Sam that this was not the police. The Ford slammed into his rear with a crunch of metal. Sam took a curve at high speed and felt the rear wheels slip on the slick pavement. He fought for control and kept the car from fishtailing. But the Ford used the opportunity to get in between Sam and the sheer rock wall on the right. His pursuers slammed into the rear quarter panel of the Prius and nearly spun Sam into the wall.

Before his first Islamabad assignment, the State Department had required Sam to take a defensive-driving course outside of Richmond. The course, which was known informally as Crash-and-Bang, was widely considered something of a lark among the diplomats. It was a fun field trip, but few of them could envision ever being in a situation where they would be required to employ the somewhat esoteric skills the course was designed to impart. Sam remembered that the best way to drive a car off the road was not to slam it full-on but rather to nudge either the front or rear quarter panel exactly as the Ford was trying to do. Maybe the driver of that car had graduated from the same course.

The instructors at Crash-and-Bang had been the particular mix of ex-military and “security professionals” that had begun to accrete, barnacle-like, to every exposed surface of the federal government after 9/11. At graduation, the lead instructor—a former DEA agent named Dwight with an immense beer belly and a Southern drawl—had passed out hats that featured the logo of TacTrain, the company that ran the program on behalf of the State Department.

“Here you go,” he had said. “With our compliments. If you are ever attacked by terrorists and survive the experience, we'd like you to wear this hat to the press conference. If you fuck up and get yourselves killed, with your last dying breath I want you to take your hat and toss it far enough away so that it'll be out of the frame when the good people from CNN show up.”

They had all laughed at that. It had been funny . . . at the time.

Sam remembered another element from his time on the track. The bootlegger turn. He pulled up hard on the emergency brake with his right hand while simultaneously jerking the steering wheel to the left in a controlled movement of something less than a quarter turn. The Prius swung into a sharp 180-degree spin in front of a pickup truck that swerved to avoid him with a loud honk. Sam jammed down the accelerator as the Ford sped past, caught by surprise.

It was a temporary reprieve. Even going as fast as he dared, it was only a few minutes before his pursuers were again on his tailpipe. Sam was hoping to make it to the exit in McLean for the CIA. There were real cops in abundance to be found on the access road to Agency headquarters.

It was not to be.

The Ford again nosed up to the Prius's right rear quarter panel and locked bumpers. The Taurus outweighed the Prius by at least five hundred pounds and put out at least twice the horsepower. Ever so gently, the Ford pushed against the rear panel and Sam could only watch helplessly as his car spun out of control. He did a complete 360-degree turn before plunging off the edge of the parkway and down the steep embankment that led to the Potomac River.

The Prius smashed through a stand of saplings and ripped thick bushes out of the ground by their roots. About halfway down the hill, the right front corner slammed into a thicker oak tree, spinning the car sideways and causing the air bag to deploy.

Sam lost his orientation as the car rolled at least twice before finally coming to a halt propped up against the side of a maple tree. It was at least upright.

The air bag deflated. The windshield of the Prius was smashed and a thick tree branch had penetrated the glass on the passenger side. It was sticking into the seat like a spear and would have impaled anyone who had been sitting there.