Secrets of State (26 page)

The van followed her.

Lena looked over her shoulder.
It's a coincidence. He was making a delivery and now he's moving on to his next stop.

She turned onto a side street that led toward Jasmine Mill Road.

The van turned with her.

Lena quickened her pace. The driver of the van matched it. She could see his face now. Dark skin. A beard.

Her heart began to beat faster and there was a tightness in her chest that Lena recognized as the first stirrings of fear. A delivery van was not the kind of vehicle you would choose to follow someone in the streets of a crowded city like Mumbai. It was the kind of vehicle you might choose for a kidnapping.

She bumped into an older woman who was selling betel nut wrapped in paper tubes.

“Murkha,”
the woman cursed her, using the local Marathi word for idiot. Her teeth and gums were stained black from years of chewing betel and her breath was foul.

“I'm sorry,” Lena muttered, without breaking stride.

The van was closer now. She could feel the driver's eyes on her. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the van was no more than twenty feet behind her. The intense look on the man's face kicked her heart rate into an even higher gear. She started to run down the crowded sidewalk. The van accelerated, pulling closer. Although there were hundreds of people on the street, none paid any attention to either Lena or the van. It was merely a single vignette in the vast, sweeping tapestry of the Mumbai cityscape.

Up ahead, just before the intersection with Jasmine Mill Road, Lena saw one of the most beautiful things that she had ever seen. A traffic jam. An auto rickshaw had hit a cow, knocking both the animal and the three-wheeled scooter onto their sides. A crowd of onlookers had gathered around the accident site shouting out their version of events. The drivers in the cars and trucks backed up behind them were already honking their horns as they searched unsuccessfully for a way to maneuver past the tangled knot of sacred cows and profane vehicles that blocked the road.

Moving now at a dead run, Lena shot past the intersection onto Mahim Station Road. Behind her, she could see the gray van turn off into a narrow alleyway lined with carpet shops and stalls trading in low-end merchandise. It was exactly the kind of place where a beat-up panel van would be making a delivery.

Lena slowed to a walk. Had the van really been following her, she wondered, or was the paranoia of Tahir and her father making her jump at shadows?

•   •   •

Tahir greeted her
that evening with a joy typically reserved for the return of a long-lost relative.

“Madam, I thought you were dead,” he said, and Lena could see that there were tears in his eyes. “When the van started after you, I was certain.”

“It was nothing,” Lena said, more than half convinced that this was true. “I don't think he was looking for me at all.”

She put ten rupees in the bowl.

After school, Lena went straight back to her apartment.

She had left the blinds open and there was enough light coming into the apartment from the outside that she did not bother to flip on the lights. Dropping her bag on the chair by the door, she walked straight to the kitchen and retrieved a bottle of cold water from the fridge. The heat and grit of Mumbai always left her feeling dehydrated and run-down by the end of the day. She stood in the kitchen drinking straight from the bottle and looking out the window onto the corrugated tin roofs of the slum on the far side of 60 Feet Road.

The lights came on.

Lena froze.

“Good evening, Ms. Trainor.”

She turned around slowly.

There was a man standing by the door to the hall with one hand on the light switch and the other resting easily on the handle of a pistol tucked into his waistband.

He was the driver of the van that had followed her that morning.

The intruder had chestnut-colored skin and a neatly trimmed beard. His hawkish nose was framed by piercing eyes that were so brown they were almost black. There was an intensity to his gaze that Lena remembered from her single glimpse of him behind the wheel.

She thought about screaming. But this was the outer edge of Dharavi. Screams in Dharavi were like car alarms in an American suburb. If you ignored them long enough, they would stop. The police were almost completely uninterested in what happened in the slum. The people there were just Dalits after all.

Lena set the bottle of water down on the countertop behind a stack of cookbooks next to a paring knife with a sharp six-inch blade. Her right hand crept slowly toward the handle even as she maintained eye contact with the intruder.

“Who are you and what are you doing in my apartment?” she asked calmly.

“I need to talk to you, Ms. Trainor.” His English was perfect. If he had an accent, it was not subcontinent. If anything, it sounded New York or New Jersey to Lena. Definitely tristate.

“Just talk?”

“No.”

“What do you want?”

As they talked, her fingers closed around the handle of the knife. The cookbooks, she hoped, would conceal what she was doing. She slipped the blade up inside the sleeve of her shirt with her wrist angled to keep it in place and the handle balanced lightly in the crook of her palm.

“Please,” the man said, gesturing to the table. “Let's sit and I will explain.”

Lena crossed over to the dining table, casting a furtive glance at the front door as she considered whether to make a run for it. The intruder seemed to sense what she was thinking.

“Don't,” he said. “Sit. Please.”

Although the man looked relaxed, she could see that he was anything but. He was a coiled spring. If she ran, he would catch her.

Lena sat down, uncertain.

“What do the Gummadi brothers want from me? They're winning. They're going to get everything they're after.”

“I do not work for the developers,” the man said.

Now Lena was afraid.

“What do you want, then?” she repeated, trying to keep the sharp edge of anxiety out of her voice. “Who are you?”

“Would you like a glass of water? It's quite warm in here.”

“Who are you?” she insisted.

“You can call me Khan.”

“Okay, Khan. I'm listening.”

Under the table, Lena let the knife slip free of her sleeve. Her palms were damp with sweat and the handle was slick to the touch. She grasped it tightly as though the knife were as much a talisman as a weapon.

“I mean you no harm,” Khan said.

“Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up.”

To her surprise, Khan smiled and it softened his features. He seemed less fanatical, less intense. He didn't look like a serial killer, or what Hollywood had taught her to believe they should look like. Even discarding the superficial, Lena was certain that this was something different. Whatever was happening to her was extremely dangerous, but she did not believe it was a random act of violence. The intruder was in her apartment for a reason.

“I'm going to have to ask you to come with me,” he said.

“Why? Where?”

“You will find out when we get there.”

“Am I being kidnapped?”

“Yes. You are.”

“But not by the Gummadis?”

“No.”

“Who do you work for?”

“That I cannot tell you.”

Lena felt strangely calm.

“What if I refuse to cooperate? Will you hurt me?”

“No.”

“So why should I come with you?”

“Because of the boy sleeping under the bridge.”

Tahir. Oh my God, had they taken him too?

Lena forced herself to show the man who called himself Khan neither fear nor anger. Either would be a sign of weakness.

“What have you done to him? If you have hurt one hair on that boy's head, I swear to God . . .”

“He is fine. And he will remain fine . . . if you cooperate.”

“And if not, you will hurt him. Is that what you are telling me?”

“No. I will not. He is a boy with no legs. I would not hurt him. But I am not alone. There are other men I work with who are not above this. So, while I assure you that I will not hurt the boy, that does not mean he is not in danger. It would be better for you and for him if you come with me.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I do not know,” Khan said, and Lena sensed that he was being truthful. “I only know what I have been instructed to do.”

“I think I'll have that glass of water,” Lena said, rising from her seat and pressing the blade of the paring knife against her thigh to keep it hidden. As she stepped past Khan, she swung the knife up toward his throat, unsure even as she did so whether she intended to kill the intruder.

It didn't matter.

With an alarming nonchalance, Khan caught her wrist and twisted it in such a way that the knife popped out of her hand and clattered onto the floor. Whatever he had done, it did not hurt, but her fingers tingled and she could not close them into a fist.

“Don't worry,” Khan explained. “The numbness will pass in a few minutes. Don't do anything like that again.”

He let go of her wrist and Lena flexed her hand open and closed as much as she could in an effort to restore feeling.

“I will ask you once more, please, to come with me.”

She considered her options. None were especially appealing.

“Give me time to pack a few things,” she said.

ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

APRIL 21

I
t had been a long time, maybe thirty years, since Sam had taken the bus. The Greyhound that crossed back and forth between Richmond and Asheville looked like it was at least that old. The passengers were the same eclectic mix of people that Sam remembered. Some kids on the way home to see the family. Retirees. And a few weirdos. One old man in a raincoat sitting all the way in the back spent the better part of three hours talking to himself.

What the bus offered, and what Sam needed at that point more than speed or convenience, was privacy. No one batted an eye if you paid cash for a bus ticket. No one checked IDs. Except for the psychotic in the rear, nobody tried to make conversation. No one even really looked at Sam once he had settled into his seat. He had dried his clothes as best he could under the hand drier in the bus station bathroom, but his jeans still felt clammy and cold.

Sam had four hundred and eighty-six dollars in his damp wallet. After walking from the boathouse to Georgetown, he had taken as much as he could out of a gas station ATM. The bus ticket to Richmond had set him back forty-three dollars and the connection to Asheville was another one hundred and twenty-four dollars. He did not know when he might be able to risk another try at an ATM. There were few more effective ways of broadcasting a “here I am” message to Weeder and his hired assassins.

For now, he needed to find a place to hide and think. He'd need to stretch his money out for as long as he could. And he would need allies. The men who were after him were not amateurs, and Sam was dispiritingly aware that he was now playing out of his league. He was not kidding himself about what had happened on the parkway. He had gotten lucky.

The only one he could think to turn to was Earl Holly. There was no guarantee that Earl would be willing to help, but Sam did not have any better ideas.

His phone had been ruined by the swim across the river. He had briefly thought about buying a prepaid phone in Georgetown. The idea of carrying around anything electronic was unsettling enough that he had decided to leave that for later. Nothing mattered now but space and time. And Lena. Sam was worried about her. He had wanted Lena to get out of Mumbai and come back to Washington, but maybe that was only trading one kind of danger for another.

It started to rain, and Sam watched the fat drops splash against the window. His head hurt and various parts of his body ached dully from the crash. He tried to sleep, but he was too keyed up. His hands shook slightly as though from too much coffee. He wished that he could talk to Vanalika.

By the time they reached Asheville, it was almost noon. Sam realized he was famished and wolfed down a club sandwich and french fries at a diner across the street from the bus station. That set him back another eight dollars. There was a local bus leaving for Linville in just over an hour. Sam bought a couple of newspapers and found a Starbucks nearby where he could sit. He caught himself staring at the door and out of the plate-glass windows expecting to see a team of Morlocks that had somehow tracked him down. It would be easy to grow paranoid, he realized.

The bus to Linville was slow. It made half a dozen stops and waited for at least twenty minutes at each one. Sam had no idea why and he did not want to ask. He did not want to do anything that might attract attention, something that might lead people to remember his face.

Linville did not have a bus station. The driver let him off in front of the IHOP in what passed for a downtown. It had been even longer since Sam had hitchhiked than it had been since he had been on a Greyhound. It was not that hard to get a ride. After about fifteen minutes, a man with a bushy red beard and a flannel shirt coming out of the pancake house offered him a ride to the end of Dry Gulch Road. From there, he walked the mile and a half or so to No. 9.

Earl was sitting on the front porch right where Sam had left him. It was late afternoon. There was a bottle of Knob Creek and a half-full glass on the coffee table next to a copy of Tyler Grigorievich's book on the history of India's Congress Party. Earl's eyes were closed.

“That book put me to sleep too,” Sam said.

“Are you sure it's not the bourbon?” Earl asked. His eyes did not open.

“Pretty sure. I know Tyler.”

“So what brings you back so soon?”

“Somebody tried to kill me.”

Earl opened his eyes.

“Thought that might happen. Go on and sit.”

Sam sat in one of the raggedy easy chairs that did not really belong on a porch.

“Was it Weeder's people?” Earl asked.

“I think so.”

“So how is it that you ain't dead?”

Sam told him about being pulled over by the fake park police, the desperate chase down the GW Parkway and his midnight swim across the Potomac. Earl listened intently but did not interrupt. When Sam had finished, he stood and waddled into the kitchen, returning with a second glass and a few ice cubes. He poured a stiff shot of the Knob Creek and set it in front of Sam.

“Serves you right for not driving American,” he said. “That little Japanese piece of crap could get run off the road by a tricycle.”

Earl raised his glass and offered a toast.

“To not being dead.”

They drank.

“Why were they after you?”

“I found something I wasn't supposed to. And then I tried to get other people interested in it. People who were in a position to do something about it.” Sam told him about the speech he had found in the Morlocks' burn bag and his unsuccessful efforts to get Tennyck to pay attention to it.

“Fuck me,” Earl said, when Sam had finished. “I didn't think they would really do it. Not even them.”

“Tenny was convinced that it was just part of some war-game exercise.”

“Tennyck is an asshole. John Weeder doesn't play games. Leastwise, nothing that you or I would recognize as a game.”

“You agree it's real? The speech, I mean.”

“I do.”

“Earl, there's something you're not telling me. Something important. I think you almost told me the last time, but you didn't. What is it? I know you have secrets to keep. But not this one. Not now. I need to know what you know. I overheard Weeder talk about something called Cold Harbor when I was stuck in that damn burn chute. It seemed to scare him. Do you know anything about it?”

Earl was quiet. He sipped the bourbon and set the glass down on the table. Then he looked down at the floorboards between his feet. This pause in the conversation was considerably longer than the others. Sam could hear the thrum of insects in the woods girdling the farmhouse. A black-headed Carolina chickadee landed on the railing by his elbow. The bird bobbed his head twice as though in greeting and flew off.

Earl finally looked up. His face graver than it had been.

“Sam, there's a program you haven't been read into that you should probably know about.”

Earl was talking about Sensitive Compartmented Information. All SCI material was “need to know.” A Top Secret clearance was just the baseline. Just because you had a clearance did not mean that you had access to any and all classified information. There were a significant number of information streams that were restricted to people who had an operational need for the knowledge. They were called programs. Each one had its own rules and “being read in” meant first being briefed on what they were and then signing away your firstborn as the penalty for violating them.

Sam waited.

“Cold Harbor is part of a larger set of protocols,” Earl said, after another thirty-second pause that he had, no doubt, used to consider the question of whether he should go further. Earl was out of government service, but he was still bound by the rules of secrecy that had governed his professional life. “Nuclear protocols. The various scenarios are named after Civil War battles. I don't know the history behind that, but the program is highly classified. Even the name ‘Cold Harbor' is considered SCI.”

“If I remember right, Grant got his ass handed to him by Lee at Cold Harbor. Seems like odd nomenclature for an Agency program.”

“It's military. Cold Harbor is a contingency plan for United States Special Forces to seize control of Pakistan's existing nuclear weapons and for the air force and navy to destroy every last nuclear site on Pakistani soil.”

“Couldn't Pakistan just rebuild the weapons after a few years?” Sam asked.

“Not if all their nuclear scientists and engineers are dead. There's a kill list. Drones and SpecOps. That's another part of the protocol.”

“The Lord administration would never do that. This president would never give that kind of order.”

“No,” Earl agreed. “She wouldn't.”

“So how does Cold Harbor tie into Panoptes?”

“Cold Harbor has prearranged triggers. A major war between India and Pakistan is supposed to set Cold Harbor in motion before Pakistan either uses a nuke or loses control of a weapon to the extremists. The actual use of a weapon is an automatic trigger. The president could stop it, but the hardline elements in her own administration could make that very, very hard to do both politically and strategically. She'd likely have to go along with the recommendation from her own SECDEF. Otherwise, the Republicans on the Hill would tear her apart.”

Sam knew that this was true. The presidency was a bully pulpit, but presidents had considerably less freedom in decision making than many people assumed. Time and again, presidents had been maneuvered by the people around them into making decisions that they would come to regret, often recognizing the trap well in advance but feeling powerless to stop it. Like Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs. The outlines of the Panoptes program now seemed clear—and terrifying.

“You're telling me that the Stoics are prepared to kill two hundred thousand people, give or take, to force president Lord to authorize the Cold Harbor operation.”

“They'd be prepared to do a lot more than that. But I'm guessing they figure that that'll do the trick. The Cassandra projections scared people, Sam. Powerful people. They see Pakistan's nuclear capability as an unacceptable threat to U.S. interests, and they would happily sacrifice a million Indians to defend ten thousand Americans.”

“Is there any paper trail for Cold Harbor?” Sam asked. “Is this written down anywhere?”

“Somewhere, I'm sure. But I couldn't tell you where and I don't think you'll have any luck getting access, not if you aren't read in. And that's not even counting the highly capable killers who would just as soon see you dead right now.”

“We can't let them get away with this.”

“We? Sam, I'm just an old drunk living in the woods with an expensive telescope. Look, you can stay with me for a while until you figure out what to do, but I don't have much left in me to help.”

Sam looked at Earl more carefully than he had. His old friend did not look well. The skin on his neck was loose and sallow. His white hair was brittle and thinning.

“What's wrong, Earl?”

“I'm dying. Cancer.”

“How much time?”

“Not a lot. A couple of months, maybe. I feel all right. I'm just tired is all.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. My ex told me that the bourbon would kill me. It's worth dying of cancer just to prove her wrong.”

They sat in silence for some time.

“So what are you gonna do now?” Earl finally asked.

“I don't know. I need some time to think that over, and if you have any brilliant ideas, I'm all ears. I want to get in touch with Lena, make sure she's okay. I'd like to take another run at getting her out of India.”

“If that speech you read talked about Rangarajan's death, then Delhi is the most likely target, no?”

“I suppose so . . . but the blank space bothers me. It's like the bomb is an instrument of assassination and the tens of thousands of other casualties are collateral. If they're going after the prime minister personally rather than the capital, they could attack anywhere, and at least some of the extremist groups from Pakistan have already demonstrated an ability to operate in Mumbai.”

“They may have had a little extra help on this one,” Earl said carefully.

“What do you mean?”

“The Stoics are hardly unique. There are homologues in other countries, particularly in the democracies where the elites sometimes feel they need to shield their irrational publics from some of the more unsavory necessities of governing. The one-party dictatorships usually have security services that can operate pretty much as they see fit. They don't need a man behind the curtain.”

“So there's an Indian equivalent of the Stoics?”

“We think so. They call themselves the Sons of Ashoka after the Maurya emperor who conquered pretty much the entire subcontinent in the third century BC.”

“But why would they cooperate in a plot to destroy an Indian city? It's kind of counterintuitive.”