Secrets of State (5 page)

“Mullah Akhbar just installed himself in the presidential palace over the weekend as an ‘advisor' to Talwar. That's just the latest sign that the influence of the clerics is on the rise. It looks like Barazani is on the way out at the Defense Ministry. He lost an arm-wrestling match with Yusaf Khel, who is close to the clerics. The headlines in the papers over the weekend were all about Kashmir and pretty inflammatory.”

“What's Talwar's role in all this?” Sam asked. “Is he even trying to hold the line against the clerics?”

“Trying and failing,” Shoe replied. “The Islamists are definitely on the ascent, helped out, mind you, by public anger at our drone-strikes program in the northwest tribal belt.”

“What about recent developments in the Pakistani military?” Sam asked, turning to Ken. “Anything I should be ready to brief upstairs on?”

“There are a lot of variables,” Ken cautioned. “Whatever you tell the boss, I'd hedge the bets a bit. Indications are that the religious leadership is extending its reach, particularly with the army. We've seen a rotation of senior colonels—brigade commanders—that has marginalized the most secular and put more overtly religious officers in charge of critical units.”

“Does that include nuclear units?”

“It does. They don't have direct control of the weapons themselves. Those units are, for the time being, reporting directly to Talwar, but the units that control the installations where the weapons are based are increasingly subject to clerical influence if not yet direct control. It's really only a matter of time, however.”

“You all are just a bundle of sunshine this Monday morning, aren't you?”

Shoe leaned across the table. “There's one more thing,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper.

“What is it?”

“I'm worried about the intel-sharing program.”

“In what way?”

“You know we have a program to share select intel with the Indian and Pakistani services?”

“Sure. In exchange for some of their reporting. It's a pretty standard arrangement.”

“Well, I'm picking up echoes in our information. What we are giving the two sides is evidently volatile enough that it's getting amplified and driving the debate within their own systems. There's something of a positive feedback loop in operation. What they know about each other, or what they think they know about each other, affects what they do and the choices they make, which in turn influences what they think about each other. The program was supposed to promote transparency and information exchange in the service of peaceful dispute resolution, but it's having the opposite effect. It's making the leadership increasingly paranoid and trigger-happy.”

“I'm seeing the same thing as Shoe is in Islamabad. Our intel is dominating the discussion and reinforcing the hardliners. The program needs to be scaled back in some way, because it's starting to warp the decision-making process in ways we don't entirely understand.”

“I'll raise it upstairs,” Sam promised. “But don't get your hopes up. Those programs are managed by the director of National Intelligence, not Argus.”

Dorothy stuck her head into the conference room.

“Spears's office called,” she announced. “He'd like to see you, Sam.”

“When?”

“Right now.”

“Tell Patty I'm on my way.”

•   •   •

Sam took the elevator
to the fourth floor where Argus CEO Garret Spears had his office. The fourth floor was more lavishly decorated than the others. The elevator opened onto a small atrium with skylights and tropical plants growing in oversize pots. A short corridor leading toward the north side of the building ended in a T junction. To the left was Spears's office. To the right, a massive metal door with a cipher lock mounted on the center. As Sam reached the turn, a large man with acne-scarred skin was just coming out from behind the steel door. Sam recognized him as Spears's special assistant, John Weeder.

There was a sizeable group of men with an unmistakable military bearing who worked behind that particular door and who seemed to have no particular responsibilities. The analysts referred to them as the “Morlocks.” Sam had not been read into the program, but he had a pretty good idea of what they were doing behind the door. Argus's contract with the Agency was for the collection and analysis of intelligence information on South Asia. Sam's team handled the analysis. The Morlocks, he suspected, were responsible for collection. And Weeder, he believed, was the king of the Morlocks.

Weeder did not so much as register Sam's existence as he walked past him toward the elevator. His hair was not quite long enough to reach his collar, and Sam could see the tattoo on his neck, a small frog holding a trident. There was something unsettling about the man. Sam felt a slight chill as Weeder passed him, almost as if he moved inside an envelope of cold air. Sam turned left toward the office of the CEO.

•   •   •

Spears's secretary,
Patty Delaney, was a no-nonsense Washington veteran who was unquestionably loyal to the CEO. They had been together a long time, going back to Spears's years in the navy. She kept Sam waiting for five minutes while the CEO finished up a phone call. Patty was not a big believer in idle chitchat, and she spent the time managing e-mails while Sam leafed through a copy of the salmon pink
Financial Times
from the side table and mentally rehearsed his apology. Argus had not been mentioned in Kamen's column, but the people in town who mattered would know.

“Okay,” Patty said. “He's off. You can go in.”

“Good morning, Sam,” Garret Spears said, rising from his desk to shake hands after Patty had ushered Sam into the room.

“Morning, Garret. Welcome back.” Spears had been away for the better part of the last two weeks on a business trip to Europe and the Middle East. It was a reminder for Sam that South Asia was only a small part of what Argus Systems did on behalf of the American government.

They sat in stylish black leather chairs that were paired with a matching couch and clustered around a sleek glass-and-bronze coffee table. The only sign that this was not the office of a Wall Street executive was the two-foot-square stainless-steel sliding door inset into one wall. This was a burn chute. At the end of the workday, Spears could toss his classified papers down the chute where industrial-strength shredders would chew them up before feeding the material into a smokeless furnace that reached temperatures well above the famed minimum of Fahrenheit 451. Every unit in the building had one. Spears had his own.

Without being asked, Patty brought in a silver tray with a carafe of coffee and a pair of mugs emblazoned with the Argus pyramid and the company's motto:
semper vigilans
, ever vigilant. Sam thought the motto, and the Latin, was a little pretentious. Spears considered it good business.

“This is the good stuff,” Spears said, pouring the coffee. “Jamaican Blue Mountain. I did some counternarcotics work with the Jamaican services a few years back and they've kept me supplied with my drug of choice ever since.”

Spears's smile was that of a politician, easy, practiced, and plastic. It was not quite enough to overcome the cruel set to his mouth. He was in his late forties and had founded Argus Systems after a twenty-year career in the navy, much of it with the Special Forces community. The Argus CEO kept his sandy blond hair shorter than the Washington norm. Sam had always suspected that this was to remind people of his professional past as a SEAL. He also kept in shape with the help of a private gym that was part of the executive suite. Even under his suit jacket, you could see that Spears had the arms and shoulders of a serious bodybuilder.

There were creases around Spears's icy blue eyes that seemed to speak of years squinting against the sun, either out to sea or in some inhospitable desert clime. Sam knew better. Before accepting the job at Argus, he had called in a few markers at DIA and reviewed Spears's classified military personnel file. Spears was a former SEAL, and he had done a few operational deployments, but he had spent the vast bulk of his navy career in the Pentagon and at the headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command in North Carolina. He had also done a stint at the National Security Council as an advisor on counterterrorism. It was the connections Spears had developed as a “political” SEAL that had helped Argus stand out in a sea of government-contracting outfits.

The coffee was good.

“I'm sorry about the Kamen column this morning,” Sam said. “I let things get a little heated with Newton. It was my mistake. I should have known better. I hope this doesn't make too much trouble for you or Argus.”

“Trouble?” Spears replied. “You have it backwards. I'm glad you stuck it to Newton. He and I had it out once over some security work that we did for the Agency for International Development in Iraq and he doesn't play nice in the sandbox. I would have been happy to have Argus's name associated with anything that puts Richard Newton in his place. Maybe next time you could wear a company tie when you demolish him in public. It was well done.”

This was hardly what Sam had been expecting to hear. It certainly would not have been the reaction of anyone at the State Department if he were still an active FSO. Maybe this was just one more advantage of life in the private sector.

“Thanks, Garret. I appreciate that. I'm still enough of a diplomat to want to keep my name out of the papers.”

“And I'm enough of a businessman to believe that there's no such thing as bad publicity, as long as it doesn't involve a prison sentence, or at least a long prison sentence. Sam, I know it's been a while since you and I have had a chance to talk. I suppose we could go over the latest news from the region, but I'm sure you and your team are on top of all that. I don't believe in micromanaging. I would, though, like to get your take on a couple of hypotheticals.”

“Sure. Shoot.”

“You'll have to bear with me. The questions seem a little odd. Understand, please. There are no right answers to any of this. This is more like the Myers-Briggs personality test. It isn't pass-fail.”

“Okay.” Sam was a little nonplussed at this, but it was certainly preferable to having to defend his ill-considered remarks at the CFR meeting.

“I want you to imagine that you're the sheriff in a small town in the Old West. There's been a horrible crime and a group of townsfolk are rioting, demanding justice. They have five hostages they're threatening to kill if you don't find the man responsible. You have no idea who committed the crime, but you could frame a man, and let's say for purposes of this story that he's what they used to call a no-account drifter, and hang him for the crime. That would save the hostages, all of whom are productive citizens of your town. Would you do it?”

“No,” Sam replied without hesitation.

“What if you were the driver of a runaway trolley and you were going to run over a group of five workmen on the track? You could switch the car to a side track on which there was a single worker, killing only the one instead of the five. Would you do it?”

Sam actually recognized this question. It was one of a series of moral dilemmas loosely clustered together as an ethical thought experiment. It was sometimes called “trolleyology” and Sam vaguely remembered reading about it in a moral philosophy class in college. The question Spears had just posed was the most basic variant.

“Yes.”

“What's the difference between the two scenarios? Don't both involve sacrificing one to save five?”

“Maybe at their most utilitarian, if the only thing you're trying to do is count. But the first seems to me to be deliberative and the second reactive.”

“So it's a question of how much time you have to make a decision?”

“In part. But it also seems to me that the second scenario is binary. You only have two tracks. The first scenario includes a world of possibilities that you left out. Maybe there was a better answer to the problem than judicial murder.”

Spears nodded his head and seemed to be considering his next question.

“What if the single worker on the track was a friend or a relative? Your brother, perhaps, or your son or daughter. Would you make the same choice?”

“No,” Sam admitted. “Probably not.”

“Is that ethical?”

“No. But I'd do it anyway.”

“What if the balance was ten to one? Or ten thousand to one? What would you do?”

“I hope I never have to find out.”

“One more variation,” Spears said. “The last one, I promise. You're standing on a bridge watching the runaway trolley bear down on a group of workmen. You could stop the trolley by pushing a heavy weight onto the tracks. Coincidently, you are standing next to a fat man. A complete stranger who weighs three hundred pounds. Pushing him off the bridge would save the five men working on the line. Do you do it?”

“No.”

“What's the difference between pushing the fat man off the bridge and switching the train onto the side track to kill the one instead of the five?”

“People are not entries on a balance sheet. We all have an internal moral compass, an inner voice in our heads and our hearts that tells us the difference between right and wrong. You need to listen to that voice even if you don't always understand why it has reached the conclusions that it has.”

Spears seemed oddly disappointed by Sam's answer.

“I think that's all that I need. Thanks for bearing with me. I know this can seem a little odd, but I find this line of reasoning very helpful in what we do.”

“But not helpful enough to ask the questions in the initial interview?”

“No,” Spears admitted. “This isn't for everyone. I want to get to know the person first. And I only run through this exercise with a select few.”