The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (13 page)

“I’d like to open a checking account,” Kate said. “You speak lovely English,” she added. “Hong Kong?”

“I’m from Singapore,” the young woman said, smiling shyly. “Is your firm a private business or will this be for a non-governmental agency?” she asked.

“It’s a personal account, for me,” Kate said.

The young woman looked flustered, as though Kate had said something inappropriate.

“We service commercial accounts only,” she said, blushing. “I’m so sorry. We have no accounts for private persons.”

“That’s OK,” Kate said. “Maybe I should open a corporate account. Can you provide the appropriate forms?”

The young Asian continued to look flustered and put out.

“Actually, to open an account, you must make an appointment with our manager, Mr. Kwang. He is not in at the moment.”

“No problem,” Kate said. “We’ll come back later. When would be a good time?”

The young woman suggested a time a few hours hence. When they were outside Kate looked at Smyth and rolled her eyes.

“A bank that doesn’t take deposits or open accounts. If that’s what passes for customer service, it’s a miracle they’re in business. And did you get a load of the security in that place?” Kate said. “Your average newsstand has better protection.”

“The store is just a front, and that poor girl doesn’t seem to have a lot of work to do, or many clients to do it with,” Smyth said.

“How hard do you think it would be to break in after dark?” Kate said. “I’ve always wanted to rob a bank.”

“This is indeed a lawless town,” Smyth said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains field offices, known as LEGATs or legal attachés, in 51 U.S. embassies around the globe. These foreign FBI outposts were established in a half-dozen countries by J. Edgar Hoover in World War II to compete with the OSS, predecessor to CIA, whose creation he viewed as an impermissible encroachment on his own turf, and a personal affront by President Roosevelt.

The LEGAT program was vastly expanded after 9/11. As recently as 1990, there were only 15 LEGATs incorporated in U.S. missions, all of them in Europe and South America. Today, some 126 special agents and 80 support staff are posted within fifty embassies and a special office in Miami that is responsible for Cuba and other Caribbean islands. They help coordinate work with national police forces overseas and gather information about crimes and criminals, including terrorists, of interest to American law enforcement.

The LEGAT office in Islamabad was established in 1996 and given responsibility for both Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was currently staffed by Legal Attaché Lawrence Griggs, an FBI star who had distinguished himself as special agent in charge of two mid-size U.S. cities and served also in a senior position in the Office of International Operations at FBI headquarters, the department within the FBI that liases with Interpol and Scotland Yard. It also has overall authority over the entire LEGAT program.

He was assisted by an assistant attaché, known as an ALAT, who was also a former special agent, and three office support staffers. At the time of Mort Feldman’s kidnapping, Larry Griggs was working on 48 open cases. All were shoved to the back burner in the days after Feldman disappeared. A special forensics team was flown in from Washington and was working on the ground within days of the kidnapping.

LEGATs have had a bumpy history with CIA, with whom they compete for intelligence, but the FBI office in Islamabad had a more cooperative relationship with CIA than many, in part because of the easy personality and integrity of Larry Griggs.

“This job has required that I embrace a certain humility” Griggs told Olof Wheatley when they met the morning after Wheatley’s dinner with the U.S. ambassador. “Though I’ve become directly involved in specific investigations, the FBI has no law enforcement authority in Pakistan, a point that has been driven home since the OBL takedown.”

“Different than telling the local police chief in Peoria that you’re taking over his case I guess?” Wheatley said. “And that if he doesn’t get out of the way, you’ll arrest him?”

Griggs laughed. “The Pakistanis are not that hard to work with. For starters, they speak English, and police work is considered an honorable profession here. That’s not true in many countries. And we have the plum of special FBI training to offer to a handful of their superstars from time to time. That helps a lot. Their senior people love going to Quantico.”

“How do you get along with ISI?”

“Very well, because I have to. ISI is the only game in town in Pakistan. They are FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, the whole shebang all wrapped into one.”

Griggs took Wheatley through a preliminary forensic analysis of the VW Microbus that the ISI had recovered with Mort Feldman’s clothes. He showed him a series of 8” by 10” photographs.

“We’ve taken this puppy apart,” Griggs said. “It’s a vehicle that dates back to the late 1960s, kept together with duct tape and baling wire. We found canary-yellow minerals both inside the vehicle and also in the tire treads. This material is bastnasite, a rare earth found near Zagi Mountain in Pakistan and also in various locations in Afghanistan. It’s also found in Colorado, so we’re familiar with it domestically. I’m waiting for confirmation from the lab in Washington, but we’re pretty sure the bastnasite we found is unique to the Zagi area, about twenty miles northwest of Peshawar, up by the Afghan border.”

As he spoke, Griggs proffered a clear plastic sealed evidence disk with a sample of the bastnasite. The grains ranged from slightly larger than small pebbles down to very fine talc dust, uniquely bright yellow in color. The larger crystals were darker, the color of caramel.

“Isn’t this bastnasite valuable? Don’t they mine it? I recall reading about Afghanistan having a potential industry in exploiting it,” Wheatley said.

“That’s right. Bastnasite is a carbonate that is rich in cerium, an industrial metal. The mineral also has lanthanum and yttrium in it, and by measuring the specific concentrations of these elements, along with fluorine and carbon, we can pinpoint precisely where it came from. The Zagi mountain variety often comes in large, beautiful crystals that are prized by geologists and collectors. Zagi is also an important economic resource in Pakistan for cerium.”

“OK, so we know that this VW bus has been near Zagi Mountain, but how recently?”

“Some of the crystals were recovered from the tire treads. That means recently. But the fact that we also found crystals all over the interior suggests that the vehicle may have been used in the area around Peshawar for a long time—years, probably.”

“It’s a start,” Wheatley said. “We need to get up there, but maybe we can get something out of the driver first?”

“We still don’t have access to him,” Griggs said, frowning. “I understood this morning that the DCM was going to make another plea for access,” he added, referring to the deputy chief of mission at the embassy, the number two American official in Islamabad.

***

Olof Wheatley received a special package through the diplomatic pouch from Washington only hours before his second meeting with Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood. Marked, “Urgent! Expedite,” it contained a hardcover copy of Hendryk Warsaw’s classic cold war text
, Conflict, Nuclear Arms, Influence and Strategy
. At Wheatley’s special request, the Nobel Prize-winning economist had inscribed it with the words “To Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood of Pakistan, a fellow student of human conflict in the service of finding a lasting peace for all mankind. With admiration and respect, Hendryk Warsaw, 2011.”

Smiling smugly, Wheatley tucked the book under his arm and left the embassy for ISI headquarters at Aabpara, a straight shot by chauffeured SUV three miles down Khayaban-e-Suhrwardy, past the French mission, the Serena Hotel, and the Islamabad Cricket Pitches.

In his first floor suite at the central ISI building, Brigadier Mahmood greeted him more warmly than he had a few days earlier, this time without his deputy, Colonel Akram, in tow, a sign Wheatley took to be auspicious.

“General, thank you again. My government is grateful for your time and your help.”

Brigadier Mahmood shook hands with Wheatley and motioned him to the same circle of armchairs and sofa they had used the first visit. As he took his chair, Wheatley handed Mahmood the gift he had brought.

“I have a feeling that this volume will find a special place in your library,” he said. “Weren’t you once a student of Warsaw?”

Brigadier Mahmood inspected the book with visible delight and carefully read the inscription, his face betraying the pleasure he clearly felt at having an autographed copy of a text he viewed as central to his professional and intellectual life.

“You could not have selected a text that moves me more,” Mahmood said. “Hendryk Warsaw is my intellectual hero. How on earth did you know...?”

“It was not difficult,” Wheatley said. “I read the master’s thesis of Colonel Mahmood Mahmood from his time at the Air Force War College at Maxwell, titled, if I recall correctly,
Avoiding Nuclear Conflict in the Asian Subcontinent: An Analysis Framed by Warsaw’s Theory of Strategic Stalemate
.

“I hope you won’t be surprised to learn that we have a copy in our central library at Langley. I learned a lot from your work, and a little also about you. I think it was a valuable contribution to the literature on nuclear arms. And this inscribed copy of Hank’s book is meant to be a memento of your stay in my country, and an expression of our belief that we may have more in common than divides us.”

As Wheatley spoke, a turbaned orderly served tea and biscuits, then left the two men alone.

“Well, Mr. Wheatley, I am at your service, as before,” Mahmood said as he lay the book down on the coffee table. “What can we do here to help you?”

“For starters, I wanted to compare notes with you about the FBI forensics on the VW Microbus you let us examine. The technical folks from our FBI lab in Virginia have identified a unique mineral, bastnasite, which places the vehicle very recently at a location called Zagi Mountain. Are you familiar with it?”

“Indeed,” Mahmood said. “I am most familiar with Zagi Mountain. This area is currently under military occupation.”

“I understand that Zagi Mountain is in a suburb of Peshawar.”

“I would not call it a suburb, Mr. Wheatley. Peshawar is the capital of a most wild and wooly part of my country, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the North-West Frontier Province near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass. These are tribal areas, hilly, very much the Wild West of Pakistan. Zagi Mountain is near Hameed Abad Kafoor Dheri, southeast of the Warsak Dam on the Kabul River. This area is 40 kilometers northwest of Peshawar, far beyond the terminal precincts of the city. The mines there cover an area about 15 kilometers square, but the use of explosives now is forbidden since the military security occupation. Mining for quartz and other minerals has been curtailed. The so-called ‘mountain’ itself is only about 200 meters higher than the surrounding land, which is 500 meters above the sea. Compared to the real mountains farther north, it hardly merits the term.”

“You don’t seem surprised that the van used to kidnap our station chief has been traced up there,” Wheatley remarked.

“Nothing surprises me,” Mahmood remarked blandly. “I am beyond surprise. I suspect that you are, too.”

“General, may I make a direct request of you?”

Mahmood said nothing, but nodded.

“Would you be willing to take me to Zagi Mountain, to show me the area personally? That may help put things in perspective for me.”

Brigadier Mahmood looked at Wheatley impassively for several seconds. He glanced at the Warsaw book on the coffee table while a thin, barely perceptible smile formed on his lips.

“I believe you may have a bright future as a diplomat, Mr. Wheatley,” Mahmood said. “It would be my honor to show you Zagi Mountain. When would you like to depart?”

***

“You know what they say about Islamabad.”

Kate Langley was talking to Olof Wheatley on the secure phone in the Special Ops center at Bagram.

“No, I don’t,” Olof Wheatley replied, sitting at Mort Feldman’s now-vacant desk at the American Embassy in the Pakistani capital. He was tired and becoming irritated at the lack of forward movement in the search for Feldman.

“They say that Islamabad is about five thousand miles west of Pakistan, somewhere near Scandinavia.”

“Ha. Ha.” Wheatley feigned laughter.

“No, I mean it. Islamabad has nothing to do with authentic Pakistan. Now that you’re going to Peshawar, you’re going to see the real country, not a Potemkin village created by some guy who spent too much time in city planning school in Denmark.”

“We’ll see.”

Wheatley took Kate through his two conversations with Brigadier Mahmood and the FBI forensics on the microbus.

“When I met with Mahmood,” Wheatley said, “he told me that the Zagi Mountain mining area was under military occupation. Why is that? Do you happen to know?”

“There’s a report in the files,” Kate said. “I remember a little. Basically, the Army seized a Taliban arms dump in a cave at Zagi Mountain that held, among other treasures, 24,000 Kalashnikov rifles.”

“Did you find out the origin of the rifles?”

“No, we didn’t take it that far. Mortie didn’t rank it as a high priority once it was clear that Zagi was out of commission for good.”

“That would be worth knowing now,” Wheatley said. “And also their intended use. It can’t be a coincidence that the vehicle used to transport Mort Feldman from his house made a recent trip to the Peshawar area.”