The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (21 page)

“These documents were faxed over to police headquarters,” Sikandar said. “They show that one of the cargo containers on the list of those flagged by your customs technicians was one of ours. Here is the ISO-BIC identification mark as required by the
Bureau International des Containers
in Paris. The shipper was Security Exports, S.A., also of Paris.”

“That’s Jacques LeClerc’s outfit,” Kate whispered. “I’m amazed he’s using his own name.”

“What was the name of the vessel you put it on?” Mahmood asked.

“The freighter
Nippon Yoku-Maru
left yesterday for its next port, Jakarta.”

“How long will that transit take?” Kate asked.

“That distance is about 3,000 nautical miles. It will get there in eight or nine days, more or less, assuming it makes 15 knots of speed, which would be normal speed for a smaller ship of that size. So it will dock in Indonesia a week from today, all things being equal.”

“And the ultimate destination of this particular container?”

“The Port of Long Beach,” Sikandar said. “In California, USA.”

***

The lovely restaurant boasted cuisine from a pan-oriental menu, had rave reviews in the
International Herald Tribune
as well as
Karachi Daily News
, and was located in the trendy Clifton Beach neighborhood, next to the British International School. It was already crowded at seven o’clock in the evening, with waiters weaving amid green, glass-topped tables with platters of sesame beef,
dim sum
, and tiny potatoes.

At the table next to that Kate shared with Brigadier Mahmood, a young woman was drinking a chilled
pina colada
. More than half the diners had a wine bottle at their table.

“Would you care for a drink?” Mahmood asked, noticing Kate’s glance in the direction of the neighboring table.

“Only if you’ll share a bottle of wine with me,” Kate said.

“I’m afraid I drink alcohol only in America,” Mahmood said. “But please don’t mind me. This district of Karachi is part of a small global village of the cultural elite—businessmen, diplomats, and travelers. It’s closer culturally to New York and Paris than it is to the Pakistan I know. Our stodgy rules don’t apply here.”

Kate laughed. “So geography is just a state of mind—except for you.”

“I’m too old to change,” Mahmood said. “I am an anachronism from a forgotten age. Tonight, I’ll stick with mineral water.”

Kate joined him. Brigadier Mahmood had shed his uniform for a perfectly tailored dark blue business suit and a discreet Hermès patterned tie. He looked like a rich lawyer. Kate couldn’t help thinking that he seemed completely at home in this world of the ‘cultural elite’ though she felt that she utterly did not.

“We have accomplished a lot today,” Kate said. “The
Nippon Yoku-Maru
is a small container ship that we can inspect in Jakarta, earlier if we are willing to board her at sea. LeClerc’s shipping documents show a California destination, 8,000 nautical miles from Indonesia by the most direct sea lanes, which is a 22-day voyage on average, assuming no other stops. We finally have some breathing room to track this down and nail it.”

The
Nippon Yoku-Maru
is indeed of modest size,” Mahmood agreed. “But I can’t imagine that it will go directly to Los Angeles. More likely they have a flexible schedule to permit them to pick up odd shipments along the way, containers from shippers who don’t want to pay for the best, fastest ships. But this scenario all seems too easy for me. The body in the warehouse, the use of LeClerc’s company name on the manifest. I’m suspicious. There is more to this, something we have missed.”

“From Jakarta, you could just as easily head north, toward the coast of China or to Japan.”

“Exactly. We shouldn’t congratulate ourselves quite yet,” Mahmood said. “These chaps still have a few tricks up their sleeves I fear.”

They were silent for a time, enjoying their meals. The chef was Malaysian, so they had started with
nasi lemak
—rice steamed with coconut milk served with fried anchovies, peanuts, cucumber, hardboiled eggs, and a torrid chili sauce called
sambal
.

“May I ask you, Kate, why you chose this business we are in?” Mahmood asked the question hesitantly, as though he might be prying.

“I’ll tell you my story only if you tell me yours,” Kate said. She liked Mahmood, though he seemed stiff and formal in a kind of antique British way. He was unlike any man she had met.

Mahmood laughed. “My story is most sadly very easy to tell. I wanted to join the military from the time I was a small boy in short pants,” he said.

“Because you are interested in war?”

“Oh, on the contrary! Because I was interested in peace! In the Pakistan of my childhood, in the sixties and seventies, the military was the single unifying institution. To join the Army was a noble calling, particularly as an officer. And it allowed me to pursue academic studies in physics and nuclear technology with ample scholarships.”

“But Pakistan did not have the bomb back then.”

“We did not have the bomb, but Pakistan built its first experimental nuclear reactor in 1965, the year I was born. It was a gift of the United States in fact, the 10-megawatt Pakistan Atomic Research Reactor in Islamabad. I studied there as a graduate student.”

“Wow, I should have known that.”

“No, that is ancient history now. There was a different mood in those days,” Mahmood said. “It was called
Atoms for Peace
, a belief that technology was going to do a lot of good in Asia. It was a program of your President Eisenhower.”

“And now?”

“Today Pakistan is a more fractured, damaged country. There is too much poverty, too much corruption. Too many people feel that they will never be able to better themselves. There is not much hope in this land.”

Kate wanted to ask all sorts of questions, but she restrained herself. In other circumstances, social circumstances, she would have enjoyed getting to know this strange, dark man better, but they were working together now, and it was imperative that she stay focussed. For a long time, neither of said anything, each lost in thought, enjoying their meal.

Olof Wheatley spent the morning at the White House discussing the
‘Moscow Bomb’
with the President’s National Security Advisor and other members of the National Security Council. He was back in his office before 10 A.M. He immediately summoned Phil Drayton, Kate Langley’s former pod-mate in the CTC bullpen. Drayton thought that Wheatley had aged ten years since he had last seen him.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Wheatley told Drayton when the younger man was seated in front of his desk.

“The bad news is that the White House wants the FBI and DOD brought into the
Moscow Bomb
case via the High Value Interrogation Group. The good news is that I’m assigning you to that team to make sure I’m in the loop.”

“You mean HIG?” Drayton asked. “The guys who sweat terrorists? Doesn’t CIA already have a rep in that outfit?”

“Yes, we do, but that individual doesn’t report to me, so you’re going along for the ride. The National Security Advisor has been telling the President that we are not moving fast enough with tracking down
Moscow Bomb
and I’m sure our friends at FBI have not been contradicting them. So we’re getting help from FBI now, whether we like it or not.”

“Who are we going to interrogate? So far, we have a dead Brit in Moscow and a dead Uzbek driver in Karachi.”

“I’m coming to that. That’s the best part, in fact. Brigadier Mahmood told me in Pakistan that he had met with Yasser al-Greeb. At one time or another, he actually had the means to reach out to him and speak with him in person. I told the White House that we must assume that he can do it again, and when that happens, we’re going to get our hands on this guy and find out what he knows.”

Wheatley took Drayton through his conversations with Mort Feldman about making Brigadier Mahmood an ‘informal’ member of the CIA team assigned to tracking down
Moscow Bomb
, and his concern about Mahmood’s true loyalties.

“This is my way of putting him under the microscope,” Wheatley concluded. “Mahmood may have pulled the wool over Mort’s eyes, but not mine. If our friendly Pakistani general can reach out to Al-Greeb once, he can damn well do it a second time for my benefit, and this time I intend to be in on the conversation. To do it right, the White House insists that I work through HIG.”

“Does Feldman know about your plan?”

“Hell no!” Wheatley said. “I only formulated it in the last couple of days. He’ll find out soon enough, when you are in Islamabad. But in the meantime, get over to the Hoover Building and let them know that you are going to be working with them. For the time being, this is just between you and me and the folks downtown at HIG. This time we’re not going to lose control of events.”

***

Though the thought of going to Pakistan excited him, Phil Drayton sorely wished he could have discussed his assignment with Kate Langley and Mort Feldman. Before leaving for FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, Drayton put the finishing touches on a report on the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
that Kate had requested from Karachi the day before.

A Yokohama-based shipping company registered in Panama had purchased the vessel, built in 1990, for $2 million in 2004. Its cruising speed was 15 knots, with a crew of 12. She was tiny by the standards of the industry. A large container ship, 1,300 feet in length, could carry up to 8,000 standard 40-foot containers. By these criteria, the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
was a shrimp: 275 feet long with a beam of 50 feet rated only for 160 TEU, or ‘twenty foot equivalent units.’ In the lingo of container shipping, that meant this ship had a maximum capacity of 160 20-foot containers, or 80 of the more conventional 40-foot intermodal containers. This was
one per cent
of the container capacity of the behemoths of the industry.

The specs of the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
just did not seem right to Drayton. He knew that so-called ‘small feeder ships,’ among the smallest in the fleet, had up to 1,000 TEUs, which meant they could carry 500 40-foot containers. What then did that make this vessel? Was it credible that such a small ship would sail halfway across the world—or even from Karachi to Jakarta? More likely, it moved like a freight taxi from smaller ports to larger ports in a constrained area, hugging the coast and carrying freight containers for transfer to larger vessels for transoceanic voyages. That would make sense.

Another detail caught his eye before he sent the report off to Pakistan. The
Nippon Yoku-Maru
was a ‘geared’ ship, which meant that she had her own cargo cranes on board for moving containers onto and off of the vessel. Most container ships did not have this luxury, relying on the specialized ports they used to provide the equipment to load and offload the intermodal boxes. In contrast, the
Nippon Yoku-Maru,
though it was a pipsqueak among cargo vessels, could drop off a container on any wharf in the world, whether that port had crane facilities or not. It could also transfer containers to and from another vessel alongside of it.

Drayton made a note to call Kate Langley to discuss his research. It was now approaching noon in Washington, which meant eleven hours later in Karachi, or 11 PM. The call could wait until Kate awoke the next morning.             

***

Like most CIA employees, Phil Drayton had never visited FBI headquarters and tended to regard the organization as a cantankerous rival, even in the post 9/11 atmosphere of enforced cooperation. Unlike CIA headquarters, hidden away in a hillside glade of trees eight miles from Washington, the J. Edgar Hoover Building was in the heart of the capital, only a few thousand feet from the White House, occupying an entire city block between 9th and 10th Streets. FBI headquarters was vastly larger than CIA, with almost three million square feet of office space housing eight thousand employees.

Rather than drive downtown himself and deal with the impossible parking problems in the heart of the city, Drayton took the ‘Blue Bird’ bus. Blue Bird was a fleet of small buses, shuttles that made a regular loop connecting the Pentagon, State Department, Homeland Security, FBI, and CIA. This fleet was used mainly to transport physical documents, a kind of internal post office, but also accommodated passengers shuttling between federal centers of power.

Drayton reached the Hoover Building a little after one in the afternoon. Passing through a phalanx of security more brutal than that at Langley, Drayton was met in the lobby by Alice Carulla, the CIA targeter whose life Kate Langley had saved in Quetta the previous February. Like Drayton, Carulla was a graduate of SAIS, the School of Advanced International Studies, though their years there had not overlapped. Drayton had not met her before but knew her by reputation. She was considered to be one of the best of the post-9/11 analysts at CIA headquarters.

Alice Carulla was a petite, attractive athletic woman, her Mediterranean complexion giving her the appearance of a beach tan. She had oversize brown eyes and long black hair, and a quirky smile.

“I heard you were coming down,” Carulla said, “so I volunteered to be the meeter-greeter. I was assigned to HIG two months ago myself. I hate it, by the way.”

“How come?”

“Not the reason you think. I get along great with the FBI people. I don’t like HIG because it is an invention of bureaucrats and politicians rather than intelligence professionals. You’ve read all the stories?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Drayton said. “HIG was meant to signal a clean break with the big bad Bush administration. Creation of ‘interrogation lite’ teams so we don’t get in trouble with Dick Cheney-type third-degree brutality, waterboarding and all that sort of stuff.”

“I like your cynicism.”

“So why did you transfer down here then?”

“Because this is the only game in town now. Most of the work I do is done from behind a computer screen anyway, but unless I want to be left out of the loop entirely, HIG is the only way to get access to a real terrorist if we’re ever lucky to get our hands on one alive.”

Alice Carulla took Drayton down the length of a corridor on the second floor of the building that was so long, the walls and ceiling seemed to converge at a point in the very great distance. The HIG occupied a suite of offices at the far end.

“Have you heard who we are after this time?” Drayton asked when they reached Carulla’s cubicle.

“My old friend Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb from Pakistan, just like in February,” Carulla replied. “Only this time I hope it’s the real guy and not some imposter with a bomb strapped to his crotch.”

“Olof thinks he’s got a way to find him. A Pakistani ISI general.”

“Ha!”

“Yeah, I thought it was strange too. And in keeping with the multiple political objectives of HIG, there may be an ulterior agenda here. The general in question is someone Wheatley can’t stand but whom Mort Feldman appears to trust. I think Wheatley wants to destroy him.”

“Jeez, what a mess.”

Drayton and Carulla spent an hour swapping information about what was known about
Moscow Bomb
. He was back in his office at Langley before four.

***

Olof Wheatley left his CIA office after seven in the evening and drove his racing-green Jaguar XJ8 back to Georgetown and the Q Street townhouse he shared with Eloise. His wife was spending the week in Manhattan, as she often did. He was a bachelor for a few days.

Wheatley was exhausted emotionally and felt physically sick. He was the man on the spot in Washington and the White House on the
Moscow Bomb
case, but he had to rely on others to provide him with accurate intelligence and to carry out his directives. Were they reporting the truth? Were they actually doing what he asked of them? He wasn’t sure. He could never be sure, and he often had doubts.

It was an intolerable situation. He had grave responsibility and accountability but little freedom of action. He had not bargained for being a deskbound spy. Though he understood that he was not cut out for field work—he frankly disliked being overseas, had no interest in foreign cultures or languages—he was unwilling to put his reputation and his future in the hands of Mort Feldman and a man whom he considered to be perhaps as dangerous as anyone in the Al Qaeda hierarchy, Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood.

What was Mahmood really up to? He had to hand it to the Pakistanis. They had raised simple treachery to an art, a kind of strategy. What mysterious agenda lay hidden behind the kidnapping of Mort Feldman?

And most intolerable of all: Wheatley never knew where he stood. There was no score sheet that could be consulted on a periodic basis. In his previous life, one knew at the end of every business day, when assets were marked to market, whether one had won or lost, to the penny. But in Washington, this was not so. How could he tell he was on the right track? Who were his friends? Who were his enemies? He could only guess. And all the while was a gnawing anxiety that doom was around the corner and that he would be blamed when things went pear-shaped, and worst of all, that he would feel that he deserved that blame. He did not have a plan.

Wheatley was too tired to eat. Instead, he sat in the cherry-paneled study of his Georgetown house, enveloped in its womb-like semi-darkness, and drank blended Scotch whiskey, an undistinguished label—he called it ‘Industrial Scotch’—a brand he bought by the case and served only at ‘B’ List cocktail parties. In time, he became numb and sleepy, his worries dissolved in ethyl alcohol.