Secrets of State (11 page)

“Hello, Nandi,” she said. “Don't worry. I have something for you.”

Lena fished through her purse for a moment before producing a Halloween-size pack of Twizzlers red licorice. The kids in Dharavi loved American candy and her father sent care packages that she could parcel out to the children. Red licorice and Starbursts were the most popular and the easiest to keep close at hand. Chocolate had an unfortunate tendency to turn to soup in the Mumbai heat.

Nandi was one of her favorites. His family was poor even by the standards the residents of the slum used to judge poor, but he had a spark about him that made those around him want to smile. Even his name, Nandi, meant “one who pleases others.” Nandi was one of the regular students in Lena's school, and one of the best. He was a quick study in math. He had already learned to code in Python, and he could repair just about any of the dated pieces of technology that kept the Dharavi economy stumbling forward. Lena used copious bribes of candy to keep Nandi and the other kids coming back for their lessons. But Ramananda too had seen something special in the boy, and his plans and hers had little overlap.

Ramananda's business model was a conglomerate, like an underworld version of General Electric. A number of independent divisions within the firm ensured a consistent revenue stream even when times were tough in any one particular area. Some of the divisions were relatively respectable: recycling trash, begging, and gambling. Others were manifestly on the wrong side of the law. He did not like to talk about it, but Lena knew that Ramananda had a piece of the action in extortion, bid rigging, fencing stolen goods, and petty larceny. Her godfather “the Godfather,” as her father had put it. A group of street toughs called the Hard Men served as enforcers. Nandi was currently apprenticing in petty theft, but Ramananda—who had no children of his own—had told her that he hoped to train Nandi to serve as his number two and ultimately, perhaps, to inherit the business.

Ramananda had long ago earned enough money to move on from Dharavi. But he stayed. He liked it here, he had told Lena once. His criminal activities were all outside the ward. He offered Dharavi businesses his “protection” on a pro bono basis and the loans he made to the residents of the slum were closer to the bank rate than to the usurious interest he charged in his more traditional loan-sharking operation. Dharavi was his home. Ramananda was a gangster and a mob boss, Lena knew, but he had a softer side as well.

It was in his capacity as an advocate for the ward and the underclass who lived there that he had first crossed paths with Lena's father. He had been perhaps less hardened back then, not quite so captured by the criminal net that he would ultimately weave around himself. Still, the compassion he felt for the poor and downtrodden of the slums was, Lena believed, genuine, both then and now.

Ramananda had once explained to Lena that he saw himself as a kind of Robin Hood, redistributing India's newfound wealth to ensure that the lower castes were not left permanently on the lowest rung. Robin Hood, Lena had observed, had not kept 80 percent of his Merry Men's take for himself. Ramananda had laughed at that.

Lena herself had visited Dharavi often as a child. Sometimes with her mother when she came to teach art classes or visit friends who had stayed behind. Sometimes with her father when he came to meet with Ramananda or other Dalit activists in the slum. She had grown up playing in these narrow, twisted alleys. It was why she had chosen to live if not in Dharavi then at least alongside it and do what she could to improve conditions for even a few of the hundreds of thousands living there in grinding poverty. Dharavi was her home too.

Ramananda had not moved. He sat cross-legged on the dais, a thin sheen of sweat on his face as though the simple act of breathing were enough to exhaust him. Lena walked over to him and bent to kiss his cheek. He smelled of cardamom and cheap aftershave.

“It looks like you've been entertaining.”

“That makes it sound as though I was enjoying myself, and I assure you that I was not. I was receiving petitions.”

The social contract in Dharavi demanded that Ramananda, as a man of power and wealth, listen to the problems and concerns of the residents of the slum and do what he could to improve their lot in life. Many asked for a loan to start a business or feed their families, and Ramananda was typically happy to oblige. Others needed help navigating the Indian bureaucracy. Ramananda was well connected and with a phone call could often make minor disputes with the BMC and its various service branches disappear. Unfortunately, the Gummadi brothers were even better connected, and Ramananda had not been able to stop the Five Star development's approval.

“How did it go with Vamsam?” Ramananda asked.

“Not well,” Lena admitted.

“I'm not surprised.”

Ramananda's relationship with Vamsam, the ward administrator responsible for implementing BMC policies in Dharavi, was not an easy one. Twenty years of development planning—some well meaning and naive and some grasping and greedy—had foundered on the rocks of entrenched local interests. No interests were more local, or more entrenched, than those of Ramananda. Lena knew that no development plan for Dharavi could succeed unless the developers were willing to work with the residents rather than seeing them as obstacles, stones they needed to remove before plowing the soil.

“Vamsam is a snake,” Ramananda continued. “And there is only one way to deal with a snake.” He slammed his open hand on the floor beside him with enough force to make the raised platform jump.

“So what do you think we should do?” Lena asked.

“Fight back.”

“Against the BMC? That's taking a pretty big bite, don't you think?”

“Not more than I can chew, I assure you,” Ramananda said, baring his teeth in a mock scowl.

“Why, Uncle, what sharp teeth you have.”

“The better to chew Sayyap Vamsam a new orifice with.”

“Don't do anything foolish,” Lena pleaded. “The last thing the neighborhood needs is more trouble with the authorities. You too. Prison wouldn't suit you.”

“I'm too pretty, aren't I?”

“That's one way of looking at it.”

“Okay, not Vamsam. He's not the weak link, in any event. How about the Gummadi brothers?”

“As the weak link?”

“Yes.”

“That's an even more ridiculous idea.”

Ramananda did not make idle talk. He always had an agenda, an angle. If he said the Gummadi brothers were somehow vulnerable, there was a reason for it.

“I don't mean head-on. No muscle.”

“So what do you have in mind?”

Ramananda stood up. This in itself was worthy of note. It was not something that Lena had seen often.

“Nandi,” he called. “Bring me the bag you picked up for me earlier today.”

The boy brought over a blue paper sack that looked like the kind that held sugar or flour in the supermarket.

“The Gummadi brothers are tough customers. But the machines they have positioned to assault our homes are not quite so invulnerable.”

Lena thought about the earthmoving equipment parked in the lot across the entrance to the slum. There had been a fence, but no guard.

“Uncle, are you going monkey-wrenching?”

Ramananda sat back down, puffing at the exertion, the blue sack balanced precariously on one knee.

“I'm unfamiliar with the term, but if it means what I think it means, then, yes, I am.”

“What's in the bag? Are you planning to put sugar in the gas tanks?”

“Alas, that doesn't really work. It's an urban myth, like the old story about the crocodiles in the Kolkata sewer system. The sugar just clogs the fuel filters. Put in a replacement and the engine's as good as new.”

Ramananda pulled a small folding knife out of his pocket and sliced open the top of the bag, pouring a small pile of white powder out onto the floor next to him.

“This, on the other hand, is another story altogether. I have a cousin in Jaipur in the gem-polishing business. He sent me a few bags of silicon carbide. They use it to polish diamonds. Mix it in with the oil in the crankcase and it will shut down the engines permanently. It will take weeks to get replacement parts.”

“And just who's going to get that assignment? I have trouble seeing you squeezing under the fence, Uncle.”

Ramananda laughed. “Me? Never. That kind of work is for the Hard Men . . . and the young and nimble.” He looked over her shoulder, and Lena turned to see Nandi sitting at a small table in the corner with an empty Twizzlers wrapper in front of him and a small pile of Starbursts that he had doubtless pilfered from her purse while she was talking to Ramananda. Nandi had demonstrated a remarkable natural aptitude for picking pockets.

“Nandi,” she scolded him gently. “No more taking candy without permission. If you do it again, you're cut off. No more Tootsie Pops, no more licorice, no nothing.”

“I'm sorry, Ms. Lena,” he replied in his Bengali lilt. “It was really just for practice. Here, you can have them back.” He pushed the small pile of Starbursts toward her on the table.

“You keep them this time. But no more stealing.”

“No more stealing,” Nandi lied solemnly.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

APRIL 5

I
t was his favorite painting, the one that reminded him most powerfully of her. Sam had set up the living room in their Capitol Hill townhouse in such a way that it occupied the spot where a normal family might have put a television. Sitting on the couch, with his feet up on the coffee table, NPR's
JazzSet
on the radio, and a tumbler full of sixteen-year-old Lagavulin in his hand, he was looking right at the picture.

It was not a self-portrait, or if it was, it was not a literal representation of what Janani had looked like. There were enough photographs scattered throughout the house to serve that purpose. The woman in the painting had sharp, angular features. His wife's face had been rounder and softer. But the woman in the diaphanous sari floating above the city like a figure in a Chagall painting captured something about her that was simultaneously ineffable but essential. Sam never tired of looking at the painting with its dark, somber colors and suggestions of impending mortality.

Janani had already been diagnosed when she started the painting and was suffering through the first round of the chemotherapy that would ultimately leave her too weak to hold a brush. The painting had depth to it, a pathos that was well beyond anything that she had done previously. The certainty of dying had elicited in Janani something that transcended her talents as a serious amateur, as though that knowledge had allowed her to tap into a well of artistic sensibility that had been buried somewhere deep and safe. Lena hated the painting for the same reason that Sam loved it. It was more reliable than their memories. More real than the truth.

Vanalika was right, Sam decided. He was living with a ghost. He should move on with his life. Lena said the same thing, and she had loved her mother at least as much as Sam had. But he did not want to. He did not want to meet somebody new. He wanted to look at the painting. If Vanalika would leave Rajiv, maybe the two of them would have a future. But even though Sam had proposed that very thing to her, his reaction to Vanalika's gentle rebuff had been closer to relief than disappointment.

He thought about the intercept he had read of Vanalika's purported conversation with Guhathakurta. He tried to think as an analyst: clearly, objectively, and dispassionately. He had been gone for maybe half an hour, and he had taken their one car. It was possible, he supposed, that Vanalika had arranged for another car to be parked somewhere nearby. She could have gotten dressed after Sam left, followed him to town, and made the call before driving back, ditching the car, getting naked—and here Sam momentarily lost his hold on professional dispassion—and getting into bed before Sam made it back from town. It was possible, he supposed, but somewhat far-fetched. On top of that, it was impossible to reconcile the contents of the message with what he knew Vanalika believed about Kashmir and the Indo-Pak dynamic. Sure, she was a patriot. But she had a sophisticated worldview that was not consistent with the paranoid fearmongering from the alleged intercept.

Occam's razor—the principle that the simplest explanation was the correct explanation—argued in favor of the message being a fabrication. Why and how were secondary questions, and for the moment, Sam would have to put them aside until he could learn more.

He worked the issue over in his mind as though he were prodding a loose tooth with his tongue. He finished the glass of Lagavulin and poured himself another two fingers.

JazzSet
was followed by the news program
All Things Considered
. The lead story was the death in the early-morning hours of White House Chief of Staff Solomon Braithwaite. It had been the talk of Washington all day, and the parade of journalists and “experts” on NPR had little new information to offer. Preliminary reports from the D.C. police indicated that the single-car accident on Rock Creek Parkway was a result of alcohol and excessive speed. The usual conspiracy nuts and talk-radio loonies were already calling it a government cover-up.

President Lord was going to miss Braithwaite. Her administration had proven difficult to control. This was not unusual. Sam remembered reading something that Truman had said when Eisenhower had won the 1952 election. “Poor Ike. He's used to giving orders . . . and having them obeyed.” But the Lord cabinet was especially fractious, and Braithwaite had been Emily Lord's most important ally and confidant. It would be more difficult for her to control the hardliners in her own cabinet without Braithwaite to hold the whip in hand. Sam liked Lord. He had voted for her, but you did not need to be an experienced analyst to see that internal divisions within her administration could undo everything that she had accomplished.

The phone rang. Sam glanced at the caller ID screen. It read
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
. He used the remote to turn down the radio.

“Trainor,” Sam said, when he picked it up, taking care not to slur.

“Sam. It's Andy.”

“Hah. I was just thinking about our little project. Are you still in the office? It's late.”

“Yeah, I kinda lost track of time. You'll understand why when you see what I have.”

“What is it?”

“Not for the phone is what it is. Can we meet tomorrow? Early . . . like, six a.m. I'd rather have this conversation when there's no one else around.”

“Sure.” Sam felt a rush of adrenaline burn through the light fog of alcohol at the implication in Andy's comment that he had uncovered something significant. “I can be at State at six. Your office?”

“No,” he replied. “Let's meet in the Fish Tank. That early, we'll have the place all to ourselves.”

The products that INR dealt with could only be handled in secure rooms. Most of the bureaus in the State Department maintained a SCIF where senior officials would do a weekly read of the “traffic” and hold particularly sensitive conversations. INR was the keeper of the department's SCIF network and had given internal nicknames to most of them. The Fish Tank was the secure conference room in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. It was one of the more obscure SCIFs in the building, and the civil-service scientists who made up the bulk of the bureau's personnel rarely dealt in the kind of highly classified information that was INR's stock-in-trade. At six in the morning, the OES bureau would be a tomb. It was a strictly nine-to-five operation.

“The Fish Tank at six,” Sam agreed. “I'll see you there.”

“Good.”

“Andy, is this big?”

“It's bigger than that.”

•   •   •

When Andy got excited,
his left eyebrow twitched. It was an obvious tell, the kind Sam had seized on when he had been subsidizing his college costs at Northwestern by playing poker against barely numerate liberal arts majors. At six in the morning, Andy's eyebrow was jumping up and down like he had made an inside straight on the final pot.

The Fish Tank was one of the smaller SCIFs. There was room for maybe eight to sit around the table. They had the room all to themselves. Sam set his cardboard cup of Starbucks on the polished conference table and took the seat opposite Andy.

“You look like you've already had your coffee,” Sam said.

“Three cups. The guys in INR got one of those espresso machines a couple of weeks ago. I didn't used to drink the stuff, but I'm starting to like it a lot.”

Sam could see Andy's hands shaking slightly from the caffeine overload.

“You might want to think about cutting back on the hard stuff,” Sam commented, “or you'll have a hell of a time sitting at your workstation.”

“There's no time to sit. We've found something . . . Hell, I've found something . . . that'll blow the doors off the intel community. We're going to be famous.”

Sam was not entirely persuaded this should be considered a good thing.

“Go on. Tell me what you've got.”

There was a dark blue briefcase on the table made of ballistic cloth. An industrial-strength zipper at the top was closed with a chunky key lock. It was the kind of bag used to move intel products from one secure location to another. This one was emblazoned with the State Department's Great Seal and the words
BUREAU
OF
INTELLIGENCE
AND
R
ESEARCH
.

Andy pulled a key out of his pocket and opened the lock. Unzipping the bag, he pulled out a brown folder sealed with tape.
Andy was always one for following the rules,
Sam thought.

The young analyst used a pair of scissors to slit the thick envelope open and slid a sheaf of papers onto the table.

“I've got somebody by the balls is what I've got.”

It was a bit melodramatic, and Sam had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling at Eagle Scout Andy Krittenbrink's best effort at cursing like a sailor.

“Who?”

Andy suddenly seemed less triumphant.

“I'm not sure,” he admitted, before adding somewhat defiantly, “yet.”

“Show me. Walk me through what you've put together.”

“Okay. I started from the assumption that the Vanalika intercept was fraudulent. As you know, I wasn't entirely sold on that idea, but I was willing to test it out. It makes no sense as a lone plant, so I went looking for similar products, things that we could cross-check. I found almost thirty pieces that don't check out, both HUMINT and SIGINT. Conversations that allegedly took place when the participants were known to be in different countries. Telephone intercepts that aren't backed up by the raw logs of calls made and received. That sort of thing.”

“Let me see some of them.”

“Sure.”

Andy riffled through the papers in front of him like an experienced Texas Hold'em dealer in Vegas.

“Let's start with this one.” He slid a single report across the table to Sam.

“It's purportedly an intercept of a conversation between General Qalat from the Pakistani Army's Third Missile Corps and Hasfan Darzada from President Talwar's office. Most of the conversation was focused on nuclear triggers tied to specific Indian provocations. It's a fairly complex topic, and they agreed to meet for lunch the next day to continue the conversation. Only that's impossible. Qalat was in Brussels for a meeting with NATO on Afghanistan and would be there for another four days. I have cables from the U.S. Mission to NATO that report on Qalat's interventions at the meetings. Darzada was in Islamabad. There's a newspaper account of his meeting with clerics at the Presidency on the same day he and Qalat were allegedly lunching together.”

Sam had skimmed quickly through the report as Andy was describing it. It was exactly what he said it was, but there was something else about it as well. It was too perfect. It provided a crystalline snapshot of high-level Pakistani thinking about nuclear doctrine. It was the kind of thing that Indian strategic planners would have been salivating over. But it was
too
neat. The intel world, in Sam's experience, was muddy, murky, and uncertain. Significant information rarely came gift-wrapped with ribbons and bows. It had to be painstakingly assembled from data that often pointed in different directions. The piece in front of Sam just did not feel real.

“Show me a few more.”

“Okay. This one is a HUMINT piece. The Indian source provides details of an analysis of a reported incursion across the Line of Control by elements of the Second Artillery Division's Third Brigade. That division doesn't have three brigades. Maybe the source was wrong, that's always a possibility with HUMINT. But this one is harder to explain.” He passed another report to Sam. It was formatted as an NSA product, meaning it was signals intelligence.

“This is an intercept of a call by Rangarajan's national security advisor to the number two person in the Indian intel service outlining hypotheticals for an assassination attempt on President Talwar in the event of an imminent nuclear launch. This stuff is absolute dynamite. But we also happen to have access to the complete call log of one of the phones associated with the conversation. There's no record of the call having taken place. In fact, the date-time group overlaps with another call to a different number. There was no report of that conversation, meaning that NSA didn't consider it interesting or important enough to circulate. I got a friend at Fort Meade to dig up the original tape of the call. The guy was just making plans with a friend to go to the symphony with their wives. A far cry from planning to murder a head of state.”

Andy offered up a few more. All were damning and all had that too-perfect quality that Sam had sensed in the first report.

“Is there any pattern to the reports? Anything that ties them together?” Sam asked.

“You mean other than being super scary and threatening to start World War III?”

“Yes. Other than that.”

“There are a couple of things. Nearly all of the products have been marked for inclusion in the intel-sharing program.”