The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (25 page)

“Actually, it does sir,” Carulla said, standing her ground. “The pattern of the containers on deck leaks into the signature. We try to fix on immovable features of the ship—the beam, length, position of fixed objects—but if you move enough stuff around, or even change a few colors, you change the signature. Remember, we have tens of thousands of ships out there that are remarkably alike. It’s not perfect technology. I’m working on it and it’s just a matter of time before I find her again. My guess is that she will be on the eastern coast of Africa or in the Red Sea, if she has not docked at Aden or one of the other local ports.”

“Let’s hope she’s not in port,” Wheatley said. “That’s my worst nightmare.”

“Olof, this is Kate. We’ll relocate the ship. Meantime, we’ve saved ourselves a wasted trip to Indonesia.”

“What if we try to focus also on the sender, not just the package?” Wheatley said. “Have you tried talking to Mahmood about making an effort to reach out to Al-Greeb?”

“Yes, we’ve discussed it. He’s willing to do it.”

“Mahmood can establish contact with Al-Greeb for us? My God, that would solve a lot of our problems! Al-Greeb likely knows just where that ship is.”

“Al-Greeb in past months was willing to provide ISI with somewhat general updates on Al-Zawahiri’s plans simply as the price of staying in Pakistan, totally under the radar.”

“So how does it work?” Wheatley asked.

“Well, for starters, Mahmood would leave a low-level contact in Peshawar a signal indicating he wanted a face-to-face. Then Al-Greeb would come to him at a mosque in the Old City.”

“And he’s willing to set that up for us?” Mort Feldman sounded skeptical.

“Yes,” Kate said. “He’ll do it. I’m certain of it.”

“This gives us another oar in the water,” Wheatley said. “Go for it. Wrap up what you’re doing in Surat and get back to Islamabad and talk to Brigadier Mahmood.”

There was a snake-oil salesman in Chowk Yadgar Square loudly proclaiming the virtues of his miracle cure for all ills in a singsong chant of many stanzas. He was perched on a narrow, rainbow-colored stool addressing a packed crowd of some twenty passersby, including several who seemed to be hanging onto his every word. They proffered their rupees. He held up a bottle of the concoction—it looked like Worcestershire sauce—and pointed to it as he sang.

Chowk Yadgar Square was teeming with traffic and people. A fine blue haze of cement dust and exhaust fumes hung in the air. Honking horns, squealing pedi-taxis, and broken mufflers provided a cacophonous drumbeat that competed with the tuneful voice of the snake-oil salesman. Kate Langley strained to hear what Brigadier Mahmood was saying to her.

“He sells a great deal of it because it is essentially fortified wine, a kind of cheap vermouth made in China,” Brigadier Mahmood said. “Most of these poor Muslims have never tasted alcohol in any form and so they don’t recognize it for what it is, but they love the ‘high,’ never guessing they are drinking ethyl alcohol. In fact, they will swear by its efficacy.” He laughed. “These city folks love their booze and consume vast quantities of this man’s wares.”

“But does it cure snakebite?” she asked.

“Any snake who bit these chaps would surely get drunk from their blood alcohol,” Mahmood suggested. “Let us hope that it is only the poisonous snakes in Pakistan who do not forswear alcohol. Never let it be said that alcohol is not popular in Muslim countries. They just call it medicine.”

They had flown together to Peshawar the night before from Surat, using the same Beechcraft turboprop that had taken them from Karachi to India. Arriving in the city after dark, Mahmood had offered Kate a room in the posh villa that was always at his disposal in Peshawar. The house was so big that she took a whole floor to herself, with a bathroom and sitting room of her own. She did not see Mahmood again until breakfast.

In the morning, he offered to show her the place in the Old City where he had previously rendezvoused with Al-Greeb’s courier.

“Let me give you a tour of the most beautiful piece of architecture in Peshawar,” Mahmood said as they headed away from the crowded square and up the hill through Andar Sheher Bazaar, a narrow lane cutting through the steep walls of the densely packed market. The lane led to the top of a hill, which was the site of the Mohabbat Khan Mosque.

“’Andar Sheher’ means ‘the inner city,’” Mahmood said. “This small hill is the oldest part of Peshawar, the center of what used to be a fortified, walled town with sixteen gates. Humans have continuously occupied these few acres for at least the last three thousand years.”

Kate told Mahmood that she had been hoping for a transfer to Peshawar the week before she was PNG’d from Pakistan. To a foreigner in Pakistan, even one who had lived for some time in Islamabad, the Old City of Peshawar seemed like a step back in time. The convoluted opulence of the Mohabbat Khan Mosque and its lavish, intricate tiles and minarets was heightened by the squalid, choked bazaars which framed it, a kind of palace growing amid the weeds of commerce. It was a Pakistan unhindered by government planners trying to make it look finer or more ‘Western,’ and so it seemed to Kate that its beauty was in point of fact enhanced.

Kate saw a dark man in a turban and carrying a rifle stare at her. It brought her mind back to the task at hand.

“I wonder how many senior Al Qaeda types live within a few miles of where we are standing?” Kate said.

“I have always thought that Ayman al-Zawahiri would be found eventually in Peshawar,” Mahmood said. “You know he worked with the Red Crescent here in the late 1980s, and often met with Sheikh Osama at this very mosque? In those days, Al-Zawahiri carried two passports, a Swiss one in the name of Amin Uthman and a Dutch credential with the name Mahmood Hifnawi. I’m told that it was fairly easy to track him back then, which we did, but of course interest in him was limited to very few.”

“Why do you refer to Osama Bin Laden as ‘Sheikh Osama’?” Kate asked, annoyed. “It seems to dignify him in a way that any American would find offensive. And doesn’t it accord him a status that he never had?”

“Perhaps it is just force of habit. I usually don’t talk about him that way with Americans, but I have grown less guarded in the way that I speak with you,” Mahmood said. “Though you may despise him, don’t forget that he was able to mobilize and motivate two large and important groups of actors: First, the mujahideen in Afghanistan, whom you Americans supported with money and arms; and then the jihadists, whom you did not. He will always be remembered by Muslims as a great man, if a flawed one. And for a long time he was a hero among Americans for the work he did to oust the Russians.”

“We do tend to think in the States that moral clarity derives from black and white distinctions,” Kate admitted. “I suppose that under different circumstances, if he’d died before the Soviets left Afghanistan, for example, Bin Laden would today be regarded in America as a freedom fighter and a hero.”

“Precisely my point,” Mahmood said. “You are so much easier than most of your compatriots in grasping the Pakistani view. I enjoy it very much and find it refreshing. I like especially your notion that he died too late. History would be written quite differently if he had.”

“What do you mean?”

“That shows a grasp of Pakistani irony. An American would say of someone, ‘he died too soon’ meaning that he was deprived of the happiness of a long life, whereas a Pakistani would sooner say ‘he lived too long’ meaning that he used the extra time on earth merely to destroy his good reputation. Americans are optimistic, and we Pakistanis are the opposite.”

“Yes, I get it,” Kate said. “Pakistanis tend to think that the dice are loaded against them. We call that a fatalistic point of view.”

“The idea of
inshallah
is fatalistic,” Mahmood agreed.

“
Inshallah
in this country means one day later than
mañana
,” Kate said. “It’s a miracle that anything ever gets done in Pakistan.”

***

Brigadier Mahmood told Kate he wanted to show her the ‘drop’ in the Mohabbat Khan Mosque: a cubbyhole in an outdoor stairwell wall where a moveable tile gave access to a tiny hiding space large enough only for a rolled slip of paper. They approached the mosque by its main entrance.

“This is a classic example of Mughal architecture,” Mahmood said. “It was built in 1670 and destroyed at various times by the Sikhs, though the British helped restore parts of it. I think it is the most beautiful building in Peshawar. Imagine what it must have looked like in its prime.”

Adjacent to the entrance of the mosque, an ancient doorway led them into a large courtyard surrounded by a three-storey gallery. They climbed the tiled stairway to the uppermost balcony. The walls and columns of the building seemed to Kate as delicate as eggshells, with mosaics made up of tiles as small as pebbles.

“It is there,” Mahmood said, pointing discreetly. “When I have wanted to see Al-Greeb or one of his people, I would leave a message, and if they wanted to see me, they would do the same. I have my driver in Peshawar check the drop once a fortnight.”

“Wow, that’s quite a wait between visits. So how long between the time you request a meet and the event itself? Is it always two weeks?”

“Less, usually. There is no set schedule. This is all done very quietly and very carefully. I believe they check the drop more frequently than we do.”

Kate knew that her orders were to try to initiate contact with Al-Greeb, but she was ambivalent about the timing and the procedure to carry it out. Who would benefit most from this transaction? If Al-Greeb was not aware of the degree to which ISI and CIA had penetrated his plans to ship arms—and possibly also a nuclear device—from Russia to Karachi and onto the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
, surely a request for a meeting from Brigadier Mahmood would signal to him that something was amiss?

To that extent, even the act of making contact made CIA worse off than they had been before. What, then, might they gain by contact? Well, that was not a question she could comfortably answer. The notion of CIA having even informal contact with Al Qaeda was beyond imagination. Only in Pakistan was it conceivable that an intelligence agency could talk off the record with a terrorist organization, if only to try to minimize surprises on both sides. It seemed to Kate this was warfare without beliefs or principles: One did not negotiate with criminals.

The one area where Kate felt completely comfortable was with her partner at ISI: Brigadier Mahmood. In the time they had spent together in Islamabad, Karachi, Surat, and now in Peshawar, she had found in Mahmood an intelligence as acute as that of Mort Feldman or Olof Wheatley, mixed with a personality that was far more likeable and cultured. Mahmood was one of those rare Pakistanis with one foot in Pakistan and another foot in the United States, a man uniquely able to explain Pakistan to Americans and America to Pakistanis.

As she got to know him better, Kate respected Mahmood more. That was not her usual experience, either with work colleagues or with personal friends, whose weaknesses became more apparent the better one got to know them.

“Well, I guess this is crunch time, Mahmood,” Kate said. “Are you still on board with trying to set up a meet?”

“I am completely on board, as you say.”

“And your bosses?”

“It is probably best that I protect them from these activities,” Mahmood said.

“But what if something goes wrong? What if Al-Greeb holds you hostage?”

“That is unimaginable. To harm an ISI brigadier would bring the wrath of the whole government down on—our guests. I’m sure they don’t want and could not withstand that.”

Kate paused before asking her last question. “And what about me coming with you?”

“I’m afraid that is out of the question,” Mahmood said. “Even if you were not a pretty woman, you are an American and an infidel, if you will forgive me for putting it so crudely. Any one of those alone would make your presence unacceptable. I am so sorry, Kate. Honestly, I could not consent to these risks even if these obstacles did not prevent our even contemplating your participation.”

Kate nodded without replying. She had already heard these arguments in the last 48 hours. Besides, there was a supportive role she could play in this exercise that did not require Mahmood’s cooperation or even his consent.

She returned to the bottom of the staircase on her own and waited outside the entrance of the mosque, by the tiled blue ablution pond. Brigadier Mahmood joined her some five minutes later.

“It is done,” he said.

***

Kate was not used to having free time on her hands, but there was little she could do in Peshawar while waiting for a response to Brigadier Mahmood’s message requesting a meeting with Yasser al-Greeb. She talked to Alice Carulla on the secure phone at the consulate on Hospital Road, though she felt quite out of her depth in the hi-tech world of image intelligence. But Carulla also relied on Kate to some extent, because Kate had more experience in the field

“What do you think the odds are that Yasser al-Greeb is on the
Nippon Yoku-Maru
?” Carulla asked her.

“If the bomb is on board, I would say pretty good,” Kate said. “It’s the sort of operation that would require high-level direction that can’t be provided at a distance. You only have the 9/11 advantage of complete surprise once. Gone are the days when Al Qaeda leaders can direct these things at a remote distance.”

“Of course, there may be some other technical person on the ship,” Carulla replied. “Especially if they’re going to detonate the device onboard. It’s possible some of those guys would stay with the bomb to make sure nothing goes wrong in the final hour or two.”

Carulla was one of those talkative analysts who seemed happiest when they had someone else to bounce ideas off of and challenge them, Kate conjectured that Mort Feldman was probably barking orders at her and otherwise treating her like a flunky, and this was correct. Carulla didn’t mind. She was happy to have an overseas gig. She told Kate that the Red Sea was sufficiently constrained a body of water to make it easier to scan for ships than the Arabian Sea or the Indian Ocean. She expected to find the vessel soon, even if she had to rely on the use of human eyeballs to do it.