Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

Genres: War & Military; Political Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

From a veteran insider with over twenty years' experience in the U.S. Foreign Service comes a taut, insightful thriller of global intrigue and behind-the-scenes international politics.

Sam Trainor's career of overseas work coupled with a penchant for being outspoken has left him on the outside of the competitive Washington establishment.  Formerly the top South Asia expert in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Trainor has moved to the private sector, working as an analyst for the consulting firm Argus Systems.

But Sam soon discovers that for all their similarities, the government and their hired contractors have vastly different motives. As he struggles to adjust to a more corporate, profit-driven version of the work that had been his life, he stumbles across an intelligence anomaly-the transcript of a phone conversation about the fastest ways to upend the delicate political balance keeping India and Pakistan from all-out war. Yet Sam knows that conversation can't have occurred-because he is having an affair with one of the alleged participants.

As he digs into the source of this misinformation, he realizes that more is at stake than just bad intel. Someone is deliberately twisting the intelligence to stoke the simmering conflict between India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed rivals that have already fought multiple wars. And Sam's new employer could be up to its neck in it.

Release date: May 26, 2015

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 432

Sample

DULLES, VIRGINIA

It is not an especially large weapon, as such things go. But then again, there really is no such thing as a small nuclear bomb, just one of which, as the bumper stickers had it, can ruin your whole day. The simple gun-type enriched uranium warhead generates an explosive force of some one hundred and fifty tons of TNT. Some of the larger thermonuclear bombs in the American or Russian arsenal, the strategic city busters, weigh in at twenty or thirty megatons. This bomb, however, belongs to one of the alphabet soup of Middle Eastern terrorist groups rather than to a superpower. For their purposes, it is more than adequate. Nor does the group’s membership—those who are not themselves incinerated in the initial fireball—mind especially that they could not arrange for the airburst at three thousand feet that would have maximized both the blast damage and the radiation effects of the bomb. Their delivery vehicle is an old Ford panel van parked in front of the Empire State Building near the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue.

One second after the small explosion that shoots a subcritical cylinder of highly enriched uranium onto a matching uranium spike, a shock wave with an overpressure of twenty pounds per square inch has reached out four-tenths of a mile from the square meter of Manhattan that instantly and irrevocably wrests the title of Ground Zero from the World Trade Center. The 102-story-tall Empire State Building disintegrates. The fifteen thousand or so people who work there and several hundred assorted tourists waiting patiently for their turn to see the fabled views on what had been a sparkling clear day die instantly, vaporized by the eight thousand–degree heat or crushed by hurtling chunks of rock and metal. Other iconic buildings within the blast zone fare no better. The New York Public Library, Penn Station, and Madison Square Garden are transformed into indistinguishable piles of radioactive rubble. At midday, there are nearly eighty thousand people within a circle with a radius of .4 mile from Ground Zero. Not a single one survives.

Four seconds after critical mass, the shock wave—now reduced to a mere ten psi—has traveled nearly a mile from Ground Zero. The thermal pulse ignites thousands of fires, most of which are promptly snuffed out by the blast wave. It is a small mercy. The top thirty stories are blown off the Chrysler Building. Even so, the misshapen stump of the art deco landmark is once again the tallest building in Midtown. The glass-and-steel UN headquarters building on First Avenue at Forty-fifth Street is a multinational deathtrap. Viktor Janukovski, the newly elected Secretary-General of the United Nations, is torn to pieces by flying glass and decapitated by his own iMac. The steel frame of the building remains largely intact. Ten blocks to the south, however, Bellevue Hospital has been leveled. There are now more than three hundred thousand dead.

Six seconds after detonation, the ring of destruction reaches out a mile and a half from the Empire State Building. At the outer edge of the ring, the blast wave has dropped to five psi, enough to blow out all of the windows at Lincoln Center. Carnegie Hall is on fire. The thermal pulse is still strong enough to kill anyone in the direct line of sight. Approximately thirty thousand people perish in exactly this fashion. All together, another two hundred thousand people die in this ring.

The iconic mushroom cloud now hovers like a specter over New York City. Radioactive fallout . . .

•   •   •

“Damn. The system froze again.” Dr. Adam Birnbaum looked up from the screen where a computer-generated image of a devastated New York City was overlaid with graphs and charts offering arcane technical details about pressure waves and radiation levels. Although he knew his way around a database and understood the fundamentals of nuclear fission, Dr. Birnbaum’s field of specialty was neither computer science nor atomic physics. He was a political scientist, widely recognized as one of the world’s leading academic authorities on terrorism.

“That can’t happen on Thursday,” said James Smith, who was the interface between Birnbaum and the source of funding for the project to which he had dedicated the last three years of his life. The Cassandra Project had started at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. When it began to produce results, the enigmatic Mr. Smith had taken over responsibility from DARPA. Perhaps the best word to describe their new paymaster was, somewhat ironically, nondescript. He was a gray man in a gray suit with gray hair that was neither short nor long. Even his skin had a grayish tinge, like that of a chameleon on a concrete wall. According to his business card, Mr. Smith represented a private consulting company called Agilent Industries that had the contract with DARPA to manage the project. Birnbaum had been in and around the Washington establishment for long enough to know that this was horseshit. Mr. Smith was with one of the various U.S. clandestine intelligence services with their own complex ecologies. And if his name was Smith, then Birnbaum would eat his hat. Whoever he worked for, Smith was able to provide the kind of computing power that made the project possible. Birnbaum did not particularly care if the money for the project came from Agilent Industries or the Central Intelligence Agency. In the end, what did it matter?

One of the first things Agilent had done after taking control of the project was to move Cassandra from downtown D.C. to a bland office park off the Dulles toll road. This was consistent with the division of spoils among researchers in the metro Washington region. Suburban Maryland, with the National Institutes of Health and a plethora of advanced genetics labs, had a virtual monopoly on the life sciences. Northern Virginia got the death sciences.

Birnbaum’s research was at the cutting edge of modeling for complex social behaviors. There was no behavior more complex in his view than political violence. Complex, however, was not the same thing as unpredictable. The behaviors involved could be disaggregated, expressed as algorithms, and—with enough computing power—modeled. At least that’s what Birnbaum had set out to prove. He was starting at the top of the Richter scale. The nightmare scenario. The Cassandra Project was focused exclusively on how different terrorist groups might acquire and utilize one or more nuclear weapons on American soil.

“What’s Thursday?” Birnbaum asked.

“You’re demonstrating Cassandra to the board of directors,” Smith replied with equanimity. “The full dog-and-pony.”

“That’s in three days. We’re not ready,” said Dr. Dora Karamanolis, Birnbaum’s primary collaborator on the Cassandra Project. She was a computer scientist and, in addition to designing the hardware, Karamanolis had also developed the programs that modeled Birnbaum’s behavioral algorithms. The diminutive Greek was Birnbaum’s physical and temperamental opposite. The corpulent Birnbaum tipped the scales at more than two hundred and fifty pounds. Karamanolis barely broke triple digits and had the delicate bone structure of a bird. Where the political scientist was pugnacious and short-tempered and—he would have been the first to admit—somewhat slovenly, Karamanolis was preternaturally calm and precise almost to the point at which it would have been considered a disorder. She was enormously proud of her brainchild. Cassandra’s existence was classified. But if the project had been stacked against the competition, Karamanolis was confident that the trailer-truck-size Cassandra would be among the five fastest supercomputers on the planet.

“You will be ready,” Smith said. It was not phrased as encouragement. It was a command. Everything Smith said was a command.

Karamanolis shook her head. “The hardware is ready, but we are still having trouble with the graphics software. It’s just too much data, even for Cassandra. We could mock something up with stock footage, but otherwise there’s no guarantee we can avoid another system freeze.”

“Stock footage would defeat the purpose of the program,” Birnbaum interjected. “We’re modeling the real world and trying to capture all of the variables. Everything from how the bad guys acquire the weapons, to how they use them, to an assessment of the fallout. Political as well as radiological. That way, when we alter the input variables, we can model probable outcomes and assess risk. If al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb gets ahold of a bomb, the mullahs are likely to use it in a considerably different way than the Haqqani network would. There are thousands of variables that we need to account for. Stock is the opposite of that. You only get out what you put in. You can’t adjust the variables and there’s no room for serendipity.”

“The board isn’t terribly interested in serendipity,” Smith observed. “They understand the science, but they’re not looking for variables so much as they are constants.”

“What do you mean?” Birnbaum asked. In their nearly two years of association, this was the first time that Smith had said anything about the nature of the “board of directors” responsible for Cassandra’s continued funding. If there was an opportunity to learn something useful about the keepers of the cash, Birnbaum wanted to seize it.

“Variables lend themselves to scenarios,” Smith explained. “Constants lend themselves to action.”

“But variables are what Cassandra is all about.”

“Are they?”

Birnbaum looked blank.

“What’s the one thing that’s constant in nearly every scenario, every regression that you’ve run?”

“The source of the weapon,” Birnbaum replied. “Everyone always assumed that Iran or North Korea would represent the biggest threat, but they are strong states. Too strong, really. They aren’t going to surrender control of the crown jewels to a bunch of wing nuts with a messiah complex. Cassandra has been remarkably consistent on that point. The real threat comes from weak states that can no longer exercise effective command and control over the nuclear infrastructure.”

“That’s right,” Smith said. “It’s hard to plan for the variable, but you can plan for the constant. The primary source of the threat. Our ally. Pakistan.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.

MARCH 28

It was a good thing that the Council on Foreign Relations did not, as the black-helicopter-obsessed lunatic fringe had it, secretly run the world. If it did, Sam Trainor thought to himself, the world would be forty-five minutes late for everything. He could only hope that the CFR’s alleged coconspirators, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Trilateral Commission, were more efficient. From long experience, however, the Council knew how to take the sting out of the seemingly inevitable delays in its programming, even in the hyperscheduled world of Washington high policy—an open bar. Uniformed caterers circulated among the great and powerful waiting for the evening’s event to begin, distributing copious amounts of free expensive liquor along with sugarcane-skewered jumbo shrimp and caviar toast points. Had this been Los Angeles or New York, the catering staff would have been a mix of aspiring screenwriters and out-of-work actors. At CFR headquarters, the drinks and canapés were shepherded by bright-eyed graduates of Ivy League and almost Ivy League universities hoping to find work as program analysts in one of the hundreds of D.C. think tanks or as legislative aides on Capitol Hill. Hard-core policy wonks.

Sam took an amber tumbler of scotch from a tray offered by a fresh-scrubbed intern who no doubt saw himself as the future ambassador to Luxembourg or some such. There was a time, Sam remembered, when he had been very much like this twenty-something, full of the kind of ambition that at its best represented a sort of naive hope that you can change the world and, at its worst, too often devolved into a mere lust for power. This was official Washington. Hollywood for ugly people. The New Rome. It was a company town in which the company was the federal government. The District of Columbia was the capital city of the single greatest power ever to bestride the globe. But it could be as shallow as Tinseltown on a bad day and as catty and as gossipy as a junior high school cafeteria.

Around him, Sam could hear the buzz of the Washington establishment playing everyone’s favorite party games: Who’s Up; Who’s Down? and Who’s In; Who’s Out? The guest of honor tonight at CFR’s spiffy, almost new headquarters at Seventeenth and F was most definitely both Up and In. A soft chime signaled that the lecture was finally ready to begin. Sam shuffled along with the now half-toasted crowd into the hotel-ballroom-style room that the Council used for larger meetings. The carpet was a distinguished charcoal gray. At the front of the room was a speaker’s dais. Behind it, a Prussian blue background announced some fifty times in six-inch-high capital letters that this was THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS. Presumably, those in attendance, nearly all of whom were either members of the Council or invited guests, knew where they were. But it looked good on television.

Sam took a seat toward the rear. In truth, he was eager to hear what the speaker had to say. Richard Newton was one of the brighter stars in the Washington firmament. He was dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and the author of the year’s most talked-about article in Foreign Affairs magazine, “The Not-So-Great Game,” a thoughtful and scholarly essay on big-power rivalry in Central Asia. On top of that, he was one of the cofounders of the think tank of the moment, American Century. Like Newton himself, American Century was somewhere to the political right of Vlad the Impaler. And Newton was rumored to be in line for a senior job in the next Republican administration, if there ever was another one of those.

He was also an asshole.

Newton and Sam had been classmates at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins nearly a quarter century ago. They say that people change as they grow older, but Sam had never met an asshole who had grown out of that particular condition. There was no reason to believe that Richard Newton was the exception to the rule.

Sam shifted awkwardly in the thinly padded plastic chair. He was uncomfortably aware of his belt buckle digging into his stomach. He was putting on weight. Janani would not have given him a hard time, but she no doubt would have started to “forget” the Ben & Jerry’s on her weekly forays to Safeway.

It had been almost seven years, and Sam had not really moved on. Closing his eyes, he tried to picture his wife as he wanted to remember her: young and optimistic and full of life. But all he could see was his dear Janani lying in her room at Sibley Memorial Hospital with a plastic tube up her nose and an IV needle in her arm pumping the chemical poisons into her body that the doctors insisted were the only thing that could save her life. Over a few short weeks, she had grown weak and thin, wasting away as the cancer and the poison ate away at her insides, racing to see which could be the one to kill her. He allowed himself a brief moment of grief that almost, but not quite, crossed over into self-pity.

It was spring now. Time to get back on the bike and lose the winter weight. D.C. had built a fantastic network of bicycle trails and in good weather Sam liked to ride his Diamondback road bike to the point of exhaustion and forgetfulness.

It took nearly ten minutes for the guests to take their seats. Sam swished the scotch in his glass and listened to the ice cubes clink against one another agreeably.

The president of the Council, Dr. George Forrester, stepped up to the dais with the easy authority of a man used to commanding lecture halls. For all of the dignity that he sought to project, there was something about Forrester that reminded Sam of Ichabod Crane. He was tall and skinny, almost gangly, with a pronounced aquiline nose. It was rumored that Forrester had had LASIK surgery to help him with his tennis game, and the rectangular black-rimmed glasses he wore were a zero-prescription affectation that he hoped made him look like the university professor he never was. If so, his three-thousand-dollar bespoke suit somewhat spoiled that effect. Forrester was a “public intellectual,” one of the Brahmins who moved in and out of government. When he was out, Forrester’s home was one or more of the higher-end think tanks. The president of the Council on Foreign Relations was at the very top of that particular pyramid.

“Council members, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Our guest of honor tonight needs no introduction.” Forrester paused and there was the somewhat mischievous look on his face of a man about to tell a joke that he is quite certain is hysterically funny. “But he needs the introduction.”

The audience laughed in self-knowing fashion. The Washington elite loved to poke fun at their own pomposity and self-importance. Ironically, Sam thought, this only made them seem somehow even more pompous and self-important. Still, Sam laughed along with the others. It was pretty funny, if only because it was largely accurate. Sitting on a comfortable leather chair next to the podium, Richard Newton smiled at the joke that was ostensibly, but not really, at his expense.

Forrester offered a brief synopsis of the featured speaker’s many accomplishments and awards. Sam couldn’t help but think about his own, much skinnier résumé. He and Newton had started from essentially the same place. Now Sam was in the back of the lecture hall and Richard Newton was listening to his praises being sung at CFR. Newton had made his career in Washington and Sam had spent most of his overseas. “Out of sight, out of mind” was an old D.C. axiom, but Sam was self-aware enough to know that there was more to that particular story.

“Dr. Newton has most recently turned his impressive intellect to the challenges of nuclear rivalry on the Indian subcontinent,” Forrester continued, after finishing up the résumé part of his introduction. “His original and penetrating analysis has helped reshape our understanding of the volatile India-Pakistan dynamic and has focused global attention on Kashmir, the single point on the planet most likely to trigger a major regional and even potentially global conflict.”

Sam leaned forward in his chair, genuinely eager to hear what Newton had to say. His interest in the subject of the lecture was deeply personal. Sam was a South Asia specialist. His graduate school research had focused on the history of peacemaking efforts in Kashmir. Richard Newton, meanwhile, had written his thesis and his first book on Soviet foreign policy. He had always been drawn to power. The end of the Soviet Union had almost been the end of his career, but Newton had found a way to reinvent himself as a foreign policy generalist, a “big thinker” as happy to pontificate on Northern Ireland as on South Africa.

On the side, he ran a lucrative international consulting business and Sam had heard from people in a position to know that the government of Pakistan was one of his confidential clients. If true, that certainly called into question his ability to express impartial judgments. Still, Newton was both extremely sharp and extremely well connected. Sam wanted to hear what he had to say about the fascinatingly complex Kashmir puzzle. He would just have to price-in a possible pro-Pakistan bias. Everyone, he reasoned, had his or her own particular blinders.

Newton had excelled at SAIS, earning his degree in a near-record four years. Sam, in contrast, had never quite finished his dissertation. In truth, Sam knew, he wasn’t really cut out for the ivory towers of academia. He liked getting his hands dirty. Eventually, he had left SAIS to join the U.S. Foreign Service, spending most of his twenty-five years in the State Department bouncing around the subcontinent, including stints in Mumbai, New Delhi, Islamabad, and Karachi. It had been a good career, if not a spectacularly successful one. If he could rewind the tape, he wouldn’t have done it differently.

Mumbai is where he had met Janani. She would be almost forty-nine now. Sam was already a few months to the wrong side of fifty. He did not like thinking about that. Somehow, he had already made it onto the AARP mailing lists. They were relentless. Hell, it was probably AARP that had found Osama bin Laden when he turned fifty and qualified for a free subscription to the magazine.

“Dr. Newton is certainly among our best and brightest,” Forrester concluded. “He is also, it probably goes without saying, a long-standing member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He’s fallen a little behind on his dues payments and has agreed to speak to you all tonight rather than wash the dishes from the CFR dining room. Thank you for coming tonight, Richard. This should cover about six months of the arrears.”

Newton laughed as he stepped up to the dais and the microphone. He looked like the power broker he was. His silver hair was gelled firmly in place. His spring tan hinted at a recent Caribbean vacation or maybe skiing in Davos. A video-friendly striped red tie stood out in sharp relief against the background of a blue suit and crisp white shirt. He spoke without notes.

“Thank you, George. I hope you know that I’m still waiting on the check from the magazine for ‘The Not-So-Great Game.’ I think we’re square.”

The audience laughed politely. Forrester nodded and smiled.

“Friends, colleagues,” Newton said, suddenly serious. “You should, all of you should, lie awake at night worrying about the India-Pakistan relationship. North Korea and Iran get the lion’s share of the headlines, but if at some point in the next twenty years, our world is consumed by nuclear fire, rest assured that the spark for that conflagration will almost certainly have been struck in Kashmir.”

The contested state of Jammu and Kashmir was the most serious point of contention in the fraught relationship between New Delhi and Islamabad. For complex historical and political reasons, the Muslim-majority province had remained part of mostly Hindu India when the British Raj had dissolved in 1947 rather than being attached to the new Dominion of Pakistan. In the half century that followed, the province triggered at least three wars between the two giants of South Asia. That had meant one thing when the bitter rivals had been too poor to fight a truly modern war. It meant something quite different now that they were both substantial nuclear powers.

Newton offered a relatively straightforward account of the Kashmir conflict that Sam thought was somewhat vanilla and unoriginal. The audience, however, seemed to hang on every word as though the speaker were on the cusp of offering some great revelation. Maybe Sam had been expecting too much. Newton was no doubt pitching his speech to a wider audience than South Asia specialists. It may have been unavoidable that the guts of the speech felt cobbled together by graduate students or junior researchers.

“Conditions along the Line of Actual Control are tense,” Newton continued. “As tense as they have been since the 1999 Kargil War. Moreover, the political relationship between New Delhi and Islamabad is at a new low. While the Pakistani government must surely shoulder its share of the responsibility, the new Indian prime minister must be held to account for his contribution to the growing crisis. Prime Minister Rangarajan has antagonized his Pakistani counterpart and has consistently rejected Islamabad’s overtures aimed at securing a political solution.”

“That’s bullshit, Richard.”

Sam looked around, wondering who had said that, before realizing sheepishly that he was responsible. For a brief moment, he clung to the hope that he had only whispered it, but the substantial number of heads turning in his direction argued otherwise. There was a boom mike suspended from a long pole hanging directly over where he was sitting. It was there for the Q&A session that was supposed to follow the lecture, but Sam realized with a creeping sense of dread that someone had left it on. His sotto voce intervention had been caught out by every Washington politician’s nightmare—the hot mike.

Newton paused and looked out over the audience to spot the heckler. There were maybe a hundred people in the lecture hall. He quickly zeroed in on Sam.

“Sam, is that you?”

“Sorry for the interruption, Richard. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

“I’m quite sure you didn’t. But having done so, I’d like to hear what you have to say. Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who don’t know my old classmate Sam Trainor, I can assure you that I am quite used to Sam’s somewhat impolitic interventions . . . at least in seminar.”

“Really, Richard, I apologize. I don’t want to interrupt the talk. I was just thinking that Rangarajan has bent over backwards to accommodate the sensibilities of the generals in Pakistan. He offered President Talwar a state visit, proposed the creation of an intelligence-sharing council aimed at minimizing the risk of overreactions stemming from misunderstanding, and even quashed a move by the opposition to authorize construction of a temple to Vishnu at Ayodhya on the ruins of the Babri Mosque. That hardly sounds like the work of a guy beating the drums of war.”

Even though he had pushed Sam to speak, Dr. Richard Newton seemed somewhat at a loss. Sam suspected that Newton’s thinking was very rarely challenged by the sycophants who surrounded him at the think tanks. Newton, however, had been in Washington long enough to have absorbed its mores and rules of behavior. One tried-and-true D.C. tactic was: If you don’t like the message, attack the messenger.

“Thank you, Sam, for that pithy and insightful riposte. Pity you couldn’t have put that down on paper. Maybe you would have managed to finish that Ph.D.”

Sam’s ears burned at the gratuitous slap. Newton was so much farther up the food chain than Sam that it seemed completely uncalled-for.

“You may have something there, Dr. Newton,” he found himself saying even as half his brain willed him to shut up and take his lumps. “I never did get the degree, but I do know that the Line of Actual Control is the effective border between India and China, not between India and Pakistan. That’s the Line of Control. You’re a former Soviet guy slumming in South Asia as a paid consultant for the Pakistani government. But, for those of us who know the region, the two are as different from each other as England and New England.”

Newton turned beet red and the Washington sophisticates in the CFR lecture hall turned away from Sam. It was difficult to tell whether they were embarrassed for him or by him. Newton resumed speaking. Sam did not really resume listening. He knew that he had dug himself a hole that would take time to climb out of.

•   •   •

After the lecture, the ever-efficient CFR staff served coffee and cake in an adjacent room with a panoramic wall of windows that offered a less-than-inspiring view of the boxlike office buildings lining F Street. Sam helped himself to a cup of coffee from the samovar and decided to skip the cake as both a form of penance and as a symbol of his resolve to get back into shape. As he walked around the room, Sam marveled at the new superpower he seemed to have acquired after his ill-advised confrontation with Richard Newton. He seemed to project an invisible force field that kept everyone else in the room at a distance of at least six feet. One senior Pentagon civilian almost tripped over his own feet in his rush to avoid engaging Sam in conversation. He was radioactive at this point and he could only hope that the half-life of his professional ostracism would be mercifully brief. This was not his first experience with the consequences of pointing out the emperor’s state of undress.

“Making friends fast, Sam.”

“I seem to have a talent for it, Andy.”

“You know you shouldn’t do stuff like that.”

“I know.”

Andy Krittenbrink was one of Sam’s favorite colleagues—former colleagues, he reminded himself—and he was glad for the company. Kritten