The Fourth Horseman Read online

  “I’m back to being an American CIA officer.”

  “If the Taliban spot you they won’t hesitate to kill you.”

  “We’ll just have to take the chance. But this is the only way I’m going to get into the Aiwan to see Barazani.”

  “There’s no way that the guards will let us through the gate, even if we could get to it. Right now there’s a crowd on Constitution Avenue and it’s growing.”

  It was just what Haaris was counting on. “We’re going in from the Colony.” The Aiwan-e-Sadr, located between the parliament building and cabinet block, was actually a compound of several buildings in addition to the president’s main residence and workplace that were used as the residences of his staff and families, and was called the President’s Colony, just off Fourth Street.

  “The guards there are just as likely to shoot first and ask for credentials later.”

  “They’ve been told that I’m coming.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jura said. “But if you’re carrying a weapon, I suggest that you keep it out of sight. It wouldn’t do you any good.”

  They headed out of the garage and around to the main gate, where the barrier was immediately raised and they were waved through. The streets were all but deserted; it was something else Haaris had been counting on. The growing crowd at the Aiwan was draining Taliban and ordinary citizens alike from across the city. The same thing had happened during the trouble in Beijing some years earlier, and during the problems in Cairo and a dozen other capital cities just lately. The world was starting to light up, and how big and terrible the fires would become before they died down was anyone’s guess.

  Haaris sat back in the seat. By now Charlene Miller, the president of the United States, would be assembling her security team in the Situation Room, if she hadn’t already done so, trying to figure out if the situation here had gotten critical yet.

  He expected that at the very least she would have ordered that the NEST teams be alerted for possible deployment. She was an intellectual who preferred the calm approach; she leaned toward thinking things out, getting the opinions of her staff, working out all of the options, before coming to a decision. But when she made one it was firm and final.

  Her favorite line to her directors of National Intelligence and the CIA was that blowback, the unintended consequences that often came because an operation had gone in some direction no one had anticipated, “will never be an option on my watch.”

  The blowback this time was going to be more than any of them had ever imagined. Much more. And for a purpose.

  * * *

  Jura had to make a long detour around Constitution Avenue because of the crowd, which already stretched at least a kilometer from the Aiwan, to get to the rear of the compound and the heavily guarded gate into the Colony. Four soldiers from the president’s Special Security Unit, armed with Heckler & Koch MP5s, surrounded the Fiat.

  Haaris lowered the window and handed out his diplomatic passport. “I’m expected,” he said in English.

  Jura rolled down his window and he translated into Punjabi, but the senior guard handed back Haaris’s passport. “Do you know the way?” he asked in good English.

  “Yes, I’ve been here before.”

  “Don’t leave the main driveway. And only you may go inside, your driver must stay with the car.”

  They eased through the gate and Jura followed the broad driveway around the side of the Presidential Palace past several of the residences. BMWs, Mercedes and Jaguars were parked in carports, but none of the buildings other than the palace showed any lights. The president’s staff and their families were keeping a very low profile this evening.

  With the windows of the Fiat down they could hear the low rumble of the crowd around front. So far the demonstration was peaceful, though no one thought that would last. The Taliban were attacking in a dozen or more spots around Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and possibly in other key cities, though information broadcast over television and radio was spotty at best. But the people were demanding that the government do something about it. The police and especially the army were nowhere to be seen. So far as the ordinary citizen knew the cowards had barricaded themselves inside their bases. Even the air force, which should have sent jets aloft to fire on the enemy, were absent from the skies.

  They had gathered on Constitution Avenue and were marching on the Aiwan to demand President Barazani take control. Or at least give them reassurances that the government was doing something.

  The people wanted someone to tell them that they were in charge. That Pakistan would survive. That their day-to-day lives would return to normal.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Lieutenant Jura said. “I know that you work for the CIA and are here at the orders of your president, but what is the U.S. going to do for us this time?”

  “Show you the way out of this situation,” Haaris said. He didn’t mind the question, not this late in the game.

  “Are you bringing the military?”

  “Pakistan’s answers are here, right in front of your nose, Lieutenant. And tonight you’ll understand.”

  “Even the mob out front?”

  “Especially them.”

  Lieutenant Jura pulled up in front of a gatehouse at one of the rear entrances. Two armed soldiers in the uniforms of the president’s security service came out as Haaris stepped out of the Fiat, his nylon bag in hand.

  “Good evening, sir,” the taller of the two guards greeted him respectfully. “Your driver will have to remain here, but one of the president’s aides will escort you upstairs.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Will you be requiring assistance with your bag?”

  “I can manage,” Haaris said.

  At that moment a man in a British-cut business suit appeared at the door. “The president is waiting for you.”

  SIX

  President of the United States Charlene Miller entered the White House Situation Room late in the afternoon, local, after getting off the phone with Walter Page, the director of the CIA. She was not in a good frame of mind, and combined with the fact she hadn’t taken the time to freshen her makeup made her look like the Wicked Witch of the North. But she didn’t give a shit. This was the first major crisis in her first year of office, and it was a whopper.

  Everyone bunched around the long table were glued to the large flat-screen monitors on the wall, showing images of the mob in front of the Presidential Palace in Islamabad. Another monitor showed fires and explosions around the city, and in Rawalpindi about ten miles away the Army General Headquarters was under attack.

  Miller took her place at the head of the table.

  Her chief of staff, Thomas Broderick, nodded. “Madam President,” he said.

  “What about David? Any word yet?” she asked.

  “No demands have been made. But we’ve confirmed that he was taken on the way in from the airport.”

  “I just got that from Walt Page.”

  The others around the table—Secretary of Defense William Spencer, a retired three-star army general who’d been commandant of West Point until he’d been tapped by the president; Secretary of State John Fay, a tall, lean, almost ascetic man with a thick shock of white hair, who’d been Harvard’s dean and was undoubtedly the smartest and most liberal person in the room; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Harry S. Altman, a short man whom everyone thought looked and sounded like Harry Truman, and whose stewardship of the military was unparalleled in fifty years; and the president’s adviser on national security affairs, Susan Kalley, a former professor of geopolitical affairs from UCLA who was the first “out” lesbian (although her significant other remained closeted) ever to serve at such a high level of government, who looked like a movie star and was beloved of the media—all looked up.

  Notably missing was Saul Santarelli, the director of National Intelligence, who was on his way back from Paris.

  “The situation in Islamabad is becoming critical,” Kalley said.

  “Is it pos
sible that Barazani will fall?” Miller asked.

  “It’s likely.”

  “We may have another problem developing as well, Madam President,” Sec Def Spencer said. “Units of the army and the ISI have been moving nuclear warheads out of their secure storage depots.”

  “As we expected they might. They’ve done it before.”

  “A risky business. But we got a series of satellite shots of a civilian vehicle showing up at Quetta Air Force Base and leaving twenty minutes later. We managed to track it south on the highway through the town of Nushki—which is practically on top of the border with Afghanistan—until it parked alongside the road. NRO analysts think they may have picked up flashes from gunfire, and then nothing. The car—actually a SUV—is still at the side of the highway.”

  “Do you think it picked up a nuclear warhead?” the president asked.

  “We got lucky with a decent angle shot of the SUV before it reached Quetta and then afterwards. In the second series of images it was low on its springs, as if it were carrying something heavy.”

  “And?”

  “There’s been traffic leaving several other suspected nuclear weapons depots—at Chagai Hills, Issa Khel, Kahuta and Karachi. But we haven’t picked up any signs of trouble, and we can’t be certain that nuclear weapons were taken off those bases.”

  “I saw part of that report,” the president said. “But have we followed any of those suspected vehicles—other than the one from Quetta—to their destinations?”

  “We don’t have the resources,” Kalley said. “Neither does the CIA or NRO. Congress has cut their budgets the last three years in a row.” The National Reconnaissance Office was responsible for putting spy satellites in orbit and maintaining them.

  Miller had been warned by her top advisers, including Spencer and Kalley, that one day the reduced funding of such a vital component of the intelligence apparatus would rise up and bite the U.S. in the ass. Which it had now. But after the Snowden debacle, which had resulted in the sharp curtailment of the National Security Agency’s ability to monitor telephone and computer traffic, Congress had been adamant that budget cuts across the board be made to the entire U.S. intel community. And it had been an issue that Miller, whose programs on poverty were most dear to her heart, and most expensive, wasn’t willing to go to the mat with Congress on.

  “What do we actually have over Islamabad and Rawalpindi?” she asked.

  “An enhanced KH-14,” Sec Def Spencer said. “It’s one of our best assets.”

  “But not all-seeing,” Miller said.

  She picked up the phone and called Walt Page at Langley. She got him in the Watch, which was the section just down the hall from his office where a half-dozen analysts working twelve hours on and twelve off were tied into every available intelligence resource. They were the only people who knew practically everything that was going on in the world in real time.

  His image came up on one of the flat-screen monitors, the connection completely secure from any outside eavesdropping. Or it was at least as secure as intel technology, and the extremely complicated quantum effects algorithms of the CIA’s computer genius, Otto Rencke, could make it.

  “Good afternoon, again, Madam President,” Walt Page said.

  “We’re not getting as much help from our satellite resources as I’d hoped we would. We think that the Pakistanis are moving some of their nuclear weapons around the country.”

  “We’re sure of it.”

  “I want to know where they’re being taken and why,” Miller said. “Especially the possibility that one of them may have been snatched from Quetta. Because if the Taliban gets their hands on even one of the things, everything changes out there.”

  “Ross has someone in the area and he’s sent them to take a look at the SUV,” Page said. Ross Austin, a former SEAL, was the CIA’s chief of station in Islamabad. “We know that it was a rental from the Quetta airport. Possibly by the ISI.”

  Miller sat forward. “Son of a bitch,” she said softly, but Page and everyone in the Situation Room with her caught it. “Is someone over there working with the Taliban again? Could this be a double-cross?”

  “At this point I’d believe anything. Ross is running a full-court press on the issue. Every asset he has in Islamabad and Rawalpindi are working the streets. Not only that but they’re looking for Dave Haaris.”

  “Are we sure that the Taliban have him?” Kalley asked.

  “Yes, nothing’s changed to this point,” Page said. “But no demands have been made.”

  “Thank you, Walter,” Miller said. “Keep me posted.”

  “Madam President, perhaps it’s time to alert our nuclear response teams.”

  “That’s the issue we’re working now.”

  “Yes, Madam President,” Page said.

  Miller cut the image. “Get me a Punjabi translator on the line, and telephone President Barazani.”

  Chief of Staff Broderick got on it and within a few seconds a young woman who’d been born, raised and educated in Pakistan before immigrating to the U.S. to get her master’s in Middle Eastern languages from Columbia came on a split screen. She had been put on standby for just this occasion.

  Moments later a man’s image appeared on the other half of the screen. “Madam President,” he said in English. “President Barazani has been expecting your call, but he begs your indulgence. He is meeting with his advisers on how best to handle the issue at hand. But he is most keen to talk to you.”

  “I’ll wait for his call,” Miller said. The connection was broken, and she thanked her translator. “Don’t go far, we may still need you.”

  “Yes, Madam President,” the young woman said.

  Miller turned to her advisers. “Alert our nuclear response teams. I want them to be ready to go airborne the instant I give the word.”

  SEVEN

  President Barazani’s private secretary brought Haaris to the top floor and down the broad marble-tiled corridor to the anteroom. The palace felt almost deserted and was quiet except for the noise of the mob outside. Despite the warm early morning, fifty-five-gallon oil drums had been filled with trash and were burning down on the street. The flames sent odd flickers through the windows that played on the walls and ceilings.

  “I’ll just leave you here, sir. The president waits inside for you.”

  “Thank you,” Haaris said.

  President Barazani stood at the bullet-proof French doors looking directly out across Constitution Avenue. His hands were clasped behind his back, his shoulders hunched, his head bowed. His jacket was draped over the back of his desk chair, and the armpits of his white shirt were stained with sweat, though his office was air-conditioned.

  He was a different man from the student Haaris remembered at Eton. Then Farid to his friends, F to Haaris’s D, he was a hell-raiser. They both had been heavy drinkers and gamblers. Haaris had little money in those days, so F had bankrolled him. Of course it never mattered, because they always lost and yet they always had fun, usually ending up with a couple of whores just before dawn.

  When Barazani’s parents—his father was a major general in the army and his mother traced her lineage back to royalty—had enough of their son’s antics and sharply reduced his allowance, Haaris had taken up the slack. He convinced his uncle that Barazani would one day be an important man in Pakistan—and therefore a good friend to cultivate. Anyway, his uncle had no children, and had heart problems; his money would probably go to his nephew. So why not spend a little of it now?

  The logic was good enough for his uncle, who opened the financial spigot; not full flow, but enough so that Haaris could bankroll Barazani. And they had become fast friends who’d never completely lost touch with each other.

  The president turned and nodded, a sad smile on his lips. He had already lost his country and he knew it. His entire range of emotions was written in deep lines on his brows, in the way he stood favoring his left knee, which he’d hurt in a rugby match, and in his general physica
l condition. Haaris estimated that Barazani had lost at least twenty kilos since the last time they’d met, the year before, in Washington. He looked ill.

  “So here you are at last, an American spy come to offer his advice,” Barazani said in English.

  “An old friend come to help where he can,” Haaris replied. He dropped his bag on the floor and crossed the room and they embraced.

  “Maybe too late. But I understand the necessity of the ruse of your kidnapping. Was it your idea?”

  “The ISI helped, of course.”

  “No doubt you and Rajput have become close over the past couple of years, but take some advice. Hasan Rajput is no friend of ours.”

  “Especially not you,” Haaris replied, and Barazani smiled and nodded.

  “But then he’s still a valuable asset. Let’s sit down so you can tell me exactly why you have gone to such lengths to get to me.”

  They sat in a pair of easy chairs at a low table with a brandy service between them. Barazani poured them drinks. The room was large, the high ceilings hand-painted with a sunrise and clouds to the east, and a sunset and a few faint stars and a crescent moon to the west. The odor of incense hung softly on the air, none of the smoke from down on the street reaching this far yet. The large desk was littered with papers and file folders, most of them stamped with “Most Secret,” orange diagonal stripes on the covers. Barazani was a busy man. Unlike Nero when Rome burned he had not been fiddling, he was trying to save his country.

  The noise of the crowd had grown since Haaris had arrived, as he’d hoped it would. He needed as large an audience as possible.

  “We’re worried about your nuclear weapons. There’s a fear—justified, I think—that one or more of them might fall into the hands of the Taliban. So my first job here is to get your assurances that your security systems are firmly in place.”

  “Your president telephoned me a few minutes ago, probably to ask me that very question. I didn’t take her call, I wanted to talk to you first. We may have a problem. At this point I’m told that four of them have gone missing.”