The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (18 page)

“We tracked a suspicious shipment from Moscow to Tashkent, Uzbekistan,” Mahmood told Feldman. “My superiors thought it might be the nuclear device we have feared. I believe they hoped the device would travel through Afghanistan, where we would catch it in transit, creating a furor and greatly embarrassing the United States.”

“A terrorist nuclear bomb in Afghanistan? That might well keep U.S. troops on the ground at Bagram for decades, if it were known,” Feldman said. “What happened to it?”

“We lost them,” Mahmood said. “And we are not close enough to the Russians to ask them for help.”

“But you are confident something dangerous is on the move?”

“Oh, without question, yes. Something very, very big.”

“So where do you think it is headed?” Feldman asked.

“To Europe or America from Karachi by sea freight. That would be their best option, and perhaps also our best option for tracking it. Sea-lanes are known and even small vessels can be tracked easily. If that is what has happened, we will find it. But perhaps its destination is somewhere in Pakistan or India. That will be harder. Of course, perhaps it is still in Afghanistan.”

“What if they take it out by air?”

“The worst scenario of all,” Mahmood said. “These things are not so large. It could easily be moved by plane. But I don’t think they will try that.”

“Because of radiation detection?”

“Exactly. Though I don’t think they face as much risk as we would like them to believe.”

Both men reflected in silence for a few minutes.

“My guess would be Pakistan,” Feldman said. “There are Arabs and Egyptians here, lots of displaced Al Qaeda types who appreciate the relative freedom of the tribal areas. Ayman al-Zawahiri learned to speak Pashto and married a woman in Mohmand, in the northern tribal agencies, as you well know. Al-Zawahiri is probably in Pakistan right now, probably in Peshawar.”

“If I knew, I personally would tell you, my friend. But I do not know.”

“I’m going to be leaning on you, Mahmood,” Feldman said. “I hope you know that. Leaning on you. We have a saying in America—‘you owe me.’ You’re going to learn first-hand what that means. You owe me big time.”

Mahmood smiled. Feldman thought he heard a barely audible chuckle.

The weekend of Mort Feldman’s return to the Pakistani capital was occasion for a daylong open house at his rambling villa on Margalla Road, with Mort enthroned on an upholstered
chaise longue
in his study, receiving friends and admirers like a recumbent Roman centurion.

It was a day to celebrate. But all the guests were from the American Embassy community. This was not a party to share with Pakistan.

An enormous homemade paper banner stretched across the den-like room, two stories high, the largest space in the house. It read
‘Welcome Home Mortie!’
and had been prepared with crayons and finger-paint by the teenage children of one of the senior communications techs. The lampshades were festooned with multicolored balloons tethered by strings that kept them bobbing. There was plenty of beer and wine.

Olof Wheatley delayed his return to Washington for a day to attend. From time to time, Feldman got up and chatted with guests, but mainly he lay stretched in his chair, watching the others and drinking beer. Though he still had a sore wrist and blistered ankle from having been chained for so long, he could not remember when he had last felt so happy.

Wheatley made small talk with the other guests but generally failed to get into the festive spirit. He was preoccupied. He never felt fully at ease when he was overseas. Late in the afternoon he pulled a dining room chair up close to Feldman’s throne, indicating he wanted to talk shop. He handed Feldman another cold Coors, still in the can, and opened one for himself, his first of the day.

“We have a credibility gap with the Pakistanis,” Wheatley told Feldman. “We are working together, but there is no trust there. And now, after this farce, how can we build confidence? The ISI have put themselves beyond the pale. There is a branch within ISI that works night and day to undermine the United States and they have the Director General’s ear. You need to give some thought about how we move the ball forward.”

Feldman smiled, nodding. “As an organization, what you say about ISI may be true. What we need within ISI is a ‘special friend’ at a high level. And now I believe we have one. I think we can work with Mahmood Mahmood. I’m sure I can. He’s a straight shooter. He’s as appalled by my having been grabbed off the street as you were.”

“You are more of a forgiving guy than I would be under the circumstances,” Wheatley said.

“Yeah, but that’s water under the bridge. I got pissed off at him and he took it like a man. And by the way, he respects you a lot Olof. You’re selling Mahmood short,” Feldman said. “Are you aware that it was the road trip he took with you that turned it for him? He felt so strongly about it that he was willing to buck his own command. You’ve got to give him credit for that. He took a risk.”

“He took no risks in public. Your kidnapping has been covered up and we cut them a lot of slack when you went along with that fabricated story for the media. The business about having been captured by a splinter group of Taliban.”

“I never expected ISI to admit their mistakes in public. Would CIA? If helping ISI save face helps me get what I want, I’ll do it.” Feldman spoke emphatically.

“You’re telling me we can turn Mahmood?”

“No, not turn him, he’s not a traitor,” Feldman said. “He’ll always be a loyal citizen and a loyal flag officer. But he has sympathy for our point of view. And we know that ISI is schizophrenic about terrorism. They fight terrorists but they also sponsor terrorists. Everything from the Haqqani bastards to the Afghan Taliban. They collaborate with us but then they work actively to subvert CIA. What does that tell you?”

“That they’re fucking nuts?” Wheatley said.

“It suggests an opportunity to mitigate tension by by-passing the official ISI leadership. We ask to work closely with Mahmood within the ISI apparatus. My guess is that they will turn over the account to him. They will be relieved that we no longer ask to see the DG.”

“Will they allow him to do that? The ISI leadership refused even to meet with me.”

“Maybe. And maybe he won’t care whether he gets permission or not. He’s a flag officer. I think we should take Mahmood into our confidence to see how far we can take it, get him to work with us on this LeClerc arms thing.”

“With the risk being that he will simply spill whatever he learns from us back into his own organization.”

“So what? This is their country. We have to assume that they know far more about what goes on in their backyard than we ever will.”

“A backyard they keep us locked out of. Don’t forget that they wouldn’t give us access to OBL’s compound until they had swept it for evidence. They refused to give us access to Bin Laden’s wives.”

“Can you blame them?” Feldman said. “We publicly made them look like idiots. In Pakistani culture, that’s about the worst thing you can do to a man. Hell, it’s about the worst thing you can do to a man in Texas, too.”

***

Ahead of her on a trail in the Margalla Hills, approaching the village of Murad Gali, Kate Langley could hear the rustle of large animals in brush, possibly the rhesus macaques said to inhabit these slopes. The noises were coming from beyond the wildflowers and butterflies in a tangled thicket flanking the hillside. Behind her was the city of Islamabad, laid out from this high vantage like an architect’s model.

“Hear that?” Kate said, pointing. “Something in the bushes over there.”

Mort Feldman shook his head. They had been hiking for over an hour and he was beginning to feel it. Two weeks of captivity had sapped him of aerobic strength.

“I don’t hear a fucking thing,” Feldman said, panting for breath. “I’ve never walked up this far, and I’ve been told to avoid the damn monkeys. They’re aggressive and will shake you down for food.”

They continued their way slowly and cautiously up the slope. At the higher elevations, the vegetation grew thicker and greener, a forest of eucalyptus, mulberry, and oaks mixed with shrubs poking from the rocky outcrops.

A troupe of the monkeys became visible in the trees around a hairpin in the dirt track, some swinging from branches, others clambering on the rocky ground. Suddenly, a monkey jumped out from a tunnel in the bush, leaped upon a rock, and began roaring and yapping. It was a female, about 12 pounds and a foot tall, with a pink face and sharp fangs. Though no larger than a small dog, she was aggressive and brimming with confidence. To Kate’s surprise, Mort Feldman raised his stocky arms above his head and charged forward like a wild man, shouting at the tiny beast. It was a passable imitation of King Kong. The macaque beat a hasty retreat.

“Jesus, Mort! You’re going to scare the poor thing to death!”

“Better that than letting her eat my arm for lunch,” Mort said. He was huffing and puffing with the exertion. “I had no idea I’d get winded so fast.”

“OK, let’s take a break,” Kate said. “I’m expecting the Army or the Islamabad police to show up at any moment and arrest me. I was kicked out of the country, remember.”

“I told Mahmood you were coming. He knows. As for the others, I’m sure your cover and alias are strong enough to fool them. Besides, I wanted to hear firsthand about what you were doing for Olof in Bagram.”

Kate opened her backpack and removed a can of soda. She had brought a sandwich, too, but was leery of unwrapping it lest a famished macaque get a whiff of food. Feldman sat next to her on a stony bench. He seemed grateful for the break and the chance to sit.

Kate told him, in bare outline, the BanKoNoKo story in Kabul, including mention of the Zagi and the Shamsi LOTUS spreadsheets linking Minh Kwang to Jacques LeClerc and the $11 million transfer from Kabul to Paris.

“Jacques LeClerc has been a bit player in the international arms game for a couple of decades," Feldman said. “I think he was supplying Kalashnikovs to the mujahideen when they were killing Soviets. Some of those purchases were paid for by yours truly. Do you happen to know who his source was in Moscow for this supposed nuclear device?”

“Not sure yet. The hard drive of the late Simon Wantree’s laptop refers to a ‘Colonel M’ but we haven’t been able to connect the dots.”

“Let’s look back in our own records in the ‘80s and ‘90s. This ‘Colonel M’ is probably someone LeClerc has used before. There may be something in our own archives about him. Who is this Wantree character?”

“Well that’s a good one. He was a technician in the Brit nuclear weapons center at Aldermaston, canned for drug abuse. It appears that he was helping LeClerc locate a nuclear weapon, a sort of scout working on commission.”

“Or making sure he wasn’t getting ripped off,” Feldman said, recalling Hendryk Warsaw’s belief that con men could be as successful as legitimate salesmen when it came to black market nuclear arms. “LeClerc can tell a real Kalashnikov from a fake a mile away, but he doesn’t know squat about nukes.”

“We really have no idea who killed him, or why,” Kate said.

“Maybe he discovered something that was going to queer the sale, and ‘Colonel M’ bumped him off.”

“Maybe,” Kate said. She finished her cola and looked around to see if any of the macaques had returned. They had not. She reached into her knapsack to take out her sandwich.

“Hold off on the grub,” Feldman said. “In a few minutes I think we may do a lot better than those cold cuts in your backpack.”

He pointed down the trail. In the distance, Kate could just make out a tall man in khaki clothes and a canvas hat walking toward them, accompanied by a servant wearing a red tarboosh with a tassel and carrying a large wicker hamper. Feldman waved, and the tall man waved back. Kate strained her eyes to see who it was.

“My new best friend forever,” Feldman said with a chuckle.

***

Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood and his servant showed Kate Langley and Mort Feldman a little-used trail that led to a clearing on a heavily wooded ridge overlooking Islamabad. A gazebo with a cupola of traditional south Asian design sheltered a rough-hewn picnic table. The servant spread a checkered tablecloth on the picnic table and set places for three, with porcelain plates, silverware, and crystal glasses. The muscular young servant wearing the tarboosh did not seemed fazed.

“Raza here has been with me since I was a lieutenant colonel,” Mahmood said. “We have gone climbing together in the Himalayas, very high up in the thin air. He can carry a fifty-pound rucksack up a mountainside at a slow trot.”

Raza broke out into broad grin but said nothing.

“Also, Raza is the soul of discretion,” Mahmood added. “And I trust him with my life.”

Raza served an elegant and tasty lunch, including a light
rosé
for the two Americans and San Pellegrino mineral water for the Pakistani brigadier.

Mort Feldman reviewed for Mahmood what was known at CTC about the efforts of Al Qaeda and other terrorists to acquire a nuclear bomb.

“We know that Al Qaeda has been fooled by con men more than once,” Feldman said, “starting as early as 1993 when Jamal al-Fadl tried to buy weapons-grade uranium from a Sudanese government minister for $1.5 million.”

“That was the incident of the South African canister of worthless gravel,” Mahmood said. “I recall that Al-Fadl was paid $10,000 as middleman but that he turned over the transaction to others, who then tested the material and found it bogus. Then he defected to America and you debriefed him.”

“But that didn’t deter them,” Kate said. “Because we know about the 25-page monograph titled
Superbomb
found in the home of Abu Khabab in Kabul. It demonstrated the breadth and depth of Al Qaeda’s research and commitment.”

“The discovery of
Superbomb
was the work of a cable news channel,” Mahmood said, grinning. “You get no credit for that at all.”

“We’ll take our info wherever we can get it, even CNN,” said Feldman. “I remember reading
Superbomb
and the comments of a senior American nuclear expert who said that he believed Al Qaeda’s commitment to nuclear terrorism was so strong that he was concerned that, given enough time, they would almost certainly succeed in acquiring a working bomb, or build one themselves.”