Watchlist (39 page)

“It’s not worth the risk.”

“You speak as if we have a choice. The president is coming here under cover. Even his most trusted advisors, believe he’s sick with the flu in the White House. He is coming to the dam opening to make a statement and nothing we can do can stop him. He’s been made aware of the danger and he’s coming anyway.”

Middleton could feel the heart racing in his chest. “In the face of a threat to his life. Those explosives . . . ”

“Cannot destroy the dam. We know that now. Remember, we’re not even sure Archer’s there.”

“Then we’re missing something. We’ve been missing it all along.” Middleton thought for a moment. “Sikari’s son couldn’t have anticipated his presence here either.”

“Now what is your point?”

“Everything, all Sikari’s plans, would’ve been based on the secretary of state. Less security. A different upshot to their plans.”

“I don’t follow, comrade.”

“Zang said it for both of you: chaos. That’s what this is about from Archer’s standpoint. To set the world on the road to a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan. You know what that would mean.”

“I’ve read the same studies you have,” Chernayev said, joining Middleton on his feet. “The complete collapse of the world economy. A decade or more of deep depression. And that’s just for starters.”

“A possible but unlikely scenario before. Now, with the president . . . ”

“Likely, if not inevitable.”

“Exactly,” said Middleton. “Pakistani militants will be blamed for the attack. The United States’ response will be . . . God, I can’t even find the word.”

“The vision suffices. Pakistan’s retaliation aimed at India because it’s all they have. Destroy our proxy.”

“Nuclear war,” said Middleton. “A world of chaos.”

“Not if we can stop it,” Chernayev told him.

Keeping up the ruse, Tesla wheeled Charley through Srinagar Airport. The airport, and the city known as the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, was located in the heart of the Kashmir Valley a mile above sea level. Tesla knew the inland and low-lying waterways made it the ideal site for the Baglihar dam.

As a smaller airport, this facility offered light security, even token. But the grounds both inside the terminal and out on the tarmac itself were teeming with Indian soldiers and district police.

“What’s going on?” Charley asked, still slumped in her chair to avoid detection.

“Look.” Tesla pointed to a large sign that welcomed visitors to the opening ceremonies of the dam. Then she gasped, “Charley.” She grabbed the younger woman’s arm.

At the bottom of the sign was some information about the dam—size, electrical output and factoids, one of which was that the people displaced by the construction and flooding had been relocated to a beautiful, new town nearby. It was affectionately called “The Village.”

“The warning in Balan’s email! Something’s going to happen here, now.” She stepped to a kiosk and bought a prepaid mobile. When it was activated, she called all of Middleton’s numbers—even his landlines—and sent text messages and emails.

After finishing, she slipped the phone away and wheeled Charley out the door. “If your father can get to any phone or computer, he’ll find out where we are and why.”

“If he’s alive,” Charley muttered.

“Stop it,” Tesla said, though not unkindly. “He’s fine. I know he is. He might even be here. If he knows about the Village.”

“The two of you are fools.”

“What?”

Charley cocked her gaze upward enough to briefly meet Tesla’s stare. “Why bother saving the world if you can’t enjoy it?”

“Charley, please . . . ”

“No, whatever it is the two of you share, I want you to know I’m fine with it. I’m honestly not sure you have any better idea how to define it than I do. But you need to make sense of it, for your own sakes.”

“Thank you.”

The doors slid open mechanically and Tesla wheeled Charley into the steaming air. It assaulted her skin like a blast furnace, seeming to instantly melt the make-up that had already turned her face into a Halloween mask. Tesla eased the chair up to the curb and raised a hand to hail a taxi.

Almost instantly, a grime-encrusted white sedan screeched forward, cutting off another cab in the queue. A fierce exchange of explosive Hindi shot back and forth and the winning cab, the sedan, pulled up in front of the women. Tesla busied herself with helping the costumed Charley out of the chair and helping her into the backseat. Leaving the airline-issued wheelchair by the curb, she walked around and climbed in the taxi’s driver side.

“What is your destination?” the ancient turbaned driver asked in awkward English. His massively wrinkled face glanced at them in the grimy rearview mirror.

“Take us to the Baglihar dam,” Tesla said.

Archer still had not heard from Jana and was fearing the worst even before word reached him that she was apparently en route to the United States—at least her cell phone was. He wondered if this was some form of cosmic punishment, that taking the life of his father had sentenced him to a life in isolation without the distractions of love and romance. No matter. He was young enough to enjoy the fruits of his labors and eventual power that would come once his work at the dam was done.

Still, he found Jana’s failure to contact him disturbing as he did the anomalies in the picture of the apparently dead daughter of Colonel Harold Middleton. And if Charlotte Middleton was still alive, then so was the female Volunteer Tesla, holding fast to Archer’s trail. It was a good thing he’d taken precautions, another legacy bequeathed him by Sikari himself.

As if on cue, Archer’s scrambled cell phone beeped and he raised it to check the incoming text message from the man he had dispatched to Kashmir.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

Middleton stood in the cordoned-off security area, gazing up at the sky in expectation of the president’s arrival. The structure of the Baglihar dam beyond made for a magnificent spectacle. The only thing that even remotely approached it in size and scope was Nevada’s massive Hoover Dam. Then, as now, construction had gone forward in essentially a wilderness; desert for the Hoover, rural unpopulated land for the Baglihar. If the concrete used here was even half what it had been there, Middleton could see no way any explosives short of the nuclear variety, including thermobaric, could possibly destroy the facility. Nor could it result in the kind of collateral damage capable of reaching the place where the president would be speaking: essentially a sprawling, natural amphitheater built to offer stunning, tourist-friendly views of the Chenab River, its vast power now harnessed between a million tons of concrete and steel.

What exactly had Devras Sikari meant in his email to Balan?

You recall what I have planned for the ‘Village.’ It has to happen soon—before we can move on.

As he gazed at it, he thought: No wonder Pakistan had lodged such a vigorous protest with the U.N. Irrigation to a great bulk of the nation’s agriculture was now endangered, especially if the season turned any drier than normal. From one side of Pakistan to the other, people could find themselves going hungry, the perfect pretext on which to strike back. Middleton couldn’t help but wonder if that had been the plan from the beginning.

“I have something you need to see, comrade,” Chernayev said, suddenly at Middleton’s side, holding out his BlackBerry. “The man pictured is named Umer, a known associate of both Sikari and Archer who helped them obtain the explosives. General Zang’s intelligence indicates he will be the one to trigger the explosion.”

“It makes no sense.”

“What?”

“Why go through all this trouble to set off explosives inside a dam they can’t effectively destroy?”

Chernayev shrugged. “A show of force, perhaps, of power as a precursor to something much worse.”

“No, this was about assassinating the secretary of state from the beginning. Now it’s the president. That’s what we’re facing.”

“Once my men locate Archer’s men, it’ll be sometime before we’ll have to face him again. And if we’re lucky enough to find the boy himself . . . ”

Middleton turned about, gazing off toward the huge throng stretching well into the thousands pulsing into the natural amphitheater from which the President of the United States would christen the opening of the dam with unprecedented pomp and circumstance.

“Any luck so far?”‘

Chernayev shrugged again. “It is a very large crowd, comrade. But my men are good and know what to look for.”

“The BlueWatch people?”

“
Da
. And, believe me, Colonel, they’ve been trained for this kind of work.”

“What kind of work is that?”

“Up-close termination.”

“Like shooting a radioactive pellet into a defector’s leg?”

Chernayev grinned, winked. “Now, comrade, where did you ever get an idea like that?”

Their eyes moved to the sky simultaneously alert by the distant
whooping
sound of a helicopter. Middleton could feel the Russian tense even as his own spine snapped erect.

The president was arriving.

“I won’t be able to get you much closer than this.”

“That’s OK,” Tesla told the driver. “We’ll manage.”

The driver regarded the hobbled Charley in his rearview mirror and continued, “But there
is
a VIP section, much, much closer to the official ceremony. Perhaps you have some sort of press or political credentials . . . ”

“As a matter of fact I do,” Tesla lied. And passed him $50.

He beamed. “Then I will do my best to get you there.”

The driver swung right, drove down an isolated stretch of hastily flattened road toward a security fence manned by a trio of Indian special police. They signaled the cab to stop, one coming round to the driver’s side while the other two kept to their posts ahead of the car’s hood.

Tesla turned toward Charley, prepared to offer some reassuring words when a sudden flash of motion snapped her attention back to the front seat. The driver’s hands were suddenly off the wheel, both grasping silenced pistols. Before she could react, he had thrust them out the window and opened fire on the approaching guard and the two standing at the front of the car.

The angle of the shots should have been impossible. Unless it was practiced. No one was around to see their murders.

Tesla gasped. Her first instinct was to protect Charley. Weaponless, there was little more that she could do.

Then, from the corner of her eye, she saw another man slip from the bushes, where, apparently he’d been waiting. Dressed in local clothing, with a long beard, he walked quickly to the driver’s window. He spoke in Hindi to the driver, then turned to the women.

“You are please to come with me. Now.” He said something else but his words vanished as the president’s helicopter, flanked by a pair of gun ships, soared overhead.

Archer’s cell phone beeped to signal an incoming text and he raised it upward, shielding it from the sun, to read Umer’s message:

IN PLACE. ALL IS READY.

Archer clicked the phone’s screen dark again without replying; there was no need to. He watched as the president’s helicopter settled onto the secure, makeshift landing pad that had been constructed to accommodate it for the opening ceremonies. The gun ships hovered protectively overhead, their rotor wash whipping dirt and debris into a swirling cloud.

If the day had been too windy for the chopper to land, he mused, all his plans might have been for naught. Even the fates smiled upon him. He could feel his father’s presence nearby, approving as well, understanding the need for his own death so that a great destiny could be achieved.

Middleton listened to the Indian cabinet minister say after his introductory remarks, “Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure, on this joyous and momentous day, to introduce the President of the United States!”

Middleton wasn’t watching when the president mounted the stage to tumultuous, ground-shaking cheers and applause from the assembled throngs. Instead he stood alongside Chernayev, sifting through the crowd with his eyes searching for Umer or any of Archer’s men, for that matter. The vast sea of humanity gave up nothing. As the president began reading from his prepared remarks on the dam opening, Middleton continued his gradual progress through the crowd, angling toward the jam-packed and roped-off area reserved for the press corps. Cameras flashed and whirred, some no smaller than a palm, recording the president’s every word and gesture.

How would I do it?

Middleton tried to place himself in Archer’s shoes. The thermobaric explosives he’d managed to obtain had never been intended to blow up the dam itself—that much was obvious. What wasn’t obvious was what did that leave? The stage and amphitheater platform itself had been dutifully checked for all varieties of explosive to no avail. Which meant . . . Which meant . . .

The explosives had never been here in the first place. And that could only mean Archer had concocted a plan to bring them in through other means, after the speeches had begun.

“On this day, I stand before you representing India’s staunchest and foremost ally, prepared to welcome in a new age of energy independence that has come to your doorstep . . . ”

Middleton gazed up at the helicopter gun ships that had taken positions too high in the sky to render them dangerous to the president if they exploded. So what did that leave?

Fifty men, he thought, if I had fifty men how would I utilize them? Layering the thermobaric explosives into suicide bomber vests would have been a possibility, had everyone who entered not been required to pass through portable detectors. So what did that leave?

Fifty men . . .

“Nothing,” Chernayev reported, receiving another report over his nearly undetectable earpiece.

“Tens of thousands of India’s people will now have light and power without damage to the environment or further waste of resources. The opening of this dam serves as an example for what the latest in wind, water and solar technology can accomplish . . . ”