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U.S.A.
IRENE Kennedy adjusted the lamp for the third time. Finally she was forced to admit that her inability to read the classified documents lying on her desk had nothing to do with a lack of illumination. Her normally unshakable ability to concentrate had simply failed her.
She took off her glasses and looked around the windowless office tucked away at the back of her home. Not that there was much to see. She’d left the overhead lights off, as was her custom.
The semidarkness was usually accompanied by a sense of security. Not that day, though. If anything, it magnified the anxiety and regret building in her. Joe Rickman’s files were still out there and it was her failure. She should have seen it coming. Rickman had always been unstable, but he’d also been brilliant. He could do things that no one else could and she had become reliant on—perhaps even blinded by—his talents.
There were no easy problems for the person running the Central Intelligence Agency. Those were dealt with well before they reached her office. Her world was an endless knife-edge balancing act. There were no wins, only scenarios where the rewards slightly outweighed the risks. In the current situation, her careful evaluation of the circumstances had led her to the wrong strategy. Or, as Mitch would undoubtedly simplify it, she’d guessed wrong.
The secure phone next to her began to ring and she reached for it reluctantly. Another drawback to her job was that people rarely called her at home with good news.
“Yes.”
“They’ve blown the fence,” Marcus Dumond said. “The smoke’s blinding my drone.”
“Thank you.”
She hung up and felt the knot in her stomach tighten. The Obrecht operation had been authorized entirely on her own authority. Neither the Swiss government nor President Alexander knew anything about it. There hadn’t been time for debate, and “no” wasn’t an option. It would be easier to offer her resignation than ask permission.
Kennedy reached for the phone again but then withdrew her hand. She had a direct line to Scott Coleman, but it existed only for emergencies. She’d laid out the rules of engagement for this rendition and Coleman would follow her orders to the letter. Rapp and Hurley, on the other hand, would do whatever they wanted. There was no action she could take and no update that would matter at this point. The die had been cast.
Instead of the phone, she used her laptop to check her email account. Automatic notifications had been set up in case she received another communication from Rickman, so she knew she wouldn’t find anything. Still, it offered some small comfort to see the empty inbox.
It was just a matter of time, though. Rickman wouldn’t let something as trivial as death stop him. He was far too smart and obsessive for that. No, if he’d embarked on a plan this grand, he would have made it foolproof. Unstoppable.
Would she be the director who presided over the disintegration of America’s intelligence capability? Was she responsible for recruiting and training the man who would tear down her country’s defenses just when the world was at its most dangerous and unpredictable?
Afghanistan was in the process of returning into what Americans considered medieval chaos but the Afghans thought of as normalcy. Various terrorist groups would use the lawlessness and lack of cohesion as cover, but the Afghans themselves posed less of a threat than most people suspected. They didn’t much like outsiders and with a little prompting could be used to combat the terrorist groups wanting to use their country as a base.
Iraq was a far more dangerous situation, and one of the keys to the current instability in the Middle East. The truth was that little could be done to remedy the situation militarily and arming moderates in the region was a strategy almost certain to backfire. People who felt moderately about things tended not to fight with the same intensity as fanatics. More often than not, they handed over their American-provided weapons and ran. Or worse, they reacted to the brutality they saw by becoming fanatics in their own right. Sadly, the best answer was for her to insert a brutal pro-American dictator. With a little luck, that would create an environment in which the rest of the region could be stabilized.
Less visceral but perhaps more dangerous were the former and future world powers. Russia was trying to restart the Cold War in order to gain the respect it craved but was incapable of earning with its anemic economy and corrupt institutions. China was trying to take possession of every piece of territory it had ever laid claim to in a cynical effort to distract its people from slowing GDP growth and an environmental disaster that was beginning to bite.
And then there was Pakistan.
As it stood, the ISI was so compartmentalized that one division could be tracking down a particular terrorist cell while another division supported it. Infighting was the norm, with people actively hamstringing operations in order to discredit their rivals and advance their own careers. The director tended to set broad goals, but the real power lay with the deputies who protected their fiefdoms like a pack of wild dogs.
This, among other things, had made the ISI’s antiterrorist efforts sporadic and often counterproductive. Problematic? Yes. Destructive to the region? Absolutely. A clear and present danger to the United States? Likely not.
The problem was that the ISI she had set up the CIA to handle was transforming at a pace she would have never thought possible. Nadeem Ashan, the eminently reasonable deputy general for analysis and foreign relations, was under house arrest. Akhtar Durrani, the violent but dull-witted head of the external wing, was dead. And Ahmed Taj had replaced both with men her analysts were unfamiliar with. The S Wing was evolving, too. At first, the CIA had seen the shrinking of the ISI’s clandestine division as a good sign. Now, though, it was clear that it was just shedding its weaker agents and stepping farther into the shadows.
She pulled up a photo of Ahmed Taj on her laptop, studying his dull, downturned eyes for a long time. He’d been chosen by Saad Chutani for his competence in logistics, moderate vie
ws, and lack of ambition. Beyond that, the CIA had uncovered little about the man. He’d grown up in a poor area of the country where written records were sparse and life expectancy was low enough that human intel about his childhood was little more than thirdhand innuendo. His father had been a pious and talented businessman who had provided Taj a life somewhat more privileged than those around him as well as a university education in America.
What hard data they possessed pointed to mediocrity in all areas of Taj’s life: his grades, his extracurricular activities, his military rec-ord. Ironically, it was this that had worried the CIA’s Pakistan experts most. Many had predicted the ISI fracturing even further with such a weak hand at the helm. And yet the opposite seemed to be true. Under the command of Taj and the ostensibly weak men he had recruited, the ISI seemed to be gaining the discipline it had always lacked.
She glanced at the report she’d been reading and closed the folder. It was yet another analysis of Taj’s ISI. More pages of the bizarre intellectual contortions necessary to explain Pakistan’s increasingly stable intelligence apparatus. The popular theory now was that it was being held together by the middle managers whom, a few years earlier, the same analysts were blaming for the organization’s Wild West culture.
Everything the CIA knew about the modern ISI had been learned by viewing the organization through the lens of Taj’s weakness. And every prediction that lens produced had proved wrong. What if their most basic assumptions about the man were inaccurate? What if they were seeing only what he wanted them to see?
She picked up the phone and dialed a number for the third time that day.
“Senator Ferris’s office.”
“Is he in? This is Irene Kennedy.”
“I’m sorry, Director Kennedy, he’s not available. I’ve given him your messages but he just returned from Pakistan and his schedule’s full. Do you want me to tell him you called again?”
