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Vinter pushed him away. “We have a meeting in ten minutes. Snap out of it. Zahir is threatening to take his men and go back to the mountains. If that happens it could create a domino effect and all of the progress I’ve achieved over the past year will vanish. All because some spook got kidnapped.” She thought about the strange turn of events. “I hear this mercenary who is trying to undo all of our hard work is going to show his face at the meeting.”
Poole pulled Vinter’s hand toward his crotch. “Speaking of hard.”
Vinter almost slapped him. “Stop it. We need to focus. Darren is absolutely beside himself. He says this Rapp has serious mental issues. Do you know what Washington will do if they hear we screwed this up?”
Poole had finally got it through his head that they weren’t going to have sex. He took a deep sigh. “You’re making way too big of a deal out of this. We didn’t screw anything up. We’re on schedule with reintegration. If this thing goes off the tracks at this point we blame it on Rapp. We lay it at the feet of the CIA and get out of the way.”
“That doesn’t work for me. I don’t fail.” Vinter stabbed herself in the chest with her index finger, attempting to add some unneeded emphasis to her position. Her hazel eyes wild with fury, she added. “I’m not going back to D.C. a fucking disaster.”
Poole sighed. It appeared that a confrontation was unavoidable. He wondered if there was any way to minimize the oncoming clash. Vinter would expect 100 percent support from him, but Poole had already decided it would be foolish to confront Rapp in such an open way. Poole had learned that when going into battle against an unknown enemy you must set your ego aside and have a contingency in place for a tactical withdrawal. That was the careful course he would have to navigate. Vinter would scream at him later, but even with the great sex, he was growing tired of her browbeatings. Maybe this would present an opportunity to balance the scales and make her more compliant.
“I’m going to support you, but I’m warning you he might not be the kind of guy you want to pick a fight with.”
“Well, I’m not the kind of woman you want to pick a fight with. And it’s not going to be a fight. I’m going to tear his balls off and send him packing and that’s going to be the end of it.”
As much as Poole wanted to believe her, he shared none of her confidence. “Arianna, I know I’m not going to be able to change your mind, but don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.” Having no desire to hear her response, Poole turned and began making his way toward the main building.
CHAPTER 7
INTER-SERVICES INTELLIGENCE HQ, ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN
NADEEM Ashan walked down the broad hallway with a sense of dread. After twenty-nine years of working for Pakistani intelligence, one would think Ashan would be used to these bumps in the road, but this particular bump concerned him for reasons that he was extremely reluctant to share with anyone else in the building. Ashan was an expert navigator when it came to the turbulent waters of the ISI, and that historical knowledge only added to his growing concern. The place was not some monolithic bureaucracy where like-minded men shaped the intelligence-gathering and covert activities of Pakistan. The ISI was a deeply divided, sectarian institution composed of intelligence professionals and military personnel who had vastly different ideas about what was best for their country.
The main fault line lay between the secularists and the religious fanatics, with various groups within each camp. The secularists typically pushed for modernity and stability. They had warned for years that the intelligence agency’s support of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir, India, would eventually bite them in their proverbial behind. The religious fanatics saw the Taliban as an ally that could be used to keep neighboring Afghanistan weak, and the fiercely nationalistic element of the group refused to waver in their support for the terrorists in Kashmir. Their hatred for India ran so deep that they blindly supported the savages who intentionally killed civilians in an effort to make Kashmir a free state.
The hard-liners were exposed as reckless fools in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks that left 195 dead and the world-famous Taj Hotel a smoldering ruin. The international outcry was deafening. As the deputy general for Analysis and Foreign Relations, Ashan heard it the loudest. Even before the attacks on New York and Washington, Ashan had had a very close relationship with the CIA and MI-5. After those attacks, Ashan began to see just how dangerous it was to support the mongrel dogs of jihad. Even President Musharraf began to see the light, and when he moved to support the United States in the War on Terror, those dogs turned on him and tried unsuccessfully to take his life seven times during his tenure as Pakistan’s head of state. Only five of those incidents had been reported. Ashan and his colleagues at ISI helped cover up the other two due to the conspirators’ ties to certain intelligence officials.
All of these incidents were embarrassing for the ISI, but none of them compared to what was uncovered when the Americans sent in one of their elite commando units to kill the world’s most notorious terrorist. Bin Laden, it turned out, had been hiding in Pakistan for years. Ashan instantly knew that factions within the ISI had been harboring him. Money would have changed hands, to be sure, but the primary motivation was undoubtedly ideological symmetry. No matter how Pakistan tried to deny it, there were a significant number of men in the Pakistani military and ISI who supported and applauded the actions of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Ashan was on his way to see just such an individual. Lieutenant General Akhtar Durrani was the deputy general of the ISI’s External Wing. Durrani and Ashan ran two of the ISI’s three main groups. Their influence was vast, and they both reported directly to the ISI’s director general. Ashan managed to move back and forth between the secularists and the hard-liners depending on the situation, while Durrani was firmly in the camp of the hard-liners. Ashan’s pragmatism was driven by an obvious fact—Pakistan was overwhelmingly a Muslim country.
Ashan moved past the handpicked military bodyguards and his colleague’s male personal assistant with nothing more than a nod. ISI Headquarters was a sprawling compound and the Foreign Relations Wing was a healthy distance from the offices of the External Wing, but even so, the two deputy generals were very close. Almost every day Ashan made the lengthy walk from his office to Durrani’s. Unlike most of the Pakistani men his age, Ashan was very focused on his health. Neither of his parents had made it to sixty. His father died of a heart attack brought on by years of smoking cigarettes, and his mother died of lung cancer brought on by years of smoking. Ashan abhorred smoking and made every effort to eat right and walk every day. He was intent on living well into his eighties.
The heavy door to Durrani’s office was closed. Ashan glanced over his sh
oulder at the assistant, who checked the lights on his phone.
“He’s alone.”
Ashan knocked on the door and turned the knob. He stepped into the large rectangular office and was enveloped in a haze of gray smoke. Ashan didn’t hesitate. He flipped a switch on the wall and the hum of an exhaust fan kicked in. He had had the unit installed nearly four years ago, because he could no longer tolerate sitting in the smoke-filled office. He considered chastising his friend for not having it on, but thought better of it. The man was breathing the carcinogens directly into his lungs. The exhaust fan would make little difference.
“Nadeem,” Durrani said, leaning back in his high-back black leather chair, “what a pleasure.” Durrani was dressed in his Army uniform, lest anyone forget the duality of his importance.
Ashan, having served only four years in the Air Force, was dressed in a blue suit and yellow tie. “I was in the neighborhood and I decided to stop by.”
“Exercising again.” Durrani smiled and held out his cigarette. “I’ve warned you, if you keep that up it will kill you.”
“Yes, I know. If only I smoked like you and the rest of the country I would be much healthier.”
“You might have more fun,” Durrani said with a broad grin forming under the ample black mustache that seemed to be a prerequisite for being an officer in the Pakistan military.
“I have plenty of fun.” Ashan continued past the two chairs in front of his friend’s large desk and sat in the chair by the window that looked out onto one of the many inner courtyards of the compound. The armchair was something else he had ordered on his own. The two chairs in front of Durrani’s desk were stubby little things that forced the occupants to look up at Durrani as if he sat high atop K2. Ashan couldn’t be certain, but he suspected that the seating arrangement was a holdover from the old colonial days when British officers ran their country.
“So what brings you to my little enclave this morning? Do you need the dirty tricks of the External Wing to save your rear end once again?”
More serious than kidding, Ashan said, “Your dirty tricks are usually what puts my posterior into the hot water.”
“Oh, come now,” Durrani said with a deep laugh. “We all have our roles to play.”