Rahman spent a couple of nights in Karachi and made sure that the couple didn't take any more excursions into town. The four young people grew quite close together during their stay in the hotel suite and found they had a lot in common with regard to their views on the way the West, headed by the USA treated the "natives" in Asia and Africa. They all thought that the "natives" had every right to get even, or realizing that it was impossible to correct all historical injustices with one deed, at least make a contribution to this end. However, Rahman said that the plan might backfire if Pakistan was held accountable for the detonation of a nuclear device in the heart of Western democratic states including Israel, and the retribution may lead to a total destruction of his country. Nagib tried to reassure him that it would be impossible to trace the devices back to Pakistan but Rahman said that he had heard a lecture about the wonders of nuclear forensics and feared that the origin of the plutonium may be determined by advanced analytical methods that were practiced by a handful of laboratories in the West. Nagib couldn't argue with that as he knew that one of those laboratories was at Los Alamos. Nagib suggested that the Pakistanis could claim that some of their plutonium had disappeared and probably stolen by sympathizers of some radical Islamic faction, perhaps by supporters of the Islamic State. In that case Pakistan could only be blamed for failing to implement appropriate security measures to guard the strategic nuclear materials. Rahman said that he would present this suggestion to the experts when he returned to Islamabad in a couple of days.
The Iranians got word that some kind of special activity concerning Pakistan's nuclear program was taking place and that General Masood from the intelligence service was involved. Their informer in PINSTECH was a mid-level technician that worked in the same department as Dr. Anwar Usman and was surprised to see him collect his personal items and carry them out while being escorted by another young man. The technician's curiosity drove him to ask his co-worker where Anwar was going and who his escort was. His colleague said that it was a secret, but that she had recognized his escort as an operative of the intelligence services because she had seen him before. The technician who was ordered by his Iranian contact to watch out for any irregularities arranged a meeting with his contact and told him that Anwar was transferred temporarily to an undisclosed position, but he found out that it involved the intelligence services. The Iranian commended him on a job well done and rewarded him with a bonus, he said that he would receive another fat bonus if he could find out the name of the person who escorted Dr. Usman.
The technician managed to discover that the escort's name was Rahman Chenna and indeed received the fat bonus he was promised. Rahman's name was well known to the Iranians as an operative of Pakistani intelligence and they also knew about his cover as a science attaché in Brussels and his involvement in bringing Nagib and Alia to Pakistan. Their hackers managed to penetrate the airline ticketing system and saw that he had been booked on a flight from Islamabad to Karachi. The Iranians didn't have an official consulate in Karachi, which was surprising considering the importance of that harbor town and its proximity to Iran, but did have several commercial offices that served as a front to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG) and minded their substantial business assets in Pakistan. A phone call from Islamabad and a description of Rahman were enough to have two agents of the IRG at the arrivals gate in Karachi airport. They had no trouble picking up Rahman who felt totally safe in Pakistan and following him to the hotel in which the American couple was enjoying their suite. However, they did not know in which room Rahman was staying and were afraid to raise suspicion by asking too many questions, so they sat in the hotel lobby and sipped tea waiting for Rahman to emerge again. They noticed that there quite a few Americans at the hotel but as they had not been briefed on Nagib and Alia didn't know what to look for.
Linda and Alma spent the evening in Linda's apartment. Their relationship had now reached a phase where they spent most of their free time together. The sex continued to be formidable and even better as Alma took on a more active role but their relationship had deepened and extended beyond pure atavistic satisfaction. In a liberal society they would have probably moved in together to share an apartment and become a couple but in the conservative Pakistani society that was out of the question. Alma's affair with Anwar didn't interfere with the way the two women regarded each other just as the fact that both worked in organizations that frowned upon significant relationships with people of foreign nations. One of the advantages for Linda was that from Alma she learned to cook Pakistani dishes and was also driven to extend her repertoire of fast food beyond salads, pasta and hamburgers. One could say that in her own way she was becoming domesticated. Her boss, Blakey, knew about her affair with Alma and actually encouraged it because of the access to PINSTECH in general and to Dr. Anwar Usman in particular.
The tall athletic blonde American girl who was nothing less than an operative of the CIA and the attractive dark skinned young woman who was an engineer in one of Pakistan's classified institutions may have looked like an odd couple to an observer. But in fact they had a lot in common — both were highly intelligent, independent and strong willed women who did not receive the credit they deserved from the mainly male society in which they operated. The discussions they had were philosophical and concerned the world situation in general but they also talked a lot about the radical Islamic movements and the threat they posed to the current world order.
With great difficulty Alma managed to convey to Linda the feeling of a large part of Pakistani society about the roughshod meddling of America and the West in the affairs of the rest of the world, particularly in the Asian sub-continent that included India, Pakistan and also Bangladesh, Afghanistan and some of the smaller countries like Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Tibet. She said that democracy may be the best type of government for the US, Australia and parts of Europe but was unsuitable for most societies in Asia and Africa. This was especially true in countries that were artificially created by drawing straight lines on a map by representatives of colonial powers with total disregard of ethnic, religious, cultural and traditional features of the population. Notable examples were Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, or more accurately what used to be Iraq and Syria, where Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians of various sorts and many other minorities were forced to share a geographical region and a formal government. As long as a strong dictator held power and kept this mélange together, the country seemed to be unified and stable. This could be done in a society that knew no better and was kept in an ignorant state. However, the advent of television and the increase in the level of literacy and especially after the dissemination of the internet, Facebook, Twitter, cellular phones and other information and communication channels things changed. People could see that in other countries the standard of living was much higher and wanted a better life for themselves and a better future for their children. Everyone could see demonstrations against the rulers, masses in the streets throwing stones and tossing burning flares at police forces, saw mass murders carried out by members of one tribe, or religion, against people who were their good neighbors for centuries and wondered if they were next in line. Linda said that these things had occurred throughout human history and mentioned well known historical precedents like tribal wars in the ancient world, the empires founded by the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, the conquests of the Americas by the Spanish, Portuguese, French and British, not to mention incidents such as the massacre of the French Huguenots by the French Catholics or the mutual genocide of Hutu and Tutsi in Burundi. Alma argued that all these examples were irrelevant because of two things: first, the scale of the potential conflict was unprecedented and included one and half a billion Muslims and secondly the availability of weapons of mass destruction that could lead to mutual annihilation of civilization. She said that if radical, fanatic factions like the Islamic State could not be stopped dead-in-their-tracks a world conflict was inevitable because that movement was not ready for a compromise or even negotiations. IS had a totalitarian approach — you are either one of us and accept the teachings of Muhammad and the law of Shariya or you are no more. Linda saw the opening that was offered and asked Alma if she believed in the goals of IS and was not surprised to hear that Alma opposed their approach although there were anti-American elements in Pakistan that thought they could use IS to settle the score with the West. Linda said that she was relieved to hear that Alma herself was against IS and wondered how strong was the support for it inside the Pakistani administration. Alma said that there was a faction that had inroads with the intelligence services and the nuclear community and they could be persuaded to participate in dangerous and adventurous actions against the USA. Linda innocently asked if Anwar was one of these and Alma said that he was opposed to these factions but had to keep quiet about it because if he were suspected as not being patriotic enough he would surely lose his privileged top secret status and his job.