“Not at the time. But I did watch the recording later. The man is a maniac, assuming he killed Barazani.”
“He tossed the president’s head over the rail.”
“Might have been an accomplice who did the actual murder,” Haaris said. “We can’t discount any avenue of investigation.”
“Is that the recommendation you’re going to give to your desk?”
“I’ll give them the same recommendation that I always give: Keep an open mind. Do not jump to conclusions. Spend a little time with your thinking.”
“They still have thirty-plus nuclear weapons at their disposal, plus the means to deliver them,” Pete said. “Do you think that time might not be on our side?”
“Pakistan is not preparing to attack India or any other country in the near future,” Haaris said to her. “What we have witnessed is a coup d’état. A long time coming, in my estimation. And, Miss Boylan, I have given that much thought over the past several years — ever since the departure of Pervez Musharraf.”
“So where is Pakistan going?”
“I’m not sure, but it is something very high on my list of priorities.”
“Should we go to war with them?” Pete asked.
“Good heaven’s, no,” Haaris said, genuinely surprised. “No nuclear power goes to war with another nuclear power in this day and age. In this case it’s likely that India would become involved after all, and possibly even China might climb aboard ostensibly as our allies. It would give them a foothold into the region.” He looked at Wicklund and Richards. “In that direction lies only madness.”
“So your recommendation to the president would be wait and see,” Wicklund said. “Not very insightful from where I sit. But believe me, Mr. Haaris, I don’t want to come across as confrontational. We’re all just trying to come to some conclusions about the situation, and you not only had your boots on the ground there, you are the go-to person on Pakistan.”
“I understand,” Haaris said. “I’ll prepare a few notes by this evening and email them to you as soon as I have time. But for now my people are waiting to get started.”
“We may have a few further questions.”
“I think we all will,” Haaris said. “Are we finished here?”
“Of course,” Wicklund said.
Haaris got up and walked out of the conference room, and Pete caught up with him before he reached the elevators.
“Do you want to buy a girl a coffee?” she asked.
Haaris smiled. “Miss Boylan, are you coming on to me?”
Pete laughed. “Your accent drives women nuts, I hope you know that. I’d like to ask you something personal, away from the recording equipment back there.”
“I am rather busy.”
“Only take a minute, promise. We can go back to the cafeteria, and I’ll buy.”
Haaris smiled again. “I suppose that it’s an offer I can’t refuse. And tit for tat. A good-looking woman drives me nuts.”
Pete suppressed a smile.
They walked back down the corridor to the cafeteria, where she got them coffee and they sat at a table by the windows. Only a few other people were there at this hour of the afternoon.
Every window in every building on campus, even the cafeteria, was double-paned, with white noise piped in between the panes to cancel out any surveillance attempts.
“Who do you think this so-called Messiah is?” she asked. It was only an opening ploy to get him talking comfortably about a difficult subject.
“Hard to say this early.”
“Your gut feeling, if you were to be pressed.”
“Not Taliban, I think. He’s likely using them only as a tool.”
“For what?”
“It’s a coup d’état, Miss Boylan, as I’ve already stated. The Taliban hates the U.S., and hate can act as a very powerful adhesive to hold a mob together. He or someone like him was probably inevitable.”
“And an aphrodisiac,” Pete suggested. He hadn’t said that the Taliban hated “us,” but that they hated the U.S. The U.S. as a third party distinct from himself as well as the Taliban.
“That too, but I wouldn’t suspect that the average Pakistani would think of it that way.”
Pete gazed out the window, sipping her coffee, letting the silence between them grow. It was an old interrogation technique. Subjects almost always wanted to fill the void by saying something.
“So, it’s been interesting meeting you,” Haaris said, rising. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
“Something’s bothering you,” Pete said, looking up at him. “Call it woman’s intuition or whatever.”
“That’s a personal statement.”
Pete smiled. “It’s the business. Goes with the territory. And trust me, none of what’s been said here will be written down. You have my word.”
Haaris hesitated for just a second then shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, I suppose, for someone else to be in on my little secret. It’s already arrived at the seventh floor.”
Pete waited.
“Fact is, I’m dying. Cancer, I’m told. And I probably have around six viable months left to me.”
Pete was taken aback. It was nothing close to what she had expected.
“Now, I must get back to my people. Time waits for no man, Miss Boylan, not even for me.”
EIGHTEEN
McGarvey went down to Otto’s third-floor suite of offices, where no one ever worked except for the special projects director. The three rooms were filled with sophisticated computer equipment: two-hundred-inch ultra-high-def flat-screen monitors on the walls, one flat-panel table about the size of a pool table in the middle of the inner room and smaller screens, keyboards, printers and several laptops and tablets scattered on various desks and worktables. In addition, several large tables were filled to overflowing with printed maps, files, books, newspapers and magazines. Most of the chairs were stacked with folders. Other books were piled just about everywhere.
“Not everything is digitized.” Otto had been saying this for years. “And probably won’t ever be, provided there’s a need for secrecy. A computer can be hacked from ten thousand miles away, but a piece of paper in some obscure file somewhere ain’t so easy to access.”
Several of the monitors showed various colors as backgrounds, ranging from light yellows and reds to deep violets, which lately meant his search programs — his little darlings, he called them — were running into something that could potentially be dangerous to the U.S.
One of the programs was working on the Messiah’s brief speech; the image was on a screen, the voice low in the background.
“Pink picked up the fact that the voice was artificially enhanced,” Otto said. “I didn’t hear it myself. But I set her to filter out the enhancement, leaving only the original. Not so easy even for her since we have no idea, not even a clue, what the original sounds like, except its Punjabi seemed to be clipped, odd vowels here and there. Maybe someone who’d learned British English.”
“About half the educated males in Pakistan,” McGarvey said.
“Eighty percent,” Otto said. He entered several commands from a keyboard. “I’m trying to translate what the guy was saying into English — the way his voice might sound if he were speaking in English.”
“Are you making any progress?”
“It’s coming, but slowly. And even if Pink does come up with a credible voice, whose will it be? Any one of millions.”
“There’s only one reason he went to the trouble to disguise his voice, and it’s because we’d recognize it. But if we could find out whether his English was Punjabi accented or not, it would give us a direction of sorts.”
“My program has a seventy-eight-percent confidence that Punjabi is his native language.”