The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage Read Online Free

office, not much larger than her own but with a coveted window, to let him know she had come to work early. He was behind his desk sitting in an oversize executive chair, telephone pressed to his ear. When he saw her, he waved her in.
     
    “Olof, Kate has just stuck her head in,” he said into the receiver. “Let me put you on the squawk box.”
     
    Feldman was an oversized man, physically and emotionally, a human bear who had earned an enviable reputation in his decades in espionage. He had once been reasonably fit, if not athletic, but years in management, deskbound, had expanded his waistline. It was said behind his back that his belt, if extended, would significantly exceed his height. Olof, the man on the other end of the secure phone line, was Olof Wheatley, the chief of the Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group, the entity that monitored and analyzed the activities of foreign counterparts to CIA, including the ISI in Pakistan.
     
    “Kate, I was just sharing with Mortie some of the concerns we have at home now that OBL has been put down,” Wheatley said on the speakerphone. There was a tinny distortion in his voice. Olof was connected via STU III secure phones. These encrypted voice communication and were considered sufficiently impenetrable for material up to Top Secret. Though there were more portable models, if you were willing to lug it around you could pack a STU III in your luggage and use it in your hotel room, so long as you kept its special encryption key with you at all times.
     
    “Every bad actor in Pakistan who ever had the most tenuous connection to OBL is going to feel the hair rise up on the back of his neck when he reads the morning paper,” he continued. “As you know from watching the take-down, we recovered thousands of pages of written text and thirty computers and hard drives. Anyone named in one of those computer drives is going to start acting squirrelly this morning.”
     
    “Or go to ground,” Kate said.
     
    “Or to ground,” Wheatley admitted. “But we know from the good work you and Mortie have been doing that Pakistan’s military and the Inter-Services Intelligence guys have been covertly sponsoring at least four militant groups with global reach, including Al Qaeda, and that last night’s events, though embarrassing, will almost certainly not deter them. They sponsor terrorism, that’s what they do. We don’t have incentives to make them change course.”
     
    Kate knew ISI’s sponsorship of terror, as she had been involved in cooperative ventures with ISI. She had seen how uncooperative they could be, while saying all the right things. Duplicity was an art form in South Asia.
     
    “So it’s going to be important for everyone at the Islamabad station to stay alert. There could be a domino effect here. OBL’s exposure may lead us to other high value targets.”
     
    Wheatley omitted to say that the terrorist hunt in Pakistan was mainly driven by technology controlled in Washington, not Islamabad. Analysts monitoring satellite and predator drone imagery had spotted the OBL compound in Abbottabad. But it was Islamabad station that had determined that OBL’s house had no telephone or Internet service. Human spies were subordinate to machines, but sometimes human spies made all the difference.
     
    “We need to focus on Peshawar,” Feldman said. “That’s probably where Al-Zawahiri is hiding, and he probably isn’t lying as low as OBL did. He isn’t six foot four. He can blend in a crowd more easily.”
     
    Kate listened carefully. She had hoped for months to transfer on TDY temp duty to Peshawar, which was far more likely than dull Islamabad to provide her with interesting work, work out in the streets instead of behind a desk.
     
    Perhaps coming in early would give her an advantage in persuading Mort Feldman to support such a request.
     
    ***
     
    It was not to be. Kate learned two days later that she was among a handful of Agency staffers in Islamabad