Anonymous Sources (36 page)

I dropped the rest of Nadeem's money on the backseat.

“I'm sorry,” I shouted. “I'm so sorry!”

And then I was sprinting, my dress hiked up around my thighs, my lungs burning. I could hear noises behind me—more cars slamming on their brakes—footsteps pounding—were they behind me?

I didn't look back. Would Mr. Carlyle's secretary have warned the guards at the gate?

“Move! Move!” I pushed at a tourist who stepped in front of me.

I was close. I could see a flag rippling on the green lawn behind the fence. Then the gate, and two Secret Service agents standing in front of it, wearing white uniforms and armed with enormous assault rifles.

“Help! Help me!” I screamed.

“Name?” called the closer one.

“Alex James!”

The guards parted and pushed me roughly behind them. The gate clanged shut. I sank to my knees, gasping for air, amazed that I was still alive.

    

    

W
hat can you buy for $25 million?

The answer is, not as much as you might think.

Edmund Tusk had spent much of the past two years pondering this precise question, and he had concluded that for a man of his age, $25 million represented a tidy sum but not a vast fortune.

On the plus side, he would not be paying taxes.

On the negative side, he had to factor in the cost of constantly moving, of plastic surgeries and disguises and new identities, of covering his tracks. When you actually ran the numbers, it was clear he would not be living out his retirement on a giant yacht, or amassing a private collection
of Ferraris. But that was fine. Better to keep a low profile. And there would be enough. Enough in the bank to pay for good hotels and business-class flights and cases of Barolo, not Budweiser. And, hell—anything beat retiring to a condo in McLean.

On a purely symbolic level, he had been pleased to negotiate a salary that put him on par with Osama bin Laden. Twenty-five million dollars. That was the bounty the FBI had offered for bin Laden all those years. And that was apparently what Tusk's services were worth as well. Tusk found it fascinating that two such different skill sets commanded the same amount in the global market. Bin Laden, of course, had sought fame. He had wanted to change history, to have his face—his voice—recognized around the world. Such pursuits did not interest Edmund Tusk. His ideology, in the end, boiled down to this: if an event was inevitable, he might as well walk away from it well compensated.

And this is exactly how he had come to view the situation he had now put in motion. When the men had first invited him to meet in Abu Dhabi, he had declined. Sure, he was cynical and disillusioned. But he was no terrorist.

For months, though, they had continued to work on him. To flatter him. The network was compact, and two made the pitch: the money guy (as Tusk thought of him), a Saudi banker claiming to represent a number of wealthy donors; and the religion guy, a pious Pakistani physicist who was both feared and revered by his country's military and intelligence chiefs. Together they had the funding. They had the bomb. They had a man, whom they called Malik, who had the technical expertise to arrange transfer of the weapon to Washington. All they needed was someone with the right access, at the right levels, inside the US government apparatus. They were willing to pay.

When they came to him, Tusk was serving as CIA station chief in Islamabad, watching the country collapse from the inside. Pakistan's politicians were rotten, its business leaders corrupt, its middle class decaying, even the military now scared of its own shadow. It didn't take a wild
imagination to put two and two together. Rising extremism plus rising instability equaled the possibility—no, the probability—that the nuclear arsenal would one day fall into the wrong hands.

Most frustrating was that there were no good guys in this game. US policy toward Pakistan was whacked. Tusk's job as CIA station chief could be described as an elaborate dance: lying to the Pakistanis, letting them lie to him, then returning to the embassy to lie to his own staff. Every so often, in the case of a coup (Pakistan) or an election (Washington), he changed partners. And then the dance carried on. Tusk was not naive. He had run the Agency stations in Kabul and Amman; he knew how this part of the world worked. But in Pakistan he simply could not see the point. An Army general he'd once worked with was fond of asking,
Tell me how this ends?

Surprisingly, the money guy and the religion guy had supplied the answer. When they approached him a third time about a meeting in Abu Dhabi, Tusk accepted. Their pitch was blunt: It's going to happen. We are going to steal a bomb from Pakistan's arsenal and detonate it inside the United States. Why not help us? Why not get rich and retire to South America, when it's going to happen anyway?

Slowly he had been drawn in. He was canny enough to ask for the money in installments. A third up front, right after they agreed the terms in Abu Dhabi. A third just this week, when he had been able to confirm the bomb had arrived on US soil. And the final $8.33 million would be wired to a Swiss account today, as soon as detonation was confirmed.

Today
. It had been a long time coming. He had encountered and dispensed with numerous bumps and setbacks along the way. People always surprised you. Some proved quite easy to manage. Jake Pearson in London, for example: a capable lackey, and so helpfully disinclined to ask questions. Pearson's little undercover mission to Claridge's had been rather useful.

Shaukat Malik, on the other hand, had proved an unexpected challenge. Such a quiet, queer man. Fastidious in some ways, but then so
careless in others: always losing his phone, and worse, blabbing within earshot of Thomas Carlyle. Malik's unilateral decision to take out Carlyle had proved the riskiest in the entire trajectory of the project. Tusk's mouth twisted in fury just thinking about it. So unnecessary. It had brought publicity. It had brought the girl. The reporter. Almost despite herself, Alexandra James had seemed to stumble along in the right direction, asking inconvenient questions so insistently that he had been left with no choice but to eliminate her as well.

He was still not sure what had happened this morning. He had given Malik a gun, for Christ's sake; surely the man was not so inept as to screw up yet again. The texted confirmation seemed in order. But why had Malik not responded to his last message? Why had his phone GPS shown him moving toward downtown Washington? Those were not his instructions. Tusk didn't understand and this worried him.

Now he had been waiting an annoyingly long time to be cleared inside the building. It was hot, even with the car air-conditioning at full tilt. Sweat dampened his shirt under the armpits. He needed to piss. Soon he would have been in the car a full hour. Tusk adjusted his protruding gut to a more comfortable position against the steering wheel. He brushed a cat hair off his pants.

At last it was his turn. He rolled down his window.

“Hi, Bill.”

“Hi, Ed. Sorry about the wait. Crazy day, huh?”

“You're telling me. I gotta get up to this meeting, though. Any chance of speeding things up?”

The security guard nodded. “Just be a sec.” Almost apologetically, he passed the long-handled mirror along the underside of Tusk's car. Both sides, and around the tires. Routine bomb check.

“You're all set. Have a good one.”

“Thanks, you too, Bill.”

The black metal gates swung open. If Tusk hurried, he could still make it inside for the start of the meeting.

    

    

T
his time I did not have to wait to see Lowell Carlyle.

The two Secret Service officers who had met me at the gate rushed me across the lawn, into the West Wing door, through the wide waiting room. Doors swung open ahead of us. The staffers clogging the hallways were made to stand back.

Mr. Carlyle's secretary was standing up at her desk outside his office, looking grim. When she saw me, she let out a little gasp. Then she reached for the phone on her desk, hit a button, and said, “She's here . . . . Yes. Mr. Carlyle asked to be notified.”

She stepped out from behind the desk.

“Thank you,” I said to her, gesturing at the guards still flanking me. “Thank you for having them ready.”

She nodded, and I watched her eyes widen as she took in the full state of my appearance. She picked up the phone again and spoke quickly. “Dr. Patterson? It's Tess. Could you step in here for a minute? . . . No, no, he's fine. But bring your bag.”

A minute later Lowell Carlyle appeared. He looked even wearier than when I had met him two days ago, as if he had not slept in years. His dark suit was creased and his eyes were red and pouchy. Their expression was kind, though, as he motioned me into his office and toward a chair.

He sat down in another chair opposite me and put his hand on my wrist. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. I'm fine. But you were right. After you called—just after you called—he was there.”

“Who was there?”

“Nadeem Siddiqui. When I opened the front door—”

“Nadeem Siddiqui? I don't understand.”

“I don't either, entirely. He is”—I took a breath—“he's dead now.”

Carlyle looked carefully at me. “Siddiqui died sometime last week, Alexandra. In Pakistan. His name was highlighted this morning in the PDB—the daily intel brief. There must be some mistake.”

“Yeah, I heard that too,” I said, suddenly angry. “But someone who seemed to know an awful lot about him showed up at my door this morning and gave me this.” I lifted my hair.

Carlyle blanched. Then he reached over to a phone on a side table and hit a button. “Tess. Could you get Dr. Patterson— Oh, he's here?”

The office door swung open to admit a middle-aged man who I assumed must be the White House physician. He bustled in, inspected my face, and started pulling wipes and bandages out of a leather bag. “You'll need stitches. Quite a few, by the look of it. That's a whopper. Why don't you come with me—”