Zero Hour pp-7 Read online

  “The distribution angle,” Megan said. “Let’s stick with it, if you don’t mind.”

  Noriko was thinking Queen Breen had reacted to her last statement a mite curtly, and doubted it was out of defensiveness over a product comparison that weighed favorably toward the competition. It was obvious everybody knew what was coming here. Aside from an exchange of information, their bicoastal klatch was definitely leading up to a staking of territorial claims. And while Noriko preferred to keep the sparks to a minimum, she wasn’t about to set herself up to be taking crap from anybody either.

  Breen wanted data, she’d get it in spades.

  “Gunn oscillators are controlled items that require licenses for sale abroad,” she said, rapid-fire. “Depending on the performance specs of a particular oscillator… its heat and transmission capacities to name a couple… it may qualify for a license exception under conditions stipulated under Part Seven-four-oh of the Export Administration Regulations. These exceptions allow sale and shipment to government agencies, private firms, and distributors in certain country groups classified by the Bureau of Industry and Security. Offhand, I know some of our oscillators go to Canada, Mexico, England, France, Germany, Sweden, and Japan… democracies that have cooperative export policies. But while the policies of these countries are guided by common principles, there’s nothing that approaches unity in how they’re implemented. England might allow license exemptions that differ from those of the United States. Mexico might have other variances in its criteria—”

  “You’re conjecturing here, yes?” Megan interrupted. “Just so I’m straight.”

  As a stick up my ass, Noriko thought.

  “Yes,” she said. “Only as far as which ones I’ve used as examples, though. I can’t claim to know the intricacies of American export law, forget what’s in some other country’s rule books. And there are something like a hundred-and-fifty in BIS’s ‘B Group,’ which puts them on its exception list for dual-use products. Nonetheless I can tell you that Yemen, Malaysia, Lebanon, Burma, Pakistan… our government doesn’t love any of them for their democratic values, but they’re all strategic geopolitical allies that qualify. And that’s just naming a few. While I know these countries are subject to checks and restraints other countries on the list might not need to worry about, and I know UpLink is more selective about its shipping policies than trade law requires, it’s still possible for them to gain possession of restricted items through a quirk in the exemption policies of, oh, Great Britain… hypothetically speaking. And that’s legal possession. What happens to a high-performance oscillator — ours, somebody else’s, it doesn’t matter — after it reaches Beirut? Rangoon? Islamabad? It isn’t supposed to be transshipped to someplace like North Korea or Libya under the agreements I’ve spoken about, but tracking re-exports is unbelievably complicated. With front companies, shady freight forwarders… when we’re talking about illicit detours, it can come right down to a single customs inspector who’s been greased in some home or foreign port of call. And I’ve been sticking to material freight. The kind that’s packed in crates and can be measured on scales. Technological data’s much, much slipperier since it’ll most often involve electronic transfers—”

  “One thing here, Nori,” Nimec said, holding up a hand. “Those oscillators Armbright’s got on the market… you telling us they’ve been reaching places they shouldn’t?”

  “Not definitively, no,” she said. “But there are indicators that warrant close attention. Steady upticks in its transnational export of oscillators, and other dual-use elements besides, including large cargoes of titanium-sapphire tubing of the same type we’ve purchased from the company. These could be — I stress, could be — related to the production of laser-based military systems.” Noriko paused right there, refraining from going through her whole checklist of suspect materials. She did not want to escalate anybody’s interest at present by volunteering that these elements might also include the chemicals deuterium and fluorine. Give them that, and she’d be opening the door for them to come on like gangbusters. “Some of the freight loads… assuming for the sake of our discussion that the shipper’s export declarations filed with Customs are legit and we have an accurate idea of what’s in them… some of these loads, well, if I put a graphic on the screen and tried to show you their progress from point-of-origin to end-user, you’d see lines crisscrossing all over the map. And wind up feeling as stumped as I’ve occasionally been since my probe got underway.”

  Thibodeau scrubbed his cheek and looked thoughtful.

  “Suppose for a minute Armbright’s into somethin’ dirty,” he said. “You think it’s a case of the right hand not knowin’ what the left’s doin’, or a bad that’s comin’ down from the top?”

  Noriko shrugged.

  “The upticks I mentioned appear to have started around when the Kiran Group was brought into Armbright, but that could be a coincidence,” she said. “I’m leery of red herrings. It would be a mistake for us to impose a time frame on the gathering of intelligence… a whole lot more of which is needed before any conclusions can be drawn. We have to be careful on this—”

  “But you do smell something fishy coming from Kiran right now,” Megan interrupted.

  Noriko met her gaze across the continent. Hesitated a moment. And then gave her a slow affirmative nod, knowing full well this was make-or-break time.

  “I think we should talk about Hasul Benazir,” she said.

  * * *

  Up a flight of stairs from the shuttle platform, then over to the Lichtenstein mural on the 42nd Street — Times Square station’s mezzanine, a depiction of some futuristic Manhattan as it might have been envisioned in an imaginary time of innocence.

  Briefcase in hand, Avram stood under the mural watching a pantomimist in silver body makeup and a robot suit do his bit for spare change — his prolonged motionlessness broken up now and then by a mechanical gesture. The shopworn routine bored Avram, and would not pry a cent from his wallet.

  He remembered the kid on the train. His agile musicianship, the wit of his song selections. That rock piece especially had caused nostalgia to seep into Avram’s thoughts. He didn’t know why, or didn’t quite know. He generally carried his past without mawkishness, but the feeling had been accompanied by images from the Club’s heyday. Those old gemstone cutters he’d been picturing earlier. Hunched over their polishing wheels, surrounded by the tools of their trade.

  It had been a very different era.

  When he’d dropped his bill into the guitarist’s donation can Avram had noticed a Web address painted on the front of his instrument along with its other graffiti. What had it been? Fuzzgrenade.com? Softgel.net? No, no. But something along those lines. Industrious kid. He must do parties, clubs.

  Avram wished he’d paid closer attention to the gaudy self-promotion. One of these days, he hoped to hold a grand affair. His silver anniversary celebration, perhaps. His son’s college graduation, his daughter’s wedding. He would rent a huge hall, maybe sail his guests away on a cruise. Why go for the common entertainers? The wedding orchestras? How nice it would be to give the kid a break, offer him some decent pay. Hear him perform his entire repertoire. One of these days, yes. At some gala reception. When he could stop hiding his true means, show that he was a man of substance. It would be a coming-out of sorts….

  His cell phone rang. Avram produced a long exhale. The dance was grinding on his nerves; he wanted it to end.

  “Yes.” Wearily.

  At the other end, Lathrop took note of his tone of voice.

  “Patience, Avram,” he said. “You’re almost there.”

  His eyes boring holes into the robot mime, Avram gave no comment.

  * * *

  As Megan listened to everything Noriko Cousins said about Armbright’s curious shipping patterns — not yet ready to call them anomalies—she was thinking that Noriko had certainly done her homework, although what she’d presented to this point (without once referring to notes) didn�
�t go very much beyond citing details already contained in the files she had transmitted to SanJo before the weekend, and, perhaps, fleshing out some of the sketchier threads of information they included. Megan was also thinking Noriko had undoubtedly touched upon matters that might well prove to be a big deal to UpLink and the entire country if her concerns — not yet ready to call them suspicions—about Armbright’s international-trade-law breaches were developed into solid evidence by process of investigation and analysis. But compelling as Noriko’s report was, Megan had begun to think that nothing in it was overly relevant to the core — and as yet unmentioned—issue they were supposed to be discussing in their virtual face-to-face this morning, which really just involved how to go about moving ahead with the boss’s clearly stated wish that Sword’s New York division allocate a small portion of its divisional resources to the Case of the Vanishing Husband. In fact, Megan had over the past few minutes grown absolutely convinced that Noriko’s goal wasn’t to add anything substantial to her previous intelligence on Armbright, Kiran, and Hasul Benazir, but instead put a deliberate and particular slant on it, using a fair amount of words to drive home a single basic message: Keep out, no trespassing, stay the hell off my block. And whereas she was patiently letting Noriko play out her string, and would continue doing so a bit longer, Megan knew that what was coming down here, sure as sunrise, was no less than the first major test of her power of authority over UpLink’s security branch since she’d been voted in as chief executive officer of the company.

  True to Noriko’s emerging modus operandi, her recital on Hasul Benazir, currently in progress — and again showing thorough familiarity with her subject — was both recap and subtly spun embellishment of the dossier in her e-files. A graduate of the prestigious University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, with dual Ph.D.s in electrical engineering and chemical, mineral, and metallurgical engineering, he’d been born forty-odd years ago in Peshawar’s exclusive Hayat Abad township to parents who were members of the Pakistani ruling elite—

  “This in a society that brags about not having a caste system like their abhorred Indian neighbors, but has class divisions so unbreachable they amount to the same thing,” Noriko was saying now. “His father’s a founding partner of the second largest industrial conglomerate in the country. Mother’s a British-educated academician and daughter of the number-one brokerage and finance firm trading on the floor of the Karachi Stock Exchange.”

  “Privileged,” Nimec said.

  “Yes,” Megan said. “I’m not sure it’s fair to call him blessed, though.”

  Noriko nodded to indicate she’d picked up on her meaning.

  “As best we know, when Hasul was twenty-two or twenty-three he was diagnosed with Xeroderma Pigmentosum, an inherited genetic disorder so rare there are only a thousand documented cases in the world,” she said. “Doctors say that if all the unreported cases were added to the total stats it would show an incidence of one in several hundred thousand, but the odds of a person carrying the mutation still falls somewhere in the area of being struck by lightning. And when you look at the ordeal of living with XP, or the chances of dying from its complications, I might prefer taking a bolt from a blue…”

  Hearing Noriko describe the condition, none of the three individuals in the San Jose conference room would have rushed to disagree.

  Characterized by acute photosensitivity due to an inability of the skin cells to repair DNA damaged by even minimal levels of ultraviolet radiation, XP in effect made its sufferers allergic to sunlight. Usually diagnosed within the first three to five years of life, XP in its classic Type A form had an astronomical childhood mortality rate because of the development of melanomas and other severe health problems linked to the defect. But Hasul Benazir had not manifested any of its pronounced, telltale symptoms — the blistering, the cancerous skin lesions and tumors, the physical weakness, impairments to sight and hearing, and premature aging — until adulthood. And that was in its own way good news for Benazir, a strong hint, later confirmed by medical tests, that his was a variant form of the condition known as Type V. With constant medical supervision and strict regulation of his lifestyle and environment, he stood a greatly increased chance of long-term survival due to XP-V’s higher level of skin-cell repair mechanisms.

  “Must be a determined sonuva gun,” Thibodeau said. “Lookin’ at all he’s accomplished. Got enough healthy people with money and resources don’t do anything with it, you know.”

  “I know. But where’s his determination focused? What’s guiding it? I suppose they’d be my main questions,” Noriko said. She refilled her coffee cup from the apparently bottomless pot on her desk. “I want to get back to Hasul’s college years for a minute. He isn’t the only notable figure associated with UET, Lahore. Another’s a professor of Islamic studies whose political discussion groups Hasul attended and helped organize to the extent you could’ve called him a true devotee. This is openly known. We also know the name Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed from his post-academic career as founder of the ‘Army of the Pure.’ ”

  Or Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, of which they all were, indeed, familiar. A militant fundamentalist group with thousands of fedayeen guerillas and an extensive support network, the LeT had done much to warrant being placed on the Defense Department’s list of international terrorist organizations. Although based in Pakistan, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and western Afghanistan, it was well-financed by backers throughout the radicalized Islamic world.

  Noriko talked about the outfit’s principal avowed goal of driving India from its territorially claimed chunk of Kashmir by any means available, and its growing ties to Pan-Islamic extremist movements with broader calls for global jihad. She told how its heavily armed fedayeen were trained in insurgent tactics, and otherwise aided and abetted by sympathetic factions entrenched within the Pakistani government — most especially its powerful intelligence service, the same branch that had assisted in the genesis of the Taliban. She told of the outfit’s countless acts of brutal, indiscriminate violence against both military and civilian targets in the decade-plus since it had come into existence… these including kidnappings, assassinations, suicide bombings, a brazen attack on the Indian Parliament that left over a hundred dead, and massacres of entire villages to their every last man, woman, and child—

  “Noriko,” Megan interrupted. “Are you suggesting there’s evidence Hasul Benazir has any connection to the LeT? Aside from his interest in Sayeed’s teachings as a student?”

  “It was more than an interest—”

  “It was over twenty-five years ago. Before Sayeed formed the LeT,” Megan said. “I’m not sure we can assume his discussion groups were even concerned with Islamic extremism… such as it existed in Pakistan during the mid-1980s.”

  “The Kashmiri brouhaha goes back almost sixty years to Britain’s partition of the region with the Radcliffe line, which led to the first Muslim calls for jihad there, which led to two years of war between India and Pakistan,” Noriko said. “And the fact is that the idea behind the creation of Pakistan was to establish an Islamic state that would stave off a civil war brewing between Hindus and Moslems since the turn of the century. Ideologies like Sayeed’s don’t spring up overnight. We don’t need to mark the exact date nationalism and religious zeal bonded in his mind—”

  “Maybe not… but we aren’t talking about him, we’re talking about Hasul Benazir,” Megan said. She paused. “Listen, when I was a college sophomore my dormie convinced me to join an Earth Day protest… its mission was to save the Oregon wilderness, and the plan was for a busload of us girls to head out to a logging site and strip naked—”

  Nimec looked over at her.

  “Naked?”

  “Nude, right,” Megan said. “So as to make ourselves human symbols of how the timber industry was denuding our forests.”

  “Uh-huh,” Nimec said. “And that’s what you did?”

  “That’s what we all did,” Megan said. “In front of a crew of about fif
ty gawking lumbermen, that swelled into a crowd of maybe a hundred fifty.”

  “Bet it stopped the wood choppin’,” Thibodeau said.

  “Until the cops came to make us put our clothes back on and haul us away.” Megan said. “After which I’m sure the log cutting resumed with increased vigor.”

  Thibodeau smiled at the images his mind conjured up, particularly of Megan, thinking he’d never gotten such agreeable distractions on any of his jobs.

  On the wall screen, Noriko was deadpan.

  “I’m not only divulging this to humiliate myself,” Megan said, meeting her gaze across the miles. “If we were to take everything people do when they’re young, and use it as a yardstick for what they become as adults, who’d ever pass muster? Hasul Benazir has a permanent resident visa that was recently renewed… and that’s under the heavy scrutiny that’s been imposed these past few years. He’s resided in this country for over a decade, employs hundreds of American citizens in his business—”