money on this? It’s unacceptable.”
“Last night, just after midnight, we picked up a minivan carrying two Kenyans in Newport, Vermont,” continued Nova. “They had clear passports but one of them popped the TSDB. He turned out to be ex-Gitmo. The other’s unknown.”
“We pushed out a cross-border alert,” said Bill Winter, the director of the FBI.
“Is it an operation?” asked the president. “What are we doing about it?”
“We need to do some work, Mr. President,” said Winter. “The Canadians reluctantly agreed to raise the border threat to red.”
“Why was he at Guantánamo?” asked Lindsay.
“He was on a cell list of one of the tertiaries in the Dahab, Egypt, bombings in ’06,” said Calibrisi. “Nothing proven, just a phone number. Your predecessor freed him, Mr. President.”
“That was nice of him,” said President Allaire. “What’d we find in the minivan? Explosives?”
“The car was clean,” said Nova.
“Which means what?” asked Lindsay, the secretary of state.
“It could mean anything,” said Nova. “It’s too early to know.”
“Where is he now?” asked Jessica.
“We flew him to Amman,” said Calibrisi, the director of the CIA. “We conducted a pharma package aboard the C-130, but he stayed silent. Obviously, we need to find out if there’s an imminent threat here.”
“Is he talking?” asked President Allaire.
“Not yet,” said Calibrisi. “Jordanian intelligence is working the prisoner. I’ll report back if they surface anything material.”
“Let’s go to Pakistan,” said Jessica.
Jessica nodded to Calibrisi, the CIA chief, who was seated across from her.
“The summit in Tehran ended three hours ago,” said Calibrisi. “This was the first meeting between Pakistan’s new president, Omar El-Khayab, and Mahmoud Iqbar, Iran’s president.”
“What came out of it, other than the usual rhetoric?” asked the president.
“Iqbar and El-Khayab signed a treaty,” said Elm. “They’re calling it the ‘Mutual Cooperation and Permanent Friendship Document.’ It’s an economic and military alliance between Pakistan and Iran, technology sharing, planned war games, et cetera.”
“We expected this, right, Jeff?” asked President Allaire.
“Yes. In fact we’d already seen a draft of the ‘treaty,’ if you want to call it that, thanks to NSA. But there is a material alteration between that draft and what came out. For the first time, Pakistan has agreed to assist the Iranians in the development of their nuclear program.”
“This isn’t a surprise,” said President Allaire.
“We’ve worked very hard to prevent this from occurring,” said Secretary of State Lindsay. “The significance lies in the public statement. They’re flouting the Russians. The Pakistanis and Iranians are asserting themselves. It is a new and emboldened stance. We have no way of knowing where a unified, radicalized Middle East could go, especially with nuclear weapons and the knowledge and infrastructure to supply chain warheads.”
“The Iranians now have enough yellowcake to manufacture thirty to forty weapons,” said Calibrisi.
“Where’s Musharraf when we need him?” remarked the president, shaking his head.
“What are we picking up?” asked Jessica, looking at Piper Redgrave, the NSA chief.
“We picked up one significant thread involving India, a conversation at a restaurant on the third evening of the summit,” said Redgrave. “Two high-level Pakistan security officials. We’ll need to brief New Delhi as soon as possible. Lashkar-e-Taiba has two large kill cells, one in New Delhi and the other in Mumbai. There was significant discussion among the Pakistanis about targets, infrastructure and people. It’s clear they’re planning a strike using Lashkar-e-Taiba.”
“I’ll call Indra Singh after the meeting,” said Jessica.
“There’s something else,” said Calibrisi. “Aswan Fortuna was seen at the conference, inside Tehran. We