Secrets of State by Matthew Palmer

brilliant academic, but Spears thought that the man responsible for strategic planning on the Governing Council had an annoying habit of stating the obvious.
    â€œYes,” Reports replied calmly. “That is why we have developed the intel-sharing program. It is also the reasoning behind our current delicate undertaking.” She put a slight emphasis on the word
reasoning
. For the Stoics, reason was both their touchstone and their shibboleth. Plans’s intervention had been laced with frustration and anxiety, emotions that had no place in the Council’s deliberations. It was an artful put-down.
    For Spears, the rest of the brief on developments in the region tracked pretty closely with what he had already read in the assessments that Sam’s South Asia Unit had prepared for Argus. Reports’s analysis may, in fact, have been drawn directly from those same products. The world of intelligence could be unwittingly circular, and there was always something of an echo-chamber effect in analytical judgments. Irrespective of the sourcing, it was clear that Pakistan was a basket case, a failed state in all but name that was slipping inexorably under the control of the Islamists.
    When Reports had finished with the brief, the Chairman looked at Spears. “Operations, can you update us on the progress your team is making?” Spears was Operations, or “Ops,” responsible for translating the Council’s decisions into action. It was a position he shared with some of the most exalted, if controversial, figures in American history. Allan Pinkerton had held the job during the Civil War. Colonel House had served as Operations during the Wilson administration. Harry Hopkins held the title during the Second World War, even as he had been living in one of the upstairs bedrooms at the White House. Spears was conscious that the history books would never group him together with these lions of the American experience. He was anonymous. A gray eminence. But, the operation he was spearheading would—he knew—be greater than anything that they had accomplished in his position. It was elegant. Visionary. And it was a shame that the world must never know.
    â€œThe wheels are turning, Mr. Chairman,” Spears said. “Everything is in train.” Spears smiled at this private joke. There was a level of granular operational detail that the Council did not need to know.
    â€œBut this is a complex op,” he continued, “and it will take time to come together. We have identified a number of possible time slots for the final stage, with the earliest opportunity approximately a month out. The initial meeting between our Indian and Pakistani assets was successful. The Indians have set it up as a false flag. Masood and the HeM think that they’re dealing with Middle Easterners who have purchased access to the . . . material. There will be no direct transfer. The Hand of the Prophet will have to make the next move on its own timeline. This obviously limits our ability to dictate the pace of events, but it significantly reduces our risk profile. The information we have made available to HeM, however, is time-sensitive. They will have to move quickly if they are going to move at all.”
    â€œThey had better move pretty damn quickly,” Plans said vehemently. “We’ve all seen the Cassandra projections.”
    Spears nodded. It had been almost a year since the oddly mismatched pair of academics from Agilent Industries had presented their preliminary findings to the Council. It was only a matter of time, they had predicated with high confidence, until a nuclear bomb exploded in an American city as an act of terror. The massively powerful computer system and clever algorithms that Agilent had funded had been equally clear about the origin of the weapon itself. The bomb that would destroy an American city and kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens would come from