Page 40 of Into the Gray Zone

I looked at Jennifer and said, “Yeah, about that attack. We need to analyze it.”

He put down his coffee and said, “Why? You guys stopped it, and we got what we wanted. They didn’t kill a bunch of civilians and we got Thakkar to agree to bankroll the rare earth mine. It’s a win-win.”

I said, “Well, we’re not sure it’s over.”

“What’s that mean? The RAW went to the hotel the attackers had been staying at this morning. They found nothing. Nothing from the hotel, nothing from the room, and nothing about any bigger plot. They were a few LeT guys that wanted to kill some people, and that’s it.”

I looked at my team, getting some nods. Originally, I’d hated the tasking as some contract flunky doing nothing but guarding a CIA meet, but I believed that Jennifer had turned up something interesting, and it was right up the Taskforce alley. I’d wanted to flee this country on the first thing smoking after the meeting, but now I had a sense that our true skills could be used. I only had to convince Kerry.

I said, “We don’t think it was a random attack. We think they wereafter the meeting. Yeah, we stopped it, but they weren’t here on an attack for Islam. They were here on a targeted attack for something else.”

As much as he wanted to be cheering about his success in his latest covert action construct, he was a good enough man to take a pause. Instead of telling me to pack sand and go home, he said, “What do you mean?”

I said, “Well, sir... we went to that hotel room last night. There’s a reason they didn’t find anything.”

I saw his mouth drop open. He was incredulous. He said, “You did what?”

I held up my hands and said, “Wait, sir, it’s not what you think. We were contacted by a member of the RAW while we were in holding. They asked us to do it. They don’t trust their own men.”

He leaned back in his chair, his hands in his scalp, then came back to me, saying, “Youbroke intothe terrorists’ room last night? Without authorization? What. The. Fuck. How did you know where it was? How did you even have the intel to do it?”

He appeared more concerned about the mission than what we’d found, which aggravated me a little bit. I said, “Like I told you, we had some help from RAW.”

He leaned forward, slapped the table, and said, “Pike, you hadnoOmega authority for offensive actions.”

I’d already debriefed my team the night before and was now supremely happy that Brett had had the presence of mind not to break the trigger on his weapon, which would have made things exponentially worse. A dead body would have led to the police being involved. As it was, there was just a fight at a hotel known to cater to dubious Russian tourists, and I knew the other side wasn’t going to the police. This was the difference between a true Operator and a gunslinger whojust wanted to use the label. Ninety percent of the U.S. intelligence community would have smoked those guys to get Jennifer out of danger, but my team had not.

I came back at him, saying, “Bullshit. You told me I had Omega to protect the meeting, and that’s what I did: proactively protect the meeting.”

I told him everything that had transpired, only leaving out the name of our RAW contact.

Incredulous, he said, “So this RAW contact doesn’t trust his own people, and he askedyouto penetrate the hotel, taking an inventory so he could compare it to what the RAW found?”

I obviously didn’t tell him my contact was Nadia. I said, “Yes, sir, and we don’t have any proof that there is something rotten in RAW, because the place was scrubbed while Jennifer was there. Someone came in to clean their tracks, and they weren’t a bunch of Muslims from Pakistan. They were Asian.”

“Asian? Indians are Asian. What’s that mean?”

I wasn’t sure how to spell it out in a professional manner without using racial slurs. I said, “They were not Indian Asians. They were... Asians.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Brett leaned over the table and barked out, “Come on, man, do we have to spell it out? They weren’t Indians. They were Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, or some other -ese.”

Bostwick turned to him and said, “How do you know?”

Jennifer said, “Because I saw them. And if you ask me, the men who chased me were Chinese.”

“Why?”

“Because theylookedChinese. They didn’t look like they were fromSoutheast Asia. They weren’t Cambodian or Thai. They were tall, bigger than someone Vietnamese, and they spoke what sounded like Chinese.”

Bostwick said, “You speak Chinese?”

Insulted, Jennifer said, “Well, Kerry, I also don’t speak French or German, but when I hear it, I know the difference.”

He held up his hands and said, “Okay, okay, so what are you saying here? China directed a terrorist attack on Indian soil? Come on, that’s a little bit much. They do a lot of gray zone stuff, but it never rises to the level of bullets flying. Maybe you’re misreading who came in the room. Maybe you had thewrongroom.”

I said, “We didn’t have the wrong room. We had the key of the guy who was killed on the lawn. We went tothatroom, and while we were in it, a bunch ofAsianscame in and cleaned it out, speaking Chinese.”

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