The Survivor

CHAPTER 7

Ahmed Taj looked between his two security men as the densely populated slum gave way to open highway. He would eventually be transferred to a nondescript Suzuki Mehran that would take him to a private jet registered in the name of a local extraction company.

It seemed almost impossible that his plan was finally going into action. He’d spent the last decade developing it, poring over every detail, examining every potential pitfall. And in many ways it extended even farther back than that. The groundwork for what was to come had been laid almost from his birth.

He had been raised in a modest neighborhood surrounded by the poverty that continued to plague Pakistan. Despite accumulating significant power and wealth, his father had been an unassuming man who deferred to those around him and rarely looked anyone in the eye.

It was the lesson that he beat into his son. Present nothing of yourself that the world would take note of. Build up others while diminishing yourself. Let the endless supply of egocentric men stand in the spotlight they craved while you remained in the darkness. That was how lasting empires were built.

Taj had quickly lost count of the men who had underestimated his father. The men whose bodies still littered the countryside surrounding his childhood home.

Eventually, he had been sent to America for college. The custom of wealthy Pakistanis at the time had been to send their children to their former oppressor, England, for their education. His father had recognized that the United Kingdom was weakening while America’s influence grew. A devout Muslim, he understood that the massive Christian country would become a formidable enemy to the followers of Allah, and he wanted his son to understand its ways.

Taj had studied business and economics at an academically competent but unremarkable school in Virginia. In honor of his father’s life lessons, he’d sat at the back of the classroom, writing all the correct answers on his tests before changing them to maintain a B-minus average. He’d made no real friends, though he was polite and reasonably well liked. In the end, he’d been satisfied to study American society from its edges.

What he’d seen disgusted him. Women who used the freedoms they were given to turn themselves into whores. Intellectualism that not only marginalized God, but often denied his existence. And the hopeless, endless arrogance.

He had recognized the seeds of America’s decline and now those seeds were beginning to grow. Like the Soviets before them, the United States had been deeply wounded by its pathetic effort to conquer countries favored by Allah. Its insatiable greed for all things material had led to a financial collapse that was already in the early stages of being repeated. And its uncanny cohesiveness — the thing that was the secret to its strength — had devolved into petty squabbling and government paralysis. It was the fundamental flaw of democracy: Power found its way into the hands of liars and mobs instead of the cunning and the strong.

Upon graduation, Taj had returned to Pakistan and enlisted in the air force at his father’s insistence. The path to power in Pakistan wasn’t through the private sector, he knew. Certainly great wealth could play a part, but the country’s soul was its military.

Taj had gone into logistics and made a name for himself as a competent and respectful officer. He’d made the right connections and, more important, done away with his rivals by manipulating them into destroying themselves. Eventually that led to his first star and to Saad Chutani foolishly giving him the helm of the ISI in an effort to gain control of the organization.

Now the unassuming Ahmed Taj was positioned to become one of the handful of men who ruled the world. He would turn his country into an enemy of America that would make what they’d experienced during the Soviet era seem trivial.

In fact, it should have already happened. As often was the case, though, even the most carefully laid plans could be derailed by unexpected events. In this instance, the actions of Akhtar Durrani.

Durrani had been a man of great hubris, violence, and ambition. He generated the fear necessary to rule over the ISI’s S Wing and was a convenient tool to insulate Taj from the potential blowback generated by its operations.

Durrani had been instrumental in hiding Osama bin Laden, allowing the Saudi to hold al Qaeda together for years longer than would have been possible otherwise. He coordinated the resistance to American forces in Afghanistan and kept track of the insurgent groups that based themselves in Pakistan. Most important, though, he kept those insurgents under control, preventing them from mounting attacks inside Pakistan without ISI consent.

Durrani’s alliance with Rickman had come as a rare surprise. Fortunately, Taj kept close tabs on everyone in a position of power at the ISI. It had been through this surveillance that he’d become aware of Rickman and decided to delay the implementation of his own plans. The value of the information the CIA man possessed was beyond calculation, a prize Taj never imagined when he’d first started scheming.

His first instinct had been to simply do away with Durrani and take Rickman when he arrived in Pakistan. Upon further consideration, though, he realized it would have been a mistake. Rickman was too brilliant, his mind too twisted. Even under extended interrogation it would be impossible to sort truth from lies.

Taj had no choice but to stay in the background and wait for the man to reveal what he knew. The trick would be finding the right moment to step out of the shadows. While his and Rickman’s goals were similar, they were not the same.

Rickman wanted to punish the CIA, but Taj wanted to co-opt it. If he could gain access to what Rickman knew — his encyclopedic knowledge of every informant, traitor, and double agent in the region — he would have the ability to take control of the massive intelligence network while Irene Kennedy remained completely unaware. Before allowing the CIA to implode under the weight of its sins, he would siphon off its power. He would make the ISI, already swollen with billions of U.S. dollars, the most feared intelligence agency in history.

Unfortunately, between Durrani’s stupidity and Mitch Rapp’s brutality, the situation had become more complicated. In the end, though, it might be better this way. In every disaster lay opportunity.

He’d been watching Rickman long enough to know that the man was aware of the possibility of his own assassination and had made provisions to protect the information he’d so carefully compiled. That witch Kennedy was undoubtedly devoting her organization’s entire capability to locating it but she was at a significant disadvantage. The CIA was just starting its search while Taj’s men were nearing the completion of theirs.