Locked On

if you once wielded some power. Your delusions of grandeur are quite childish, actually.” Kovalenko smiled, sipped his morning drink. If he was offended by the insult, he made no show of it.

“So, how can I help you? This is, I am guessing, about our good old times together? You feel the need to settle something from our past?” Laska shrugged. “I left the past behind. If you haven’t done that yet yourself, you are an old fool.” “Ha. That is not how it worked for we Russians. The past left us behind. We were more than willing to remain there.” He shrugged, drained his mimosa and immediately began looking around for a fresh one. “Tempus fugit, as they say.” “I need a favor from you,” Laska said.

Kovalenko stopped searching for a drink. Instead he looked to the Czech billionaire, then he climbed out of the chaise and stood with his hands on his wide hips. “What could I possibly have that you need, Pavel?” “It’s Paul, not Pavel. It has not been Pavel for forty years.” “Forty years. Yes. You turned your back on us a long time ago.” “I never turned my back on you, Oleg. I was never with youi>w mee in the first place. I was never a devotee.” Kovalenko smiled. He understood completely, but he pressed. “Then why did you help us so eagerly?” “I was eager to get out of there. That’s all. You know that.” “You turned your back on us, just as you turned your back on your own people. Some would suggest you have turned yet again, turning away from the capitalism that made you in the West. Now you support everything that is not capitalism. You are quite a dancer for an old man. Just the same as when you were young.” Laska thought back to when he was young, in Prague. He thought back to his friends in the movement, his initial support of Alexander Dubcek. Laska also thought about his girlfriend, Ilonka, and their plans to get married after the revolution.

But then he thought of his arrest by the secret police, the visit to his cell by a big, powerful, and dominant KGB officer named Oleg. The beating, the threats of imprisonment, and the promise of an exit visa if the young banker only informed on a few of his fellow rabble-rousers in the movement.

Pavel Laska had agreed. He saw it as an opportunity to go to the West, to New York City, to trade on the New York Stock Exchange, and to make a great deal of money. Kovalenko turned him with this enticement, and Laska had helped turn the tide against the Prague Spring.

And inside of two years the traitor was in New York.

Paul Laska shook Pavel Laska out of his mind. Ancient history. “Oleg. I am not here to see you. I need something else.” “I am going to let you pick up the check for my lovely room downstairs, I am going to let you reimburse me for my flight, I am going to drink your Champagne, and I am going to let you speak.” “Your son, Valentin, is SVR. High-ranking, higher than you ever made it in the KGB.” “Apples to oranges. Very different times. A very different industry.” “You don’t seem surprised that I know about Valentin.” “Not at all. Everything can be bought. Information as well. And you have the money to buy everything.” “I also know that he is assistant rezident in the UK.” Oleg shrugged. “You would think that he’d call on his old father when he learned that I was here. But no. Too busy.” Kovalenko smiled a little. “I remember the life, though, and I was too busy for my father.” “I want to meet Valentin. Tonight. It must be in complete secrecy. He is to tell no one of our appointment.” Oleg shrugged. “If I can’t get him to see me, his dear father, how can I persuade him to see you?” Laska just looked at the old man, the KGB officer who beat him in Prague in 1968, and he delivered his own blow. “Apples to oranges, Oleg Petrovich. He will see me.”

31

General Riaz Rehan launched the opening volley of his Operation Saker with a phone call over a voice-over-Internet line with a man in India.

The man had many aliases, but forever more he would be known as Abdul Ibrahim. He was thirty-one, thin and tall, with a narrow face and deep-set eyes. He was also the operational chief for i>w mses,Lashkar-e-Taiba in southern India, and October 15 would be the last day of his life.

His orders had come in a phone call from Majid just three nights earlier. He’d met Majid several times before at a training camp in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, and he knew the man to be a high-ranking member of the Pakistani Army and a commander in the ISI. The fact that Ibrahim did not know that Majid’s real name was Riaz Rehan was unimportant, as unimportant as the fact that the four other men who would go on this mission did not know the other aliases of Abdul Ibrahim.

Ibrahim and his cell had been operating in the Karnataka region of India for some time. They were no sleepers; they’d bombed a railroad exchange, four electrical power stations, and a water treatment facility, and they’d shot a policeman and firebombed cars in front of a television station. For LeT it was small-time stuff, but Abdul Ibrahim had been ordered by Majid to perform harassing operations against the population in a manner that would not put his cell into too much jeopardy. He’d long assumed he was being kept safe and in place for a major operation, and when Majid called him on his voice-over Internet line three days prior, it had been the proudest moment of Abdul Ibrahim’s life.

Following orders received in the phone call, Abdul Ibrahim had picked his five best operators, and they all met at their safe house in Mysore. Ibrahim appointed one of the men his successor as chief of operations. The young man was shocked to be told he would be in charge of Lashkar-e-Taiba ops in southern India in two-days’ time. The other four men felt lucky to be told they would be going with Abdul on a martyrdom operation in Bangalore.

They took the best weapons from the cache: four grenades, ten homemade pipe bombs, and a pistol and rifle for each of the five men. This along with nearly two thousand rounds of combined ammunition they packed into backpacks and suitcases along with a change of clothing. Within hours they were on a train to the northeast, and they arrived in Bangalore early in the morning of their second-to-last day.

A local man with Pakistani roots met them, took them to his home, and handed them the keys to three motorcycles.

Riaz Rehan himself had picked the target. Bangalore is often referred to as the Silicon Valley of India. With a population of six million, it possesses many of the largest technology companies in the huge nation, many located in Electronics City, a 330-acre industrial park in the western suburbs of Bangalore — more precisely in Doddathogur and Agrahara, former villages that had been swallowed up with the explosion of both population and progress here.

Rehan felt that Abdul Ibrahim and his four men would be slaughtered relatively quickly if they attacked this target. Electronics City had good security for a nongovernmental installation. But still, any success at all by Abdul Ibrahim and his men would send a symbolic message. Electronics City was a major outsourcing hub of India and the operations run from offices there involved hundreds of companies, large and small, around the world. Blowing up people and property here would affect, to one degree or another, many of the Fortune 500 companies, and this would ensure that the attack would have a huge amount of play in the Western media. Rehan reasoned that a single death here by the southern India cell of LeT would carry the value of twenty deaths of peasants in a Kashmiri village. He intended for Abdul Ibrahim’s act in Bangalore to create a thunderclap of terror that would reverberate across the globe and frighten the West, ensuring that India would not be able to downplay such an attack.

More attacks would follow, and with each ad with ettack the conflict between India and Pakistan would worsen.

Riaz Rehan understood all this because he was a Westernized jihadist, an army general, and an intelligence chief. All these titles attributed to just one man gave him another, more ominous identity — Riaz Rehan, aka Majid, was, above all, a master terrorist.

When Abdul Ibrahim and his four men arrived in Bangalore and fueled up their motorbikes, they immediately began reconnaissance on their target, because they had no time to waste. They found that the industrial park was covered with heavily armed security, both private guards and police. Further, the Central Industrial Security Force, the Indian paramilitary force in charge of government industrial installations, airports, and nuclear site security, was now working under contract for certain well-heeled private businesses in Electronics City. The CISF had even established checkpoints at the entrance to the industrial park. Ibrahim was certain he and his men would not be able to breach any of the major buildings themselves. He was dejected, but nevertheless he decided to spend much of the time until the attack driving around the perimeter of Electronics City, searching for a way in.

He did not find a way in, but on the final morning, just hours before his planned attack, he decided to pass by