Zero Hour

concerns — not yet ready to call them suspicions—about Armbright’s international-trade- law breaches were developed into solid evidence by process of investigation and analysis. But compelling as Noriko’s report was, Megan had begun to think that nothing in it was overly relevant to the core — and as yet unmentioned—issue they were supposed to be discussing in their virtual face-to-face this morning, which really just involved how to go about moving ahead with the boss’s clearly stated wish that Sword’s New York division allocate a small portion of its divisional resources to the Case of the Vanishing Husband. In fact, Megan had over the past few minutes grown absolutely convinced that Noriko’s goal wasn’t to add anything substantial to her previous intelligence on Armbright, Kiran, and Hasul Benazir, but instead put a deliberate and particular slant on it, using a fair amount of words to drive home a single basic message: Keep out, no trespassing, stay the hell off my block. And whereas she was patiently letting Noriko play out her string, and would continue doing so a bit longer, Megan knew that what was coming down here, sure as sunrise, was no less than the first major test of her power of authority over UpLink’s security branch since she’d been voted in as chief executive officer of the company.

True to Noriko’s emerging modus operandi, her recital on Hasul Benazir, currently in progress — and again showing thorough familiarity with her subject — was both recap and subtly spun embellishment of the dossier in her e-files. A graduate of the prestigious University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, with dual Ph.D.s in electrical engineering and chemical, mineral, and metallurgical engineering, he’d been born forty-odd years ago in Peshawar’s exclusive Hayat Abad township to parents who were members of the Pakistani ruling elite—

“This in a society that brags about not having a caste system like their abhorred Indian neighbors, but has class divisions so unbreachable they amount to the same thing,” Noriko was saying now. “His father’s a founding partner of the second largest industrial conglomerate in the country. Mother’s a British-educated academician and daughter of the number-one brokerage and finance firm trading on the floor of the Karachi Stock Exchange.”

“Privileged,” Nimec said.

“Yes,” Megan said. “I’m not sure it’s fair to call him blessed, though.”

Noriko nodded to indicate she’d picked up on her meaning.

“As best we know, when Hasul was twenty-two or twenty-three he was diagnosed with Xeroderma Pigmentosum, an inherited genetic disorder so rare there are only a thousand documented cases in the world,” she said. “Doctors say that if all the unreported cases were added to the total stats it would show an incidence of one in several hundred thousand, but the odds of a person carrying the mutation still falls somewhere in the area of being struck by lightning. And when you look at the ordeal of living with XP, or the chances of dying from its complications, I might prefer taking a bolt from a blue…”

Hearing Noriko describe the condition, none of the three individuals in the San Jose conference room would have rushed to disagree.

Characterized by acute photosensitivity due to an inability of the skin cells to repair DNA damaged by even minimal levels of ultraviolet radiation, XP in effect made its sufferers allergic to sunlight. Usually diagnosed within the first three to five years of life, XP in its classic Type A form had an astronomical childhood mortality rate because of the development of melanomas and other severe health problems linked to the defect. But Hasul Benazir had not manifested any of its pronounced, telltale symptoms — the blistering, the cancerous skin lesions and tumors, the physical weakness, impairments to sight and hearing, and premature aging — until adulthood. And that was in its own way good news for Benazir, a strong hint, later confirmed by medical tests, that his was a variant form of the condition known as Type V. With constant medical supervision and strict regulation of his lifestyle and environment, he stood a greatly increased chance of long-term survival due to XP-V’s higher level of skin-cell repair mechanisms.

“Must be a determined sonuva gun,” Thibodeau said. “Lookin’ at all he’s accomplished. Got enough healthy people with money and resources don’t do anything with it, you know.”

“I know. But where’s his determination focused? What’s guiding it? I suppose they’d be my main questions,” Noriko said. She refilled her coffee cup from the apparently bottomless pot on her desk. “I want to get back to Hasul’s college years for a minute. He isn’t the only notable figure associated with UET, Lahore. Another’s a professor of Islamic studies whose political discussion groups Hasul attended and helped organize to the extent you could’ve called him a true devotee. This is openly known. We also know the name Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed from his post-academic career as founder of the ‘Army of the Pure.’ ”

Or Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, of which they all were, indeed, familiar. A militant fundamentalist group with thousands of fedayeen guerillas and an extensive support network, the LeT had done much to warrant being placed on the Defense Department’s list of international terrorist organizations. Although based in Pakistan, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and western Afghanistan, it was well-financed by backers throughout the radicalized Islamic world.

Noriko talked about the outfit’s principal avowed goal of driving India from its territorially claimed chunk of Kashmir by any means available, and its growing ties to Pan-Islamic extremist movements with broader calls for global jihad. She told how its heavily armed fedayeen were trained in insurgent tactics, and otherwise aided and abetted by sympathetic factions entrenched within the Pakistani government — most especially its powerful intelligence service, the same branch that had assisted in the genesis of the Taliban. She told of the outfit’s countless acts of brutal, indiscriminate violence against both military and civilian targets in the decade-plus since it had come into existence… these including kidnappings, assassinations, suicide bombings, a brazen attack on the Indian Parliament that left over a hundred dead, and massacres of entire villages to their every last man, woman, and child—

“Noriko,” Megan interrupted. “Are you suggesting there’s evidence Hasul Benazir has any connection to the LeT? Aside from his interest in Sayeed’s teachings as a student?”

“It was more than an interest—”

“It was over twenty-five years ago. Before Sayeed formed the LeT,” Megan said. “I’m not sure we can assume his discussion groups were even concerned with Islamic extremism… such as it existed in Pakistan during the mid-1980s.”

“The Kashmiri brouhaha goes back almost sixty years to Britain’s partition of the region with the Radcliffe line, which led to the first Muslim calls for jihad there, which led to two years of war between India and Pakistan,” Noriko said. “And the fact is that the idea behind the creation of Pakistan was to establish an Islamic state that would stave off a civil war brewing between Hindus and Moslems since the turn of the century. Ideologies like Sayeed’s don’t spring up overnight. We don’t need to mark the exact date nationalism and religious zeal bonded in his mind—”

“Maybe not… but we aren’t talking about him, we’re talking about Hasul Benazir,” Megan said. She paused. “Listen, when I was a college sophomore my dormie convinced me to join an Earth Day protest… its mission was to save the Oregon wilderness, and the plan was for a busload of us girls to head out to a logging site and strip naked—”

Nimec looked over at her.

“Naked?”

“Nude, right,” Megan said. “So as to make ourselves human symbols of how the timber industry was denuding our forests.”

“Uh-huh,” Nimec said. “And that’s what you did?”

“That’s what we all did,” Megan said. “In front of a crew of about fifty gawking lumbermen, that swelled into a crowd of maybe a hundred fifty.”

“Bet it stopped the wood choppin’,” Thibodeau said.

“Until the cops came to make us put our clothes back on and haul us away.” Megan said. “After which I’m sure the log cutting resumed with increased vigor.”

Thibodeau smiled at the images his mind conjured up, particularly of Megan, thinking he’d never gotten such agreeable distractions on any of his jobs.

On the wall screen, Noriko was deadpan.

“I’m not only divulging this to humiliate myself,” Megan said, meeting her gaze across the miles. “If we were to take everything people do when they’re young, and use it as a yardstick for what they become as adults, who’d ever pass muster? Hasul Benazir has a permanent resident visa that was recently renewed… and that’s under the heavy scrutiny that’s been imposed these past few years. He’s resided in this country for over a decade, employs