State of Honour Read Free Page B

that a threat has been made,” she said, clearly doing her best to sound mundane.
    “A threat. Why wasn’t I briefed?” he asked, his jaw muscles flexing.
    “It’s not serious. An anonymous phone call to the embassy just a minute ago. The CIA will brief you before we leave this morning.”
    “I’d like you to reconsider your visit to the hospital, ma’am.”
    The faint lines on her forehead deepened. “The president gets ten threats a day. He got fifty on the morning of his inauguration. Where would we be if we succumbed to them all? Ensconced in a bunker at Fort Bragg, I imagine.”
    “But, ma’am—”
    “No, Tom. My mind is made up.”
    He looked down at the watch. “This is very generous.”
    “Don’t ask what the G stands for. I never use it, and no one knows apart from my parents. Don’t ask about my birth certificate, either.” She feigned a laugh.
    His head snapped back up. “I’ll get you safely home, ma’am,” he said. “I promise.”
    “Yes, you will.”

3.
    Tom sat in the front passenger seat of the third MSD SUV, feeling agitated. The convoy was doing a steady sixty-five along the eight-lane highway leading from the embassy, police outriders front and rear. They were ten minutes behind schedule. The secretary had had to take an urgent call from the president on a secure landline. Sitting directly behind Tom, the safest place from a protective viewpoint, she discussed the speech she’d give to the army generals at Parliament House right after her visit to the hospital. The speech writer had a retro moustache and a servile tone, a skinny guy whom Tom considered a hindrance.
    After they’d agreed on the final changes, the secretary said, “The president wants the visit to the hospital cut to twenty minutes tops.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Tom replied.
    “That means no press questions.”
    “Understood.”
    “He mentioned the threat.”
    Tom turned around in his seat. “If the agreed procedure is followed, your exposure will be minimal, ma’am.”
    She nodded, slowly.
    Tom double-checked that her seat belt was fastened securely, that the doors were locked and the windows closed. He ran through the various evacuation scenarios, depending on the nature of the attack and which vehicles might be taken out. She’d be plunged into the footwell. The driver would employ a full bootlegger’s turn or resort to ramming. They played out like video games in his head, priming him for a potential en-route ambush.
    Next, he tested his push-to-talk, or PTT, radio. The PTT button was inline and ran between the radio connection and the earpiece. It could be used either via the button or as a voice-activated unit, providing a handsfree facility. The destinations they’d be travelling to today had codenames. The hospital’s codename was Cradle. He used them to communicate with his team, checking their radios were functioning in the process. Satisfied, he focused on the pre-planned arrival procedure. He’d alight first, opening the passenger door. The agents in the vehicle behind would form an open-box formation around her as she entered the building.
    Check.
    The Faisal Children’s Hospital was a few miles from the Saudi-Pak Tower, a contemporary landmark known for its Islamic tile work. Nineteen floors high, the tower was visible from the tinted windows of the SUV. Tom worried that the hospital was outside the so-called Blue Area, the commercial centre of Islamabad. Together with a couple of his team, he’d walked the route the day before, liaising with a group of ISI operatives, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the main Pakistan security service.
    The lead operative had been called Awan. He was a beefy six-footer with leathery skin, who wore a sombre suit and black necktie.
    “The road has been checked for IEDs. The hospital is clean, at least in terms of bombs,” he said, his wide face breaking into a crooked grin.
    “What about all these people?” Tom asked.
    “This isn’t the