Kit Love, another cofounder, also happens to be my mother. In stark contrast to Li, she wears faded blue jeans, a printed silk shirt, and cowboy boots. My mother is a music star—or used to be—and wherever she goes, she always just feels like someone you need to pay attention to.
Between Kit and Li sits Peggy Delaney. One of the first African American women to be a US ambassador to the UK, Peggy is also a trained lawyer, and a woman whose global connections always manage to surprise us. Nobody wears a Chanel suit or a string of pearls better than Peggy, and on top of that, she’s just one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. Of everyone in this room, it’s usually Peggy who will get up to greet us all with hugs. But today, even she makes do with brief smiles of welcome. There’s a nervous tension hanging in the air and we all settle in quickly.
“Let’s begin,” says Li. “Time is of the essence.”
Briskly, Amber flicks a picture onto the screen. A sixty-year-old man with a thick beard flecked with gray, heavy eyebrows, and small, sharp eyes. It’s a face we have become familiar with. Imran is from Pakistan. He is the tribal leader in the village where Peggy, Li, and Kit opened a school for girls two years ago under the auspices of the United Nations. And he took it upon himself to burn down that school, while the girls and their teachers were still in it, because he believed that girls should be married off by the age of fourteen. Li, Kit, and Peggy lobbied and fought for justice and got absolutely nowhere. It was a dark few months, but something did change in the end. When no government would help and the UN seemed tied up in political knots, all three women took a stand—a deeply secret stand—and our agency, Athena, was born.
“As you know, Imran escaped any consequences for . . . what he did,” Li says. Unusually, she seems emotional, and tries to cover it by talking more quickly. “And as you also know, we’ve done our best to track his movements ever since. It hasn’t always been easy, but we’ve had help from this man, Asif. His twin daughters died in Imran’s attack.”
A new photo pops onto the screen: a young man with high cheekbones, a light growth of beard, and eyes that look older than the rest of his face. Kit’s eyes flicker away from the photo, a tiny muscle in her jaw clenched. It was Kit who convinced Asif to put his daughters back in school when he was afraid of what Imran and his Taliban backers might do. To say it still haunts her would be an understatement. But at least now she deals with it through her work with Athena rather than by staring at the bottom of an empty vodka bottle.
“Asif gets information from Imran’s housekeeper and passes it to us. The housekeeper is a man who’s worked with Imran for years. He’s been very helpful.”
“How?” Hala asks.
Amber chips in: “He’s helped us keep tabs on which phones Imran uses so we can always monitor him. He switches handsets and SIM cards like he’s changing underwear—rather frequently. And now, something’s come up through the phones.” She pulls at the ends of her spiky, purple-highlighted hair, tense.
“Imran is planning a terror attack in India,” says Li.
“What kind of attack?” I ask, sitting up.
“We don’t know.”
“What’s the target?” I try.
“We don’t know that either.” Li looks pained at the admission.
“What do we know?” asks Hala, biting into a muffin.
“We know it’s happening tomorrow at four thirty a.m. Indian time.”
The three of us start to look at our watches and phones, but Amber spares us the math. “That’s in just over thirteen hours from now,” she announces, her voice serious.
“Where?” Caitlin asks.
“Somewhere in Mumbai, we think.”
“Somewhere in Mumbai? A city of, what, twenty million people?” I ask, stressed. “How are we supposed to protect the target?”
“You’re not,” Kit says. “You’re going to track Imran on the ground and find out what the target is. He’s gone completely dark in the past few hours—burner phones included. It’s standard practice for terrorists ahead of an attack, to reduce the chances of being caught or foiled.”
Peggy chimes in. “You have to keep it clean and simple. No fighting, and minimal danger to the three of you. Amber will outline possible strategies as you fly out. And once you know the target, I have a direct line to the Indian ambassador here and we can get the Indian police involved to stop the attack.” Peggy’s long and illustrious diplomatic career has left her with a wealth of contacts all over the world. I don’t doubt she can arrange an intervention in another country, but the whole mission sounds pretty vague.
I stand, suddenly too keyed up to even stay in my seat. Pacing around sometimes helps.
“And what do we do with Imran?” I ask.
“Hand him over to Asif and his neighbors. They’ve been planning to take back their village for some time. The extremists supporting Imran have moved much farther north and his funding is drying up.”
That’s all fine and dandy, but another question is bugging me. “Why is Imran targeting somewhere in India? When he’s over the border in Pakistan?”
“He’s working with a relatively new group called Family First,” Peggy explains. “They are so new we don’t have anything much on them, but he’s referenced them in connection with this upcoming attack, and there is intelligence out of India about them. They are against gender equality, anti-LGBTQI+, and their biggest focus is to stop women and girls being educated or working, because it erodes traditional family values.”
Hala makes a face that communicates her disgust with that manifesto.
“Have they committed attacks before?” Caitlin asks.
“No,” says Peggy.
There’s a brief lull, but it seems like these scraps are all the information there is. Li nods to Amber to deliver the practicalities.
“You’ll be on a private flight to Lahore two and a half hours from now,” says Amber, reading from one of her tablet screens.
“Can’t we leave sooner?” I ask.
“It’s not a walk in the park arranging private planes to places like northern Pakistan,” replies Amber crisply. “I’ve done my best and the plane you’ll take is faster than a commercial flight. You’ll be in the air for just over seven hours. When you land, a stealth helicopter will be waiting for you. Caitlin will pilot. Estimated time to get to Imran’s village is around thirty minutes. Giving you over an hour to get the target details out of him.”
Well, there’s not much margin for error there. The room falls silent, probably because we’re all wondering at the immensity of the task. Only the sound of Li’s manicured nails tapping compulsively on the table fills the air. It’s not a sound I’ve ever heard before from her—the sound of nervous tension. And it doesn’t make me feel great.
“I’m not happy about this,” Li admits, at last. “It’s rushed. But if we do nothing and people die . . .”
There’s a moment’s pause, broken finally by Caitlin. The oldest of us agents, she’s our team leader and often our unofficial cheerleader too. “I think I speak for all of us in this room when I say we never met a challenge we said no to,” she says seriously. “Let’s get our asses in gear.”