The Good Son

8

C ynthia often lost track of time when she worked with sound files, a habit that originated during her language studies in graduate school. In the language lab, eyes closed in concentration, in the little soundproofed cubicle with a big padded Bose headset on her ears, the uncomfortable syllables of a conversation in Arabic or in Dari filling her mind and her foot on the replay pedal so she could hear the same phrase over and over like some kind of rap sample, she would fall into a strangely delicious state, bordering on intoxication, although her auditory senses, at least, were strung to the last notch. She loved it, she supposed, because of the element of control. She had always been a good girl up until then, which is to say she fulfilled the expectations of others-her father, her teachers, her peers, society at large-but in the lab she was the queen of time; with the headset on, the various external pressures on her seemed to dissolve in that universe of perfect feedback, the voices starting, stopping, repeating at the tap of her foot. She spent more time in the lab than she had to-it was a kind of addiction, she supposed later, as was her pursuit of perfection in the shaping of sounds in her own throat. They had a machine that gave you a word or phrase and you had to repeat the phrase perfectly, if you could, and then the machine showed you a sonogram that told you how well you’d done and gave you a score. Cynthia had reached the maximum score in all her languages.

Here was something.

She played the sound file over again. Two men were speaking over cell phones in Urdu. She checked the source notation and found that one cell phone was in Kahuta and the other was in Lahore. They were young voices, and the one in Kahuta was obscured by what sounded like wind and motor traffic; the man was outside, at any rate.

KAHUTA: Hello, is that you, Walid?

LAHORE: Please! No names!

KAHUTA: Sorry. I am told to tell you we have the shipment on board.

LAHORE: Excellent. You can leave immediately?

KAHUTA: Absolutely. I have the directions.

LAHORE: No trouble at all? No alarms from the… the facility?

KAHUTA: Nothing. It went as we planned.

LAHORE: Thank God! Everything is ready at the destination; all the equipment arrived today. They should be setting it up now. How long do you think-

KAHUTA: No more than three days, God willing. I will call in on the way.

LAHORE: Then peace be with you, brother, in God’s name.

KAHUTA: And peace unto you. God is great!

Cynthia typed out the translation on her computer, removed her headset, and sat for several minutes in thought. There was something wrong with the colloquy. For one thing, the conversation was in Urdu, which was fine-Urdu was the official language of Pakistan-but in general, when Pakistanis conversed with people they knew they spoke in their cradle tongues, of which that land had hundreds: Panjabi, Lahnda, Pashto, Sindhi, and on and on. That these two were speaking Urdu to each other meant they were from different origins and the transaction was a commercial one, which didn’t seem right. Terrorist groups were famously tight, especially in that part of the world, with its endemic mistrust of the stranger, one reason why they were nearly impossible to infiltrate. And there was something else: the tone and rhythm of the talk were a little off; there were none of the minor hesitations and repetitions that appear in natural conversations, no ahs, no hmms. It was almost as if they were reading a script.

Or maybe she was losing it. She attached the source header, the sound file, and her translation to an e-mail and zapped it off to Ernie Lotz: READ THIS AND LET’S TALK.

She put the headphones back on and returned to the stolen etheric whispers. Even with the most sophisticated electronic filtering, there was still an enormous amount of dross to get past. A lot of people in South Asia were talking about shipments, many of which were illegal but were of no interest to NSA or to her. The listening at this point was automatic, and her mind was free to drift above the chatter. As she often did, she thought about her career and where it was going. N Section was a fine place to learn the ropes, but it was a dead end. Vital, yes, because obviously terrorists could not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, but it was vital in the way that night watchmen were vital. You didn’t want the factory robbed or burned down, but you also were not going to offer the guy with the square badge a seat on the board. No, N was a springboard to something better, a wider scope…

Something touched her shoulder and she yelped, tore the headset off, and spun around in her chair.

“Jesus, Ernie! Don’t come in and touch me when I’m listening!”

“Sorry,” he said, “but you have to see this.” He handed her a piece of paper.

“Did you get my message?” she asked.

“Yeah, but that’s nothing compared to this.”

It was a few lines of typescript in English.

“Who translated this?”

“No one. It was English in the original. Read it!”

She did.

MAN: Hello, it’s me. Don’t be angry, my dear, but I have to tell you I will not be home to night.

WOMAN: What? Are you mad? To night is the party for Shira and the Sajjids.

MAN: I am sorry, my love, but it is quite impossible. We have an emergency at work.

WOMAN: God help us! Not the reactor?

MAN: No, thank God. But it is almost as bad.

WOMAN: What then? What is more important than your daughter’s happiness?

MAN: I can’t tell you. It is a security issue.

WOMAN: Before God, if you do not give me a proper explanation I will never speak to you again. This is the most outrageous thing I ever heard of. The Sajjids will think it is an intentional insult.

MAN: Be calm, for God’s sake! Look I may be able to get away, we may find the blasted stuff in the wrong place, but I must be here to supervise.

WOMAN: What stuff? What are you talking about?

MAN: I am talking about thirty-three kilograms of ninety-four percent enriched uranium that has gone missing.

WOMAN: Thirty-three kilograms? Is it that valuable?

MAN: Not as such, but it is enough to manufacture several nuclear weapons, and we must find it. If we don’t, I could conceivably be sacked.

WOMAN: Oh, God protect us!

“What’s the source here? Who are these people?” she asked.

“The source tap is from a cell phone out of Kahuta belonging to Jafar Baig Qasir. I looked him up in the database. He’s a nuclear engineer who works at Kahuta and lives in Lahore. He’s one of the people in charge of refining and casting weapons-grade uranium. From the context, I assume he’s talking to his wife.”

“Why are they speaking English?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Cynthia,” replied Lotz, a hint of annoyance in his voice. “Why shouldn’t they? A lot of upper-class Pakistanis use English as their second language.”

“Yes, but not on intimate family subjects to their wives. Besides that, don’t you notice anything fishy about the conversation?”

“No. What do you mean?

“It has the same phony tone as the one from the supposed trucker. Did you listen to that one?”

“Yeah, it sounded fine to me, and it just adds to the case. Cynthia, I don’t understand why you’re-”

“And on top of that, don’t you think it’s funny that a senior scientist should talk to his wife on an open cell-phone line about something that should be the most top secret thing that ever happened: a theft of weapons-grade uranium? He makes it sound like a fender bender or a coffee spill on his pants. What’s the traffic like from Pakistani security?”

Lotz said, “I haven’t checked it recently. I wanted you to see this right away.”

“Well, check it. They should be running around like chickens with their heads cut off if this is real.”

“I will, but don’t you think we should get Morgan in on this?”

“No, I don’t. The last thing we need is a premature orgasm, and I can tell he’s ready to pop.”

“You would know,” said Lotz, half under his breath. She didn’t call him on it, and he left her office. Yet another reason for getting the hell out of N Section.

She put her headset back on, but she was too restless to focus on the voices. Instead, she switched to her music collection. The Allegro of Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra sounded, in her ears, so much more soothing than the chatter of conspirators, a souvenir of a less dangerous, more orderly world.

If they were conspirators. If they had stolen enriched uranium. If they could make a bomb. Cynthia had been through a secret course given by some people from Los Alamos. She knew that making an effective nuclear device was a lot harder than most people supposed. Yes, there was a lot of public information available, but the devil was in the details and in the technical skills through which they were applied, and these were not so generally available. Could a group of terrorists actually steal nuclear materials and manufacture a weapon in some mountain village? Not very likely. Nevertheless, even the possibility was sufficient to provide employment for her, the rest of N Section, and the other parts of the government that worried about such things. On the other hand, a nuclear scam could be mounted with a lot less effort and, if America fell for it, it might be nearly as damaging to its cause as a nuclear explosion. American boots on the ground in some Pakistani village, civilian casualties, the erosion of what little trust remained between the two governments: a cheap victory and intensely embarrassing for the already embattled intelligence community. Cynthia would have recommended such a scam herself, had she been on the other side.

She listened to the music, the familiar melody of the clarinet, soaring, glorious, but always returned to earth by the repetitive thrum of the full orchestra, each phrase sculpted to fit, each original but grounded in its form. That’s how she wanted her life to be, soaring but under control. Her thoughts drifted for a time, lost in Mozart’s structured beauty, and then settled on the figure of Abu Lais.

If there was such a person, if this whole thing was not an elaborate ruse. Here was the paradox of espionage, and especially of the type NSA practiced. NSA snooped; everyone in the world knew NSA snooped; everyone knew that electronic communications were not secure; therefore, anyone with any brains would send into the ether only those things he wanted NSA to know; therefore, what NSA learned with its multibillion-dollar investment in snooping was essentially valueless. But such thoughts, although they occurred to everyone who worked at the agency from time to time, were distinctly not profitable, and Cynthia had no patience for the unprofitable.

As often when she listened to music, an idea coalesced. She considered it, turned it around, found it potentially profitable, if not strictly a part of the normal order. After some browsing on the Internet, she worked for a while until she had covered half a dozen sheets of paper. With these in hand she left her office to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Morgan’s prohibition. She walked down many a sterile hallway and up several flights of stairs until she came to the part of NSA devoted to scouring the Internet for terrorist chatter, and specifically to the office of Walter Borden.

Borden was in. Borden was rarely out. On his own admission, he had no life, was a self-proclaimed nerd of the pear-shaped rather than the pencil-necked variety, and his office door was covered with a collage of Dil-bert cartoons, beer coasters, and dozens of tiny strips from fortune cookies. A bumper sticker proclaimed, NERDS DO IT DIGITALLY. Cynthia had a history with guys like Borden, having learned early how easy it was to obtain intellectual favors from desperate misfits-math tutoring, computer repair-in return for a modest investment of smiles and badinage. And she enjoyed the hopeless worship.

She knocked and without waiting for a response entered the usual nerd nest-wrappers and cans on the floor, science-fiction posters on the walls, cartoons stuck to his whiteboard with magnets. It had a peculiar smell, too, like someone had cooked an unsuccessful dessert featuring caramel and canned mushrooms. The origin of Borden’s smell was a topic in the local hallways.

His job was keeping abreast of the innumerable Web sites, most of them ephemeral as mayflies, that the international jihad used to keep its real and prospective membership up-to-date and to recruit new members. One reason they were ephemeral is that Borden and his section took them down by technical wizardry nearly as soon as they arose, except for a rotating number of favored ones, which they filled with misinformation or embarrassing pictures. Borden often remarked that he could hardly believe that they were paying him to do this work.

His office, as usual, was dark except for the glow of a huge flat-panel screen. Borden had his headset on, so Cynthia had to tap him on his Spiderman T-shirt to get his attention. He swiveled in his chair and brightened when he saw who it was.

“Hi, Lam,” he said. “Look, we can’t keep on meeting like this. People are starting to talk.”

“Let them, Borden. My passion for you knows no bounds.”

“I don’t think so, Lam of my heart. I think you’re fascinated by my unearthly intelligence, but you don’t love the real me deep inside.”

“You got me, Borden. I’m a faithless slut.” She glanced at the screen in front of him. It was blue and covered with dense lines of code. “What are you up to? It looks like work.”

“Yes, but it’s nothing I could put in girl language. It’s part of the AMICUS project.”

The name stirred a vague memory. “This is the thing about intel coordination? I didn’t realize it was up yet.”

“It’s not. It’s years away. Decades, even.”

“I’m surprised. I thought that was a big DCI priority.”

“Yeah, right, like anyone cares what the DCI thinks. Look, in the first place you have dozens of different systems, all mutually incompatible, a lot of them written in languages no one uses anymore. You could never get them to talk to one another. So let’s have a single system that everyone uses, right? I mean, we could just agree on a commercial database system and tweak it a little, but oh, no, the government can’t do that, it might save too much money, so there are endless committee meetings about agreeing to formulate a plan to plan for developing a data plan. It’s like riding on a glacier. But you didn’t come down here to talk about data set coordination. Tell me you want to sit on my lap and coo sultry songs in my ear.”

“I’ll have to take a rain check on that. Actually, I was interested in Paki -stani sites, any chatter about a big coup, any approaching major blow to the infidels.”

“This is nuclear, right?” Borden knew where she worked. “Someone lifted a bomb.”

“No one lifted a bomb, Borden. Get real. If someone lifted a bomb there’d be red lights flashing in the hallways and a whoop-whoop sound would be playing over the hall speakers. I’m just following up on some suggestive comint, and rather than send it through the usual channels I thought I’d come down here and get it from the unearthly intelligence himself.”

“Or itself. But now that you mention it, there was this little beauty. It sprang into being, as near as we can figure, at 9:53 P.M. our time and immediately went viral in the jihadi Web world.”

He pressed keys, and the screen of code shrank to a window and another, larger window popped up. Borden pulled out his headphone jack and the sound of a Pashtun song filled the room, a man singing, with tabla and rubab in back, a war song about jihad and how sorry the infidels will be when the Muslims take their revenge, how they will wail. The screen showed quick cuts of European and American cities, interwoven with shots of nuclear explosions and devastated cities: Paris, explosion, Hiroshima; New York, explosion, Hamburg ’44; and so on. Cynthia watched it twice.

“No idea where this came from, of course,” she said.

“Well, they try to mix us up, the usual anonymous cutouts, run it through Moscow and then Kiev and then Iceland, et cetera, but I’m pretty sure this one comes out of a server in Peshawar. There are technical similarities with some stuff we know was produced there, so odds-on it’s the same guy or group. Their production values are coming right along, I have to say.”

“They’ve mastered production values? Why fight on?”

“I agree,” said Borden. “You should order your burqa before the rush.”

“Seriously, though, the real reason I came down here was I need a favor.”

“I’m listening.”

“Suppose the Pakistani Ministry of Trade wanted to do a survey to see if certain items had been purchased domestically or imported into Pakistan over, say, the past three months, and because they’re an up-to-date country they would send an official e-mail to these firms, with a form attached, which I’ve designed for them, and the merchants would fill out the form and send it to a link at the official Ministry of Trade Web site but really-”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m all over it like a cheap suit,” said Borden. “The e-mail part is trivial, of course, and obviously you don’t want the Pakistanis to know you’ve doing this survey in their name. Interesting little problem.” Borden looked up to the ceiling and his eyes started to glaze as the unearthly intelligence cranked up.

Cynthia said, “So you can do it?”

Borden glanced at her, rolled his eyes upward, and mimed typing. “Mozart on the keys. To night too late?”

“To night would be perfect. “ She handed him the sheets of paper. “Here’s the apparatus list and the company list. Thanks a million, Borden. I owe you a big one.”

“Indeed you do, and yet I surmise that the payback would not include, say, sexual favors of any kind.”

“Correct. But I will allow you to fantasize about me all you want. And by the way, there are women on this floor who might not find that kind of remark amusing.”

“Well, those women can kiss my pimply ass,” said Borden. “I happen to be very selective about whom I fantasize about.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I was starting to feel like, you know, cheap? Oh, and Borden.” Cynthia was now moving toward the door. “Let’s just keep this little project between the two of us, okay?”

“What project?” said Borden, and swiveled his bulk back to the screen.

Cynthia stayed at work until eight or so that evening, long enough to determine that Borden had set up his phony Pakistani Web site and sent the e-mails, and then went home. The next three days passed without any significant intercepts. On the fourth day, a Friday, Cynthia received an e-mail from Borden with an attachment containing the catch from their fake Pakistani government survey. She was perusing the information on her screen when Lotz burst in.

“We got another one. It’s dynamite. So to speak.” He handed her a paper, a sheet from the NSA’s machine translation service.

She read it, put on her headset, and called up the referenced sound file. The Urdu conversation had been recorded off the same cell phone that Cynthia’s original trucker had used outside Kahuta.

KAHUTA: Peace be with you, brother.

PESHAWAR: And with you be peace. All is well?

KAHUTA: Yes, we are on the road. We have the birdcage concealed under sacks of wheat.

PESHAWAR: And it’s satisfactory? No leaks?

KAHUTA: No, we tested it. We used one made by the same plant that manufactures birdcages for Kahuta itself.

PESHAWAR: It might have been better to dispense with the barrel and just bury the material in a sack of wheat.

KAHUTA: No. It has to be shielded. It may be a while before the theft is discovered, but we can’t take the chance that an alarm will go out and the authorities will be watching with… ah… special equipment.

PESHAWAR: Well, you know best. You have done wonderful work! How long will you be?

KAHUTA: Not long. A day or two at the most. Tell our friends they will have their birdcage by Thursday evening at the latest. God is great!

PESHAWAR: God is great! Death to the enemies of God!

She listened to it three times, making notes, and then removed the headset.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Speaker ID was fairly accurate for a change. I assume the search term was birdcage.”

“Yeah, we have a priority on it. Anytime anyone mentions a birdcage on any of the phones we’re tracking we generate a translation. They use the English term.”

“Yes, people there often do with technical words,” said Cynthia. She stared at the transcript and recalled the care with which the trucker (if he was a trucker) had mentioned the word. He’d used it three times. Cynthia didn’t think he would’ve done that if he’d been talking about structures for confining fowl rather than the fifty-five-gallon steel drums with internal bracing that were used throughout the world to transport highly radioactive matter.

Lotz’s attention had turned to Cynthia’s computer screen. “What’s that stuff?” he asked.

“Just a survey I did. Four days ago, M. K. Chupa Metal Fabricators Ltd. purchased from Lahore Foundry Supply Company Ltd. a Morgan Mark IV dual-energy bale-out furnace and a used Bridgeport Series One manual milling machine, plus graphite crucibles and various other casting and machining accessories, for the equivalent of ninety-three hundred dollars and they paid cash. Before you ask, Pakistani tax records have no record of any M. K. Chupa Ltd. Chupa, by the way, is Urdu for “hidden.” Could be just a coincidence, I guess.”

“The bomb factory,” said Lotz. “That would seem to be the closer, along with that line in our conversation here where the Kahuta guy says, ‘It has to be shielded. It may be a while before the theft is discovered, but we can’t take the chance that an alarm will go out and the authorities will be watching with… ah… special equipment.’ ”

“Yes, and that’s to make us believe they’re worried about radiation monitors,” said Cynthia. “And yet they’re not worried about blurting the whole thing out over a cell phone that might be compromised. And they bought their supposed equipment on the open market in Pakistan instead of smuggling it into the country, even though smuggling is half of Pakistan’s GDP. It’s absurd, Ernie! At the levels of al-Q we’re talking about, they smuggle everything they use, including cell phones, which they typically use once and then ditch. No one involved in a plot like this would use the same phone day after day to report on the progress of a load of stolen weapons-grade.”

“Abu Lais did. And we know for sure that he was talking to al-Zaydun; we have the voiceprint. Do you think that’s a fake too?”

“No, but one ambiguous conversation does not a nuclear conspiracy make.”

“So what would convince you, Cynthia, a mushroom cloud? You know what I think? I think you’ve got stage fright.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about us, N Section. For years we’ve been sitting in our tiny offices, forgotten, more or less, watching for something that nobody really thought would happen, and now it has happened and suddenly we’re going to be the most important people in the whole government. This intel is going to go from our hands straight to the president’s people, and they’re going to want to make damn sure it’s right. And you’ve got butterflies.”

She looked at him coldly. He seemed a different person now, hectic, avid, like a frat boy planning a date rape. She said, “You’re wrong. It has nothing to do with my personal shit. The tapes are wrong. The people on them are reading scripts. And if you’d spent as much time listening to real conversations as I have you’d know that.”

“Yeah, well, maybe that’s why we have analysts and why the munchkins in the headsets don’t get to make the decisions.”

She stared at him, stunned by the nastiness of this remark from the ordinarily genial, flirty Ernie Lotz. The supposed plot must have unleashed some kind of testosterone storm in the men involved. She had little hope that Morgan would be any different.

Nor was he, later in the day, after Lotz had briefed him on the latest intercepts and the commercial information, what he insisted on calling Lam’s bomb factory.

The three of them were in Morgan’s office. With every bullet point on Lotz’s briefing paper, Morgan seemed to expand, his face to glow, his bright blue eyes to send forth sparks. The grand finale was the playing of the Qasir intercept. He didn’t need Cynthia to understand that. Lotz concluded with a recommendation that the GEARSHIFT material should be passed up the line for an executive decision. When it was finished, he turned to Cynthia and said, “That should satisfy even you, Cynthia.”

They both looked at her. Seconds ticked by in silence. She said, “What do we know about this guy Qasir?”

“What do you mean?” said Lotz. “He’s legitimate. He checks out. He’s in Kahuta; he handles nuclear materials for their bomb program. What more do we have to know?”

“His politics maybe?”

Morgan said, “Oh, please! You think he and his wife are in on your conspiracy too?”

“I didn’t say that,” she replied, trying to keep the snap from her voice. “I have reservations, I won’t deny that. I still believe this could all be a clever provocation. But I concur with Ernie’s recommendation. There’s no way we can come to a conclusion just on the basis of comint. We have to have people on the ground. Besides that, if there’s one thing we learned from 9/11, it’s that if intel agencies don’t share all their data it leads to disaster. It may be a provocation, but if it’s not, and someone detonates a nuke and it comes out that we had this data and did nothing… I don’t even want to think about it. So let’s get everyone in the same room and find out whether this thing is real.”

It was a reasonable finesse, she thought, and was satisfied to feel the tension drain from the office. Morgan favored her with an amused smile. She was a team player again. This is why empires collapse, she thought: Vietnam, 9/11, Iraq. Everyone wants to be a team player, to bask in the respect of their peers and the favor of their superiors. She was no different.

“Okay, generate a briefing,” Morgan said. “Fifteen minutes. Just the data and our conclusions. I’m sure I can get a meeting with both Holman and Spalling on the strength of this. After that, I think it’ll move very quickly indeed. Don’t plan on going anywhere until this is resolved.”

Interesting, that. He’d given her the responsibility for pulling together the briefing: her, not Ernie. She could see the brief wave of disappointment pass across Lotz’s face. Morgan was rewarding her for caving on this; besides, she was a lot better at putting together briefings than Lotz was. She had the language skills.

While the meeting was being organized by those at levels far above her, Cynthia returned to her office and worked on the PowerPoint presentation Morgan had ordered. When it was done, she e-mailed it to him and an hour later it came back with a note requesting some corrections, all weakening the caveats, which she duly made. After that she noodled. She read some technical articles, answered e-mail from colleagues, and stared blankly at the door and the wall clock.

At ten of six her phone rang and it was Morgan’s secretary telling her to be in front of the building in five minutes. She was, and in a few moments Morgan came down the drive in a gray government car. She got in, hauling her special NSA laptop and a stack of copies of the presentation and tapes of the source material.

“We’re going alone?” she asked, as he drove off.

“No, of course not. Spalling and Holman are coming in their own car.”

Yes, she should have known that. The iron law of bureaucracy insisted that no one can talk to anyone several rungs higher in the chain of command without the intermediate rungs being in the room. James Spalling was the deputy director of operations, NSA, and Ken Holman was the head of W, Morgan’s boss.

Anticipating her next question, Morgan said, “We’re going to Liberty Crossing.”

Cynthia nodded. The Liberty Crossing Building in McLean, Virginia, was where the National Counterterrorism Center had its headquarters. The main purpose of this tiny organization was to encourage the mammoth organizations that actually countered terrorism on behalf of the American people to talk to one another and to avoid the ignominy that attended upon one counterterrorist mogul having to actually visit the lair of another. She asked Morgan who would be there and he said, “The usual cluster-fuck,” which did not encourage conversation, so they drove the rest of the way in silence.

She looked out the window at the uninteresting traffic and the bland suburban scenery, the golf courses and homes of a peaceful nation at war. She had been a government employee long enough to understand what Morgan’s salty term implied. Another iron law of bureaucracy: no one in government will take seriously a command from anyone who does not directly control his budget or hiring. For counterterrorism in general there is no such person other than the president, who has a lot of other stuff to worry about. The director of national intelligence is supposed to speak with the voice of the president on these matters, but this person certainly does not control the bud get of the secretary of defense, who spends 80 percent of the intel bud get and personnel and who, like the president, has many things other than intelligence to worry about. Even within the defense empire there are intel rivalries; all the services have direct connections to Congress and to their contractors, who also have direct connections and generous lobbyists, which is why the U.S. Army has a navy and an air force, and the U.S. Navy has an air force and an army. Everything that’s done has to be negotiated with many layers of people, all of whom see their particular organization as the center of the national effort or would like to build it up as such, and nearly every office with “intelligence” or “terrorism” in its title wants to directly control guys with face paint and silenced submachine guns. All these important people were about to make, she thought with growing dread, a terrible mistake, one that she would be helpless to stop.

Unless. For the rest of the drive she concentrated her thoughts on how to derail this onrushing freight train without throwing her own body onto the tracks. Most government mistakes can be stopped if someone is willing to sacrifice a career, but Cynthia knew she was not that sort of person. The art of bureaucracy is to crawl through garbage and end up smelling like a rose. As this thought crossed her mind she thought of the man who had taught her that-and also provided her with the image of N as a pathetic, if necessary, night watchman: Harry Anspach. That was what she would do. She’d call old Harry and seek advice. Maybe something could be done. Maybe the mighty coup could still be extracted from this disaster.

Morgan and Cynthia arrived early, as befitted their relatively junior status. They busied themselves connecting the laptop to the apparatus that would project their presentation on the conference room screen and testing to make sure that it worked. It was one of those ultrasecure conference rooms, windowless, carpeted, low-ceilinged. Cynthia hooked up her laptop to the room’s speaker system and played some of the sound files she had brought along. She walked to different parts of the room, to make sure of the acoustics, and found that sound bounced in odd ways. In one far corner of the room she could hear Morgan breathing and turning the pages of his notes, as if he were close enough to touch. Strange, but not uncommon in such hyper-sealed rooms, not significant.

She had just finished with these chores when the attendees began to arrive, first a woman, the deputy director of the counterterrorism center, their nominal host; then the CIA man, the deputy director of operations; then another woman, this one the deputy director of the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team, the people responsible for finding lost or stolen nuclear material; then their own bosses, Spalling and Holman; then a full colonel from the Defense Intelligence Agency, representing the Pentagon-the real Pentagon. The National Security Agency, although formally part of the defense establishment, was obviously not deemed representative enough. Cynthia thought it was because the NSA had no personnel with face paint and silenced submachine guns.

Each of these people brought along an aide, it being another iron rule that no senior person go unaccompanied to any meeting of his peers in other agencies. These aides sat in chairs against the wall, along with Cynthia. Then, finally, the ostensible senior person, Thomas Bettleman, the deputy director of national intelligence, a tall fit-looking man with black horn-rims and an academic air. He had two aides. He sat down at the head of the table and, after introducing himself and asking the others to do the same, briskly turned to Spalling and said, “Jim, I believe this is your meeting.”

Spalling made some introductory remarks to the effect that NSA had uncovered evidence that an agent of al-Qaeda had stolen nuclear material from Pakistani sources, that this meeting had been called to determine whether a response by the United States was warranted, and, if so, what form it would take. With that, he introduced Morgan, described the duties of his section, and motioned to him to begin. Morgan stood up, the lights dimmed, and the screen immediately shone with the NSA seal.

Morgan was a good briefer, Cynthia thought: concise and positive, an avoider of hems and haws. Everyone in the room, she knew, was a good briefer, that’s how they had risen to their current positions, since the ability to put complex issues into a form politicians could understand without making them feel stupid or putting them to sleep was the golden road to power in Washington. The other thing they all had in common was that none of them had ever made a mistake they could be blamed for, which meant they were each of them either perfection itself or unusually skilled in avoiding blame.

As Morgan went through the evidence, the Abu Lais connection, the quality and reliability of the comint, the confirming conversation of the trucker and the man from Peshawar, Cynthia was able to turn her attention from the screen and study the people in the darkened room. She had never attended a deputy-director-level meeting before, and it gave her a certain chill to realize that these were the people chiefly charged with keeping America safe from terrorism. She was not impressed. Although she actually worked for a national security operation, her imagination had been formed by movies, and none of these people looked heroic enough for their roles.

This opinion lost nothing when Morgan presented the transcript of the Qasir colloquy and played the tape over the room’s speakers. She thought she saw fear on some of the faces; yes, there was a palpable sense of fear in the room when Morgan wound up his spiel, with the appropriate (weakened but still ass-saving) caveats. It could be a scam, a provocation designed to further erode the shaky relationship between the U.S. and the Pakistani government, but in order to explore that they would either have to confront the Pakistanis with this evidence, seek clarification using significant human intelligence, or bet that it was a scam and not rise to the bait.

Morgan now had the options up on the screen. Three options, two impossible, which was the usual way in which ju nior people manipulated and controlled government policy. No one was prepared to enrage the Pakistanis and make the Afghan insurgency even more disastrous than it already was, and no one was going to contemplate lying doggo while al-Qaeda got a nuke. But they were going to have to decide something now, and whatever way they decided would generate a high-risk situation. These were not people who sought risk.

After a pause, Bettleman turned to the woman from the Department of Energy.

“Doris, if they really have thirty-three kilograms of weapons-grade uranium, could they build a working nuclear weapon?”

This was a neat dodge. It provided the opportunity for some technobabble, during which all the important members of the group could gather their thoughts and prepare their responses. Doris Ames, the NEST person, was a thin, pleasantly ugly woman with a mass of springy black hair escaping from a silver clip. She wore a fuzzy purple dress, the only note of color in the room besides the men’s ties and the colonel’s ribbons.

She cleared her throat. “Well, the short answer is yes, with thirty-three. But a lot depends on how they’re going to use it and how skillful they are. What we call ‘bare crit’ for metallic uranium at ninety-four percent U-235 is fifty-two kilograms. That means it’ll go off if you just drop one half on the other. But obviously weapons aren’t designed that way. They use shielding to contain and reflect the neutron flux, and shielding can be anything that’s dense enough: steel, lead, graphite, even water. With the proper shielding the critical mass drops by around half. That said, the real answer to your question depends entirely on how good your guys are. A crude gun-type bomb would use all their metal and produce something like the Hiroshima bomb, say fifteen kilotons on detonation, if everything worked right. They apparently have a furnace for melting and machine tools for shaping the target and the plug. They can probably steal or buy lithium and polonium for the initiator. On the other hand, if they had a fair weapons designer on board and they wanted to build an implosion device, say a levitated pit design, with an aluminum pusher and a depleted uranium tamper, they could make three bombs out of what they have, all with approximately Hiroshima yields. If they didn’t care about optimum yield, they could make a whole bunch of five kilogram fizzle devices that would yield, say, a hundred tons of TNT. Or if they were really good, if they had a professional weapons designer and skilled machinists, they could make half a dozen linear implosion devices, the so-called suitcase bomb, yielding one to three kilotons each. In general, the smarter you are, the smaller and more lethal the bomb. Does that answer your question?”

Cynthia thought that the woman sounded more satisfied than the grim occasion warranted. It must have given her considerable pleasure to have all these big, important men hanging on her words. She felt a sister-hood: Doris and Cynthia both had jobs that were almost silly until the bad day came; they were the night watchpersons who never got to sit at the big table, but on the bad day they got to tell the boys in charge the evil tidings, and the boys had to listen! Cynthia looked at the NEST woman and thought, That is not my fate, a job like that is not where I intend to end up, a middle-aged minor supergrade wearing a purple dress so people will notice her.

Bettleman thanked the woman and opened the room to discussion, of which there was very little. The main conclusion was that the material should be put before the president for his decision. Bettleman responded by asking for more detailed options, from both the Pentagon man, Colonel Brand, and the CIA man, Wayne Price. Price was the youngest person at the table, a man in his forties, and his smooth face had the constipated look of someone operating out of his depth. In years gone by the deputy director for operations of the CIA was one of the most powerful men in the world. He ran legions of spies and dozens of front organizations, he was the world’s biggest briber, he played with the rulers of nations like pawns on a board. But no longer. This guy, Cynthia knew, had been recently shot into his job by the resignation of three people senior to him, in the great political revolution that had also stripped the central intelligence coordinating power from the CIA director and given it to Bettleman’s tiny office. The national government believed that what the CIA could not do-coordinate national intelligence-with a multibillion-dollar black budget and twenty thousand troops could be done by one man and a corporal’s guard of bureaucrats.

They all listened to what Price had to say. He had sent a message to his Pakistani operation to gather anything they had on a nuclear theft or on the whereabouts of Abu Lais, but so far there hadn’t been any incoming humint that such a plot was in the offing. Col o nel Brand did not roll his eyes, and no one passed looks. The CIA still retained some resources and had some good people, but as an organization capable of meeting the intel needs of the United States it was finished. Bettleman said something diplomatic, a head pat, to Price and then turned to the col o nel.

They all turned to the uniform, like flowers to the sun, because everyone understood that the military was the big player here. Colonel Brand talked about assets and intercepts and operations. The Defense Intelligence Agency had its own little NSA for monitoring certain communications, the kind you couldn’t get with the big antennae or the satellites, and it had its own little CIA too, although that bordered on the illegal. It seemed DIA knew all about Abu Lais and his nuclear plotting. There had been indications-buzzing on the terror networks-for some time. The col o nel thought Abu Lais was the key; they should all forget about the Pakistanis and find Abu Lais. Cynthia found it hard to follow the col o nel; the buzz in her head was like the buzz on the terror networks, obscure, threatening, boiling with many tongues all saying wrong wrong wrong.

“Ms. Lam?”

She started. Spalling was calling her name, not for the first time, she realized, and she became aware that everyone was looking at her. She felt herself blush.

“Sir?”

“Ah, you’re back with us,” Spalling said, which provoked a titter around the room. “Yes, Ms. Lam, I understand you have some linguistic evidence you derived from the Abu Lais interception.”

“Yes, sir. He was speaking Standard Arabic with a Pashtun accent. I also detected a softening of the Arabic gutterals characteristic of someone who has spent time speaking English.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“About the Pashtun accent? I’m fairly certain about that. On the En – glish, it’s more or less a guess. The colloquy wasn’t long enough for me to make a definitive call.”

Colonel Brand asked, “Is this kind of speech what you might expect from a man with Pashtun as his cradle tongue, who had later been educated in the U.K. or the U.S., and then learned Arabic as an adult?”

“It’s possible, sir, but his Arabic was pretty good. He could have learned it as a child, like many people in that part of the world… But also-”

This was the moment. They’d all heard the tape. Why couldn’t they hear the phoniness? Why didn’t anyone ask the obvious questions about a senior scientist chatting casually about the theft of nuclear materials to his wife-if it even was Qasir and his wife? But no one did. They were all team players too.

“Yes, Ms. Lam?” said Spalling, but she shook her head and mumbled, and Bettleman nodded vaguely in her direction and began to sum up the meeting. He said the obvious: The White House would have to be informed and he would undertake to do that this afternoon. There would have to be a fuller analysis of the situation in the president’s daily intel brief tomorrow, and he would be sure to ask for options, so the Chiefs would have to get that rolling right away. Col o nel Brand could be trusted to do just that. Then he passed compliments all around, expressed optimism, and was about to close the meeting when Morgan spoke up.

“What are we going to call this? I mean, the incident and the intel that comes in.”

“Let’s stick with GEARSHIFT until further notice, shall we?” Bettleman said.

The meeting broke up shortly afterward, the attendees assembled in transitory clots around the room, the principals and their aides mostly, speaking in confidential tones as they filed out. Cynthia was pulling up her cables when she heard, as if from someone standing right next to her, a fragment of a conversation. Startled she looked up and saw that the deputy director for operations of the Central Intelligence Agency was deep in conversation with another man, halfway across the room. That she could hear what they were saying was a trick of the safe room’s peculiar acoustics.

She turned away, still coiling her cable, and listened. The DDO said, “Anything new on Ringmaster?”

“Only that it’s confirmed; Ringmaster’s definitely a hostage. Do you think this business here is connected to Showboat?”

“Has to be,” said the DDO, “but I’m goddamned if I know how. Look, when we get back to Langley…”

But Cynthia couldn’t hear what was planned when they got back to Langley, because they had moved away from the acoustic pocket. She continued her packing up, keeping her inner excitement from showing in her expression only with difficulty. She had by accident snatched the gold ring of intelligence work: she had learned something she was not supposed to know, and from the highest levels of the CIA. This slip established that there was more to GEARSHIFT than the CIA was willing to share with the rest of the intelligence community: no one had mentioned anything called Ringmaster or Showboat at the meeting, so she assumed they were names of assets or operations so secret that not even the highly cleared people at this meeting were allowed to know about them. But now she knew, and it remained only to determine how she could use the knowledge to her best advantage. It never for a moment occurred to her to share this knowledge with Morgan or anyone else at NSA.