The Good Son

12

T hey held another meeting of the GEARSHIFT group the following day, but Cynthia Lam was not invited to this one. Ernie Lotz went in her stead, and she understood why. She’d admitted her doubts to Ernie, not as devil’s advocate but for real, and he had naturally passed them along to Morgan. She was now officially unreliable on the next phase of the project, which, according to Lotz, was bending every sinew of NSA to pinpoint the location of the supposed bomb factory. The president had given approval to start planning for a military option, but obviously they had to know where to invade. Satellites shifted their orbits to provide better coverage of the suspect terrain-the northwest frontier of Pakistan and the southern tier of Afghanistan-and hundreds of analysts dropped other projects to pore over the photographic catch. Drone aircraft were hastily fitted with radiation detection gear and flown low through the mountain valleys, although the area to be covered was so vast that no one expected a timely hit from the flights. The role of N Section was to expand the listening watch, on the theory that the supposed errors of the earlier cell phone ill-discipline would be repeated.

Cynthia believed this was a waste of time, because any calls they were likely to intercept would be fakes, like the others. She thought the original Abu Lais call was genuine, but whether or not it involved a nuclear conspiracy was at present unknown. N Section was also receiving feed from optical cable intercepts out of Pakistan; no Pakistani official could pick up a phone, she thought, without NSA listening in, although here, as always, the bottleneck was translation. She was particularly interested in traffic from the security services, because if there really had been a nuclear theft, these should be going mad. But they were not, or not that she could tell. It seemed to be business as usual in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, so either they were back to carrying messages in cleft sticks or there was nothing big going on.

Still, she logged her dutiful hours and even demonstrated zeal in the futile hunt, and at the same time she embarked on a covert venture of her own. First she searched NSA’s secure intranet and found no reference to the code name Ringmaster. This was not particularly surprising. Security clearances at NSA are highly compartmented and her own Top Secret clearance gave her access only to those parts of NSA’s vast trove of information that directly related to her work. Besides that, Ring-master was a CIA operation and, despite changes in intel policy after the 9/11 events, Langley was not inclined to share. She would have to figure out some other way to discover what was going on.

It was, in contrast, no problem to research the nuclear scientist Jafar Baig Qasir, his family, and their connections. NSA’s resources gave her every fragment of electronic information available about him: his bank records, his credit reports, his recent e-mails, the works. When she was done with that, and intrigued by what she had learned, she put in a call to Harry Anspach, got an answering system, and left a casual message-long time no see, let’s have a drink.

He hadn’t called back by the time she left work, at around seven, but she knew that Harry kept odd hours, spook hours. He’d rung her up occasionally in the middle of the night.

He might be one part of the thread she was beginning to tease out of the GEARSHIFT tangle. He was a consultant, so-called; he ran a tiny firm that provided undisclosed services for the U.S. intel community. Cynthia thought he might be close to seventy, although he looked a lot younger. Harry always had a nice tan and wore slightly rakish English-cut suits. He was, or claimed to be, an old CIA hand, a veteran of the glory days when the governments of nations lived or fell at Langley’s pleasure. Harry had specialized in South Asia, he spoke the languages, knew the players face-to-face, and had a pile of stories. She’d met him at a training course early in her career at NSA. He’d been an instructor. It had been thought useful to give junior NSA staff some idea of how comint and humint worked together, and that was Harry’s task. He’d begun by stating flatly that they did not, offered to leave the platform, and got a polite laugh. Then he’d launched into a brilliant analysis of the faults of the national intelligence effort from the point of view of the poor bastards who were out in the field, trying to make sense of the machinations of an alien culture. He talked about the difficulties the average American had in doing this, and of how hard it really was to weave the little bits derived from spies, intercepts, and open sources into a real understanding of what the bad guys were up to.

Cynthia thought it was the best presentation she’d ever heard during her training. Later that evening, when the trainees and their instructors were mingling in the facility’s lounge, she’d heard a voice behind her say, “The hard work of the foolish is all a waste, as rainless clouds make only dust.” It was in Pashto. She turned around to find Harry Anspach grinning at her, and she’d asked what he meant in the same language.

“A line from Rahman Baba,” he’d said. “The old guy might have been talking about U.S. intelligence.”

And then they’d had a long conversation in Pashto about intelligence and Pashtun culture and the war against the Russians. He’d been there for nearly the whole thing, and before that, along with everyone else, he’d been in Southeast Asia. He had a lot of stories about both places, but somehow they never involved him; it was always “a guy I knew” or “someone told me that…” She got the impression that Harry liked to go deep, that he wasn’t an embassy cocktail party kind of agent, and that this had crimped his career. The CIA didn’t like it when their people went native: intelligence was all well and good, but they didn’t really want to hear stuff that conflicted with their prejudices or might embarrass their political masters. That evening Harry talked mainly about Afghanistan and the Pashtuns, those wonderful, horrible people. She got the impression he had gone very native, donning turban and shalwar kameez, growing his beard, living in the villages for weeks on end.

He was surprised that she’d never been there. She said she hadn’t traveled much; she was a headquarters kind of person. He said she should go, and said her Pashto was excellent but a little schoolmarmish, it was stripped of colloquialism of the sort you could only pick up in a Pashtun village. He said he’d heard about her; she was a prize catch with her languages. And they talked about her for the rest of their conversation; whenever she tried to turn the talk back to his obviously far more interesting life, he diverted it back with a laugh and a joke.

Since that time, every so often they’d meet for a drink or a meal, and she’d tell him what was going on at the agency and in N Section. Cynthia understood that she was a source, he was using her to keep track of what that part of NSA was doing, and also maybe he was checking up for someone about how free she was with things she wasn’t supposed to talk about-or even know. She didn’t mind. She liked him. She thought they were two of a kind, both dedicated to the secret world, both alone, both a little lonely. It was like having a father who really understood what you were doing and approved and would help if he could, quite unlike her actual father, who wondered why Cynthia, with her grades, had not gone into medicine or law.

Anspach called just after six. She asked him where he was and he said he was in the street outside her apartment house and would she like to get something to eat? She said she would and he took her to their usual place, an Afghan restaurant on the other side of Dupont Circle. It was a tiny place, eight tables, only one of which was occupied when they came in, by a large noisy family, the men talking loudly in Pashto, the women, demure in hijabs, tending to the wriggling children. The proprietor greeted them like old friends, all smiles, handshakes, an embrace and two kisses for Harry, a bow for Cynthia. They sat and he fed them, not bothering with menus. They drank scalding sweet minted tea and ate: kadu, aushak dumplings, fesenjan chicken with Basmati rice, steaming slabs of Afghan naan bread. As usual Cynthia talked about herself, what was happening at NSA, nothing personal. They did not have that kind of relationship, and she had long since given up trying to get anything out of Harry, a worm-proof man.

Inevitably, GEARSHIFT and its discontents came up. She told him the whole story, probably in violation of innumerable security regulations, but she didn’t care. She wanted to know if she was crazy or not. She told him about Abu Lais, and all the unlikelihoods, the phoninesses of the intercepts, and when she ran down he said, “That’s pretty thin soup. Paranoia is a virtue in intel work, but it’s got to be based on something more than hunches.”

“It’s not just hunches, Harry. First of all, I’m the language guy in this, and the language is fake. I know a staged conversation when I hear it. The original Abu Lais colloquy was genuine; I had no doubts at all about that one. But the others weren’t. You can put that in the bank. The second thing is I did a little checking on Dr. Qasir. The woman he was supposedly talking to is Rukhsana Laghari Qasir, his wife. She’s a journalist, works for a liberal English-language newspaper in Lahore. Have you been following this hostage thing in Pakistan? With Bill Craig?”

“What about it?”

“One of the hostages is Sonia Bailey Laghari, the writer. She’s Rukhsana Qasir’s sister-in-law.”

“So?”

“So she’s being held by a jihadi group. What if someone decided that this would be a good time to engineer a provocation, using the connection between Sonia Laghari and her brother-in-law, the nuclear engineer? Maybe the Laghari family is trying to fake up something. Maybe the point of this provocation has nothing to do with an actual bomb but is-I don’t know-a way to get Sonia Laghari out of the hands of the mujahideen?”

“That’s a big jump, Cynthia. A senior Pakistani scientist is going to commit treason to save his sister-in-law?”

“If it really was Jafar Qasir.”

“You haven’t checked?”

“No. I’m telling you, Morgan put this whole thing together on the fly. He finally gets to play in the bigs, he’s not going to check every little detail. But I’m going to put in a call to Qasir to night, and also to his wife, and I’ll match the voiceprints to the intercept. Then we’ll see.”

Harry said, “I want more tea. Would you like dessert? I’m going to have the phirnee.”

Cynthia shook her head, and Harry called the waiter over and had a brief Pashto conversation with him. When he went away, Harry said, “I assume if this voiceprint checks out the way you think it will, you’ll go to Morgan and tell him to stop the train.”

“Not Morgan. That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”

“You want to go around him.”

“Or something. God, Harry, you have no idea what he’s been like. He doesn’t listen to me, he doesn’t take me to the big meetings… I honestly think that if I show him that the Qasir intercept is a fake, he’ll suppress it or tell me I made it up or I don’t know what. Whatever, I’ll be finished at NSA.”

“Uh-huh. Well, we can’t let that happen.” He smiled. “I’ll tell you what. If it turns out the Qasir intercept is a scam, get your evidence written up, the voiceprints and all, and shoot it over to me by courier. I’ll make sure it gets to the right people and that they know you saved the day.”

She felt some tension drain. “Thanks, Harry. But there’s something else.” She explained about the acoustic freak in the meeting room, what she’d overheard, and her conclusion: “There’s some other link between the hostages and this nuclear scam.”

“What connection could there be?”

“That depends on who this Ringmaster is and what Showboat is. Anything ring a bell?”

Harry looked up at the approaching waiter. He said, “This is really good phirnee they make here. It’s a kind of rice pudding with rose water and pistachio nuts. Want some?”

Cynthia took a fleck of the stuff on her spoon, to be polite. It tasted like cold cream.

He caught her look. “No? Well, it’s an acquired taste. I ate a lot of it in Peshawar during the jihad.” He started in on the dessert. Cynthia waited for what seemed like a long time and then said, “Harry? We were having a conversation.”

He put his spoon down and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “No, actually you were trying to pump me, which I thought we had an agreement you weren’t going to do. My advice to you is to forget you ever heard those words.”

As he said this, he gave her a look she did not recall ever seeing before on Harry Anspach’s face, bleak and cold, the eyes blank and pitiless as a shark’s. It lasted for only a second, but it stunned her; she felt her jaw slacken embarrassingly, like that of a schoolgirl caught at some naughtiness.

“You know, I just remembered,” said Harry, in a different tone, as if that look and his comment had not occurred, “I ran into Sonia Laghari once, in Peshawar, back in-oh, gosh, it must’ve been ’eighty-seven. The war was winding down and we were tying things up, preparing to go back to ignoring Afghan i stan and ditching all the people we’d been supporting, the usual American deal. You know, when I first started with the Agency, in the late sixties, when someone really fucked up, we used to roll our eyes and say, ‘Afghan i stan,’ like he was going to get assigned to someplace of absolutely no importance. Anyway, I used to have an office, sort of, over a tea shop in the Meena Bazaar, and when I was in town I used to sit there all day drinking mint tea and people knew where to find me. So I’m sitting there one morning and in walks this woman in a burqa. Well, the place just froze, everybody stopped talking and stared, because women just don’t stroll into tea shops in that part of Peshawar, and she walks up to me, hands me a piece of paper, and walks out. The note said she had to see me, matter of life and death, and she’d come by at ten that night, and it was signed Sonia Bailey. Of course I knew who Sonia Bailey was. After she wrote that book on Soviet Central Asia, half the Agency was trying to get next to her, to pump her about what she hadn’t put in the book, but no dice. She said she was a writer and she didn’t want to compromise herself, and so forth, so I gathered they gave up trying. And obviously I was interested. Did you ever read her books?”

“No. Are they any good?”

“Yeah, they are. But you’re not that interested in travel. Or in the people who speak the languages you speak so well.”

Cynthia was about to object to this remark but forbore. A personal revelation from Anspach was so rare she didn’t want to stem his flow.

“So I’m in my room that night, and there’s a knock, and in comes this little guy in the full Pashtun rig: shalwar kameez, waistcoat, turban, little mustache, never saw the guy before, and I jump up and the guy says in Pashto, ‘Relax, Mr. Anspach, I’m Sonia Bailey.’ Could’ve knocked me over. The mustache was phony, of course, but aside from that she was a Pashtun guy-language, gestures, the whole works. Better than me, as a matter of fact, and I’m pretty good. I mean, even though I knew she was an American woman, I totally bought her as a Pashtun man. Uncanny. And what she wanted to see me about was her kid, a teenager. Told me the damnedest story about how her kid had been kidnapped as a boy by this Pashtun bodyguard of her father-in-law’s down in Lahore and had fought up in Afghan i stan for years and she’d thought he was dead, and then she finally figured out that this legendary boy mujahid that everyone was talking about in Peshawar must be her son. And of course I’d heard of Kakay Ghazan; they were singing songs about him in the streets.”

He motioned to the waiter, who was there in an instant with the check. Harry laid some bills on it, which Cynthia noted included a huge tip, and then the patron came out and they had some chat about wonderful to see you again and the best Afghan food in America, all smiles and embraces, and a special smile for Cynthia too, and then they were out in the street.

“So what happened?” Cynthia asked. “With the kid.”

“What? Oh, I pointed her to some people and apparently they got him out of there. Interesting woman, though. Sad about what happened to her, getting kidnapped. I heard there was a fatwa out on her. The Muslims don’t like mixing up the sexes, they like to know who’s a woman and who’s a man. Especially in Mecca.”

“Do you think they’ll kill her?”

“Oh, yeah. If they haven’t already. So that idea you’re developing about how this thing might be a Laghari family domestic intrigue probably isn’t worth pursuing. The woman is toast.” This thought seemed to depress him and they walked back to his car in silence. When they were driving, he said, “Look, Cynthia, I meant what I said about not messing with that stuff you overheard. I know you like to think you’re a real insider, but there’s some shit you don’t want to get inside.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, a little stiffly. “I’ve been put in my place.”

“Yeah, and that attitude. It doesn’t go with your chosen career path. You need to stay on the reservation, do your excellent work, and when the boss says jump, you say, ‘How high, please, sir?’ ”

“You didn’t.”

“Right, and look where it got me. You notice I’m not running Langley these days.”

“No, but you know all about Ringmaster.”

“Never heard of it. And in the same vein you need to look again at this business about GEARSHIFT being a jihadist provocation. Do you really want to go ahead with rocking the boat? Morgan won’t appreciate one of his people making an end run.”

“But if it’s a provocation, Morgan’s finished anyway.” She hadn’t meant to say this. He slowed for a red light, and the red glare from above gave his face a devilish cast as he turned and looked at her.

“Yeah, I figured that was your plan, more or less. A chance for a big win and you kick your mentor in the ass, and not only your mentor but the guy you’ve been screwing for years; what does that say? That you’re ruthless, that you won’t let anything stand in the way of your devotion to the job? A very popular point of view around headquarters and why I couldn’t ever stand working there for long. On the other hand I ended up in Afghan i stan, where betrayal is a refined art, like calligraphy is in China.”

“But I’m right! I mean, if I’m right it’s not just about me or Morgan or who comes out on top. It’s a national security issue.”

“Yeah, that’s what they always say. I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that used as an excuse for doing something dirty.”

“Oh, fuck it, Harry! Blowing the whistle on a serious mistake is not doing something dirty. You make it sound like getting us kicked out of Pakistan is… is some kind of office politics I’m twisting for my own advantage. Jesus, wasn’t the whole 9/11 fiasco and the whole Iraq war fiasco the result of people who knew better not standing up and telling the truth?”

“Yes, but in those cases, the people who knew better didn’t want to risk career damage, so they stayed silent. You’re speaking out because you think it will advance your career. You want to be famous as the little girl with her thumb in the dike, the one person who found what all the big shots missed, that GEARSHIFT was an enemy provocation.”

“What does that matter,” she snapped, “if it avoids a disaster?”

They had come to her apartment building on California Street, and Harry swung the car into an empty space by a fire hydrant. He shifted in his seat and looked her in the face.

“You think it’ll be a disaster, but you don’t know. We never know. You have no idea what will happen if a strike team goes in and shoots up a Pakistani village and there’s no bomb factory there. Maybe it’ll be a nine-day wonder. Maybe the Pakistani parliament gets blown up the same day and it drives the raid clean out of the headlines. Or suppose the worst case: there’s an uproar, a national uprising, and the Islamists take over Pakistan and we have to evacuate Afghan i stan. So fucking what? I can recall when it was going to be the end of the world if we lost Vietnam. Fifty-six thousand American dead, three million Vietnam ese dead, two fucked-up countries, and now American tourists are sipping cocktails in Hue and the grandchildren of the Vietcong are lining up for jobs as busboys in Swiss hotels.”

“I can’t believe this. You’re saying it doesn’t matter if Islamists take over a nuclear-armed nation?”

“Why should it? I spent three-quarters of my working life fighting a completely amoral nation that had three thousand nuclear missiles targeted on American cities, and not one of them ever came close to being fired, so why should I worry about some mullahs having a dozen undeliverable nukes?”

“Unless one of them goes off in New York.”

“Yes, the old bogeyman. Just think for second, Cynthia! No one is ever going to use nuclear weapons against a nation that has nuclear weapons. As soon as anyone has nuclear weapons they immediately become grown-ups. They become part of the balance of terror. Nuclear terrorism is something that happens in the movies.”

“Al-Qaeda isn’t a regular nation.”

“No, and so what? The same rule applies. The al-Q leadership has been living underground for a decade because they knocked down two buildings. They’ll be underground for the rest of their lives. If they used a nuclear weapon on us we’d kill everyone in Waziristan and no one in the world would utter a peep.”

“Be serious, Harry.”

“I am. The only people who can really destroy the United States are the Americans, just like the only people who could destroy the USSR were the Soviets, and they did, and we seem to be following in their footsteps. Modern nuclear-armed nations are essentially invulnerable. They can never be conquered in the sense that Hitler and Stalin conquered nations sixty years ago, but all our political stances and the intel that supports them are based on 1930s thinking. We have to prevent another Munich. How often have you heard that? We can’t appease dictators? There are no dictators worth our trouble. It’s all a fraud, Cynthia; I mean the high seriousness that attends all this statecraft, this strategizing. It’s completely empty, down to the bones.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“Because it’s what I do. It’s the only thing I know. It’s a game, like tennis, existentially meaningless but amusing. It takes me-or took me, I should say-to interesting places, just like a tennis pro, and the possibility of being killed just added to the thrill. I’m a pro at this and I thought you were shaping up to be a pro too. A pro does his job, collects the data, makes an honest report. The people responsible make their decisions and if they’re the wrong ones, in your view, it’s none of your business. Your business is to keep faith with the people you work for, and the people who work for you, and let the chips fall wherever, because in the end the fate of nations doesn’t depend on whatever bullshit passes for grand strategy.”

“So you won’t help me.”

He paused and gave her a long stare, but in the dim car she couldn’t quite make out his expression. He said, “Of course I’ll help you. I’m your friend. But you need to think about it more than you have, okay?”

“Okay, Harry,” she said. “I’ll do that.” She held out her hand and he took it and she leaned over and kissed his cheek. He smelled faintly of rose water.

Back in her apartment, confused and angry, she paced back and forth on the living room rug in front of her television set, turned to cable news with the sound off, and tried to make sense of what Harry had said. The content of his talk she dismissed as clearly nonsense-who could believe such a line? The problem lay in his intent. It was a smokescreen, it was meant to confuse, and it had started immediately after she’d mentioned Ringmaster and Showboat. No, SHOWBOAT, she thought, making the word appear uppercase on the screen of her thoughts, obviously an operation of some kind, something to do with nuclear weapons or nuclear theft, and Ringmaster, now held by the terrorists somewhere in the ungoverned wilds of Pakistan, must be an agent connected with it. Yes, she’d explained her theory that GEARSHIFT was a provocation, and he’d accepted it blandly, had even seemed pleased, and then she’d said the secret words and he went, Cynthia, be a team player; it’s all a game; don’t rock the boat.

But he’d forgotten how deep she was into the secrets of NSA. She had Top Secret clearance for all matters relating to nuclear theft, and therefore if SHOWBOAT had to do with nuclear theft (and what else could it be?) she would have known about it because Morgan would have known about it and he told her everything; she was sure of that. And suddenly there came the dawning of a new idea: what if SHOWBOAT was a rogue operation, what if the only people who knew about it were a small cabal at Langley-not the president, not the director of national intelligence, not the directors of NSA and DIA? A secret beyond secrecy! Immediately she felt a thrill race over her skin and sweat popped out on her forehead. That’s what had gotten Harry so uncharacteristically upset; he was in on it too. It was a Pakistan-Afghanistan operation obviously, and nothing whatever went on in that region without Harry Anspach’s thumbprints all over it.

What to do? What to do? Using Harry was now out of the question, and there was no one else she could think of who was both outside her normal chain of command and had the appropriate connections in the intel community-and whom she could trust. That was the problem. This thing had to be so big, that… okay, slow down, she told herself, she didn’t yet have a lock on the scam. She needed one further piece of incontrovertible evidence.

She made herself relax. She switched on the sound and watched the news and then watched a late-night talk show. Gradually an alternative plan formed in her mind. She didn’t have to knock off Morgan, not if she could use him, if her intel was so good, so undeniable, that he could carry it upstairs and save the day; he could be the hero, and he’d owe her big time. He might get a promotion out of it, and she’d make sure she got the credit for the save, and she’d move with him to the higher regions.

Cynthia felt a sense of relief and was in a strange way grateful to Harry for his odd little lecture on loyalty. Yes, a nice finesse. The show ended at midnight and she turned off the set and lit up her computer. She went to her bag and retrieved the small notebook where she’d written down the cell-phone numbers from the Qasir intercepts and also took out two pieces of contraband: the voiceprints of the two parties to the Qasir intercepts. It was a violation of strict NSA policy to remove anything from its premises, but she believed it was justified in exigent circumstances. Besides, no one would ever know.

She rigged the computer to make a digital recording of any conversations it might carry using voice-over-Internet protocol and then placed the first call, to Dr. Qasir’s cell phone, at ten A.M. in Lahore. She got the answering service. In her fine Urdu she identified herself as an officer at his bank with an urgent question regarding his balance and a possible fraud. He called back ten minutes later and she engaged him in conversation for an additional five. Then she called his wife, got her right away, and had another five-minute conversation, posing as a potential source for a story about corruption in the Ministry of Finance.

After running a voice analysis program on both conversations, she made hard copies of the voiceprints and compared them to those from the original intercepts. Her sensitive ears had already told her what the voiceprints now revealed. The man in the original intercepts was not Jafar Baig Qasir; the woman definitely was his wife, Rukhsana.

So no one had stolen any uranium from Dr. Qasir’s facility. That intercept was proved phony, and thus all the intercepts after the original Abu Lais one, all that stuff about moving shipments, had to be phony as well. It was the proverbial smoking gun. But she wasn’t going to show it to Morgan yet, because what she’d now learned was bigger than N Section, maybe bigger than NSA. Nor would she send it to Anspach. Harry’s response to her questions had confirmed that it was a major secret, involving the capture of hostages and the faked theft of uranium. Harry had tried to slam the door of the big boys’ club house in her face, but she was not having any of that, oh, no: she was going to find out what SHOWBOAT was all about and who Ringmaster was, and just at that instant it popped into her mind how she was going to do that as well. It had been triggered by the memory of the odd odor of roses that had come off Anspach. She was tapping away at the computer when it came to her: the unlikely smell and the computer. Borden.