The Good Son

17

W hen Cynthia went to visit Borden she almost went right past his door. It was clean. All the nerd spoor had been removed, exposing an ordinary NSA slab. She paused outside with her hand on the knob and sniffed. No smell. A knock and Borden’s voice answered; that hadn’t changed. Borden was in.

Inside, she paused and let out a whistle. “What happened, Borden? Have you been born again?”

The tiny office had been stripped like the door-no junk, no decorations, no trash. Borden himself had obtained what appeared to be an expensive haircut, and he was wearing a cotton sports jacket over a striped button-down shirt and flannel trousers.

“No,” he said, “the new me is nondenominational. I assume you approve, being fairly tight-assed yourself. So to speak.”

“I’m amazed,” she said. “You realize that you’ll be barred for life from Star Trek conventions if this gets out. What happened?”

He looked at her, and she noticed that he had traded his greasy horn-rims for stylish aviators. He said, “Oh, you know, it was time. I turned thirty-five last week.”

“I didn’t know. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you. No one knew. I say I have no life, but it’s not just a throw-away line or a disguised boast, like I’m so busy and important that I have no time for trivia like relationships. It’s simply the case. So it’s my birthday and I go to Chicago Pizza and, like I always do to celebrate, I order a giant deep-dish pepperoni-mushroom, anchovy, and olive-and I’m scarfing it down when I see two girls at a table nearby sort of watching me, and I can tell they’re grossed out; it’s a classic, a fat, stringy-haired nerd pigging on pizza, nothing new about that; but just then I happen to notice that I’m sitting just where I can see my reflection in one of those mirrors they have on the columns and all of a sudden I’m grossed out too. It was like a revelation. Half my life is over and I’m alone on my birthday grossing out a couple of girls, and I realized that this was going to be it into the indefinite future: no life, no girls, nothing but video games and porn. No child porn, not yet, but I could see it was only a matter of time. It was like I’d been hit on the head and woke up a different person. And strangely enough I thought about you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. The way you come down here and get me to do you favors, and I pretend to sexually harass you and you flirt in a nonserious way, like an instinct, like one of the lower animals, and you let me look down your dress and get close enough for me to smell your perfume, and suddenly I could see myself from outside myself, like you probably see me, and it was, like, appalling. I stopped eating and practically ran out of there and I was thinking, What crime did I commit to be sentenced to this life? Was it just a matter of being overweight and interested in computers? Was it Asperger’s? It’s like in middle school we all lined up in the hallway and got issued a life: you got exotic beauty destined for world domination and I got pathetic fat nerd; it was like Brave New World, where all the Deltas are programmed to love their menial existence. I’m glad I’m a Delta, Deltas wear lovely brown uniforms, or whatever.

“I got into my car to drive home and the car was filthy, sticky from spilled drinks and full of wrappers, the foot well on the passenger side up to the seat rim in trash, because, what the hell, I never have a passenger, so why clean it? My skin was crawling, you know? And the same in my apartment: the junk, the filth, the spilled food, pizza boxes with roaches, no light or anything alive, except my tarantula. The banality of it! Ha ha, he’s a nerd so of course he has a tarantula. Why the fuck do I have a tarantula in my home?

“There was this smell too, and I was, like, how can I have lived all my life with this smell? So I got a roll of thirty-gallon plastic bags and started to clean up, and once I started I couldn’t stop. I took a couple of Adderall and worked all night. Not only did I clean out the junk, I threw everything away; clothes, towels, posters, everything but my comic book collection, and I put that in cartons and ran an ad on Craigslist to sell the whole thing. I’m fucking thirty-five and I’m still reading comic books?”

“The tarantula went too?”

“George? Get rid of George? I couldn’t do that. If I got rid of George, I’d be alone. The next day I called in sick and took all the shit down to the Dumpster and went to Tyson’s and got a haircut and shopped for regular grown-up-type clothes-not too many because I don’t plan to be this shape forever-and then I went to Rock Creek Park and walked for hours, until my feet hurt, and looked at, you know, normal people, until it got dark and then I went and joined a gym near my house and went to an exercise class, twenty fat women and me, and bought a lot of fruit and salad stuff at the organic market and went to sleep early, and today I came in and cleaned this place up. And here you are but still the same.”

“Not really. I’m scheduled for astronaut training right after I have the sex change operation.”

Borden flashed an impatient smile, so unlike his usual ironic grin it startled her. “Still the same. I relate the most remarkable experience of my life, and you crack a joke. So, on to business: what’s the favor?”

Cynthia felt her cheeks warm. “I’m sorry, Borden. I didn’t mean to be flippant. It’s just a little strange. The new you and all.”

“It’s strange for you, you can imagine how I feel. Have a seat. I cleaned it with a janitorial substance.” She sat. The chair exuded a sharp astringent smell.

He said, “But really-what’s on your mind?”

Cynthia had prepared an anodyne and amusing story about what she wanted done but on the instant decided, against her usual instincts, to tell Borden the plain truth.

“Okay, this is some serious shit, and I’m in trouble right now for telling you. You can’t know this, and you’re putting your career in jeopardy if you hear me out, and so am I, but more so. Are you up for that?”

Borden thought for a moment, then shrugged. “My career here is not as interesting to me as it was a couple of days ago. I think my era of staring at a screen in a tiny office, for however noble a purpose, may be coming to a close. What’s the serious shit?”

So she told him about the provocation, and how everyone was being taken in by it except her, and about what she had overheard at the meeting, Ringmaster and SHOWBOAT, and how Anspach had stonewalled on that, and how there was no one else she could tell about it but him.

When she’d finished, he said, “That’s an interesting story. You think there’s some kind of rogue operation going on at Langley? That for some reason this operation wants us to get fooled into… what, invading Pakistan? Why would anyone want that?”

She said, “I don’t care. Our only job is to find out what the truth is and send it up the line. This nuclear theft scam is not the truth. End of story.”

“That’s a fairly naïve expression of what we do. It’d be more accurate to say that we give our masters such information as they’re willing to receive.”

“Granted, and we can’t do anything about a fraud concocted above us-WMD in Iraq and so on. But it’s different when the fraud is concocted from below. It’s a deeper violation. No one elected those guys. No one authorized them to drag us into another war.”

“Why are you so sure these guys don’t have authorization? Maybe it’s another Iran-Contra. Someone way up high looks at Pakistan and thinks, This is a failed or failing state. It’s got deliverable nuclear weapons. The Taliban have complete control of an area within a day’s drive of the capital and the nuclear facilities, plus a good chunk of their army and intel apparatus seems to be in bed with the insurgents. So this someone thinks, let’s prep the world for the idea that we better move in there and secure the nukes before the crazies do, and what better way to make that happen than by a big nuclear theft scandal?”

Cynthia was shaking her head during the last of this. “No. I was at the meeting. I know Morgan and I know Anspach. Morgan absolutely thinks it’s genuine and so did everyone at that meeting, with the possible exception of the DDO of the CIA. That bunch of people are as secret as it gets in this country, so if a scam is in progress it has to be a small cabal. In fact, I would’ve thought it was nothing but an al-Q provocation if I hadn’t overheard that business about Ringmaster.”

“So what’s your theory of the plot? Say there’s no real theft. So our guys go in there, shoot up the place, and draw a blank. It’s another Iraq, and no one is going to fall for that again. I mean, we’re stupid, but not that stupid.”

“But that’s just the point, Borden! They can’t have a fiasco. They have to find something, and that has to be what Ringmaster is about. Look, I’ll tell you how I’d do it. First, you set up an agent, someone with the skills to infiltrate a mujahideen group. The conventional wisdom is that it can’t be done, but that can’t be right or else Muslim drifters from all over the world wouldn’t be fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Christ, that gormless kid John Walker Lindh walked right into al-Qaeda a few weeks after 9/11 and no one said boo! So they set up a organization around this agent, who has all kinds of credentials that he can get hold of nuclear material. That shouldn’t be hard to fake. And these guys are waiting in some village for the delivery; they’re going to make a nuke or at minimum a dirty bomb. The inside agent leaks the location. Meanwhile, our cabal produces this scam, phony phone calls and so on, and the government panics and sends in a strike team, and of course they have to have a special unit to handle the nuclear material, and these are guys that none of the Deltas or whoever have ever seen before and they’re carrying ‘special equipment’ in sealed crates.”

She made quotation marks with her fingers as she said special equipment.

“They go to this village and blow up everyone, and lo and behold the special team finds nuclear material, which of course they’ve brought along with them in the sealed crates. Another triumph for the free world.”

“But the Pakistanis will say they haven’t lost any nuclear material.”

“Oh, please! What would anyone expect them to say? Who on earth would believe the Pakistanis when we’re showing off containers full of plutonium? And the beauty part is how covert the whole thing is. DOD, NSA, and the White House have full deniability. The president can get up there and announce with a straight face that we’ve averted a nuclear catastrophe and, by the way, the world has got to do something about Pakistan. Two days later the Indian army mobilizes on the border and U.S. missiles are retargeted.”

Now Borden was shaking his head. “That’s pretty rich, Lam. I mean, it’s one thing to speculate outside, in the lefty press, about evil cabals, but we’re in the belly of the beast. Did anyone ever ask you to join an evil cabal? Me neither. Something like this would leak like crazy; there’d be water on the floor.”

“Then how do you explain what I’ve learned?”

He thought about that for a long minute. She studied his face, willing him to roll, willing him to see what she saw so clearly. At last he sighed and said, “Let’s say I go with it. What specifically did you want me to do?”

“Use your AMICUS connections to trace any references to Ringmaster or SHOWBOAT in the CIA databases.”

“What? That’s… for God’s sake, Lam, that’s completely out of the question. I told you before, there is no AMICUS. It’s a fucking committee! It’s all bullshit coordination to make sure the different intel agencies aren’t duplicating or stepping on one another’s jockstraps. No one is going to let me wander through the CIA database, and even if they did, what should I look for? Do you think a search for rogue operations is going to yield many hits?”

“I didn’t mean asking for permission. You’ve been telling me for a long time that a smart-enough computer guy on the inside could find out anything that anyone in the government ever put on a computer.”

“You want me to hack the CIA?”

“Yes.”

“Get out of here.”

“You’re saying it can’t be done?”

“Of course it can be done, in principle. I’m over there for AMICUS meetings all the time, and they write their passwords on Post-its and stick them on their desks just like we do. I know the data architecture. And it’s the government. Any operation spends money, and even a black budget has bud get codes for different operations. But, frankly, I don’t see any upside for me in this.”

She stared at him until he dropped his eyes. He said, “What?”

“What? You know, I always thought you had your problems, but I also thought you were a real person, not the night troll everyone else thought you were. So you cleaned up your act and got a haircut? Terrific. But when I ask you to do something that might prevent the deaths of thousands of people, including your own people, you ask me if there’s some personal advantage? I’m putting my whole life on the line here, and you want to know what’s in it for you? Well, fuck your upside and fuck you, troll!”

She turned and headed out of his office, quickly, but not so quickly that she missed the response she expected.

“No, wait!”

She faced him. “What?”

“I’ll look into it. I’m over at the Agency for a meeting early tomorrow. I’ll see if I can get a line into their budget system.”

She waited a few beats and then strode over, slid easily onto his broad lap, and kissed him firmly on the mouth, a kiss just the tiniest bit south of platonic.

“Thank you, Borden. That was a very un-troll-like decision.” She could see the sweat bubble up on his forehead.

“My pleasure, so to speak. I hope they give us adjoining cells in Guantánamo.”

“It won’t come to that,” she said lightly, “you’re smarter than all of them. I just want to find out what SHOWBOAT is, so I can make the case with Morgan. We’re not selling secrets to the bad guys. Besides, the whole point is to share intel across the government. We’ll be heroes if we stop this and no one will bother about the details of access protocol.”

Borden did not respond to this; he just stared at her with the same concentration he paid to lines of code on his screen.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Tell me, Lam, do you ever have any fun?”

“What do you mean, fun?”

“Oh, you know, like people do in movies or TV commercials. Happy family parties made better with adult diapers, and couples running through fields of flowers in slo-mo. Or clubbing. You know, sweaty dancing with colored lights. Do you ever do any of that?”

“I’m a grown-up, Borden. I don’t go clubbing and my happy family consists of one unhappy person. But I’ll tell you what: if this thing comes off, I will personally find a field of flowers and run through it with you, in slo-mo.”

“I’d like that,” he said, and turned to his screens as she left.

Cynthia walked back to her office thinking that it had gone rather well. She had been manipulating men with an adroit combination of sexuality and anger for many years; she knew she was good at it, and in this instance she hardly considered it manipulation. It was as natural as breathing. She had great hopes for Borden and his skills.

Some time with the headphones, then, where she found some interesting leads unrelated to the present scam, after which she composed the necessary reports and shipped them out via NSA’s secure intranet. She checked her e-mail. That was odd: not a single message today from anyone in NSA. A slow day? It happened from time to time.

Feeling pretty pleased with herself after rolling Borden, she decided to go out for lunch. Cynthia did this several times a week and almost always at the same place, a Vietnamese restaurant located in a strip mall in Laurel, Mary land, a six-minute hop from the NSA parking lot. She took Fort Meade Road to Mary land 198, once a major north-south route along the eastern seaboard but now a continuous strip development of cheap restaurants, hot-sheet motels, used car lots, and marginal businesses selling things like secondhand batteries, videotapes, and truck parts. There was one point of historical interest on the way, however, an ugly tan eighty-unit lodging house with a mustard-colored sign out front, announcing it as the Valencia Motel. Here, during the summer of 2001, five men had stayed in room 343 and planned how to fly four passenger jet planes into American buildings. The events of 9/11, the single most devastating breach of America’s national security, had been or ga nized virtually in the shadow of the agency called National Security, and all its exquisitely sensitive instruments and magnificent computers had been powerless to stop it.

She passed that dismal monument and pulled into a undistinguished strip that contained an Arby’s, a Firestone Tire store, a pet groomer, a mailing facility, a computer repair shop, and a restaurant called Pho Bac, which Cynthia considered one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in the Washington region, unlikely though it seemed. The patron and the waitresses all knew her; she got to keep up her Viet nam ese; she was one of the family, without having to be one of the family. The spring rolls and the pho were wonderful, and she was able to comfort herself with these simple foods, so reminiscent of a warm and happy childhood that it almost didn’t matter that she had never actually had one. It was an indulgence, one of the few she allowed herself, quite secret from anyone at work, and she had invented for the benefit of the staff at Pho Bac a wonderful Vietnamese-American family, about which she gaily chatted as she ate. The place, oddly enough, had a full bar and she occasionally treated herself to a drink, always a vodka martini, and she ordered one now.

After the spring rolls, she pulled her laptop out of her briefcase, which was the signal for the staff to leave her alone. No private device that can record or send electronic data is allowed within the buildings of NSA, so in order to check her personal e-mail during the day Cynthia had to leave Fort Meade for a place like this or one like it. The computer store had a powerful Wi-Fi signal and she had arranged with them, for a small fee, to use it whenever she was in the area. She logged on, found a note from someone she knew in school, answered it briefly, and deleted another message from a head-hunting firm looking for translators. She got a few of these every week. The rest of the inbox was junk mail-drugstores, sexual aids, a scam that asked her to contact a Swiss bank about her account-and two more of those peculiar encrypted messages. She’d received half a dozen of these in the past week, clearly from someone who had mistaken her for another person, or was it the back-wash of another more obscure computer scam? She deleted all of it.

After lunch she went to the mail center and used her key to open the mailbox she kept there. It was usually stuffed with catalogs and magazines and mail-order merchandise. Cynthia was a big Internet shopper, and she lived in an apartment building where the postman or UPS guy had to leave packages on the lobby floor, from which they would occasionally disappear. Adams-Morgan was a neighborhood where such things still occasionally happened, hence this mailbox convenient to work.

She opened the box and was astonished to find it empty. It was never empty. She went to the clerk at the desk, a large tan woman with beads in her hair, and asked her if there had perhaps been some mistake. Perhaps the label with her name on it on the inside of the mailbox had come loose? The clerk checked and said it was right where it should be. But there was something wrong. The woman, usually cheerful and willing, often too willing, to chat and pass the time of day, was reserved, close-faced, avoiding Cynthia’s eye. Had the woman stolen something? Cynthia dismissed this thought as unworthy, unlikely. She’d used the place for years without a problem.

Back at NSA, as she left her car, another car pulled into a nearby slot. Two men in suits got out, and as Cynthia walked by them she smiled and nodded in a friendly way. There was no response from the men; their faces stayed blank, as if they were looking at a telephone pole or a dog. Since passing through puberty Cynthia had seldom experienced this response to a social smile directed at a man, and it disturbed her. Was there something wrong with her face, cilantro on the teeth? When she returned to her office she checked herself out in a hand mirror. No, the same attractive face stared out at her but with worried eyes.

No, this was stupid; it was stupid to attribute meaning to a set of coincidences. She checked her office e-mail again and found a couple of routine circulars from administration, one about the schedule for annual evaluations and the other relating to changes in reimbursement for mileage in private vehicles. Ah, she still existed! She put the day’s slight oddities out of mind and returned to her headphones and the dull conversations that might or might not be terror talk. Some were simple duds, people mouthing off about America or the Jews. These she erased with a few keystrokes. Even the vast storage facilities of NSA could not contain the far vaster flux of the intake. A few that seemed to fit certain predesignated patterns she saved in various files. Across the breadth of the great ear of the agency, scores of others were doing the same task, searching for patterns, specific words, the output of certain SIM cards, in hopes that significance might emerge from the buzz. Tedious work: she understood that it was necessary, but she hoped she would not, personally, be doing it much longer.

It was just after three when, with an almost physical shock, she heard it, a familiar voice, one she’d listened to dozens of times, the anonymous man who was pretending to be the nuclear engineer, Jafar Baig Qasir. Quickly she checked the log file. The call had been placed from Kahuta at 10:46 A.M the previous morning, near midnight on the East Coast of the United States. Both parties were speaking Urdu, and she did not recognize the other one, who was in Lahore. She listened to it again:

KAHUTA: Peace, brother. Any news?

LAHORE: Peace to you, brother. Yes, the best. The products are completed and ready to ship. The courier just arrived from Paidara.

KAHUTA: When will they leave Paidara?

LAHORE: Very soon, not more than a day or two, God willing. The trucks are moving as we speak.

KAHUTA: Wonderful! I would not like to be in Tel Aviv or New York next month. I assume the money has been distributed.

LAHORE: Yes, I made the wire transfers myself. It is all done, and soon the whole world will know it. Death to America!

KAHUTA: And to Israel! God is great!

LAHORE: God is great! God be with you, brother.

KAHUTA: And with you.

Cynthia felt her belly roll and had to take several deep breaths. This was insane, patently false, but the GEARSHIFT people would never stop to ask why men who had stolen weapons-grade nuclear material would reveal the location of their bomb factory over a cell phone. They’d bite so hard the hook would never work loose, the elite troops would go on full alert, the planes would spin up their engines on some midnight runway, and the invasion of Pakistan would be under way. Almost without volition her fingers flew to certain keys and the message disappeared. She knew it would reside in backup for thirty days and then be purged, but she didn’t care. This whole thing would be over far sooner than that.

Could anyone else have seen or heard it? She checked the machine translation files. There it was, a little crude, as ever, but the gist was clear and the place-name Paidara hung there on the screen, the hook’s juicy worm. But she was the chief translator and had certain privileges on the system. She had the authority to correct certain critical translations before they were distributed. It was necessary to log in to the system and leave her fingerprints on the changes she now made, but no one would notice that. She did it all the time. When she was done, the place-name was gone and the conversation made as anodyne as possible. Maybe bad guys were shifting money around, so what?

But maybe someone had seen it and recognized its supposed importance. She got up and found that her legs would hardly support her weight. Her face felt odd, and when she touched it her fingers came away wet. Sweat was running in streams from her hairline down to her neck, as if she had just completed a heavy workout. That was ridiculous. She hardly sweated even when she actually worked out. She ran from her office to the bathroom.

Who was this person in the mirror? What had happened to the famously cool Cynthia Lam? A wave of nausea griped her, and she fled to a stall and heaved futilely over the bowl, willing the attack to pass. After a quarter of an hour she felt calm enough to approach the mirror again, where she dried herself with paper towels, adjusted her hair and makeup, and realized that she was feeling this way because she had crossed a line for the first time in her life. Although she had no problem with dissimulation and the subtle lie, never before had she done anything frankly illegal. She had never shoplifted, cheated on exams, or inflated her résumé, nor had she ever even had a traffic ticket. She had been a good girl and had reserved a silent contempt for those who weren’t, who committed impulsive and stupid acts.

She practiced a disarming smile. She thought it looked ghastly but it might do for Ernie Lotz. He answered her knock, she applied the smile, and asked him if he’d found anything hot in the recent traffic.

“Funny you should ask, I’m just about to go through the translations. I’ve been in Satcom meetings all afternoon about moving another bird to cover South Asia. Now if al-Q starts a branch in Tegucigalpa we’ll never know. Hey, is something wrong? You look terrible.”

“I think I ate something salmonella-ish at lunch. I’m going home,” she said, and escaped.

Cynthia had a lively interior-dialogue generator, by means of which she could usually convince herself that some course of action beneficial to her was the right thing to do, and she exercised this in turbo mode on the drive home. She played that last intercept over and over again through the headset of her memory and found she had not been mistaken in her initial judgment. The thing was so obviously a fraud, and using the same guy they’d used to fake Jafar Qasir was the capper, an easy proof of fraudulence. So why hadn’t she immediately gone to Morgan with it? Because they wouldn’t see it, they’d explain away the voiceprint comparisons. Morgan was maddened, they all were maddened by their own swelling importance, because at last, after the fiasco of Iraq, the intelligence community was actually going to find weapons of mass destruction in the hot hairy hands of terrorists. It justified their whole existence-unless it was a scam devised by a rogue element.

Which it was, which it had to be. And so she was justified in opposing it, heroic in opposing it, the little Dutch girl with her finger in the dike, preventing another stupid war, another catastrophe for the United States, better than the FBI woman who had almost caught the 9/11 conspirators, because there would be no almost about it. Borden would find the SHOWBOAT files, and she’d put the whole thing together in a neat package, the voiceprint comparisons, the CIA plotters, everything, and take it triumphantly to Morgan; and if he didn’t buy it, she’d take it up the line, to the top of the agency. And the whole thing would wind down, the culprits would be exposed and canned, the intel world would breathe a great sigh, and everyone, right up to the director of national intelligence, would know that little Cynthia Lam had done it all by herself.

These thoughts relaxed her, and by the time she entered her apartment she was feeling as she normally did, which was a kind of irritable discontent. She changed into jeans and a T-shirt, made a salad of field greens with a squat cylinder of tuna from the can plopped in its center, drank a glass of white wine to wash this down, and watched cable news while she did so. Then some minutes at her computer, writing to distant strangers, checking e-mail, disposing of yet another request from a Swiss banker and yet another encrypted e-mail.

Her father called. She put his voice on the speaker while she cleaned her already clean apartment. He complained about his clients in terms that reflected the racism of a generation ago, complained about his health, asked when she was coming home, and asked for money. She listened and responded with meaningless sounds at appropriate intervals, promised a check, and got off as soon as she reasonably could. After that she watched two DVDs, one a steamy French one in which the couple rarely stopped having sexual intercourse and the other a frothy romantic comedy. She switched it off before the boy got the girl again, took a Xanax, and went to bed.

Before she fell asleep she thought about what Borden had said, about having fun. She thought he was right, in a way. After this was resolved she would ditch Morgan and find a suitable boyfriend. She would take some of the huge amount of leave she’d accumulated and go to the islands, a warm beach with palms, and have some.

As was her occasional practice when arriving at work, Cynthia bought a couple of coffees and sticky treats at the canteen and knocked on Ernie Lotz’s door. Ordinarily, she would hear a cheerful greeting, she’d enter, and the two of them would sit and have coffee and discuss the day’s upcoming problems, or Ernie’s personal problems if he had any that morning, and then she’d go back to her own office with a sugar-caffeine high adequate for the morning’s labor. This morning, however, there was silence behind the door.

Could he be out sick? No, he would have called in and the group secretary would have put a Post-it on his door to that effect. She knocked again and tried the doorknob. The door was locked; then came Ernie’s voice.

“I’m busy.”

“I have cinnamon buns.”

She heard movement within and the door opened just enough for Ernie’s face to appear. It was not his usual morning face. It looked like he’d recently been gut-punched.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing. I’m working on a rush thing for Morgan.”

“Can I help?”

“No.” He started to close the door and she said, “At least take your stuff!”

He hesitated for a second, then took the profferred breakfast and kicked the door shut. She heard the lock turning.

Very strange, she thought, Ernie was never like that in the morning. She was the grumpy one and he the ray of sunshine; it was a standing joke between them.

She shook off the feeling and turned to her work. People were still talking about wicked deeds in Urdu and Arabic and the great antennae were still sucking it in. She adjusted her headset and brought up the evening’s catch of sound files.

As usual, there was nothing of vital interest. More significant was what was missing. She did not get a single call all morning, or any e-mails, and no one came to her door. It was as if she were working at a neutron bomb site. At noon, she knocked again on Lotz’s door and asked him if he wanted to go for lunch in Laurel.

A muffled curt refusal through the door.

Something unpleasant was happening here and she felt the anxiety of the previous day return, stronger than before. She called Borden. He must be back from Langley by now and she was dying to learn what he’d found.

The phone rang twice and then she heard a strange voice say, “Dan Wilson.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I must have the wrong number.”

“What number were you calling?”

“Extension 3988.”

“This is 3988.”

“It is? Look, I’m trying to reach Walter Borden. This is his number.”

“Sorry, it’s my number.”

“Then what’s his new number?”

“I have no idea. Have you tried the directory?”

“Wait a minute. Are you in Internet surveillance?”

“That’s right. But there’s no Walter Borden here.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t help you,” said the voice, and broke the connection.

Cynthia dashed out of her office, down the corridors, choosing the stairs over the elevators, and arrived panting at the door of Borden’s office. It was covered with Dilbert cartoons and the name Daniel G. Wilson was in the slot next to it. She threw the door open. A young man with thinning sandy hair and wire-rimmed glasses turned in his chair and looked at her. She stared at him and his office, which was filled with books and manuals and personal memorabilia, as if this Wilson had been occupying it for years.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

She shut the door, turned, and ran. She ran out of the building and got into her car. She drove to Laurel, to the strip mall, and went into Pho Bac. The waitress gave her a peculiar look and asked her if there was anything wrong. Cynthia forced a smile. There was nothing wrong. But she needed a drink and she ordered a vodka martini. And comfort food, hot and spicy: banh bop dumplings, and a bo kho with lots of chili sauce. And another martini to help her think.

She stayed there for over an hour, going through her options. The main thing in her favor was that she was right. Yes, she had cut corners, and the business about roping Borden into looking for SHOWBOAT and Ringmaster was highly irregular, but agencies spied on one another in various ways all the time, and okay, she had violated security clearance protocol, but wasn’t this a special case? She just might be able to make the argument. Suppressing the Paidara intercept was perhaps an actual misdemeanor, but she could not imagine that anyone would come down hard on her for that, if they even knew about it. And, most significantly, she was right; there was no bomb plot, and therefore the location of the fictitious bombs was a nullity, disinformation rather than intelligence. It wasn’t as if she had compromised national security in any way. Perhaps a bit of a cowgirl, was Ms. Lam, inclined to go off on her own, but that was not entirely a bad thing in the intel game. Looked at positively, it might even be described as flair. After all, there was Harry Anspach. In any case, Anspach would understand, yes, and Morgan wouldn’t dare come down too hard on her, having himself taken sexual advantage of a female subordinate and so forth, not a scandal NSA wanted to get into.

She drove back to NSA, angry with herself for the momentary panic but feeling confident that she would be able to brazen it out. She wondered briefly what had happened to Borden and then dismissed the thought. Borden was an adult with a million-dollar skill set. He would be fine, whatever the government chose to do. Again, it wasn’t as if they had compromised national security.

She parked and walked through the lot to her building. There was a black car parked at the entrance. It had its rear door open and a couple of men in suits were standing in the road, watching her approach. She was composing a smile on her face when she recognized that they were the same two men who had been studying her in the parking lot yesterday, the ones who hadn’t smiled back. They didn’t smile back this time either. Instead, they flashed their ID: NSA Office of Security. Then they ushered her into the black car and out of her life.