The Good Son

4

S hortly after six in the morning, with the sun just a pink promise overhead, Cynthia Lam left her apartment on California Street in the Adams-Morgan district of Washington, D.C., entered her Taurus, and began her commute. She worked at Fort Meade, Maryland, the headquarters of the National Security Administration, and it would take her a little more than forty minutes to drive there at this hour, instead of the ninety that would be required by a later departure. Cynthia liked living in the city and did not mind rising before dawn. She went to sleep early; like many young people on the make in Washington, D.C., she had no appreciable life outside of her job.

Cynthia Lam was the product of a Vietnamese father and a French-Canadian mother. Her father, Colonel Lam, late of the air force of the late Republic of Vietnam, had emigrated to the United States after a spell in a reeducation camp and an extremely trying voyage on a small boat, and like many boat people he had cast ashore in the capital of his former patrons. Like many of his colleagues he had been corrupt, but not very corrupt, for the money he had managed to sequester was just enough to buy a small dry-cleaning establishment on the wrong end of Massachusetts Avenue, a mile or so southeast of Capitol Hill.

The shop did not flourish but survived anyhow, and toward the end of its first year of operation it received the custom of a pretty young woman named Celeste Moreau, a French-Canadian employed as a nanny in the wealthy zone. Colonel Lam was ordinarily morose behind the counter but he had an eye for beauty and a certain look in women’s eyes, which Celeste had, and one day the woman forgot herself and addressed him in French, at which he lit up and answered her in kind, and the kinship of shared language led to other things, and eventually to the birth of the girl Chau-Thuy, who called herself Cynthia.

The small family lived above the dry-cleaning shop, but their life there was not a happy one. Colonel Lam had never got over not being a colonel anymore, with an orderly and a staff to command, and Celeste bridled under the quasi-military discipline. She thought she might as well have stayed in Montmagny and endured the fists of her dad, so it often happened that she ran from him into the streets of southeast D.C., where crack was as common as dog shit and there were plenty of enterprising fellows to teach her how to smoke it and how to pay for it too. The colonel wasn’t having any of that, and at the age of three little Chau-Thuy found herself motherless.

The next Mrs. Lam was a plump, dull Vietnamese girl obtained through an ad, who knew how to follow orders and press shirts. She raised Cynthia with care but without much love, reserving her affection for her own baby, which unhappily never arrived. Colonel Lam’s contribution to this rearing consisted of ignoring the embarrassing fact that Cynthia was a girl. He applied rigor and discipline and was rewarded with a brilliant and beautiful not-quite-son, who won all the prizes and got a full scholarship to Stanford, the most distant school that made an adequate financial offer. (She did get offers from schools closer to home, but she trashed them before her father learned of these successes; at seventeen she was already an expert in disinformation and the keeping of secrets.)

Now Cynthia worked as a translator for NSA, although she did not translate from the Vietnamese. Her usual joke was that although she was Vietnamese and a translator, she was not a Vietnamese translator. Her languages, besides her native English and Vietnamese, were Modern Standard Arabic, Urdu, Dari, and Pashto, and she could do Persian in a pinch as well. This was an unusually rich and useful suite of tongues for an American citizen to own. Cynthia had planned it this way, starting in her days as an undergraduate at Stanford, for it answered the question of how to distinguish herself from among all her frighteningly bright peers, to make C. Lam into a unique product that someone would want to buy.

She’d been amused and contemptuous when the dorm chatter turned to selling out. No one, it seemed, wanted to sell out-all the computer geniuses, the science geniuses, the artistic geniuses said they had a horror of selling out, or so they claimed-but Cynthia wanted nothing more than to sell out, although at a very high price. And since the only thing she had going for herself, besides her startling Eurasian looks, was a facility with languages, and since in the late nineties it was obvious that the languages that would count in the future were those spoken in the contested areas of the earth-the Middle East and South Asia-she had set herself to master them.

This had worked as planned. NSA snatched her up right out of graduate school. She was now the senior translator in her section, but she did not intend to remain a translator forever. She intended to ascend through the GS ranks to the Senior Executive service and beyond.

Because she understood that if she knew the languages she would know the secrets, the subtle hints, the nuances that could only be communicated in a native tongue, and this would give her an unassailable advantage over her monoglot rivals in the perilous world of national intelligence. Eventually she would be one of the mandarins who actually ran U.S. foreign policy behind the shadow-puppet politicians. She would write the critical memos, she would accompany the figurehead on the secret mission, she would propose the options, trade or boycott, peace or war, carefully crafted to force the choice she desired, she would leak the career-destroying indiscretion to the press, she would exercise the power of the anonymous, from which there is no redress.

She counted rising before dawn and working eighty-hour weeks a trivial price to pay for this future, and such thoughts were frequently in her mind on these mornings when she drove through the half-deserted streets of the capital. She had been with NSA for three years and had made herself indispensable to her section chief. It was time to think about making a move. She’d had several tentative offers but she wanted the move to be a big one, and for that she needed a coup, something that would make her name known to the people who could really advance her career.

She was considering idly what sort of thing that would be, and how she might position herself so as to be more likely to have access to something like that when her cell phone rang, an austere chime.

She groped in her bag and pulled it out, frowning with annoyance. She was not a good driver, she was over the speed limit on the Beltway, and her exit was coming up, but when she looked at the glowing face of the thing and saw who was calling, she pushed the button.

“What is it, Ernie? I’m in traffic.”

“Drive faster,” said the phone. “And could you meet me in my office before you talk to anyone else?”

She agreed, suppressing her curiosity about what had caused Ernie Lotz to call her at that time in the morning, which he’d never done before. But naturally she hadn’t asked him to elaborate. Employees of NSA don’t discuss work on their cell phones. She increased her speed as much as the traffic allowed, perhaps a little more than that, and so arrived quickly at the Fort Meade Military Reservation, or the part of it that its residents call Crypto City, the headquarters of the National Security Agency. She parked her car and entered the security lobby of the enormous black glass Headquarters/Operations building. She put her blue card into the access control terminal, passed under the big NSA shield, and walked through a set of hallways until she came to Building OPS-1, an A-shaped 1950s building where the actual business of the NSA was accomplished, the working quarters of thousands of cryptographers, eavesdroppers, signals analysts, and linguists like her. She reached Lotz’s office, knocked, and Ernie Lotz appeared, with a big smile on his pink face that faded a little when he saw the expression on hers.

“Okay, what’s so important?” she asked.

He ushered her in and relocked the door.

“Abu Lais has surfaced,” he said.

“What! When? Are you positive?”

“I’ll let you decide. Have a seat, I’ll bring the files up.”

They sat next to each other on rolling chairs while he punched his computer keyboard. “This intercept came in last night from Fort Gordon, and NSOC routed it here. Obviously, the filters picked up the name mention, and-”

“Did they get both ends?”

“Yeah, they did, and that makes it more interesting. He’s talking to Khalid al-Zaydun.”

“Holy shit! Are you sure?”

“Wait a second, I’ll let you listen to the sound files.” Cynthia slipped on a set of headphones. He pressed several keys. A conversation entered her headset.

It was the refined product of an immense eavesdropping program, millions of cell-phone conversations a day sucked out of the Asian ether by satellites and beamed down to the antenna array at Fort Gordon, Georgia, inspected at microsecond speeds by the most sophisticated filtering software in the world, reanalyzed by secret machines and programs, and then sent, as an ultimate distillate, to Crypto City’s own ultra-secure intranet. Cynthia and Ernie were both part of NSA’s W Group, the Office of Global Issues and Weapons Systems, one of the big units that had replaced the old geographical-specialty divisions the agency had used during the Cold War. W Group was largely about international terrorism; within W Group was the N Section, a multidisciplinary team devoted to tracking terrorist efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. N Section was rich in comint experts, who were constantly improving the collection and filtering apparatus. At their command, spy satellites shifted orbit and recommendations were generated that might send teams of spies to penetrate fiber-optic cables on the other side of the world. But ultimately, the information thus collected had to pass through the human brain of someone who spoke the languages the terrorists spoke, and this sort of brain was the very rarest commodity at NSA’s disposal. Cynthia was such a commodity, as she had planned, and was much caressed in the agency.

The voices she was now hearing, filtered and cleaned to the technological limit, supposedly belonged to two of N Section’s prime targets. The first was Khalid ibn Hammad al-Zaydun, a longtime associate of Osama bin Laden and the leader of al-Qaeda operations in Pakistan. The second man-who, she noted, spoke Modern Standard Arabic with an accent-was known as Abu Lais. They had no idea what his real name was, but they knew that, three years ago, someone of that name had tried to make off with nuclear material from a former Soviet depot in Tashkent. That plot had been foiled, but there was no reason to believe that Abu Lais had stopped looking. Since that time trickles of information about the man had come in, from informants, from prisoners, from the web chatter that NSA combed assiduously. He was a Pashtun, of Pakistani origin. He had fought against the Russians in the eighties, and so must now be around fifty. He was educated as an engineer, probably somewhere in Europe or America. He had continued the association with al-Qaeda first formed during the Russian war but seemed to have no operational responsibility. It was suspected in the U.S. intelligence community that obtaining a nuclear weapon was his sole task.

It was a short conversation. She listened to it once straight through and then went through it in short segments, seeking nuance.

AL-ZAYDUN: Abu Lais, it’s good to hear your voice, but this is dangerous.

ABU LAIS: I know. I will be brief. Tell them I have achieved the first phase.

AL-ZAYDUN: That’s wonderful. Is it definite, then?

ABU LAIS: Yes. I will have the package in my hands within three days, if God wills.

AL-ZAYDUN: The sheikh will be very pleased. Do you need anything?

ABU LAIS: I will in some small time-money, men, and vehicles at the location we discussed. I will let you know.

AL-ZAYDUN: Courier only.

ABU LAIS: Of course. Good-bye. God is great!

AL-ZAYDUN: God is great! Good-bye, and the blessings of God be on you.

Cynthia slid off the headphones. “This is hot,” she said. “Abu Lais! And the sheikh they mention has to be bin Laden. Does Morgan know yet?”

“He might have transcripts from Speaker ID by now, but you know what they’re like.”

Cynthia did. Speaker ID was NSA’s application of the Berger-Liaw Neural Network Speaker Independent Speech Recognition System developed at the University of Southern California, designed to pluck words or phrases from electronic cacophony and convert them into printed text. But in the nature of things, there were a lot of false positives, innocent conversations, and jokes swept up, and these still had to be perused by humans. It was a work in progress, and NSA’s human linguists thought it would be a while before it replaced them at NSA.

“So this catch wasn’t off Speaker ID?”

“No,” said Lotz, “we got it the old-fashioned way: the bad guys slipped up. They’ve got a million cell phones and they usually use them once and toss them, but we had a watch on the one al-Zaydun used to receive that call. I think it came from a number on a SIM card that got picked up in a raid on a safe house in Kandahar. Maybe they didn’t realize it was compromised. It’s hard for them to keep ahead of that kind of thing. I mean, they’re fairly smart, but they’re a couple of hundred guys and we’re the United States.”

“Don’t let that get out, we’ll lose our jobs.”

“Yeah, but that’s why they call it asymmetric warfare. We can win on every single day but one and then we lose. Meanwhile are you thinking what I’m thinking? The package?”

She nodded. “What’s the point of origin of the cell phones?”

Lotz turned to his computer screen. “It looks like al-Zaydun’s is out of a cell tower in Peshawar. Abu Lais’s call came out of Kahuta.”

“That’s not good,” she said, and they stared at each other. Ernie’s look was bleak, but she felt a growing thrill: shameful, of course, but there it was. Kahuta is the Los Alamos, the Oak Ridge, of Pakistan, where they refine fissionables and manufacture the weapons.

There was something about a secret like this, Cynthia thought, looking into Ernie’s face, that was like nothing else, almost an intimacy: they were probably the only two people in the country right now who knew about this. Ultimately, only a few people would ever know about it, but just now, for these few moments, it was theirs alone-or, rather, they shared it with a few violent men in Pakistan, whose voices she had just heard. Another intimacy, between the hunters and the hunted. And she was the hunter here, the girl with the languages.

The two of them sighed in unison and smiled, like they had just shared a kiss. Lotz said, “I guess it’s time to hit the red button.”

This meant bringing in Lloyd Morgan, the head of N and their boss. He had made his reputation in signals intelligence, tracking Soviet missile launches, although he had seen earlier than most of his peers that NSA had to change: unwrapping Russian ciphers and tracking their missiles was not going to be as important as formerly, there was a future in electronic eavesdropping on terrorist cell phones, and to do that successfully you needed linguists. He had pulled in Cynthia straight out of her initial orientation and brought her into N Section when it was formed.

Cynthia called him, asked for an urgent meeting. The name Abu Lais cleared all previous appointments. They went to Morgan’s office immediately.

Morgan had enough status to rate a TV set in his office, and it played continually. Just now it was running CNN silently, a grim-faced anchor talking to a correspondent on a dusty tan street, the logo on the upper right of the screen showing the subject: the kidnapping of billionaire William Craig and others by Islamic terrorists, now in its second day.

Cynthia launched into her report without polite preliminaries. She described the situation for him, played the message on his computer speakers, translated it line by line as it played.

Morgan listened without comment. He was a good-sized fleshy man, pleasantly ugly, with dark-red straight hair combed back from a large pale freckled face. Colorless eyes. In anger, red bars appeared on his cheeks and the eyes turned to lead slugs, merciless. She liked that about him, in the way that attractive women of a certain stripe like men who are impressed by power rather than beauty. Cynthia had gone through enough of the other kind.

She’d gone through Morgan too. He’d put a heavy make on her from her first day in the office, nothing annoying or actionable, just a slow intense burn. Two months after she started working for him he’d taken her along to San Diego for an academic conference funded by NSA. It was about advances in natural language filtering, and neither of them really needed to be there. And the usual: they drank deeply, they told stories about their lives, and a good-night clinch in the elevator led naturally enough to his bed.

It hadn’t developed into a passionate affair, neither of the parties being that kind of person, but after San Diego she was the one he took along on junkets and to important meetings, so her name would circulate at the higher levels. She had not failed to notice that many men at these high-level conferences had attractive female assistants. Out of town, sex was on the menu, but they never engaged in anything around the office, no assignations at local hotels, all very discreet in the tradition of the inhabitants of the secret world. Cynthia regarded the liaison as a reasonable career move and a useful relief of workplace tension, one of the things a good-looking young woman did to get ahead, like earning a first-class graduate degree. She had no idea how Morgan felt, nor did she particularly care. He was married, with a couple of grown kids, well settled; she thought he rather appreciated her indifference.

After she finished, he thought for a full minute in silence. A deliberate man, Morgan; she’d never quite decided whether it was because he was extremely smart, and was calculating chess moves off into the distant future, or because he was playing outside his league and had to compensate. Morgan was another of the closely guarded secrets of the NSA.

At last he spoke. “What do you make of this, Cynthia? I mean, just from the languages.” He had a deep baritone voice, the kind they use in commercials to convey reliability.

“Well, both of them are speaking Modern Standard Arabic,” she replied, “indicating that they’re not from the same Arabic-language area or they’d be talking in one of the colloquial forms. We know al-Zaydun’s home dialect is Eastern Saudi, and it shows here in the substitution, in a couple of words, of the g sound for the q and a few other details. The other man isn’t a native Arabic speaker at all. He messes up the ’ayn, gayn, and ha’ sounds, like almost all non-native speakers do.”

“But not you.” A smile here.

“No.” No smile.

“What’s his native language, do you think?”

Cynthia had spent thousands of hours listening to recordings of dozens of Arabic dialects, and of native speakers of several score other languages speaking Arabic. “It’s hard to say exactly. I’m inclined to think a South Asian language. Dari or Pashto. Maybe Panjabi. Maybe Farsi. But Abu Lais is supposed to be Pashtun, so that fits. I could tell more with a longer colloquy.”

“Yes, and it would be nice to have their cell-phone bills with the address printed on them.” He turned to Lotz. “What does the voiceprint say about the recipient subject?”

“The voiceprint?”

“Yes. We have a recording of al-Zaydun’s voice. Is it the same?”

“I haven’t… I mean, we thought we should come to you…”

“Go do it.”

“Now?”

“No, next Easter. Go! No, wait! Lotz, this catch stays with us three alone until further notice, understand? I mean no one else.” Lotz said he got that, and Morgan made a shooing motion.

When the door had closed on Lotz, Morgan leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head, and grinned. “Well, finally!”

“You think it’s genuine?”

“Fuck, yes! We have the right guys-I fully expect the voiceprints to check out-and the right place, and what the hell else could it be? They’re not shipping bananas.” He gave her an inquiring look. “Why, don’t you?”

“Not just yet. As a matter of fact, I’ve been waiting for them to try something like this. I mean, don’t you think it’s a little funny that the most elusive al-Q operative on earth, who as far as we know hasn’t used a cell phone in years, should call a senior al-Q leader on a compromised device, which leader immediately identifies him by name?”

“People make mistakes,” he said. “The history of intelligence is full of boners.”

“Yes, Lloyd, we both know the history of intelligence,” she replied. “But I’m more concerned with recent history. This country is involved in two wars right now, and both of them are the result of massive systemic intelligence failures: we missed 9/11, and that’s the war in Afghanistan, and we screwed up on WMD, and that’s Iraq.”

“I’d hardly call Iraq an intelligence failure. There was no evidence of WMD because there weren’t any weapons.”

“No, but our intel on the Iraqis was so piss-poor that any bunch of bozos could make a temporarily plausible case for an invasion. Now we’re making noises at Iran. So I ask you, who would benefit from a stolen-nuclear-weapons scare in Pakistan? Who would love to see us involved in yet another attack on a Muslim country?”

“Iran?”

“For starters. The mullahs would love it. Plus, any hints that the Paks are not reliable custodians of nuclear weapons drives a wedge between us and them. Actually, al-Q would like nothing better than a U.S. involvement in northern Pakistan. The country would come unglued. Half the population would go jihadi. A big chunk of their military and intelligence service are sympathizers already; so we have to make absolutely sure that this is the real thing before we pass it upstairs.”

“There are no absolutely sure things in intel,” he said. “That’s one of the things you learn when you’ve been in the business as long as I have. I got a good feeling about this one, Cyn. And I’d like to win one for a change.”

As he said this Morgan leaned back in his chair, and Cynthia saw his eyes pass across a souvenir of a lost one, a framed North Vietnamese battle flag Morgan had brought back from his tour as a junior army intelligence officer in 1968. That was one of his object lessons: we had tried to fight a war where the enemy knew everything about us and we knew practically nothing about them-or, rather, we had all the information we needed but wouldn’t use it.

After a moment, Morgan continued. “Look, get off anything else you’re doing and tell Ernie to do the same. Focus on the intercepts from Peshawar and the Kahuta area. I’ll make sure all that material is routed to you. If you get any confirmation, anything at all, come direct to me.”

They spoke about details for a while, and Cynthia asked if he wanted to open a permanent file on the intercept. Morgan said he did and, after consulting his computer and a list of available code names, he told her to call the file GEARSHIFT.

As she left she reflected once again on Morgan’s perfect discretion. Within the bounds of the institution, even when they were alone in an office, never did he indicate by a look or an action that they were anything but subordinate and superior. In this too was Morgan a career model.

Cynthia went back to Ernie Lotz’s office and found him hunched over his keyboard.

“Are you recovered?” she asked.

“My shorts are still smoking, but I’m fine. He never yells at you like that.”

She ignored this. Cynthia didn’t really know how widespread was the intel that she was sleeping with Morgan, but gossip usually filled in the blanks

“Actually, I should have thought of checking the alleged al-Zaydun voice against the files. Sorry, my bad. Did you have any luck with it?”

“I did some preliminary checks. The software says it’s the same voice. So it’s the real deal.”

“It could be. Morgan certainly thinks so.”

“And you don’t?”

“I’m reserving judgment.”

Lotz made a face. “Yeah, but if it’s real and we don’t blow the whistle, we’re in deep shit. Why do you think it’s a fake?”

“I didn’t say it was a fake. I’m a little suspicious, is all. And I didn’t like that cat-eating-cream look on Morgan’s face. He’s been waiting for this for years. It justifies his whole existence. So let me play devil’s advocate for a while. Anyway, this intercept is now GEARSHIFT, and just for the three of us until further notice. You didn’t tell anyone else about it, did you?”

“No. I put it up on my Facebook page, but no one ever looks there. I have three friends, and one of them is my mom.”

Cynthia let this go by, and there was the kind of silence that occurs when someone has made an inappropriately facetious remark. Ernie was prone to these little high-school-level comments, excusable as office banter, self-deprecating remarks about his social life, although why he should have trouble in that department was beyond Cynthia’s comprehension. The sad-puppy thing did not suit him, she thought, or maybe it really did and it didn’t suit her. Irritating, at any rate.

After a moment, she said, “We need some way to refocus the comint screens around voiceprint catches off these two subjects,” and they began to work in their usual easy professional way, planning how to lay off their current duties on others and roughing out communication intelligence protocols.

Afterward, Cynthia went back to her own office and started to read through recent transcripts from relevant areas. Now that they had this lead, she thought, maybe other conversations that seemed innocent at the time might appear in a different and more interesting light. She searched for package, first phase, sheikh, occurring in the same intercept and also for that odd locution, some small time. Not an idiom, the phrase was more likely to be used by someone not at home in Modern Standard Arabic.

As she worked, she thought about her paranoia, if that was the word. She knew Morgan didn’t think that their enemy’s psychology ran to this kind of deception. They were true believers, not at all like the cynical gamesmen of the late Soviet regime. These people were perfectly frank about their aims. They felt that God was on their side and, while they were crafty enough, they were not crafty in that way. On the other hand, there was always a first time. The events of 9/11 had drilled that lesson deep into the minds of the entire U.S. intelligence community.

So she would try to keep a lid on Morgan’s enthusiasm. And as she thought about this she considered the possibility that his enthusiasm, his desire to be at the center of the largest conceivable kind of national security crisis, would lead him to overstep, to push the evidence further than it warranted. And if he did that, and if she was the one who reined the whole thing in, who prevented America from falling into yet another blunder fueled by faulty intel-well, that would be it, the much-desired coup. She would be made. Morgan would be destroyed, of course, at the same time, and as she reflected on this she found, a little to her surprise, that she didn’t mind at all.