It was pretty interesting in a not very real way, and the impression I got was that a terrorist nuke was not all that likely, but if it happened then all bets were off; it would immediately become the only thing on the agenda of the U.S. government, balls to the wall, and so on. On the trip home me and Stoltz were in the back of a van with some SEALs and other guys we didn’t know and they were all sacked out and he turned to me and said, “What was the NCO course like?”
And I told him, and he said the officers’ course was like that but also they talked about the tactical aspects; if you knew some terrorists had a bomb, how would you go in there and get it out? It was an impossible problem, really, and they were still working on the doctrine.
“You see why,” he said.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “If the bad guys hear you coming they’ll flip a switch and take out everything within a couple of miles, including all your guys and the whole civilian population.”
“Right. So you’d have to have totally accurate pinpoint intel about where the bomb was, and you’d have to get a team on that spot without anyone raising an alarm. It would have to be perfect, no do-overs, first time right. I mean, you’ve been on enough missions-when did anything ever go perfect? I mean, we can do tactical surprise, fire superiority, sure, but that wouldn’t be enough. We would have to be on the bomb before they knew we were there. I don’t think it can be done.”
“It can be done,” I said.
“How?”
“You’d need a guy on the inside, to pinpoint the device and keep the bad guys away until the good guys got there.”
“Right. And how are you going to infiltrate a nuclear terror cell?”
“I don’t know, sir,” I said, “but at least it’s doable in theory. For that matter, we pass as bad guys all the time. But any other way is instant mushroom cloud, game over.”
He thought about that for a while and then he said it was above his pay grade, and we starting talking about sports and shit.
Now, checking through the little boxes that rated how valuable you thought the course had been, I recalled it pretty well, and especially that conversation with Captain Stolz. By the time I got back to my folks’ place I had the sketch of a plan that might get my mother out of where she was with her head still on her neck.
I was anxious to talk to my father about it, not so much because I wanted his advice or because I thought he’d encourage me, but because it was the kind of thing I couldn’t pull off alone. Or maybe I wanted him to talk me out of it. I’m not much of a planner.
When I walked in he was sitting in the living room with Mohammed Afridi. My father said, “Oh, good, Theo, you’re back. Come sit down and listen to what Mo has to say.”
Afridi is about the same age as my father, wears his hair long, and has a short graying beard. He’s a Pashtun of the intellectual class, a fairly rare bird in America, and he teaches at Georgetown. He’s supposed to be one of the big academic experts on Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier Province. My father thinks he worked for the CIA during the Russian jihad, but he doesn’t talk about it to us. Which is fair because we don’t talk about my own involvement in that war either.
Afridi was talking about the situation around where my mother had been taken, and he rolled back a little to bring me up to speed. He confirmed what we already suspected, which was that the group involved, al-Faran, was pretty much a creation of the Pakistani ISI, and that up until now they had been operating in Indian-occupied Kashmir. Why they had suddenly decided to kidnap a group of foreigners was something of a mystery, but Mo thought that they never would have done it without a wink from the ISI.
“So why did ISI wink?” I asked.
He shrugged and spread his hands. “Well, that would depend on who in ISI you mean. Like all of Pakistani society it’s riven by factions, some more aggressive than others, some religious, some out for the main chance. That they have kidnapped a billionaire suggests a ransom is in the offing, although, as you know, kidnap for ransom has never been a Pashtun specialty. Hostages, yes, but taking people and exchanging them for money is a little…” He sniffed and touched his nose.
“Punjabi?” my father said, and the two of them laughed.
“You have said it, my friend, not me. No, ransom is not a Pashtun thing; it goes against the idea of hospitality. It is hard for a Pashtun to give someone food and shelter and then sell him. There is a price of twenty-five million dollars on bin Laden’s head but no one has collected it, and the same rule applies, in general, to this kind of kidnapping. It is different from stealing women for wives, which was practically the Pashtun national sport in the old days. On the other hand, Alakazai is a peculiar man.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Bahram Alakazai, the leader of al-Faran. I knew him during the war. His mother was Punjabi, so perhaps that explains it.”
My father said, “Explains what?”
Afridi was silent for a moment, stroking his beard. “He was not a man at peace with himself. You know, the Pashtuns have many vices but one vice they have avoided, and that is the divided heart. You cannot, of course, trust a Pashtun, but you can trust a Pashtun to be himself, to do the things demanded by the Pashtun code, to seek revenge, to offer hospitality, and so on. Alakazai was not like that. We could never quite understand his goals. He seemed to enjoy playing with people just for the sake of the game. And he was good at it, a master manipulator, far more subtle than the Pashtuns, Pakistanis, and Americans with whom he typically dealt. An educated man, naturally, he studied in both Pakistan and the U.K., and I believe he was in America for a time, in the eighties.”
My father said, “He seems an unlikely fellow to lead a mujahideen band.”
“Oh, for that he has Idris Ghulam Khan, his field commander, an entirely different sort, the usual fanatic. Bahram negotiates with the Pakistanis and plans grand strategy and Idris does the shooting. It seems to work, and now they have pulled off this coup. It is just the sort of affair that Bahram is good at. He likes to keep the world guessing.”
“Can you get to them?” I asked. “Find out what they intend to do with the hostages?”
He frowned and shook his head. “I can leave messages with people who might be in contact with them, but I could not guarantee that al-Faran would receive them. I feel so helpless in this matter.”
“You could do something,” I said, and my father looked at me with interest.
“Anything in my power.”
“You consult with the U.S. government, don’t you? On politics among the mujahideen?”
He smiled faintly and replied, “Officially, no, I’m afraid. But should I be asked to consult, what would you like me to do?”
“Someone must be following the terrorist chatter about this kidnap, in the CIA and the NSA. There can’t be that many people fluent in Urdu or Pashto or Dari working on this end. If you could find out who they are and what they’re talking about over there, it could give us a better idea about what’s going on.”
After that there was some polite protest from Afridi that he was a very small fish and could not pretend to penetrate very far into the guts of the national security establishment, but I pressed him a little and he promised to keep his ears open. I believed him. He’s one of the many my mother has charmed.
When he left, my father asked me why I’d made that request and I told him it could be helpful in our plan.
“What plan?”
“The plan to get the U.S. Army to invade Pakistan and rescue Sonia.”
And I laid it all out for him, just like it had popped into my head while I was filling out that eval form on the conference in the Virginia woods. It would involve my going to Pakistan, yes, but not just wandering around at random, and it would have to involve our family. I thought he would object, being a lawyer and having that legal-procedure cast of mind, but he didn’t. He thought it was a good idea, and I thought this was another example of what so often happened when my mother was in the picture, people cranking i
t up to do for her what they never thought they would or could do.
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 Good Son Page 8