The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  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 the
y 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 a
bout 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.

  5

  B ound together in a line, the Conference on Conflict Resolution on the Subcontinent: A Therapeutic Approach is herded through the night over rocky trails, across drifts of sand and shale that drag at their feet, through ankle-twisting boulder fields, across freezing streams. Sonia is tied behind Karl-Heinz Schildkraut and in front of Annette Cosgrove, who is the last of the coffle. Schildkraut is wearing European slip-on shoes and in the waning daylight Sonia can see they are coming to pieces. Sonia herself is wearing sandals made of buffalo hide, of local manufacture, and she has complete confidence in them, although her feet are now soaked and numb with cold. Schildkraut stumbles often and several times falls heavily. When this happens their silent captors jerk at his rope and prod him with the butts and barrels of their rifles until Sonia and Annette grab him by his arms and help him to his feet. He is ashen and wheezing, and Sonia tries to suppress useless feelings of guilt. She thinks he might not survive this travail.