The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  MAN: Be calm, for God’s sake! Look I may be able to get away, we may find the blasted stuff in the wrong place, but I must be here to supervise.

  WOMAN: What stuff? What are you talking about?

  MAN: I am talking about thirty-three kilograms of ninety-four percent enriched uranium that has gone missing.

  WOMAN: Thirty-three kilograms? Is it that valuable?

  MAN: Not as such, but it is enough to manufacture several nuclear weapons, and we must find it. If we don’t, I could conceivably be sacked.

  WOMAN: Oh, God protect us!

  “What’s the source here? Who are these people?” she asked.

  “The source tap is from a cell phone out of Kahuta belonging to Jafar Baig Qasir. I looked him up in the database. He’s a nuclear engineer who works at Kahuta and lives in Lahore. He’s one of the people in charge of refining and casting weapons-grade uranium. From the context, I assume he’s talking to his wife.”

  “Why are they speaking English?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Cynthia,” replied Lotz, a hint of annoyance in his voice. “Why shouldn’t they? A lot of upper-class Pakistanis use English as their second language.”

  “Yes, but not on intimate family subjects to their wives. Besides that, don’t you notice anything fishy about the conversation?”

  “No. What do you mean?

  “It has the same phony tone as the one from the supposed trucker. Did you listen to that one?”

  “Yeah, it sounded fine to me, and it just adds to the case. Cynthia, I don’t understand why you’re-”

  “And on top of that, don’t you think it’s funny that a senior scientist should talk to his wife on an open cell-phone line about something that should be the most top secret thing that ever happened: a theft of weapons-grade uranium? He makes it sound like a fender bender or a coffee spill on his pants. What’s the traffic like from Pakistani security?”

  Lotz said, “I haven’t checked it recently. I wanted you to see this right away.”

  “Well, check it. They should be running around like chickens with their heads cut off if this is real.”

  “I will, but don’t you think we should get Morgan in on this?”

  “No, I don’t. The last thing we need is a premature orgasm, and I can tell he’s ready to pop.”

  “You would know,” said Lotz, half under his breath. She didn’t call him on it, and he left her office. Yet another reason for getting the hell out of N Section.

  She put her headset back on, but she was too restless to focus on the voices. Instead, she switched to her music collection. The Allegro of Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra sounded, in her ears, so much more soothing than the chatter of conspirators, a souvenir of a less dangerous, more orderly world.

  If they were conspirators. If they had stolen enriched uranium. If they could make a bomb. Cynthia had been through a secret course given by some people from Los Alamos. She knew that making an effective nuclear device was a lot harder than most people supposed. Yes, there was a lot of public information available, but the devil was in the details and in the technical skills through which they were applied, and these were not so generally available. Could a group of terrorists actually steal nuclear materials and manufacture a weapon in some mountain village? Not very likely. Nevertheless, even the possibility was sufficient to provide employment for her, the rest of N Section, and the other parts of the government that worried about such things. On the other hand, a nuclear scam could be mounted with a lot less effort and, if America fell for it, it might be nearly as damaging to its cause as a nuclear explosion. American boots on the ground in some Pakistani village, civilian casualties, the erosion of what little trust remained between the two governments: a cheap victory and intensely embarrassing for the already embattled intelligence community. Cynthia would have recommended such a scam herself, had she been on the other side.

  She listened to the music, the familiar melody of the clarinet, soaring, glorious, but always returned to earth by the repetitive thrum of the full orchestra, each phrase sculpted to fit, each original but grounded in its form. That’s how she wanted her life to be, soaring but under control. Her thoughts drifted for a time, lost in Mozart’s structured beauty, and then settled on the figure of Abu Lais.

  If there was such a person, if this whole thing was not an elaborate ruse. Here was the paradox of espionage, and especially of the type NSA practiced. NSA snooped; everyone in the world knew NSA snooped; everyone knew that electronic communications were not secure; therefore, anyone with any brains would send into the ether only those things he wanted NSA to know; therefore, what NSA learned with its multibillion-dollar investment in snooping was essentially valueless. But such thoughts, although they occurred to everyone who worked at the agency from time to time, were distinctly not profitable, and Cynthia had no patience for the unprofitable.

  As often when she listened to music, an idea coalesced. She considered it, turned it around, found it potentially profitable, if not strictly a part of the normal order. After some browsing on the Internet, she worked for a while until she had covered half a dozen sheets of paper. With these in hand she left her office to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Morgan’s prohibition. She walked down many a sterile hallway and up several flights of stairs until she came to the part of NSA devoted to scouring the Internet for terrorist chatter, and specifically to the office of Walter Borden.

  Borden was in. Borden was rarely out. On his own admission, he had no life, was a self-proclaimed nerd of the pear-shaped rather than the pencil-necked variety, and his office door was covered with a collage of Dil-bert cartoons, beer coasters, and dozens of tiny strips from fortune cookies. A bumper sticker proclaimed, NERDS DO IT DIGITALLY. Cynthia had a history with guys like Borden, having learned early how easy it was to obtain intellectual favors from desperate misfits-math tutoring, computer repair-in return for a modest investment of smiles and badinage. And she enjoyed the hopeless worship.

  She knocked and without waiting for a response entered the usual nerd nest-wrappers and cans on the floor, science-fiction posters on the walls, cartoons stuck to his whiteboard with magnets. It had a peculiar smell, too, like someone had cooked an unsuccessful dessert featuring caramel and canned mushrooms. The origin of Borden’s smell was a topic in the local hallways.

  His job was keeping abreast of the innumerable Web sites, most of them ephemeral as mayflies, that the international jihad used to keep its real and prospective membership up-to-date and to recruit new members. One reason they were ephemeral is that Borden and his section took them down by technical wizardry nearly as soon as they arose, except for a rotating number of favored ones, which they filled with misinformation or embarrassing pictures. Borden often remarked that he could hardly believe that they were paying him to do this work.

  His office, as usual, was dark except for the glow of a huge flat-panel screen. Borden had his headset on, so Cynthia had to tap him on his Spiderman T-shirt to get his attention. He swiveled in his chair and brightened when he saw who it was.

  “Hi, Lam,” he said. “Look, we can’t keep on meeting like this. People are starting to talk.”

  “Let them, Borden. My passion for you knows no bounds.”

  “I don’t think so, Lam of my heart. I think you’re fascinated by my unearthly intelligence, but you don’t love the real me deep inside.”

  “You got me, Borden. I’m a faithless slut.” She glanced at the screen in front of him. It was blue and covered with dense lines of code. “What are you up to? It looks like work.”

  “Yes, but it’s nothing I could put in girl language. It’s part of the AMICUS project.”

  The name stirred a vague memory. “This is the thing about intel coordination? I didn’t realize it was up yet.”

  “It’s not. It’s years away. Decades, even.”

  “I’m surprised. I thought that was a big DCI priority.”

  “Yeah, right, like anyone cares what
the DCI thinks. Look, in the first place you have dozens of different systems, all mutually incompatible, a lot of them written in languages no one uses anymore. You could never get them to talk to one another. So let’s have a single system that everyone uses, right? I mean, we could just agree on a commercial database system and tweak it a little, but oh, no, the government can’t do that, it might save too much money, so there are endless committee meetings about agreeing to formulate a plan to plan for developing a data plan. It’s like riding on a glacier. But you didn’t come down here to talk about data set coordination. Tell me you want to sit on my lap and coo sultry songs in my ear.”

  “I’ll have to take a rain check on that. Actually, I was interested in Paki -stani sites, any chatter about a big coup, any approaching major blow to the infidels.”

  “This is nuclear, right?” Borden knew where she worked. “Someone lifted a bomb.”

  “No one lifted a bomb, Borden. Get real. If someone lifted a bomb there’d be red lights flashing in the hallways and a whoop-whoop sound would be playing over the hall speakers. I’m just following up on some suggestive comint, and rather than send it through the usual channels I thought I’d come down here and get it from the unearthly intelligence himself.”

  “Or itself. But now that you mention it, there was this little beauty. It sprang into being, as near as we can figure, at 9:53 P.M. our time and immediately went viral in the jihadi Web world.”

  He pressed keys, and the screen of code shrank to a window and another, larger window popped up. Borden pulled out his headphone jack and the sound of a Pashtun song filled the room, a man singing, with tabla and rubab in back, a war song about jihad and how sorry the infidels will be when the Muslims take their revenge, how they will wail. The screen showed quick cuts of European and American cities, interwoven with shots of nuclear explosions and devastated cities: Paris, explosion, Hiroshima; New York, explosion, Hamburg ’44; and so on. Cynthia watched it twice.

  “No idea where this came from, of course,” she said.

  “Well, they try to mix us up, the usual anonymous cutouts, run it through Moscow and then Kiev and then Iceland, et cetera, but I’m pretty sure this one comes out of a server in Peshawar. There are technical similarities with some stuff we know was produced there, so odds-on it’s the same guy or group. Their production values are coming right along, I have to say.”

  “They’ve mastered production values? Why fight on?”

  “I agree,” said Borden. “You should order your burqa before the rush.”

  “Seriously, though, the real reason I came down here was I need a favor.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Suppose the Pakistani Ministry of Trade wanted to do a survey to see if certain items had been purchased domestically or imported into Pakistan over, say, the past three months, and because they’re an up-to-date country they would send an official e-mail to these firms, with a form attached, which I’ve designed for them, and the merchants would fill out the form and send it to a link at the official Ministry of Trade Web site but really-”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m all over it like a cheap suit,” said Borden. “The e-mail part is trivial, of course, and obviously you don’t want the Pakistanis to know you’ve doing this survey in their name. Interesting little problem.” Borden looked up to the ceiling and his eyes started to glaze as the unearthly intelligence cranked up.

  Cynthia said, “So you can do it?”

  Borden glanced at her, rolled his eyes upward, and mimed typing. “Mozart on the keys. To night too late?”

  “To night would be perfect. “ She handed him the sheets of paper. “Here’s the apparatus list and the company list. Thanks a million, Borden. I owe you a big one.”

  “Indeed you do, and yet I surmise that the payback would not include, say, sexual favors of any kind.”

  “Correct. But I will allow you to fantasize about me all you want. And by the way, there are women on this floor who might not find that kind of remark amusing.”

  “Well, those women can kiss my pimply ass,” said Borden. “I happen to be very selective about whom I fantasize about.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I was starting to feel like, you know, cheap? Oh, and Borden.” Cynthia was now moving toward the door. “Let’s just keep this little project between the two of us, okay?”

  “What project?” said Borden, and swiveled his bulk back to the screen.

  Cynthia stayed at work until eight or so that evening, long enough to determine that Borden had set up his phony Pakistani Web site and sent the e-mails, and then went home. The next three days passed without any significant intercepts. On the fourth day, a Friday, Cynthia received an e-mail from Borden with an attachment containing the catch from their fake Pakistani government survey. She was perusing the information on her screen when Lotz burst in.

  “We got another one. It’s dynamite. So to speak.” He handed her a paper, a sheet from the NSA’s machine translation service.

  She read it, put on her headset, and called up the referenced sound file. The Urdu conversation had been recorded off the same cell phone that Cynthia’s original trucker had used outside Kahuta.

  KAHUTA: Peace be with you, brother.

  PESHAWAR: And with you be peace. All is well?

  KAHUTA: Yes, we are on the road. We have the birdcage concealed under sacks of wheat.

  PESHAWAR: And it’s satisfactory? No leaks?

  KAHUTA: No, we tested it. We used one made by the same plant that manufactures birdcages for Kahuta itself.

  PESHAWAR: It might have been better to dispense with the barrel and just bury the material in a sack of wheat.

  KAHUTA: No. It has to be shielded. It may be a while before the theft is discovered, but we can’t take the chance that an alarm will go out and the authorities will be watching with… ah… special equipment.

  PESHAWAR: Well, you know best. You have done wonderful work! How long will you be?

  KAHUTA: Not long. A day or two at the most. Tell our friends they will have their birdcage by Thursday evening at the latest. God is great!

  PESHAWAR: God is great! Death to the enemies of God!

  She listened to it three times, making notes, and then removed the headset.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Speaker ID was fairly accurate for a change. I assume the search term was birdcage.”

  “Yeah, we have a priority on it. Anytime anyone mentions a birdcage on any of the phones we’re tracking we generate a translation. They use the English term.”

  “Yes, people there often do with technical words,” said Cynthia. She stared at the transcript and recalled the care with which the trucker (if he was a trucker) had mentioned the word. He’d used it three times. Cynthia didn’t think he would’ve done that if he’d been talking about structures for confining fowl rather than the fifty-five-gallon steel drums with internal bracing that were used throughout the world to transport highly radioactive matter.

  Lotz’s attention had turned to Cynthia’s computer screen. “What’s that stuff?” he asked.

  “Just a survey I did. Four days ago, M. K. Chupa Metal Fabricators Ltd. purchased from Lahore Foundry Supply Company Ltd. a Morgan Mark IV dual-energy bale-out furnace and a used Bridgeport Series One manual milling machine, plus graphite crucibles and various other casting and machining accessories, for the equivalent of ninety-three hundred dollars and they paid cash. Before you ask, Pakistani tax records have no record of any M. K. Chupa Ltd. Chupa, by the way, is Urdu for “hidden.” Could be just a coincidence, I guess.”

  “The bomb factory,” said Lotz. “That would seem to be the closer, along with that line in our conversation here where the Kahuta guy says, ‘It has to be shielded. It may be a while before the theft is discovered, but we can’t take the chance that an alarm will go out and the authorities will be watching with… ah… special equipment.’ ”

  “Yes, and that’s to make us believe they’re worried about radiation mo
nitors,” said Cynthia. “And yet they’re not worried about blurting the whole thing out over a cell phone that might be compromised. And they bought their supposed equipment on the open market in Pakistan instead of smuggling it into the country, even though smuggling is half of Pakistan’s GDP. It’s absurd, Ernie! At the levels of al-Q we’re talking about, they smuggle everything they use, including cell phones, which they typically use once and then ditch. No one involved in a plot like this would use the same phone day after day to report on the progress of a load of stolen weapons-grade.”

  “Abu Lais did. And we know for sure that he was talking to al-Zaydun; we have the voiceprint. Do you think that’s a fake too?”

  “No, but one ambiguous conversation does not a nuclear conspiracy make.”

  “So what would convince you, Cynthia, a mushroom cloud? You know what I think? I think you’ve got stage fright.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about us, N Section. For years we’ve been sitting in our tiny offices, forgotten, more or less, watching for something that nobody really thought would happen, and now it has happened and suddenly we’re going to be the most important people in the whole government. This intel is going to go from our hands straight to the president’s people, and they’re going to want to make damn sure it’s right. And you’ve got butterflies.”

  She looked at him coldly. He seemed a different person now, hectic, avid, like a frat boy planning a date rape. She said, “You’re wrong. It has nothing to do with my personal shit. The tapes are wrong. The people on them are reading scripts. And if you’d spent as much time listening to real conversations as I have you’d know that.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe that’s why we have analysts and why the munchkins in the headsets don’t get to make the decisions.”

  She stared at him, stunned by the nastiness of this remark from the ordinarily genial, flirty Ernie Lotz. The supposed plot must have unleashed some kind of testosterone storm in the men involved. She had little hope that Morgan would be any different.