“Excuse me,” the priest said. “Why Zurich, of all places?”
“That’s where the first plane out of Lahore stopped: British Air to Zurich direct and then change planes for London, where Farid had arranged with some friends to put me up, but when I got to the airport I didn’t get on the connecting flight, I could not bear the thought of being with Pakistanis, however sympathetic, and I could not bear dealing with what I’d done, dealing with the press, with the publicity. I took a cab into the city and holed up. Zurich turned out to be a good place for someone like me to hide. The Swiss are incurious, and the umma was not well represented on its streets. And then my children were killed, my girls for real and my son as far as I knew, and I went crazy and that qualified me to be a shrink. No, I’m still avoiding.” After a moment, she resumes. “This was something that began in Lahore, when my son was a baby. I fell in love.”
“Yes?” says Father Shea in a certain tone, when the pause she made after this remark had gone on for a while.
“Oh, no, nothing like that!” she says quickly. “It was a child I fell in love with, not a man. A little boy; he was four at the time. He was the son of my father-in-law’s bodyguard and his wife, who was the only real friend I had in my father-in-law’s house. It’s hard to explain. I had Theo, I had my own baby, but he wasn’t really mine, he was the heir of the Lagharis, somehow alien and a reminder to me that I had done exactly the same thing as my mother had. I had married a man I didn’t really love in gratitude for saving my life. Every time I looked at Theo I felt trapped, and it made me a terrible mother. I abandoned him twice-though I told myself it wasn’t really abandonment because he had that gigantic, overwhelming family-and I used him. I tried to make him into an ally, or at least someone who wouldn’t be smothered by the family as his father was, or almost was. I mean he married me, poor soul. But my real attention was focused on Wazir.”
“The bodyguard’s son,” Shea says. “What was the attraction?”
“Oh, he was beautiful, first of all, just a knockout. And strong, athletic too, and very, very smart. When he was seven or so I found him in the courtyard with little piles of pebbles. He’d discovered prime numbers and he was scratching with a stick in the dirt trying to generate number theory. But more than that, there was this air about him, even as a little boy, that he was going to be something special, something really grand. And Theo, I have to admit, is a sweet enough man but nothing special; and I wanted to be part of something great. Pride, again, the ghosts of ten generations of impoverished aristocrats howling in my blood.”
“What happened to him?”
So she tells him the story. Afterward he says, “I’m afraid I don’t understand you when you say you sold Wazir to the CIA.”
“In return for their help in getting Theo out of the war and bringing him back to the States. They were recruiting Pashtun mujahideen. They found out where Wazir was and brought me in there, and I convinced him and they took him away, back to America, and sent him to college, as I said. I made it sound like it was a great opportunity, and he went along with it. We were very close. His mother had died while he was on jihad and I was more than a mother to him. I don’t know what they’ve done to or with him, but at the time that didn’t bother me. I just wanted Theo out. Mother love? Or guilt. You tell me.”
“I’m afraid that’s not part of my job, Sonia. But I will say that in Guatemala I heard confessions from rebels and soldiers and paramilitary police officers during the dirty war there, and as a monster you don’t stack up. What are you guilty of? Lack of singleminded devotion? Excessive interest in another woman’s child? Betrayal? Yes, you meddle too much in the affairs of others. Cut it out. Trust in God more. Be easier on yourself. That’s your penance, although being in this place would seem to be penance enough for worse sins than you’ve just told me about. Do you want a formal absolution?”
She did.
Father Shea said the magic words and made the motions, and Sonia thanked him and went back to her own cot. She did feel better. She had made a good act of contrition in her heart and wondered whether that would be sufficient for God. Because she hadn’t told the priest anything near the whole truth.
12
T hey held another meeting of the GEARSHIFT group the following day, but Cynthia Lam was not invited to this one. Ernie Lotz went in her stead, and she understood why. She’d admitted her doubts to Ernie, not as devil’s advocate but for real, and he had naturally passed them along to Morgan. She was now officially unreliable on the next phase of the project, which, according to Lotz, was bending every sinew of NSA to pinpoint the location of the supposed bomb factory. The president had given approval to start planning for a military option, but obviously they had to know where to invade. Satellites shifted their orbits to provide better coverage of the suspect terrain-the northwest frontier of Pakistan and the southern tier of Afghanistan-and hundreds of analysts dropped other projects to pore over the photographic catch. Drone aircraft were hastily fitted with radiation detection gear and flown low through the mountain valleys, although the area to be covered was so vast that no one expected a timely hit from the flights. The role of N Section was to expand the listening watch, on the theory that the supposed errors of the earlier cell phone ill-discipline would be repeated.
Cynthia believed this was a waste of time, because any calls they were likely to intercept would be fakes, like the others. She thought the original Abu Lais call was genuine, but whether or not it involved a nuclear conspiracy was at present unknown. N Section was also receiving feed from optical cable intercepts out of Pakistan; no Pakistani official could pick up a phone, she thought, without NSA listening in, although here, as always, the bottleneck was translation. She was particularly interested in traffic from the security services, because if there really had been a nuclear theft, these should be going mad. But they were not, or not that she could tell. It seemed to be business as usual in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, so either they were back to carrying messages in cleft sticks or there was nothing big going on.
Still, she logged her dutiful hours and even demonstrated zeal in the futile hunt, and at the same time she embarked on a covert venture of her own. First she searched NSA’s secure intranet and found no reference to the code name Ringmaster. This was not particularly surprising. Security clearances at NSA are highly compartmented and her own Top Secret clearance gave her access only to those parts of NSA’s vast trove of information that directly related to her work. Besides that, Ring-master was a CIA operation and, despite changes in intel policy after the 9/11 events, Langley was not inclined to share. She would have to figure out some other way to discover what was going on.
It was, in contrast, no problem to research the nuclear scientist Jafar Baig Qasir, his family, and their connections. NSA’s resources gave her every fragment of electronic information available about him: his bank records, his credit reports, his recent e-mails, the works. When she was done with that, and intrigued by what she had learned, she put in a call to Harry Anspach, got an answering system, and left a casual message-long time no see, let’s have a drink.
He hadn’t called back by the time she left work, at around seven, but she knew that Harry kept odd hours, spook hours. He’d rung her up occasionally in the middle of the night.
He might be one part of the thread she was beginning to tease out of the GEARSHIFT tangle. He was a consultant, so-called; he ran a tiny firm that provided undisclosed services for the U.S. intel community. Cynthia thought he might be close to seventy, although he looked a lot younger. Harry always had a nice tan and wore slightly rakish English-cut suits. He was, or claimed to be, an old CIA hand, a veteran of the glory days when the governments of nations lived or fell at Langley’s pleasure. Harry had specialized in South Asia, he spoke the languages, knew the players face-to-face, and had a pile of stories. She’d met him at a training course early in her career at NSA. He’d been an instructor. It had been thought useful to give junior NSA staff some idea of how comint
and humint worked together, and that was Harry’s task. He’d begun by stating flatly that they did not, offered to leave the platform, and got a polite laugh. Then he’d launched into a brilliant analysis of the faults of the national intelligence effort from the point of view of the poor bastards who were out in the field, trying to make sense of the machinations of an alien culture. He talked about the difficulties the average American had in doing this, and of how hard it really was to weave the little bits derived from spies, intercepts, and open sources into a real understanding of what the bad guys were up to.
Cynthia thought it was the best presentation she’d ever heard during her training. Later that evening, when the trainees and their instructors were mingling in the facility’s lounge, she’d heard a voice behind her say, “The hard work of the foolish is all a waste, as rainless clouds make only dust.” It was in Pashto. She turned around to find Harry Anspach grinning at her, and she’d asked what he meant in the same language.
“A line from Rahman Baba,” he’d said. “The old guy might have been talking about U.S. intelligence.”
And then they’d had a long conversation in Pashto about intelligence and Pashtun culture and the war against the Russians. He’d been there for nearly the whole thing, and before that, along with everyone else, he’d been in Southeast Asia. He had a lot of stories about both places, but somehow they never involved him; it was always “a guy I knew” or “someone told me that…” She got the impression that Harry liked to go deep, that he wasn’t an embassy cocktail party kind of agent, and that this had crimped his career. The CIA didn’t like it when their people went native: intelligence was all well and good, but they didn’t really want to hear stuff that conflicted with their prejudices or might embarrass their political masters. That evening Harry talked mainly about Afghanistan and the Pashtuns, those wonderful, horrible people. She got the impression he had gone very native, donning turban and shalwar kameez, growing his beard, living in the villages for weeks on end.
He was surprised that she’d never been there. She said she hadn’t traveled much; she was a headquarters kind of person. He said she should go, and said her Pashto was excellent but a little schoolmarmish, it was stripped of colloquialism of the sort you could only pick up in a Pashtun village. He said he’d heard about her; she was a prize catch with her languages. And they talked about her for the rest of their conversation; whenever she tried to turn the talk back to his obviously far more interesting life, he diverted it back with a laugh and a joke.
Since that time, every so often they’d meet for a drink or a meal, and she’d tell him what was going on at the agency and in N Section. Cynthia understood that she was a source, he was using her to keep track of what that part of NSA was doing, and also maybe he was checking up for someone about how free she was with things she wasn’t supposed to talk about-or even know. She didn’t mind. She liked him. She thought they were two of a kind, both dedicated to the secret world, both alone, both a little lonely. It was like having a father who really understood what you were doing and approved and would help if he could, quite unlike her actual father, who wondered why Cynthia, with her grades, had not gone into medicine or law.
Anspach called just after six. She asked him where he was and he said he was in the street outside her apartment house and would she like to get something to eat? She said she would and he took her to their usual place, an Afghan restaurant on the other side of Dupont Circle. It was a tiny place, eight tables, only one of which was occupied when they came in, by a large noisy family, the men talking loudly in Pashto, the women, demure in hijabs, tending to the wriggling children. The proprietor greeted them like old friends, all smiles, handshakes, an embrace and two kisses for Harry, a bow for Cynthia. They sat and he fed them, not bothering with menus. They drank scalding sweet minted tea and ate: kadu, aushak dumplings, fesenjan chicken with Basmati rice, steaming slabs of Afghan naan bread. As usual Cynthia talked about herself, what was happening at NSA, nothing personal. They did not have that kind of relationship, and she had long since given up trying to get anything out of Harry, a worm-proof man.
Inevitably, GEARSHIFT and its discontents came up. She told him the whole story, probably in violation of innumerable security regulations, but she didn’t care. She wanted to know if she was crazy or not. She told him about Abu Lais, and all the unlikelihoods, the phoninesses of the intercepts, and when she ran down he said, “That’s pretty thin soup. Paranoia is a virtue in intel work, but it’s got to be based on something more than hunches.”
“It’s not just hunches, Harry. First of all, I’m the language guy in this, and the language is fake. I know a staged conversation when I hear it. The original Abu Lais colloquy was genuine; I had no doubts at all about that one. But the others weren’t. You can put that in the bank. The second thing is I did a little checking on Dr. Qasir. The woman he was supposedly talking to is Rukhsana Laghari Qasir, his wife. She’s a journalist, works for a liberal English-language newspaper in Lahore. Have you been following this hostage thing in Pakistan? With Bill Craig?”
“What about it?”
“One of the hostages is Sonia Bailey Laghari, the writer. She’s Rukhsana Qasir’s sister-in-law.”
“So?”
“So she’s being held by a jihadi group. What if someone decided that this would be a good time to engineer a provocation, using the connection between Sonia Laghari and her brother-in-law, the nuclear engineer? Maybe the Laghari family is trying to fake up something. Maybe the point of this provocation has nothing to do with an actual bomb but is-I don’t know-a way to get Sonia Laghari out of the hands of the mujahideen?”
“That’s a big jump, Cynthia. A senior Pakistani scientist is going to commit treason to save his sister-in-law?”
“If it really was Jafar Qasir.”
“You haven’t checked?”
“No. I’m telling you, Morgan put this whole thing together on the fly. He finally gets to play in the bigs, he’s not going to check every little detail. But I’m going to put in a call to Qasir to night, and also to his wife, and I’ll match the voiceprints to the intercept. Then we’ll see.”
Harry said, “I want more tea. Would you like dessert? I’m going to have the phirnee.”
Cynthia shook her head, and Harry called the waiter over and had a brief Pashto conversation with him. When he went away, Harry said, “I assume if this voiceprint checks out the way you think it will, you’ll go to Morgan and tell him to stop the train.”
“Not Morgan. That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”
“You want to go around him.”
“Or something. God, Harry, you have no idea what he’s been like. He doesn’t listen to me, he doesn’t take me to the big meetings… I honestly think that if I show him that the Qasir intercept is a fake, he’ll suppress it or tell me I made it up or I don’t know what. Whatever, I’ll be finished at NSA.”
“Uh-huh. Well, we can’t let that happen.” He smiled. “I’ll tell you what. If it turns out the Qasir intercept is a scam, get your evidence written up, the voiceprints and all, and shoot it over to me by courier. I’ll make sure it gets to the right people and that they know you saved the day.”
She felt some tension drain. “Thanks, Harry. But there’s something else.” She explained about the acoustic freak in the meeting room, what she’d overheard, and her conclusion: “There’s some other link between the hostages and this nuclear scam.”
“What connection could there be?”
“That depends on who this Ringmaster is and what Showboat is. Anything ring a bell?”
Harry looked up at the approaching waiter. He said, “This is really good phirnee they make here. It’s a kind of rice pudding with rose water and pistachio nuts. Want some?”
Cynthia took a fleck of the stuff on her spoon, to be polite. It tasted like cold cream.
He caught her look. “No? Well, it’s an acquired taste. I ate a lot of it in Peshawar during the jihad.” He started in on the d
essert. Cynthia waited for what seemed like a long time and then said, “Harry? We were having a conversation.”
He put his spoon down and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “No, actually you were trying to pump me, which I thought we had an agreement you weren’t going to do. My advice to you is to forget you ever heard those words.”
As he said this, he gave her a look she did not recall ever seeing before on Harry Anspach’s face, bleak and cold, the eyes blank and pitiless as a shark’s. It lasted for only a second, but it stunned her; she felt her jaw slacken embarrassingly, like that of a schoolgirl caught at some naughtiness.
“You know, I just remembered,” said Harry, in a different tone, as if that look and his comment had not occurred, “I ran into Sonia Laghari once, in Peshawar, back in-oh, gosh, it must’ve been ’eighty-seven. The war was winding down and we were tying things up, preparing to go back to ignoring Afghan i stan and ditching all the people we’d been supporting, the usual American deal. You know, when I first started with the Agency, in the late sixties, when someone really fucked up, we used to roll our eyes and say, ‘Afghan i stan,’ like he was going to get assigned to someplace of absolutely no importance. Anyway, I used to have an office, sort of, over a tea shop in the Meena Bazaar, and when I was in town I used to sit there all day drinking mint tea and people knew where to find me. So I’m sitting there one morning and in walks this woman in a burqa. Well, the place just froze, everybody stopped talking and stared, because women just don’t stroll into tea shops in that part of Peshawar, and she walks up to me, hands me a piece of paper, and walks out. The note said she had to see me, matter of life and death, and she’d come by at ten that night, and it was signed Sonia Bailey. Of course I knew who Sonia Bailey was. After she wrote that book on Soviet Central Asia, half the Agency was trying to get next to her, to pump her about what she hadn’t put in the book, but no dice. She said she was a writer and she didn’t want to compromise herself, and so forth, so I gathered they gave up trying. And obviously I was interested. Did you ever read her books?”
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