The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  “No. Are they any good?”

  “Yeah, they are. But you’re not that interested in travel. Or in the people who speak the languages you speak so well.”

  Cynthia was about to object to this remark but forbore. A personal revelation from Anspach was so rare she didn’t want to stem his flow.

  “So I’m in my room that night, and there’s a knock, and in comes this little guy in the full Pashtun rig: shalwar kameez, waistcoat, turban, little mustache, never saw the guy before, and I jump up and the guy says in Pashto, ‘Relax, Mr. Anspach, I’m Sonia Bailey.’ Could’ve knocked me over. The mustache was phony, of course, but aside from that she was a Pashtun guy-language, gestures, the whole works. Better than me, as a matter of fact, and I’m pretty good. I mean, even though I knew she was an American woman, I totally bought her as a Pashtun man. Uncanny. And what she wanted to see me about was her kid, a teenager. Told me the damnedest story about how her kid had been kidnapped as a boy by this Pashtun bodyguard of her father-in-law’s down in Lahore and had fought up in Afghan i stan for years and she’d thought he was dead, and then she finally figured out that this legendary boy mujahid that everyone was talking about in Peshawar must be her son. And of course I’d heard of Kakay Ghazan; they were singing songs about him in the streets.”

  He motioned to the waiter, who was there in an instant with the check. Harry laid some bills on it, which Cynthia noted included a huge tip, and then the patron came out and they had some chat about wonderful to see you again and the best Afghan food in America, all smiles and embraces, and a special smile for Cynthia too, and then they were out in the street.

  “So what happened?” Cynthia asked. “With the kid.”

  “What? Oh, I pointed her to some people and apparently they got him out of there. Interesting woman, though. Sad about what happened to her, getting kidnapped. I heard there was a fatwa out on her. The Muslims don’t like mixing up the sexes, they like to know who’s a woman and who’s a man. Especially in Mecca.”

  “Do you think they’ll kill her?”

  “Oh, yeah. If they haven’t already. So that idea you’re developing about how this thing might be a Laghari family domestic intrigue probably isn’t worth pursuing. The woman is toast.” This thought seemed to depress him and they walked back to his car in silence. When they were driving, he said, “Look, Cynthia, I meant what I said about not messing with that stuff you overheard. I know you like to think you’re a real insider, but there’s some shit you don’t want to get inside.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, a little stiffly. “I’ve been put in my place.”

  “Yeah, and that attitude. It doesn’t go with your chosen career path. You need to stay on the reservation, do your excellent work, and when the boss says jump, you say, ‘How high, please, sir?’ ”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Right, and look where it got me. You notice I’m not running Langley these days.”

  “No, but you know all about Ringmaster.”

  “Never heard of it. And in the same vein you need to look again at this business about GEARSHIFT being a jihadist provocation. Do you really want to go ahead with rocking the boat? Morgan won’t appreciate one of his people making an end run.”

  “But if it’s a provocation, Morgan’s finished anyway.” She hadn’t meant to say this. He slowed for a red light, and the red glare from above gave his face a devilish cast as he turned and looked at her.

  “Yeah, I figured that was your plan, more or less. A chance for a big win and you kick your mentor in the ass, and not only your mentor but the guy you’ve been screwing for years; what does that say? That you’re ruthless, that you won’t let anything stand in the way of your devotion to the job? A very popular point of view around headquarters and why I couldn’t ever stand working there for long. On the other hand I ended up in Afghan i stan, where betrayal is a refined art, like calligraphy is in China.”

  “But I’m right! I mean, if I’m right it’s not just about me or Morgan or who comes out on top. It’s a national security issue.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they always say. I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that used as an excuse for doing something dirty.”

  “Oh, fuck it, Harry! Blowing the whistle on a serious mistake is not doing something dirty. You make it sound like getting us kicked out of Pakistan is… is some kind of office politics I’m twisting for my own advantage. Jesus, wasn’t the whole 9/11 fiasco and the whole Iraq war fiasco the result of people who knew better not standing up and telling the truth?”

  “Yes, but in those cases, the people who knew better didn’t want to risk career damage, so they stayed silent. You’re speaking out because you think it will advance your career. You want to be famous as the little girl with her thumb in the dike, the one person who found what all the big shots missed, that GEARSHIFT was an enemy provocation.”

  “What does that matter,” she snapped, “if it avoids a disaster?”

  They had come to her apartment building on California Street, and Harry swung the car into an empty space by a fire hydrant. He shifted in his seat and looked her in the face.

  “You think it’ll be a disaster, but you don’t know. We never know. You have no idea what will happen if a strike team goes in and shoots up a Pakistani village and there’s no bomb factory there. Maybe it’ll be a nine-day wonder. Maybe the Pakistani parliament gets blown up the same day and it drives the raid clean out of the headlines. Or suppose the worst case: there’s an uproar, a national uprising, and the Islamists take over Pakistan and we have to evacuate Afghan i stan. So fucking what? I can recall when it was going to be the end of the world if we lost Vietnam. Fifty-six thousand American dead, three million Vietnam ese dead, two fucked-up countries, and now American tourists are sipping cocktails in Hue and the grandchildren of the Vietcong are lining up for jobs as busboys in Swiss hotels.”

  “I can’t believe this. You’re saying it doesn’t matter if Islamists take over a nuclear-armed nation?”

  “Why should it? I spent three-quarters of my working life fighting a completely amoral nation that had three thousand nuclear missiles targeted on American cities, and not one of them ever came close to being fired, so why should I worry about some mullahs having a dozen undeliverable nukes?”

  “Unless one of them goes off in New York.”

  “Yes, the old bogeyman. Just think for second, Cynthia! No one is ever going to use nuclear weapons against a nation that has nuclear weapons. As soon as anyone has nuclear weapons they immediately become grown-ups. They become part of the balance of terror. Nuclear terrorism is something that happens in the movies.”

  “Al-Qaeda isn’t a regular nation.”

  “No, and so what? The same rule applies. The al-Q leadership has been living underground for a decade because they knocked down two buildings. They’ll be underground for the rest of their lives. If they used a nuclear weapon on us we’d kill everyone in Waziristan and no one in the world would utter a peep.”

  “Be serious, Harry.”

  “I am. The only people who can really destroy the United States are the Americans, just like the only people who could destroy the USSR were the Soviets, and they did, and we seem to be following in their footsteps. Modern nuclear-armed nations are essentially invulnerable. They can never be conquered in the sense that Hitler and Stalin conquered nations sixty years ago, but all our political stances and the intel that supports them are based on 1930s thinking. We have to prevent another Munich. How often have you heard that? We can’t appease dictators? There are no dictators worth our trouble. It’s all a fraud, Cynthia; I mean the high seriousness that attends all this statecraft, this strategizing. It’s completely empty, down to the bones.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “Because it’s what I do. It’s the only thing I know. It’s a game, like tennis, existentially meaningless but amusing. It takes me-or took me, I should say-to interesting places, just like a tennis pro, and the possibilit
y of being killed just added to the thrill. I’m a pro at this and I thought you were shaping up to be a pro too. A pro does his job, collects the data, makes an honest report. The people responsible make their decisions and if they’re the wrong ones, in your view, it’s none of your business. Your business is to keep faith with the people you work for, and the people who work for you, and let the chips fall wherever, because in the end the fate of nations doesn’t depend on whatever bullshit passes for grand strategy.”

  “So you won’t help me.”

  He paused and gave her a long stare, but in the dim car she couldn’t quite make out his expression. He said, “Of course I’ll help you. I’m your friend. But you need to think about it more than you have, okay?”

  “Okay, Harry,” she said. “I’ll do that.” She held out her hand and he took it and she leaned over and kissed his cheek. He smelled faintly of rose water.

  Back in her apartment, confused and angry, she paced back and forth on the living room rug in front of her television set, turned to cable news with the sound off, and tried to make sense of what Harry had said. The content of his talk she dismissed as clearly nonsense-who could believe such a line? The problem lay in his intent. It was a smokescreen, it was meant to confuse, and it had started immediately after she’d mentioned Ringmaster and Showboat. No, SHOWBOAT, she thought, making the word appear uppercase on the screen of her thoughts, obviously an operation of some kind, something to do with nuclear weapons or nuclear theft, and Ringmaster, now held by the terrorists somewhere in the ungoverned wilds of Pakistan, must be an agent connected with it. Yes, she’d explained her theory that GEARSHIFT was a provocation, and he’d accepted it blandly, had even seemed pleased, and then she’d said the secret words and he went, Cynthia, be a team player; it’s all a game; don’t rock the boat.

  But he’d forgotten how deep she was into the secrets of NSA. She had Top Secret clearance for all matters relating to nuclear theft, and therefore if SHOWBOAT had to do with nuclear theft (and what else could it be?) she would have known about it because Morgan would have known about it and he told her everything; she was sure of that. And suddenly there came the dawning of a new idea: what if SHOWBOAT was a rogue operation, what if the only people who knew about it were a small cabal at Langley-not the president, not the director of national intelligence, not the directors of NSA and DIA? A secret beyond secrecy! Immediately she felt a thrill race over her skin and sweat popped out on her forehead. That’s what had gotten Harry so uncharacteristically upset; he was in on it too. It was a Pakistan-Afghanistan operation obviously, and nothing whatever went on in that region without Harry Anspach’s thumbprints all over it.

  What to do? What to do? Using Harry was now out of the question, and there was no one else she could think of who was both outside her normal chain of command and had the appropriate connections in the intel community-and whom she could trust. That was the problem. This thing had to be so big, that… okay, slow down, she told herself, she didn’t yet have a lock on the scam. She needed one further piece of incontrovertible evidence.

  She made herself relax. She switched on the sound and watched the news and then watched a late-night talk show. Gradually an alternative plan formed in her mind. She didn’t have to knock off Morgan, not if she could use him, if her intel was so good, so undeniable, that he could carry it upstairs and save the day; he could be the hero, and he’d owe her big time. He might get a promotion out of it, and she’d make sure she got the credit for the save, and she’d move with him to the higher regions.

  Cynthia felt a sense of relief and was in a strange way grateful to Harry for his odd little lecture on loyalty. Yes, a nice finesse. The show ended at midnight and she turned off the set and lit up her computer. She went to her bag and retrieved the small notebook where she’d written down the cell-phone numbers from the Qasir intercepts and also took out two pieces of contraband: the voiceprints of the two parties to the Qasir intercepts. It was a violation of strict NSA policy to remove anything from its premises, but she believed it was justified in exigent circumstances. Besides, no one would ever know.

  She rigged the computer to make a digital recording of any conversations it might carry using voice-over-Internet protocol and then placed the first call, to Dr. Qasir’s cell phone, at ten A.M. in Lahore. She got the answering service. In her fine Urdu she identified herself as an officer at his bank with an urgent question regarding his balance and a possible fraud. He called back ten minutes later and she engaged him in conversation for an additional five. Then she called his wife, got her right away, and had another five-minute conversation, posing as a potential source for a story about corruption in the Ministry of Finance.

  After running a voice analysis program on both conversations, she made hard copies of the voiceprints and compared them to those from the original intercepts. Her sensitive ears had already told her what the voiceprints now revealed. The man in the original intercepts was not Jafar Baig Qasir; the woman definitely was his wife, Rukhsana.

  So no one had stolen any uranium from Dr. Qasir’s facility. That intercept was proved phony, and thus all the intercepts after the original Abu Lais one, all that stuff about moving shipments, had to be phony as well. It was the proverbial smoking gun. But she wasn’t going to show it to Morgan yet, because what she’d now learned was bigger than N Section, maybe bigger than NSA. Nor would she send it to Anspach. Harry’s response to her questions had confirmed that it was a major secret, involving the capture of hostages and the faked theft of uranium. Harry had tried to slam the door of the big boys’ club house in her face, but she was not having any of that, oh, no: she was going to find out what SHOWBOAT was all about and who Ringmaster was, and just at that instant it popped into her mind how she was going to do that as well. It had been triggered by the memory of the odd odor of roses that had come off Anspach. She was tapping away at the computer when it came to her: the unlikely smell and the computer. Borden.

  13

  A long with the rest of the village, Sonia awakens to the sound of the azan: make haste to worship, make haste to the real triumph, prayer is better than sleep! Agreeing, she shakes out of the really interesting dream she has been having, not even pausing to write it down, and goes to the prayer rug in the corner of the room marked with the qibla. She performs the ritual washing with the ewer and basin there and hears the sound of soft footsteps behind her. It is Amin. They wish each other peace, he washes, and they unroll the prayer rugs provided by the management and pray the Fajr, the dawn prayer.

  Around them the infidels also arise, in their different ways. Father Shea kneels by his charpoy with his breviary, Manjit sits silently on his charpoy, perhaps in a meditative trance; Schildkraut sits slumped, coughing at intervals, staring at the ground; Ashton stomps heavily to the alcove where the slop pot is kept, trips over a blanket, curses vilely, and urinates with vigor, still cursing. Over this earthy noise they hear a sound that has become distressingly familiar: Porter Cosgrove has begun his groans and wails, and they can hear the soft strained murmur of his wife, trying to provide comfort.

  “I thought Quakers were famous for being quiet,” says Amin. “Shame on me! That is uncharitable. See how quickly the peace of prayer evaporates under these conditions?”

  “Yes,” says Sonia, “but isn’t it strange then that every religion looks back to its time of persecution as one where the faithful practiced the purest religion with the most fervor? Perhaps it’s different when one isn’t being persecuted for the religion per se.”

  “No, I hardly think this captivity has to do with the religious beliefs of

  our hosts. It is a tribal matter entirely, in my view. On the other hand, I confess I have become more punctilious in my observances since we were taken. Perhaps the mind is concentrated by the prospect of eternity, except in cases like poor Cosgrove there, when it is utterly destroyed.”

  He cast a glance around the room, then stared for a moment at a particular vacant charpoy. He grabbed Sonia’s
arm. “Good God! Where is Mr. Craig?”

  Ashton emerged from behind the curtain. “What’s the matter?” he asked, when he saw Amin.

  “Craig isn’t here. Is he behind the curtain?”

  “No, nothing back there but the old piss pot. What, you mean he’s done a bunk?”

  “I rather doubt that. They must have come in the night and taken him. My God, can they mean to kill him?”

  “Why would they do that?” says Ashton. “He’s worth millions to them alive. Isn’t it obvious now why were were kidnapped? It’s a simple ransom scheme. All of us were what they call side catch in the fisheries game. Although I daresay they’ll find some propaganda use for us. Christ, I could kill for a drink! And I’d pick that weepy little bastard.” He gives the Cosgroves an angry stare. “What an absolute waste of a beautiful woman. Can you credit it? I wonder what she ever saw in him.”

  “He did some heroic negotiations in Mozambique,” Sonia says. “Apparently saved countless lives. It’s an attractive trait, I suppose. Everyone responds to danger in a manner characteristic of their temperaments. Some grow stronger, like my friend Amin here, and some go to pieces.”

  “Is that so? And what do you do? Seek the comfort of religion?”

  “Yes, I do. And you get nasty.”

  “Do I? Well, you can just kiss my arse, Miss Laghari, or Bailey, or whatever your name is. As I recall, it was you who concocted this brilliant idea of trekking through the most terrorist-strewn portion of the planet with a billionaire in tow. You might as well have taken out adverts-PARTY OF GORMLESS DO-GOODERS SEEKING YOUNG MEN WITH WEAPONS. MONEY NO OBJECT.”