The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  Cynthia felt her cheeks warm. “I’m sorry, Borden. I didn’t mean to be flippant. It’s just a little strange. The new you and all.”

  “It’s strange for you, you can imagine how I feel. Have a seat. I cleaned it with a janitorial substance.” She sat. The chair exuded a sharp astringent smell.

  He said, “But really-what’s on your mind?”

  Cynthia had prepared an anodyne and amusing story about what she wanted done but on the instant decided, against her usual instincts, to tell Borden the plain truth.

  “Okay, this is some serious shit, and I’m in trouble right now for telling you. You can’t know this, and you’re putting your career in jeopardy if you hear me out, and so am I, but more so. Are you up for that?”

  Borden thought for a moment, then shrugged. “My career here is not as interesting to me as it was a couple of days ago. I think my era of staring at a screen in a tiny office, for however noble a purpose, may be coming to a close. What’s the serious shit?”

  So she told him about the provocation, and how everyone was being taken in by it except her, and about what she had overheard at the meeting, Ringmaster and SHOWBOAT, and how Anspach had stonewalled on that, and how there was no one else she could tell about it but him.

  When she’d finished, he said, “That’s an interesting story. You think there’s some kind of rogue operation going on at Langley? That for some reason this operation wants us to get fooled into… what, invading Pakistan? Why would anyone want that?”

  She said, “I don’t care. Our only job is to find out what the truth is and send it up the line. This nuclear theft scam is not the truth. End of story.”

  “That’s a fairly naïve expression of what we do. It’d be more accurate to say that we give our masters such information as they’re willing to receive.”

  “Granted, and we can’t do anything about a fraud concocted above us-WMD in Iraq and so on. But it’s different when the fraud is concocted from below. It’s a deeper violation. No one elected those guys. No one authorized them to drag us into another war.”

  “Why are you so sure these guys don’t have authorization? Maybe it’s another Iran-Contra. Someone way up high looks at Pakistan and thinks, This is a failed or failing state. It’s got deliverable nuclear weapons. The Taliban have complete control of an area within a day’s drive of the capital and the nuclear facilities, plus a good chunk of their army and intel apparatus seems to be in bed with the insurgents. So this someone thinks, let’s prep the world for the idea that we better move in there and secure the nukes before the crazies do, and what better way to make that happen than by a big nuclear theft scandal?”

  Cynthia was shaking her head during the last of this. “No. I was at the meeting. I know Morgan and I know Anspach. Morgan absolutely thinks it’s genuine and so did everyone at that meeting, with the possible exception of the DDO of the CIA. That bunch of people are as secret as it gets in this country, so if a scam is in progress it has to be a small cabal. In fact, I would’ve thought it was nothing but an al-Q provocation if I hadn’t overheard that business about Ringmaster.”

  “So what’s your theory of the plot? Say there’s no real theft. So our guys go in there, shoot up the place, and draw a blank. It’s another Iraq, and no one is going to fall for that again. I mean, we’re stupid, but not that stupid.”

  “But that’s just the point, Borden! They can’t have a fiasco. They have to find something, and that has to be what Ringmaster is about. Look, I’ll tell you how I’d do it. First, you set up an agent, someone with the skills to infiltrate a mujahideen group. The conventional wisdom is that it can’t be done, but that can’t be right or else Muslim drifters from all over the world wouldn’t be fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Christ, that gormless kid John Walker Lindh walked right into al-Qaeda a few weeks after 9/11 and no one said boo! So they set up a organization around this agent, who has all kinds of credentials that he can get hold of nuclear material. That shouldn’t be hard to fake. And these guys are waiting in some village for the delivery; they’re going to make a nuke or at minimum a dirty bomb. The inside agent leaks the location. Meanwhile, our cabal produces this scam, phony phone calls and so on, and the government panics and sends in a strike team, and of course they have to have a special unit to handle the nuclear material, and these are guys that none of the Deltas or whoever have ever seen before and they’re carrying ‘special equipment’ in sealed crates.”

  She made quotation marks with her fingers as she said special equipment.

  “They go to this village and blow up everyone, and lo and behold the special team finds nuclear material, which of course they’ve brought along with them in the sealed crates. Another triumph for the free world.”

  “But the Pakistanis will say they haven’t lost any nuclear material.”

  “Oh, please! What would anyone expect them to say? Who on earth would believe the Pakistanis when we’re showing off containers full of plutonium? And the beauty part is how covert the whole thing is. DOD, NSA, and the White House have full deniability. The president can get up there and announce with a straight face that we’ve averted a nuclear catastrophe and, by the way, the world has got to do something about Pakistan. Two days later the Indian army mobilizes on the border and U.S. missiles are retargeted.”

  Now Borden was shaking his head. “That’s pretty rich, Lam. I mean, it’s one thing to speculate outside, in the lefty press, about evil cabals, but we’re in the belly of the beast. Did anyone ever ask you to join an evil cabal? Me neither. Something like this would leak like crazy; there’d be water on the floor.”

  “Then how do you explain what I’ve learned?”

  He thought about that for a long minute. She studied his face, willing him to roll, willing him to see what she saw so clearly. At last he sighed and said, “Let’s say I go with it. What specifically did you want me to do?”

  “Use your AMICUS connections to trace any references to Ringmaster or SHOWBOAT in the CIA databases.”

  “What? That’s… for God’s sake, Lam, that’s completely out of the question. I told you before, there is no AMICUS. It’s a fucking committee! It’s all bullshit coordination to make sure the different intel agencies aren’t duplicating or stepping on one another’s jockstraps. No one is going to let me wander through the CIA database, and even if they did, what should I look for? Do you think a search for rogue operations is going to yield many hits?”

  “I didn’t mean asking for permission. You’ve been telling me for a long time that a smart-enough computer guy on the inside could find out anything that anyone in the government ever put on a computer.”

  “You want me to hack the CIA?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “You’re saying it can’t be done?”

  “Of course it can be done, in principle. I’m over there for AMICUS meetings all the time, and they write their passwords on Post-its and stick them on their desks just like we do. I know the data architecture. And it’s the government. Any operation spends money, and even a black budget has bud get codes for different operations. But, frankly, I don’t see any upside for me in this.”

  She stared at him until he dropped his eyes. He said, “What?”

  “What? You know, I always thought you had your problems, but I also thought you were a real person, not the night troll everyone else thought you were. So you cleaned up your act and got a haircut? Terrific. But when I ask you to do something that might prevent the deaths of thousands of people, including your own people, you ask me if there’s some personal advantage? I’m putting my whole life on the line here, and you want to know what’s in it for you? Well, fuck your upside and fuck you, troll!”

  She turned and headed out of his office, quickly, but not so quickly that she missed the response she expected.

  “No, wait!”

  She faced him. “What?”

  “I’ll look into it. I’m over at the Agency for a meeting early tomorr
ow. I’ll see if I can get a line into their budget system.”

  She waited a few beats and then strode over, slid easily onto his broad lap, and kissed him firmly on the mouth, a kiss just the tiniest bit south of platonic.

  “Thank you, Borden. That was a very un-troll-like decision.” She could see the sweat bubble up on his forehead.

  “My pleasure, so to speak. I hope they give us adjoining cells in Guantánamo.”

  “It won’t come to that,” she said lightly, “you’re smarter than all of them. I just want to find out what SHOWBOAT is, so I can make the case with Morgan. We’re not selling secrets to the bad guys. Besides, the whole point is to share intel across the government. We’ll be heroes if we stop this and no one will bother about the details of access protocol.”

  Borden did not respond to this; he just stared at her with the same concentration he paid to lines of code on his screen.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he replied. “Tell me, Lam, do you ever have any fun?”

  “What do you mean, fun?”

  “Oh, you know, like people do in movies or TV commercials. Happy family parties made better with adult diapers, and couples running through fields of flowers in slo-mo. Or clubbing. You know, sweaty dancing with colored lights. Do you ever do any of that?”

  “I’m a grown-up, Borden. I don’t go clubbing and my happy family consists of one unhappy person. But I’ll tell you what: if this thing comes off, I will personally find a field of flowers and run through it with you, in slo-mo.”

  “I’d like that,” he said, and turned to his screens as she left.

  Cynthia walked back to her office thinking that it had gone rather well. She had been manipulating men with an adroit combination of sexuality and anger for many years; she knew she was good at it, and in this instance she hardly considered it manipulation. It was as natural as breathing. She had great hopes for Borden and his skills.

  Some time with the headphones, then, where she found some interesting leads unrelated to the present scam, after which she composed the necessary reports and shipped them out via NSA’s secure intranet. She checked her e-mail. That was odd: not a single message today from anyone in NSA. A slow day? It happened from time to time.

  Feeling pretty pleased with herself after rolling Borden, she decided to go out for lunch. Cynthia did this several times a week and almost always at the same place, a Vietnamese restaurant located in a strip mall in Laurel, Mary land, a six-minute hop from the NSA parking lot. She took Fort Meade Road to Mary land 198, once a major north-south route along the eastern seaboard but now a continuous strip development of cheap restaurants, hot-sheet motels, used car lots, and marginal businesses selling things like secondhand batteries, videotapes, and truck parts. There was one point of historical interest on the way, however, an ugly tan eighty-unit lodging house with a mustard-colored sign out front, announcing it as the Valencia Motel. Here, during the summer of 2001, five men had stayed in room 343 and planned how to fly four passenger jet planes into American buildings. The events of 9/11, the single most devastating breach of America’s national security, had been or ga nized virtually in the shadow of the agency called National Security, and all its exquisitely sensitive instruments and magnificent computers had been powerless to stop it.

  She passed that dismal monument and pulled into a undistinguished strip that contained an Arby’s, a Firestone Tire store, a pet groomer, a mailing facility, a computer repair shop, and a restaurant called Pho Bac, which Cynthia considered one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in the Washington region, unlikely though it seemed. The patron and the waitresses all knew her; she got to keep up her Viet nam ese; she was one of the family, without having to be one of the family. The spring rolls and the pho were wonderful, and she was able to comfort herself with these simple foods, so reminiscent of a warm and happy childhood that it almost didn’t matter that she had never actually had one. It was an indulgence, one of the few she allowed herself, quite secret from anyone at work, and she had invented for the benefit of the staff at Pho Bac a wonderful Vietnamese-American family, about which she gaily chatted as she ate. The place, oddly enough, had a full bar and she occasionally treated herself to a drink, always a vodka martini, and she ordered one now.

  After the spring rolls, she pulled her laptop out of her briefcase, which was the signal for the staff to leave her alone. No private device that can record or send electronic data is allowed within the buildings of NSA, so in order to check her personal e-mail during the day Cynthia had to leave Fort Meade for a place like this or one like it. The computer store had a powerful Wi-Fi signal and she had arranged with them, for a small fee, to use it whenever she was in the area. She logged on, found a note from someone she knew in school, answered it briefly, and deleted another message from a head-hunting firm looking for translators. She got a few of these every week. The rest of the inbox was junk mail-drugstores, sexual aids, a scam that asked her to contact a Swiss bank about her account-and two more of those peculiar encrypted messages. She’d received half a dozen of these in the past week, clearly from someone who had mistaken her for another person, or was it the back-wash of another more obscure computer scam? She deleted all of it.

  After lunch she went to the mail center and used her key to open the mailbox she kept there. It was usually stuffed with catalogs and magazines and mail-order merchandise. Cynthia was a big Internet shopper, and she lived in an apartment building where the postman or UPS guy had to leave packages on the lobby floor, from which they would occasionally disappear. Adams-Morgan was a neighborhood where such things still occasionally happened, hence this mailbox convenient to work.

  She opened the box and was astonished to find it empty. It was never empty. She went to the clerk at the desk, a large tan woman with beads in her hair, and asked her if there had perhaps been some mistake. Perhaps the label with her name on it on the inside of the mailbox had come loose? The clerk checked and said it was right where it should be. But there was something wrong. The woman, usually cheerful and willing, often too willing, to chat and pass the time of day, was reserved, close-faced, avoiding Cynthia’s eye. Had the woman stolen something? Cynthia dismissed this thought as unworthy, unlikely. She’d used the place for years without a problem.

  Back at NSA, as she left her car, another car pulled into a nearby slot. Two men in suits got out, and as Cynthia walked by them she smiled and nodded in a friendly way. There was no response from the men; their faces stayed blank, as if they were looking at a telephone pole or a dog. Since passing through puberty Cynthia had seldom experienced this response to a social smile directed at a man, and it disturbed her. Was there something wrong with her face, cilantro on the teeth? When she returned to her office she checked herself out in a hand mirror. No, the same attractive face stared out at her but with worried eyes.

  No, this was stupid; it was stupid to attribute meaning to a set of coincidences. She checked her office e-mail again and found a couple of routine circulars from administration, one about the schedule for annual evaluations and the other relating to changes in reimbursement for mileage in private vehicles. Ah, she still existed! She put the day’s slight oddities out of mind and returned to her headphones and the dull conversations that might or might not be terror talk. Some were simple duds, people mouthing off about America or the Jews. These she erased with a few keystrokes. Even the vast storage facilities of NSA could not contain the far vaster flux of the intake. A few that seemed to fit certain predesignated patterns she saved in various files. Across the breadth of the great ear of the agency, scores of others were doing the same task, searching for patterns, specific words, the output of certain SIM cards, in hopes that significance might emerge from the buzz. Tedious work: she understood that it was necessary, but she hoped she would not, personally, be doing it much longer.

  It was just after three when, with an almost physical shock, she heard it, a familiar voice, one she’d listened to dozens of times, the ano
nymous man who was pretending to be the nuclear engineer, Jafar Baig Qasir. Quickly she checked the log file. The call had been placed from Kahuta at 10:46 A.M the previous morning, near midnight on the East Coast of the United States. Both parties were speaking Urdu, and she did not recognize the other one, who was in Lahore. She listened to it again:

  KAHUTA: Peace, brother. Any news?

  LAHORE: Peace to you, brother. Yes, the best. The products are completed and ready to ship. The courier just arrived from Paidara.

  KAHUTA: When will they leave Paidara?

  LAHORE: Very soon, not more than a day or two, God willing. The trucks are moving as we speak.

  KAHUTA: Wonderful! I would not like to be in Tel Aviv or New York next month. I assume the money has been distributed.

  LAHORE: Yes, I made the wire transfers myself. It is all done, and soon the whole world will know it. Death to America!

  KAHUTA: And to Israel! God is great!

  LAHORE: God is great! God be with you, brother.

  KAHUTA: And with you.

  Cynthia felt her belly roll and had to take several deep breaths. This was insane, patently false, but the GEARSHIFT people would never stop to ask why men who had stolen weapons-grade nuclear material would reveal the location of their bomb factory over a cell phone. They’d bite so hard the hook would never work loose, the elite troops would go on full alert, the planes would spin up their engines on some midnight runway, and the invasion of Pakistan would be under way. Almost without volition her fingers flew to certain keys and the message disappeared. She knew it would reside in backup for thirty days and then be purged, but she didn’t care. This whole thing would be over far sooner than that.

  Could anyone else have seen or heard it? She checked the machine translation files. There it was, a little crude, as ever, but the gist was clear and the place-name Paidara hung there on the screen, the hook’s juicy worm. But she was the chief translator and had certain privileges on the system. She had the authority to correct certain critical translations before they were distributed. It was necessary to log in to the system and leave her fingerprints on the changes she now made, but no one would notice that. She did it all the time. When she was done, the place-name was gone and the conversation made as anodyne as possible. Maybe bad guys were shifting money around, so what?