“I practically am. I was in the States nearly as long as you. I was educated there, Case Western and Berkeley.”
“How? The last time I saw you, you were a Pashtun mujahid. How in hell did you get a college education?”
“A Ph.D., actually.”
“And you never tried to contact me in all those years?”
Wazir looked a little embarrassed at this and asks Sonia, “Can I tell him?”
“That’s up to you, Wazir,” she says. “I’m retired.”
“Retired from what?” asks Theo. Now the confusion on his face gels, with an angry flush, a knotting of the brows. “Wazir, what is she talking about? What in hell is going on?”
Wazir leans back in his chair and takes a deep breath, lets it flow out.
“Well, let’s see-where to start? Let’s start with your mother.”
He makes a rotating motion with his fingers.
“The axis, the source of it all. Sonia’s the reason I got an education in America. She pulled me out of the jihad just like she pulled you, but in my case I did a little better in school than you did. I can see you’re about to ask why she did such a thing. Why me? Well, I’m smart, she knew that from Aitchison College and our many conversations up on the roof at your grandfather’s house, and she needed a smart Pashtun with good mujahideen credentials.”
“I don’t understand,” says Theo.
Wazir looks at Sonia, eyebrows elevated in surprise. “You never told him?”
She shakes her head.
“Told me what?”
After a considerate pause, Wazir answers, “Your mother has been an asset of the Central Intelligence Agency for a very long time, and she’s been involved in a very deep Agency game, probably the deepest it has ever played.”
“That’s crazy,” Theo says. “Sonia’s not a CIA agent.”
“Asset. There’s a difference. Think about it for a minute, Theo. In 1973, Sonia Laghari probably knew more about Soviet Central Asia than any other American. She was an embarrassment to the KGB. Don’t you think the CIA would’ve been interested in her? And they were. An agent approached her and she turned him down: oh, no, she was not going to spy for America. Then, what happened to your grandfather happened, and we did what we did. As I’m sure you know, she thought you were dead too, and when she found out you weren’t, it was nearly as bad, because you were lost in the jihad. You, her last child; she was desperate to get you back. And they knew this. They contacted her in Zurich again, and this time she agreed to do anything they asked her to do if only they would get you out. They gave her a contact in Peshawar, and he arranged for you to be snatched and taken to America. So then it was time for the payoff, and the payoff was me.”
“Why did they want you?” Theo asks. “They were funding the jihad all along, they had access to all the leaders, and you were just a foot soldier.”
“Yes, then I was, but I was also young. I could be-how should I say it?-groomed for greater things.”
“I don’t understand. Are you saying the CIA educated you? For what, to spy on the jihad?”
“Not exactly. Let me give you a hint. My B.S. is in physics, and my doctorate is in nuclear engineering. My thesis was on new computational approaches to the analysis of nuclear explosions. The research was paid for by the Department of Energy, the people who manufacture nuclear weapons.”
Sonia is silent, watching her son’s face as he thinks this through. She feels a wave of shame, another blast of her failed-mother grief, and also compassion for what she has allowed to happen to him. He is not stupid, her boy, but neither is he Wazir; no, she has not groomed him.
At last Theo says, “You’re a Trojan horse.”
This provokes another sunny smile on the handsome face. “Exactly! I am Abu Lais, the great hope of the whole jihad to lay hands on nuclear weapons. Isn’t that a joke?”
“Yeah, it’s hilarious,” says Theo, unsmiling.
Wazir does not notice this, his grin grows broader. “Yes, and the kind of joke only a Pashtun can really appreciate: Pashtunistan, the Brillo pad of intersecting betrayals.”
“Why you?” Theo demands. “Why do you get this terrific education, courtesy of Uncle Sam?”
“As I said, it’s a long story,” Wazir says, not smiling now.
“We got time,” says Theo. “I like long stories.” He unslings the AK, props it against the wall, sits down on the charpoy. Sonia sits next to him.
“Theo… the gun,” she says. “I think you can put it away, yes?”
He looks at the Stechkin in his hand, realizes he has been gesturing with it, gives her a quick annoyed look, replaces the pistol in its holster, and returns his attention to Wazir.
“Okay, brother,” says Wazir. “So, it’s 1987, the jihad is winding down, and the CIA is thick in Afghanistan. And what do they see? This Soviet threat they’ve been working against for their whole lives is crap. The great Red Army can’t even provide bullets and food for its troops. The idea that this army could attack Europe or anywhere else against the wishes of the U.S. military is revealed as nonsense, Chad with rockets, and all that. So they start asking, Where’s the next enemy? And what do they see? They see the jihad, the movement they helped to create, and at the center of this movement is a man they have built up into a great leader, and what a surprise! They find this great leader has no love for America; in fact he sees that America, far more than Russia, is the reason the Muslims are groaning under oppression. America is the prop for the Saudis, for the Egyptians-”
“Bin Laden,” says Theo.
“Yes. And the CIA tells this to Washington, but Washington doesn’t listen, communism has always been the enemy and always will be the enemy, and if, for some reason, communism falls, there will be an era of endless peace; democracy and capitalism will spread throughout the world, the end of history, and so forth. But one small group of operatives had their eyes open. They’d read the books bin Laden read-Sayyid Qutb and others in the same vein-and they understood that his goals were the destruction of the apostate regimes, the recovery of Palestine, and the re-creation of a caliphate that would unite the entire umma under one political roof. Well, of course this is ridiculous on the face of it-the Prophet, peace be upon him, was hardly dead before the umma fell apart into factions, where it has remained to this day. But uniting the world under a supposed Aryan master race was ridiculous, and the dictatorship of the proletariat was ridiculous too, yet the world paid dearly in blood for these two absurdities, and the same could happen again.”
“Get to the fucking point, Wazir,” says Theo. Sonia feels the atmosphere in the room changing, growing more tense. She can feel the anger pouring off her son like waves of heat from a stove; she has never seen this part of Theo before-he has always been careful to shield her from it, but not now-now she really understands that her boy kills people for a living.
Wazir makes an acquiescent gesture. “All right. Very simply: In 1987 elements in the CIA conceived a plan to recruit a mujahid and train him in the United States as an expert on nuclear weapons, so that if the jihad ever came close to getting nuclear material, they would have someone on the inside, a sleeper, as they say. The operation was codenamed SHOWBOAT and it was secret beyond secret, so secret that this person had to be recruited outside normal CIA channels. Not only the recruit, but the recruiter had to be perfectly secure. So they thought of your mother, who famously had turned down the CIA’s overtures. A man named Harry Anspach, who had been deeply involved in the Russian jihad, had noticed a young warrior named Kakay Ghazan, and done the usual background check on him. Anspach was making a list of the future leaders of the jihad, should it ever turn against its sponsors, and in the course of this he was surprised to find the connection between you and your mother. I believe he thought you might be a candidate for his sleeper. He had your mother contacted in Zurich with the news that you were still alive and that Harry Anspach in Peshawar would be willing to help her get you out of Afghanistan, for a price. She immediately left
for Peshawar, with the results you know. You were taken and returned to America,”
“But they didn’t make me the sleeper,” says Theo.
“No. I’m afraid your mother had another candidate for that role. I’m sorry, my brother, but you would not have been suitable. As I recall it, you were having problems with your studies at the age of ten. So I was recruited instead, and my existence is secret from all but a tiny handful of people. I am not on any list of assets, and my handler is not a CIA agent. My handler is codenamed Ringmaster, and I believe you can guess who she is.”
Here he glances at Sonia and goes on, “Anspach understood the doomsday scenario was that al-Qaeda might get hold of nuclear material. India had exploded a nuclear weapon in 1974, and everyone knew Pakistan was working on one. Pakistan is a Muslim nation full of people sympathetic to the jihad. It was only a matter of time before doomsday arrived. So when the jihad gets hold of some plutonium or whatever, what do they do with it? You can’t make a nuclear device in your kitchen like you do a roadside bomb. You need an expert, with excellent mujahideen credentials, who has kept contact with the movement throughout his education and who has been allowed to dig into classified material, despite those connections, protected of course by Anspach and his friends. AlQaeda needed someone like Abu Lais, and here he is, finished and packaged by the CIA. Naturally, such a figure is close to the leadership of al-Qaeda, but he doesn’t betray them, not even for 9/11 does he betray them; oh, no, he is far too valuable. He waits for the moment when the jihad obtains nuclear material. Yes, Anspach is a farseeing man, Theo, farseeing and very covert. And here we all are.”
The confusion is back on Theo’s face, Sonia observes. He says, “But there isn’t any nuclear material.”
There is a silence now, and Wazir takes a long moment before responding. “Why would you think that, Theo?”
“Because I invented the whole thing. It’s a scam. We needed a serious effort to rescue my mother, and the only way the U.S. was going to send a competent force into Pakistan was if they thought Pakistani weapons-grade uranium had gone missing. Farid and the family generated a set of fake conversations to convince NSA that there’d been a theft.” He turns to his mother. “I had to do something. America wasn’t going to try to rescue you, and the ISI was in with the kidnappers. I sent another phony message the other day saying the bomb was here in Paidara. I have a radio. In a minute I’m going to make a call saying that I’ve located the nuke and the specials will come in and secure the area and that’ll be it.”
“Oh, Theo!” cries Sonia.
“What?” he says, and sees that Wazir is looking at him with a peculiar expression on his face: amazement, dismay, the kind of look one uses with madmen on the street.
“If true, that’s actually quite amusing,” Wazir says. “Because, you know, there was a theft. I have seventy-five kilograms of enriched uranium. And I made it into bombs.”
“He’s joking,” Sonia says, looking at her son, wrenching a false smile onto her face.
“Are you?” Theo asks. He draws his terrible pistol and rises, changing his position, moving slightly on the charpoy so that his mother is not blocking a potential shot at Wazir.
Wazir seems unconcerned. “Of course not. Do you want to see one? I have it here.”
He goes to the corner of the room, draws aside the tarp, and reveals a packing case. Theo’s pistol comes up to cover him.
From the packing case Wazir takes a large stainless steel box, the kind mechanics use to store their valuable tools. It is obviously quite heavy, and Wazir has to strain at the handle with both hands to lift it out onto the table. He opens it with a key.
Theo rises and looks inside the box. It contains a steel cylinder eighteen inches wide by about thirty long that fills nearly the whole of the interior. The rest of the space is taken up by a small green plastic container the size of a lunch box, on top of which is a keypad and several small LED lights.
“It’s based on the W-82/XM-785 artillery shell from the sixties,” Wazir says, “but it’s a little more advanced. My own design, really. Fifteen kilograms of fissionable material, beryllium reflector, weighs less than a hundred pounds. It’s a linear implosion device. The fissile material is formed into an egg shape and it’s surrounded by a cylinder of high explosive rigged for simultaneous detonation at each end. An inert wave-shaper channels the shock wave so as to compress the egg into a spheroid to achieve supercriticality. The calculated yield, best case, would be over two kilotons, but I’d be happy with one point five or even one. Of course I haven’t tested it, but the math is right and the people I used for the assembly were all Dara artisans. I figured anyone who could manufacture a perfect working replica of a Beretta nine-millimeter out of an old crankshaft could do the job. The firing sequence runs off IGBT transistors rather than krytron tubes, not as efficient but a lot more available. I had the boards custom made in Malaysia and wrote the software myself. This is one of six.”
He smiles like a schoolboy who has given the right answer. Then he sees that Theo is pointing the pistol at him and he frowns a little.
“Why are you pointing that at me, Theo?” he asks.
“Why? Fuck it, Wazir, you’re my brother, but I’m not going to let you blow up an American city with that thing.”
Wazir looks stunned; he gapes. “An American city? Why on earth would I do such a thing? That’s crazy!”
“Thank you. That’s a good description of al-Qaeda.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Theo! There’s no such thing as al-Qaeda. Was there such a thing as the jihad? You were there. It’s just different factions. Sometimes they cooperate; sometimes they fight. Some of them are maniacs; some of them are perfectly reasonable people trying to fix an intolerable situation, which is the oppression and humiliation of the umma. Sure there are some who’d love to destroy New York or Tel Aviv, but I’d be a maniac myself if I listened to them. You saw what happened when those idiots knocked down two office buildings on 9/11. Can you imagine what America would do, what Israel would do, if we blew up one of their cities? They have thousands of nuclear missiles. They’d massacre every Muslim in the world.”
“So what are you going to do with them?”
Sonia says, “He’s going to blow up Ras Tanura.”
“What?” says Theo.
“It’s the Saudi oil terminal. Ten percent of the world’s oil supply flows through it,” she says.
“Yes,” says Wazir, “and we will also take out the Khor-el-Amaya terminal in Iraq and Kharg Island in Iran. The other bombs will go to the giant Saudi fields, Ghawar and either Khurais or Manita, I haven’t decided. All at once, of course. The world oil supply will be reduced for a period of several years by about forty percent. Yes, they can rebuild, but it’s going to be hard to do in radiation suits in eighty centigrade heat.”
Theo looks at his mother, remembering her television interview.
“This was your idea.”
“I was speaking theoretically,” she says. “I had no idea he was going to put it into actual practice. He’s going to kill thousands of people. Do you think I wanted that?”
Theo realizes that his gun is pointing at her and he moves it away. He says, “Mother, just once I wish you’d tell me the truth.”
“That is the truth,” she says. “Ask him.”
Theo turns to Wazir. “Well?”
“Does it matter?” Wazir says. “Really? Ideas cause events. That’s the story of the twentieth century. Do you think that the theoretical anti-Semites, respectable people all of them, all the intellectual race theorists, ever imagined Auschwitz? Or earnest European communists ever imagined the Gulag or Katyn Forest? What did I learn from her in all those years, Theo, when she was more my mother than she was yours? That oil is the curse of the umma; that it is inherently corrupting, worse than slavery; that Wahabi puritanism funded by oil is essentially a fraud, a fig leaf the Saudis use to salve their consciences while they live like emperors; that what the umma needs more tha
n anything is to be left alone to find its way back to God; and that it will never be left alone as long as the oil flows smoothly out of the terminals. So that’s one reason why I am going to turn off the taps.”
“What’s the other reason?” asks Theo, after a pause.
Wazir’s face changes, and Sonia sees the mujahid boy flash out again, a startling resurrection, and in thick Pashto he says, “Revenge, of course. I am a Pashtun, after all.”
“Revenge for what?”
“For everything!” cries Wazir. “Against being manipulated. Against being treated like a tool. Against the arrogance that believed I could be treated so. Against the arrogance that allows a tenth of the world to live in peace, comfort, and security, ignoring the miseries of the rest. Against the idea of collateral damage. Against the lazy stupidity of the Americans and the diligent hypocrisy of the oil sheikhs. That world has to be smashed. It can’t go on. But I am only one man and that’s all I could think of. Is that enough?”
“It’s enough,” says Theo. “But I can’t let you do it, brother.”
“Why not? Don’t you feel the same way?”
“It doesn’t matter what I feel. I’m a soldier and you’re an enemy. It’s an honor thing. Where are the other bombs?”
“What if I don’t tell you? Will you torture me?”
“Don’t be stupid, Wazir!”
“She knows,” says Wazir, pointing at Sonia. “She helped me set up the networks under the noses of her CIA masters, and it was easy because none of them could imagine blowback on this scale. You could torture her as well.”
Theo looks at his mother, and she thinks it is the same look he wore when he was a little boy and she came home from her long journeys, a look that said, Why did you leave me? What did I do wrong? A look that is a window into a heart that can never be healed.
“Is he right, Mom?” Theo asks. “Is he telling the truth?”
She says, “Why did you come, Theo? You’re not supposed to be involved in this.”
“Well, I’m sure as hell involved now. So tell me! He’s blowing smoke, isn’t he? I get the CIA connection, I get the whole Trojan horse thing. But you didn’t know about the bombs, did you? You didn’t help him plan this?”
The Good Son Page 44