There was a knock at Dr. Omar’s door. A young man with a scraggly beard peered into the room. His name was Tahir and he was a doctoral candidate under Dr. Omar’s supervision. His thesis topic was promising: “Traffic Analysis for Network Security using Streaming Algorithms and Learning Theory.” When it was completed, the army would probably decide to classify it, and then Tahir would be stuck, but for now he could dream.
“Excuse me, professor, I am sorry to bother you,” said the young man. He looked like he hadn’t eaten or slept in a week.
“Come in, Tahir,” said the professor, taking the student’s hand and pulling him gently into the room. “It is office hours. You are not bothering me. I belong to you today. What is it that you want?”
“I was wondering, Doctor, if you had heard from Stanford or Caltech?”
Dr. Omar had contacts in the computer-science faculties of both those schools, from his own days as prodigy in computer security. Tahir had asked for his help in arranging a postdoctoral fellowship at one of the California schools.
“I did talk to them, but I am afraid it is not good news. They cannot take you next year. They have already made commitments to people with similar research topics. Koi baat nahin, I tell you. Never mind. There will be other chances to study abroad. The university has many exchanges with China now.”
The young man shook his head sorrowfully. He did not want to go to China, but to the United States.
“What about Iowa State?” the student asked. “Or the University of Central Florida?” The National University of Science and Technology had official links with both those schools, too.
Dr. Omar laughed at the thought of little Tahir, scrawny as a she-goat, trying to make his way in the wilds of Orlando.
“We’ll try,” he said. “I don’t know anyone at either place, but I will send the abstract of your dissertation with a nice note, and you never know.”
“Thank you, professor.” The graduate student gave a little bow and backed out of the room, as if he were leaving an audience with a medieval prince.
Dr. Omar smiled as Tahir was leaving. They all wanted to go to America, these boys, even with the visa problems and the expense and everything else. The professor could understand it well enough. He had been much the same at that age, wanting to escape a world where you were bound to live with your mother until you had found a wife, who then behaved as if she were your mother, too.
Dr. Omar did not have that problem now, though it gave him no comfort. He had lost his mother nearly two years before, along with most other members of his family, and the memory was as bitter to him as if it were poison. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, the world went white again. He did not talk about it, ever, and few people even knew of it. He had one surviving sister, who had been away with her own family on that terrible day. She lived in Peshawar, where Dr. Omar visited her occasionally and sent her money to help pay for her children’s schooling.
The professor went back to his research, waiting for the next earnest student to knock at the door. His main project these days, at least officially, was in something known as “computational neuroscience,” which focused on the algorithms of the human brain. It was hopeful and uplifting, the idea that computers could mimic the processes that took place in threads of neurons, and in that sense it was a relief from the other work that Dr. Omar hid from everyone. He had told his contacts at the Military College of Signals in Rawalpindi, who reviewed his work, that computational neuroscience was the future of warfare, because it would someday drive robots. They liked that, and approved a handsome grant.
Dr. Omar kept his hand in computer security, too, to make everyone happy. He wrote occasional papers, and did consulting abroad, and gave lectures in Rawalpindi at the MCS when they asked. His original work as a graduate student had been in a specialty known as “pseudo-randomness,” a technique that used algorithmic techniques to produce numbers that were indistinguishable, in a technical sense, from random values. Dr. Omar had always been fascinated by numbers, ever since he was a little boy in Makeen when the solutions to number puzzles used to light up in his head like the display on a carnival arcade.
It had turned out that this topic of “pseudo-randomness” was a very hot one when Dr. Omar had gotten his doctorate in the late 1990s. A team at Stanford was doing similar work, and they had invited Dr. Omar to give a paper on his research. That was how he had met the Californians, and a lot of other people, too. The visiting analysts sitting in the back of the lecture hall had studied the Pakistani’s formulas, and found uses for them that were far beyond what the young man had imagined.
Omar al-Wazir, nicknamed “the Waz” by an Indian friend he met that summer, stayed in Palo Alto for a month. He lived in a suite in the graduate student housing behind the law school, but he spent most of his time in the computer science library in the Math Wing of Memorial Hall.
When Omar went to Peet’s Coffee & Tea nearby, the California girls often tried to pick him up. He was tall and exotic-looking, and he had the endearing manner, even then, of a young professor. A girl named Debbie finally succeeded in taking Omar home to bed. She lived in a big California ranch house on Page Mill Road. She had the biggest breasts Omar had ever seen or could imagine. They made love every day after that until it was time for him to fly home. She said she would write, but she never did; he was a summer romance.
Omar made many other friends that month in Palo Alto, who did stay in touch and continued to ask about his research. The Pakistani authorities queried him when he returned home, but they were proud of him, too. He did some consulting for the government, and as he began to be invited to conferences abroad, he always reported back on them—not all the details, and not every conference, but enough to keep everyone satisfied. Because of his tribal upbringing and his gentle ways, Omar al-Wazir was regarded as a man above reproach.
There had been a time several years ago, before the disaster in Makeen, when the Inter-Services Intelligence had invited him—commanded him, in fact—to pay them a visit in Aabpara. They were summoning a lot of professors in those days.
He was quizzed by an unpleasant man who called himself Major Nadeem. This interrogator took him through all the byways of his life.
“Why did you go to Cadet College at Razmak?” the major had asked.
“My father sent me. He said I would be useless as a hunter or a fighter, because I was always thinking about numbers. Don’t ask me how, but I knew which ones were primes and which ones were divisible by nine, or twenty-seven, or one hundred twelve. My father decided it was a gift, although a strange one. He said I should go to a real school. Here, you can call him and ask him.”
Dr. Omar had handed the major his cell phone.
His father was still alive then, a craggy old man trying to survive in a South Waziristan that was becoming, more each day, a shooting gallery.
The major shook his head. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to an old Pashtun grandfather living among the rocks.
“What did you do at Razmak?” the major had demanded.
“I studied math and engineering. I won all the prizes there, two years before I was supposed to, so they got me a scholarship to study at the University of Peshawar, where they had a computer science department. I lived in one of the hostels and joined the Khyber Islamic Culture Society. You can check.”
“Did you know any Americans then?”
“No. I wanted to. I had a picture on my wall of Bill Gates when he was young. He looked no better or smarter than any of the Pashtun boys in the hostel. We all wanted to be like him.”
The major nodded. Bill Gates was acceptable. He asked about the Stanford trip. Who had been interested in the research?
“So many people, I did not know them all. They studied my work. They asked me questions. I told the ISI about it when I got home. A major like you, he was. You can check.”
The major did not want to make more work for himself. And it was true, the story as it had been narrated and underst
ood was all in the files.
“Why did you go back to America?” he demanded, looking at a sheet of paper.
“I was invited to present a paper at a conference that was cosponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It was a great honor for me, and for my university. You can ask them.”
He held out his cell phone again, so that Major Nadeem could make a call to verify, but the major shook his head.
They spent several more hours like this, going through the major episodes of Dr. Omar’s career. When they came to his most recent work on computer-security algorithms, Dr. Omar apologized that he could not talk about this work in any detail because it had been classified as “top secret” by the Pakistani military.
The major found nothing of interest. Dr. Omar was very careful, then and always. The major asked him to sign a paper, and to report any suspicious contacts, and Dr. Omar assured him that he would. The Pakistani authorities never came after him again. That was three years before his world went white.
Omar al-Wazir had multiple binary identities, it could be said. He was a Pakistani but also, in some sense, a man tied to the West. He was a Pashtun from the raw tribal area of South Waziristan, but he was also a modern man. He was a secular scientist and also a Muslim, if not quite a believer. His loyalties might indeed have been confused before the events of nearly two years ago, but not now.
Sometimes Dr. Omar grounded himself by recalling the spirit of his father, Haji Mohammed. He remembered the old man shaking his head when Omar took wobbly practice shots with an Enfield rifle, missing the target nearly every time. The look on the father’s face asked: How can this be my oldest son, this boy who cannot shoot? But Haji Mohammed had taught him the code of manhood, just the same.
Omar had learned the catechism from his father: Wars begin with badal, an assault on a man’s honor and self-respect. A proud man must avenge this insult, measure for measure, or he would suffer the greatest shame. That was why there were ceaseless wars in the tribal areas, Haji Mohammed had explained. It was the Nang-e-Pashto, the tribal code of honor, which required people to seek vengeance for the injustices inflicted by their cousins, neighbors, rival tribes, foreign invaders. A man would vow to sleep on the ground, or eat with his left hand only, until he had taken revenge, and only then would he let himself relax.
“To my mind death is better than life, when life can no longer be held with honor,” Haji Mohammed had said one night after a long talk under the stars.
“Please, Father,” Omar had implored, thinking that the old man might put a gun to his son’s head at that very moment. But Haji Mohammed had laughed and explained that he was just quoting a passage from Khushal Khan Khattak, the warrior poet of the seventeenth century, and that it was the same now and always.
This was a code that understood war, but it had been tested by the great wars that shook the red-rock hills like a long, echoing chain of explosions.
When Omar was a little boy, the Russians were still over the border and his town was a staging ground for the Afghan holy warriors. Omar remembered how they would parade through town with the guns they had received from the Americans and their Pakistani agents. When the Russians finally left, the holy warriors became ordinary warlords and it was a world of anarchy. Then when Omar was a teenager, there were the fierce young men who called themselves Talibs and demanded justice. They marched through Makeen, too, on their way in and out of Khowst and Kandahar.
But all this was just a prelude to the big war that had come after Omar had left home to pursue his studies—when Al-Qaeda came to South Waziristan with its money, and then the Americans came after them, and brought all the hell there is on earth. Dr. Omar had wondered then if he should return home, but he knew that was impossible. He had pleaded with his mother and father to leave, but that was impossible, too. They were rooted in the rocky soil like two prickly cactus bushes.
Omar had thought for a time that he could end the war if he helped make Al-Qaeda go away, so that the Americans would go away, too. But that was beyond his powers.
There was a shadow that followed him, as it follows every Pashtun man, and that was shame. It was not enough to be successful; what was essential was to be an honorable man. That was why he had gone home two years before, to see if he could escape the shadow. But another shadow, a shame that was shameless, had darkened his world.
Omar had always wondered what he would do if something bad happened to his parents. And then, on that terrible day, he had discovered the answer.
Dr. Omar waited for more of his graduate students, but none came by for the rest of the morning. He locked the door of his office and went to the computer lab, a squat two-story building a hundred yards away, where he preferred to do his communications for reasons of concealment. He had a number of different email accounts that he visited and, it might be said, a number of different personalities that inhabited these electronic spaces.
Most times, Omar felt that he was living behind a mask. But oddly, when he did this work under a variety of assumed names, he felt something close to peace.
15
STUDIO CITY, CALIFORNIA
Sophie Marx was numb from fatigue when she returned from Dubai. She hadn’t slept well on the outward leg because of worries about the meeting ahead. She had hoped to collapse into her seat on the way home, but she slept only fitfully: Her body was too heavy for slumber, and her mind was too hot. She had taken on responsibility, on behalf of Gertz and the whole team, for investigating the disappearance of a colleague. But she was coming home empty-handed. Her theory had been wrong. She was still baffled about how Howard Egan’s cover had been broken, and she didn’t know who else in her organization might be vulnerable. It was an oppressive sense of failing in an assignment where she had badly wanted to do well.
She tossed back and forth on the couchette of the Emirates jet, trying to get comfortable. But sleep didn’t come, and she thought about ways she could answer her questions. Part of her problem, she concluded after many hours, was that she didn’t understand the context for these events: Why was Egan in Pakistan in the first place? Why was he paying money to tribal emirs? What was the mission for which Gertz had risked this man’s life?
Marx went to the office, tired as she was, after a brief stop at home to shower and change. She wanted to begin querying the files to see if she could answer these questions. Jeff Gertz was away on one of his mystery trips, which made it easier. She figured that she didn’t have to ask his permission to pull the operational files, because he had already granted it.
The Hit Parade’s most sensitive information was not in the computer system, but kept in hard copy only, in a large room called “the Vault” on the ninth floor. The keeper of this archaic library was a retired military officer who had formerly worked for the National Security Agency’s military cryptology branch, known as the Central Security Service. He was a fussy man who had helped protect some of the country’s biggest secrets for several decades. He was always called “the Colonel,” even though he had retired from active duty ten years before.
Marx took the elevator to the ninth floor and walked to the colonel’s lair. The door was closed and he didn’t answer at first, perhaps hoping that the visitor would go away. She knocked again, harder, and this time the door opened and out stepped the Colonel. He was a short, balding man, little taller than Marx herself, with a florid face and a bulbous nose. His actual name was Samuel Sinkler, but people rarely used it; he preferred rank only.
“Sorry to disturb you, Colonel, but I need to look at the Pakistan operations files.”
She showed him her badge.
“Nope,” he answered. “Sorry, you can’t have them.”
“But Mr. Gertz personally authorized me to look at all files I needed to investigate the Howard Egan case.”
“He didn’t tell me that.” The Colonel had a thin smile. He liked saying no.
Marx shook her head. She was tired and didn’t like being jerked around.
<
br /> “I need those files, Colonel. I can’t do my work without them.”
“That’s not my problem, miss. You could get Mr. Gertz, but he isn’t here.” He smiled again.
She pondered what to do. He obviously expected her to give up if he said no often enough.
“I’m not leaving until I see those files. Will you give me access if Steve Rossetti says it’s okay?”
“That’s a hypothetical,” said the Colonel.
She picked up a phone on the nearest desk and dialed Rossetti’s extension.
“Steve, it’s Sophie. I’m back from Dubai and I have an emergency. I need access to some files on the ninth floor and Colonel Sinkler says he needs someone’s permission. Can you come up now?”
There was a pause, while Rossetti temporized on the other end. He didn’t like making decisions.
“I really need help now, Steve,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll have to call Jeff. He won’t be pleased, but I have no choice.”
That did it. Rossetti arrived five minutes later and personally signed the necessary piece of paper for the Colonel. Neither man was happy.
“Thanks, gents,” she said breezily. The Colonel marched her back to the Vault and unlocked the steel door, while Rossetti retreated to his office.
It was cold in the stacks. The Colonel was one of those men who believed that people worked more efficiently at lower temperatures. Marx was wearing a long-sleeved blouse, but she was shivering after thirty minutes. She descended to her office and returned with a cardigan sweater, which she buttoned to the neck. It was dark among the racks and cabinets, so she asked the Colonel for a flashlight, which he grudgingly provided. He seemed to think that darkness, too, was part of good security.
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