The Good Son (23 page)

Or maybe she was losing it. She attached the source header, the sound file, and her translation to an e-mail and zapped it off to Ernie Lotz:
READ THIS AND LET’S TALK
.

She put the headphones back on and returned to the stolen etheric whispers. Even with the most sophisticated electronic filtering, there was still an enormous amount of dross to get past. A lot of people in South Asia were talking about shipments, many of which were illegal but were of no interest to NSA or to her. The listening at this point was automatic, and her mind was free to drift above the chatter. As she often did, she thought about her career and where it was going. N Section was a fine place to learn the ropes, but it was a dead end. Vital, yes, because obviously terrorists could not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, but it was vital in the way that night watchmen were vital. You didn’t want the factory robbed or burned down, but you also were not going to offer the guy with the square badge a seat on the board. No, N was a springboard to something better, a wider scope. . . .

Something touched her shoulder and she yelped, tore the headset off, and spun around in her chair.

“Jesus, Ernie! Don’t come in and
touch
me when I’m listening!”

“Sorry,” he said, “but you have to see this.” He handed her a piece of paper.

“Did you get my message?” she asked.

“Yeah, but that’s nothing compared to this.”

It was a few lines of typescript in English.

“Who translated this?”

“No one. It was English in the original. Read it!”

She did.

MAN
: Hello, it’s me. Don’t be angry, my dear, but I have to tell you I will not be home to night.
WOMAN
: What? Are you mad? To night is the party for Shira and the Sajjids.
MAN
: I am sorry, my love, but it is quite impossible. We have an emergency at work.
WOMAN
: God help us! Not the reactor?
MAN
: No, thank God. But it is almost as bad.
WOMAN
: What then? What is more important than your daughter’s happiness?
MAN
: I can’t tell you. It is a security issue.
WOMAN
: Before God, if you do not give me a proper explanation I will never speak to you again. This is the most outrageous thing I ever heard of. The Sajjids will think it is an intentional insult.
MAN
: Be calm, for God’s sake! Look I may be able to get away, we may find the blasted stuff in the wrong place, but I must be here to supervise.
WOMAN
: What stuff? What are you talking about?
MAN
: I am talking about thirty-three kilograms of ninety-four percent enriched uranium that has gone missing.
WOMAN
: Thirty-three kilograms? Is it that valuable?
MAN
: Not as such, but it is enough to manufacture several nuclear weapons, and we must find it. If we don’t, I could conceivably be sacked.
WOMAN
: Oh, God protect us!

“What’s the source here? Who are these people?” she asked.

“The source tap is from a cell phone out of Kahuta belonging to Jafar Baig Qasir. I looked him up in the database. He’s a nuclear engineer who works at Kahuta and lives in Lahore. He’s one of the people in charge of refining and casting weapons-grade uranium. From the context, I assume he’s talking to his wife.”

“Why are they speaking English?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Cynthia,” replied Lotz, a hint of annoyance in his voice. “Why shouldn’t they? A lot of upper-class Pakistanis use English as their second language.”

“Yes, but not on intimate family subjects to their wives. Besides that, don’t you notice anything fishy about the conversation?”

“No. What do you mean?

“It has the same phony tone as the one from the supposed trucker. Did you listen to that one?”

“Yeah, it sounded fine to me, and it just adds to the case. Cynthia, I don’t understand why you’re—”

“And on top of that, don’t you think it’s funny that a senior scientist should talk to his wife on an open cell-phone line about something that should be the most top secret thing that ever happened: a theft of weapons-grade uranium? He makes it sound like a fender bender or a coffee spill on his pants. What’s the traffic like from Pakistani security?”

Lotz said, “I haven’t checked it recently. I wanted you to see this right away.”

“Well, check it. They should be running around like chickens with their heads cut off if this is real.”

“I will, but don’t you think we should get Morgan in on this?”

“No, I don’t. The last thing we need is a premature orgasm, and I can tell he’s ready to pop.”

“You would know,” said Lotz, half under his breath. She didn’t call him on it, and he left her office. Yet another reason for getting the hell out of N Section.

She put her headset back on, but she was too restless to focus on the voices. Instead, she switched to her music collection. The Allegro of Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra sounded, in her ears, so much more soothing than the chatter of conspirators, a souvenir of a less dangerous, more orderly world.

If
they were conspirators.
If
they had stolen enriched uranium.
If
they could make a bomb. Cynthia had been through a secret course given by some people from Los Alamos. She knew that making an effective nuclear device was a lot harder than most people supposed. Yes, there was a lot of public information available, but the devil was in the details and in the technical skills through which they were applied, and these were not so generally available. Could a group of terrorists actually steal nuclear materials and manufacture a weapon in some mountain village? Not very likely. Nevertheless, even the possibility was sufficient to provide employment for her, the rest of N Section, and the other parts of the government that worried about such things. On the other hand, a nuclear
scam
could be mounted with a lot less effort and, if America fell for it, it might be nearly as damaging to its cause as a nuclear explosion. American boots on the ground in some Pakistani village, civilian casualties, the erosion of
what little trust remained between the two governments: a cheap victory and intensely embarrassing for the already embattled intelligence community. Cynthia would have recommended such a scam herself, had she been on the other side.

She listened to the music, the familiar melody of the clarinet, soaring, glorious, but always returned to earth by the repetitive thrum of the full orchestra, each phrase sculpted to fit, each original but grounded in its form. That’s how she wanted her life to be, soaring but under control. Her thoughts drifted for a time, lost in Mozart’s structured beauty, and then settled on the figure of Abu Lais.

If there was such a person, if this whole thing was not an elaborate ruse. Here was the paradox of espionage, and especially of the type NSA practiced. NSA snooped; everyone in the world knew NSA snooped; everyone knew that electronic communications were not secure; therefore, anyone with any brains would send into the ether only those things he wanted NSA to know; therefore, what NSA learned with its multibillion-dollar investment in snooping was essentially valueless. But such thoughts, although they occurred to everyone who worked at the agency from time to time, were distinctly not profitable, and Cynthia had no patience for the unprofitable.

As often when she listened to music, an idea coalesced. She considered it, turned it around, found it potentially profitable, if not strictly a part of the normal order. After some browsing on the Internet, she worked for a while until she had covered half a dozen sheets of paper. With these in hand she left her office to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Morgan’s prohibition. She walked down many a sterile hallway and up several flights of stairs until she came to the part of NSA devoted to scouring the Internet for terrorist chatter, and specifically to the office of Walter Borden.

Borden was in. Borden was rarely out. On his own admission, he had no life, was a self-proclaimed nerd of the pear-shaped rather than the pencil-necked variety, and his office door was covered with a collage of Dil-bert cartoons, beer coasters, and dozens of tiny strips from fortune cookies. A bumper sticker proclaimed, NERDS DO IT DIGITALLY. Cynthia had a history with guys like Borden, having learned early how easy it was to obtain intellectual favors from desperate misfits—math tutoring, computer repair—in return for a modest investment of smiles and badinage. And she enjoyed the hopeless worship.

She knocked and without waiting for a response entered the usual nerd nest—wrappers and cans on the floor, science-fiction posters on the walls, cartoons stuck to his whiteboard with magnets. It had a peculiar smell, too, like someone had cooked an unsuccessful dessert featuring caramel and canned mushrooms. The origin of Borden’s smell was a topic in the local hallways.

His job was keeping abreast of the innumerable Web sites, most of them ephemeral as mayflies, that the international jihad used to keep its real and prospective membership up-to-date and to recruit new members. One reason they were ephemeral is that Borden and his section took them down by technical wizardry nearly as soon as they arose, except for a rotating number of favored ones, which they filled with misinformation or embarrassing pictures. Borden often remarked that he could hardly believe that they were paying him to do this work.

His office, as usual, was dark except for the glow of a huge flat-panel screen. Borden had his headset on, so Cynthia had to tap him on his Spiderman T-shirt to get his attention. He swiveled in his chair and brightened when he saw who it was.

“Hi, Lam,” he said. “Look, we can’t keep on meeting like this. People are starting to talk.”

“Let them, Borden. My passion for you knows no bounds.”

“I don’t think so, Lam of my heart. I think you’re fascinated by my unearthly intelligence, but you don’t love the real me deep inside.”

“You got me, Borden. I’m a faithless slut.” She glanced at the screen in front of him. It was blue and covered with dense lines of code. “What are you up to? It looks like work.”

“Yes, but it’s nothing I could put in girl language. It’s part of the
AMICUS
project.”

The name stirred a vague memory. “This is the thing about intel coordination? I didn’t realize it was up yet.”

“It’s not. It’s years away. Decades, even.”

“I’m surprised. I thought that was a big DCI priority.”

“Yeah, right, like anyone cares what the DCI thinks. Look, in the first place you have dozens of different systems, all mutually incompatible, a lot of them written in languages no one uses anymore. You could never get them to talk to one another. So let’s have a single system that everyone uses, right? I mean, we could just agree on a commercial database system
and tweak it a little, but oh, no, the government can’t do that, it might save too much money, so there are endless committee meetings about agreeing to formulate a plan to plan for developing a data plan. It’s like riding on a glacier. But you didn’t come down here to talk about data set coordination. Tell me you want to sit on my lap and coo sultry songs in my ear.”

“I’ll have to take a rain check on that. Actually, I was interested in Paki -stani sites, any chatter about a big coup, any approaching major blow to the infidels.”

“This is nuclear, right?” Borden knew where she worked. “Someone lifted a bomb.”

“No one lifted a bomb, Borden. Get real. If someone lifted a bomb there’d be red lights flashing in the hallways and a whoop-whoop sound would be playing over the hall speakers. I’m just following up on some suggestive comint, and rather than send it through the usual channels I thought I’d come down here and get it from the unearthly intelligence himself.”

“Or itself. But now that you mention it, there was this little beauty. It sprang into being, as near as we can figure, at 9:53 P.M. our time and immediately went viral in the jihadi Web world.”

He pressed keys, and the screen of code shrank to a window and another, larger window popped up. Borden pulled out his headphone jack and the sound of a Pashtun song filled the room, a man singing, with tabla and
rubab
in back, a war song about jihad and how sorry the infidels will be when the Muslims take their revenge, how they will wail. The screen showed quick cuts of European and American cities, interwoven with shots of nuclear explosions and devastated cities: Paris, explosion, Hiroshima; New York, explosion, Hamburg ’44; and so on. Cynthia watched it twice.

“No idea where this came from, of course,” she said.

“Well, they try to mix us up, the usual anonymous cutouts, run it through Moscow and then Kiev and then Iceland, et cetera, but I’m pretty sure this one comes out of a server in Peshawar. There are technical similarities with some stuff we know was produced there, so odds-on it’s the same guy or group. Their production values are coming right along, I have to say.”

“They’ve mastered production values? Why fight on?”

“I agree,” said Borden. “You should order your burqa before the rush.”

“Seriously, though, the real reason I came down here was I need a favor.”

“I’m listening.”

“Suppose the Pakistani Ministry of Trade wanted to do a survey to see if certain items had been purchased domestically or imported into Pakistan over, say, the past three months, and because they’re an up-to-date country they would send an official e-mail to these firms, with a form attached, which I’ve designed for them, and the merchants would fill out the form and send it to a link at the official Ministry of Trade Web site but really—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m all over it like a cheap suit,” said Borden. “The e-mail part is trivial, of course, and obviously you don’t want the Pakistanis to know you’ve doing this survey in their name. Interesting little problem.” Borden looked up to the ceiling and his eyes started to glaze as the unearthly intelligence cranked up.

Cynthia said, “So you can do it?”

Borden glanced at her, rolled his eyes upward, and mimed typing. “Mozart on the keys. To night too late?”