The Good Son (25 page)

She looked out the window at the uninteresting traffic and the bland suburban scenery, the golf courses and homes of a peaceful nation at war. She had been a government employee long enough to understand what Morgan’s salty term implied. Another iron law of bureaucracy: no one in government will take seriously a command from anyone who does not directly control his budget or hiring. For counterterrorism in general there is no such person other than the president, who has a lot of other stuff to worry about. The director of national intelligence is supposed to speak with the voice of the president on these matters, but this person certainly does not control the bud get of the secretary of defense, who spends 80 percent of the intel bud get and personnel and who, like the
president, has many things other than intelligence to worry about. Even within the defense empire there are intel rivalries; all the services have direct connections to Congress and to their contractors, who also have direct connections and generous lobbyists, which is why the U.S. Army has a navy and an air force, and the U.S. Navy has an air force and an army. Everything that’s done has to be negotiated with many layers of people, all of whom see their particular organization as the center of the national effort or would like to build it up as such, and nearly every office with “intelligence” or “terrorism” in its title wants to directly control guys with face paint and silenced submachine guns. All these important people were about to make, she thought with growing dread, a terrible mistake, one that she would be helpless to stop.

Unless. For the rest of the drive she concentrated her thoughts on how to derail this onrushing freight train without throwing her own body onto the tracks. Most government mistakes can be stopped if someone is willing to sacrifice a career, but Cynthia knew she was not that sort of person. The art of bureaucracy is to crawl through garbage and end up smelling like a rose. As this thought crossed her mind she thought of the man who had taught her that—and also provided her with the image of N as a pathetic, if necessary, night watchman: Harry Anspach. That was what she would do. She’d call old Harry and seek advice. Maybe something could be done. Maybe the mighty coup could still be extracted from this disaster.

Morgan and Cynthia arrived early, as befitted their relatively junior status. They busied themselves connecting the laptop to the apparatus that would project their presentation on the conference room screen and testing to make sure that it worked. It was one of those ultrasecure conference rooms, windowless, carpeted, low-ceilinged. Cynthia hooked up her laptop to the room’s speaker system and played some of the sound files she had brought along. She walked to different parts of the room, to make sure of the acoustics, and found that sound bounced in odd ways. In one far corner of the room she could hear Morgan breathing and turning the pages of his notes, as if he were close enough to touch. Strange, but not uncommon in such hyper-sealed rooms, not significant.

She had just finished with these chores when the attendees began to
arrive, first a woman, the deputy director of the counterterrorism center, their nominal host; then the CIA man, the deputy director of operations; then another woman, this one the deputy director of the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team, the people responsible for finding lost or stolen nuclear material; then their own bosses, Spalling and Holman; then a full colonel from the Defense Intelligence Agency, representing the Pentagon—the real Pentagon. The National Security Agency, although formally part of the defense establishment, was obviously not deemed representative enough. Cynthia thought it was because the NSA had no personnel with face paint and silenced submachine guns.

Each of these people brought along an aide, it being another iron rule that no senior person go unaccompanied to any meeting of his peers in other agencies. These aides sat in chairs against the wall, along with Cynthia. Then, finally, the ostensible senior person, Thomas Bettleman, the deputy director of national intelligence, a tall fit-looking man with black horn-rims and an academic air. He had
two
aides. He sat down at the head of the table and, after introducing himself and asking the others to do the same, briskly turned to Spalling and said, “Jim, I believe this is your meeting.”

Spalling made some introductory remarks to the effect that NSA had uncovered evidence that an agent of al-Qaeda had stolen nuclear material from Pakistani sources, that this meeting had been called to determine whether a response by the United States was warranted, and, if so, what form it would take. With that, he introduced Morgan, described the duties of his section, and motioned to him to begin. Morgan stood up, the lights dimmed, and the screen immediately shone with the NSA seal.

Morgan was a good briefer, Cynthia thought: concise and positive, an avoider of hems and haws. Everyone in the room, she knew, was a good briefer, that’s how they had risen to their current positions, since the ability to put complex issues into a form politicians could understand without making them feel stupid or putting them to sleep was the golden road to power in Washington. The other thing they all had in common was that none of them had ever made a mistake they could be blamed for, which meant they were each of them either perfection itself or unusually skilled in avoiding blame.

As Morgan went through the evidence, the Abu Lais connection, the quality and reliability of the comint, the confirming conversation of the
trucker and the man from Peshawar, Cynthia was able to turn her attention from the screen and study the people in the darkened room. She had never attended a deputy-director-level meeting before, and it gave her a certain chill to realize that these were the people chiefly charged with keeping America safe from terrorism. She was not impressed. Although she actually worked for a national security operation, her imagination had been formed by movies, and none of these people looked heroic enough for their roles.

This opinion lost nothing when Morgan presented the transcript of the Qasir colloquy and played the tape over the room’s speakers. She thought she saw fear on some of the faces; yes, there was a palpable sense of fear in the room when Morgan wound up his spiel, with the appropriate (weakened but still ass-saving) caveats. It could be a scam, a provocation designed to further erode the shaky relationship between the U.S. and the Pakistani government, but in order to explore that they would either have to confront the Pakistanis with this evidence, seek clarification using significant human intelligence, or bet that it was a scam and not rise to the bait.

Morgan now had the options up on the screen. Three options, two impossible, which was the usual way in which ju nior people manipulated and controlled government policy. No one was prepared to enrage the Pakistanis and make the Afghan insurgency even more disastrous than it already was, and no one was going to contemplate lying doggo while al-Qaeda got a nuke. But they were going to have to decide something now, and whatever way they decided would generate a high-risk situation. These were not people who sought risk.

After a pause, Bettleman turned to the woman from the Department of Energy.

“Doris, if they really have thirty-three kilograms of weapons-grade uranium, could they build a working nuclear weapon?”

This was a neat dodge. It provided the opportunity for some technobabble, during which all the important members of the group could gather their thoughts and prepare their responses. Doris Ames, the NEST person, was a thin, pleasantly ugly woman with a mass of springy black hair escaping from a silver clip. She wore a fuzzy purple dress, the only note of color in the room besides the men’s ties and the colonel’s ribbons.

She cleared her throat. “Well, the short answer is yes, with thirty-three.
But a lot depends on how they’re going to use it and how skillful they are. What we call ‘bare crit’ for metallic uranium at ninety-four percent U-235 is fifty-two kilograms. That means it’ll go off if you just drop one half on the other. But obviously weapons aren’t designed that way. They use shielding to contain and reflect the neutron flux, and shielding can be anything that’s dense enough: steel, lead, graphite, even water. With the proper shielding the critical mass drops by around half. That said, the real answer to your question depends entirely on how good your guys are. A crude gun-type bomb would use all their metal and produce something like the Hiroshima bomb, say fifteen kilotons on detonation, if everything worked right. They apparently have a furnace for melting and machine tools for shaping the target and the plug. They can probably steal or buy lithium and polonium for the initiator. On the other hand, if they had a fair weapons designer on board and they wanted to build an implosion device, say a levitated pit design, with an aluminum pusher and a depleted uranium tamper, they could make three bombs out of what they have, all with approximately Hiroshima yields. If they didn’t care about optimum yield, they could make a whole bunch of five kilogram fizzle devices that would yield, say, a hundred tons of TNT. Or if they were
really
good, if they had a professional weapons designer and skilled machinists, they could make half a dozen linear implosion devices, the so-called suitcase bomb, yielding one to three kilotons each. In general, the smarter you are, the smaller and more lethal the bomb. Does that answer your question?”

Cynthia thought that the woman sounded more satisfied than the grim occasion warranted. It must have given her considerable pleasure to have all these big, important men hanging on her words. She felt a sister-hood: Doris and Cynthia both had jobs that were almost silly until the bad day came; they were the night watchpersons who never got to sit at the big table, but on the bad day they got to tell the boys in charge the evil tidings, and the boys had to listen! Cynthia looked at the NEST woman and thought, That is
not
my fate, a job like that is
not
where I intend to end up, a middle-aged minor supergrade wearing a purple dress so people will notice her.

Bettleman thanked the woman and opened the room to discussion, of which there was very little. The main conclusion was that the material should be put before the president for his decision. Bettleman responded
by asking for more detailed options, from both the Pentagon man, Colonel Brand, and the CIA man, Wayne Price. Price was the youngest person at the table, a man in his forties, and his smooth face had the constipated look of someone operating out of his depth. In years gone by the deputy director for operations of the CIA was one of the most powerful men in the world. He ran legions of spies and dozens of front organizations, he was the world’s biggest briber, he played with the rulers of nations like pawns on a board. But no longer. This guy, Cynthia knew, had been recently shot into his job by the resignation of three people senior to him, in the great political revolution that had also stripped the central intelligence coordinating power from the CIA director and given it to Bettleman’s tiny office. The national government believed that what the CIA could not do—coordinate national intelligence—with a multibillion-dollar black budget and twenty thousand troops could be done by one man and a corporal’s guard of bureaucrats.

They all listened to what Price had to say. He had sent a message to his Pakistani operation to gather anything they had on a nuclear theft or on the whereabouts of Abu Lais, but so far there hadn’t been any incoming humint that such a plot was in the offing. Col o nel Brand did not roll his eyes, and no one passed looks. The CIA still retained some resources and had some good people, but as an organization capable of meeting the intel needs of the United States it was finished. Bettleman said something diplomatic, a head pat, to Price and then turned to the col o nel.

They all turned to the uniform, like flowers to the sun, because everyone understood that the military was the big player here. Colonel Brand talked about assets and intercepts and operations. The Defense Intelligence Agency had its own little NSA for monitoring certain communications, the kind you couldn’t get with the big antennae or the satellites, and it had its own little CIA too, although that bordered on the illegal. It seemed DIA knew all about Abu Lais and his nuclear plotting. There had been indications—buzzing on the terror networks—for some time. The col o nel thought Abu Lais was the key; they should all forget about the Pakistanis and find Abu Lais. Cynthia found it hard to follow the col o nel; the buzz in her head was like the buzz on the terror networks, obscure, threatening, boiling with many tongues all saying wrong wrong wrong.

“Ms. Lam?”

She started. Spalling was calling her name, not for the first time, she
realized, and she became aware that everyone was looking at her. She felt herself blush.

“Sir?”

“Ah, you’re back with us,” Spalling said, which provoked a titter around the room. “Yes, Ms. Lam, I understand you have some linguistic evidence you derived from the Abu Lais interception.”

“Yes, sir. He was speaking Standard Arabic with a Pashtun accent. I also detected a softening of the Arabic gutterals characteristic of someone who has spent time speaking English.”