The Good Son (54 page)

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 anonymous 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?

But maybe someone had seen it and recognized its supposed importance. She got up and found that her legs would hardly support her weight. Her face felt odd, and when she touched it her fingers came away wet. Sweat was running in streams from her hairline down to her neck, as if she had just completed a heavy workout. That was ridiculous. She hardly sweated even when she actually worked out. She ran from her office to the bathroom.

Who was this person in the mirror? What had happened to the famously cool Cynthia Lam? A wave of nausea griped her, and she fled to a stall and heaved futilely over the bowl, willing the attack to pass. After a quarter of an hour she felt calm enough to approach the mirror again, where she dried herself with paper towels, adjusted her hair and makeup, and realized that she was feeling this way because she had crossed a line for the first time in her life. Although she had no problem with dissimulation and the subtle lie, never before had she done anything frankly illegal. She had never shoplifted, cheated on exams, or inflated her résumé, nor had she ever even had a traffic ticket. She had been a good girl and had reserved a silent contempt for those who weren’t, who committed impulsive and stupid acts.

She practiced a disarming smile. She thought it looked ghastly but it might do for Ernie Lotz. He answered her knock, she applied the smile, and asked him if he’d found anything hot in the recent traffic.

“Funny you should ask, I’m just about to go through the translations. I’ve been in Satcom meetings all afternoon about moving another bird to cover South Asia. Now if al-Q starts a branch in Tegucigalpa we’ll never know. Hey, is something wrong? You look terrible.”

“I think I ate something salmonella-ish at lunch. I’m going home,” she said, and escaped.

Cynthia had a lively interior-dialogue generator, by means of which she could usually convince herself that some course of action beneficial to her was the right thing to do, and she exercised this in turbo mode on the drive home. She played that last intercept over and over again through the headset of her memory and found she had not been mistaken in her initial judgment. The thing was so obviously a fraud, and using the same guy they’d used to fake Jafar Qasir was the capper, an easy proof of fraudulence. So why hadn’t she immediately gone to Morgan with it? Because they wouldn’t see it, they’d explain away the voiceprint comparisons. Morgan was maddened, they all were maddened by their own swelling importance, because at last, after the fiasco of Iraq, the intelligence community was actually going to find weapons of mass destruction in the hot hairy hands of terrorists. It justified their whole existence—unless it was a scam devised by a rogue element.

Which it was, which it
had
to be. And so she was justified in opposing it, heroic in opposing it, the little Dutch girl with her finger in the dike, preventing another stupid war, another catastrophe for the United States, better than the FBI woman who had almost caught the 9/11 conspirators, because there would be no
almost
about it. Borden would find the
SHOWBOAT
files, and she’d put the whole thing together in a neat package, the voiceprint comparisons, the CIA plotters, everything, and take it triumphantly to Morgan; and if he didn’t buy it, she’d take it up the line, to the top of the agency. And the whole thing would wind down, the culprits would be exposed and canned, the intel world would breathe a great sigh, and everyone, right up to the director of national intelligence, would know that little Cynthia Lam had done it all by herself.

These thoughts relaxed her, and by the time she entered her apartment she was feeling as she normally did, which was a kind of irritable discontent. She changed into jeans and a T-shirt, made a salad of field greens with a squat cylinder of tuna from the can plopped in its center, drank a glass of white wine to wash this down, and watched cable news while she did so. Then some minutes at her computer, writing to distant strangers, checking e-mail, disposing of yet another request from a Swiss banker and yet another encrypted e-mail.

Her father called. She put his voice on the speaker while she cleaned her already clean apartment. He complained about his clients in terms that reflected the racism of a generation ago, complained about his health, asked when she was coming home, and asked for money. She listened and responded with meaningless sounds at appropriate intervals, promised a check, and got off as soon as she reasonably could. After that she watched two DVDs, one a steamy French one in which the couple rarely stopped having sexual intercourse and the other a frothy romantic comedy. She switched it off before the boy got the girl again, took a Xanax, and went to bed.

Before she fell asleep she thought about what Borden had said, about having fun. She thought he was right, in a way. After this was resolved she would ditch Morgan and find a suitable boyfriend. She would take some of the huge amount of leave she’d accumulated and go to the islands, a warm beach with palms, and have some.

As was her occasional practice when arriving at work, Cynthia bought a couple of coffees and sticky treats at the canteen and knocked on Ernie Lotz’s door. Ordinarily, she would hear a cheerful greeting, she’d enter, and the two of them would sit and have coffee and discuss the day’s upcoming problems, or Ernie’s personal problems if he had any that morning, and then she’d go back to her own office with a sugar-caffeine high adequate for the morning’s labor. This morning, however, there was silence behind the door.

Could he be out sick? No, he would have called in and the group secretary would have put a Post-it on his door to that effect. She knocked again and tried the doorknob. The door was locked; then came Ernie’s voice.

“I’m busy.”

“I have cinnamon buns.”

She heard movement within and the door opened just enough for Ernie’s face to appear. It was not his usual morning face. It looked like he’d recently been gut-punched.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing. I’m working on a rush thing for Morgan.”

“Can I help?”

“No.” He started to close the door and she said, “At least take your stuff!”

He hesitated for a second, then took the profferred breakfast and kicked the door shut. She heard the lock turning.

Very strange, she thought, Ernie was never like that in the morning. She was the grumpy one and he the ray of sunshine; it was a standing joke between them.

She shook off the feeling and turned to her work. People were still talking about wicked deeds in Urdu and Arabic and the great antennae were still sucking it in. She adjusted her headset and brought up the evening’s catch of sound files.

As usual, there was nothing of vital interest. More significant was what was missing. She did not get a single call all morning, or any e-mails, and no one came to her door. It was as if she were working at a neutron
bomb site. At noon, she knocked again on Lotz’s door and asked him if he wanted to go for lunch in Laurel.

A muffled curt refusal through the door.

Something unpleasant was happening here and she felt the anxiety of the previous day return, stronger than before. She called Borden. He must be back from Langley by now and she was dying to learn what he’d found.

The phone rang twice and then she heard a strange voice say, “Dan Wilson.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I must have the wrong number.”

“What number were you calling?”

“Extension 3988.”

“This is 3988.”

“It is? Look, I’m trying to reach Walter Borden. This is his number.”

“Sorry, it’s my number.”

“Then what’s his new number?”

“I have no idea. Have you tried the directory?”

“Wait a minute. Are you in Internet surveillance?”

“That’s right. But there’s no Walter Borden here.”